The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,147

boys and girls alike, wore beads and bell-bottom jeans with patches. Often, I had to take a few discreet glances at their chests or wait until one spoke before I could tell if I was speaking to a boy or a girl. A few of them were black, their full afros bobbing softly. They all carried large macramé bags, backpacks, or guitars.

Their ideas about life were very different from when I had been a teenager. Whatever we thought of our leaders in the forties, we knew the enemy and he wasn’t us. But in the sixties, the enemy was closer at hand—white adults spitting on little black girls going to school, assassins, and the advocates of the Vietnam War. The world seemed to be on fire. More than once, the girls sat rapt in front of the TV news, tears of outrage on their faces.

Unlike me, the girls were ready to step into the world they saw on TV. They were young and could not ignore the fire. Flyers announcing protests and rallies, album covers, books, and newspapers littered the house. For hours at a time, Gracie’s friends gathered, talking about music, the Vietnam War, or the latest protest on campus.

But for Adam and me, the ranch was an oasis. We were happy to share it, to have all the girls’ friends visit. I remembered what a refuge the farm had been for me during the last war and hoped we were providing similar solace.

Today, we’d be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors for what went on at the ranch then. Adam and I were uneasy at times. We were also naive. In small-town North Carolina in the forties, there had been only booze and sex, no drugs, no protests. No curfews, because there were no places to go after nine or ten o’clock at night.

Once I saw a friend of Gracie’s step out of the back of a van parked in the driveway. As the girl bent to tie her fringed boots, I saw, through the open van door, a boy buttoning his shirt. I knew the girl was only seventeen, a high school senior. A sweet, bright kid. I felt I should do something. But I wasn’t sure what I should or could do. At their age, I had the responsibility of a farm. I had first Cole, then Addie, in my bed. Most of the girls, Gracie told me, could get birth control pills at the local clinics. Many of the boys who crowded our porches faced the bane of chastity: the draft. So, after I’d gone over the facts of life once again with Gracie, I could think of nothing more to say than “be careful and don’t get pregnant.”

One evening, Adam found a hand-rolled cigarette on the stable floor and a lighter nearby. “It sure doesn’t smell like tobacco.” He sniffed the twisted end.

We’d both read about marijuana, and the Woodstock festival of muddy, stoned hippies had been all over the news the weeks before. Neither of us was easy with the idea of the girls or their friends doing drugs. But the lighter concerned us as much, maybe more, than the pot. We knew what a burned-down stable would cost.

“I want to know what it’s like before we talk to the girls about it,” Adam said. “Let’s try it.”

I held back, reluctant. But Pauline had tried it and proclaimed it “no big deal.” She preferred Jack Daniel’s, she said.

So we strolled out past the stables and lit up the cigarette, passing it back and forth between coughing fits. A cool puff of wind wafted the smoke farther into the pasture.

Not much happened. Adam seemed a little more talkative. I felt relaxed and a little weird, but not elated or particularly high. It seemed as if the world, not me, had gotten oddly and thoughtfully drunk. An experience far short of the dire warnings I’d read in magazines and newspapers. I scorched the spaghetti sauce for dinner that night, but we both ate a lot and thought it particularly good. Then we went to bed without ill effect.

But we did have some new rules after Adam found the marijuana. No visitors in the stables unless Adam or Rosie was with them. No matches or lighters anywhere near the stables. No one could offer or give Lil and Sarah anything stronger than chocolate milk. And because the number of visitors on the weekends had increased, and a few parents of Rosie’s high school friends