The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Adam walked in, wiping his face on a handkerchief as the back door swung shut behind him.

  “You’re next!” Gracie called to him.

  “Stop cheating, Lil.” Rosie perched the ruler on Lil’s head.

  Lil lowered her heels to the floor, then turned to look at the mark Gracie made.

  Adam joined us and ran his finger from Jennie’s name up to the line of Lil’s new height. “Look how much you’ve grown.”

  Lil bit her lip. Her eyes went back and forth between the two marks. “She would be this tall now, too,” she whispered.

  “Yes, she would be,” Adam replied. He massaged her shoulders. “Your turn.” He touched Sara’s back.

  Sarah stepped up. She’d grown the most, almost three inches.

  Gracie waved the ruler impatiently. “Mom and Dad, you two haven’t been measured in years. Come on!”

  “We won’t have grown, we’re already grown up,” I protested.

  But Adam stepped up and Gracie reached, leveling the ruler over his head.

  “Wow! You’ve grown,” Rosie boomed. “Look!”

  I pointed to his feet. “Your boots.”

  Sarah helped him pull them off while he balanced on one foot.

  In his stocking feet, he still stood taller than his original height. His feet were flat on the floor. I measured him again. Six foot three and a half. A little more than an inch between the first and second measurement.

  He stepped away from the door frame, unimpressed with his growth. I took his place.

  Gracie squinted at the line of her father’s height above my head. “That is weird. He has grown!”

  I was slightly shorter than my first measurement. Adam marked my height right over the new line for Gracie.

  Within minutes, all of them had dispersed, intent on phone calls, TV, homework, or chores. My eyes kept returning to the new, darker mark above all the others. He had grown. Only an inch or so in the fourteen years we’d been recording the girls’ heights there. We were literally going in opposite directions. But what did it mean about him? About us? Every time I walked through that doorway, I felt I passed through those questions.

  We put up a simple sign—THE HOPE RANCH, A. & E. HOPE—and built a second, larger stable. Adam began boarding, training, buying, and selling horses as he had in North Carolina. He quickly filled the stables. They were farther from the house than they had been on the farm. But I could hear Adam as he worked, his whistle and calls to the horses, and on the days he gave his horsemanship lessons, his admonitions to the riders to “balance. True yourself.”

  My garden lay between the house and the stables, and I kept some chickens. Having my own land felt like a wondrous, luxurious relief, endearing me to the place I’d recently found so strange. I still missed the farm. I missed the Clarion hills. I missed Joe, Cole, the Sunday picking parties at Marge and Freddie’s, quiet Rita, and even cranky Bertie, but I no longer ached for them.

  Lil and Sarah helped me plant persimmon, fig, and pecan trees in the afternoons, when they came home from school. Rosie nearly lived in the stables when she and Gracie were not picking at their guitars or listening to Joan Baez or Beatles albums. In fact, all four girls took up some kind of instrument. Lil joined the marching band at her school and played the flute. Sarah began lessons on violin Tuesdays after school and impromptu fiddle lessons from Adam in the evenings. He found some local picking parties and often took all the girls. I was the only nonmusical one in the family.

  The next year, Gracie turned eighteen and was on a date almost every Friday and Saturday night. Sometimes, Rosie would go out with her—a double date. Ranch life started early in the morning and we were all usually in bed by ten. They complained of their early curfew, but when we stood firm, they relented without much protest.

  One Friday night, Adam shook me awake soon after I’d gone to sleep. He pressed his finger to his lips. His other hand covered my mouth. “Gracie and Rosie have just left. Let’s surprise them and go with them.”

  “What?”

  He led me out of bed to the front porch. “See, we’ll have to hurry.” He pointed down the driveway. In the light of a full moon, I could make out Gracie and Rosie hurrying toward the highway. The clock glowed eleven o’clock. I started for the front door, pissed.

  “Not yet. Go get dressed first. I’ll get Lil and Sarah ready,” Adam said. “We need to see where they are going—all of us.”

  As I changed clothes, I heard Lil’s and Sarah’s voices.

  “Don’t,” Adam whispered to them. “It’ll spoil the surprise if you turn on the lights.”

