by Rhonda Riley
Not long afterward, she carried the fiddle down to Momma’s for Sunday supper and we stopped by Freddie and Marge’s. They recognized Lester’s fiddle in her hands and playfully asked her what she planned on doing with it. Without a word, she stepped into the center of them, put it under her chin, and started on a slow version of “The Old Rugged Cross,” a little rough but all there. Rusty, an old man well known in the area for his fiddling, picked up on the chorus with her. When they were done, he put his old, mottled hand on her shoulder and said, “That was real sweet, darling.”
After that, we spent our Sunday evenings at Freddie and Marge’s. She preferred to play standing. Among the mostly middle-aged, meaty men who met at Freddie’s, she was a bright contrast, swaying pale and slender. Sometimes she set the fiddle aside and we sang, harmonizing like sisters. Her skin seemed to shine then, and when she turned that gaze on me, she was brilliant. Absorbing. She filled the room.
Cole was confined while his leg mended. The thought of the two of them meeting again made me nervous. Addie had told me that, while I’d gone for help, Cole had mostly been unconscious, moaning and cursing some. Still, I wasn’t certain what he might think about me and her. When I visited him during his recovery, I went alone. I brought him magazines and a pie. He spent his days in his family’s parlor, his broken leg encased in a thick white cast, stretched out the length of the couch, the rest of him covered with blankets. I told him about Addie, reminding him of how she favored me.
He nodded. “I don’t remember much but the pain and cold. She held my hand and hummed to me. That helped. She reminded me of you.” He rubbed his chest thoughtfully.
I distracted him with a question about my plans to get his daddy to loan us the tractor in the spring.
He would have to come with the tractor, he told me. His daddy wouldn’t want a girl driving it by herself. Beyond that, we spoke of nothing important. We had no privacy sitting there in the parlor, awkward with his family around, coming and going. I stayed only a few minutes each time.
By late March, Cole’s leg had healed well enough for him to get up on a horse. I was sweeping the back porch when he trotted up on his old chestnut. He dismounted slowly, easing his bad leg down, then walked up to the house with a limp that made me wince. He had a bouquet of dried mistletoe tied with a red ribbon. “This is the best I can do this time of year.” He grinned. “I was hoping to remind you of my Christmas present.”
He meant my Christmas promise to him. I had expected he would want to be back in my bed. But too much had changed. He and I had not so much as kissed since early December. I could not be with him like that, not while I was with Addie. For the first time, I had to admit to myself that what I did with her was what I had done with him. That admission stunned me speechless. He laughed, misunderstanding my stammering blush. Waving the mistletoe over my head, he leaned forward for a kiss.
Just then Addie and Hobo came around the corner of the house. She stopped, smiled at him, and held out her hand. His mouth hung open. He looked from me to her and then whistled. “Geez, I’d heard you looked alike, but I really didn’t remember. I didn’t see that well when my leg . . . Geez.” He shook her hand. “Thank you, Miss . . . Addie, for . . .” He pointed toward the road. “. . . When I . . . umm.” It was his turn to go red-faced.
“Just Addie. Where’s the horse you rode before—the gray one? I liked her.” She walked over to his horse and stroked her neck. The mare sidestepped closer to Addie, nudging her shoulder.
“She’s too lively for me now with my leg. Too spooky to begin with. That’s why we got her so cheap. Though I reckon I have paid a price for her. She’s worse now. Daddy’s thinking of selling her. She’s still trouble.” He rubbed his leg and moved to sit on the edge of the porch.
“I’ve seen her out in your pasture and talked to her. I’ll take this one to the barn for you,” she said and turned. The horse followed, its reins dangling. Cole watched them walk away.
“God, she looks like you.” Then he turned to face me. “Can I come see you some evening?”
“Just me?”
“Well, yes, just you. Like before.” He moved closer but I continued to sweep the steps. A subtle move, but it registered in his face.
“I can’t. Cole, I can’t, not with her here.”
“We can be quiet.”
