by Rhonda Riley
“Not the first time you’ve come home empty-handed,” Daddy said and they all laughed.
Cigarette smoke wafted out the back door. Frank’s voice muttered behind me, “How ’bout your Adam? He hear anything up there?”
I remembered Frank’s smell in the farmhouse years before and his disturbing photos. I pulled my sweater up closer around my shoulders. I herded the girls onto the porch, past Frank, and down the hall to Momma’s warm kitchen, leaving the old men to their tobacco and gossip.
That night, I asked Adam what he did in the mountains. “Molt,” he said simply, but with a grin. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more, but he continued. “I go up the mountain as far as I can and just listen to whatever there is to hear—the mountain, the air, the ginseng growing.”
“You don’t just listen.”
“Well, sometimes I talk back, too. It’s like any other conversation, Evelyn. No one does all the listening. Why are you asking now?”
“Uncle Otis and one of his buddies heard you. Some people think you’re a ‘haint.’ ”
He laughed the sweet, big laugh I always found irresistible. “The deer—some of them let me touch them. They’re strong as a horse but it’s a different strength. Lighter, with more spring. And there are places where the mountain answers. Like an echo, but there’s always something in it that didn’t come from me.” He pressed his fist to his chest.
“You pet deer and sing to the mountain?”
“Not to. With.”
Through the Winter and Spring that followed, the image of Adam’s solitary howl in the mountains stayed with me. I imagined his voice filling the hollows and slopes, the deer docile and the mountain dwellers puzzled. But when the heat of summer settled over the farm, taking up residence in our un-air-conditioned house, and Adam suggested we take the girls up into the mountains, I thought only of the blessed cool relief.
The seven of us drove up out of the clotted summer heat until Adam found the special spot he wanted to show us on Mount Mitchell. We hiked down a short distance from the narrow dirt road to a creek. The girls scattered like pups as soon as they heard water. At the creek, the forest opened. An outcropping of boulders sent the water in a sharp turn and created a short waterfall. The girls stripped to their panties and plunged, screaming, into the water. They splashed and swam until they began to shiver, then leapt out of the water to make water angels on the flat, warm rocks. Once the sun warmed them, they plunged back into the water.
While I prepared our lunch, Adam found a patch of ginseng and cut us each a piece for dessert. The girls, their lips still tinted blue from the cold water, wrapped themselves in towels. Their panties and hair dripped onto the rocks as we ate our sandwiches.
When we finished eating, Adam pointed up the mountain. “There is a beautiful waterfall east of us. Not as good a swimming spot as this one, but the view is amazing.”
I rolled my pedal-pushers up a little higher and waded into the icy water. Adam stripped to his boxers and the girls dragged him into the water. Gracie held back a little, shy to see her father almost naked.
She had shot up that summer. Change would come soon, but for now, she shouted and dodged with the other girls as Adam splashed them with icy water.
I climbed up the trail to put away our leftovers. On my way back, ducking the overhanging branches, my arms full of fresh, dry towels, I felt a vibration through the rocks under my feet, like an approaching train. Puzzled, I stopped and listened.
Below me, Adam lay spread on the large, flat boulder—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man encircled by daughters. Sarah curled up on his chest, her hands tucked under her belly, her eyes shut. Gracie and Rosie lay parallel to him, their heads pillowed on his outstretched arms. Jennie and Lil draped across their father’s legs. The four of them had their eyes closed, too. They appeared to be napping, but something in their posture suggested anticipation. Adam stared up at the sky.
Carefully, I made my way to the edge of the clearing a few feet above them. A pure, sweet tone lilted, threading through the sound of falling water. Adam’s voice, but not the sharp crescendo of his pleasure with me at night. A broad, tender tone, undulant, almost narrative.
Everything, save the sensation of his voice, seemed to have stopped. The girls were motionless. Adam’s eyes were still open, but he did not seem to be present.
The distance between me and them seemed enormous. I was outside their circle. Adam was the different one, the outsider. But here, alone with my family, I realized I was the different one.
