The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (26 page)
“Sarah reminds me of you as Addie in some way. She knows things.”
He sighed and pulled me toward him. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The girls will be okay.”
Until then, I was the only person who had heard his other voice. I remembered the power of his voice the day he came back in the skin of Roy Hope. Anxiety thickened in my diaphragm and I took a deep breath. Adam spooned up against me, then rolled over me, as his voice had earlier.
The girls never mentioned what he did that day. Perhaps they saw Adam’s explanation of singing rocks as just another adult charade, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Or maybe the relative isolation of the farm made it easier for them to assume that we were the norm, that all fathers in the privacy of their families could make the rocks sing.
Either way, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For them to question or to change.
As Gracie reached puberty, my fears about how normal the girls were returned. How would they cope with their changing bodies, would Adam’s genes mitigate or amplify the normal or somehow pull it offtrack?
That year, Gracie had grown almost five inches. We marked the girls’ growth on the door frame of Gracie’s and Rosie’s bedroom. Gracie’s height marks were always at the top. The other girls followed in stair-step clusters of names and dates. Recently, Gracie had passed five and a half feet and was now within inches of the mark indicating my height. Her chest also popped out, first in pink, puffed buds, then small, round breasts. She began to lock the bathroom door when she bathed.
Months before her thirteenth birthday, she called me into the bathroom one afternoon to show me the bloody stain on her underwear. We were prepared. I’d shown her the sanitary pads and how to attach them to the elastic belt I bought for her. I felt the buoyancy of relief as I sent her off to her room to change while I washed her first pair of bloody panties in the bathroom sink. She was a normal woman.
A few weeks later, she passed through the kitchen as Adam helped me unpack a load of groceries. He handed Gracie the toilet paper. “Take this to the bathroom on your way.” Then he held up a box of pads. “These, too.” He stacked the box on top of the toilet paper in Gracie’s arms. “So much better than those rags, aren’t they?” he commented with the certainty of experience.
Gracie nodded enthusiastically at her father. Then frowned, puzzled, and turned abruptly, striding off to the bathroom.
B
y the spring of 1965, we were in a state of equilibrium. We were finished having babies. The girls were all healthy, all in school, and doing well—normal, sweet, and ornery as any children. No longer the main reason we needed help, they now worked in the garden and stables. Business was good. A new corral extended out from the stable and we were thinking of adding a second stable. With the new highways complete on two sides of our land, the farm was worth more than we’d ever dreamed possible.
O
n the morning of Saturday, April 10, 1965, I woke and sat up on the edge of the bed. Everything shifted sideways. But nothing in the dim bedroom had moved. Silently, I checked myself and stood up. The world seemed normal again. Just some odd quirk of the body, an unexplained dizziness that passes over and is gone. Momma would have said a possum had walked over my grave.
The girls woke and we all began our morning routines. Gracie brought in the milk while I started breakfast. Rosie fed the chickens and collected the eggs. Sarah disappeared into the barn to play with the latest stray cat. Jennie and Lil revved up for their normal morning debate. They were arguing about
Mister Ed,
the TV show with the talking horse.
“I
know
how they get Mr. Ed to do that!” Jennie shouted. Then she appeared at my side. “Lil’s not listening again,” she fished for my support. She was still in her nightgown. Her bright hair tangled around her shoulders.
“Get dressed. Brush your hair. Brush your teeth.”
She marched away, down the hall toward their bedroom.
“Your sister, too. Breakfast in twenty minutes,” I shouted after her. “And no experimenting on the horses!”
While my hands were in the biscuit dough, Adam kissed me and ran his hands along my sides. He poured himself a cup of coffee, refilled my cup, and set it down next to me. A bar of morning light crossed his cheek. His lips met the rim of the cup. He leaned back against the kitchen counter and talked. The near field needed disking for the alfalfa this week.
I listened to the grain and lift of his voice. How, inside those words about the tractor, were the same familiar sounds, the breath of everything he had ever said to me, every groan, song, and whisper.
