The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Adam put his hand on my back. “They were early, Evelyn. It may take a day or two longer to lose the newborn look.” The two nurses took the twins into an adjoining room and shut the door.

  “Adam, I need to have them close to me. I need to hold them like I did Gracie and Rosie. Like I held you. I want them,” I whispered.

  “Wait here,” Adam said.

  Still a little groggy from the anesthetic, I let him go without further comment. My engorged breasts ached. I wanted to hold my babies. Momma and the girls, exclaiming over the other babies, hadn’t noticed Adam leaving.

  Across the nursery, another glass wall revealed a parallel hall. Adam appeared opposite us on the other side of the nursery and knocked at a glass door near the room the nurses had taken our babies into. The nurses came back out without the twins and went to the door where Adam stood. He said something. The younger nurse looked at the older one, who shook her head at Adam. The older nurse pointed back to the room where they’d left the twins; she began to shut the door. Adam put his hand out to stop her, his brow furrowed in protest. He stepped into the nursery. Both nurses stepped back.

  “Back in a minute, Momma,” I said.

  She looked up and saw Adam, too. I waved away her question.

  I waddled over to the other side of the nursery to join Adam.

  An unfamiliar hardness resonated in his voice. “No blood tests. We don’t want any blood tests. No tests of any kind. My daughters are fine. You can’t do that to our children without our consent.”

  The nurses exchanged looks. The older one brushed past us as she strode out of the nursery and down the hall. The remaining nurse smiled weakly and said, “Twins.”

  The older nurse returned with a doctor. He held a chart and seemed surprised when Adam reached out to shake his hand and formally introduce himself. “I’m Adam Hope, father of the twins your nurses are examining. There’s no need for any tests.”

  The doctor shook his head and raised his hand, dismissing Adam’s objection.

  But Adam continued. “Their reflexes are normal. Lungs and heart normal. They have taken some formula.”

  The doctor’s face hardened with each statement as Adam’s voice grew more firm. “Mr. Hope, I am not even sure your children are female. We need to discuss some options. There are procedures for children like yours.”

  “They are girls. They look exactly like our other two daughters did when they were born.” This registered in the doctor’s eyes, but his face remained set. One of the nurses shifted beside us and cleared her throat softly.

  I squeezed Adam’s arm to shut him up. It took effort to think through the lingering veil of anesthesia, but his tone alarmed me.

  “We don’t want blood tests. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I lied.

  The doctor snorted. “No tests,” he said to the nurses.

  “They’re fine.” Adam’s voice dropped. “And we want to take them home.”

  I slipped my hand into Adam’s. “As soon as possible.” I stared back at the doctor, who regarded us as if we were demented.

  The doctor opened his mouth, snapped it shut, then quickly scrawled something across the chart. “These babies should be examined by pediatric urology. But I’m signing for early dismissal. Tomorrow.” He thrust the chart at the nurses and marched away.

  I went back to my room while Adam stayed to argue the nurses into letting me keep Jennie and Lil with me for the night.

  They were good babies, crying so softly and infrequently that they did not wake the newly delivered woman who shared the room with me. I ignored the bottled milk and let them relieve me. I held them close, willing them to become normal girls.

  The next morning, we checked out of the hospital without blood tests and without incident. Tired, sore, and happy, I took my ugly carrot-tops home.

  Then the shit hit the fan of domestic life—the shit and the laundry and the spit-up and the spills and the scraped knees and the shoes and the holidays and the biscuits and the grits and the cats and the dogs and the rain and the manure and the weeds. We had tilted toward chaos with two kids, a farm, and a stable full of horses, but the addition of twins tipped things straight into the gutter. The next years were a blur of babies and work. They were probably the happiest years of my life.

  We needed more assistance on the farm than family could supply. For the first time, we hired regular help, Wallace, Granny Paynes’s nephew. A natural stable hand and an otherwise quiet man, he muttered to the horses as he worked, a deep, rhythmic chatter that calmed them. His daughter, Macy, sometimes helped me in the house.

