Two
The Yield
The next morning, well before dawn, a flash of lightning woke me. Immediately, darkness returned and thunder vibrated the windowpane. The drumming of rain followed as I rolled away from the bed’s warmth and groped for the lantern and a match.
After I dressed, I put on my uncle’s oilcloth coat and a leather hat, then went out to the barn. Lester had been dead for years now, but the recent dampness brightened all odors. As I went about my morning chores, the smell of his sweat and tobacco lingered around his clothes.
By the time I’d finished my work in the barn, the rain had slowed to a steady soft sprinkle, giving me an opportunity to check the drainage outside the house. That odd gathering of runoff I’d seen the day before made me uneasy. It was too close to the house. I couldn’t risk a flooded basement or a compromised foundation.
I stoked the stove, draped a fresh set of clothes and a quilt over the dining chairs nearby, then headed for the front yard. The storm had uprooted a small tree, washing it against a clot of dead leaves and blackberry bramble. Overflow from the field backed up the shallow ditch that normally drained down to the railroad tracks.
When I’d finally extracted the last branches, the plug of debris broke. The freed water plunged twenty feet to the tracks below. Not convinced that the tree, hardly more than a sapling, and a bunch of dead leaves and vine could account for such a backup, I shoveled the newly drained trench. The exertion warmed me, but my hands were wet and cold. I looked forward to the warm stove and my dry clothes as I slogged around the house toward the back porch. Hobo barked a greeting from the steps.
But something caught my eye. The ridge where the land rose a foot before plateauing into the fields had collapsed in one spot. Red lumps of clay lay tumbled down onto the roots of the apple tree below. I walked along the edge of the rise. The ground felt solid and gave no more when I pressed my foot at the edge. But it needed support. There were old fence posts and some planking in the barn. Daddy or Joe would have to help me, or maybe even Cole. He was probably over the flu by now.
Despite the rain’s pause, the horizon remained dark and mobile in all directions. There would be more rain very soon. Beyond the fresh-washed barnyard stretched the unbroken brown of bare trees and the rust of the earth. The air felt clear and cold, as if it had never been breathed.
Leaning slightly forward, I listened. Hobo leapt to the ground and took a quick trot around the yard. He bounded around the barn, then skidded to a stop a few yards away, his nose to the ground. His tail uncurled and he sniffed and whined.
I stepped toward him. He jumped back, barked at me, and then circled as if avoiding something on the ground. He pressed himself against my leg and whined again. I reached down to pat him. The ground was slightly depressed before us. I’d never noticed rain puddling there before.
“It’s just a puddle, boy. Just water.”
Hobo danced beside me, bumping my leg, not taking his eyes off the ground.
I squatted and skimmed my hand over the water. Fat, sparse raindrops spattered the ground.
Hobo barked sharply, then muttered a low, startled growl. I petted him with one hand and fanned my other hand through the puddle. The water was not more than an inch deep, opaque and rust-red. I meant only to reassure the dog, but saw that something was down there. Something round stuck up out of the puddle, solid like a rock, but the texture of it was unusual.
For balance, I kept my hand on Hobo as I stretched farther; the thing in the puddle gave when I pressed it. Instantly, Hobo leapt back from my hand with a full-throated bark. What was in the water? Wet fur? Skin? I thought I saw a bubble of air rise through the puddle, but it was difficult to tell as the rain pocked its surface harder now. Hobo ignored my commands to quiet.
I pulled my hat down more firmly against a gust of wind and pushed my sleeves up. Kneeling, I used the flat of my arm to rake the water away, clearing the odd lump. Hobo barked and whined, pacing. I pushed more mud away. For a second, I didn’t recognize what I was looking at: a shoulder and the slope of an arm. I jerked my hand away and tried to scramble sideways, but my knee, sunken in the mud, hit something—a hip. I’d been straddling it.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I scooted back farther. I glanced over my shoulder down the hill. No one would hear me shout from there. I motioned violently for Hobo to shut up. He dropped to a loud whimper.
What was a dead man doing here?
I forced myself to look again. Judging from the hip-to-shoulder distance, he was about my height. I followed the line of his shoulder down to the muck. Stretching forward, my belly almost touching the ground, I pressed my fingers into the mud where his hand would be. There it was, solid. I felt it twitch and saw my own fingertip rise with it. I lurched back and set Hobo barking again. The rain picked up.
I took a deep breath and reached forward again. The wet clay gave easily. I held the arm aloft by the wrist. The mud-caked mitt of a hand hung limp. Then it flexed, turning in my clay-slick grip.
I froze. Blood rushed to my head.
He was alive!
I dug into the slurry, following shoulder and neck to the roundness of his head. I scooped him up, straining to gain leverage on the wet ground. There was a loud sucking sound as the soil released him from its grip. Mud encased him completely, obscuring his features. I tried to hold him with one arm and wipe his face, but he slipped, tilting in my arms, his face turned away.
Rain spat down harder. I jerked off my hat and used it to shield the head I cradled. The rain battered my bared head. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?” I shouted. A low mutter of thunder erupted behind me. The wind flared, whipping my hair across my face.
He hung limp, heavy in my arms, entirely covered in clay. No sign of clothes. I twisted out of my coat and threw it over him, tucking it quickly across his chest and over his body. I tried to hold the hat with one hand and use the other to wipe his face, but that only seemed to make things worse.
I hunkered over with his head against my waist and glanced under the hat, my wet face inches from his. Under the shadow of the hat, he seemed to have no face and no hair, just a muddy round head. I drew back, slung my hair out of my eyes, and tried to blink away the gray-white curtain of rain.
“Are you okay?” I yelled, my voice drowned by Hobo’s barks and the deafening rain. I tried to focus, squinting at the form slumped against me. The pelting rain exposed the lower half of his mud-caked head. I touched his jaw. His warm skin felt gritty, not the stubble of beard. His face cracked, and a small, lipless mouth opened. His chest expanded, a long, ragged breath. Then expanded again. He was breathing!
A strange sensation rose again from my belly to my chest. Hobo went silent. Under the white noise of rain pounding my head, I heard a tone like a large bell. It rushed up, sweet and soothing, through the bones of my chest. Rising and rising until it came out the top of me, clearing my head—through me or from me, I could not tell. Hobo leapt into the puddle, wagging his tail, licking at me and the man in the mud. The man’s hand flexed again. His arm jerked.
Suddenly, I felt the frigid water soaking my clothes. I had to get him inside. I grabbed him under the arms, dragged him out of the puddle to firmer ground. I could barely see for the blowing rain and my drenched hair, but he seemed caked with mud. Every inch of him covered. I tried hoisting him up, but we were too slippery. “Stay, Hobo, stay. I’ll be back.”
I ran inside to get the quilt I’d left warming at the stove. I grabbed the oiled tablecloth, too. Outside again, I struggled against the wind-driven downpour. Blinded by pounding gusts, I threw the quilt over him, then jerked the coat out from under it. I felt my way around him. Tucking the quilt under, I worked quickly down from his head to his feet. Then I spread the oilcloth over him. I shoved my arms into the coat and pressed the hat down onto my head.
Wrestling his bundled weight up into my arms, I managed to stand. Inside the quilt, he moved in small, spasmodic jerks, like someone doped or on the edge of sleep. Wind gusted at my back. Staggering, I once went down on my knees with him. His weight and size were at the edge of my strength. Hobo nudged me, whimpering inquisitively.
