The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Adam pointed out that if Addie and I had been able to run the farm, surely he and I could do better. “Robert,” I overheard him say one day when they were out on the porch, “I promise you, if your daughter is ever close to going without anything, I’ll be down at the mill the next day looking for a steady income. I expect most of our money to come from the horses. Addie made some money with them, and I’ll do the same. Better, I hope. Evelyn and our children will not do without.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, son. That’s good to know. You’ll have a family to support.”

  They went straight into a discussion of how the farmhouse should be wired for electricity. An ice-box and indoor plumbing were also in the plans. Suddenly, everyone thought it was a pity that I had to go outside to relieve myself, that I washed my clothes in a tub, or lit a lantern at night. Before Adam, it seemed to everyone that we had just been two girls keeping house, waiting for a man to come along. If we had known he’d come with an ice-box and a washing machine, I’m sure we would have found one sooner.

  The wedding was simple: the preacher at Momma’s house, the new white dress for me, and a borrowed suit for Adam. Then, after the ceremony, plenty of food set up on sawhorses and boards in Momma’s front yard under the oak tree. Mostly family and a few friends. Cole came with Eloise, now officially his fiancée. Freddie, Marge, and the Sunday-evening picking folks provided the music. Even my strange, aloof cousin Frank contributed by photographing the wedding. Everyone got fed, the men drank, and some of us danced.

  Our honeymoon was as simple as our wedding. We got married on Saturday, left right after the wedding, and drove to my cousin Pauline’s place in Florida. Momma took a rare day off on Monday to take care of the chores and Joe took Tuesday.

  Pauline had moved to Florida only months before and rented a cottage on Lake Swan, a large, spring-fed pond. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms and a porch.

  When we arrived, Pauline announced that she would not interfere with our wedded bliss. She winked and was gone, off to stay with a friend. We were out in the middle of nowhere, miles from Gainesville where she worked. The lake, shallow with a pale, sandy bottom, was clear as drinking water.

  We made love that night in the water under a gibbous moon, quietly, with as little motion as possible. “I think I can feel the baby in you. Our tadpole daughter.” He pulled me under as he climaxed, his sweet voice suddenly muffled and shimmering the water above us in the bright distortion of moon. We tumbled through the water, my hair floating around us, his face inches from mine, laughing bubbles.

  Later, I stood shoulder-deep in the crystal water as he floated beside me, pale belly, rope of penis, long legs, and, below him, his shadow like an angel on the sand as he waved his arms. I put my hand on my belly, which was still flat, and asked myself the question every expectant mother asks: “Who is this child?” Then there was the other question that I dared not ask out loud: “What is this child?”

  Five

  Ordinary Life

  Being pregnant bonded me to Adam, as it can bond any woman to the father of her child. I wanted to give him a child. I wanted to have a part of him inside me in every sense. But my pregnancy also put us firmly on opposite sides of an experience. Addie and I had been the same. While I could commiserate with Joe’s wife, Mary, and with any other woman who had had a baby, for the first time what was happening to me could not be shared with A. in the same way

  That Adam could exist the way he did was, for him, as it is for all of us, the first given, the absolute. He took his own existence for granted. But the impossibility of his existence, the guilt and isolation I felt in choosing him over my own kind and bearing his children, these were things I wanted to share with him but did not. What good could come from telling him I had these conflicts?

  But in my sleep, I gave myself away.

  During the fourth month of my pregnancy, the nightmares began. In each dream, I was with the baby in public. Happily, I showed off my new child and everyone admired her. But then I looked down and I saw that she was shapeless and faceless. In some dreams, I tried to hide her face from everyone and get away. Other nights, her shapelessness seemed to be my own craziness and no one else saw it. I tried to keep the nightmares to myself. But I would wake from them with Adam holding me, rocking and humming.

  Once when Momma and I were alone in her kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday supper, I asked, “Did you have bad dreams when you were pregnant?”

  “Most women do. Don’t let it worry you.”

