The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  The interest I heard in his voice then, the precursor of love, was all I needed to convince me, but he continued. “I feel different. I like the smell of the air here and the ground feels good under my feet.”

  I felt the evidence of his words as I leaned against his chest. The tightness that had thrummed through him for months had quieted.

  “We will miss the farm,” I said.

  “Just thinking about it feels a little like being unfaithful to the farm, doesn’t it?” Adam whispered. “That land has been like a good woman to me.”

  We listened to the night sounds. An owl bellowed in the distance. “I think maybe Florida could want me—all of me,” Adam said.

  “She’s calling your name, huh?”

  He waved his hand. “What kind of place is this?”

  “A warm place?” I offered. He raised his eyebrows. “Hot place?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “A place with horses and rolling green hills?” He gave me his broad smile. Finally, I got it: “A good woman calling your name?”

  He nodded. “Call my name.” He kissed me, my reward, and I said his name.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll go look,” he said, his voice sober again. “See what work there is. And whether this is the kind of place where my wife can grow beans, tomatoes, and flowers.”

  “Have you looked at the dirt here? I don’t know. We’ll have to see if Florida calls my name, too.”

  “Been a while since you had a good woman, huh?” He pressed his hips against me.

  “Yes, it has been, but the last one sent me a wonderful substitute.” I kissed him. “Take Rosie with you tomorrow. She needs it. She misses the horses.”

  Dew fell and the odor of the earth rose up, different from the smell of North Carolina red clay—musky and less metallic. I remembered Addie, misshapen and lying on her side like a bear in the mud. “Let’s not sell any more land. Not just yet, okay?” I couldn’t sever that tie.

  “No, we shouldn’t have to. If I get work, we’ll be okay. We need to find someone willing to take care of the farm and the horses.”

  I immediately thought of Joe’s son, Bud. He was grown now and recently married. His wife, Wanda, had been a farm girl until she married him.

  With that we decided to try living in Florida. We went to bed and I did not stay awake listening to crickets, mockingbirds, and my husband’s breathing. I slept deep and hard and woke to Adam bending over me to kiss me good-bye as he left to look for work.

  Adam found a job quickly—a job with a house. Randy and Edith Warren needed a groom and trainer. They hired him on the spot. The job came with a small house if we wanted to live on the property.

  The wood-frame house needed paint, and had three small bedrooms instead of four, but its windows looked out on those rolling hills and grazing horses that Adam found so appealing. The Warrens’ ranch was pretty, especially in that early part of the year before the summer sun dulled the green of the pastures.

  As we dusted, bleached, and cleaned our new home, wolf spiders skittered out of sight. What furniture there was in the house smelled of unfamiliar molds. We quickly discovered how far Florida roaches can fly and which shade of red hair they prefer for a landing. But Pauline helped us, and her presence defused the girls’ whining. She and the Warrens loaned us furniture, so each of us had a place to sit during the day and a place to lie down at night. We enrolled the girls in school as soon as possible.

  At the end of their first week in school, I made a trip back to North Carolina, alone. A lightning raid to check on the farm and pick up essentials.

  The Florida flatlands receded and the sun rose to my right as I drove north. The solitary drive took all day. Through the monotony of southern Georgia back roads, I waffled between anxiety and anticipation. I reminded myself that the authorities wanted Adam—not me, not our land. I imagined all my familiar things in our Florida kitchen. No more paper plates or cheap, new coffee cups.

  By late afternoon, the first of the familiar red clay hills rose around me, a bittersweet, almost sexual pleasure. An hour after sunset, I was on the farm. My motherland. The place my children were born.

  In the moonlight, I could see little had changed in the weeks we’d been gone. Wallace had even kept up the parts of the garden already planted. The tea roses needed pruning.

  I unlocked the back door, swung it open, and stepped into my kitchen as if into a lover’s arms. But before my hand reached the light switch, I felt the emptiness of the house as a tangible, shocking thing. My hand faltered. Then light burst through the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Exactly as we’d left it. The only difference was a neat pile of mail in the middle of the table, right where I’d asked Joe to leave it. Numbly, I fanned the envelopes, searching them as if the key to our changed lives resided there. Bills. Letters from the girls’ schools. A letter from the Centers for Disease Control. I dumped them all, unopened, in a paper bag, and ran out to the car, away from the oppressive quiet of the house.