“It’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. I can get you there. It’s warm inside. You’ll be warm and dry soon,” I shouted. Easing him on the porch floor, I wrapped the quilt and tablecloth tighter around him, keeping him completely covered, and half-carried, half-dragged him across the porch into the kitchen. I shoved the chairs aside and pulled him up close to the warm stove.
The relative warmth and quiet of the house stunned me. My arms ached from carrying him. I peeled the oilcloth away. Mud streaked the sides of the wet quilt beneath, but it was surprisingly warm from his body heat. “Are you warm enough? Are you okay?” I asked softly near his covered head. He didn’t respond. I went for more quilts. I debated unwrapping him completely. But I was reluctant to expose him, even for a few seconds, to the cold bare floor. Instead, I left the wet quilt on him and pressed another quilt around him firmly for a moment to wick some moisture away, set it aside, and then swaddled him in a couple more dry quilts, head to toe like a mummy. He didn’t move as I tucked the quilts around him.
I knelt beside him, my hair and clothes dripping. In the dim kitchen light, I could barely discern the subtle rise and fall of his breathing. My teeth chattered. But I continued staring at the wad of blankets not knowing what to do next when I felt that sensation again. A strange, uncoiling calm hummed through me. This time I was sure I heard something below the drumming of the rain, a chime, sweet and soft, then it vanished. I wiped my chest, smearing more dirt on myself. I was freezing, suddenly aware of my heavy, drenched clothes.
“I’ll be back,” I said and grabbed the fresh clothes I’d left warming by the stove.
In the bedroom, I stripped and changed as quickly as my shaking hands would allow.
He lay still and bundled on the floor when I returned with the rest of the blankets and quilts. I took two warming bricks from the stove and folded them in flannel. After I eased a pillow under his head, I lined the bricks up at his feet, then wrapped myself in a blanket, lay down behind him, and pulled the remaining quilts over both of us. I had no idea how long he had been out in that cold storm; I needed to keep him warm. I shivered and pressed up close.
Who was this strange man? How had he come to be buried on the edge of my field? What was wrong with him? With his face? I decided I should give him a few more minutes, to make sure he was warm. I should be as warm as possible, too, before starting down the hill to Mildred’s to call Momma and Daddy. They would know what to do. I’d have to go soon. The steady applause of rain continued on the metal roof. The expansion of his ribs as he breathed reminded me of sleeping with my sisters. I felt that odd hum in my chest again and, despite my plans to go for help, I fell asleep.
I woke suddenly. We were still spooned up tight, my arm around him. We hadn’t slept very long. The stove still radiated heat. Early evening light shone through the windows. Rain pounded hard on the roof and windowpane, drowning the sound of the strange man’s breath, but I felt his chest rise under my arm.
Curious, I lifted a corner of the blanket from his face. He was grotesquely, vividly ugly. His skin was lumpy, rough whorls like burn scars. Worse than the woman in the photograph Frank had left. I’d never seen such jaundice, an unnatural dark yellow. Only his cheek and part of his nose were visible, a flat nose, small like a baby’s, with no bridge. How could I have missed that? The memory itself seemed dreamlike. I lay the blanket back across his scarred, bare shoulder and let it fall forward to cover the side of his face again.
I got up. Outside the dining room window, the sky was a solid iron-gray. I had no telephone and the road was out. There was no way to get this poor man to anyone who could help him. I didn’t want to leave him alone.
He must be a soldier, I realized, horribly disfigured from the war. But how had he stumbled naked onto my land and ended up nearly buried in the mud? What was wrong with him?
An unfamiliar scratching sound came from the porch, followed by a sharp bark. I opened the back door and Hobo darted in. He went immediately to the man on the floor, sniffing voraciously and wagging his tail. The barn cat followed, her fur as damp as Hobo’s. Rain blew in with them.
Farm dogs and cats are not let in the house; their jobs are outside. I’d occasionally tried to bring Hobo or the cat in just for the company and to have a pair of eyes to look at while I talked to myself. But Hobo, out of his usual territory, would be shy inside and usually stayed near the door. The cat, an opportunist, always curled up close to the stove or the pantry. Now both circled the man, sniffing him vigorously, and then lay down, Hobo at his feet and the cat near his chest.
I let them stay. The kitchen was more companionable with them there, the man somehow less exceptional. The rush of cold air that had surged in with them dissipated.
Rain drummed, shooting off the roof and hitting the ground in a solid sheet. Dusk fell, but no houses were lit down the hill. The electric poles were down. The only illumination was farther away, the faint light of the mill’s generator.
I knew I should check outside to make sure the drainage was still good beside the house. But first we needed food.
I lit a couple of lanterns, loaded the stove, and, stepping around the man, the cat, and the dog, I began to make some biscuits. While the biscuits baked, I went out to the front porch. Wind whipped the trees near the bank and slanted the rain nearly horizontal. But the runoff sluiced efficiently away from the house. A thin film of ice slicked the floorboards. Carefully, I hurried back inside, feeling oddly calm, aware of the man and how his position in relation to me changed as I moved through the house—behind me as I walked to the front door, ahead of me as I came back down the hall toward the warmth of the kitchen.
The man sighed as I took the biscuits out of the oven. A long, sweet-sounding sigh, but nothing else. He shifted inside the quilts and rolled onto his back. I was relieved to see that the blanket remained across his face.
He had to be hungry. I dragged the cat and the dog outside so I could feed the man in peace. Then I warmed some milk, and set it, the fresh biscuits, some jam, a thick slice of ham, and a bowl of canned peaches on a plate beside him and got down on the floor. I lifted the blanket away from his face again to see if he was awake.
It was hard to look at his face and hard to look away. The whorled scarring covered him—his scalp, temples, face, eyelids, and neck—as if his skin had recently been liquid, stirred by some cruel hand. His lips, though, were normal. Just thin. He had very small ears. All of his features were small and faint, his cheekbones wide, and his whole face flat the way some babies’ are. The way some Chinese and Japanese faces are. I had only seen black-and-white photographs, but the Japanese were called yellow. Were they really this strange a color? Was he a Japanese prisoner brought over after the bomb? I thought again of the woman in Frank’s photograph.
Then his odd, flat eyelids opened. His eyes were not brown, not Asian, but light, like my family’s. He was not an escaped Japanese prisoner. The pupils were strange, though—very large—and the line between them and the iris was vague, his gaze unfocused. Was he blind?
“Hello,” I said, keeping my eyes on his so I would not have to see his skin.
He blinked slowly. His eyes focused, the pupil coming into definition, and he opened his mouth. “ ’Ello” came out. An old, heavy door opening, a cat being choked.
“You hungry?” I held up the plate.
“Hungry,” he stated, his voice a little less rough. He took a quick breath, opening his mouth slightly, the way a tomcat does when it’s getting a scent.
I shifted him up, putting my leg under his shoulders to prop him up and support his back. I offered him a slice of peach. He did not take his eyes off mine, nor did he open his mouth any wider.
“They’re good. I canned them myself.” I popped the peach into my mouth, then forked another slice and offered it to him. He stared at it and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were small and round, like a child’s baby teeth. Chewing slowly, he locked his eyes on mine and swallowed. A sigh of pure joy came out of him and he shuddered. I heard and felt that sweet chime I’d heard outside, felt it in my belly and chest and head, nearer now, softer than before. It came from the man!
