The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley Page B

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.
    H ow 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 hand. She put the bucket down and strolled toward Crandall, who swayed side to side with the precision of a metronome.
    It was a relief and a pleasure to see her from a distance, to take her likeness to me in a smaller dose. Her back and shoulders seemed straighter, more graceful than I felt myself to be when I walked. She stopped at the fence and held her hand out as I had instructed her to when meeting someone for the first time. From where I stood on the porch, I saw her in profile. Her mouth moved, but I was too far away to hear what she said.
    He didn’t break rhythm of his scale or acknowledge her. Her hand remained in the air, innocent. Suddenly, I realized that I needed to explain his odd behavior to her. I jumped off the porch and jogged toward them, focused on her hand, motionless above the fence. As I came near, she tilted her head and, bending over, peered up at his face. For that second, they seemed similar, twin oddities. I had my hand out to touch her shoulder. As Crandall paused to inhale, a crisp, loud tone pealed through the air one perfect octave above his last note, like nothing I had heard from her so far. A short, clear pop of a question like a single sharp rap on a triangle.
    Crandall froze. Addie’s hand shot out and caught the falling harmonica. His eyes focused, shifted