His voice, undulating up to me, filling the air, seemed to be the manifestation of my difference from him, from them. Suddenly, I wanted to fight its seduction, to stop my ears and cover my chest. I stooped to pick up the towels I’d dropped.
My breath drew short. Then a single word flooded me: No. I shivered and pushed away my resistance.
Abandoning the towels, I climbed down and circled the rock they lay on. I knelt near Adam, a knee on either side of his head, my hands softly on his temples.
My legs tingled. The vibrato changed, sweeping up and down, seeming to fall into the timbre of the waterfall and reemerge over and over. Shimmering, joyful.
Gradually, his voice vanished as if withdrawing into the rocks and water. No one moved. A bird called nearby, and then a single-note retort followed down creek. Adam reached up and touched my wrist. He tilted his face up at me and we looked upside down at each other. The girls stirred. The spell broke.
Jennie looked up, drunkenly, and announced, “Momma, Daddy’s right, if we get very still and listen for a long time, the rocks sing.”
Sarah looked up from Adam’s chest, first at her sister and then at me. I saw in her eyes, so like her father’s then, that she knew it was not the rocks. I pointed out the towels for Gracie. She retrieved them and passed them out. The girls and Adam dressed. Speechless, we moved slowly. As if underwater, we gathered our things and returned to the car.
Sarah slept in the front seat with me and Adam. Gracie and Rosie stared out the windows. Lil and Jennie snored between them. Adam drove us down the winding mountain road, his face soft and relaxed.
As the road grew flat and straighter, the girls began to wake from their stupor, fidgeting and mumbling. I didn’t want to think or talk. I started singing “Red River Valley.” The girls picked up on the chorus, their voices harmonizing perfectly from the backseat.
Once home, they were unusually subdued. We all went to our homework and chores. I fixed us a quick late dinner of eggs and grits.
Later that evening, Sarah, the last to bathe and the only one still young enough to need help, stood naked in the tub, her arms at her sides. I poured a final rinse over her smooth shoulders and down her back. “It was Daddy singing today. He sang with his mouth shut. Not the rocks,” she said.
“I know, honey. But it was the mountains. Daddy can only do that in the mountains.”
She stared at me dubiously.
“It’s true, baby. Some places are special. Some things can happen one place, but not another.”
More staring and silence. Then she held her arms up for me to lift her out of the bath. “I want to live in the mountains then,” she declared while I toweled her back.
That night, in bed, I asked Adam if he had ever “made the rocks sing” for the girls before.
“No, not like that. But I realized we were alone and I could do it without disturbing anyone else. Besides, the mountains do echo my voice in ways that the open land here doesn’t. The mountains do sing.”
“What was their reaction at first, before I got there?”
“Same as when you were there: they listened. I don’t know what they can do. How much like me they are.”
“Sarah reminds me of you as Addie in some way. She knows things.”
He sighed and pulled me toward him. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The girls will be okay.”
Until then, I was the only person who had heard his other voice. I remembered the power of his voice the day
he came back in the skin of Roy Hope. Anxiety thickened in my diaphragm and I took a deep breath. Adam spooned up against me, then rolled over me, as his voice had earlier.
The girls never mentioned what he did that day. Perhaps they saw Adam’s explanation of singing rocks as just another adult charade, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Or maybe the relative isolation of the farm made it easier for them to assume that we were the norm, that all fathers in the privacy of their families could make the rocks sing.
Either way, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For them to question or to change.
As Gracie reached puberty, my fears about how normal the girls were returned. How would they cope with their changing bodies, would Adam’s genes mitigate or amplify the normal or somehow pull it offtrack?
That year, Gracie had grown almost five inches. We marked the girls’ growth on the door frame of Gracie’s and Rosie’s bedroom. Gracie’s height marks were always at the top. The other girls followed in stair-step clusters of names and dates. Recently, Gracie had passed five and a half feet and was now within inches of the mark indicating my height. Her chest also popped out, first in pink, puffed buds, then small, round breasts. She began to lock the bathroom door when she bathed.