  In temperament, Lil and Jennie fluctuated between Gracie’s calm and Rosie’s natural-born outrage. More than any of the other girls, they were left to their own devices. All energy and wide eyes, they calmed and excited each other in turns. As babies, they burbled contentedly at each other for hours until one of them bit, hit, or scratched the other and all hell broke loose. Each added to the other’s wails in an endless cycle. If they were left unattended, their cries reached a crescendo at which they gagged then threw up. Together. On each other. Their mutual mess provided immediate distraction and they grew quiet again. Quite the team.

  Before they were two years old, Jennie and Lil learned to pull themselves up the side of their crib, crawl over the top, and slide down the rails to the floor. Soon they began appearing everywhere—in the barn, under the house, in the chicken coop. Like me, they wandered fearlessly as toddlers, but they were doubly bold and agile. Wallace often called to me from the back door, the two bright-haired, squirming girls in his dark arms and an apology on his lips, as if he were to blame for being unable to bear them underfoot in the stable.

  One day, Adam spotted them at the end of the driveway. Their bright curly mop tops disappearing as they descended, heading for the railroad tracks. He bolted after them. I found the curtains of their bedroom fluttering out the window and the screen on the ground below. Adam trudged back to the house, the girls struggling, unharmed, in his arms. That evening he and Wallace screwed all the screens into the window frames and began work on fencing. By the end of the week, the front and side of the house were fenced and the driveway gated.

  In rebellion against their terrible confinement, Lil and Jennie made their own playhouse. With help from Adam, they built it out of scraps and anything they could successfully filch from the house or the barn. They were good thieves and scavengers. The playhouse held a collection of bottle caps, empty birds’ nests, a stinking fox skull, and a seemingly continuous litter of kittens. A semicircle of little rocks at the entrance forbade anyone else entry. They worked out complex fantasies in their little playhouse. At the supper table, they embellished the stories in dual chattering blasts of an English patois known only to the two of them, a peculiar Southern drawl sprinkled with nasal, Asian intonations.

  On our tenth wedding anniversary, Momma took care of the girls while Adam and I went to a restaurant and a movie, a rare night out for us. When we returned, rather than going inside, I waited by the car while Adam checked the stable. Lil and Jennie would be asleep, maybe Rosie, too. But Gracie’s voice carried through the windows, followed by Momma’s reply. A faint breeze crossed the yard. I leaned back over the hood of the car and scanned the thick field of stars vibrating above. A beautiful, clear night. Adam joined me.

  I took his hand. “Let’s not go in yet. We haven’t been outside alone at night in years. Let’s take a walk.”

  But when we passed the twins’ house, he stooped and pulled me in after him. Some small animal scurried away. We leaned against the trunk of the oak that was a corner support and kissed. We made love there on the dirt floor. The sweet voice of his pleasure echoed against the tin walls. What should have been a safe time of the month was, instead, Sarah, our fifth child.

  Her birth was uneventful. I had not even bothered consulting Granny Paynes, who had grown frail in the last few years. The hospital nurses were concerned. But the doctor, after I repeated my lie about being Jehovah’s
Witnesses, was nonchalant about our daughter’s oddity and our confident refusal of his services.

  The quietest of the girls, Sarah spent her first months content among her cavorting sisters and the daily chaos. Watchful and calm, she reminded me of Addie. She grew in leaps, seeming to develop skills overnight. Standing one day and running the next, babbling incoherently, then suddenly speaking in complete sentences. She learned to hold a crayon one day and covered the walls with smiling faces and stick-figure horses the next. Only in her quest for art supplies did she exhibit Lil and Jennie’s gift for theft and deception. For her, a crayon or pen was incomparable for fixing the boo-boos and injustices of being the youngest of five daughters. Gradually rising smudges, gray fingerprints, and crayon drawings on every wall marked her growth.

  With her, we were done. No more children. I felt it in my heart.