  Moments later, as the four of us walked silently down the driveway, we could see Gracie and Rosie clearly in silhouette under the big oak by the highway, their guitar cases propped beside them. They were sneaking out to play music? My anger began to slip. Adam grinned next to me. It had been a long time since we had all been outside at night together. Sarah squeezed my hand and tried not to giggle. A cool wind lifted my skirt. We marched side by side, holding hands.

  “Shit!” Rosie hissed when she looked over her shoulder and spotted us.

  Gracie, who’d picked up her guitar and stepped closer to the road to peer north toward town, whirled around, her mouth a dark O of surprise.

  “We’re going out with you!” Sarah ran ahead to hug Rosie.

  “We’re not going anywhere. We were just out for a walk.” Rosie swatted Sarah away.

  “Walking your guitars, that’s a good one!” Adam laughed.

  Lil joined Sarah in a little jig and chorus of “We’re going out! We’re going out!”

  An old, battered station wagon with wooden panels pulled up slowly, its lights out. The driver, a blond boy in a white shirt, got out and stared wordlessly at the six of us. “Daddy, please!” Gracie whispered as Adam stepped up to the boy and held out his hand.

  “Thank you, it’s so nice that you’re letting us come along. We don’t get out much,” Adam said.

  The boy stared at Adam’s outstretched hand, baffled. Adam had the advantage of about five inches and at least fifty pounds on him.

  “It’s okay, Keith.” Rosie’s voice was flat with resignation.

  Keith looked at all of us. The moon shone so bright I could see every hair on his head. He gave us a determined grimace of a smile and then shook Adam’s hand.

  We piled in. Rosie and Gracie slipped their guitars in the back of the station wagon, then climbed into the front seat with Keith. Adam and I got in, pulling the younger ones onto our laps. The young man next to us in the backseat reached quickly behind the seat and put something away. “This is Andy. Be nice,” Rosie said to me and Adam.

  “I will,” Andy croaked and pressed himself closer to the window.

  “Lights, son.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Keith turned on his lights and we were off.

  I dared not look at Adam. I bit my lip all the way into town to keep from laughing.

  Skinny Andy beside me cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses every mile or so. Rosie turned several times to mutter and slap at Lil, who squirmed and kicked her seat. Otherwise, we were silent until we reached the first streetlights of Gainesville.

  “We were going to this place in town where people get together and play music. We’re playing there tonight,” Gracie said with flat, offended dignity. “If we don’t sign up early enough, all we can get is the later time slot.”

  We pulled up outside what looked like an ordinary house. A few dozen cars lined the street. Gracie led us down a short, dark hall with random squiggled psychedelic colors painted on the black walls, and into a large, dimly lit room. The place smelled of smoke and beer and another, unfamiliar sweetness. Small tables crowded the room of about forty people. No one there looked over the age of thirty. This was nothing like a Clarion picking party.

  We were obviously Ma and Pa Yoakum with our gang of young’uns, but after a few quick glances of interest, everyone returned to their drinks and cigarettes. Keith and Andy scoot
ed off to get extra chairs. We sat crowded around a single little table near the back.

  A man with a goatee played banjo on a small stage, a familiar but jazzed-up tune. Adam leaned over toward me. “Not bad.” Sarah wiggled off my lap and returned to the hall to trace the colored swirls. Keith, obviously deciding that servility would be the best approach to the situation, brought us each a cup of coffee. I thanked him with pointed warmth. Lil, who had recently learned to wink, gave him one. He stood uncertainly for a moment, then sat down beside us. Rosie and Gracie ignored everything but the banjo onstage.

  Then the girls were on.

  Gracie leaned over the mic. “We’re the Hope Sisters.” After the pale banjo player, they were exotic flowers. A few people waved and nodded from the audience. I realized, with a shock, they had been there before. They knew these people, this place. Adam took my hand. To my ears, they did Bob Dylan better than Bob Dylan. A woman in a long skirt brought cookies for Lil and Sarah, who stopped fidgeting long enough to thank her.

  After the next song, Gracie covered her mic and said something to Rosie, who first shook her head then nodded. Gracie peered past the lights into the audience and pointed, “Those are our parents in the back.”