Months before her thirteenth birthday, she called me into the bathroom one afternoon to show me the bloody stain on her underwear. We were prepared. I’d shown her the sanitary pads and how to attach them to the elastic belt I bought for her. I felt the buoyancy of relief as I sent her off to her room to change while I washed her first pair of bloody panties in the bathroom sink. She was a normal woman.
A few weeks later, she passed through the kitchen as Adam helped me unpack a load of groceries. He handed Gracie the toilet paper. “Take this to the bathroom on your way.” Then he held up a box of pads. “These, too.” He stacked the box on top of the toilet paper in Gracie’s arms. “So much better than those rags, aren’t they?” he commented with the certainty of experience.
Gracie nodded enthusiastically at her father. Then frowned, puzzled, and turned abruptly, striding off to the bathroom.
Six
The Storm
By the spring of 1965, we were in a state of equilibrium. We were finished having babies. The girls were all healthy, all in school, and doing well—normal, sweet, and ornery as any children. No longer the main reason we needed help, they now worked in the garden and stables. Business was good. A new corral extended out from the stable and we were thinking of adding a second stable. With the new highways complete on two sides of our land, the farm was worth more than we’d ever dreamed possible.
On the morning of Saturday, April 10, 1965, I woke and sat up on the edge of the bed. Everything shifted sideways. But nothing in the dim bedroom had moved. Silently, I checked myself and stood up. The world seemed normal again. Just some odd quirk of the body, an unexplained dizziness that passes over and is gone. Momma would have said a possum had walked over my grave.
The girls woke and we all began our morning routines. Gracie brought in the milk while I started breakfast. Rosie fed the chickens and collected the eggs. Sarah disappeared into the barn to play with the latest stray cat. Jennie and Lil revved up for their normal morning debate. They were arguing about Mister Ed, the TV show with the talking horse.
“I know how they get Mr. Ed to do that!” Jennie shouted. Then she appeared at my side. “Lil’s not listening again,” she fished for my support. She was still in her nightgown. Her bright hair tangled around her shoulders.
“Get dressed. Brush your hair. Brush your teeth.”
She marched away, down the hall toward their bedroom.
“Your sister, too. Breakfast in twenty minutes,” I shouted after her. “And no experimenting on the horses!”
While my hands were in the biscuit dough, Adam kissed me and ran his hands along my sides. He poured himself a cup of coffee, refilled my cup, and set it down next to me. A bar of morning light crossed his cheek. His lips met the rim of the cup. He leaned back against the kitchen counter and talked. The near field needed disking for the alfalfa this week.
I listened to the grain and lift of his voice. How, inside those words about the tractor, were the same familiar sounds, the breath of everything he had ever said to me, every groan, song, and whisper.
Outside the kitchen window, the sun shone in a brilliant slant. The field waited to be turned. The fresh impatience of the morning breeze blended with the kitchen’s odors of bacon and biscuits as I opened the window over the sink. Adam, the girls, and I were at the table passing around the last of the scrambled eggs when my cousin Frank arrived to help with the tractor.
I didn’t like Frank any better now than I had during the brief time he’d been my housemate, but I’d gotten used to him showing up a couple of times a year and disappearing with Adam to work on the truck or the pump. He was a good mechanic. Whiskey and years as a civilian had worn his edge down to the common, guarded bitterness of a middle-aged man who thinks life has not offered him what he deserves. He’d never married, though he was seldom without a woman at his side on a Saturday night. Some men envied him. During the week, he worked at the mill as a mechanic. On weekends, he drank hard.
A flask bulged in his back pocket when he stretched across the table for the syrup, but I didn’t smell anything on his breath.
I didn’t want him working on any motors if he was drinking. As I set a fresh plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, I took a sniff to assure myself that he was sober.
He and Adam finished off the rest of the breakfast, then headed outside to the tractor. Rosie and I set up the two rinse tubs next to the wringer washer on the back porch. She no longer needed a stool to stand on as she swung the heavy wringer head over the rinse tubs.
