wanderer, you know”—her grandmother gave a dark nod—“and look what good it brung us.” Ade had often been invited to consider her father’s life—an abandoned wife, an orphaned daughter, all for the sake of his restlessness—but it proved a toothless warning to Ade. Her father had abandoned them, certainly, but he’d also seen love and war and perhaps some of the intoxicating world beyond the farm, and such adventure seemed worth any price.
(It seems to me that Lee Larson’s life was more defined by impulsivity and cowardice than an adventurous spirit, but a daughter must find what value she can in her father. Especially if he is absent.)
Sometimes Ade wandered with purpose, as when she hid aboard the Illinois Central line and made it all the way to Paducah before a railway man nabbed her, and sometimes she simply moved for the sake of motion, as birds do. She spent whole days walking along the tangled riverbank, watching the steamers huff past. She pretended sometimes she was a member of the crew leaning over the railing; more often she imagined she was the steamer itself, a thing made for the sole purpose of arriving and leaving.
If we were to draw her childhood wanderings on a map, represent her discoveries and destinations in topographic form and trace her winding way through them, we would see her as a girl solving a maze from the center outward, a Minotaur working her way free.
By fifteen she was half-mad with her own circling, heartsick with the sameness of her days. She might have turned inward then, bent by the weight of the unseen labyrinth around her, but she was rescued by an event so powerfully strange it left her permanently discontent with the ordinary and convinced of the existence of the extraordinary: she met a ghost in the old hayfield.
It happened in early fall, when the tall grasses of the field were burnt auburn and rose and the cawing of crows rang sharp through clear air. Ade still visited the old house on the back acres often, though she was too old for make-believe. On the day she saw the ghost she was planning to scale the rough blocks of the chimney and perch on the roof to watch the starlings in their mad patterns.
As she approached she saw a dark figure standing next to the ruined house. She stopped walking. There was no doubt that her aunts would advise her to turn around immediately and return home. The figure was either a stranger, who ought to be avoided at all costs, or a ghost from the house itself, which ought to be treated similarly.
But Ade found herself drawn on like a compass arrow. “Hello?” she called.
The figure twitched. It was long and lanky, boyish even from a distance. He shouted something back at her, but the words sounded jumbled in his jaw. “’Scuse me?” she called again, because good manners were advisable when dealing with either strangers or ghosts. He answered with another string of nonsense words.
Now Ade was close enough to see him clearly, and she wondered if she ought to have turned around after all: his skin was a lightless reddish-black that Ade had no name for.
The Larson household didn’t subscribe to the paper on the grounds that they got all the news they needed in church, but Ade sometimes scrounged copies secondhand. She was therefore familiar with the dangers of strange black men—she’d seen the columns describing their offenses, the cartoons depicting their appetites for innocent white women. In the cartoons the men were monstrous and hairy-armed, with tattered clothes and buffoonish expressions. But the boy in the field didn’t look much like the drawings in the papers.
He was young—her own age or perhaps a little less—and his body was smooth and long-limbed. He wore a strange arrangement of rough woolen cloth, draped and folded around him in an intricate swooping pattern, as if he’d stolen a ship’s sail and wrapped it around his body. His features were narrow and delicate-looking, his eyes clear and dark.
He spoke again, a series of many-syllabled words arranged almost like questions. She supposed it might have been a dialect of hell, known by ghosts and demons alone. The words switched suddenly in his mouth and familiar vowels fell into place. “Pardon, lady? Can you hear me?” His accent was utterly strange but his voice was mild, mindfully gentle, as if he feared startling her.
Ade decided in that moment that her aunt Lizzie was right: