The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (25 page)

In the early mornings, when I took coffee out to Adam, the snort and shuffle of horses and the clean odors of large animal health filled the stable. On winter mornings, when I stepped into their animal warmth from the cold yard, my head still thick with sleep, the horses seemed like an animal extension of my dreams, an animate den of horseness that I moved through. I loved them then, for that unconscious availing of themselves. I admired the sleekness of their hide, the powerful depth of their chests and legs, and the whiskery velvet of their inquisitive mouths. The rare times I had alone with them in pasture when they were at rest, I felt honored by their indifference and the glimpse they offered of the herd’s solace. Their grace at play in pastures never failed to stop me and hold me for a moment.

But for all my developing appreciation, I never became a good horsewoman. I remained most content among horses rather than on them. My attempts at honing my skills had been constantly interrupted by pregnancy, and I could never quite be convinced any animal wanted me on its back, that it preferred me to the open sky above.

All the girls eventually became respectful and skilled on the back of a horse. Adam made certain of that. Gracie, like me, appreciated the horses’ company but was the least interested in riding. She often carried a chair out to the stable and read, her back to the light of the open door. She’d glance occasionally from her book to the horses as she read. Jennie and Lil dressed the milder horses in scarves. They loved to steal away on Darling together, but their interest was not deep. Sarah drew them, of course, and, as soon as her vocabulary was equal to the task, began to advise Adam. He’d listen patiently to her analysis of a horse’s emotional state, his head cocked to one side. She was often right, he told me. Rosie remained the most interested in the horses. She lived in the stable, apprenticing herself to her father, and became his chief riding partner. Nights when she wanted refuge from the antics of her younger sisters, she slept in the stable. More than once she missed a day of school after being up all night with Adam nursing a sick horse or a mare in foal.

Once, when Sarah was still a baby, I passed the corral on my way back from picking squash and paused to watch Adam deep in his own observation of a fearful, volatile mare that had been brought to him for social repair. He stood a few yards from the corral fence, his hands relaxed at his side, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I was thinking about what was under his clothes—his shoulders and the slope from his back to his waist. He turned, smiled, and then crooked his finger, calling me over. “What kind of horse is this?”

I gave him a blank look. The horse circled the corral, her eyes darting back and forth.

“Is she scared, content, nervous, healthy?”

I shook my head and shrugged.

He raised his eyebrows. “Look. The kind of horse she is shows right there on her skin and how she moves.” Then he began a recitation, pointing at her ears, the tension in her neck, how she held her tail, the balance of her spine, and the condition of her skin. “She’s been poorly groomed and someone beat her,” he announced. He waved his beautiful hands, tracing the horse’s back and the curve of her neck in the air. He entered the corral and raised his right arm. Immediately, the horse stopped circling the corral and began an agitated pace opposite him, neighing sharply.

Later that evening, while Adam finished in the stable, I got the girls ready for bed. I squatted by the bathtub bathing Sarah, who, completely soaped, wiggled in my hands and struggled to climb the shower curtain. Lil and Jennie perched on the sides of the sink, peering into the drain, their heated debate about toothpaste bringing them close to blows. Gracie sat on the toilet, peeing and tracing my spine with her toes. Rosie rushed in, accused Gracie of stealing her favorite stuffed horse, then bit her sister. Suddenly, the four of them were in full skirmish behind me. Sarah rubbed soap into her eyes and screamed. I calculated whether I’d be able to let go of her and have time to knock the others’ heads together before she drowned. “Out!” I shouted. “Everybody out!”

Adam popped his head into the bathroom.

“What kind of girls are these?” I snapped at him over the ruckus.

“Huh?”

“What kind of children are these?” I shouted. “It’s on their skin and how they move.”

He grinned. “Children with a mad momma, children with a tired momma.”

From then on, when Adam or I wanted the other to pay attention to someone or something, we played the question game. The girls caught on and the game expanded. What kind of blossom is that? What kind of sky is that? What kind of report card is this? The questions might be a simple invitation to curiosity, a request for praise, a lesson, or a warning.

