The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,29

of my world. I was happy.

That night the lights came back on down the hill and the trains ran again. I took Addie outside when I heard the 8:10 coming. We stood in the thin light of the moon, our breath fogged around us and the train gleaming as it cleared the curve. It was deafening, but I could feel her beside me, the low, vibrant hum of her expanding under the sound of the train. When the conductor blew the horn, she laughed and, letting go of my hand, she held her arms out as she had earlier for the mare.

On the first night after Cole broke his leg, I dreamed that she and I were Siamese twins, joined belly to belly, and I woke in the middle of the night to find that we, in a sense, had merged. Only years later would I have the words “lover” or “sex” to describe what we began that night.

The next evening, we began to touch each other as soon as we got into bed. In the darkness, she seemed to make of her body a room that we entered. And there was nothing but that room and her presence. She left no part of me untouched.

The moment I touched the warm, moist folds of her, she ceased moving. She sighed deeply then; an audible chime tingled up my arm and chest and into my head. Her strange, unnatural voice expanded, rising, then soaring past hearing as she shuddered and convulsed.

For a second, she was silent. “Are you okay?” I touched her face.

“Yes.” Then she laughed, deep and sweet, as she would each night.

I did not know then that there was a vocabulary for what we did, or that other women had done the same before us. So, for me, there were no words for what we did, just as there was no word for how she had changed, emerging from the dirt and transforming into someone so like me. How we touched each other at night in bed seemed a small thing next to that. But I knew, without doubt, that it was good, as good and pure as the eyes she turned to me each morning. Good, but one more thing I could not speak of.

Three

Addie

I’ve never been able to say with any precision why I responded to finding Addie as I did. I was very young, often alone, and without self-consciousness on the farm, a girl raised among people who did their jobs, seldom questioning what fate, commonly called the Lord, gave them. Then she arrived, inexplicable as the Lord. Undeniable, intelligent, and strange. To have her come up literally from the land I loved seemed natural, a fit to my heart’s logic. The land’s response to my love. So when fate gave me Addie, I let her be given.

How others would accept her remained a question that January as the sky finally began to clear, the mud dried, and the place I’d found her became only a slight depression in the soil. My thoughts were on my family and Addie’s first meeting with them. But there were others closer at hand.

The Lay family—Mildred, Ralph, and their son, Crandall, who was a few years younger than me—lived west of the farm. Their house was downhill from us and there was a narrow field where they kept a couple hogs and a small garden.

Crandall was peculiar. “Not quite right in the head” was the way most people put it. He never learned to read and, by fourth grade, had been allowed to drop out of school. He did not like to be touched, and I’d heard that he once had some kind of fit in church. He rarely spoke and spent most of his time outside, rocking side to side and playing scales on his harmonica. Never a melody, always scales. Tow-headed and scarecrow-thin, he’d stand in the sun, out by his momma’s vegetable garden, and play like there was nothing else in the world but a harmonica. Certainly, people were not in his world. He looked right through everybody.

The day before the roads cleared up and anyone else could make it up to the farm, something brought Crandall Lay close to our land. He stood down by the creek, next to the barbed-wire fence that separated our farm from the Lays’. I watched him from the back porch, listening to the monotonous drone he made of note after note when Addie appeared at the barn door, bucket in