The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

Five

Ordinary Life





Being pregnant bonded me to Adam, as it can bond any woman to the father of her child. I wanted to give him a child. I wanted to have a part of him inside me in every sense. But my pregnancy also put us firmly on opposite sides of an experience. Addie and I had been the same. While I could commiserate with Joe’s wife, Mary, and with any other woman who had had a baby, for the first time what was happening to me could not be shared with A. in the same way

That Adam could exist the way he did was, for him, as it is for all of us, the first given, the absolute. He took his own existence for granted. But the impossibility of his existence, the guilt and isolation I felt in choosing him over my own kind and bearing his children, these were things I wanted to share with him but did not. What good could come from telling him I had these conflicts?

But in my sleep, I gave myself away.

During the fourth month of my pregnancy, the nightmares began. In each dream, I was with the baby in public. Happily, I showed off my new child and everyone admired her. But then I looked down and I saw that she was shapeless and faceless. In some dreams, I tried to hide her face from everyone and get away. Other nights, her shapelessness seemed to be my own craziness and no one else saw it. I tried to keep the nightmares to myself. But I would wake from them with Adam holding me, rocking and humming.

Once when Momma and I were alone in her kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday supper, I asked, “Did you have bad dreams when you were pregnant?”

“Most women do. Don’t let it worry you.”

“But these are real bad—really bad. They wake me up.” Then I told her one of the dreams.

“Everybody’s scared when a baby’s coming, Evelyn. That’s normal. But all you can do is take it easy and let Nature do the rest.”

Suddenly, her ignorance irritated me. I shook my head. “You can’t understand. You can’t!”

I saw the hurt in her face as she paused before starting to speak. I held up my hand to interrupt her, but my own words backed up in my throat. Nothing came out of my open mouth. The puzzled expression on her face as I left the room reminded me of the faces in my dreams.

The week after I told Momma my bad dreams, she insisted on taking me to Dr. Hanks, who delivered most of the babies in Clarion then. I knew she was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t help. He talked about what I should eat, what work I should do. Everybody assumed that I’d be having the baby at the hospital, of course. Only backwoods or desperately poor women still had their babies at home. To have sought any alternative then would have been seen as a kind of insanity. But in a hospital, I would be asleep and alone when the baby came out, as helpless as I was in my dreams. I didn’t want others to be the first to see her. I was afraid of what they might do if she looked like her daddy had when I first saw him.

By the time I neared my seventh month, I was irrational with worry. Women then referred to the deep anesthesia of hospital labor as the “twilight sleep.” The phrase seemed ominous to me and I became convinced they would kill my baby or spirit her away before I woke, then tell me she had been born dead in order to spare me having to see her or raise a deformed child.

I woke in a sweat one night with Adam holding me. “Tell me about it,” he whispered. And, finally, I told him about the dreams and my fears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I chose. I chose to do this.”

Then I realized he might not remember much of those first few days. I turned on the light and got out the picture that Frank had left, the one of the Japanese girl burned in the bombing. I had put it away, deep in the small drawers of the wardrobe.

“Do you remember this?” I asked. “Do you remember your skin being a different color and looking like this?” I traced my finger along the burnt shoulder of the woman.

Adam moaned, low and awful. “I remember this picture. I know I was different from you, but I don’t remember being like this. I never saw myself. I only saw you. Even when I looked in a mirror, I saw you.” He drew me to him and pressed his face against my big belly.

After a while, he got up and pulled the covers up tight around me. “Go back to sleep. No more nightmares. Let me think about this.” Despite the chilly night, he went outside and sat in one of the front-porch rockers. I listened to its rhythmic squeaking as I fell back asleep.

Hours later, I woke to the sound of the truck pulling away. I leapt up out of bed. My first thought was that he had left me because I was so afraid of having his baby. But the bedroom remained undisturbed. He hadn’t taken any clothes. The photograph still lay on the bed where we had left it. I found a note on the kitchen table: “I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most.—Love, Adam.” The morning’s milk sat in the ice-box. Outside, the chickens were happy, scratching in the coop.

Soon, he returned with a solution. I wouldn’t need to go to the hospital, he told me. A week later, we went to Pearl’s barbeque shack. He waited outside while Pearl took me into the back room to meet the midwife Adam had arranged the morning he went off alone. “This is Granny Paynes,” Pearl introduced us. “P-a-y-n-e-s,” she spelled it out after a quick glimpse at me, then left the two of us alone.

