The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

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.

How 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 rapidly from her to me then back to her, his expression dead calm, open, as her nonverbal question fell into silence. I could not see her face, but as his gaze returned to it, she held the harmonica out to him, touching his hand. For a second, he looked at her. Then his features contorted and he exploded in a guttural scream. He spun, snatching the harmonica from her and ran, stumbling back toward his home.

Suddenly, I could not breathe. I was sure he recognized her unnatural nature. My next thought was that we were safe: whatever he’d seen or heard, he would not be able to report, no one would believe him.

She whirled around to face me, wide-eyed. “What happened? I was asking him to say hello.”

I opened my mouth, mirroring her.

Then she answered her own question. “He is not like us,” she announced.

“Like ‘us’?” I thought. Like us? I giggled.

She frowned and glanced toward the Lay home. “Why is he afraid of me?”

The question sobered me. “No one can do what you just did. None of us make those sounds.” I touched my own throat and asked, “Can all your people do that?”

She waved the question away. “I don’t know who or where my people are or what any other people can do.” She spread her fingers on her chest. And I heard a drone, the timbre of a large bell, a pure tone without question or inflection, a simple demonstration that blossomed through my head and chest then vanished into the air between us. “No one can do that?” she asked.

I hesitated. Perhaps others could. Maybe I was the innocent one, the ignorant one. But I shook my head and took her arm to lead her back toward the house. “No. No one here can.” Suddenly, it seemed best if we were out of sight. “He’s in his own world, Addie. He usually doesn’t notice anyone. I’ve never seen him look anyone in the eye, not even his own momma. He’s not hurt. He’s just different. It was a kind of compliment that he reacted to you at all.”

She tapped herself on her breastbone and then waved her hand in a graceful arc. “If no one else can do that, then I won’t do it out here. But I won’t be able to stop it at night with you. Then I forget everything. Everything. For a moment.”

“Then is okay.” I remembered the night before, the moan of her into my mouth, flushing through me. For a second, I could barely walk. Then I ran ahead of her up the steps of the house and held the door open for her. She entered, grinning like an ordinary woman.

When it comes to personal things, affairs of the family or the heart, there seem to be two kinds of men. There are men who ask questions and may even pry. These men may be tender in their solicitations or simply authoritarian, but they are present to their families. The second kind of man never asks questions and certainly never pries, particularly about emotional situations or conflicts. These men give an angry or sad woman a wide berth, and they will leave a hapless child to wander into trouble. At times these unquestioning men may seem wise and patient. Other times, they don’t seem to be there at all. They can have an air of absence about them that leaves their women and children lonely.

Daddy was the second kind of man. He rarely asked me about anything except money, food, and the farm. The only subjects of conversation for him were the concrete, daily arrangements of things. He did not seem to want to know what was in our hearts. Whether it was shyness, lack of curiosity, or indifference, I never knew. Once, when he had come to the farm to bring me some flour and feed, Cole’s cap lay on the sofa where he had left it the night before. Daddy glanced at it without a word.

Perhaps Daddy was like that because he had too much of his own burden to keep hidden and quiet. It made sense that he would not want to speak of his half-sister who, without benefit of marriage, ran off with a strange man, but he seldom mentioned anyone else in his family either. They were all poor farmers. Most of them drunks, I heard, his father the worst of them. His mother had died when he was a boy and his father married again. With his new wife, he had had Doris, Addie’s “mother.” When other men told their stories, Daddy would laugh with them, but he told none of his own.

He was not a bad father, not much of a disciplinarian, and never cruel. Yet his love was like light to me. I could see it and I knew intellectually that it touched me, but I could not touch it back. And like the sun’s light on an overcast winter day, it did not warm me, just reminded me of warmth and made me hunger for it.

With Daddy, Addie and I were safe from scrutiny. But Momma was a curious woman, one who liked to know the end of stories. Out of respect, she would leave Addie alone, for a while, at least. But over time, I was sure, she would give voice to her curiosity.

They would, I knew, be coming to check on me as soon as they could, and so I did my best to make Addie look less like me. I curled her hair on Eva’s bobby pins. That made one small difference—she had short, very curly hair. Mine was long and hung in waves. Aside from her hair, there wasn’t much I could do. I went over her story several times. But my knowledge was limited. All I could tell her was the names of her momma and daddy and where she was from. I hoped no one else knew more than I did and that my father’s half-sister had truly vanished.

I coached her to shake hands with my parents when she first met them and to call them ma’am and sir till they told her not to. They would, I assured her, be like Cole’s family and nothing like Crandall Lay.

So when we heard the truck shut off down the road, we were ready. They came walking up the driveway, just Momma and Daddy. They had left my brother and sisters at home. Daddy had on a good shirt, and Momma had on one of her shopping dresses. Not Sunday stuff, just better than their everyday clothes. Clearly, they had heard about Addie.

She emerged from the chicken coop with the eggs. They hollered a hello to her, and she raised a hand hesitantly. Momma started over to her, reaching out to touch what she thought was my newly shorn hair. She turned to me when I called.

“Good Lord,” she said and shut her mouth on whatever else she had been about to say. We all stood there a minute—Momma and Daddy looking back and forth at me and Addie.

Momma glanced back over her shoulder to Daddy. “No doubt about it, she’s kin.” Then she took the hand Addie offered. By the time we all got inside, I had told them most of Addie’s story, being careful to meet Momma’s gaze once or twice. The discomfort of lying to my parents fluttered through my chest. Then I felt the very faint, now familiar humming of Addie next to me. Momma and Daddy did not seem to notice anything at first, but their faces softened. In the kitchen, Daddy cocked his head, a look of concentration on his face, and Momma rubbed her breastbone. I touched Addie’s hand and in that split second of contact the humming sensation vanished, lifting from the room. Momma’s hand dropped to her side.

Addie left us to put the eggs away in the pantry. While Daddy stopped at the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee, Momma pulled me down the hall and into Ricky’s old bedroom, squeezing my arm. “It sure is strange how much she looks like you. She ought to look like that Hardin boy and your daddy’s side of the family. But she sure resembles you and my side of the family. Looks like her momma ran into one of my brothers on her way out of town. What will everybody think?”

What could Momma’s brothers have to do with Addie? Then I realized how utterly stupid I’d been. I looked like my mother’s side of the family. I had big hands like Daddy and thought my chin looked like his as much as Momma’s. But the McMurrough red hair, height, and freckles from Momma’s family trumped everything. How could Addie have gotten those through my daddy’s side of the family? My mind went blank.

She gave me a glance I couldn’t read, then turned her attention to the kitchen where Daddy and Addie were.

I heard him ask how the patch on the porch roof had held up through the storms. Would she know what a patch was? She replied softly, barely audible.

Momma pulled me close. “She even sounds like you,” she hissed. Panic rippled through my belly and I thought I would be sick. I opened my mouth to respond but Daddy called out for Momma then, and her face returned to its normal expression. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see what your daddy wants. She’s family. We can figure the rest out later.”

They were cordial but they did not sit down, and stayed only long enough to make a list of the things I needed from town. Addie was quiet, big-eyed, and shy. They were leaving when Daddy stopped at the door and turned to Addie. He held his hat in his hands, turning the brim slowly. “Your family, how are they?”

Momma raised her eyebrows at me in surprise. Daddy inclined his head listening for her answer, his gaze drifting to the floor.

Addie glanced at me. “Her momma died not long ago,” I told them.

Momma touched Addie’s arm, muttering, “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

Daddy just nodded, his eyes still on the floor. He put his hat on and looked directly at Addie. “It’s Uncle, Uncle Robert. Welcome to North Carolina, Addie.” That was the last and only time he ever asked Addie anything about her family.

Momma and Daddy came back soon, of course, and they brought the rest of the family with them. Joe, Bertie, and Rita piled out of the back of the truck and stood in a line, their eyes darting from Addie to me and then back again in that ping-pong of glances that would become so familiar in the next weeks and months. Surprise showed on their faces, but they were meeting Addie with an explanation in hand, and I’m sure Momma and Daddy had prepared them.

For a long moment, we all just stared at each other, and then Addie laughed, sweet and pure.

Joe held out his hand. “Welcome, Addie Hardin. You are definitely among family.” I thought he might be making a veiled reference to her questionable paternity. But the wide grin on his face was a guileless match to Addie’s. He winked at me. “Next long-lost relation you bring home has to be a boy like me, okay?”

Bertie crossed her arms on her chest. Her mouth turned down at the corners and the tendons in her neck twitched. She didn’t like change or things that took her by surprise. “You came all the way from Chicago to work on this farm?”

Addie shrugged. “I like it here.”

Rita erupted in a shy giggle and touched my arm briefly as if checking the reality of what she saw, then she dashed past us into the house.