“No, we sleep in the same bed. She’s scared of the dark. She doesn’t like being alone at night since her momma died.” I talked too fast, made new lies without thinking.
He sighed. “Okay, okay.” Then he glanced toward the barn. “If you want to, you can sneak out when she’s sleeping. We could meet in the barn.”
I imagined disentangling myself from her arms to go to him. I didn’t want to leave her at night. “I’ll see . . .” I couldn’t think. I knew he could see the answer on my face.
“You blush too much,” he said, his grin gone. He hobbled off, following Addie into the barn. A few minutes later, he rode away. I tried to read his back as he disappeared, but his posture told me nothing of what he knew or sensed between me and Addie.
My silence about the joy Addie gave me pulled me away from the people I loved, particularly my mother. All the things I couldn’t explain about Addie created a void that wanted filling.
The Depression and the war were right behind us, thick in everyone’s past. But Addie was a clean slate. When anyone asked about her past, she was vague. An outright lie seemed an impossible act for her. But she was deft with a turn of phrase.
I took on the task of storytelling and lying, volunteering when I was alone with the curious questioner that Addie was shy about things, embarrassed by her momma’s past. I felt oddly compelled to make her imaginary life as extraordinary as she herself was. By the time she’d been with me a few months, I’d told quite a bit about her. Not much to one person, but everything together would have amounted to a life—a life that to my small-town eyes was exotic. Addie had one brother, a blessedly small family. They lived in an apartment in Chicago. They went to live plays on Saturday nights, a Lutheran Church on Sunday.
For the first time in my life, I had the pleasure of telling a complete anecdote. No one tried to finish sentences for me, correcting or adding to what I said. No one knew her story but me.
One night, before we fell asleep, I asked her if it bothered her not having a past, a family, or a place she came from. “I come from here,” she whispered close. “Just like you.” She spoke again in a slow, deliberate voice. “I don’t like lying. I can’t do it without laughing.”
“I know, and you laugh when you hear someone else lying, too. But nobody gets upset with you. They just laugh along.”
She rolled over on her back. In the dimness, she stared up at the ceiling. “It’s funny when people lie. They know they’re lying and they think they’re getting away with it. But they’re like a naked man trying to straighten his tie.” She paused and sighed. “Other times, it is not a lie, but something else. I’ve heard others tell about something that happened when I was there, but they tell it differently than I would.”
My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight through the windows. I studied her profile, conscious of how others must see me.
“They do it without thinking,” she added. “To keep other stories going. Their own stories, or the things their mothers or cousins or the preacher have told them. They’re also telling about themselves. You hear two things at once—the facts and the storyteller’s heart.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, and laid her hand on my chest. “I know you’re helping me fit into your family’s story. They need the stories. And so do you. But I don’t.”
“So what do you tell yourself?”
“That I am here. That I am. And I am.”
I suddenly felt naked. Naked and so unlike her.
She turned toward me again and touched my face. “So go ahead. Tell any stories you need to.”
How could they not have known about Addie then? Not sensed on her skin or seen in her eyes
the deep, strange difference of her? I kept expecting someone to pull me aside and say they knew she wasn’t one of us. Once I dreamed that Momma, Daddy, and Joe buried her—put her back in the dirt where she came from—her eyes, open, calm, and beseeching as they shoveled dirt on top of her.
But no one ever accused her. No one stopped us. No one tried to take her away.
Gradually, I saw that everyone would treat Addie as people have always treated their relatives and neighbors with embarrassing but essentially harmless traits. They would ignore the trait. Or, in Addie’s case, the question of her father.
My mother was the only rupture in the acceptance of my lies about Addie. Momma was rarely on the farm alone with me and Addie. She didn’t drive. Usually, Daddy or Joe stayed after they drove her to the farm. Bertie was in high school by then and was too busy with her hair and her schoolmates for anything but the most necessary farm chores. Rita often tagged along, happy to shadow the “big girls,” as she referred to me and Addie.
