The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Granny Paynes pushed herself between us and took my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Stop that screaming up in your nose. You are working now. Grunt. Low, low down in your throat.” She growled at me and patted my collarbone.

  I growled back, low. The next wave of pain began, but I rode it, pushed behind it, not at its mercy, not drowning anymore. Again and again. I pushed and growled and grunted and pushed and growled. Granny Paynes knelt on the bed down between my legs. I felt her rubbing me, massaging my perineum between the pains. Then she held up three fingers. “Three more times,” she said. “Maybe two.”

  I took “two” as a challenge and began pushing before the next contraction. After the second one, both she and Adam hunched between my legs, staring. I pushed again. I felt the slither of shoulders, hips, and feet. Then the first newborn bleat.

  Silence followed. Everything stopped. Adam and Granny Paynes peered down at the baby. I closed my eyes and saw a featureless face in the mud.

  When I opened my eyes, Adam smiled at me. Tears ran down his face and he nodded. All I could see of the baby was the top of her wrinkled head and her waving arms as Granny Paynes held her between my legs. The skin on her scalp appeared strange.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “The Lord have mercy.” Each word out of Granny Paynes’s mouth rang separate.

  Suddenly, I felt very cold and dizzy. I held my voice as steady as I could. “Boy or girl?” I pulled myself up against the headboard to see. Adam looked to her and she shook her head.

  Granny Paynes cut and tied the cord. They quickly dried the baby, wrapped her, and slipped a knit cap over her head. Adam brought her up to me. He gazed at our child enraptured. Everything still seemed fuzzy in the dim light, but I could see that the baby’s facial features were oddly flat. Still, all the parts were there—ears, nose, mouth, and, when she opened them, clear blue eyes. I counted fingers. Ten. I began singing “Amazing Grace,” but my voice cracked out from under me.

  I lifted the blanket and tried, through the fog of exhaustion, to focus. “A girl?” I blinked. She looked like a girl, but in the shadowed lamplight, there seemed to be too much there between her legs.

  “More girl than boy, I’d say,” Granny Paynes agreed. “We need to keep her wrapped against the cold.” She pressed on my belly for the afterbirth. “This is not a birthing problem. Nothing could have been done. You gonna have to let a doctor look at her. Maybe they can do something.”

  “She’s beautiful. Our Grace.” The certainty and resonance in Adam’s voice calmed me.

  My fear subsided as I surrendered to my fatigue. My child was whole and well. I touched his jaw, but he did not take his eyes off our baby. A strong final contraction hit me. The dense, thick odor of blood filled the room.

  “A big, healthy afterbirth and all there.” Granny Paynes dropped it into a basin and turned her attention to the baby. She laid the baby on the bed beside me, unwrapped the blankets, and took a long look. “I have to tell you, I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” she said.

  She lifted Grace up by her little fists, then turned her and looked at her back, her neck, and skull. Grace’s arms shot out when Granny Paynes laid her back down and she began a full-throated wail, her face flushing dark pink. Granny Paynes worked the baby’s arms and legs, looked in her mouth, and then announced, over Grace’s diminishing cries, “She might not be quite right when it comes to learning—only time will tell you that. But everything else seems to be working fine. Specially her lungs. She’s not at all early and she’s strong. Born so close to Christ’s day, she’ll be a good one.”

  She diapered and swaddled Grace then pressed her against my breast. “We need to see how she sucks,” she said.

  Grace latched on immediately. A visceral, sharp tenderness radiated up my body into my breasts. The three of us watched as she sucked and grunted, her fists working under her chin. I was happy. She looked better than I had feared, but I wanted to see more. I motioned for Adam to turn on the overhead light.

  I fought an impulse to flinch and cover my eyes as the harsh yellow light flooded the room. Her slightly jaundiced skin did not have the rough swirled texture of her father’s when I first pulled him from the clay. Rather she resembled Addie on the second or third day. Every surface of her was oddly dimpled, like fat under the skin on a woman’s thighs. Her neck, face, shoulders. Individually, her features were normal. Tiny reddish brows, puffy newborn eyelids and lips. Bridgeless button nose. Toothless, shallow jaw. But the total effect was off. Was that my imagination? I held her close. Everything was there!

  “She’ll be okay, Granny Paynes. I know she will,” I mumbled. Then, to Adam, “And, yes, she is beautiful.”

  To him, she may have been pretty. The texture of her skin might have been deeply familiar to him. He now had someone who was truly his own flesh and blood, however much his flesh might now resemble another man’s.

  For what seemed like hours, Granny Paynes cleaned me and the bed up—though there was far less mess than I had expected. She sent Adam into the kitchen to make a tea from some herbs she pulled out of her bag.

  “It’s got catnip and some other good stuff in it. Good for your blood and the baby’s.” She spooned warm drops of it onto Gracie’s lips.

  She announced that she would be at my side until I could relieve myself. The four of us sat in silence, one new life among us and the odor of blood iron in the air. Granny Paynes eyed us as we gazed at the baby. She must have been surprised at our peculiar relief at having had such an ugly, sexually ambiguous child.

  After she sent Adam out of the room and helped me with the chamber pot, she gathered her things and gave me instructions. She made me promise that I would drink more of her tea, take the baby to a doctor as soon as I could, and not let my man at me for six weeks. Then she gave me some homemade salve for the baby’s cord, lit a pipe of something foul-smelling, and walked out the door.

  She and Adam talked softly in the kitchen. The tea tin where we kept the money since I’d broken the cookie jar clattered gently when Adam opened it to pay her. It was four in the morning on December 23, 1950. Almost four years since I’d found Addie.

  “Merry Christmas! Jesus be with you,” Granny Paynes called down the hall to me before she left with Adam.

  The next thing I knew, winter sun blazed through the bedroom window. I studied the baby’s sleeping face in the bright morning light. Already, she looked smoother. I remembered the shadowy, profuse genitals I’d seen earlier. I wanted to take her diaper off but the room was colder now, she was sleeping, and I wanted Adam with me when I looked. I ran my finger gently over her cheek, which felt smooth and soft as any baby’s. She grunted and turned instinctively toward my finger, her mouth open. Her eyes opened a slit, then wider. She focused.

  In that simple, clear moment of focus, I saw Addie’s first glance.

  I got out of bed stiffly and went looking for Adam, first thinking I would leave the baby asleep on the bed and then finding that the cord, though cut, remained strong. I turned, halfway down the hall, and shuffled back for her.

  The clock chimed nine times. Everything had changed for me and Adam. Our child had arrived. I held my daughter up so she could get her first look at her home. I tried to imagine all that would occur in those rooms—the parlor, the kitchen, the hall. She would do and say and think things in those rooms that I could not imagine. She was the first daughter of Adam, who was not a man.

  At the back door, I called Adam out of the barn. Our baby stared up blinking, undisturbed by the cold or my shouts to her father.

  Adam came and stood on the step below me and I handed him his daughter. They were beautiful.

  “Let’s do name her Grace,” he said. For weeks we had tossed names around. Grace had been his favorite.

  “Let’s take a close look at how things are going first. Make sure that we don’t have a Gary,” I said. Adam took her inside and I followed, waddling down the hall, anxiety rising in my chest.

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nbsp; He laid her on the bed and unwrapped her, ceremoniously letting the diaper fall away. She kicked her spread legs and muttered at the cool air. We peered. Definitely a vulva, protruding and very ornate, swollen, open. At its peak, a mushroom nub of pink, covered in foreskin, too large to be a clitoris. Bulging skin, unmistakably scrotal, framed the outer labia. She was both.

  I sunk down onto the bed.

  “Give her time. Hold her close to you. She’s our daughter, I’m sure.” Adam took my arm to help me sit. “She’s perfect.” He beamed at me. Then he pulled his waistband out and looked down at himself. He lifted my nightgown and made a show of examining me. “Yep, I’m pretty sure we don’t have a doolywhacker here. She’s Grace. Our Gracie.”

  I laughed and swatted his hand away, pretending that I shared his confidence.

  We re-pinned Gracie’s diaper, then lay down, one of us on each side of her. After a moment, Adam pressed our daughter against me as he slipped out of the bed. “I think she needs to be next to you now. That will help her be more girl. It worked with you and me, with Roy and me.”