That was it: they accepted her. My story about her origins may have had its flaws, but she was clearly one of us.

I braced myself for Addie’s introduction to the rest of Clarion, certain someone would see her as an imposter or find a hole in my story. Someone who would claim they had not seen me on Clear Lake Road just before the storm. Or someone who had been on the train and knew she had not. Suddenly, my home and community did not seem so transparent. My heart pounded every time she held out her hand to a new person and announced herself: “Addie Hardin.” I followed with the announcement that she was the daughter of my daddy’s half-sister, Doris. There was the moment of hesitation while everyone took in the similarity between us. I am sure that there must have been some speculation about our situation and who Addie’s father might be, but I heard none of it. In fact, the only person, besides Momma, to bring up Addie’s mother was Miss Biddy.

Addie’s first time off the farm was the Sunday after she met Momma and Daddy. She and I finished the morning chores, dressed in our Sunday clothes, and walked down to the mill-village church. It was a cold, bright morning, the ground still soggy from the days of rain. Addie beamed—at the trees and the houses, at each person we passed on the way to church, then, at church, the whole congregation. Every set of eyes we met bounced swiftly back and forth between us. But I’m sure the differences were apparent immediately that day. She was the quiet one with the smile and the ready handshake. I was the anxious, chatty one. I was sweating under my coat by the time we sat down on our pew in the sanctuary. I kept thinking of the day she met Crandall Lay and wondering what sound might burst out of her, but she produced only words, handshakes, and her infectious smile.

For the sermon, she sat between me and Rita. She gave the preacher her full attention, looking at me occasionally, her eyes wide with questions. When we opened the hymnal and began to sing, she did not join us until the repeat of the chorus. Her voice was strong and, to my ears, richer than my own. She glanced at me between verses, a question on her face. I did not understand, at first. I ran my finger along the hymnal words, but she shook her head. That’s when I realized she couldn’t read. She had picked up some of the books on the farm. I had assumed she could read them. But my assumption suddenly seemed foolish. She had arrived knowing nothing, why should she know how to read?

Outside, after the sermon, Rita gazed up and asked her, “How come you didn’t sing all the songs, Addie?”

Addie took her hand and gave her that smile. “I couldn’t. I don’t know all the words yet.”

“Why not, you ain’t been to church?” Rita smiled back. “Or they didn’t sing in your church?” Normally very reserved, Rita swung Addie’s hand now, and peered up at her almost flirtatiously.

I didn’t wait for Addie’s truthful answer. Instead, I took Rita’s other arm and turned her toward Momma. “Scoot,” I told her and turned my attention to the gauntlet of introductions as everyone filed out of the church. There was a ripple of attention from the older women. The younger men eyed us from across the churchyard. Addie took the attention well.

She and I lingered longer than usual outside the church. My family had gone on ahead. I was trying to explain the sermon to Addie as we walked toward Momma’s house when Miss Biddy stopped us.

Miss Biddy wasn’t her real name, but that’s what half the town called her. She had a long, unpronounceable Polish name that started with a B. She was a tiny woman and had a birdlike way of tilting her head side-to-side. Something of the Pole remained in her speech and made a peculiar blend with her Southern accent. She and her husband had a laundry and, later, a dry-cleaning service downtown.

She plucked at my elbow, and, squinting up at us, waited for her introduction to Addie. “I just wanted to tell you girls how happy I am to see you in church. Especially you.” She tilted her chin at Addie. “I knew your mother. She was a sweet girl, quiet and a little sad sometimes. But good. A good girl regardless of what anyone says. She ironed for me. She was always neat, a good worker. I was sorry when she left.”

“Thank you,” Addie replied and held out her hand. “Thank you for telling me that about her.”

Miss Biddy opened her mouth, as if to say more, but Addie clasped Miss Biddy’s slender, freckled hand and smiled. “We have to go now. Aunt Lily is expecting us for dinner.” She tilted her head, mirroring Miss Biddy, and they beamed at each other.

I was calmer by the time we got to Momma’s. At the dinner table, she was just another family member, passing a plate of ham down the table. Momma was the only one who treated her like company, offering then reoffering second helpings.

That night, when we were alone, Addie began the practice of repeating the names of people she had met, asking me about them and mapping out the social relations of the town. I found an old reading primer in the parlor bookcase, dated, worn, and childish. She sniffed its pages as she spread it open on the dining table.

“We start here.” I flipped to the first page. I felt my tension release as I recited the alphabet to her and pointed to each letter. She had made it through her initial introduction to Clarion without incident. No one knew our secret. No one but me.

Addie ran her finger over the faded illustrations and short sentences, her voice rising and falling as she read aloud, sounding out the simple nouns and verbs. I stood behind her and brushed her short hair, as Eva had done countless times for me. In that moment, I had no questions for her: it did not matter where she came from or what strange things she could do.

She learned quickly, finishing the primer before we went to bed.

What I saw at church that day was repeated over the weeks of introductions everywhere we went—the mill-village, Rhyne’s store, downtown, the feed store—people stopping to fuss over us and exclaim about our similarity. Addie was attentive and calmly gracious, speaking very little and volunteering nothing of herself in terms of facts. Smoothly deflecting questions with her warm smile and gentle touch.

From the moment I found Addie in the mud, my fears calmed by her unique voice, I felt myself bent to a new form. Part lullaby, part plea, and part question, the sound she made was a peculiar combination of elements. It had the metallic droning vibrato of a bell and the hummed warmth of the human voice. I felt its sweet harmonics in my bones as I heard them with my ears. Deep in me, something cracked open and unfurled, a giving way that would neither need, nor brook repair.

For months after I found her, I was in a heightened state, my nerves on a slow, white-hot burn. I could not sleep for more than five or six hours at a stretch, often getting only four hours in a night. I could not eat much at a sitting. Food, even plain biscuits with syrup or jam, turned heavy and too rich after a few bites. I lost weight and clothes hung on me, yet I was not tired.

For all of this, I did not feel upset. An odd calm lay over me, like the calm that comes in the middle of some great disaster, when things must be done quickly, yet the world seems to move slowly and with more light and precision. Everything was sharper and more defined, brighter, as if my pupils were open more than normal. The sky’s light, the patterns in cloth, the minute convolutions of a tree’s bark, the speckling of rust on a car fender—all these I looked not at but into. When I spoke to people, I looked directly into their faces, and there was more there in each of them than I’d previously seen. Not different things—just more of who they were—as if their souls were coming to the surface of their skin, giving themselves to me.

Addie’s arrival was a baptism by adrenaline, yet my body’s fight-or-flee response left me, and I could do neither. All I could do was surrender. Allow the seemingly inevitable, the fantastic, to come in and eat at my table like a long-known neighbor.

But I did not surrender passively. I wanted the slight metallic taste of her, the grassy odor of her sweat. Her sweet, strange voice at night. I wanted all that she contained that was not like me. Each time I touched her, I bonded my longing for her otherness to the nerves and fibers of my body.

Sometimes she would sit on the bed in the dark next to me with her legs crossed and lightly touch me everywhere—from the crown of my head to my heels and toes. Again and again her hands would roam over me, as if she were a blind woman trying to memorize my contours. She was always silent when she did this and, if there was moonlight enough, I could see that her eyes were half-open, her face calm and slack, as if all of her being had gone into her hands. Her touch buoyed me. When she was done, she leaned over and pressed her chest against mine, her hands on my face. Her body became a room we entered. Everything else fell away and I forgot myself. Her strange voice rose around us, the harmonics of it on my skin, then ringing like light in my breastbone up to my skull and down through my hips. She found the core and pressed in.

I was nearly undone, as if the literal fibers of my being were unwinding themselves—dissipating. Her touch and her laughter would carry through into the day, sticking like fine powder on my skin.

One night I lay stunned, limp, and humbled next to her. “Does it bother you that I can’t do everything you can do? That I can’t do with my voice what you do with yours?”

“It doesn’t come from here.” She touched me lightly on my throat. “But here.” She tapped between my breasts. “Would it still be called a voice?”

“It’s like a voice. But it is not a voice. How do you do it?”

She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. A short, declarative tremolo radiated from her. She opened her eyes. “I don’t know how I do it. Most of the time, it just happens. I’m not trying to do anything.”

“At night, here with me, you always sigh ‘Aaahh’ first, then you start to . . . to resonate.”

“I resonate?” She laughed. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t give me the same kind of ‘voice’ I can give you. You gave me all this.” She skimmed her hand lightly over my face and down my body.

I did not know what to say. I had given nothing. She had taken her identity from me, yet left it with me and given me every reason to see how vastly different we were from one another. She pulled me closer and, pressing her mouth to mine, gently exhaled into me.

No name for what she was or what she did. No name for the place she had come from.

