The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  The Enchanted Life

  of Adam Hope

  Rhonda Riley

  Dedication

  For my mother, Sarah Louise Riley Auten Thomas, who was an exquisite and fortunate fit for me. I offer this as repayment for the stories she told on the front porch during countless summer evenings. She left too early. I am still listening.

  This story is for her—a fiction, because, like her, I could not tell the whole truth or a single truth whole.

  Contents

  Dedication

  One: The Land

  Two: The Yield

  Three: Addie

  Four: Adam

  Five: Ordinary Life

  Six: The Storm

  Seven: Flood

  Eight: Renewal

  Nine: Surrender

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  The Land

  My husband was not one of us. He remains, after decades, a mystery to me. Inexplicable. Yet, in many ways, and on most days, he was an ordinary man.

  With him I learned that, before all mysteries, surrender is inevitable. We all give way to our true natures. This is his story. It is, of course, also my story, for I am the one left to do the telling.

  Now finally, after decades, I am writing this down for my daughters, for their children and the children after them, the act of writing my atonement for all I have not told them. Until now. For now I have proof. Sweet, indisputable proof.

  Sarah, our youngest daughter, sent me a photograph weeks ago, a full year since she moved to China with her husband, Jian, and their son, Michael. In it, her hair is glossy dark brown and straight. Her eyes are a deep brown as well, and the folds of her eyelids now suggest Asian ancestry. Her curly red hair and gold-flecked green Irish eyes are gone; in her new skin, she is her father’s daughter. Lil, my daughter who lives with me now, insists that Sarah must have had plastic surgery and dyed her hair. She’s puzzled and disappointed that her sister would take such measures to fit in where she now lives. But I know the truth.

  This truth begins on a Saturday in 1944. I was fresh out of high school and already tired of working at the cotton mill when I heard our car pull up in the backyard. Then Momma trudged through the door, hard news on her face.

  Without taking her coat off, she slumped down into one of the dining chairs. She stared at the table, then opened her mouth as if to speak. I propped the iron up.

  Every day brought news of boys missing or dead in the war. Momma and Daddy had been visiting my widowed aunt Eva. Two of Eva’s three sons were already dead. The third, Ricky, was overseas after lying about his age to sign up with the army. I braced myself, expecting Momma to announce Eva’s remaining child among them. Instead, she closed her mouth, hung her head, and covered her eyes as Daddy paused on the back porch to wipe his feet.

  “It’s your aunt Eva, Evelyn. She’s gone,” he said.

  Then Momma began to cry in earnest. Aunt Eva, the baby sister of my grandmother, was in spirit, if not in fact, the matriarch of our family. Closer to Momma than her own mother had been.

  I unplugged the iron as Daddy went to find my sisters, Rita and Bertie.

  “It’s okay, Momma. It’ll be okay.” I rubbed her back. I loved my stern and demanding aunt Eva. I could not imagine her energy stilled by death and the farm left empty. But I sensed, even then, that this change was larger than a single death, that it would radiate out from this single point.

  Daddy returned, shepherding my sisters into the kitchen. Bertie held out a handkerchief for Momma. Rita blinked nervously. Tears were rare for our mother.

  Momma wiped her face and sighed a deep, shuddering sigh. “I knew something must have been wrong. She hadn’t been into town in over a week. She always . . .”

  I started to sit down again and reached for Momma’s hand.

  Daddy stopped me. “You’re going to the farm with me. Eva’s cows haven’t been milked.”

  I didn’t want to leave Momma, but he was right. I was the one who should go with him. My brother, Joe, had no interest in the farm. Bertie had never deigned to touch a cow’s teat, and any animal larger than a house cat intimidated Rita. I knew Aunt Eva’s farm better than I knew my own bedroom. I followed Daddy to the car and slid in beside him.

  “Probably a heart attack,” he said. “I don’t think she suffered. Your momma found her on the parlor couch, pictures of her boys next to her.”

  He offered no more and I didn’t ask. We had never been much for words, the two of us. I looked out at the houses we passed. Eva was gone. A wave of anger surged through me. I tried to console myself with the hard practical thought that the natural death of an old woman was better than one more boy dead.

  Daddy muttered, cursing the roughness of the steep driveway and downshifting the old Ford.

  “The coroner’s here,” Daddy announced as we pulled around behind the house. Eva’s dog, Hobo, barked a welcome then retreated. Two men slid Eva’s sheet-covered body, strapped down as if she might get away, into the back of an open ambulance. Daddy got out of the car and greeted a man in a suit, who approached us holding some papers. I walked away from their voices, turning my back on the face of Eva’s house and its door propped open like a gaping mouth.

  The plow horse, Becky, whinnied and pawed as soon as I opened the barn door. Eva’s three cows bellowed. Their bags hung heavily, enormous and painfully pink. Manure soured by too much urine lay over the normal sweet barn smell. I started first with Maybell, the cantankerous one, working my hands gently along her bag, checking for lumps. For once, she seemed grateful for the milking.

  Only then, leaning against her warm, firm side, listening to the rhythm of milk hit the tin bucket, breathing the sweetness of it rising, did I begin to cry for the woman who had taught me to milk. I cried for her and for what the war had taken. All those boys dead, a new one in the newspaper every day. Now the war was taking my refuge, the farm. It had fallen into such neglect. That would not have happened just with the death of Uncle Lester. It took the war biting off one son at a time until there were none.

  Since I’d been old enough to carry a bucket or wield a hoe, I had done my best to help Eva. But blinded by grief, she had let the place go. A dull darkness slipped over me as if, in her death, Eva’s sorrows had shifted to my shoulders.

  After a few minutes, Daddy joined me. He snorted in disgust and stomped the manure off his shoes, then set to work on Beulah next to me. He offered nothing more about Eva’s death. He hated the farm. He had grown up poor on a farm and had vowed never to go back to one. I couldn’t see that we were any better off, the six of us living paycheck to paycheck crowded into the tiny mill-village house, but Daddy trusted the steady income of the textile mills. To him, farmers were a lot to be pitied. “Farmers are at the mercy of nature’s whims,” he liked to say. We finished the milking and started the feeding. While Daddy watered the hogs and chickens, I went into the house, drawn to it now that the coroner was gone. I pulled the screen door closed. Eva hated flies getting in the house. The stove was cold and held the same stillness that permeated the house. A saucer sat on the table, a half-eaten square of corn bread on it, a cup of coffee next to it, a spoon left in the cup. Such a puny breakfast—nothing like the ham, eggs, and biscuits she had always made for Uncle Lester, her boys, and me. I took the dishes to the sink and put them down soundlessly, not wanting to disturb the silence. I lay my hand on the pump handle, letting the cool of it into my palm. Through the window over the sink, I saw Daddy, bent at the hog pen, emptying a bucket of water into the trough. I imagined Aunt Eva behind me at the table, overwhelmed b
y a sudden urge to see her boys and, taking uncharacteristic leave of her breakfast and chores, going to look at their pictures in the parlor. Or had she known what was coming and decided to die there with them?

  I followed her path down the dark-wood hall past the bedrooms. A stench surprised me before I got to the parlor. I sucked in my breath and I turned my head, but kept going. Her bedroom door stood open, the bed neatly made. She’d gotten that far. On the front porch, the rocking chairs sat motionless. I stood out at the edge of the yard where the land dropped to the railroad tracks. The air was calm and empty.

  Then I felt the train, first in my feet—that faint, familiar vibration. The 5:40 out of Charlotte heading for the mill. I leapt and waved as the engine chugged rhythmically into sight, bursting into the air. I gave the engineer the bent-armed sign and pumped my elbow up and down. He saluted and obliged: two sharp blasts. The force reverberated in my breastbone, and I was a little girl for a moment, laughing and bouncing on my feet. The roar of the train swelled into a moving wall of sound as the long line of freight cars passed below. The ground shook.