But on this day it was only the three of us—Momma, Addie, and me. Daddy dropped Momma off at Mildred’s down the road and she had walked from there. She planned to stop on her way back and pick up some quilting scraps Mildred had prepared for her.
Momma and I were in the kitchen doing dishes. In the yard, Addie groomed Cole’s gray mare. The horse had somehow gotten loose, shown up that morning, and followed Addie in from the field. We could see them out the window over the sink.
Momma nodded her head. “She has a way with that horse.” She studied Addie a little longer. “I like Addie, but I can’t figure her. There’s something unusual about her,” Momma said, handing me a pot to dry.
I felt a jolt in my chest and belly and almost dropped the heavy pot.
She hadn’t taken her eyes off Addie since she first spoke. Outside, Addie mounted the mare bareback. “Her momma never told her who her real daddy is?”
I shook my head.
“Well, somebody in the McMurrough family was involved, from the looks of her. Doris might not have known she was already pregnant when she left with that Hardin boy.”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t breathe. She passed me another pot and the milk pitcher, washing the dishes by touch, keeping her eyes on Addie.
“Momma, she’s a good girl. A good person.”
She turned to me then, the same eyes Addie had. “I know, Evelyn. She’s got a good heart and a good head. She’s a good worker for you, too. I’m glad she’s here on the farm with you. And, in the long run, that’s all that matters.”
The tightness in my chest eased. I wanted to tell her the truth, to confess my lie. I wanted company.
Momma glanced out the window again. Addie headed for the porch, the mare followed. Momma turned back to me, her eyes moving over my face, judging me, weighing something. “I guess we all have our secrets.”
Hot, bright fear surged up my chest again, higher. My neck and ears burned. “Momma . . . Momma?” was all I could get out.
“Oh, Evelyn, don’t cry now.” She put her arm around me and kissed my temple. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s okay. You and Addie are both good girls. Everything’s fine.”
Addie opened the door and stomped the dirt off her shoes. She looked at us and I felt a very faint hum as she bent to brush the clay dust off her pant leg.
“I was just telling Evelyn what a fine job you girls are doing on the farm.” Momma took me by the shoulders and turned me toward Addie and the door. “Now, walk me down the hill to Mildred’s before it gets dark.”
The three of us strolled down the road in silence. The sky flushed velvet-pink above us as dusk settled. Birds called from the spring bud of the trees. I wanted Momma to say more but feared what she might say or know. Addie was quiet. I thought she sensed something and listened, too. I felt a twinge of guilt at my relief a few moments later when Momma latched Mildred’s wire gate behind her and waved good-bye.
Momma never said another thing like that about Addie. She was always good to Addie and comfortable enough around her, but I sometimes would catch her watching us, comparing. Addie had become a wedge between me and Momma. Not Addie herself, but the lies I told about her. I’d always been able to tell Momma everything. Not quite everything. Not Cole. But even that I felt I would have eventually told her—maybe years later, after I was married, with my own kids, and it would be something she would understand, maybe laugh about. She was a forgiving, understanding woman. To have to keep something so strange and so important from her seemed an affront to those cherished qualities. Not being able to confide in her made a difference between us, more of a difference because I feared what she might already know about Addie. Maybe she had seen something, more than just the resemblance between me and Addie. I wanted to know what she knew, but we kept our silence—both of us.
After Addie and I returned from walking Momma down to Mildred’s that evening, she returned Cole’s mare to the Starneses. She rode her bareback—the high-strung, mean horse that none of the Starnes men could handle. To hear Cole tell about it at church the next Sunday, Mr. Starnes had been more than impressed. Addie continued visiting the mare at the fence, and the horse galloped to Addie whenever she saw her.
A couple of weeks after the mare’s first visit, we were out in the field hoeing the corn. The mare spotted Addie when we were a good ways from the Starneses’ pasture. The work was hot and tiresome. We pushed ourselves. Every time Addie glanced up, that mare paced the fence and called to her.