Resistance, a snake of fear convulsed along my spine, then lay still and vanished under his gaze. Looking into those eyes, which were now a pure, lucid blue, I saw no harm or malice. Only strange, expansive otherness. Sitting on the floor, cradling his head in the bend of my knee as his odd voice hummed through me, I fell not so much in love but into fascination, into a deep and tender accord.
I smiled and he smiled back, his face creasing, his damaged skin surprisingly supple. I fed him a few more bites. Then his hand emerged from the blankets—the same horrible skin as on his face. His hand swerved twice before he took the biscuit I held. He brought it slowly to his mouth. The scarring covered his palms and fingertips, too. Miraculously, he seemed to be in no pain.
With every bite, he beamed. I’d never seen anyone take such unabashed pleasure in simple food, at least not an adult. He almost swooned.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He stopped chewing and swallowed.
I pointed at myself. “I am Evelyn, Evelyn Roe. What’s your name?”
The smile left his face. He stared expectantly as if he had asked the questions.
“Where are your clothes?”
Nothing, no reply. Just his open face, waiting.
I stammered on, “Why were you in the dirt like that? You could have drowned in that puddle.”
Still, just that steady, bright gaze.
I could not tell if he understood what I was saying, but he listened very closely, reluctantly taking his attention from the food each time I spoke. The way he watched me reminded me of the deaf girl who lived down in the mill-village. She had the same intense way of taking everything in through her eyes, drinking in the world. But when I laughed at his ecstatic expression after he took his first bite of the blackberry jam, he stopped his chewing to watch me and listen. He was not deaf.
Maybe he had amnesia. Maybe if I told him about my family and where I came from, he would be reminded of who he was. So I talked, telling him my name and where we were and everything we were eating, as though he were from another country.
We ate and ate. Three plates of food and two glasses of milk, him watching me each time I got up to get more.
When he finally seemed to be full, he sighed deeply. The room went oddly quiet and still.
I laid my hand on my chest and opened my mouth to ask about that sound, but he stopped me with that gaze. Then he placed his hand carefully over mine. The roughness of his palm against the back of my hand was both pleasant and repulsive. Slowly, his eyes closed, but his hand did not move from mine. After a long, quiet while, I laid his hand down, gently lowered his head from my leg to the pillow, and covered him again.
I thought I should offer him a bath and some clothes, but when I finished cleaning our supper dishes, he still slept, breathing deeply.
As I slipped into Lester’s coat, I wondered about the stranger’s people. Were they somewhere, not far from us, slipping into dank coats and going out into the same rain? Sick with worry about him? He did not look at me like any of the local boys, but something was familiar about him. I was certain he was a good man. His people would be searching for him.
When I stepped off the porch, the rain on my hat overwhelmed every other sound. I stopped in the middle of the barnyard and surveyed the horizon. Where could he have come from so naked and scarred? I went to the place where I had found him. The depression in the soil still held his general shape, but it was already beginning to vanish, its sides collapsing. I put my hands into the cold, opaque water and felt the round spot where his head had been, the deeper indentation his shoulder had made, then down toward his hips. Just clay slick and grit. Not a clue, not a hint of clothes or identity. There had to be something. I pushed my coat sleeves up higher and dug into the harder clay below. Nothing. I remembered that strange sound surging through me when I found him, and I stopped digging. Whoever he might be, he was a naked, hungry man out in the cold. A close flash of lightning followed by an instant boulder of thunder sent me scurrying for the barn.
Becky snorted a welcome and one of the cows belched a soft moo. They shifted in their stalls when I lit a lantern. I spread fresh hay and felt a surge of tenderness for the animals’ familiar bodily warmth. They needed only dry, secure shelter and food.
What would the near-mute, ugly man inside my house need? As I lifted the full, covered buckets of milk, I felt the fatigue in my shoulders from carrying him.
Back in the kitchen, I dried myself again and got things ready for when he woke. I pulled out some of Uncle Lester’s old clothes—overalls, wool socks, underwear, and a flannel shirt. They smelled musty, so I laid them over the dining chairs to air. I got out the tub, towels, and a washcloth, then checked the temperature of the water in the stove tank. I tried to read while I waited for him to wake up, but my eyes kept leaving the page for the long bundle of quilts on the floor.
He did not wake. It was late and I began to feel sleepy. I didn’t want to wake him to move him again, certainly not to a cold bedroom. I couldn’t bear the thought that he might wake in the middle of the night alone in a strange place. All that scarring; he’d already been through so much. What if he needed something?
So I brought out the rest of the pillows and quilts. I lined his cold side with the down pillows, then made myself a bed on the floor so we could sleep head to head, forming a semicircle near the stove.
For a long time, I did not sleep. An alertness filled me, but I also felt a peculiar calm. I thought again of the awful picture of the Japanese woman, how the skin on my strange-looking guest was so similar to hers. I was pleased that he was alive, however he had come to be half-buried on my land. There must be a secret military hospital nearby, I reasoned, a place for specially damaged soldiers. I tried to imagine such a place, and how he might have managed to leave naked. Lightning snapped, brightening the room. Rain on the tin roof drowned the sounds of his breathing. Then, despite my nap earlier that day, exhaustion overcame me and I drifted into sleep.
Before dawn, I woke with a start. In the dimness of the clouded moonlight coming through the window, I could sense more than see him looking at me.
I rose, stumbled blindly against the table, and then lit a lantern. He had turned in his sleep, his back to the stove. He stared up at me from his bed on the floor, that bright gaze drinking me in. He seemed familiar in a way I could not place. His skin appeared much better. The swirling and roughness remained, but less severe, like very old burn scars.
He pulled himself awkwardly up on his elbows, as if about to speak, and I knelt beside him. Reaching up, he touched my face and ran his fingertips lightly over my cheeks, lips, and eyelids. His hand had become smoother. His color was better, too, sallow rather than rusty, his head not nearly so spherical. His nose and eyes were more normal. Short, barely visible reddish hairs sprouted from his scalp. His ears were normal in size. The room fell away. Fascinated, I touched his cheek and forehead. He was not healing. This was too fast for healing. He was changing. Small sparks of alarm caught my breath. His hand on my jaw stopped, a question on his face.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “Where are you from?”
“From?” He pulled his hand slowly away, and his face went blank and still. I could almost hear him thinking. His gaze left my face and lost its focus. I leaned closer to him, touched his bare shoulder. I wanted his focus back. Fear surrendered to tenderness, a shift deep in my chest. “Are you feeling better?”
“Better.” A statement, not a question. Even his voice, far less coarse than the day before, sounded familiar. Maybe he was a local boy, his war scars making him unrecognizable.
The blanket slid farther off his shoulder. I remembered the clothes. “You should have a bath first, to get the dirt off, but these are for you.” I laid them on the blankets next to him.
He rubbed his hand along the pant leg of the overalls.
“Rest until I get the water and breakfast ready.”
I dressed, stoked up the stove, and fed the animals while he seemed to be sleeping again. I pulled the tub as close to the stove as I dared. After I filled it with warm water, I touched him on the shoulder to wake him. “Does this hurt?” I massaged his shoulder lightly.
“No.”
“You can take a bath now.”
He held my hands and pulled himself up into a sitting position. His grip was strong.
“You okay sitting up?”
“Okay.” He nodded back at me.
He didn’t seem to understand what to do next. Helping him stand was like pulling a very large, drunk child out of a low bed. He kept his eyes on me and I kept my eyes on his face so I wouldn’t have to see his naked body.