  “But these are real bad—really bad. They wake me up.” Then I told her one of the dreams.

  “Everybody’s scared when a baby’s coming, Evelyn. That’s normal. But all you can do is take it easy and let Nature do the rest.”

  Suddenly, her ignorance irritated me. I shook my head. “You can’t understand. You can’t!”

  I saw the hurt in her face as she paused before starting to speak. I held up my hand to interrupt her, but my own words backed up in my throat. Nothing came out of my open mouth. The puzzled expression on her face as I left the room reminded me of the faces in my dreams.

  The week after I told Momma my bad dreams, she insisted on taking me to Dr. Hanks, who delivered most of the babies in Clarion then. I knew she was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t help. He talked about what I should eat, what work I should do. Everybody assumed that I’d be having the baby at the hospital, of course. Only backwoods or desperately poor women still had their babies at home. To have sought any alternative then would have been seen as a kind of insanity. But in a hospital, I would be asleep and alone when the baby came out, as helpless as I was in my dreams. I didn’t want others to be the first to see her. I was afraid of what they might do if she looked like her daddy had when I first saw him.

  By the time I neared my seventh month, I was irrational with worry. Women then referred to the deep anesthesia of hospital labor as the “twilight sleep.” The phrase seemed ominous to me and I became convinced they would kill my baby or spirit her away before I woke, then tell me she had been born dead in order to spare me having to see her or raise a deformed child.

  I woke in a sweat one night with Adam holding me. “Tell me about it,” he whispered. And, finally, I told him about the dreams and my fears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I chose. I chose to do this.”

  Then I realized he might not remember much of those first few days. I turned on the light and got out the picture that Frank had left, the one of the Japanese girl burned in the bombing. I had put it away, deep in the small drawers of the wardrobe.

  “Do you remember this?” I asked. “Do you remember your skin being a different color and looking like this?” I traced my finger along the burnt shoulder of the woman.

  Adam moaned, low and awful. “I remember this picture. I know I was different from you, but I don’t remember being like this. I never saw myself. I only saw you. Even when I looked in a mirror, I saw you.” He drew me to him and pressed his face against my big belly.

  After a while, he got up and pulled the covers up tight around me. “Go back to sleep. No more nightmares. Let me think about this.” Despite the chilly night, he went outside and sat in one of the front-porch rockers. I listened to its rhythmic squeaking as I fell back asleep.

  Hours later, I woke to the sound of the truck pulling away. I leapt up out of bed. My first thought was that he had left me because I was so afraid of having his baby. But the bedroom remained undisturbed. He hadn’t taken any clothes. The photograph still lay on the bed where we had left it. I found a note on the kitchen table: “I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most.—Love, Adam.” The morning’s milk sat in the ice-box. Outside, the chickens were happy, scratching in the coop.

  Soon, he returned with a solution. I wouldn’t need to go to the hospital, he told me. A week later, we went to Pearl’s barbeque shack. He waited outside while Pearl took me into the back room to meet the midwife Adam had arranged the m
orning he went off alone. “This is Granny Paynes,” Pearl introduced us. “P-a-y-n-e-s,” she spelled it out after a quick glimpse at me, then left the two of us alone.

  Granny Paynes was a thin, very old black woman, but she rose quickly and stood erect. She shooed two little boys out into the backyard and turned on a bare-bulb light that hung in the middle of the room. She sat down on the only chair, next to a gigantic old wood stove. She observed me a moment, expressionless. The room smelled of sweat, hickory, and sorghum syrup. The warmth and sweetness made me drowsy.

  “Take off your coat and come over here.” She motioned and spat tobacco juice into a cup, then sat the cup back down next to the stove. Her deep voice sounded much younger than she appeared. “Stand up straight and lift up your shirt,” she said.

  I complied.

  “Now”—she looked up at me as her strong hands worked around my belly—“why you want a colored granny woman to help get your baby into this world instead of going to the hospital in Charlotte like all the other white women?”

  I’d never had a colored person touch me that intimately, but her hands felt strong, sure, and, like her voice, young. “I’m scared of hospitals,” I told her. She had turned her head sideways, as if listening to my belly, as she studied my face. Her brown irises had a faint ring of pale blue around them.

  “I’m scared of not waking up when they put me out. I don’t like hospitals,” I added.

  “I hear you on that one.” She nodded. “It ain’t natural for a thing like that to happen and a body feel nothing a’tall. Your people know you here? Would your momma want you here?”

  “No, ma’am. Nobody knows about this but my husband.” I stared straight ahead at the wall of the shed. Her hands were low on my belly, pressing up.

  She stopped then, pulled my shirt down over my skirt, and straightened herself to eye level. One quick glance down at my wedding band. “I do not get rid of babies for people. Have you got yourself into trouble with a colored man?”

  “No, oh, no,” I stammered. “I’m just scared, that’s all. I’m so scared. And they would make me go to the hospital. I know they would.” She studied my face again. She must have heard the truth of the fear in my voice. She patted my arm.

  “Well.” She took a snuff tin out of her dress pocket and put a pinch in her cheek. “I have only brought along a few white babies—only when necessity made it so.”

  “I’ve heard of you, Granny Paynes. Pearl tells us you . . .”

  She raised a hand to shush me. “They was poor white women. You don’t look rich exactly, but your people could afford to take you to a white doctor, I know. My Rankin has done some work on your farm, years ago before you was living up there. I’ll come to you when your time has come, but, like I told your man, I want twice my normal birthing fee. If anything happens to you or your baby, your people will be after me. You understand?”

  “I do, I do,” I told her. I had not considered what a risk she might be taking. “Thank you, Granny Paynes, thank you.”

  She inspected me again, her eyes scanning me head to toe, and then smiled so broadly her whole face erupted into fine lines. “By my reckoning you have yourself a Christmas baby, most likely a daughter. Between now and then you eat as well as your purse and land will allow. Take a sip of wine or beer—nothing harder—after supper if you can’t sleep and stewed prunes if you can’t relieve yourself. After December first, don’t eat garlic, chocolate, or tomatoes. And no tobacca. They go into your womb. They’ll spoil your milk and make your baby fussy. The baby needs your milk.”

  She walked me toward a side door of the shed. “Now, if you pass blood without any pain, you let me know. When your child is coming, the pain will be like your monthly, only stronger. Your man should come for me when you cannot finish singing through all the verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ twice between the pains.”

  I laughed. “ ‘Amazing Grace’?”

  She smiled again. “You do that, child. And you come see me one more time beforehand—come the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This is your first, right? Maybe three times through all the verses then. Then Granny Paynes will be happy to come help your baby get here.” She held on to my arm as if she needed help walking, but I could feel her fingers working through my coat sleeve as if she was checking my strength as she returned me to my husband.

  Outside again, Granny Paynes and I squinted at the brilliant morning sun. Adam waited, a slab of wrapped ribs in his hands. He had that tentativeness men have around birth, and his eyebrows shot up in a question. For the first time, he seemed wholly a man. A pang of grief for Addie surged through me. Granny Paynes winked at him and handed me off like a bride.

  I felt how young we were, how new the world was in that cool autumn light. I rode home in the truck with the warm ribs on my lap, one hand on Adam’s leg and the other on my belly.

  Pregnancy changed things between us. Adam became my protector. Not that I was in any danger. But I felt my primal vulnerability. My belly stuck out between me and the world. Any danger coming at me would come through our child. I was an animal then, more than at any other time in my life.

  Adam probably felt more like my servant than my protector. In the last month, he took over most of the milking and all of the heavy work while keeping the horses, too. Protector or servant, things were very different from how Addie and I had been. Like so much with A., the new arrangement felt both strange and natural.