  By the time Sarah learned to walk, the focus of the farm had shifted from the fields to the stable of horses. Except for a few acres of feed crops and the kitchen garden, the farm was pasture and a riding arena now. We kept a cow and the chickens, too. I became the bookkeeper and part-time secretary for the horse business, often taking calls with a baby on my hip.

  Wallace was our full-time, all-the-time stable hand and groom. We sometimes hired a second part-time man to help him. In a pinch, Cole also helped us. He and Adam were not the partners he and Addie had been, but they were still a good team when occasion arose.

  Cole, his wife, Eloise, and their two boys often joined us on the Fridays when Lloyd, the farrier, was on the farm and stayed for dinner. With Lloyd, Cole, and Wallace, there were enough men for post-dinner poker in the barn. Sometimes Joe or Freddie joined them. If the wives came too, we women would let the kids run amok while we retired to the front porch for iced tea. I loved those evenings on the porch with the women, especially when Eloise and my sister-in-law, Mary, both came. When the men came alone, their voices drifted out the open barn door. I loved their unhurried masculine conversation, the quiet rhythm of the game punctuated by an occasional question or a laugh.

  We boarded mostly normal horses, but some that came through our stable were the fine-bred, splendid, and damaged animals of the wealthy and obsessed, brought to Adam, often as a last-ditch effort to reclaim them. People from Charlotte and Louisville with contrary horses showed up or called on a regular basis. Often, they paid Adam to come to them. Sometimes, we organized small groups of riders for “classes.” On those days, the pasture filled with horse trailers, the larger, round pen we eventually built, crowded with riders and horses come to learn good manners. Adam continued refining his philosophy of horsemanship, urging the riders to true themselves. Calm, balance, lead. Willingness, not will.

  He spent a lot of time observing horses, particularly the troublesome ones. His methods with them varied. But there was a pattern to his process of sweetening a colt. Before the saddle went on, a subtle seduction began. Adam and the horse regarded each other, then turned slightly away. His gaze was expectant then but without the tensions of anticipation, his whole being a simple, upright announcement: I am here. Adam possessed a special kind of stillness then, stalwart and open. He blinked, a single, slow blink. Though I heard nothing, I could tell by the turn of the horse’s ears when Adam’s unique voice came into play. The young horse would sniff with added curiosity and stretch his neck. Gradually, Adam moved toward the horse, then the interaction of touch began. Within minutes, the colt would follow him around as if drawn by some invisible line. If at any point the horse balked, backing away from the blanket or saddle, Adam’s stillness returned. Sometimes then, as he paused, waiting briefly for the horse to reflect his calm, I would feel a slight hum in the air, a feathery drone as if he’d changed pitch or tone.

  In the early mornings, when I took coffee out to Adam, the snort and shuffle of horses and the clean odors of large animal health filled the stable. On winter mornings, when I stepped into their animal warmth from the cold yard, my head still thick with sleep, the horses seemed like an animal extension of my dreams, an animate den of horseness that I moved through. I loved them then, for that unconscious availing of themselves. I admired the sleekness of their hide, the powerful depth of their chests and legs, and the whiskery velvet of their inquisitive mouths. The rare times I had alone with them in pasture when they were at rest, I felt honored by their indifference and the glimpse they offered of the herd’s solace. Their grace at play in pastures never failed to stop me and hold me for a moment.

  But for all my developing appreciation, I never became a good horsewoman. I remained most content among horses rather than on them. My attempts at honing my skills had been constantly interrupted by pregnancy, and I could never quite be convinced any animal wanted me on its back, that it preferred me to the open sky above.

  All the girls eventually became respectful and skilled on the back of a horse. Adam made certain of that. Gracie, like me, appreciated the horses’ company but was the least interested in riding. She often carried a chair out to the stable and read, her back to the light of the open door. She’d glance occasionally from her book to the horses as she read. Jennie and Lil dressed the milder horses in scarves. They loved to steal away on Darling together, but their interest was not deep. Sarah drew them, of course, and, as soon as her vocabulary was equal to the task, began to advise Adam. He’d listen patiently to her analysis of a horse’s emotional state, his head cocked to one side. She was often right, he told me. Rosie remained the most interested in the horses. She lived in the stable, apprenticing herself to her father, and became his chief riding partner. Nights when she wanted refuge from the antics of her younger sisters, she slept in the stable. More than once she missed a day of school after being up all night with Adam nursing a sick horse or a mare in foal.