I loved the playfulness of the question game. But there were times it seemed to be shadowed by the questions I did not ask, the questions now less urgent, subsumed by normal daily life. What kind of man is my husband? How are our daughters like him?

A
ddie’s solo mountain trip became an annual ritual with Adam. He would leave just after morning chores on a Sunday and come back two or three days later. Many men did the same, going hunting or fishing. But Adam always went alone and brought home nothing. His trips were dependent on the seasons and our work. But they always seemed sudden, imperative. Tension built in him the weeks before he left. I felt uneasy as he packed for his trips. But each time, he returned refreshed and ready for work.

One Sunday, after church and dinner, the girls and I were still at Momma’s. Daddy, Momma’s brother, Otis, and another old guy from the mill sat on her back porch, smoking and spitting. I leaned on the porch rail nearby, watching the kids playing in the mill yard. I paid little attention to what the men said until Otis raised his voice to be heard over the girls. “ . . . Just like a woman keening, the most gawd-awful thing a man would want to hear.” I turned at the strange comment.

Otis’s buddy shook his head and spat off the edge of the porch. “No, weren’t no wolf. Besides, it sounded pretty sometimes. Like singing, but no words. That old hill farmer said it was a haint.”

Otis nodded in agreement. “A queer sound. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to lie down and sleep to it or go out and shoot it. We didn’t see sign one of deer, fowl, or squirrel out there. And it peak season.”

“Not the first time you’ve come home empty-handed,” Daddy said and they all laughed.

Cigarette smoke wafted out the back door. Frank’s voice muttered behind me, “How ’bout your Adam? He hear anything up there?”

I remembered Frank’s smell in the farmhouse years before and his disturbing photos. I pulled my sweater up closer around my shoulders. I herded the girls onto the porch, past Frank, and down the hall to Momma’s warm kitchen, leaving the old men to their tobacco and gossip.

That night, I asked Adam what he did in the mountains. “Molt,” he said simply, but with a grin. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more, but he continued. “I go up the mountain as far as I can and just listen to whatever there is to hear—the mountain, the air, the ginseng growing.”

“You don’t just listen.”

“Well, sometimes I talk back, too. It’s like any other conversation, Evelyn. No one does all the listening. Why are you asking now?”

“Uncle Otis and one of his buddies heard you. Some people think you’re a ‘haint.’ ”

He laughed the sweet, big laugh I always found irresistible. “The deer—some of them let me touch them. They’re strong as a horse but it’s a different strength. Lighter, with more spring. And there are places where the mountain answers. Like an echo, but there’s always something in it that didn’t come from me.” He pressed his fist to his chest.

“You pet deer and sing to the mountain?”

“Not to. With.”

T
hrough the Winter and Spring that followed, the image of Adam’s solitary howl in the mountains stayed with me. I imagined his voice filling the hollows and slopes, the deer docile and the mountain dwellers puzzled. But when the heat of summer settled over the farm, taking up residence in our un-air-conditioned house, and Adam suggested we take the girls up into the mountains, I thought only of the blessed cool relief.

The seven of us drove up out of the clotted summer heat until Adam found the special spot he wanted to show us on Mount Mitchell. We hiked down a short distance from the narrow dirt road to a creek. The girls scattered like pups as soon as they heard water. At the creek, the forest opened. An outcropping of boulders sent the water in a sharp turn and created a short waterfall. The girls stripped to their panties and plunged, screaming, into the water. They splashed and swam until they began to shiver, then leapt out of the water to make water angels on the flat, warm rocks. Once the sun warmed them, they plunged back into the water.

While I prepared our lunch, Adam found a patch of ginseng and cut us each a piece for dessert. The girls, their lips still tinted blue from the cold water, wrapped themselves in towels. Their panties and hair dripped onto the rocks as we ate our sandwiches.

When we finished eating, Adam pointed up the mountain. “There is a beautiful waterfall east of us. Not as good a swimming spot as this one, but the view is amazing.”

I rolled my pedal-pushers up a little higher and waded into the icy water. Adam stripped to his boxers and the girls dragged him into the water. Gracie held back a little, shy to see her father almost naked.