Granny Paynes was a thin, very old black woman, but she rose quickly and stood erect. She shooed two little boys out into the backyard and turned on a bare-bulb light that hung in the middle of the room. She sat down on the only chair, next to a gigantic old wood stove. She observed me a moment, expressionless. The room smelled of sweat, hickory, and sorghum syrup. The warmth and sweetness made me drowsy.

“Take off your coat and come over here.” She motioned and spat tobacco juice into a cup, then sat the cup back down next to the stove. Her deep voice sounded much younger than she appeared. “Stand up straight and lift up your shirt,” she said.

I complied.

“Now”—she looked up at me as her strong hands worked around my belly—“why you want a colored granny woman to help get your baby into this world instead of going to the hospital in Charlotte like all the other white women?”

I’d never had a colored person touch me that intimately, but her hands felt strong, sure, and, like her voice, young. “I’m scared of hospitals,” I told her. She had turned her head sideways, as if listening to my belly, as she studied my face. Her brown irises had a faint ring of pale blue around them.

“I’m scared of not waking up when they put me out. I don’t like hospitals,” I added.

“I hear you on that one.” She nodded. “It ain’t natural for a thing like that to happen and a body feel nothing a’tall. Your people know you here? Would your momma want you here?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody knows about this but my husband.” I stared straight ahead at the wall of the shed. Her hands were low on my belly, pressing up.

She stopped then, pulled my shirt down over my skirt, and straightened herself to eye level. One quick glance down at my wedding band. “I do not get rid of babies for people. Have you got yourself into trouble with a colored man?”

“No, oh, no,” I stammered. “I’m just scared, that’s all. I’m so scared. And they would make me go to the hospital. I know they would.” She studied my face again. She must have heard the truth of the fear in my voice. She patted my arm.

“Well.” She took a snuff tin out of her dress pocket and put a pinch in her cheek. “I have only brought along a few white babies—only when necessity made it so.”

“I’ve heard of you, Granny Paynes. Pearl tells us you . . .”

She raised a hand to shush me. “They was poor white women. You don’t look rich exactly, but your people could afford to take you to a white doctor, I know. My Rankin has done some work on your farm, years ago before you was living up there. I’ll come to you when your time has come, but, like I told your man, I want twice my normal birthing fee. If anything happens to you or your baby, your people will be after me. You understand?”

“I do, I do,” I told her. I had not considered what a risk she might be taking. “Thank you, Granny Paynes, thank you.”

She inspected me again, her eyes scanning me head to toe, and then smiled so broadly her whole face erupted into fine lines. “By my reckoning you have yourself a Christmas baby, most likely a daughter. Between now and then you eat as well as your purse and land will allow. Take a sip of wine or beer—nothing harder—after supper if you can’t sleep and stewed prunes if you can’t relieve yourself. After December first, don’t eat garlic, chocolate, or tomatoes. And no tobacca. They go into your womb. They’ll spoil your milk and make your baby fussy. The baby needs your milk.”

She walked me toward a side door of the shed. “Now, if you pass blood without any pain, you let me know. When your child is coming, the pain will be like your monthly, only stronger. Your man should come for me when you cannot finish singing through all the verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ twice between the pains.”

I laughed. “ ‘Amazing Grace’?”

She smiled again. “You do that, child. And you come see me one more time beforehand—come the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This is your first, right? Maybe three times through all the verses then. Then Granny Paynes will be happy to come help your baby get here.” She held on to my arm as if she needed help walking, but I could feel her fingers working through my coat sleeve as if she was checking my strength as she returned me to my husband.

Outside again, Granny Paynes and I squinted at the brilliant morning sun. Adam waited, a slab of wrapped ribs in his hands. He had that tentativeness men have around birth, and his eyebrows shot up in a question. For the first time, he seemed wholly a man. A pang of grief for Addie surged through me. Granny Paynes winked at him and handed me off like a bride.

I felt how young we were, how new the world was in that cool autumn light. I rode home in the truck with the warm ribs on my lap, one hand on Adam’s leg and the other on my belly.

Pregnancy changed things between us. Adam became my protector. Not that I was in any danger. But I felt my primal vulnerability. My belly stuck out between me and the world. Any danger coming at me would come through our child. I was an animal then, more than at any other time in my life.