As soon as I got him standing, I let go and grabbed a towel. He swayed a little, but caught himself and planted his feet firmly apart while I reached behind him and wrapped the towel around his waist. I pulled his arm over my shoulder. We were the same height. He teetered awkwardly.
“You must have been on a real bender before you got here.” His hapless nakedness made me giddy.
He turned his head, so close now I could smell the clean, sweet odor of his breath, and gave me a blank, patient look.
“Just joking,” I said. The second step, which got him to the edge of the tub, was smoother.
“Get in,” I told him. “It’s warm, it’ll feel good.” But he only turned his head and regarded me with that pale-eyed gaze again. I reached down and lifted one of his legs, easing it slowly into the warm water. He let out a sharp “ahhh” of surprise as soon as his foot touched the water. I startled, afraid it might be too warm. But then he beamed a sweet, wide smile as if I’d just given him a whole tub of blackberry jam.
Once he got both feet in, he just stood there. I had to help him sit. In what I took for modesty, he left the towel on when he went down into the water. He sat in the tub smiling, waving his hands in the water, but not making any effort to bathe himself or take the cloth I held out. So I began to bathe his arms and shoulders very gently. He watched my face and hands, all the while smiling at me. A sweet odor rose from the water. He smelled like a newly mowed summer lawn. He sighed and shut his eyes. I sensed that odd sound again, the soothing resonant chime. I touched his chest. He opened his eyes wide, and the sound changed timbre and pitch. I could feel its vibration through my hand.
I took my hand away from his chest and forced myself to move around behind him to wash his back. The scarring was there, too. My throat clenched. I needed words to counter what I saw, to soften the horrors I imagined had caused such damage. “Are you from around here? Where are you from?”
He said nothing. I couldn’t see his face, but imagined his blank then confused expression. After a moment, he spoke. “I don’t know where I am from.” Each word stood carefully by itself, his first full sentence.
The bath water began to cool. I held his hands again and he stood with more confidence. But the towel stayed in the water. He did not seem to notice and just held the dry towel when I handed it to him.
“Dry yourself. Here. Like this.” I rubbed his shoulder with the towel, careful not to look down. “You can get dressed. Hurry before you get cold.” I dried him off and he helped in his awkward way.
He just stood there when he was dry. Clearly, he needed my help getting dressed. I knelt in front of him holding his underwear open and, averting my eyes, I motioned that he should lift his leg. He got the idea and, steadying himself by holding on to my shoulders, stepped with his other leg into the shorts. I bent forward, holding them open. As I rose to pull them up around his hips, I had to see what was right in front of my face. There was an awful protruding mangle of flesh, neither man nor woman, and a fuzz of red pubic hair.
“Who did this to you? Who hurt you like this?” I held his rough face in my hands. “What happened to you?”
His face contorted, alarmed and puzzled. He put his hand up and touched a tear on my face. “Hurt?” he said. “Who did this?”
“Were you in Japan?”
“Japan?”
I was upsetting him. He didn’t seem to know how to answer. He stared at me, waiting to find out about Japan.
“Let’s finish putting your clothes on and then I’ll show you something,” I said. I helped him put on the rest of his clothes. They were too big, even the shoes. He was not as tall as Uncle Lester. I slipped Uncle Lester’s socks on over his scarred foot. Like the bath, socks seemed new and unexpected to him, but after the struggle of the first one, he held his foot firm so the second one slipped on easily.
“Wait,” I said when he was dressed. I brought the picture of the Japanese woman back to him and held it out. He took it carefully, holding it by the corner, and studied the woman. A ragged sigh rose from him.
“This is hurt?” He held the photograph out for me to take.
I touched his hand, feeling the strangeness of his skin, and turned it over next to my hand, comparing. “I know who did this to her, but who did this to you?”
He seemed to struggle for words and then announced, “I am not like her. I am not hurt. I do not hurt.” I took the photograph back.
“You don’t hurt anywhere?” I rubbed his shoulder. He leaned into my touch like a purring cat.
He shook his head, then turned his attention back to our hands. Taking my hand in both of his, he held it, touching me lightly at first, then searching the bones and tendons of my wrist as if memorizing them.
I did not bathe after him, as I normally would have, to take advantage of the labor of getting up a hot bath. I let the water go cold. When I went to throw it out, it was not muddy as I had expected it to be, but almost clear, with just a bit of grit in the bottom. There was not much dirt on the quilts, either, not nearly what there should have been given the conditions I’d found him in.
The rain continued that day, the waterfall of it crashed off the roof, keeping me housebound with my odd stranger. I had begun to think of him as mine. Mine to protect and teach. Mine to bring back to what he had been before. I tried not to think of the unnatural speed of his recovery, or the faint vibrating drone that sometimes emanated from him. I still thought of him as a damaged soldier.
Except for my brief trips to the barn, I spent that day holding him by the hand, guiding his clumsy steps around the house, and talking to him.
Again and again, I asked him about his family and where he was from. Did he remember anyone or anything? The answer remained the same, “I don’t know.” The only thing he seemed to be certain of was his lack of pain.
In the hope of triggering some memories, I told him stories of my family. Stories about my momma’s family, poor Appalachian hill farmers coming down to work in the cotton mills. About her crazy cousin who robbed post offices and the federal agents who came looking for him. I told the story of my father’s half-sister, the only relation I had never met, who ran off with a boy from Chicago named Hardin.
Of all things, I thought my talk of the war would make him remember something, but even that seemed news to him. He could not remember anything from his past. Reluctantly, I concluded that he must be brain-damaged. But he was so lucid. He filled the room.
Something in his manner and bearing seemed so familiar. I was certain that he was a local boy. I covered the local geography, naming towns, counties, hills, rivers, and creeks nearby, hoping to jog some uninjured part of his brain. None of what I said helped him remember his people, but he turned that deaf-man gaze on me, and I felt like I was reciting Holy Scripture to a drowning sinner.
I saw no judgment, no appraisal in his eyes. He wasn’t like the boys in the mill-village. He reminded me of Cole. I was not too tall, red-haired, or freckled when I talked to him. I was unaccustomed to the intensity of his attention, and at times it made me shy, but I wanted to meet his gaze. I wanted to tell this man everything, to give him the world he seemed to have lost.
By the end of the day, his gait was almost normal and the questions were coming from him. He followed me, watching everything I did. He wanted to know the name of everything—a knife, the stove, the buckle on his overalls.
That afternoon, I discovered that he had even forgotten what a chamber pot was for. The outhouse was not close, so I had taken to using a chamber pot sometimes even during the day, and I certainly wasn’t going out in the continuing downpour just to pee. Since I had been living alone so much, I’d taken to leaving the pot on the back porch. In bad weather, I used it in a corner, behind the tool shelves. He found me there just before sunset that day. I was squatting over the pot, doing my business, when he appeared. I startled, but there wasn’t much to be done except finish peeing. He watched me with the same intense interest he had in everything. Beside him, Hobo peered at me, sniffing the air. Then the cat stuck her head around the corner.
“I guess this means we’re pretty good friends, but even my family doesn’t find this so interesting they have to watch.”
My comment seemed to please him.
“Oh!” he said when I finished and he saw the pot behind me. He stood very close to me. I smelled his faint green odor. He sniffed, too. I offered him the pot and walked away until I heard the metallic clink of the fasteners on his overalls. I couldn’t help myself, I peered back over my shoulder. When I didn’t see him standing over the pot, I took a couple of quiet steps backward and peeked over the shelves. He squatted like a woman, staring down between his legs like a child. I blushed, remembering what I had seen there when I helped him dress. After he finished, he beamed up at me, happy, completely unself-conscious.
Later, when we ate dinner, I noticed his skin was much better. Not quite normal, but in the lamplight, I could see that it had lost its odd yellow hue. Only traces of the burn-like scarring remained. His skin was smoother. The roughness now seemed just below the surface, like the dimpling and slight lumpiness of fat. His hair formed a short copper halo. He reminded me of the children in my family when they were younger. His emerging familiarity kept my mind off of how he had looked when I found him. I no longer felt the urgent need to call Momma and Daddy for help. This strange man had begun to feel like a gift instead of an emergency. A curious gift.
It wouldn’t have been right to have him sleep on the floor again for his second night. At bedtime, I put him in the room closest to mine, not the one Frank had slept in. Getting him into long johns was easier than dressing him after his bath. He did most of the work himself, but I had to remind him to keep his socks on for warmth. His bed squeaked when he sat on it. He echoed with his own squeak of surprise and leapt up. I laughed. He grinned before gazing warily at the bed.
“It’s just the springs.” I lifted the mattress to show him and then I sat down bouncing and patting the bed beside me. I left him squeaking and grinning.
In my room, the sound of the rain drowned any noise he might have made on the squeaking bed, but I was aware of the wall between us as I changed into sleeping clothes and got into bed. I had been in bed only a few minutes when I heard him at my bedroom door. Then he was a darker lump in the darkness beside my bed.
“I want to be in here with you,” he announced with such simplicity that I opened the covers. Given what I had seen bathing him, he was in no shape to take advantage of me.
We slept that night spooning together for warmth as we had the afternoon I found him. All night, I dreamed of hands and eyes and tongues, of an indistinct jumble of flesh and skin sliding by and around and then into me. Boundaries disappearing and reappearing. My own hands cupping a kneecap or a shoulder blade, or tracing the rippled expanse of ribs. They were liquid dreams, familiar and unfamiliar. Disturbing.
Waking in the morning, I was conscious first of something good and new. Then I remembered. Yes, him. That was how I thought of him—just Him. He needed a name. I wanted to find out what his name was rather than give him one. His lack of knowledge about himself was, otherwise, becoming peculiarly undisturbing to me.
He turned in the bed beside me, a column of warmth. I lay there a moment, not moving as I listened to his breathing and the rain. Beyond the rain there was silence. Even the trains were flooded out now. It would be days before the road would be clear again. I would have my stranger to myself. We were alone in a house of present tense; for now, he did not need a name or history. The extreme weather fit him. Something equally extraordinary and extreme had happened to him.
When I got out of bed, he moaned sweetly. Before I got the stove warm, he walked into the kitchen looking even better than the day before. His hair, about an inch long, was red—bright red like mine and my mother’s. A carrot top like me. His skin was more natural, all the yellow gone out of it, though it did not appear quite normal in its smoothness. He moved well, too, lowering himself gracefully to sit cross-legged on the floor where he watched me make our breakfast. His eyes never left me, going from my face to my hands and back again. I did not ask myself how he could heal so quickly. My mind went around that question like creek water around a stone. I thought, instead, of a cicada I’d once watched emerge from its chrysalis. The short, nubby wings, clearly not large enough for its bulk, had expanded as if converting the air itself into more wingspan, the delicate veins growing as I watched.
All day, he shadowed me, watching and listening while I did my chores. We went to the coop first. The chickens murmured as I unlocked the door. They fluffed themselves and strutted to the feeding pans. He laughed when he saw them, a bubbly, metallic laugh. I measured their feed at the first pan and he copied me with precision at the second feeding pan.
We were a parade of three, me doing my routine chores, jabbering away. Him big-eyed, one step behind me. And Hobo was at the man’s side at every opportunity. While we were in the barn, the cat joined us. I explained everything—chickens, the sow, bridles, the pump, the water coming up from underground. Everything seemed new to him.
Becky nickered softly and one of the cows lowed deep and long when I opened the barn door. Behind me, he exclaimed, “Ooooh!” and stopped on the threshold. I pulled him out of the rain into the barn. I lit the lantern. He stood beside one of the cows. Becky turned in her stall to face him.
For the first time, he seemed oblivious to my presence. Solemnly, he studied the cow, running his hands along her back and shoulders. Then he went to her ears and face. The cows, particularly, were not patient when waiting to be fed, but they were quiet as he went to them one by one. Without complaint, they let him touch them—hooves, tail, ears, and muzzle. I moved closer with the lantern. The planes of his face reminded me of my mother’s family.
An expression of complete absorption and concentration filled his face. The sound of rain pelting the roof dominated, but I felt a steady, barely audible drone beneath it. Becky snorted softly, straining toward him, and he went to her. He lifted his face and shut his eyes. She rubbed her head against his, sniffing him loudly.
He moved into shadows as he circled Becky. Then he reappeared and gently combed his hands through her mane. He sighed deeply, then stepped back, smiled at me, and opened his hands. The barn fell completely still and I realized that the humming drone had ceased. “Show me how,” he said.
I did. We fed, watered, shoveled, and combed. His study of the cows and Becky seemed to have sobered him, but when we got to the milking, he grew more excited. He squatted beside me, so close he could have suckled the cow. When the first squirt of milk hit the bucket, he squawked and rolled back onto his heels.
“It’s just milk,” I said.
“Milk!” His mouth hung open in surprise. He leaned back and eyed the cow respectfully. Just then one of the other cows farted loudly. Still open-mouthed, he swirled toward the second cow, then glanced quizzically at me. I started laughing and could not stop. I giggled and guffawed in waves until I cried. All the strangeness of the last days uncoiled from my diaphragm.
He just watched me, a patient smile on his face. Clearly, I was a benign, interesting idiot.
When I finally stopped laughing and wiped my eyes, he sat up straight, cocked his head, and said, “You okay?” He touched a tear on my cheek.
“Great,” I said.
He held his hands out as if ready to take over the milking. I showed him how to hold the udders. I wrapped my hands around his so he could feel the pressure as I pulled and squeezed. His hands were warm and the same size as mine. When I let go, he continued the milking. He was a quick study.
On the way back from the barn, the downpour soaked us. Lester’s old clothes hung bedraggled on him. I offered him a shirt of mine. As he changed, I saw that he had a heaviness in his hairless chest, his nipples were puffy, the way some boys are as they change into men. Maybe I had overestimated his age. He did not need any help with the shirt. I scooted out the door when he started taking his pants off, which he did without bothering to turn from me.
In the evening, the rain continued washing over the house. I taught him how to make corn bread. While it baked, I prepared the beans and ham. He stood at the big kitchen window, peering out one side and then the other, taking in as much of the view as he could and giving me a rare chance to watch him unobserved. Beyond him, the horizon was dark and cloud-banked. The way he lifted his chin and swiveled his head—I’d seen my mother do that, her hand on the sill like that as she surveyed her backyard.
He looked healthy and good. He could have been one of the boys from town, his facial features still a little fuzzy in some way I couldn’t put my finger on, but very normal. A little feminine. His skin was now as smooth as mine. No sign of a beard. No sign at all that he had ever looked so strange.