But each night there was her sweet voice.

On my moonlit, sleepless nights, she lay beside me, sleeping. Everyone, everything else slumbered, and the world was quiet. In the surreal silence of midnight, I watched her, studying a face more like my own than a mirror. I lay close enough that I breathed her exhalations and she mine, the air going in and out of us in matched rhythm. Watching her eyes move over the dream world under her closed lids, I could not imagine what she saw. A world peopled with others like her? I saw the face my mother must have seen when she watched me sleeping, the face I would see later when my own daughters, so like me, slept. I was inside and outside my own skin, both the mother and the daughter, the other and myself.

Other nights, I would have to rise from our bed and walk the house, touching the walls and the furniture until the ordinary proportions and places of things returned.

Once, while pacing the bedroom, I saw a fox cross the bright, night-gray yard, trotting purposefully, confidently on small, delicate paws. I wanted to touch those paws, to feel the press of them on the ground and know the texture of her coat. To be outside in the cool darkness, my nose in the air.

Sometimes, without moving, Addie would open her eyes and look at me from a seemingly deep sleep. I would see, then, who I was not. The distinctness of myself lurched within me, the tender presentness coming over me as she opened her arms and pulled me into them again.

Freddie and Marge Rumford were a young couple, just married. I had known Freddie all my life, but Marge, whom he married shortly after coming back from the war, was from Cramerton. Freddie, a thin man with a dry sense of humor, had returned from the war almost mute until he met Marge, a big, friendly girl, her body seeming to move in loose, relaxed circles. After they married, local musicians gathered every Sunday evening for picking parties at their home.

One Sunday, Addie and I passed Freddie and Marge’s on our walk back to the farm from dinner at Momma’s. The early spring air was warm enough that they had left the door open. Music tumbled out onto the street—banjo, guitar, fiddle, and mandolin. Addie stopped dead in the street, her head cocked to one side. She followed the music into their house. Just opened the screen door and strode in. I was right behind her.

Freddie sat on a tall stool in the kitchen. One of the Wilkes girls and a few of the old fellows who used to play with my uncle Lester crowded the room, not skipping a beat of their waltz as Addie barged in.

I couldn’t see Addie’s face, but I saw Marge’s when she turned from cleaning up at the sink and realized we were in her kitchen. There was the little flash of surprise that crossed people’s faces when they met Addie. I waved so Marge would know which one of us was me.

Addie stood motionless, transfixed by the music, then cackled with delight as the tune ended. Amid the noise of everyone shifting around to pull in some more chairs, I introduced her. No one blinked or asked a question as we settled in our seats.

“I’ve heard about you,” Marge said. “Glad to meet you, Addie.”

The musicians picked up their instruments again and started playing “Haste to the Wedding.” Marge pulled me to my feet. We turned in the middle of the kitchen and danced out to the porch and back. Addie stood up with her hands held out expectantly. Marge took her for a spin, the two of them laughing. Addie followed surprisingly well.

When they danced back into the kitchen and Marge released her, Addie sat and stared at the musicians, enthralled. During their next break, Freddie leaned across the kitchen and said to Addie, “Here, you look like you want this in your hands. Try it.”

Addie took the banjo and ran her hands over its strings, “ahhing” like a child, and everyone laughed at what they took to be comic exaggeration. She bent over it in precise imitation of Freddie’s shoulder-hunched way of playing and grinned up at me as she plucked.

After Addie returned the banjo, the musicians resumed playing. She closed her eyes as she listened, tilting her head as if zeroing in on one instrument then another. We stayed until milking time.

Days later, she found Uncle Lester’s old fiddle at the bottom of the wardrobe. It made an awful squawk when she first touched bow to string. She winced and echoed with her own surprised cry. Holding the fiddle out away from her shoulder, she glared at it.

I’d been around enough fiddle players to show her some basics—the tuning pegs, the bow, the rosin. The next time we went into town, we bought strings. She worked on her fiddle-playing every spare moment, her face screwed up in concentration. She paced the house, the yard, and the barn, fiddle to her chin. Soon she had notes and had taught herself a simple song. In the next few days, she pulled me from my chores and asked me to sing for her. I’d sing a song and then she’d work at it and work at it until she got it right.

Once, after I sang “The Old Rugged Cross” for her, she spent every spare moment of her day working on it. She showed up at the barn while I finished the evening milking, fiddle and bow in hand, her brow furrowed. “Once again? I almost have it,” she said. I sang it again, leaning my head on old Lilac’s warm side. She listened intently, staring up into the rafters of the barn, the way I’d seen Daddy stare as he listened to the radio. Then she played it again, swaying in the lantern light, her eyes closed.

Not long afterward, she carried the fiddle down to Momma’s for Sunday supper and we stopped by Freddie and Marge’s. They recognized Lester’s fiddle in her hands and playfully asked her what she planned on doing with it. Without a word, she stepped into the center of them, put it under her chin, and started on a slow version of “The Old Rugged Cross,” a little rough but all there. Rusty, an old man well known in the area for his fiddling, picked up on the chorus with her. When they were done, he put his old, mottled hand on her shoulder and said, “That was real sweet, darling.”

After that, we spent our Sunday evenings at Freddie and Marge’s. She preferred to play standing. Among the mostly middle-aged, meaty men who met at Freddie’s, she was a bright contrast, swaying pale and slender. Sometimes she set the fiddle aside and we sang, harmonizing like sisters. Her skin seemed to shine then, and when she turned that gaze on me, she was brilliant. Absorbing. She filled the room.

Cole was confined while his leg mended. The thought of the two of them meeting again made me nervous. Addie had told me that, while I’d gone for help, Cole had mostly been unconscious, moaning and cursing some. Still, I wasn’t certain what he might think about me and her. When I visited him during his recovery, I went alone. I brought him magazines and a pie. He spent his days in his family’s parlor, his broken leg encased in a thick white cast, stretched out the length of the couch, the rest of him covered with blankets. I told him about Addie, reminding him of how she favored me.

He nodded. “I don’t remember much but the pain and cold. She held my hand and hummed to me. That helped. She reminded me of you.” He rubbed his chest thoughtfully.

I distracted him with a question about my plans to get his daddy to loan us the tractor in the spring.

He would have to come with the tractor, he told me. His daddy wouldn’t want a girl driving it by herself. Beyond that, we spoke of nothing important. We had no privacy sitting there in the parlor, awkward with his family around, coming and going. I stayed only a few minutes each time.

By late March, Cole’s leg had healed well enough for him to get up on a horse. I was sweeping the back porch when he trotted up on his old chestnut. He dismounted slowly, easing his bad leg down, then walked up to the house with a limp that made me wince. He had a bouquet of dried mistletoe tied with a red ribbon. “This is the best I can do this time of year.” He grinned. “I was hoping to remind you of my Christmas present.”

He meant my Christmas promise to him. I had expected he would want to be back in my bed. But too much had changed. He and I had not so much as kissed since early December. I could not be with him like that, not while I was with Addie. For the first time, I had to admit to myself that what I did with her was what I had done with him. That admission stunned me speechless. He laughed, misunderstanding my stammering blush. Waving the mistletoe over my head, he leaned forward for a kiss.

Just then Addie and Hobo came around the corner of the house. She stopped, smiled at him, and held out her hand. His mouth hung open. He looked from me to her and then whistled. “Geez, I’d heard you looked alike, but I really didn’t remember. I didn’t see that well when my leg . . . Geez.” He shook her hand. “Thank you, Miss . . . Addie, for . . .” He pointed toward the road. “. . . When I . . . umm.” It was his turn to go red-faced.

“Just Addie. Where’s the horse you rode before—the gray one? I liked her.” She walked over to his horse and stroked her neck. The mare sidestepped closer to Addie, nudging her shoulder.

“She’s too lively for me now with my leg. Too spooky to begin with. That’s why we got her so cheap. Though I reckon I have paid a price for her. She’s worse now. Daddy’s thinking of selling her. She’s still trouble.” He rubbed his leg and moved to sit on the edge of the porch.

“I’ve seen her out in your pasture and talked to her. I’ll take this one to the barn for you,” she said and turned. The horse followed, its reins dangling. Cole watched them walk away.

“God, she looks like you.” Then he turned to face me. “Can I come see you some evening?”

“Just me?”

“Well, yes, just you. Like before.” He moved closer but I continued to sweep the steps. A subtle move, but it registered in his face.

“I can’t. Cole, I can’t, not with her here.”

“We can be quiet.”

“No, we sleep in the same bed. She’s scared of the dark. She doesn’t like being alone at night since her momma died.” I talked too fast, made new lies without thinking.

He sighed. “Okay, okay.” Then he glanced toward the barn. “If you want to, you can sneak out when she’s sleeping. We could meet in the barn.”