  “Obviously!” someone shouted from near the stage. Gracie smiled, pulled her hair out to her shoulders, and dipped her head in a little curtsey.

  “They hitched a ride with us tonight. They don’t get out much,” Rosie dead-panned.

  Adam pulled me to my feet for the quick splatter of applause. Everyone turned to look. It was my turn to be mortified. I blushed.

  “And our two little sisters.” Gracie motioned them to the stage.

  Sarah bolted from behind us. Lil hung back. “Go on, Lil, go to your sisters.” Adam pushed her gently. Sarah and Lil blinked at the lights as they stepped up to the stage. Their sisters, who whispered away from the mics, positioned them. Then the four of them sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

  I stood behind Adam’s chair to get a better view. He leaned his head back against me. The last time I’d heard them all sing together in public had been at Momma’s funeral. I recalled how, when they held some notes, there seemed to be an extra voice, five rather than four daughters. I listened now, sure that I heard a fifth voice entwined. I closed my eyes and slid my hand down Adam’s chest to feel the barely perceptible hum of his breastbone under my palm. When I opened my eyes, Adam gazed up at me. We were submerged in our daughters’ voices. Then their harmony seemed to expand, then unravel and move closer, rising from behind me and on each side. With a small jolt, I realized there were, in fact, many extra voices. At the table near us, several women sang along with the girls. Scanning the crowd, I saw others singing. A song I did not know, sung by a room full of people who did not look or think like the people of Clarion, people my daughters might know for many years to come. This place—the house and the town we were in—were not what I had expected for our future. But here the girls would have more options. If there was ever a knock on the door, if anyone came for their father again or for them, they would have options and multiple paths. My world may have contracted, but our daughters’ had expanded.

  They finished the song. Warm applause erupted. A few people whistled and called for more. Our daughters bowed. Beautiful, innocent, harmonious daughters.

  We’d never grounded them before, but we did the next weekend. They also had to muck the stable every day and do the dishes each night for the next two weeks. But we moved their curfew to one A.M. on the nights they played at the Bent Card. Adam stayed up reading until he heard them return.

  That fall, Gracie started college at the University of Florida but continued to live at home. On the weekends, the house filled up with young people. They were polite and respectful but they did not call us ma’am and sir, as the Clarion kids would have. They dressed differently, too, and they smelled sweet, like flowers or incense, and, eventually I realized, like marijuana. The boys, at first, wore Beatles haircuts, but soon it seemed they all had shoulder-length hair. All of them, boys and girls alike, wore beads and bell-bottom jeans with patches. Often, I had to take a few discreet glances at their chests or wait until one spoke before I could tell if I was speaking to a boy or a girl. A few of them were black, their full afros bobbing softly. They all carried large macramé bags, backpacks, or guitars.

  Their ideas about life were very different from when I had been a teenager. Whatever we thought of our leaders in the forties, we knew the enemy and he wasn’t us. But in the sixties, the enemy was closer at hand—white adults spitting on little black girls going to school, assassins, and the advocates of the Vietnam War. The world seemed to be on fire. More than once, the girls sat rapt in front of the TV news, tears of outrage on their faces.

  Unlike me, the girls were ready to step into the world they saw on TV. They were young and could not ignore the fire. Flyers announcing protests and rallies, album covers, books, and newspapers littered the house. For hours at a time, Gracie’s friends gathered, talking about music, the Vietnam War, or the latest protest on campus.

  But for Adam and me, the ranch was an oasis. We were happy to share it, to have all the girls’ friends visit. I remembered what a refuge the farm had been for me during the last war and hoped we were providing similar solace.

  Today, we’d be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors for what went on at the ranch then. Adam and I were uneasy at times. We were also naive. In small-town North Carolina in the forties, there had been only booze and sex, no drugs, no protests. No curfews, because there were no places to go after nine or ten o’clock at night.