She had shot up that summer. Change would come soon, but for now, she shouted and dodged with the other girls as Adam splashed them with icy water.

I climbed up the trail to put away our leftovers. On my way back, ducking the overhanging branches, my arms full of fresh, dry towels, I felt a vibration through the rocks under my feet, like an approaching train. Puzzled, I stopped and listened.

Below me, Adam lay spread on the large, flat boulder—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man encircled by daughters. Sarah curled up on his chest, her hands tucked under her belly, her eyes shut. Gracie and Rosie lay parallel to him, their heads pillowed on his outstretched arms. Jennie and Lil draped across their father’s legs. The four of them had their eyes closed, too. They appeared to be napping, but something in their posture suggested anticipation. Adam stared up at the sky.

Carefully, I made my way to the edge of the clearing a few feet above them. A pure, sweet tone lilted, threading through the sound of falling water. Adam’s voice, but not the sharp crescendo of his pleasure with me at night. A broad, tender tone, undulant, almost narrative.

Everything, save the sensation of his voice, seemed to have stopped. The girls were motionless. Adam’s eyes were still open, but he did not seem to be present.

The distance between me and them seemed enormous. I was outside their circle. Adam was the different one, the outsider. But here, alone with my family, I realized I was the different one.

His voice, undulating up to me, filling the air, seemed to be the manifestation of my difference from him, from them. Suddenly, I wanted to fight its seduction, to stop my ears and cover my chest. I stooped to pick up the towels I’d dropped.

My breath drew short. Then a single word flooded me:
No
. I shivered and pushed away my resistance.

Abandoning the towels, I climbed down and circled the rock they lay on. I knelt near Adam, a knee on either side of his head, my hands softly on his temples.

My legs tingled. The vibrato changed, sweeping up and down, seeming to fall into the timbre of the waterfall and reemerge over and over. Shimmering, joyful.

Gradually, his voice vanished as if withdrawing into the rocks and water. No one moved. A bird called nearby, and then a single-note retort followed down creek. Adam reached up and touched my wrist. He tilted his face up at me and we looked upside down at each other. The girls stirred. The spell broke.

Jennie looked up, drunkenly, and announced, “Momma, Daddy’s right, if we get very still and listen for a long time, the rocks sing.”

Sarah looked up from Adam’s chest, first at her sister and then at me. I saw in her eyes, so like her father’s then, that she knew it was not the rocks. I pointed out the towels for Gracie. She retrieved them and passed them out. The girls and Adam dressed. Speechless, we moved slowly. As if underwater, we gathered our things and returned to the car.

Sarah slept in the front seat with me and Adam. Gracie and Rosie stared out the windows. Lil and Jennie snored between them. Adam drove us down the winding mountain road, his face soft and relaxed.

As the road grew flat and straighter, the girls began to wake from their stupor, fidgeting and mumbling. I didn’t want to think or talk. I started singing “Red River Valley.” The girls picked up on the chorus, their voices harmonizing perfectly from the backseat.

Once home, they were unusually subdued. We all went to our homework and chores. I fixed us a quick late dinner of eggs and grits.

Later that evening, Sarah, the last to bathe and the only one still young enough to need help, stood naked in the tub, her arms at her sides. I poured a final rinse over her smooth shoulders and down her back. “It was Daddy singing today. He sang with his mouth shut. Not the rocks,” she said.

“I know, honey. But it was the mountains. Daddy can only do that in the mountains.”

She stared at me dubiously.

“It’s true, baby. Some places are special. Some things can happen one place, but not another.”

More staring and silence. Then she held her arms up for me to lift her out of the bath. “I want to live in the mountains then,” she declared while I toweled her back.

That night, in bed, I asked Adam if he had ever “made the rocks sing” for the girls before.

“No, not like that. But I realized we were alone and I could do it without disturbing anyone else. Besides, the mountains do echo my voice in ways that the open land here doesn’t. The mountains do sing.”

“What was their reaction at first, before I got there?”

“Same as when you were there: they listened. I don’t know what they can do. How much like me they are.”