I imagined disentangling myself from her arms to go to him. I didn’t want to leave her at night. “I’ll see . . .” I couldn’t think. I knew he could see the answer on my face.

“You blush too much,” he said, his grin gone. He hobbled off, following Addie into the barn. A few minutes later, he rode away. I tried to read his back as he disappeared, but his posture told me nothing of what he knew or sensed between me and Addie.

My silence about the joy Addie gave me pulled me away from the people I loved, particularly my mother. All the things I couldn’t explain about Addie created a void that wanted filling.

The Depression and the war were right behind us, thick in everyone’s past. But Addie was a clean slate. When anyone asked about her past, she was vague. An outright lie seemed an impossible act for her. But she was deft with a turn of phrase.

I took on the task of storytelling and lying, volunteering when I was alone with the curious questioner that Addie was shy about things, embarrassed by her momma’s past. I felt oddly compelled to make her imaginary life as extraordinary as she herself was. By the time she’d been with me a few months, I’d told quite a bit about her. Not much to one person, but everything together would have amounted to a life—a life that to my small-town eyes was exotic. Addie had one brother, a blessedly small family. They lived in an apartment in Chicago. They went to live plays on Saturday nights, a Lutheran Church on Sunday.

For the first time in my life, I had the pleasure of telling a complete anecdote. No one tried to finish sentences for me, correcting or adding to what I said. No one knew her story but me.

One night, before we fell asleep, I asked her if it bothered her not having a past, a family, or a place she came from. “I come from here,” she whispered close. “Just like you.” She spoke again in a slow, deliberate voice. “I don’t like lying. I can’t do it without laughing.”

“I know, and you laugh when you hear someone else lying, too. But nobody gets upset with you. They just laugh along.”

She rolled over on her back. In the dimness, she stared up at the ceiling. “It’s funny when people lie. They know they’re lying and they think they’re getting away with it. But they’re like a naked man trying to straighten his tie.” She paused and sighed. “Other times, it is not a lie, but something else. I’ve heard others tell about something that happened when I was there, but they tell it differently than I would.”

My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight through the windows. I studied her profile, conscious of how others must see me.

“They do it without thinking,” she added. “To keep other stories going. Their own stories, or the things their mothers or cousins or the preacher have told them. They’re also telling about themselves. You hear two things at once—the facts and the storyteller’s heart.” She rolled onto her side, facing me, and laid her hand on my chest. “I know you’re helping me fit into your family’s story. They need the stories. And so do you. But I don’t.”

“So what do you tell yourself?”

“That I am here. That I am. And I am.”

I suddenly felt naked. Naked and so unlike her.

She turned toward me again and touched my face. “So go ahead. Tell any stories you need to.”

How could they not have known about Addie then? Not sensed on her skin or seen in her eyes the deep, strange difference of her? I kept expecting someone to pull me aside and say they knew she wasn’t one of us. Once I dreamed that Momma, Daddy, and Joe buried her—put her back in the dirt where she came from—her eyes, open, calm, and beseeching as they shoveled dirt on top of her.

But no one ever accused her. No one stopped us. No one tried to take her away.

Gradually, I saw that everyone would treat Addie as people have always treated their relatives and neighbors with embarrassing but essentially harmless traits. They would ignore the trait. Or, in Addie’s case, the question of her father.

My mother was the only rupture in the acceptance of my lies about Addie. Momma was rarely on the farm alone with me and Addie. She didn’t drive. Usually, Daddy or Joe stayed after they drove her to the farm. Bertie was in high school by then and was too busy with her hair and her schoolmates for anything but the most necessary farm chores. Rita often tagged along, happy to shadow the “big girls,” as she referred to me and Addie.

But on this day it was only the three of us—Momma, Addie, and me. Daddy dropped Momma off at Mildred’s down the road and she had walked from there. She planned to stop on her way back and pick up some quilting scraps Mildred had prepared for her.

Momma and I were in the kitchen doing dishes. In the yard, Addie groomed Cole’s gray mare. The horse had somehow gotten loose, shown up that morning, and followed Addie in from the field. We could see them out the window over the sink.

Momma nodded her head. “She has a way with that horse.” She studied Addie a little longer. “I like Addie, but I can’t figure her. There’s something unusual about her,” Momma said, handing me a pot to dry.

I felt a jolt in my chest and belly and almost dropped the heavy pot.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off Addie since she first spoke. Outside, Addie mounted the mare bareback. “Her momma never told her who her real daddy is?”

I shook my head.

“Well, somebody in the McMurrough family was involved, from the looks of her. Doris might not have known she was already pregnant when she left with that Hardin boy.”

I didn’t speak. I didn’t breathe. She passed me another pot and the milk pitcher, washing the dishes by touch, keeping her eyes on Addie.

“Momma, she’s a good girl. A good person.”

She turned to me then, the same eyes Addie had. “I know, Evelyn. She’s got a good heart and a good head. She’s a good worker for you, too. I’m glad she’s here on the farm with you. And, in the long run, that’s all that matters.”

The tightness in my chest eased. I wanted to tell her the truth, to confess my lie. I wanted company.

Momma glanced out the window again. Addie headed for the porch, the mare followed. Momma turned back to me, her eyes moving over my face, judging me, weighing something. “I guess we all have our secrets.”

Hot, bright fear surged up my chest again, higher. My neck and ears burned. “Momma . . . Momma?” was all I could get out.

“Oh, Evelyn, don’t cry now.” She put her arm around me and kissed my temple. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s okay. You and Addie are both good girls. Everything’s fine.”

Addie opened the door and stomped the dirt off her shoes. She looked at us and I felt a very faint hum as she bent to brush the clay dust off her pant leg.

“I was just telling Evelyn what a fine job you girls are doing on the farm.” Momma took me by the shoulders and turned me toward Addie and the door. “Now, walk me down the hill to Mildred’s before it gets dark.”

The three of us strolled down the road in silence. The sky flushed velvet-pink above us as dusk settled. Birds called from the spring bud of the trees. I wanted Momma to say more but feared what she might say or know. Addie was quiet. I thought she sensed something and listened, too. I felt a twinge of guilt at my relief a few moments later when Momma latched Mildred’s wire gate behind her and waved good-bye.

Momma never said another thing like that about Addie. She was always good to Addie and comfortable enough around her, but I sometimes would catch her watching us, comparing. Addie had become a wedge between me and Momma. Not Addie herself, but the lies I told about her. I’d always been able to tell Momma everything. Not quite everything. Not Cole. But even that I felt I would have eventually told her—maybe years later, after I was married, with my own kids, and it would be something she would understand, maybe laugh about. She was a forgiving, understanding woman. To have to keep something so strange and so important from her seemed an affront to those cherished qualities. Not being able to confide in her made a difference between us, more of a difference because I feared what she might already know about Addie. Maybe she had seen something, more than just the resemblance between me and Addie. I wanted to know what she knew, but we kept our silence—both of us.

After Addie and I returned from walking Momma down to Mildred’s that evening, she returned Cole’s mare to the Starneses. She rode her bareback—the high-strung, mean horse that none of the Starnes men could handle. To hear Cole tell about it at church the next Sunday, Mr. Starnes had been more than impressed. Addie continued visiting the mare at the fence, and the horse galloped to Addie whenever she saw her.

A couple of weeks after the mare’s first visit, we were out in the field hoeing the corn. The mare spotted Addie when we were a good ways from the Starneses’ pasture. The work was hot and tiresome. We pushed ourselves. Every time Addie glanced up, that mare paced the fence and called to her.

By the time we got within thirty feet of the fence, the mare was farther off in the pasture. “Looks like she’s finally tired of you,” I said.

“I don’t think so.” Addie peered across the field, shading her eyes.

Then I heard the mare coming, a full, hard run.

She cleared the fence in a leap that seemed to stop for a second in midair, all grace. It was a beautiful thing to see, the kind of thing that stays with you. The mare, which she renamed Darling on the spot, followed Addie up and down the rows of corn, docile as a dog, oblivious to the four-foot corn tight against her flanks. I’d never seen anything like it.

Dark had fallen by the time we finished our work, so we stabled the mare overnight.

A few days later, Cole came by. From the garden, I saw him stroll confidently up to the back porch where Addie was bent over the washtub, singing. Her hair, now as long as mine, hung down her shoulders. He reached out to touch it. But when she glanced up and smiled that smile at him, he jumped back awkwardly.

As I joined them, Addie was telling him when she could be at his house to meet with him and his daddy. Cole jumped again when he realized I stood next to him. His eyes darted toward me, then quickly away.