  Once I saw a friend of Gracie’s step out of the back of a van parked in the driveway. As the girl bent to tie her fringed boots, I saw, through the open van door, a boy buttoning his shirt. I knew the girl was only seventeen, a high school senior. A sweet, bright kid. I felt I should do something. But I wasn’t sure what I should or could do. At their age, I had the responsibility of a farm. I had first Cole, then Addie, in my bed. Most of the girls, Gracie told me, could get birth control pills at the local clinics. Many of the boys who crowded our porches faced the bane of chastity: the draft. So, after I’d gone over the facts of life once again with Gracie, I could think of nothing more to say than “be careful and don’t get pregnant.”

  One evening, Adam found a hand-rolled cigarette on the stable floor and a lighter nearby. “It sure doesn’t smell like tobacco.” He sniffed the twisted end.

  We’d both read about marijuana, and the Woodstock festival of muddy, stoned hippies had been all over the news the weeks before. Neither of us was easy with the idea of the girls or their friends doing drugs. But the lighter concerned us as much, maybe more, than the pot. We knew what a burned-down stable would cost.

  “I want to know what it’s like before we talk to the girls about it,” Adam said. “Let’s try it.”

  I held back, reluctant. But Pauline had tried it and proclaimed it “no big deal.” She preferred Jack Daniel’s, she said.

  So we strolled out past the stables and lit up the cigarette, passing it back and forth between coughing fits. A cool puff of wind wafted the smoke farther into the pasture.

  Not much happened. Adam seemed a little more talkative. I felt relaxed and a little weird, but not elated or particularly high. It seemed as if the world, not me, had gotten oddly and thoughtfully drunk. An experience far short of the dire warnings I’d read in magazines and newspapers. I scorched the spaghetti sauce for dinner that night, but we both ate a lot and thought it particularly good. Then we went to bed without ill effect.

  But we did have some new rules after Adam found the marijuana. No visitors in the stables unless Adam or Rosie was with them. No matches or lighters anywhere near the stables. No one could offer or give Lil and Sarah anything stronger than chocolate milk. And because the number of visitors on the weekends had increased, and a few parents of Rosie’s high school friends had called looking for their sons and daughters, everyone h
ad to come through the house and introduce themselves to us.

  As the boys would troop by on their way to gather in the fields, Adam would shake their hands firmly and look them in the eye. Then, with uncharacteristic paternal sternness, he’d announce his rules: “Stay away from the stable and horses. Take care of the girls. And have a good time, boys.”

  “Sure, Mr. Hope, it’s cool.” The boys always nodded. Rosie and Gracie would roll their eyes at Adam and pull the boys through the house and out the back door.

  On a May Saturday in 1970, Gracie and Rosie prepared for a big party they’d be having out in the pasture. Sarah and Lil left earlier that morning with Pauline for the beach. All afternoon, the older girls bustled around in the kitchen and house, driving firewood, tables, and baskets of food out to the spot where they usually gathered, under one of the large live oaks. Adam cleared an area in the pasture we never used for riding. They would be allowed to have a bonfire there. They’d be far enough away to dim their music and debates, but close enough to run back to the house for the bathroom or any emergency.

  I spent the day in the garden, mulching, trying to keep the water in and the weeds out. Adam mended the far corral and worked with a young mare, a pretty, gold thing whose love bite had left a bruise on my behind the week before. By sunset, we were beat. We sat inside at the kitchen table, drinking iced tea and watching each other sweat.

  After dinner, Adam and I relaxed on the front porch, greeting a steady stream of arriving kids. The yard filled with cars and vans. It looked like it was going be one of their bigger parties.

  Finally, the mosquitoes chased us inside. There was no more iced tea in the refrigerator, so we each poured ourselves a glass from a pitcher of bright red Kool-Aid. Adam finished his quickly and poured himself a second glass. I settled down on the couch with a novel while he gave the stables a final check for the evening.

  It was well past ten o’clock, my normal bedtime. I didn’t feel sleepy but the words on the page blurred toward the margins. I set my book aside. I was back in the kitchen, trying to decide if the Kool-Aid tasted like strawberry or cherry—maybe raspberry—when Adam joined me and a batch of kids shuffled through. We rose to greet them. They were a brightly dressed group, all so sweet and beautiful. I felt a great tenderness toward them.