By the time we got within thirty feet of the fence, the mare was farther off in the pasture. “Looks like she’s finally tired of you,” I said.
“I don’t think so.” Addie peered across the field, shading her eyes.
Then I heard the mare coming, a full, hard run.
She cleared the fence in a leap that seemed to stop for a second in midair, all grace. It was a beautiful thing to see, the kind of thing that stays with you. The mare, which she renamed Darling on the spot, followed Addie up and down the rows of corn, docile as a dog, oblivious to the four-foot corn tight against her flanks. I’d never seen anything like it.
Dark had fallen by the time we finished our work, so we stabled the mare overnight.
A few days later, Cole came by. From the garden, I saw him stroll confidently up to the back porch where Addie was bent over the washtub, singing. Her hair, now as long as mine, hung down her shoulders. He reached out to touch it. But when she glanced up and smiled that smile at him, he jumped back awkwardly.
As I joined them, Addie was telling him when she could be at his house to meet with him and his daddy. Cole jumped again when he realized I stood next to him. His eyes darted toward me, then quickly away.
I understood his confusion, the strangeness of seeing her face, so similar to mine. It was still a small shock to me if I saw us in a mirror. I longed to smooth things for him, put him at ease, but I didn’t want to lead him on. My offer of tea sounded lame, almost formal, and I felt a twinge of relief when he refused. His eyes flitted awkwardly back and forth between me and Addie as if he couldn’t decide where to look. With a tight, cordial smile, he muttered something about needing to get back home, then he left.
Addie studied his back as he limped away. “He’ll be okay, Evelyn.”
After supper, she saddled our Becky and left for the Starneses, an extra bridle in hand.
When she returned, Darling belonged to her, and Mr. Starnes was entitled to a quarter of our hay plus the hay for his livestock that he’d been promised in exchange for the use of his tractor. Addie had her first horse.
Her ease around animals, especially large animals, amazed me. I managed Becky and the cows well enough. But I could never shake my awareness of their size and power or my assumption that they longed for the herd, the open plain, and an undomesticated sky above them. A part of me always braced for their revolt.
Now there were two things—ordinary things—that we did not share: the fiddle and Darling. It felt right to have our vast, less obvious diffe
rence reflected in such public talents.
After several months with Addie, I calmed down a bit. I had no choice. I forced myself to eat more and eventually I put some weight back on. I was able to sleep a full night. My monthly cycle returned. Gradually, the world lost some of its bright hues and became more ordinary. But I often felt as if I lived in dual worlds. One eye saw everything and everyone as they had always been and the other eye perceived a world in which anything might suddenly, impossibly give forth, transforming itself as Addie had. Some days, I felt crazy and alarmingly innocent.
Addie, in contrast, retained her own unique take on things. After I showed her how to fold the soft cotton rags and safety-pin them to the inside of her underwear for her first period, she pulled her pants up, pressed her hand over her womb, then gave her hips a little shake. “It feels different. The emptying of it. Too bad we can’t stop and start it, like peeing or spitting.”
I laughed. I’d never thought of it that way. I dreaded my monthly. The rags we used were washed and hung out on the line to dry and be ignored along with all the other “unmentionables,” then reused the next month. But Addie took it all in with her normal aplomb.
There were, of course, other facts of life. I did my best to explain the biology of boys and babies. I thought I’d completed the job, but one day Addie came striding out of the field with my little sister close behind. Rita, a long, knobby twelve-year-old by then, adored Addie, following her around like a chick does a mother hen when she came to the farm. They both had a look of concern on their faces.
“We saw a stallion in the Starneses’ pasture,” Addie announced. Then she put her arm protectively around Rita and nodded. “Go ahead, ask her.”
Red-faced, Rita whispered, “How big does a man’s thing get?”
I held my hands out about a foot and a half apart.
Rita gasped, covering her mouth. Her eyes widened and she blanched.
Amazement flashed across Addie’s face, then her eyes traveled from my hands up to my face. “Evelyn!”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. They scowled. I brought my hands closer, to about six inches apart.