  Outside, the air seemed brittle and strange, deeply familiar and distant, unattainable as the dead. I wanted to call the names into the air: Jennie. Momma. I wanted to go down on my knees and scream their names into the dirt. But I held my tongue on those fruitless syllables. I walked the perimeter of the hay field. In the garden, I dug my hand into the soil and felt the residue of the day’s warmth. The ground rendered nothing of the sweat we’d put into the farm, nothing of the generous bowls of beans, corn, and squash we had passed, hand to hand, at the supper table.

  In the empty barn, I methodically scanned every surface with the flashlight beam. The chickens, hog, and remaining cow had gone to Wallace’s and Cole’s families. The walls and rafters seemed skeletal, oddly intimate in their solitary exposed planes.

  I opened the stable door and listened to the breath of the remaining horses in the close darkness, then went back into the house. At last, I packed. Kitchen, first, then bedrooms. I tried not to look at things, not to think. Just get the job done.

  By four in the morning, the car bulged. Luggage and more boxes were tied on top. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I left more money for Wallace and a glowing letter of recommendation Adam had written. Then I fled, again.

  As I made my final turn out of Clarion before dawn, I thought I saw a row of police lights atop an approaching car. I pressed the brakes suddenly. Boxes groaned and shifted in the backseat. My heart hammered. I turned in the opposite direction and took the longer route out of Clarion, heading back to Florida as quickly as I could, fleeing what I had, just the day before, looked forward to embracing.

  The sun began to rise.

  I drove south and turned my heart toward my girls, to consoling and protecting them, as much as possible, from the sorrow of leaving the only home they’d ever known. I wanted to make them understand, to tell them: it will work out. No one will look at your father as people in Clarion had. No one will take him from us. He can return to himself in our new home.

  When I pulled into the yard that evening, they eagerly surrounded the car, immediately unpacking and exclaiming over all our old familiar stuff as if I’d returned long-lost treasures to them. My solicitous tenderness found no purchase. They dashed into their bedrooms, unloading clothes and books. Their decorating and organizing decisions seemed endless. The only hesitation I saw was in Rosie. She sat in the dining room, staring pensively at her collection of horse figurines lined up on the table. “I miss Beau.” She sighed.

  “Soon,” I said, relieved that I would be able to provide what she was missing. “Your horse will be here.”

  The next night at the dinner table I asked my normal questions about school. Lil, who usually just said “Okay,” announced, “No one here knows I’m missing anything.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah added. “Here, we’re just an ordinary family.”

  “Cool.” Gracie’s new favorite word.

  Rosie rolled her eyes, her favored reaction to her little sisters.

  “You girls will have to set them straight. You are
not ordinary.” Adam leaned back in his chair and grinned at us. The girls regarded their father with surprise.

  “I want to be ordinary.” Lil scowled. “I don’t want everybody to know.”

  “Ordinary’s good,” Sarah echoed.

  Rosie nodded.

  Adam reached across the table and touched Lil’s hand as he touched Sarah’s back with his other hand. “You’re right. Here we can be as ordinary as we want to be. And we get to decide how we are ordinary, no one else decides.”

  Lil smiled back at her father.

  They managed their mutual goal of being ordinary and fitting in very well. All their conversations now were sprinkled with the names of classmates I didn’t know, teachers I’d met only once, if that. With four girls, the phone was ringing constantly. Even Sarah’s second-grade pals called. I didn’t recognize any of the voices, and the deep, unfamiliar voices of boys asking for Gracie or Rosie always surprised me. The freedom of driving, a necessity since we lived so far out of town, also widened Gracie’s social circle. Rosie still came straight home from school each day, changed into dungarees, and joined her father in the stables.