  I held my ambiguous daughter closer and, despite my anxiety about what I had just seen, I slept. I dreamed that I woke and found them both looking at me, one set of brown eyes, one of blue eyes regarding me with equal knowledge and wisdom.

  I woke again with Adam offering me a cup of Granny Paynes’s tea. Gracie’s face seemed better. Her features were knitting themselves, her face seemed less flat, her skin smoother. Good enough to be just an ordinary ugly baby, I thought. I hoped the same was happening between her legs.

  “Go get Momma. It’s time she knows Santa has arrived,” I told Adam. “Just Momma,” I thought to add before he got out the door. “Tell them just Momma tonight. We’ll all be down for Christmas.”

  It felt wonderful to be moving, to have a much smaller belly, and be light on my feet again, but I moved slowly to keep from getting dizzy. I sat at the kitchen table, holding the baby and sipping a cup of Granny Paynes’s tea when Adam and Momma arrived. I handed my mother her new grandchild. “Grace Adele Hope,” I announced.

  “Oh, my Lord,” she said, clutching at our arms. “You delivered her yourself, Adam?” she kept asking as if she could not believe a man could do such a thing. She fussed and went on about the fast birth and how good I looked and how pretty the baby would be as soon as she got a little older and “lost the newborn look,” as she kindly put it. I don’t know what shocked her most, Adam delivering Gracie or how Gracie looked, but she, uncharacteristically, did not seem to know what to do with herself.

  Finally, she settled on making us a meal and starting on laundry. Soon the house filled with the smell of her corn bread and chicken soup. I napped again, curled up with my new baby in a warm bed, lulled by the voices of my mother and husband talking in the kitchen. There could not have been a better way to have a baby.

  Christmas Day, Momma urged me to stay in bed and rest. Everyone could come see me, she insisted. But I didn’t want to miss Christmas dinner. I was tired, but not nearly as tired as I thought I would be. Finally, I convinced Momma that it would be easier on us and the baby if we did the visiting and came to Christmas dinner rather than everyone coming to see us.

  By the time she met the rest of my family, Gracie looked normal. Only from certain angles did her skin have an unusual texture. Her genitals were more normal, less swollen. What had looked like a small penis had receded. The scrotal creases on the sides of her vulva had relaxed into a normal smoothness. She had a steady gaze, as intelligent as her father’s. Her fine down of hair glowed a faint copper in sunlight. We, of course, thought she was gorgeous. Still, I was gratified when Momma held her again and exclaimed, “Oh, her color’s better already. And she doesn’t look so newborn!” Gracie stared up at her grandmother. A calm, but very alert baby, she closed her eyes only to nurse and sleep. She went through all of the bustle and noise of Christmas dinner with those blue eyes wide-open, never complaining.

  Again and again, I told the story of how fast she had come—told it at the supper table and then to everyone who came by from around the mill-village to see the baby and exchange Christmas visits. I didn’t like leaving Granny Paynes out of the story. She’d been good and patient with me. But I did, disloyal as it may have felt. It bothered me most to lie to Momma.

  I did the majority of the talking. Adam basked quietly in the praise as he held the small bundle of Gracie upright against his chest.

  “Why didn’t you just pick her up and cart her off to the doctor?” Uncle Otis asked Adam. “That’s what I’d’ve done. Just picked her up.” Being a bachelor, Otis was both squeamish and inexplicably knowledgeable about such situations. “Just hauled her out that door,” he added, “before she knew what was happening and got her to a doctor. A man shouldn’t deliver his own children.”

  Adam leaned across the table toward Otis, but winked at me. “Otis, you and I both know nobody makes a McMurrough woman do something she does not want to do. Especially if she is hurting and feeling mean about it.”

  Daddy agreed. “Lily Mae was mean then, too. If she had taken a notion to, I’d have had to let her have her babies in the middle of the railroad tracks.”

  “I was not about to get in that old truck and go bumping down the road. It was too late for that,” I cut in.

  “Does it really hurt that bad?” Rita asked, looking worried and tearful. That year everything made her giggle or weep. Nothing was neutral. Bertie leaned down the table, eyeing me and Mary skeptically as she listened for my reply.

  Momma patted Rita’s hand and shot a look down the table at me and Mary to let us know we were not invited to share our pain. “Look around you. How bad can it be if everybody keeps having babies? And besides, Adam is right. We McMurrough women only do what we want to do.”

