and alarmingly innocent.
Addie, in contrast, retained her own unique take on things. After I showed her how to fold the soft cotton rags and safety-pin them to the inside of her underwear for her first period, she pulled her pants up, pressed her hand over her womb, then gave her hips a little shake. “It feels different. The emptying of it. Too bad we can’t stop and start it, like peeing or spitting.”
I laughed. I’d never thought of it that way. I dreaded my monthly. The rags we used were washed and hung out on the line to dry and be ignored along with all the other “unmentionables,” then reused the next month. But Addie took it all in with her normal aplomb.
There were, of course, other facts of life. I did my best to explain the biology of boys and babies. I thought I’d completed the job, but one day Addie came striding out of the field with my little sister close behind. Rita, a long, knobby twelve-year-old by then, adored Addie, following her around like a chick does a mother hen when she came to the farm. They both had a look of concern on their faces.
“We saw a stallion in the Starneses’ pasture,” Addie announced. Then she put her arm protectively around Rita and nodded. “Go ahead, ask her.”
Red-faced, Rita whispered, “How big does a man’s thing get?”
I held my hands out about a foot and a half apart.
Rita gasped, covering her mouth. Her eyes widened and she blanched.
Amazement flashed across Addie’s face, then her eyes traveled from my hands up to my face. “Evelyn!”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. They scowled. I brought my hands closer, to about six inches apart.
Addie glanced at Rita then back at me. “Does your momma really call it a doolywhacker?”
“Yes!” Rita and I crowed. Then we all exploded, laughing till we cried.
Later, I watered the horses as Addie and Rita finished the evening milking. Addie, squatting at Maybell’s side, muttered, “Doolywhacker!”
From the side of the other cow, Rita giggled.
From then on, if Rita was in one of her glum moods, Addie could make her smile by simply mouthing the word “Doolywhacker.”
Addie eventually had more personal questions about sex. When I first told her I had slept with Cole, she’d simply shrugged and raised her eyebrows as if to say “of course.” But weeks later, as we pumped water for the livestock, she asked, “What was it like with Cole? What was different from being with me?”
I waddled to the hog’s trough, the bucket of water sloshing at my side. Addie followed with a second bucket. The morning was crisp with the first hint of fall, but sunny as midsummer.
Talking about sex so directly made me uncomfortable. I laughed. “I can’t slop a hog while I think about doing that. With you. Or Cole.”
She waited patiently, her face serious.
“Well, you and Cole are very different from one another . . . I don’t know, Addie. Other than the different body parts, everything else is sort of the same. Kissing. Touching. But all I know is him and you. With Cole, it was always over pretty fast. You and I have so much more time together. You smell different. You touch me differently. You fill up the whole room. And when I touch you, I know what it feels like to you. We’re alike.”
She had been tapping her chest lightly as she listened to my answer.
I stopped her hand. “Except for that. No one else has a voice like yours.”
She glanced down at my hand on her breastbone. “I can see how I’m different from Cole. And you’re right. I don’t think anyone else can do this.” She covered my hand with hers. “You inspire me.” She smiled as she drew me close, but I thought I saw a spark of sadness in her eyes.
I didn’t pursue that spark. But I wondered how she bore her gifts, her differences. What costs there might have been for her. I had no means to measure my choice in turning Cole from my bed, from a possible future. I had no scale, no map for the territory I found myself in.
It was Addie’s gift—not the private gift of her voice or her origins, but her gift with horses—that brought Cole back to our door with his own question. A few days after his daddy gave Darling to Addie, he rode up into the yard on his daddy’s mild old gelding. I waved him