  The roar diminished as the train disappeared toward the mill and the quiet returned.

  When Daddy called, I followed his voice to the parlor. He had maneuvered the sofa to the door and waited for my help. “It’s ruined. She must have lost control in the end.”

  I held my hand up to shush him, a gesture my father normally would not have accepted from one of his children. I picked up my end and we worked the sofa down the hall. The smell was awful. Even in the dim light, the dark stain that ran half the length of the sofa was visible.

  I kept my eyes on Daddy. Moving furniture was something he would normally do with my brother. Outside of his work at the mill, he was sedentary with his pipe and his rocking chair, already middle-aged, though still in his thirties. His strength and competence as we carried the big sofa through the kitchen surprised and pleased me. Sweat stuck my dress to my back by the time we got the heavy old sofa outside and, turning from the sight and smell of it, dropped it on the hard, bare clay beside the back porch.

  A few minutes later, we drove away in the glow of the dashboard light. The dark shapes of trees slipped by in the dusk. I glanced at my father. His hands were on the wheel. Immutable and endlessly taciturn, he peered at the road ahead.

  All my life, I had heard stories about my mother, both from her and her family. Illustrations of her stellar memory for numbers, her sly stubbornness, or her random gullibility. My youngest sister, Rita, pale and skittish as a feral cat, had always been transparent to me. Bertie, three years younger, was more complex but guileless and always willing to announce what was on her mind. My brother, Joe, born only eleven months after me and resembling Daddy as much as I resembled Momma, I knew in the thoughtless, unconscious way one knows a close sibling.

  My father was a different story. I sometimes saw him laughing with other men, but at home he sat detached, his face vague behind the smoke of his pipe. Only blatant insubordination or dangerous stupidity on the part of us kids could animate him into flashes of authority. I never heard him tell a story.

  Riding home from Eva’s, I glanced at him again. I wanted something from him, some sign of being touched by the same loss, a token of kinship. But we did not even look like kin. I had red, wavy hair and freckles. Like all the women of my mother’s family, I was tall. He was clear-skinned and compact, his dark hair straight.

  We drove home in silence.

  After the funeral, Momma and I crowded into the small basement of the farmhouse, pulling dusty jars of Eva’s beans, jams, and relishes off the shelves, sniffing and checking them to make sure they were still good. The small room smelled of mold and dust. Shelves of jars lined each wall.

  “This farm kept us alive during the Depression,” Momma said. From her tone, I knew this was not idle chatter.

  For me, the Depression was the dim past of my early childhood. I thought instead of how the war—which, at first, had seemed like a big, bright party—was taking everything. I had done my share for the war effort: helped neighbors in their victory gardens, donated my pennies, and collected cans, newspaper, toothpaste tubes, and grease. But these seemed like such small things. In the year before her death, when I should have been helping Eva, I’d worked the mill instead, standing in deafening noise, watching the birth of thread for the war effort. At night, I’d pulled cotton from my hair and the creases of my neck. In the mornings, I pinned my underwear to my skirts because all the rubber for elastic went to the war.

  Momma raised her voice to get my attention. “Careful, Evelyn. We don’t have rations for more jars.” She motioned for me to remove the jars from the next shelf. “During the Depression everybody helped everybody else. And we traded what we could. But it was Eva and Lester who gave us the most, and they could afford to only because they had the farm. You kids didn’t get so skinny or quiet as some did.”

  She stopped dusting, as if expecting an answer, then continued, “Land’s a terrible thing to waste, Evelyn. We’ve felt the lack of Eva’s work this year. Your brother and sisters are still growing. The government didn’t have growing kids in mind when it started the rationing.”

  I understood then where she was going.

  “We need at least a good garden crop this coming spring. Somebody needs to tend the house and barn, slop the hogs, and milk the cows. This war will be over one day and we don’t know how things will be then. Jobs can be lost. Wages can go down. But land will keep giving, if you work it. We may need every ounce this farm can give.”

  Through the small, cobwebbed basement window, I saw the apple tree and the wild brown tangle of the roses Eva had abandoned in her grief.