  Once, when Sarah was still a baby, I passed the corral on my way back from picking squash and paused to watch Adam deep in his own observation of a fearful, volatile mare that had been brought to him for social repair. He stood a few yards from the corral fence, his hands relaxed at his side, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I was thinking about what was under his clothes—his shoulders and the slope from his back to his waist. He turned, smiled, and then crooked his finger, calling me over. “What kind of horse is this?”

  I gave him a blank look. The horse circled the corral, her eyes darting back and forth.

  “Is she scared, content, nervous, healthy?”

  I shook my head and shrugged.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Look. The kind of horse she is shows right there on her skin and how she moves.” Then he began a recitation, pointing at her ears, the tension in her neck, how she held her tail, the balance of her spine, and the condition of her skin. “She’s been poorly groomed and someone beat her,” he announced. He waved his beautiful hands, tracing the horse’s back and the curve of her neck in the air. He entered the corral and raised his right arm. Immediately, the horse stopped circling the corral and began an agitated pace opposite him, neighing sharply.

  Later that evening, while Adam finished in the stable, I got the girls ready for bed. I squatted by the bathtub bathing Sarah, who, completely soaped, wiggled in my hands and struggled to climb the shower curtain. Lil and Jennie perched on the sides of the sink, peering into the drain, their heated debate about toothpaste bringing them close to blows. Gracie sat on the toilet, peeing and tracing my spine with her toes. Rosie rushed in, accused Gracie of stealing her favorite stuffed horse, then bit her sister. Suddenly, the four of them were in full skirmish behind me. Sarah rubbed soap into her eyes and screamed. I calculated whether I’d be able to let go of her and have time to knock the others’ heads together before she drowned. “Out!” I shouted. “Everybody out!”

  Adam popped his head into the bathroom.

  “What kind of girls are these?” I snapped at him over the ruckus.

  “Huh?”

  “What kind of children are these?” I shouted. “It’s on their skin and how they move.”

&n
bsp; He grinned. “Children with a mad momma, children with a tired momma.”

  From then on, when Adam or I wanted the other to pay attention to someone or something, we played the question game. The girls caught on and the game expanded. What kind of blossom is that? What kind of sky is that? What kind of report card is this? The questions might be a simple invitation to curiosity, a request for praise, a lesson, or a warning.

  I loved the playfulness of the question game. But there were times it seemed to be shadowed by the questions I did not ask, the questions now less urgent, subsumed by normal daily life. What kind of man is my husband? How are our daughters like him?

  Addie’s solo mountain trip became an annual ritual with Adam. He would leave just after morning chores on a Sunday and come back two or three days later. Many men did the same, going hunting or fishing. But Adam always went alone and brought home nothing. His trips were dependent on the seasons and our work. But they always seemed sudden, imperative. Tension built in him the weeks before he left. I felt uneasy as he packed for his trips. But each time, he returned refreshed and ready for work.

  One Sunday, after church and dinner, the girls and I were still at Momma’s. Daddy, Momma’s brother, Otis, and another old guy from the mill sat on her back porch, smoking and spitting. I leaned on the porch rail nearby, watching the kids playing in the mill yard. I paid little attention to what the men said until Otis raised his voice to be heard over the girls. “ . . . Just like a woman keening, the most gawd-awful thing a man would want to hear.” I turned at the strange comment.

  Otis’s buddy shook his head and spat off the edge of the porch. “No, weren’t no wolf. Besides, it sounded pretty sometimes. Like singing, but no words. That old hill farmer said it was a haint.”

  Otis nodded in agreement. “A queer sound. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to lie down and sleep to it or go out and shoot it. We didn’t see sign one of deer, fowl, or squirrel out there. And it peak season.”