Outside the kitchen window, the sun shone in a brilliant slant. The field waited to be turned. The fresh impatience of the morning breeze blended with the kitchen’s odors of bacon and biscuits as I opened the window over the sink. Adam, the girls, and I were at the table passing around the last of the scrambled eggs when my cousin Frank arrived to help with the tractor.
I didn’t like Frank any better now than I had during the brief time he’d been my housemate, but I’d gotten used to him showing up a couple of times a year and disappearing with Adam to work on the truck or the pump. He was a good mechanic. Whiskey and years as a civilian had worn his edge down to the common, guarded bitterness of a middle-aged man who thinks life has not offered him what he deserves. He’d never married, though he was seldom without a woman at his side on a Saturday night. Some men envied him. During the week, he worked at the mill as a mechanic. On weekends, he drank hard.
A flask bulged in his back pocket when he stretched across the table for the syrup, but I didn’t smell anything on his breath.
I didn’t want him working on any motors if he was drinking. As I set a fresh plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, I took a sniff to assure myself that he was sober.
He and Adam finished off the rest of the breakfast, then headed outside to the tractor. Rosie and I set up the two rinse tubs next to the wringer washer on the back porch. She no longer needed a stool to stand on as she swung the heavy wringer head over the rinse tubs.
As we gathered the dirty clothes, the tractor motor sporadically caught then faltered into silences punctuated by Frank’s cursing. Every time he worked on someone’s car, a child acquired a more colorful vocabulary. For once, I was grateful for the noisy, rhythmic chugging of the old wringer washer.
The tractor sputtered and choked through the first load of washing. After a particularly long silence, Adam marched up to the back door. He held up a tattered length of hose. “We need a new one. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Anything you need in town?” he called through the screen door.
“We’re fine. Go on,” I said.
Adam washed his hands at the spigot outside, then drove away in the truck. Frank paced in front of the open barn doors and sucked on his cigarettes. A strong breeze whipped the jeans and shirts on the line.
As I finished hanging up the first load, Adam returned, new hose in hand. Soon the motor came to a steady low rhythm and held. The men’s whoops of congratulations followed. I hauled a basket of wet bed linens out to the line as Adam and Frank attached the disker to the tractor. Frank climbed up and drove to the edge of the field. He turned in the seat and gave Adam a thumbs-up. Adam began picking up the tools scattered on the ground and returning them to the barn.
Then the tractor quieted to an idle. I pushed aside the pillowcase I’d just hung up.
Jennie stood at the edge of the path, shading her eyes as she looked up at Frank. She wore a light blue dress that had been worn down to softness by Gracie and Rosie. She looked tall and thin and faraway. Frank nodded and seemed to be speaking to her. She shook her head, pointing back toward the house. Then he rolled slowly away toward the field, the disker bobbing above the ground behind the broad tires.
I went back to hanging up our bedclothes and underwear.
I’d thrown the last sheet over the line and was smoothing it out when the tractor stopped again. I lifted a damp corner and peered. The tractor stood vacant in the field, the disker turned at an odd angle, one side higher than the other. Half the round blades jutted up. Frank had only gotten as far as the turn at the end of the first row.
He stood behind the disks, looking down as if he had dropped something in the darker streak of freshly turned earth. I thought of the flask in his pocket and the time he’d been alone in the barn. I opened my mouth to let Adam know Frank needed help. But all I got out of my mouth was “Adam.” Something blue lay on the ground in front of Frank. Jennie’s dress.
I ran.
Adam dashed past me. Shoving Frank out of the way, he fell to his knees at Jennie’s side. Beyond him, two of the tilted disks gleamed red.
A broad, bright sash of blood surged across Jennie’s waist toward her hip. A furrow of dirt dented her dress hem. A gash gaped at each ankle.
She blinked calmly up at the sky, freckles bright against her pallor. Her hair the same red as the dirt under her. “I can’t get up.”
Blood bubbled at the slice in her waist. Adam slid his hands under her, lifting. She coughed and smiled up at us. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth to her jaw and down her neck.
We ran past Frank, sprawled where Adam had knocked him, a dumb animal look of incomprehension on his face, the whiskey flask empty beside him.
