The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope Read Free Page A

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 the route that appeared different, more spacious, without my family, I hiked from familiar point to familiar point. Then, there it was: the house on top of the hill. Following the narrow road up and around to the barn, I presented myself to Eva, who stood at a chest-high trellis of roses.
    “I was wondering when you’d make it up here on your own. Figured you’d show up one day,” she said. Then she did something she had never done before. She knelt and took my hand.
    I was a well-cared-for child, and so took those who cared for me for granted. Adults were simply part of a world that moved to rhythms and needs invisible to me. Large boots or full skirts to stay out of the way of.
    As Eva knelt in front of me, sunlight glinting in her clear green eyes, she took me in with a long, assessing gaze. It was as if she had stepped out of the vague ether of the adult world into a full and separate being before me. The sweetness of her tea roses surrounded us. For the first time in my life, I was conscious of loving another person.
    So it was I who became compensation for Eva’s lack of a daughter and my labor on the farm payment for the cans, baskets, and sacks full of food that Eva and Lester brought down the hill to my family.
    On the farm, my three older cousins called me Little Sis. There, I could forget the children in the mill-village who teased me about my height and my bright red hair. I slept on a cot in the corner of the parlor. With no little sisters to complain about the lantern’s glare, I could read as late as I wanted. I learned to chop wood, sew, milk cows, cure hams, make butter, sauerkraut, and biscuits, bleach apples, store or preserve almost anything, and to make a toothbrush out of a hickory stick. Eva combed out my hair in the evenings and told me I should be proud of its new-penny brilliance.
    Each time I came up the hill and saw the house, its front half shaded by the chinaberry tree, the farm seemed full of possibilities and far from the drab mill-village. My love for the farm set me further apart from my peers. While other children were fascinated with everything modern and aware of the deprivations of the Depression, I collected eggs and churned butter by hand and thought myself privileged, wealthy. It was a good place to be a child, the best place to be a child during the Depression.
    During my first months alone on the farm after Eva’s death, I thought of these two events frequently—my mother’s pained gaze in the woods and my first solo trek to visit Aunt Eva. They seemed the first points in a line that led me to where I now was as the farm’s caretaker. Gradually, I also came to realize how much freedom and trust my parents had always given me. A kind of special dispensation. While other girls my age, particularly those with younger siblings, had been kept home with chores, I had been allowed to wander.
    At times, I felt guilty about the pleasures I took on the farm while the suffering of war persisted. But I relished the luxury of my solitude. I worked hard. I ate when I was hungry. I took naps in the barn and, on one particularly cold night, made myself a pallet on the kitchen table and slept there to soak in the dying warmth of the