  Three months later, I returned to the farm once more, via Greyhound bus, for the truck and some of the furniture. The horses we’d boarded and cared for had all been sent to other stables. Only our two remained. Darling, now docile with age, and Beau, Rosie’s favorite, waited for me to bring them to their new home. I braced myself against the shrill vacancy of the farm.

  We’d arranged for Joe’s son, Bud, and his wife, Wanda, to rent the house. Despite the scattered cardboard boxes of their things, neatly labeled and sealed in anticipation of moving in, the house felt even more abandoned. I walked from room to room, touching boxes and the doors of empty closets. The violent shock of my earlier visit devolved into forlorn sorrow. I tried to imagine the clear spaciousness of when I’d lived there alone before Addie. But I couldn’t see past the deserted rooms.

  The top shelf of the bureau I’d shared with Adam still bulged with old single gloves, the odd scarf, and a few stray photographs that I kept separate from the photo albums and the shoe box of family snapshots. A wide, white envelope held the photo of the burned Japanese woman that Frank had left years before. With it was the photo of me and Addie that Momma had been looking at when she told me about my father. I recalled A.’s face in those few short days after I found her when she was not yet Addie. The mixture of horror and empathy that had bloomed across her face as she held the picture of the Japanese woman that day was one of the things that led me to trust her so. That quality was still there in Adam; I still trusted him deeply, intuitively. He had changed so much, yet remained the same. But I knew no more about him after almost twenty years. I had no idea what changes twenty more years would bring, but I sensed in him something new since we’d moved to Florida. Good, but slightly different, as if his voice held new frequencies just over the edge of my ability to hear.

  I put the two photographs back in the envelope and packed them.

  The next day warmed unseasonably. I would have preferred to do all of the moving alone, but knew I couldn’t manage the furniture on my own and so had asked Joe to help. I hadn’t told anyone else about my trip back to the farm. I didn’t want to take any chances, even though Joe assured me there had been no more phone calls or visits from the sheriff.

  It wasn’t that difficult to withhold information, even about where, exactly, we were living, and Joe didn’t press. Without Momma, our family had no center. Except for the day we cleaned Momma’s closets, I’d hardly seen Bertie or Rita. As Joe and I sweated, cramming headboard, tables, and chairs into the back of the truck, he told me about Rita’s move to Hickory, where her new boyfriend lived. She worked at a store there and rented a little apartment.

  Like Daddy, Joe had somehow become middle-aged while still in his thirties. Since Momma’s death, he’d even taken up pipe-smoking and now smelled of the same sweet tobacco Daddy smoked. When we’d finished with the furniture and hitched the horse trailer to the truck, Joe hugged me, a rare thing for him. “Come back when you can.” His voice thickened. Of all of them, I felt he was the most likely to forgive Adam, the most likely to find a way to treat him like an ordinary man.

  “Thank you, Joe. I will,” I whispered as he released me. I felt I should say more, but I didn’t trust myself. As I watched his car pull away and his hand sweep out the window in a final wave, I knew that I—we—would not be coming back.

  As night fell, I leaned against the porch, surveying the pastures and star-filled sky above the stables. A stone of sorrow grew in my stomach. The cooling night air smelled of spring.

  Only one task remained. For years, Adam and I had measured the height of our daughters each year in the dining-room doorway. Dozens of horizontal pencil marks, dates, and initials marked the door frame. The lowest mark was Jennie and Lil in early 1959, when they were toddlers. The highest was marked “Dad.” I was about three inches below him.

  The nails that held the board to the door frame, hammered home long before I had been born, groaned as I pried them loose with a crowbar. I worked up one side and then down the other. By fractions of an inch, the nails released. Finally, the board clattered to the floor, its dual row of nails jutting up. By the back-porch light, I banged all the nails out except a center stubborn one, then wedged the board into the tight press of the furniture strapped into the truck bed.

  After I made a final sweep of each room, I stood in the hall and sang, as steady as I could, for those empty, echoing rooms and all that had happened in them: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.” Then the last stanzas of “Amazing Grace,” and my own voice disappeared into the house.

  I made myself a pallet on the bare floor of the bedroom where our bed had once been. I waited for peace, but I felt only the weight of sorrow. Finally, I fell asleep. In the ballet of my dreams, Bud and Wanda’s furniture settled into the corners.

  The next morning, after I loaded the horses in the trailer, I took a fresh jelly jar from the cellar shelf and filled it with clay from the spot where I had found Addie. I hesitated before screwing the lid on, then I went to the spot where Jennie had bled into the ground and added another fistful.

  For the last time, I locked the door to a house that I owned but that was no longer mine. The footstool I had sat on as a girl when I pumped the butter churn for Aunt Eva was pressed against the back window of the truck, filling the rearview mirror as I drove away. A few moments later, I parked at the edge of the graveyard. The graves were neat, recently mown. The remains of water-stained, wilted pictures of flowers Sarah and Lil had torn out of magazines drooped against Jennie’s tombstone. I left a little yellow cup with a lamb embossed on the side, Jennie’s favorite when she’d been a baby.

  Then I drove away to my husband and daughters.

  Months passed before I stopped expecting a knock at the door. The escape from the hospital and those first days in Florida had burned a new kind of anxiety into my nerve cells. Gradually, the sense of constant vigilance slipped away. While I had no illusions that Clarion would ever be a safe or happy place for Adam again, I began to feel that we were safe where we were.

  It was 1966 and the sorrow and loss of our family seemed to be reflected all around us. Kennedy had been assassinated, blacks marched for civil rights, and Vietnam splattered across the TV and newspapers every day. The world smoldered and soon would catch fire, fire of a very different sort than in my youth—the fire of protest and rebellion.

  But we had found our refuge.

  The change of place began the thaw of grief for all of us. If death had chilled our hearts, the heat of that first summer quickened our pulses. Much of what I felt was the exhilaration of relief at being away from all the problems of Clarion. The rest was sheer physical newness. I perceived the same new lightness in the girls and Adam. But I felt a new grief that was not reflected in their faces.

  The first few months in the house on the Warren ranch, eve
rything seemed an affront to my expectations, to everything I knew. Our dirty clothes stained in grays and blacks instead of red Carolina clay. The strange view out the windows. The damp, odd odors of the house. I kept expecting the low, gentle slopes, the house, even the horses to be taken down and carried away like cardboard props so we could all stop the pretense. So we could go home. Then I would remember the empty rooms of the farm, Jennie bleeding in the truck, the faces of everyone I knew as we left her funeral, and it would hit me: this strange, surreal place was my home. My heart stumbled from the blow.

  While Adam and the girls fell quickly into their daily routines of school and job, I now had nothing to do but housework, and that was finished by noon each day. There was no bookkeeping to be done. There were no hogs, chickens, or cows, no garden to tend.

  On the farm, the stable had been within shouting distance. Now Adam spent his days in stables that were rectangles on the horizon, far past the sound of my voice. Gracie and Rosie, both in high school, had begun gathering up their small privacies for the life they would have when they left home. Boys collected around them, calling and dropping by the house, practicing nonchalance in their new men’s bodies, their voices as deep as Adam’s. Lil and Sarah studied their sisters for clues of what was to come.

  What should have been a time of leisure and solitude for me lay heavy, solid as a blanket over my face, and I had no energy to throw it off. Nights, I lay awake next to Adam in the un-air-conditioned house, the mid-spring air already thick with moisture. As spring turned to the full heat of summer, it seemed we slept in the mouth of God, the air already breathed by some huge being. I tossed in the heat, listened for the relief of rain. I thought of everyone in North Carolina: Joe and the rest of my family, Marge and Freddie, and Wallace. I longed to see their faces, but my longing for the land surpassed all other desires. I ached for the sunrise view down the hill. In the swelling heat of Florida, I lusted for the crunch of fall leaves underfoot, the hard grip of the cold under my nightgown as I went out to milk in the morning. I hungered to take that curve where the road dipped to the mill-village houses and Momma’s. I would have given almost anything then to press myself into the farm’s embrace, to match my contours to hers.