The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,4

vegetables, herbs, and her one frivolity—tea roses. East of the barn were the smokehouse and the outhouse. A lone tart apple tree graced the barnyard. Just past it, the land took one more short step on its rise toward the Appalachians and then settled into 150 acres of blessedly flat fields. It was open land, seemingly without mystery, clad in the same hard, demanding red clay found throughout the Southeast. If you squatted to take a handful of that soil, you would feel its strength, smell its clean sweetness, and know that it would give back if given to.

Clarion, where I was born and lived with my parents, Robert and Lily Roe, was a one-business town. Narrow streets hugged the Lenford cotton mill, and the identical, mill-owned houses of the neighborhood everyone called the mill-village stood in curved rows. Not long out of the Appalachian hills, the mill workers who lived there were a rough, hardworking people, mostly Protestant and Sunday-school literate. They had lost their Celtic accents and immigrant hope for prosperity long before they came to the cotton mill-village for the luxury of electricity, indoor plumbing, and a weekly paycheck. During World War II, they bent to the rhythm of their work, seven days a week, in shifts that spanned the clock.

Clarion was not a tolerant community. Racism was the most glaring intolerance, but even small differences were noted. My father was known for his unusual habit of smoking a pipe as he pushed the dope wagon through the mill, selling the candies, colas, and tobaccos that helped the mill hands keep the stupor of their work at bay. What set my mother, my sisters, and me apart from everyone else was our height—even the women in the family were near six feet—and our copper-red hair from the McMurroughs, my mother’s side of the family. I was teased without mercy for what I could not control. The public library and the farm were my escapes.

I had hardly been more than a toddler when I first wandered away from our mill-village home. Dual lines of flapping sheets hid me from Momma’s sight while I made my getaway, past the streets and the other houses, across a meadow and through woods to a creek. Nothing beyond the meadow was familiar. The rapid purl of creek water made a comforting sound, sweeter than the noise of the mill and the chattering voices. Ferns lined the narrow bank of the creek, some open-handed, others still furled tight. Overhead, in the cathedral of the bright spring canopy, a woodpecker rapped. I sat on a tree root and watched pale butterflies siphon water from the sand. An owl’s bell-shaped call rose, then fell. I was happy. I was at the center of the universe, certain I had found the place where everything began.

A low branch lifted nearby, and my mother, stooping to go under it, emerged. She stepped out, scanning the underbrush and the creek, her face knotted in concern. A lock of her red hair caught on the branch behind her. I followed her glance down the creek but saw nothing unusual. Then she screamed my name and ran toward me.

I bolted, slid across a flat rock, and plunged neck-deep into icy water. Scrambling to the opposite bank, I choked on a mouthful. Momma scooped me up and turned me toward her, shaking me. Instead of scolding, she stared at me as I dangled, dripping in her extended arms. Wordlessly, she looked me over as if I was an unexpected stranger, a child she had never seen before. For one terrible moment, my mother did not know me.

Then she clutched me to her chest, her face inches from mine, fear in her eyes, an old, large fear. Her whole face opened into a wail and she crushed my head against her breasts. Her hand covered my ear, pressing me into the cacophony of her sobs and heartbeat, inside her sweet, milky odors. She stumbled back through the woods, clutching me. I could not have been more than three years old.

After that, the world began its split into twos: the spoken and unspoken, the known and unknown, home and not home, my mother and myself. Curiosity locked into my soul and put me at the edge of my tribe, an observer more than a participant, scouring the land for words and clues.

I was still very young, not in school yet, the first time I made my way to the farm by myself. Unsure of