The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,17
some clothes, but when I finished cleaning our supper dishes, he still slept, breathing deeply.
As I slipped into Lester’s coat, I wondered about the stranger’s people. Were they somewhere, not far from us, slipping into dank coats and going out into the same rain? Sick with worry about him? He did not look at me like any of the local boys, but something was familiar about him. I was certain he was a good man. His people would be searching for him.
When I stepped off the porch, the rain on my hat overwhelmed every other sound. I stopped in the middle of the barnyard and surveyed the horizon. Where could he have come from so naked and scarred? I went to the place where I had found him. The depression in the soil still held his general shape, but it was already beginning to vanish, its sides collapsing. I put my hands into the cold, opaque water and felt the round spot where his head had been, the deeper indentation his shoulder had made, then down toward his hips. Just clay slick and grit. Not a clue, not a hint of clothes or identity. There had to be something. I pushed my coat sleeves up higher and dug into the harder clay below. Nothing. I remembered that strange sound surging through me when I found him, and I stopped digging. Whoever he might be, he was a naked, hungry man out in the cold. A close flash of lightning followed by an instant boulder of thunder sent me scurrying for the barn.
Becky snorted a welcome and one of the cows belched a soft moo. They shifted in their stalls when I lit a lantern. I spread fresh hay and felt a surge of tenderness for the animals’ familiar bodily warmth. They needed only dry, secure shelter and food.
What would the near-mute, ugly man inside my house need? As I lifted the full, covered buckets of milk, I felt the fatigue in my shoulders from carrying him.
Back in the kitchen, I dried myself again and got things ready for when he woke. I pulled out some of Uncle Lester’s old clothes—overalls, wool socks, underwear, and a flannel shirt. They smelled musty, so I laid them over the dining chairs to air. I got out the tub, towels, and a washcloth, then checked the temperature of the water in the stove tank. I tried to read while I waited for him to wake up, but my eyes kept leaving the page for the long bundle of quilts on the floor.
He did not wake. It was late and I began to feel sleepy. I didn’t want to wake him to move him again, certainly not to a cold bedroom. I couldn’t bear the thought that he might wake in the middle of the night alone in a strange place. All that scarring; he’d already been through so much. What if he needed something?
So I brought out the rest of the pillows and quilts. I lined his cold side with the down pillows, then made myself a bed on the floor so we could sleep head to head, forming a semicircle near the stove.
For a long time, I did not sleep. An alertness filled me, but I also felt a peculiar calm. I thought again of the awful picture of the Japanese woman, how the skin on my strange-looking guest was so similar to hers. I was pleased that he was alive, however he had come to be half-buried on my land. There must be a secret military hospital nearby, I reasoned, a place for specially damaged soldiers. I tried to imagine such a place, and how he might have managed to leave naked. Lightning snapped, brightening the room. Rain on the tin roof drowned the sounds of his breathing. Then, despite my nap earlier that day, exhaustion overcame me and I drifted into sleep.
Before dawn, I woke with a start. In the dimness of the clouded moonlight coming through the window, I could sense more than see him looking at me.
I rose, stumbled blindly against the table, and then lit a lantern. He had turned in his sleep, his back to the stove. He stared up at me from his bed on the floor, that bright gaze drinking me in. He seemed familiar in a way I could not place. His skin appeared much better. The swirling and roughness remained, but less severe, like very old burn scars.