I understood his confusion, the strangeness of seeing her face, so similar to mine. It was still a small shock to me if I saw us in a mirror. I longed to smooth things for him, put him at ease, but I didn’t want to lead him on. My offer of tea sounded lame, almost formal, and I felt a twinge of relief when he refused. His eyes flitted awkwardly back and forth between me and Addie as if he couldn’t decide where to look. With a tight, cordial smile, he muttered something about needing to get back home, then he left.

Addie studied his back as he limped away. “He’ll be okay, Evelyn.”

After supper, she saddled our Becky and left for the Starneses, an extra bridle in hand.

When she returned, Darling belonged to her, and Mr. Starnes was entitled to a quarter of our hay plus the hay for his livestock that he’d been promised in exchange for the use of his tractor. Addie had her first horse.

Her ease around animals, especially large animals, amazed me. I managed Becky and the cows well enough. But I could never shake my awareness of their size and power or my assumption that they longed for the herd, the open plain, and an undomesticated sky above them. A part of me always braced for their revolt.

Now there were two things—ordinary things—that we did not share: the fiddle and Darling. It felt right to have our vast, less obvious difference reflected in such public talents.

After several months with Addie, I calmed down a bit. I had no choice. I forced myself to eat more and eventually I put some weight back on. I was able to sleep a full night. My monthly cycle returned. Gradually, the world lost some of its bright hues and became more ordinary. But I often felt as if I lived in dual worlds. One eye saw everything and everyone as they had always been and the other eye perceived a world in which anything might suddenly, impossibly give forth, transforming itself as Addie had. Some days, I felt crazy and alarmingly innocent.

Addie, in contrast, retained her own unique take on things. After I showed her how to fold the soft cotton rags and safety-pin them to the inside of her underwear for her first period, she pulled her pants up, pressed her hand over her womb, then gave her hips a little shake. “It feels different. The emptying of it. Too bad we can’t stop and start it, like peeing or spitting.”

I laughed. I’d never thought of it that way. I dreaded my monthly. The rags we used were washed and hung out on the line to dry and be ignored along with all the other “unmentionables,” then reused the next month. But Addie took it all in with her normal aplomb.

There were, of course, other facts of life. I did my best to explain the biology of boys and babies. I thought I’d completed the job, but one day Addie came striding out of the field with my little sister close behind. Rita, a long, knobby twelve-year-old by then, adored Addie, following her around like a chick does a mother hen when she came to the farm. They both had a look of concern on their faces.

“We saw a stallion in the Starneses’ pasture,” Addie announced. Then she put her arm protectively around Rita and nodded. “Go ahead, ask her.”

Red-faced, Rita whispered, “How big does a man’s thing get?”

I held my hands out about a foot and a half apart.

Rita gasped, covering her mouth. Her eyes widened and she blanched.

Amazement flashed across Addie’s face, then her eyes traveled from my hands up to my face. “Evelyn!”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. They scowled. I brought my hands closer, to about six inches apart.

Addie glanced at Rita then back at me. “Does your momma really call it a doolywhacker?”

“Yes!” Rita and I crowed. Then we all exploded, laughing till we cried.

Later, I watered the horses as Addie and Rita finished the evening milking. Addie, squatting at Maybell’s side, muttered, “Doolywhacker!”

From the side of the other cow, Rita giggled.

From then on, if Rita was in one of her glum moods, Addie could make her smile by simply mouthing the word “Doolywhacker.”

Addie eventually had more personal questions about sex. When I first told her I had slept with Cole, she’d simply shrugged and raised her eyebrows as if to say “of course.” But weeks later, as we pumped water for the livestock, she asked, “What was it like with Cole? What was different from being with me?”

I waddled to the hog’s trough, the bucket of water sloshing at my side. Addie followed with a second bucket. The morning was crisp with the first hint of fall, but sunny as midsummer.

Talking about sex so directly made me uncomfortable. I laughed. “I can’t slop a hog while I think about doing that. With you. Or Cole.”

She waited patiently, her face serious.

“Well, you and Cole are very different from one another . . . I don’t know, Addie. Other than the different body parts, everything else is sort of the same. Kissing. Touching. But all I know is him and you. With Cole, it was always over pretty fast. You and I have so much more time together. You smell different. You touch me differently. You fill up the whole room. And when I touch you, I know what it feels like to you. We’re alike.”

She had been tapping her chest lightly as she listened to my answer.

I stopped her hand. “Except for that. No one else has a voice like yours.”

She glanced down at my hand on her breastbone. “I can see how I’m different from Cole. And you’re right. I don’t think anyone else can do this.” She covered my hand with hers. “You inspire me.” She smiled as she drew me close, but I thought I saw a spark of sadness in her eyes.

I didn’t pursue that spark. But I wondered how she bore her gifts, her differences. What costs there might have been for her. I had no means to measure my choice in turning Cole from my bed, from a possible future. I had no scale, no map for the territory I found myself in.

It was Addie’s gift—not the private gift of her voice or her origins, but her gift with horses—that brought Cole back to our door with his own question. A few days after his daddy gave Darling to Addie, he rode up into the yard on his daddy’s mild old gelding. I waved him down from the garden before he got to the house.

“I came to find out how Addie got the mean out of that horse. I can’t figure it,” he called as he rode up.

“She’s in the barn. Ask her.”

He glanced at the barn, but did not leave. His hat shaded his face.

I squinted up and shielded my eyes against the sun. “How’re you doing, Cole. How’s your leg?”

He dismounted, smoother, more confidently. “Anything changed?”

“No.”

“She still sleeps in the same bed as you?”

I nodded.

“Just checking.” He gave me a long look, his mouth in a grim line. “My leg still gives me some trouble, but it’s healed.” He squared his shoulders and strolled away, his leg stiff as he tried to hide his limp.

When I finished cutting the okra, I joined them in the barnyard.

Addie had led Darling out to him. “She handles real smooth now. Be firm and gentle with her and she’ll do what you want. She’s like new now. Don’t think about what she was.” Addie handed him Darling’s reins.

“I’m ready,” he said softly, his face still and determined, the same expression I’d seen when he showed up at my door months before. He vaulted into the saddle and walked her in a slow, broad circle.

“Take her out,” Addie called. “She’s easy now. Talk sweet to her. Stay loose. Don’t clinch. Don’t pull.”

Cole waved his hat and urged Darling up to a trot along the field.

Addie smiled at me. “He’ll be okay. I talked to her.”

“Talked?”

“Like I do with you only . . .” her lips parted. “Hear anything?”

I heard Becky paw in the barn. Hobo barked a single sharp response from somewhere behind me.

“No. But the horse does. Hobo, too.”

“Feel anything?”

I closed my eyes. The basket of okra I held dug into my hip.

“No.”

“Keep your eyes closed. Now?”

I felt a faint hum in my chest and face. Becky nickered loudly from the barn. I opened my eyes.

Addie winked at me and took my hand, pressing my palm to her sternum. Warmth shimmered up my arm, a barely perceptible tingle. “That’s what I did with Darling before I led her out. So, he’ll be fine.” She nodded toward Cole, who galloped back to us, a wide grin on his face.

I felt a twinge. Would she, like me, find him attractive?

Cole dismounted smoothly. “You musta found some Goody headache powders for horses. She was some kind of headache before. She’s smooth as silk now.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Addie, I wasn’t talking, I was praying. If I hurt my leg again on the same damn horse and couldn’t work, my daddy would shoot the horse and me. You’ve got to show me what you did to get her this way.” It was good to hear him laugh again.

Cole’s questions about our sleeping arrangement bothered me. Although people did not make the assumptions they do today about two women sleeping in the same bed—it truly was the love that dared not speak its name—it seemed logical that he would know, that his intimacy with me, however brief, would make him privy to my desires. We needed his good will, his friendship.

The next time Cole dropped by, I invited him to supper. He sat stiffly at the table, like a boy in church, while I set out the dishes. Addie watched us a moment, then said to Cole, “I’ve got a question for you.” She pointed at the barn. “About Darling. Can I show you? She doesn’t like the bridle we have.”

His posture softened immediately and he turned to her with genuine interest when he heard Darling’s name. She led him out to the barn, both of them talking excitedly about bridles and horses.

After that, they talked horses and went riding whenever they had a chance. At first, I thought he might have been making a play for her, perhaps some ploy to make me jealous, but I soon realized they simply shared a philosophy and an ability to talk nonstop about horses. Gradually, I saw that Cole treated her like she was one of the boys. For him, her skills seemed to override any sexual tensions. Through Cole, others began to hear about Addie’s touch with horses.

The day she went to watch his father break a new horse she came home at dusk, riding Darling. She slammed the door on her way into the house. “I never want to see that again!” she announced, her face dark with outrage, and she marched out again.

