The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope Read Free Page B

stove. Whole days passed in which I saw only my neighbors, Mildred or one of the McAverys, when I took the eggs down the hill to them. Some days, I saw no one at all.
    Having never had so much as a closet of my own, I now had a whole house, a whole quiet house. At night, cranky Bertie wasn’t there pulling quilts off me as I slept. Rita didn’t kick me in her sleep or wake me up because she heard some little noise. No radio blaring, no doors slamming. No neighbors arguing.
    Privacy also had its smaller, vulgar privileges. Alone, I cursed out loud. I checked my armpits and crotch to find out if it was time for the trouble of drawing a bath in a house without indoor plumbing. Momma never would have tolerated such. On the first warm night of 1945, I slept naked, something I’d never done before. Moonlight spread across the sheets and over my bare belly, a thing not possible in a Baptist house with sisters crowded in a bed.
    Later that year, when the Germans surrendered, the whole mill fell silent. Then a cheer burst from the office and rolled through the workers who ran outside, whooping and hollering, kissing and hugging each other. Kids poured out of the schools. I wasn’t there. Everyone told me about it later.
    But up on the farm, I heard the car horns blasting. Church bells clanged. The mill horn blew as if calling God Himself to the cotton. I stopped mucking the barn stalls and dashed outside to the road. Louellen McAvery, who lived down the hill, knelt in the middle of Clear Lake Road, praying. Her boy, Tom, was still overseas. When she finished with God, she jumped up, danced a little jig, and waved to me, shouting. The war was over!
    I jumped and ran back to the barn to tell—tell who? The chickens? The cows? The chickens, the sky, the barn were all the same, as indifferent to the end of the war as they had been to the war itself. I stopped halfway across the yard. The land I had worked stretched out before me and the blind sky above.
    The horns and bells continued. The people celebrating below were people I knew. I knew their sons far away at war or fresh in their graves. They’d eaten the beans and corn my family grew and brought them back to us in heaped bowls when someone got sick, or died. The boy who would dig my grave was probably out there among those cheering.
    We were under the same sky, breathing the same air. All of us. And not just us. The Germans and the Japanese, too.
    In the months after the victory of war, a stunned quiet followed, then the town leapt into optimistic giddiness. Everyone everywhere seemed relieved, fatigued, excited. The world seemed wide-open. At church, at the feed store, in the shops downtown, and on the streets of the mill-village, expectation and relief blossomed into robust intent. Any moment things could burst out of themselves. I felt it in the long bones and muscles of my arms and legs.
    Even in the quiet of Sunday morning, returned to us now that the war was over and the mill no longer ran seven days a week, I woke aware of the people down the hill, my family still warm in their beds, sleeping the sound sleep of victors.
    Downtown one Saturday, I saw a woman open a newspaper. The headline declared the liberation of the death camps. The photograph showed gaunt, skeletal Jews. She studied the front page and crossed herself.
    A violent scorn rose up in me. “Fool,” I thought. “You have the same God as the Germans.” I imagined a Nazi crossing himself before he turned on the gas.
    I stood outside Bun’s Café, about to cross the street. Then, like a slap, the thought came: I, too, had the same God as the Nazis. I stepped away and turned my back to the busy street. I saw my face mirrored in the window of the café. The reflection of a passing car slid over the backs of the men eating inside at the counter. They were—we all were—Christians. Good Christian people.
    A door shut in my mind. My heart tilted.
    I kept that moment, running my hands over the worry stone of