  “I’ve heard you forget about the pain real fast,” Mary added and rolled her eyes at me.

  Later, as we passed the first pie around, Uncle Grady’s sister, Lou, dropped in from down the street. Cole arrived with Eloise, now his wife and herself a few months pregnant. Cole gave Adam a bear hug of congratulations and kissed my cheek. He and Eloise were a sweet, warm contrast to Frank, who appeared soon after them, edgy and brusque as usual, his camera ready. We all crowded around the table, eating our slices of pie from little saucers, smiling for Frank’s snapshots.

  Lou stood in the kitchen door, swaying back and forth with Gracie spread over her big bosom, ignoring the streak of spit-up on her blouse. “That’s how my second and third ones got here, just popped out before I could hardly get out of the bed. Getting them out doesn’t have to take much longer than it takes to get them started in there in the first place. I was lucky, I guess. Some have a lot of trouble on both ends of that one. But my last two boys turned out fine without a doctor.”

  Silence rippled across the room as we suppressed our laughter and tried not to think of both ends of that one.

  Even Frank smiled, his normal brooding stare gone for a moment.

  Momma waved a warning at Joe, who gazed intently at the crumbs on his plate, his lips pressed shut. Rita looked puzzled, opened her mouth, but never asked whatever question Lou’s comments had brought to mind.

  “Fine Christmas supper as usual, Lily. Fine pie,” Daddy announced, pretending to laugh at the pleasure of mincemeat and pumpkin.

  I loved them all. My child was normal and whole. We were a family among family. I was a lucky, lucky woman.

  By the time Christmas visits were over, everyone had made their comments and told us their stories of babies being born. Depending on the point of view and the sex of the friend or relation, Adam was foolish and henpecked for not having made me go to a hospital for decent care. Or he was a hero, a man able and unafraid to do what needed to be done. The women in the family liked him better for calmly delivering his own child. That, and the way he cradled her so comfortably in his arms. He got almost as much attention as Gracie. I, on the other hand, became the butt of jokes about my exaggerated meann
ess and ability to intimidate. I felt sore and I tired quickly, but I would not have missed Christmas dinner in the mill-village for anything. I had just given birth to the world’s most beautiful child. How could I have kept her at home?

  Within two days, she appeared completely normal. Beautiful. Her skin as smooth as any baby’s and her genitals, though still puffy, had taken on the normal cleft of a female.

  Gracie was a good baby, calm and watchful, always moving but never frantic. To my relief, she walked and talked very early. When Adam came in from the stables or home from a job, she would roll back her head, stretch out her arms, and give a gleeful screech of welcome. He called her “my girl” so often that when she began to speak, she introduced herself as My-Girl-Gracie. We did not spoil her. She, in her good-natured and cooperative way, spoiled us.

  From the time of Gracie’s birth, we were an ordinary family. Like most ordinary families in the 1950s, we were making a living and making babies, not much else. I spent more time in the house and Adam spent more time in the stables. He had made a solid business of training, boarding, rehabilitating, and sweetening horses. We were down to one cow, but even then there was not room for all the horses. Building the new stable was our first major change at the farm, outside of plumbing and wiring for the house. Adam and I owned the farm free and clear by then. Momma had signed the deed over to us on our first wedding anniversary. The stable was our only debt.

  Gracie was almost two years old when she had her first cold. Normally an easygoing child, she became demanding and whiny. I’d been up with her the night before and was happy to have Rita come help. Late in the morning, I found them both asleep on Gracie’s narrow bed.

  I went looking for Adam. Between family and carpenters working on the new stable and Gracie being sick, the only time Adam and I had alone was at night, when we were both exhausted. We had not made love for days.

  For the first time that week, there were no cars or trucks in the driveway. All the workmen were gone. I found Adam in the clean, virgin stable, spreading sawdust and hay in the empty stalls. The odors of fresh wood filled the stable—no scent of sweat, manure, or leather yet. I came up quietly behind him, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and slipped my hands across his bare belly, then down to that flat, smooth spot I loved so much where his legs joined his hips. That was all it took—for either of us. Moments later, I conceived Rosie in the third stall on the left, on a bed of sweet, fresh hay.