He was like the cicada expanding into itself—a normal face and skin emerging from his muddy, ugly surface. My anxiety about his unnatural transformation still rested under my diaphragm. But I felt the same sense of privilege studying him as I had when I watched the cicada.
At the dinner table, he saw me observing him and put his fork down to look back at me. I had no doubt anymore: he was not foreign at all. He smiled. Lord, he had a smile.
He reminded me of my momma and my brother, Joe.
When we were going to bed that night, he asked if he could sleep in my bed for the whole night. I thought of Cole, then set that thought aside. This was not the same. This strange man was different and, I reminded myself, not quite a man anymore. I pushed the blanket aside to make way for him as I had the night before.
He laughed a soft belly laugh, clear and pretty as springwater, and climbed in beside me.
Though we slept fully clothed for warmth as we had the night before, I was very conscious of him next to me under the covers. He went to sleep almost immediately. Then there was just the warmth of his breath on my neck, the sound of the rain, and, harmless on the other side of the walls, the night.
What he was doing was impossible: no one healed or changed so fast. It was impossible and unnatural, but I had watched it happen. Tentatively, I touched his hand and found it as warm and smooth as my own. What he had done could not be done; it could not be. But it was. A dizzying panic filled me. I took my hand away from him. I wanted light. I focused on the gray rectangle of window in the darkness, forced myself to listen to the rain. Rain was still just rain. It sounded on the tin roof as it always had. I calmed myself by listing the other things that were also the same: Hobo sleeping on the porch, the chickens in their coop, and the cows making milk, my family sleeping down the hill, the houses of the mill-village spread out on either side of my family’s house. In each of those houses slept the people I had known all my life. Nothing else had changed. And no one else knew about him. I was the only one who had seen him change. The experience was mine. Only mine. How could I possibly explain what he had done? I pictured myself trying to tell my momma, and my mind froze. How would anyone believe me? Eventually, I slept, dreaming the same dreams as the night before—disturbing, beautiful dreams of touch and taste.
For two more days I explained the farm and its various chores to the strange man who shadowed me, ever more agile and confident, recalling nothing of who he was or where he came from. The rain abated for hours at a time, then swept through with renewed fury.
Sunday morning arrived. I got up in the darkness, stoked the stove, set the coffee on it, and then went back to bed. On Sundays, I allowed myself the luxury of snuggling warm in bed for the time it took the kitchen to warm up and the coffee to begin percolating. Aunt Eva would have considered it a sinful self-indulgence not to begin the chores immediately upon waking, which I did every other morning. But I was queen of the farm now, and the animals were no worse for the half-hour Sunday delay, and the Lord, I was certain, had better things to judge.
I returned to the bedroom with the lantern, and, as I slipped back between the covers and settled on the pillow, he turned, his face inches from mine. His eyes were green now, flecked with gold. Like Momma’s eyes and Eva’s, the eyes I’d looked into all my life. We lay there for a long time, absorbing each other. No one had ever regarded me like that, not even Cole when he lay with me. We touched each other’s faces—lips, eyelids, cheeks. A single reverberation of thunder broke our reverie. The rain began its pounding anew. We got out of bed.
I heard a voice call my name as if from far away. I turned him to face me, to see if this was one more strange thing he could do.
His shirt had come unbuttoned in the night, and I saw them—breasts. Not the fatty chest muscles of a boy, but a woman’s small, fully formed breasts. I stepped back, alarmed.
“I have to see!” With my hands shaking, I fumbled the lantern and pulled him toward the light.
I opened his shirt. His nipples puckered in the cold. “You’re a girl!”
He peered down at his breasts, too. “I’m like you.” He smiled, as if his breasts were gifts for me. Behind his voice was another, fainter, more familiar call: “Evelyn!” He had breasts, and he called my name without opening his mouth. Blood banged in my chest and ears.
I pulled the long johns away from his stomach. He was a woman for sure: small breasts, curve of hips, and nothing at all coming out from the patch of light red pubic hair.
Blood rose to my face, a flush of embarrassment, not for his nakedness but for my own. I was in deep waters, drowning in innocence, betrayed in some new way I had no name for.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “It’s okay.” He wiped a tear from my chin, and I realized that I still held his pants open, still stared down.
Again, I heard my name as I turned to the mirror on the wardrobe. Just for a second, I saw the two of us, facing the mirror, identical. He had my face. I took a deep breath. My diaphragm locked. Then he turned from me, toward the voice that I suddenly understood was coming from outdoors. My name again, small under the pelting rain, “Evelyn! Help, Evelyn!”
It took great effort to breathe, to pull myself away from him, from the reflection of us in the mirror. A voice outside called and the stranger was a woman now and looked just like me. Anything was possible. Anything, anyone could have been outside calling my name. I had to go and be ready. I wanted, suddenly, to get away from him. I stopped only to put my boots and coat on, and I ran to the voice that continued to call to me.
Sharp, icy rain slashed at me. I clenched my jaw and willed myself not to shiver. Cold was easier to take than what I had just seen. Rain pecked my face, so I could barely see. There was no ground, not a surface to step on, just an expanse of moving, shallow, clay-red water. I waded toward my name. “Help! Evelyn!” It was Cole’s voice.
I staggered down the driveway until the ground dropped away suddenly. Cole sprawled on the ground four feet below me. He lay in the mud, facing up, his hat had tumbled away from him and his left leg stuck out beside him, the angle of it so wrong it seemed to belong to someone else. His horse, a young gray mare his daddy had just bought, stood a few yards off, tensed as if to bolt. There were deep gouges where the stone and clay of the driveway had given way.
Cole held his hand up to his eyes, shielding his face from the rain, and struggled to get up on one elbow when he saw me. I glanced back at the house. My stranger was in there, warm, dry, and calm where we had been alone for five days—a place like a dream of comfort. I was the link between Cole and the cold and her—her—in the house.
I could barely see. My skin prickled with the heat of alarm. None of this was a dream.
I turned back to Cole below me, shouting over the rain, “Cole, I’m here. Don’t move! I’ll get help.”
I felt a warm hand on my arm. She was there beside me, a jacket and Uncle Lester’s hat on. I allowed myself one short glance. “Stay here with him. I’ll be back.”
Below us, Cole grimaced with pain, his face ash-white against the mud. The rusty rainwater eddied around him.
“Cole, we’re going to pull you up. I’m going to get some rope.”
When I returned with rope, a wide plank, and an old sled, she stood where I’d left her, looking down at Cole, who squinted up. His face was all pain, but his eyes held a question. I gave her one end of the rope and had her back up a little while I went down for Cole.
His voice was hoarse. “I was worried ’bout you.”
“Hush,” I told him, and tied the rope around his chest. The fabric of his pant leg was blessedly coarse, easy to grip. I straightened his leg. He made a high, whimpering sound, shuddered, then passed out. While I strapped his legs to the plank, his horse came over and pulled at my coat. With Cole so slick and wet, dragging him up onto the sled took several tries. Unconscious, he was heavy, dead weight. We would need the horse.
I glanced up, but the mare was gone. Then I heard a sharp whinny behind me. Further down, past the driveway where the rise was less steep and covered with grass and rock, she stood above the horse, her hands open, encouraging. Under the drone of rain and the horse’s sharp cries, I first felt, then heard a tone expand, sweet and imploring. The horse struggled, muscles straining at the collapsing mud. Crouching, she opened her arms. Her strange voice soared, split through the drumming of rain. Brilliant. The horse reared and beat the ground below her. She straightened, her arms open wider. The mare gained purchase, heaving up, then pranced straight toward her, neighing triumphantly. She tilted her face up and closed her eyes. The mare nosed under her hat, mouthing her short red hair intimately. She held the horse’s head, laughing as her hands trailed the wet mane. Turning, they encircled each other.
