Godiva dark chocolates kept at our bedside. To Adam’s delight, I sautéed our morels in a reduction of coconut milk, and that did add some richness to the flavor.
One day, when Adam and I had just sat down in the grass, a silver jet roared over the plain, not much higher above our heads than the top of a tall skyscraper would have been. The plane slightly rotated its torso as it ripped across the sky, and Adam began to count, “One thousand and one, one thousand and two,” and on up. The grazing wildebeests off to our left jerked their heads up and ran a short distance.
My mouth fell open and stayed open till a fly buzzed close by. Of course I knew the jets were up there, but far above, very far away, thirty or more vertical miles into the stratosphere. It was the large, close-up view, the terrifying speed and sound, that had seemed unreal. When Adam reached one thousand and ten, we heard a soft and mushy thud.
“Impact,” he said. “There are low hills that mark the boundary. About ten miles away.”
“How do you know?”
“Sound travels about a mile a second.”
I felt shaken, as though the reverberation that entered my ear had set off a quake within. “What boundary?”
He lowered his eyes and smiled a slight secret smile. “Eden’s.” He did not look at me.
“And did you meet the cherubim with the twisting fiery sword when you came in?”
“Yes.” He bit his lower lip and looked ashamed.
One day a Jersey cow, lowing pitifully, wandered out of a group of zebra and walked purposefully toward us as we were eating. Butter, I thought.
“The milk wagon,” Adam said. “Look at her udder.”
Though I was not at all a farm girl, even I had noticed the fullness of the cow’s udder hanging so low that it barely cleared the ground. When the cow stopped close to us, I saw her teats were leaking milk.
“She’s in pain,” Adam explained. “Lie down close to her and I’ll squirt milk into your mouth.”
“Really?” I asked. “Can you really do that? What if she steps on me?”
“I won’t let her,” he said. “I’m a farm boy—didn’t you guess? Besides, you won’t be that close, not underfoot.”
Lowing more insistently, the cow fixed her eye on Adam. He petted her neck and then stroked her flank. When his fingertips smoothed her udder, the cow shivered all over.
“Now lie down,” Adam said quietly to me, pointing to a place some five feet away from the cow’s four hooves. “And turn your face this way. Not too much, or the milk will just run out. Open up.”
I obeyed. When a zing of milk tickled the roof of my mouth, I laughed out loud and choked.
“Don’t scare her,” Adam cautioned. “We’ll have to practice till you get the knack. Didn’t you ever see anybody shoot milk into a barn cat’s mouth?”
But I couldn’t answer. I was choking and drooling and smacking the warm milk. Trying to be ready, I watched the milk rhythmically spurt across the short distance toward my face. I marveled at how thin and laserlike came the squirt of milk. Somehow I had expected it to pour obediently in a thick rivulet as from the spout of a pitcher or from the opening in a carton. I had expected to lie underneath to catch a thick stream twisting slightly, as though it were falling into a wide-mouthed glass. But no. To trap even a little of the milk in my mouth, I smacked my lips and tried to use my tongue to lap the liquid backward into my throat.
“You could practice snapping flies,” he teased.
Occasionally, Adam squirted me in the eye, and I suspected that he did it on purpose.
Soon my face was bathed in milk, and my neck was sticky with it. I tried cupping my hand beside my mouth to catch the drippings, but the method didn’t work well.
“I hate to waste it,” I sputtered. “Can’t you slow down?”
Adam laughed. “You don’t have any idea how many gallons of milk she has. Now watch this.”
He changed his hand position and suddenly the milk squirted upward into his own mouth. He drank and drank and didn’t spill a drop. Finally he paused, then expertly squirted the milk just once more toward his face—up one nostril.
I shrieked, and he laughed, too.
“I guess I’ve had enough,” he said, grinning, and he again took aim at me. The cow was the model of patience through all his