  “We’ll all come up to help. Until your cousin Ricky gets back—if he gets back—it’s this or the mill, Evelyn.”

  We looked at each other. I was seventeen. It was 1944. I was a farmer.

  We went outside to watch Joe and Daddy burn the stuffing and upholstery they had pulled off the sofa Eva died on. Momma held her hand up to shade her eyes, as if the fire was the sun, as if restricting her vision would diminish the stench of burning horse hair, the loss of her aunt.

  “I know we are all flesh—as much as the hogs and chickens we eat. And we go to dust. But it was hard finding her that way. A hard reminder,” Momma said softly as she stepped sideways to loop her arm through Daddy’s.

  Though I wasn’t cold, I stood near the fire and held my hands out to its heat. The smoke wafted up. Parts of Eva were in that fire and smoke—probably a hair or two from her head, a sliver of fingernail, a thread from one of her dresses, along with what had drained out of her while she lay dead on the sofa. All of that rose above us, spread out, and joined the sky.

  The next day was a Sunday. After supper, I carefully packed my clothes, my Bible, and the few possessions that I did not share with my siblings. Everything I owned fit into a bushel basket and two small suitcases.

  Momma walked me to the car, carrying the last suitcase. Daddy waited, the motor running. She took my arm as she slid the suitcase into the backseat. “You’ll be fine, Evelyn. The land on Eva’s farm is tough, but better than most of the farms around here, and you know that farm better than you know your own bedroom. Eva always told me how hard you worked. Your daddy or I will come up with your brother and sisters every Saturday to help you. Sundays you’ll be at church and then have supper here.” She kissed my cheek.

  I hated the monotony of the mill work and was happy to leave it, but the farm was now the means to fulfill a responsibility, not the solace it had once been. Later that evening, I folded my clothes and put them away in the newly emptied wardrobe Aunt Eva and Uncle Lester had shared for decades.

  Soon, it became clear to me how much of Eva’s work I had taken for granted. The stove was cold when I got up in the mornings, the kitchen pump stiff or frozen. I had to do the milking and feeding both morning and night. The garden needed to be revived. The dead were a heavy absence.

  Not lo
ng after I moved onto the farm, a man in uniform showed up at the back door, his hand raised, ready to knock when I spotted him. Before he spoke, I knew the news. Ricky wasn’t coming back; my laughing blond cousin was gone. There was no son to take over the farm.

  The farm had always been the farm to my family. It lay an hour’s walk outside of Clarion, and about twenty-five miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the rest of my family, the Roes and the McMurroughs, lived. If you took Clear Lake Road from the mill and, when it veered west, continued up the narrow dirt road ahead, you crossed a creek. Then the simple clapboard house appeared perched on a small cliff formed by the railroad cutaway. At the end of the steep driveway, between the well-kept, generous barn and the creek, were Aunt Eva’s three-acre kitchen garden of table vegetables, herbs, and her one frivolity—tea roses. East of the barn were the smokehouse and the outhouse. A lone tart apple tree graced the barnyard. Just past it, the land took one more short step on its rise toward the Appalachians and then settled into 150 acres of blessedly flat fields. It was open land, seemingly without mystery, clad in the same hard, demanding red clay found throughout the Southeast. If you squatted to take a handful of that soil, you would feel its strength, smell its clean sweetness, and know that it would give back if given to.

  Clarion, where I was born and lived with my parents, Robert and Lily Roe, was a one-business town. Narrow streets hugged the Lenford cotton mill, and the identical, mill-owned houses of the neighborhood everyone called the mill-village stood in curved rows. Not long out of the Appalachian hills, the mill workers who lived there were a rough, hardworking people, mostly Protestant and Sunday-school literate. They had lost their Celtic accents and immigrant hope for prosperity long before they came to the cotton mill-village for the luxury of electricity, indoor plumbing, and a weekly paycheck. During World War II, they bent to the rhythm of their work, seven days a week, in shifts that spanned the clock.