She paced the hall until she was calmer, her gait normal. Then she came back into the kitchen, where I sat reattaching a shirt button. She picked up the lantern that sat next to me and held it out at arm’s length. “If I drop this and break it, I don’t have a lantern anymore. It is broken. I’ll have light, but not the kind of light I want. Just fire. When they break a horse, they break it. The horse is gone. Gone.”

She was magnificent, her face flushed, her arm steady. Gently, she lowered the lantern back to the table. “They go around on horseback, but they are not with the horse. The horse is gone. Conquered, not led.” Her voice was low, normal now.

That was the beginning for her. She read everything she could find on horses. She rode every chance she had. For weeks, she carried around a book, old and yellowed even then, written by an Englishwoman, on gentle methods of “sweetening” horses. She and Cole spent hours that fall discussing the best ways to train a horse. They went to horse shows and auctions, much to the chagrin of his new girlfriend, Eloise, who tagged along with them.

They talked long and hard to convince me to move the kitchen garden and make way for a new corral adjacent to the barn. As soon as they finished building the corral, Cole brought a colt over to sweeten, away from his father’s watchfulness. Within a day, they were on its back.

One Sunday, an old farmer from Stanley showed up with a tall, lean white mare. “Some damn geese landed last spring when I was turning the field. Whole cloud of ’em landing all of a sudden. Not more than twenty feet away.” The old man swept his hat through the air. “She nearly dragged me to my death getting away. Now she won’t go near fowl of any kind and I got forty laying hens. When the rooster starts in the morning, no one can get near this one.” He stroked the horse’s mane. “The coop is near the barn. She won’t go near the barn or take the harness now.” His shoulder was bandaged and the horse had fresh whip marks. His wife wanted the horse shot, but he couldn’t bear to do it, he admitted.

The mare became the first test of Cole’s and Addie’s new methods—their first job, though there had been no discussion of payment. They agreed that the horse would stable with us and Addie would do the initial daily work with the mare, “sweetening” her to the chickens. Cole would advise and cheerlead until the horse was ready for a test rider. I knew Cole needed to be careful with his bad leg, and it made sense that he be the second rider. But I knew plenty of young men who would not have been so comfortable letting a girl take the lead, regardless of their admiration of her skills.

Addie did not force the mare into the barn or near the chickens, but rose earlier every morning to turn Becky and Darling out into the corral with her so she would have some calm company when the rooster crowed. During the day, Cole and Addie groomed and rode her as much as they could.

The third morning, Addie saddled the mare for the big dawn event and leaned over the mare’s neck, soothing her in the predawn darkness. They were barely visible in the middle of corral. I heard, then very faintly felt, that familiar low drone vibrate from Addie. My part was to rouse the chickens and get the rooster going. He was on his third morning chorus when I made it back to the corral. The mare flinched and tossed her head, but did not buck or pull back.

“Cock-a-doodle-do!” Addie crowed and laughed.

After that, Addie wore one of Eva’s big aprons when she was in the barn or the corral, a couple of chirping biddies in each pocket as she combed the mare down.

By the end of the week, it was Cole’s job to hold one of the chickens as Addie rode the horse around the corral, passing within a few feet of him. I contributed by providing Cole with hot coffee.

“I sure feel stupid being the chicken-holder,” Cole said. “But it’s working. Look at her.” Addie and the mare trotted, steady and calm, bright in the first of the day’s light.

When she reached the opposite side of the corral, Addie gave a signal and Cole held the hen up and shook her so she squawked and flapped. The horse’s hide went tight and she complained, but kept moving very slowly toward the hen. Addie leaned low, whispering. I knew what the horse felt, that sweet harmonic blossoming through her bones.

If Cole sensed anything unusual beyond the ruckus of the chicken, he gave no sign. He held the angry hen at arm’s length. His eyes followed Addie intently, ignoring me, ignoring the chicken shit on his sleeve. I saw the admiration on his face and wanted to say, “She’s cheating, she has something you don’t know about.” But all I got out was his name.

He turned, the excitement still on his face, then it changed. It wasn’t the usual guarded expression he’d had since I’d stopped sleeping with him, but there was still a small hesitancy. Part of me wanted him to look at me with the same admiration. But I was happy to see them working together, excited about what they were doing. He tucked the chicken back up under his arm, held his hand out for the coffee, and mouthed the words “thank you” with such a broad smile that I felt forgiven for whatever potential future I might have taken from us. He raised the cup high in a toast.

Within a couple of days, the horse could pass the chicken without hesitation even as it bobbed furiously in Cole’s hands. Getting the mare to take the plow harness went easily after that.

When the old farmer returned, Addie asked him to wait in the yard. She rode the horse out of the barn and Cole brought out a hen, which he handed to her. She rode the horse around the barn, past the chicken coop to the corral, holding the clucking hen in her arms. The farmer jogged behind them, shaking his head.

When they got to the corral, Addie signaled the old man to follow them in as she dismounted. “She’s going to have to trust you as much as she trusts me. Last she knew, you were the one who whipped her. You can’t whip her again. Ever again. Now she needs to know something of you that is not the whipping.”

The old man nodded and wiped his eyes. “That chicken next to her. Good Lord, that was a beautiful thing.”

Addie led him to the mare. She reached for his hands. The old man obviously wasn’t used to young women holding his hands. His arms stiffened and he stepped back.

I couldn’t hear what she said to him, but he let Addie take his hands again and they slowly circled the horse, touching her all over. Then they walked away together, letting the horse follow them to the chicken coop. The farmer spit his tobacco juice and cackled.

Addie and the farmer took short turns plowing. The mare pulled steady and straight. The poor hens released in her path fluttered to the ground and strutted in confused circles.

The old farmer bought his feed at Rayburn’s feed store downtown, and the story of his ornery, chicken-scared mare and Addie’s “cure” spread fast.

A few weeks later, a bright new truck pulled up, hauling one of the fanciest horse trailers I’d ever seen. A big girl wearing an English riding outfit that probably cost more than a year’s groceries for us tumbled out of the driver’s seat and told us she was from Charlotte. I don’t know how she’d heard of us or found us.

“My daddy gave me this horse, but I can’t ride him. He won’t let me,” she announced. “I’ll pay you. A hundred if you can get him so I can ride him and show my daddy when he gets back.”

I sucked in my breath. A hundred dollars was an enormous sum then.

Addie went to the horse and stroked his neck. She let him mouth her hand inquisitively as the girl watched, keeping her distance. “Two.” Addie held up two fingers. “I have a partner and I’ll need his help on this. One hundred dollars now and one hundred when you can ride out of that corral, happy and easy, on this fellow.” The girl nodded and took out her wallet.

I was in shock. We were in business.

It turned out that the problem was the girl, not the horse. Her father loved horses. She wanted to please him, but she was terrified of them. We boarded the horse while the girl’s father was out of town. Cole and Addie required that she come several times a week to feed and groom the horses. And they took turns riding with her on her horse, a gentle, jet-black gelding. The girl’s face would go soft when she rode double with Addie. I knew what she felt, Addie’s arms around her, that glow at her back.

But Addie talked, too. She honed her philosophy and developed the vocabulary she would take into decades of working with horses and people. “Make it true. True yourself and the horse will go with you,” she urged the rich girl. “Willingness, calm, and balance.” Addie waved her hand across the horse’s shoulders and down his spine. “For both of you.” She tapped the girl on the chest, then lightly pulled her shoulders back.

Gradually, the girl’s spine became more supple and she began to look like she belonged on a horse. The day before the girl’s father came back to Charlotte, Addie slid into the saddle behind her and tied a blindfold around the girl’s face. The girl dropped the reins in protest, and a shiver ran down her legs and into the horse, who whinnied and shook himself. Addie reached behind with one hand and touched the horse. With her other hand, she gently returned the girl’s hands to the reins. After a long moment, the horse and the girl were calm and waiting.

“Your final test. You know this farm well enough. Think of where you want to go and tell him from here.” She patted the girl’s thighs. “No words. I’m here with you.”

The girl’s brow furrowed, but she nodded, took a deep breath, and they took off. Later, I found the girl in the stable, brushing her horse down, singing softly to herself. I’m sure she got her money’s worth. Addie and Cole got that second hundred dollars.

I never fully understood what Addie did with the horses. She just seemed to be with them, to sweeten and socialize them with patience, contact, and good grooming. She never used any force. She just glanced at them and talked to them and soon they followed her like lovesick pups, nosing her shoulder. I know, when no one else was around, she soothed them with that strange voice of hers.

I watched Addie and Cole working together with an odd combination of emotions. I was glad that Cole was comfortable coming to our house. Though some awkwardness remained between us, he was a kind man. I regretted having hurt or disappointed him, and wanted him to understand that I hadn’t left him on a whim. I longed to tell him who and what she really was, to have him see what I saw, to know what I knew. I was also a little jealous of the attention they gave each other. He was, in his own way, as seduced by Addie as I was. But I could also see that he was smitten not by her touch or her voice, as I had been, but by her skill. He flat-out bragged about her horsemanship to anyone who would listen.