I had to look away. Take a deep breath.
The two of them walked side by side, both seemingly oblivious to the rain and cold, to where she had dropped the rope. She picked it up and tied it to the saddle horn in a knot, her movements swift and sure.
I checked the line that bound Cole to the sled, then dragged him to a spot close to where the horse went up. She led the mare pulling the sled, and, with me guiding and pushing, we made it up over the rocks.
Cole came to, shouting a curse of pain just as we reached the top. Raising his head enough to see her and the horse ahead of us, he grunted, “Who is she?”
She. I glanced at her. Uncle Lester’s big hat covered most of her face. She was drenched to the skin. She.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, unable to form an explanation.
In the white noise of the rain, he heard a name. “Addie Nell? Addie Nell,” he said. He grasped the sides of the sled as it lurched forward. “That’s a nice name.” Then he cursed God and passed out again.
She put Cole’s horse in the barn and came back to help me. She was strong and well-coordinated, taking his whole weight from the bottom as we pushed him up the steps. I fought to keep my concentration, to not stare at her.
We set Cole up by the stove, on the spot where I had slept beside her a few days before. He shivered and then opened his eyes. He inspected her as she wiped mud off his face. “Evelyn?”
“Yes?” I replied.
He peered down at me as I cut his pants away from his swelling leg. His eyes went from me to her and then back and forth between us. “Addie Nell, right?” It seemed to please him that he remembered the name.
She turned to me. I shrugged.
“Yes,” I told him.
Cole opened his mouth as if to say more, but a wave of pain hit him as I pulled the boot off of his bad leg. He closed his eyes and trembled silently. The bone had not come through, but it was a bad break. Except for a few moans, he lay quietly while we finished covering and cleaning him the best we could without moving him anymore.
We stood, dripping on the floor. My momma’s eyes—my eyes—staring back at me. She left, came back with another towel, and began to dry my hair.
“No.” I pushed the towel away. “I have to go get help. He needs help now. I’ll just get wet again. We have to keep him warm or he’ll go into shock. You get some dry clothes on.”
She nodded and disappeared down the hall. I went for more blankets. I moved mechanically and did not allow myself to think.
She returned quickly and began wrapping warming bricks in towels. I froze, unable to take my eyes off her face. She laid the bricks at his feet then stretched on the floor next to him. She motioned for me to tuck the blankets around them. “Like you did for me.”
I touched her arm as I pulled more blankets over them. She held my gaze a moment, then smiled. One thought came to me, overriding everything: I don’t know who she is, but I trust her.
Then I had to go.
I shut the door behind me and stepped into the familiarity of the cold, stinging rain. In the barn, Cole’s horse startled and backed away, head high, and rolled her eyes while I saddled Becky. I fumbled the bridle. Cold and shock numbed me.
The ride to Cole’s house seemed endless. Twice I had to get off and walk for fear that my own horse would slip. My mind was as blurred by her, by Addie Nell, as my sight was by the veil of driving rain. I worried about Cole, but I knew what a broken leg was. Broken legs could be set and healed. Addie Nell—who had been neither woman nor man and now seemed to be my twin—I did not know.
What I had seen in the mirror just before I ran out to Cole rang like a deep blow to my chest. I had to catch my breath, to let my internal organs slip back where they should be. There was no logical, no reasonable explanation for her to look like me, no natural explanation for her transformation. My mind kept going back and forth from the seemingly faceless person I’d found in the mud to the face I’d seen next to mine in the mirror. My panic rose again. I dismounted, fell to my knees, and retched. I stayed there kneeling on the ground until long after I had stopped gagging. I was dumb, senseless as the water that streamed down my shoulders and back.
I wanted to go on past Cole’s and into town and tell Momma. I wanted the dry comfort of my mother’s kitchen. But she—Addie Nell—appeared so normal now. Would anyone, even Momma, believe me? It was unbelievable. But I had seen it with my own eyes.
I thought of her bright gaze and smile, of the sorrow on her face as she handed the photograph of the Japanese woman back to me. Another kind of panic filled me. I knew then, instinctively and with certainty, that I would not be able to tell anyone the truth. I sensed, just beyond my attempts to imagine telling anyone, a darkness and confusion, an amalgam of all the people around me—those smiling GIs in Frank’s pictures, the Thompson family sneering when the Catholic family moved in next door to them, the eyes of the white men at the gas station and the feed store as they followed the colored people walking by, the strained face of the Murray girl as she hurried her bastard kid down the street. I remembered the faces of the boys who had teased me voraciously, sometimes cruelly, simply for the color of my hair or my height.
Soon she would be among Cole’s family, then my family, then the town of Clarion.
For the first time in my life, I feared and distrusted my own kind. I saw them for a moment as an outsider might. If I told them and they believed me, how would they view her? A circus freak to stare at? Someone unnatural to be avoided? And if I told exactly what had happened and I was not believed, would I be pitied and tolerated or would they think I was crazy enough to be locked away? Away from her? I could not imagine her among the people in Clarion, the people I had known all my life. Folks who got up every morning and walked to the mill, the other kids I had gone to school with, or the congregation of the church. My head throbbed and my stomach churned violently. I fought the wave of nausea that swept through me as I lurched into the saddle.
She waited for me on the farm. I had to say something. I needed a plausible explanation for her presence and our resemblance. I needed to protect her and myself.
For a crazy moment, I imagined us boarding the train, heading for a new life in Chicago. Maybe we could find my aunt there, my father’s long-lost sister, Doris, who had run away so many years before. No explanations would be necessary where no one knew us, and surely she would take us both in as family.
Immediately, I abandoned that idea. I knew I could not run away. I could not leave the farm and my mother. I could not leave the people I loved.
Then it hit me and I stopped, stunned.
Ignorance ran both ways. If my aunt in Chicago knew nothing about us, then it was also true that no one in Clarion knew anything about her. Rather than explain Addie Nell to my estranged aunt, I could use my estranged aunt to explain Addie Nell to my family. She could be the daughter of Doris Roe and the Hardin boy Doris had run off after. Addie Nell could be my cousin, come to find her mother’s family. That would explain her resemblance to me. The thought seemed as wild as running off to Chicago, but it was the only thing I could think of. Within minutes I’d concocted a story: I’d ridden Becky into town for bag balm. The cows’ udders were often chapped in winter. I’d taken Becky instead of walking, hoping to beat the approaching storm. Addie Nell, arriving in town to find her mother’s relations, had immediately spotted me as family when I passed the train depot. Then the rain hit and we headed straight back to the farm to stable Becky and pick up fresh dry clothes for Addie Nell. It was plausible. I’d taken Becky on mid-week errands a couple of times.
Addie Nell Hardin. It could work. No one had heard from Doris since she left when my father was a teenage boy.
Giddy with relief, I laughed into the cold rain and urged Becky toward the Starneses’ land.
All my life, I’d been a good daughter. Except for my nights with Cole, I’d never lied to Momma and Daddy, never done anything of importance that I knew they really didn’t want me to do. But the lie would, I thought then, be easier than the truth. For everyone. Especially me.