Adam ran to the truck, clutching Jennie. I sprinted inside for the keys. Her head slumped against her shoulder as he laid her on the truck seat. The blood sash had expanded to a full skirt. The hem dripped. Adam dashed around the front of the truck and climbed in. With my back pressed against the dashboard, I knelt on the edge of the seat facing Jennie, as he revved the engine.
The steering wheel slipped in his bloody hands. He cursed and tried to dry them on his blood-soaked shirt. Jennie’s pallor deepened. Her eyes opened, distant. The artery at her neck pulsed faintly, then flattened.
Nothing.
I touched her neck, then gripped Adam’s leg. He stopped. We were still at the top of the drive. All we had done was back the truck up and turn it around.
Without looking at her, he stretched one hand out and laid it on her chest. Then his head fell forward onto the steering wheel. We broke. Silence ripped into screams. Adam heaved against the steering wheel. Light filled the closed truck cab, blood filled the air. Her lips were white and motionless.
The four girls stared in through the driver’s-side window. Their faces came apart in recognition. I heard heavy footsteps, and Frank peered in my window.
Adam roared.
He leapt out of the truck. In one motion, he grabbed Frank by the throat and threw him. Frank bounced against the stable wall. Adam yanked him up again by his throat, Jennie’s blood on both of them now. Frank’s feet dangled inches from the ground. Purple-faced, he clawed at Adam’s hands.
“Daddy!” Sarah rushed Adam.
Adam’s shoulders crumpled and he let go. Frank scrambled toward the driveway and ran as Adam sunk to his knees.
Lil stood at the open door of the truck, staring at Jennie, her face equally white. I took her head in my hands and forced her to look away. She turned to me, open-mouthed with horror. I pressed her against my chest. I could not save her from what she saw.
C
haos enveloped the silence at the center of that day. Momma and Daddy arrived as the coroner drove up. Someone—I never found out who—moved the tractor, covered the blood, and cleaned the truck.
The girls vacillated between inconsolable silence and bursts of weeping. Adam stared at the floor, looking up only when one of the girls approached him. Then, he held them, his face vacant. Through my tears, his features had that same not-quite-held-together look that the girls all had when they were born.
That night, Sarah and Lil were already in the bed with me and Adam when we heard crying. “Is that Gracie or Rose?” Adam asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He left the bed and came back with both of them. We slept, the six of us in a dense tangle, as if in the crowding we would not miss the one who was gone.
I woke more than once in the middle of that night, rising to the surface of consciousness and then falling back into oblivion. Near dawn, I surfaced a final time, forgetting for a moment and basking in the familiarity of the touch and smell of my family. Legs, elbows, breath, and hair. I reached down and touched someone’s leg. Warm, youthfully smooth skin. One of the girls sighed and shifted. One by one we all moved, each reacting and adjusting to the others in a ripple across the bed.
Then I woke fully and remembered why we were all there. The questions crushed into my chest: Why hadn’t I called her away from the tractor? Why had I turned back to the sheets? To the meaningless push of cloth over a wire line?
Everything broke up into pieces. The days after Jennie died were a series of faces; among them, Adam’s face always dead-still and faraway or completely naked and mobile in his cries. I’d never, and have never since, seen a man weep so. It wrenched me, and all who saw him. Most men looked away or offered him whiskey. A few bear-hugged him as if to squeeze out his grief. The women touched him, offering him food and handkerchiefs. To me, his skin was hot, searing.
And the girls, their faces wide-eyed, were stricken with sorrow one minute, then lapsing into their ordinary expressions the next. Lil, particularly, seemed lost. I could not protect them, could not soften or mitigate anything. I could only hold them close.
Every time I sat down, Sarah, who was only six years old and otherwise seemed to be enjoying the attention and commotion, crawled into my lap and silently sucked her thumb, something she had not done since she was a toddler. Momma seemed to be everywhere. She answered the phone. She laid out the bowls of food brought in by neighbors.
I pressed my jaw firmly shut and did not scream or vomit. I touched my daughters and my husband when they were near.