They both had an easy, apparently effortless grace on horseback, but my eyes always returned to Addie. On horseback, she was part of the horse. I’d never been interested in horses, but I began to admire them. I loved seeing her so engrossed in her work with Cole and the horses. I followed her hands as she groomed the horses, humming to them, her hands sliding over their shoulders and down their legs.

I loved how she took things into her hands, holding and touching everything—food, Hobo, horses, the stove handle, the ax, me—in a way that seemed more than mere contact or simple utility. There was gusto, intent, knowledge. At night, when she touched me, I felt the difference between her and others. The horses felt it, too. They turned toward her, sniffing her, licking her.

Addie’s hands made me look at the world anew, to study surfaces and textures I might otherwise have ignored. This was not simply a lover’s envy of objects touched by the loved one. My eyes lingered on after her touch, curious as to what she had just understood. I saw in her a lack of inhibition, a possible way of being that I could never have learned in my Baptist family. As she touched the world, her hands seemed to be inviting me to do the same. She, who had so recently needed my help crossing the floor, now gave the world back to me in subtle and profound ways.

A Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin said that “the self is the gift of the other.” It seems to me most true now. The genes I carry, the clothes I wear, the food I eat all have come through the hands of others. Even these words I write now, my vocabulary, are not only mine. They are an agreement, a social contract between the two of us.

I did not see this when I was a young woman. I was so sure, even as I held my hands out to Addie and took all she gave, that I was self-made, an individual before all else. And there she was, so unlike any of us, the only truly unique person I have known, pulling her identity straight from the flesh of others.

She seemed eager to absorb everything around her. She read voraciously, her arms loaded with books when we came back from the library. I preferred stories, my favorite that year was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. We read it out loud to each other at night. But her curiosity roamed beyond novels: biographies, science, history, even fairy tales. Her focus settled for a while on religion. She worked her way through the Clarion library’s slender religion section.

I’d made her promise not to ask anyone else about church or Jesus, so she leveled all of her Sunday questions at me: If God is omnipotent and good, why is there suffering? If there is only one God, why did we worship the Holy Trinity?

I gave her everything I had, repeating what the preachers had told me about life and sin until everything I’d been taught sounded strange even to me. More and more, I saw my people as an outsider would. Church was becoming an obligation, something I did only to belong, which, of course, was exactly what it had been for her all along. I’d never truly believed, but I’d always felt that one day I might. Addie’s questions seemed to preclude that possibility for me. I wasn’t going to see the light or be saved.

Her questions often popped up on Sunday walks from the farm to join my family in church. One Sunday, during our trek into Clarion, her questions about God were particularly exasperating. I literally threw my hands up in the air. “Addie, I don’t know where God came from. Or if He really exists. But evil people exist. And we all die. We need some way to explain. Otherwise, it makes no sense. And some people would go crazy if they didn’t have God or Jesus. Or, for that matter, sin.” The next question crossed her face and I added, “No, I won’t go crazy. But this is where I live. This is what people think.”

The church bulletin that day requested our dimes and dollars for a new campaign to save the poor souls of New Guinea. Addie tapped the photo of smiling native children, then whispered, “If they’re already good, happy people when the missionaries get there, how do the missionaries convince them that they’re sinful and need Jesus to save them?”

I had no response.

Addie leaned her head toward me as we slipped into our pew. “Do you think I need to be saved?”

“No!” I whispered and grasped her arm. “No.” A hot anger bolted up my chest.

A bitter sadness gnawed at me all through the sermon. The preacher’s focus was original sin and God cursing Eve with the sorrow of childbearing. Each time I glanced at Addie, I remembered her arrival. No hair, no breasts. Not like me. Not like us. Just that gaze. Wide-open, intelligent, and curious. Unsullied by guilt or sin.

On our walk home, she issued a declaration rather than a query. “They’re wrong. Childbearing is not a sorrow like the Bible says or a curse like the preacher claims. I’ve seen how your momma looks at you sometimes—how other mothers look at their children. It’s not a curse. Not a sorrow.”

I nodded my agreement and began to cry. I don’t know who I cried for—the cursed mothers or all the innocent children taught they are sinful wretches.

That evening, Addie took my hand and led me outside. She made me lie down at the edge of the fields recently shorn of their hay and alfalfa. A single oak branch stretched out over us. Beyond it, the sky was clear deep cobalt and spread with endless points of light. Hobo lay down at our feet.

Addie stretched out beside me. “Nobody agrees or really knows. The Catholics and Jews believe, just like the Baptists and the Methodists, but they don’t know anything for sure, either. They all—you all—seem to need to believe in something. You have to have a story.”

I didn’t like it when she talked like that, setting herself apart. I thought of how tenuous her presence was and how she might slip away as inexplicably as she had appeared.

“I’ve been reading about the Milky Way, too.” She swept her arm in an arc over our heads, then patted the ground between us. “This is all we really know.” Her voice resonated with urgency and calm. “It is a mystery, but it’s beautiful, Evelyn. And it is all we need. All we are.” She held up a fistful of dirt and let it fall between her fingers.

A breeze passed over, filled with the cool promise of rain.

I knew she spoke the truth. She brushed her dirty fingers over my lips, transferring the primal grit to my tongue.

She may have become like me physically, but I was, in my own curious way, becoming like her.

There was one other thing I couldn’t begin to explain to Addie: “Whites only.” Clarion was completely segregated in 1948. Except for the women who came into town to work as maids and the men who picked up the mill workers’ kitchen slops for hog feed, the only time Addie and I were around black people was at Pearl Freedman’s barbeque shack. Hers was the only business in town that served both black and white people. Her barbeque ribs and pulled pork were the best in the county. Her place near downtown, corrugated tin on top and three sides, was dark and hot year round and filled with a distinct blend of sweat, spices, and wood smoke. If the wind blew right, folks would be salivating in the post office as they bought stamps.

When Joe and I were kids, Momma often sent us over to Pearl’s to pick up dinner. I loved the tart, hot ribs, but Pearl scared me. She stood over six feet tall with arms like hams and breasts larger than my head. Pearl was very dark-skinned, and in the dimness of her shack, her features were difficult to pin down.

She’d flash a big smile at us as she handed over the warm ribs wrapped in wax paper and then folded into sheets of newspaper, and boom, “You enjoy, now. I hope Lily Mae sends you back real soon.” Her accent wasn’t the same as the other black people. Some said she was Gullah and a “conjure” woman. She’d take our money and retrieve the change from a cloth bag stored deep in her cleavage, dropping the warm, moist coins into our small, open palms.

Pearl’s only child, Peg, was close to my age, a tall girl but, unlike her momma, slender in the waist and hips. She hunched her shoulders forward and slunk everywhere, like a cat that had been kicked and was trying to avoid the next foot.

One Saturday, Addie and I were downtown, a quiet still time in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. We’d picked out a yellow gingham at Ina’s shop for kitchen curtains. While Addie paid, I stepped outside. Peg walked by, clutching a shopping bag to her chest.

“Good morning,” I said.

Peg smiled, almost too fast to see, and then returned her gaze to the sidewalk. I remembered her grin from when we were little girls, each peeking out from behind our momma’s skirts. She had not been shy then. Her gaze was direct, her smile quick and wide.

Addie joined me and we headed toward home. The street was empty except for us and Peg about half a block ahead. Addie watched her carefully.

“If she had been the one to find me, I would look like her,” she said.

My skin prickled in the heat, and a wave of dizziness rolled over me. What would it be like to be able to say that about anyone you passed on the street? I looked at Addie and tried to imagine her different, my features gone from her and Peg’s emerging from the muddy new surface of her.

A car pulled up suddenly at the next intersection, John Thompson at the wheel. John’s family lived outside of town in a little house surrounded by bored hound dogs and dying cars. He hated “Yankees and niggers,” as though it was the only occupation a man needed, the kind of vehement racism that allowed the rest of us to feel noble in our more genteel and subtle racism.

The hood of his car stopped directly in front of Peg, cutting off her path. His hand darted out, grabbing at Peg, who flinched, wrenching her arm out of his grasp, then scurried around the back of his car and continued rapidly down the street.

John turned right, following her. “I’m gonna come get me some more of that dark meat, girl. You watch out,” he called. He sped up to the red light and braked with a short screech. She sidled on, her shoulders bunched forward, her head low.

“Hold this.” Addie handed me the bag of curtain cloth, then jogged ahead to John’s car. She slapped the top of it to get his attention. Before John could turn to her, she bent over and whispered something in his ear. Just as the light changed to green, his head jerked to the side and his shoulder came up as if he had been tickled. He floored it then, and his daddy’s old Ford sped across the intersection and straight into a telephone pole in the middle of the next block.