I worked the details of my story, clinging to it like a drowning woman, while I made my way to Cole’s family. I imagined Addie Nell at the train station and how I would phrase my story. I repeated the story of Addie Nell to myself as I crossed the Starneses’ pasture. Wild fear pressed into the core of me, guarded by my desire to keep that bright gaze safe. By the time I got to Cole’s house and saw his mother’s worried face at the door, my teeth chattered violently. But internally, I was iron-calm, steady as a rock. As Mrs. Starnes opened the door and the warmth of her kitchen embraced me, I remembered her first name—Nell—and realized that Cole had heard the name Nell because he was familiar with it. We hear what we expect to hear. We accept things in the terms we can understand. That’s what I was hoping for—that everyone would, like Cole, see what they expected to see and believe me.
From that point on, Addie Nell was just Addie to me.
We rode back to my house. Cole’s father, his two brothers, and me. We squeezed into the front of their truck, with me sitting on the younger brother’s, Reese’s, lap bunched up against the door. We drove as far up the road as we could, then walked and slipped the rest of the way. The sky had grown even lower and darker, a hand slipped between us and the sun. Mr. Starnes fell coming up the bank and muttered something about his son being a fool. Otherwise, we were silent and hunched against the thick, cold rain. I feared this first meeting: my strange new twin and these quiet men who smelled of tobacco and cold leather.
Inside, Addie rose from the floor where she had been lying next to Cole. I was the first in the door and heard that soothing faint bell tone withdraw like a wave back toward the two of them. The skin along my forearms tingled. Cole did not move; he seemed to be asleep or unconscious.
The men filled the room awkwardly, watching Addie get up and then glancing at me for an explanation. “This is my cousin, Addie Hardin.”
Without question, they nodded politely at her, then turned their attention to Cole, who had begun to moan as soon as they touched him. Only Reese looked back, his eyes going from her back to me, as they began to lift Cole.
His face blanched again and he twisted his neck to see me. “I just wanted to know if you were all right. You have wood and food?” The men stopped.
“I’m okay. We’ve got plenty of both.”
“She’s got better sense than you, Cole, going out in this weather,” Mr. Starnes said, then they continued maneuvering him toward the back door.
“Bye,” I told him and pulled the oilcloth over his face to keep the rain off. “I’ll come see you as soon as I can.”
Addie and I went to the front of the house, returning to the bedroom window to watch them ease down toward the road with Cole, and then reappear at the truck. Covered like that with his brother crouched beside him in the rusted truck bed, Cole resembled a dead man.
Alone again, Addie and I turned to each other. She was flesh and blood. Undeniable, impossible flesh and blood. I felt the startle of her presence in my chest, deep in my gut, but made myself look at her and breathe normally. She still had Uncle Lester’s hat on. She’d had it on the whole time. Maybe the men hadn’t seen her face very well. I felt the pressure of her unformed questions, but I held my hand up before she could speak and pulled her back over to the mirror.
“Take your clothes off,” I told her. And she did, just like that. The hat, too.
“You?” She pointed to my clothes. And I took them off, everything. The air was cold, but the cold stayed outside us. I turned to her, staring. We were exactly alike. The only difference I could see was her straight left collarbone. Mine had a lump in it where I’d broken it as a baby. Her hair, much shorter than mine, was the same copper color and just as coarse and curly. We were the same height. Her toes were long, like mine. The veins branching across the backs of our hands were not identical. I turned her and saw, for the first time, my own back. “Is my behind that broad?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer, but she backed up against me and ran her hands from her hipbones back to mine.
“We’re the same,” she announced.
“How did you do this? What did you do?”
She stared down at her own hands, then her breasts. “I don’t know. You were next to me.” She shrugged.
“Why do you look like me? How?”
“I am like you. I don’t know why. I opened my eyes and you were there. If I knew why, I would tell you. I would give you that. I am sorry. I don’t know.”
Her hands were warm. Her breath, as she turned to me, a thin vapor. We were inches apart. I saw nothing but her face and those familiar eyes, green flecked with gold. I felt nausea of fear and confusion, then a wave of calm. Under her gaze, the panic in me dwindled down to quiet the way a child’s cries fall away under the rhythm and melody of a lullaby.
Suddenly we were both cold, and I remembered the animals unfed and unmilked in the barn. We dressed quickly, laughing when we stumbled in our rush.
We did chores, made coffee, and ate breakfast. I did the things I had done on countless ordinary days. Habit carried me through the job of slopping the hog, feeding the chickens, and milking the cows. But my skin was on fire, my nerves ping-ponging from “it cannot be” to “it is.”
While we ate breakfast, I told her the story of my father’s sister. I explained that she would be the daughter of my long-lost aunt, come to Clarion looking for her mother’s relations. We had met at the train stop. As the train pulled up to the station, she’d seen me across the street at the feed store, and was so taken by our resemblance that, in her haste to get off the train, she forgot her suitcase. That’s why she had nothing. As I finished my story, she took the dirty dishes from me, carried them to the sink, and began washing up as if she had been doing it for a lifetime.
“We have to say those things?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You think people will not like me if we don’t tell them your story?”
I winced to hear it put so bluntly. “Mostly I think they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. But I have to tell them something. There has to be a reason for you to look like me.”
She peered down at her body and her dripping hands. “Okay.” She smiled. “But you are not afraid of me? And you like me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do like you and I’m not afraid.”
She laughed. “You don’t scare me either, and I like you, too.” She turned that gaze on me while she dried her hands. “A train stop? Tell me about the train stop.” She put her arm through mine and led me out of the kitchen, and I realized, with a shock, that she was comforting me.
The sun shone for the first time in days when we stepped outside late that afternoon. Everything glistened, new and distinct. For a moment I saw everything—the pump, the house, the barn, the apple tree, the fields—through her eyes, through the eyes of someone new. Every run-down, beautiful, waterlogged bit of my world. I was happy.
That night the lights came back on down the hill and the trains ran again. I took Addie outside when I heard the 8:10 coming. We stood in the thin light of the moon, our breath fogged around us and the train gleaming as it cleared the curve. It was deafening, but I could feel her beside me, the low, vibrant hum of her expanding under the sound of the train. When the conductor blew the horn, she laughed and, letting go of my hand, she held her arms out as she had earlier for the mare.
On the first night after Cole broke his leg, I dreamed that she and I were Siamese twins, joined belly to belly, and I woke in the middle of the night to find that we, in a sense, had merged. Only years later would I have the words “lover” or “sex” to describe what we began that night.
The next evening, we began to touch each other as soon as we got into bed. In the darkness, she seemed to make of her body a room that we entered. And there was nothing but that room and her presence. She left no part of me untouched.
The moment I touched the warm, moist folds of her, she ceased moving. She sighed deeply then; an audible chime tingled up my arm and chest and into my head. Her strange, unnatural voice expanded, rising, then soaring past hearing as she shuddered and convulsed.
For a second, she was silent. “Are you okay?” I touched her face.
“Yes.” Then she laughed, deep and sweet, as she would each night.
I did not know then that there was a vocabulary for what we did, or that other women had done the same before us. So, for me, there were no words for what we did, just as there was no word for how she had changed, emerging from the dirt and transforming into someone so like me. How we touched each other at night in bed seemed a small thing next to that. But I knew, without doubt, that it was good, as good and pure as the eyes she turned to me each morning. Good, but one more thing I could not speak of.