both of us. “Can I give you a ride on my way home? It’s getting dark.”
“You were lucky, son,” Momma said. Then she turned to Adam. “Now, about that room and board. We’ll need to decide where that room will be.”
Adam glanced at me quickly. Neither of us had thought of that.
A half hour later, Joe dropped me off at the farm. As they pulled away, Adam turned to wave at me through the truck’s back window. He would be staying at Joe’s and coming to help me during the day.
Over the next few days, we worked together as Addie and I had. I made him leave before sunset each day and walk back down to Joe’s. I did not let him have me or come to me at night. I was not being coy. I wanted him, terribly, powerfully. I wanted that encompassing touch and the ring of that unique voice, but I was caught in the whiplash of change. Addie was now wholly different from me, and, in Adam, both absent and present. I needed those evenings alone to let what I’d seen of him during the day seep into my skin and muscle, to register on my nerves.
In my struggle to make sense of Addie becoming Adam, I needed a way to think of them as the single being I knew them to be, a term that bridged their obvious differences. Without any conscious decision to do so, I began to think of them simply as A. From that point on, A. became the private name that, in my mind, encompassed both of them as well as the person I had pulled from the land, who was neither man nor woman. A. was their totality.
While I was alone at night, my family slept down the hill, innocent and distant. Momma in her nightgown, her hair loose on the pillow, oblivious. Bertie and Rita dreamed in their beds. Freddie and Marge slept down the street from them. From my bedroom window, the streetlights of Clarion seemed smaller and farther away. Even the mill lights seemed dimmer now.
I imagined myself squatting by Momma’s bed in the dark or bent over Rita’s sleeping face, whispering the truth to them, my words settling onto their shoulders and slipping into their ears. They would wake to carry into their days a few ounces of what I knew.
To all of them, Adam was a large, well-mannered, good-looking person, clearly and solely a man. They would wonder, as Momma had, about Addie’s disappearance and my sudden bond with Adam, but in the end they would, I knew, accept what they saw before them. Still, I could not fully quell my fear that their credulity would be exhausted, that they would somehow recognize him as the violation of nature that he was. Of the two, Adam did seem the greater violation. He was not the innocent, earth-sprung being of Addie, but a consequence of will and desire.
With Addie’s arrival, I had been in an adrenaline-soaked haze, amazed at what I had seen, certain I would be thought crazy if I told the truth, and, if I was believed, that she would be thought a freak. These things seemed equally true for Adam, perhaps more so. Lying about him seemed more calculated.
I kept my own introductions of Adam to a minimum—he was simply a horseman from Kentucky looking for a job—and refused to embellish. The lack of detail would work itself out. Meanwhile, it may have lent him a greater air of mystery. The next Sunday, when he came into the church with Joe and Mary, Uncle Lester’s old suit tight across the shoulders, a brief pause of attention in the preservice whispers followed him. I’m sure the young women were taking his measure and, when I moved over on the pew to be closer to the three of them, calculating my relation to him.
As we filed out of the church, I lost sight of Adam in the crush of Sunday suits and hats. I caught up with him as Momma introduced him to some of the church ladies. Adam, of course, had to act as if he had never met any of them. He graciously shook hands and repeated his name. Old Mrs. Bailey stood next to him, scrutinizing him from under her hat brim, then casually brushed a bit of lint from his shoulder.
The ghost of Addie seemed to linger with us as we all filed out of the church. Everyone mentioned her absence