Ahead of us, Peg looked from Addie to the car, her eyes wide. Addie and I rushed to the car. His hand dangled out the window. His head hung over the steering wheel and rested against the bloody, smashed windshield. A single line of blood rolled out of his left ear and down his neck. Then the streets filled with people.

After the ambulance had taken John away, I asked Addie what she had said to him. “I told him I didn’t like what he said.”

Later, at home, as we chopped cabbage to make sauerkraut, I asked, “Did you know that he would do that?”

“No. I just wanted him to leave her alone.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t trying to make him do anything. I didn’t mean for him to get hurt, but I don’t regret trying to keep him from her. He’s not a decent man.”

“Did you use your other voice when you spoke to him?”

“Not the way I do with you at night. Not the lower voice I use to calm Darling. But what I said to him came from the same place.” She pressed her fist to her breastbone. Then she scooped the cabbage shreds up and dropped them into the wide measuring bowl.

The next time we went to Pearl’s for barbeque, she waved our money away. “My Peg says you were a help to her. Today, your ribs are on the house—Pearl’s house.” Peg stepped out from a dark corner of the shack and smiled shyly.

Addie’s hand disappeared in Pearl’s grip. “Thank you, ma’am. We’ll relish our supper.” Then Peg delicately shook her hand.

After that, when we passed Peg on the street, she would say, “Hey, Miss Addie.”

“Hey, Miss Peg,” Addie would respond.

From the day of his accident, John Thompson was deaf in his left ear, and never again held a job. He spent the rest of his life harmlessly wandering around town collecting bottles for the penny deposit. I never heard of him harming or insulting anyone after his accident. The old men who hung around downtown, outside the drugstore, let him sit in on their conversations and laugh at their jokes.

Because everyone knows everyone else in a small town, there can be an appreciable acceptance for human idiosyncrasies, for the accidents of the body and heart. Privacy was limited in Clarion and most of us assumed we would live and die close to where we were born. By our mid-twenties, we knew a great deal about each other. Knowledge accumulated over decades of church bulletins, brief exchanges on the street, and casual observation. Faces filled with health and hope or fell into the stupor of love or work or misfortune. We watched each other grow older, our gaits and wardrobes reflecting both age and fortune. And we knew that we were known by others as we knew them. All of this made for a kind of quiet personal tolerance—but only for the accidents and stupidities that we or our children might fall prey to. Acceptance of those who were clearly different was another thing entirely. Race mattered more than anything. Racism is the laziest hatred. The quickest, most peripheral glance is all it takes to categorize.

Other than what happened with John Thompson, Addie and I lived on the farm without incident. By the end of our second harvest together, I had been on the farm over four years. She quieted my restlessness. I no longer imagined myself wandering off into the woods. She drew me into the world of Clarion. Certainly, I would not have gone to Freddie and Marge’s on Sunday evenings without her.

So we lived our daily lives, each being who we were, identical and vastly different. Working together during the day and tangled in each other at night. I felt sinful, but uncertain which was the greater of my sins—lying about Addie or lying with her.

Secrecy might seem to be the ultimate privacy, but in truth it is the antithesis of privacy. A social solitude. Secrets are only necessary when others are present. I was more alone in my secrecy than I had ever been in my actual solitude.

Despite the tensions of secrecy, the time with Addie had a kind of peace to it, an exciting tranquility, like stillness of the first snow—clear, fresh, and new. Only later would I realize how fortunate I was to have that time between being the daughter of my parents and becoming the parent of my daughters.

Still, from the moment I bundled the seemingly formless Addie and carried her in from the cold, I had sensed a tidal wave in the distance, something large approaching, just outside my peripheral vision, impossible to really see but coming nonetheless, large and unstoppable. All I could do was wait, hoping I would hear the far-off rumble of it as it came into sight, hoping that, by then, I would know how to swim or surrender.

My brother, Joe, married his sweetheart, Mary, in the spring of 1949. They had known each other most of their lives—probably knew each other a little too well late that winter of ’48–’49. Their engagement was suspiciously short. At the wedding, Mary cradled a large bouquet of yellow roses at her waist. Joe seemed stunned and not nearly old enough to be doing what he was doing, but happy.

Everyone teased me for letting my little brother beat me to the altar. I reminded folks that he was barely a younger brother, more like a delayed twin, the two of us being born in the same year, me in the first weeks of it, him in the last. That was one race I didn’t mind losing.

Yet the boys were interested—in both of us—and most often approached us in pairs, walking us home from Momma’s or church or inviting us on double dates. But there was no one in particular that either one of us wanted to keep seeing. The men who fought in the war were either shell-shocked or they had an unsettling urgency about them. The boys who had been too young to go to war or had not made it to the action, seemed naive, more boy than man.

All of them took Addie’s direct gaze as an invitation. But they were like house cats stalking a wild turkey, confident and focused at first, then shying away as they got closer and saw that she was not the jay or wren their instincts and abilities were prepared for.

Once some mill-village boys borrowed an old car and drove me and Addie west for a picnic, a rare midday Sunday excursion outside the county and Addie’s first time in the mountains. I saw one of the boys kiss Addie. The heat of jealousy bolted up my gut through my chest and coiled there painfully for the day. That was all that happened, as far as I knew, and Addie seemed no different. New mountain landscape seemed to impress her much more than the kiss did.

Months later, Baby Bud, the first grandchild in the family, arrived only seven months after Joe and Mary’s wedding. Babies often came early then and were, without the benefit of medical intervention, miraculously healthy and well-formed in their premature state.

Thanksgiving dinner at Momma’s house was Baby Bud’s big debut. When I passed through on my way to the bathroom, I found Mary sitting on the bed, her back to the door as she nursed Bud.

“Come here, Evelyn.” She patted the bed. Little Bud had just finished feeding, his eyes rolled back, and his full lips parted, showing the small nursing blister. Mary was still exposed, her big pink nipple flattened and wet.

“Look at him. It’s like there’s a sleeping potion in my milk,” she whispered. “He does this every time, passes right out. Here, hold him. You’re the only one who hasn’t yet. Go on, he won’t bite.”

He felt surprisingly light and warm in my hands. He sighed and squirmed. I felt the strength of his tiny body and, when he yawned, smelled his milky breath. Mary got herself back into her blouse. I stared at Bud, lifting his little fist with my finger, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“You want one,” Addie whispered so close I could feel her breath on my cheek.

She was right. I did want one. Like all girls then, I assumed I would have children one day. I naturally imagined myself married and with kids. It was not something I’d ever questioned. I had never felt the physical urge to have a baby, the way I had felt an urge toward Cole, toward the land I lived on, or toward Addie herself. But I felt it then, holding Bud, touching that perfect soft skin and breathing in the moist sweetness of him.

“You’ll need a man first,” Mary said. “Both of you.”

“We’ll get one then,” Addie whispered back, sitting down beside us.

Mary pulled Bud’s little sprouts of hair up into a peak with her fingers. “Better get two. You two can’t share everything.”

Little Bud wiggled again, pulled himself into a ball, turned red, and audibly shit. I felt the force of it in my hand and half-expected that he had gone through his diaper, the gown, and the blankets. Mary looked at my face and laughed. Bud woke. Calm and wide-eyed, he stared up at us.

For days after, Addie was quiet and subdued, often taking long rides alone. She spent a Sunday afternoon at Cole’s house learning how to drive. Then she somehow talked his momma into letting her borrow the family’s old Ford truck the next weekend. She told me she was going “up into the mountains” as if she was doing more than changing geography. And she was going alone. She packed an old pup tent borrowed from Joe and two days’ worth of food. When I saw her fold the tent and put it in the back of the truck, anxiety snaked through my gut. I waited until she came back outside with blankets, the same ones I had first wrapped her in two years before.

“Don’t go.” I took her arm. “Why are you going? What are you going to do up there?”

She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what I’ll do. But I need to go.”

Her eyes had the focused, faraway look of someone already on her way. She caught me staring at her, worried, and snapped back into the present.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be okay, Evelyn. I’m coming back. Just tell everyone I’ve gone hunting.” Then she laughed that staccato laugh that reminded me of Joe.

I did not want to, but I let her go.

Two days later, she came back as she had left, without explanation, herself again.

I felt the pressure to marry and have a family—that was the expectation of my community, my family, and my body. I was content with Addie. But the ripeness of my body was not something I could resist or suppress.

After I held little Bud, I thought of these things more often. I couldn’t see how I would fit a man into the house Addie and I lived in. We would each have to find someone at the same time or share a single man. The former was unlikely, the latter seemed impossible. But that is just how it happened. We found a man.