  He was not squeamish or disgusted as some men are by periods, pregnancy, birthing, or breast-feeding. Of course, for a man, he possessed a unique perspective in these matters. His passion became gentler, sweeter. At night in bed, he knelt before my belly, stroking it, singing to the child until the vibrato of his unique voice made me ache with tenderness. At the sound of his voice, the baby turned inside me, wriggling.

  Momma had told me not to let Adam make love to me in the last month. She said it was not good for the baby. But we did. I did not feel very erotic, but I craved the sound and odors of him, his hands on me, and his body surrounding me. When my own pleasure increased, my womb tightened and that satisfied the way a good scratch does an itch. I thought the contraction of sexual climaxes would make my womb stronger.

  I spent the last weeks at home, not even wanting to go to Momma’s. In the evenings, I walked through the house, touching everything and thinking of how my baby would soon be in those rooms seeing the same things I saw. We packed away everything in the parlor—everything but the photographs. I put up new curtains, too. The jars of food Momma and I had canned the previous summer overflowed the basement shelves. The new electric refrigerator hummed in the dining room. Over and over, I sang “Amazing Grace,” as if it would charm our child into the world.

  I was ready, past ripe.

  The heaviness and the waiting did not sit well with me. On some of the last nights, I tossed and turned around my big belly. In my misery, I kicked Adam out of the bed. He tried to comfort or distract me, singing or reading, sometimes bringing up his beautiful harmonics. But even that worked only for a few hours—until the next time I woke up to pee. I sometimes used a chamber pot again, even though we had indoor plumbing. The bathroom seemed so cold and so far down the hall in the middle of the night.

  On the morning of December 22, I woke with a start in the darkness. Adam took a sharp breath behind me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my belly. “This contraction woke you up.” My womb clenched hard as a rock and painful down through my legs.

  “Yes. It hurts.”

  Softly, he sang “Amazing Grace,” all verses once, then went through them a second time. Silence followed and no more pain. We listened, the two of us in the dark. Another five minutes passed before the next contraction.

  All day long, painful, but erratic—twenty, maybe ten, sometimes five minutes apart—the contractions came. I boiled towels, sheets, and a single white shoelace as Granny Paynes had instructed, grateful for the automatic washer and wringer. Before dinner, Adam drove into town to warn her that m
y time approached. Otherwise, he stayed close by. We went through our normal routines. I ate well. Then, about nine o’clock, the pains came on hard and always right at the end of the second round of the song.

  Suddenly, I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t want Adam to leave to fetch Granny Paynes. He dragged in Hobo, who seemed puzzled but stood patiently by the bed, his snout on the pillow next to me. I moaned my way through contractions, clutched handfuls of his hide, and curled up fetal around my own womb.

  With each contraction, everything broke into a grainy blueness, then returned to its natural color and density when the pain released me. Then Adam was back with Granny Paynes and Hobo was gone.

  Granny Paynes and Adam coaxed me out of bed. “Walk the baby out. You keep moving and it’ll come out easier. Walk it out. Sing it out,” she urged.

  Into the kitchen, then into the parlor and back to the bedroom over and over we walked, with her and Adam singing “Amazing Grace.” His strong, soft baritone on one side and her rich, old alto on the other. “Sing through the pain, li’l momma. Sing.”

  I tried, but my voice evaporated into a tuneless hiss. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but words were too much. Movement and even breath seemed too much. Pain obliterated everything.

  At last, they led me back to the bedroom. Granny Paynes smoothed a clean oilcloth and a layer of towels across the bed. They helped me lie down. The pain grew until it overcame everything. The visual world narrowed to a single crack and everything else disappeared into the pain. I began to disappear, too. There was only pain.

  Then, it felt like the hand of God reached inside me and pulled down. Abruptly, the pain changed direction. I was pushing. The pain gathered in the diffuse, overwhelming blueness and shot down to one sharp, blind-white spot between my legs. I screamed high and scared, grabbed Adam by his shirt, and pulled his face up to mine until there was nothing but his brown eyes. I thought I was dying.