As we gathered the dirty clothes, the tractor motor sporadically caught then faltered into silences punctuated by Frank’s cursing. Every time he worked on someone’s car, a child acquired a more colorful vocabulary. For once, I was grateful for the noisy, rhythmic chugging of the old wringer washer.
The tractor sputtered and choked through the first load of washing. After a particularly long silence, Adam marched up to the back door. He held up a tattered length of hose. “We need a new one. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Anything you need in town?” he called through the screen door.
“We’re fine. Go on,” I said.
Adam washed his hands at the spigot outside, then drove away in the truck. Frank paced in front of the open barn doors and sucked on his cigarettes. A strong breeze whipped the jeans and shirts on the line.
As I finished hanging up the first load, Adam returned, new hose in hand. Soon the motor came to a steady low rhythm and held. The men’s whoops of congratulations followed. I hauled a basket of wet bed linens out to the line as Adam and Frank attached the disker to the tractor. Frank climbed up and drove to the edge of the field. He turned in the seat and gave Adam a thumbs-up. Adam began picking up the tools scattered on the ground and returning them to the barn.
Then the tractor quieted to an idle. I pushed aside the pillowcase I’d just hung up.
Jennie stood at the edge of the path, shading her eyes as she looked up at Frank. She wore a light blue dress that had been worn down to softness by Gracie and Rosie. She looked tall and thin and faraway. Frank nodded and seemed to be speaking to her. She shook her head, pointing back toward the house. Then he rolled slowly away toward the field, the disker bobbing above the ground behind the broad tires.
I went back to hanging up our bedclothes and underwear.
I’d thrown the last sheet over the line and was smoothing it out when the tractor stopped again. I lifted a damp corner and peered. The tractor stood vacant in the field, the disker turned at an odd angle, one side higher than the other. Half the round blades jutted up. Frank had only gotten as far as the turn at the end of the first row.
He stood behind the disks, looking down as if he had dropped something in the darker streak of freshly turned earth. I thought
of the flask in his pocket and the time he’d been alone in the barn. I opened my mouth to let Adam know Frank needed help. But all I got out of my mouth was “Adam.” Something blue lay on the ground in front of Frank. Jennie’s dress.
I ran.
Adam dashed past me. Shoving Frank out of the way, he fell to his knees at Jennie’s side. Beyond him, two of the tilted disks gleamed red.
A broad, bright sash of blood surged across Jennie’s waist toward her hip. A furrow of dirt dented her dress hem. A gash gaped at each ankle.
She blinked calmly up at the sky, freckles bright against her pallor. Her hair the same red as the dirt under her. “I can’t get up.”
Blood bubbled at the slice in her waist. Adam slid his hands under her, lifting. She coughed and smiled up at us. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth to her jaw and down her neck.
We ran past Frank, sprawled where Adam had knocked him, a dumb animal look of incomprehension on his face, the whiskey flask empty beside him.
Adam ran to the truck, clutching Jennie. I sprinted inside for the keys. Her head slumped against her shoulder as he laid her on the truck seat. The blood sash had expanded to a full skirt. The hem dripped. Adam dashed around the front of the truck and climbed in. With my back pressed against the dashboard, I knelt on the edge of the seat facing Jennie, as he revved the engine.
The steering wheel slipped in his bloody hands. He cursed and tried to dry them on his blood-soaked shirt. Jennie’s pallor deepened. Her eyes opened, distant. The artery at her neck pulsed faintly, then flattened.
Nothing.
I touched her neck, then gripped Adam’s leg. He stopped. We were still at the top of the drive. All we had done was back the truck up and turn it around.
Without looking at her, he stretched one hand out and laid it on her chest. Then his head fell forward onto the steering wheel. We broke. Silence ripped into screams. Adam heaved against the steering wheel. Light filled the closed truck cab, blood filled the air. Her lips were white and motionless.