Adam probably felt more like my servant than my protector. In the last month, he took over most of the milking and all of the heavy work while keeping the horses, too. Protector or servant, things were very different from how Addie and I had been. Like so much with A., the new arrangement felt both strange and natural.

He was not squeamish or disgusted as some men are by periods, pregnancy, birthing, or breast-feeding. Of course, for a man, he possessed a unique perspective in these matters. His passion became gentler, sweeter. At night in bed, he knelt before my belly, stroking it, singing to the child until the vibrato of his unique voice made me ache with tenderness. At the sound of his voice, the baby turned inside me, wriggling.

Momma had told me not to let Adam make love to me in the last month. She said it was not good for the baby. But we did. I did not feel very erotic, but I craved the sound and odors of him, his hands on me, and his body surrounding me. When my own pleasure increased, my womb tightened and that satisfied the way a good scratch does an itch. I thought the contraction of sexual climaxes would make my womb stronger.

I spent the last weeks at home, not even wanting to go to Momma’s. In the evenings, I walked through the house, touching everything and thinking of how my baby would soon be in those rooms seeing the same things I saw. We packed away everything in the parlor—everything but the photographs. I put up new curtains, too. The jars of food Momma and I had canned the previous summer overflowed the basement shelves. The new electric refrigerator hummed in the dining room. Over and over, I sang “Amazing Grace,” as if it would charm our child into the world.

I was ready, past ripe.

The heaviness and the waiting did not sit well with me. On some of the last nights, I tossed and turned around my big belly. In my misery, I kicked Adam out of the bed. He tried to comfort or distract me, singing or reading, sometimes bringing up his beautiful harmonics. But even that worked only for a few hours—until the next time I woke up to pee. I sometimes used a chamber pot again, even though we had indoor plumbing. The bathroom seemed so cold and so far down the hall in the middle of the night.

On the morning of December 22, I woke with a start in the darkness. Adam took a sharp breath behind me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my belly. “This contraction woke you up.” My womb clenched hard as a rock and painful down through my legs.

“Yes. It hurts.”

Softly, he sang “Amazing Grace,” all verses once, then went through them a second time. Silence followed and no more pain. We listened, the two of us in the dark. Another five minutes passed before the next contraction.

All day long, painful, but erratic—twenty, maybe ten, sometimes five minutes apart—the contractions came. I boiled towels, sheets, and a single white shoelace as Granny Paynes had instructed, grateful for the automatic washer and wringer. Before dinner, Adam drove into town to warn her that my time approached. Otherwise, he stayed close by. We went through our normal routines. I ate well. Then, about nine o’clock, the pains came on hard and always right at the end of the second round of the song.

Suddenly, I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t want Adam to leave to fetch Granny Paynes. He dragged in Hobo, who seemed puzzled but stood patiently by the bed, his snout on the pillow next to me. I moaned my way through contractions, clutched handfuls of his hide, and curled up fetal around my own womb.

With each contraction, everything broke into a grainy blueness, then returned to its natural color and density when the pain released me. Then Adam was back with Granny Paynes and Hobo was gone.

Granny Paynes and Adam coaxed me out of bed. “Walk the baby out. You keep moving and it’ll come out easier. Walk it out. Sing it out,” she urged.

Into the kitchen, then into the parlor and back to the bedroom over and over we walked, with her and Adam singing “Amazing Grace.” His strong, soft baritone on one side and her rich, old alto on the other. “Sing through the pain, li’l momma. Sing.”

I tried, but my voice evaporated into a tuneless hiss. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but words were too much. Movement and even breath seemed too much. Pain obliterated everything.

At last, they led me back to the bedroom. Granny Paynes smoothed a clean oilcloth and a layer of towels across the bed. They helped me lie down. The pain grew until it overcame everything. The visual world narrowed to a single crack and everything else disappeared into the pain. I began to disappear, too. There was only pain.

Then, it felt like the hand of God reached inside me and pulled down. Abruptly, the pain changed direction. I was pushing. The pain gathered in the diffuse, overwhelming blueness and shot down to one sharp, blind-white spot between my legs. I screamed high and scared, grabbed Adam by his shirt, and pulled his face up to mine until there was nothing but his brown eyes. I thought I was dying.

Granny Paynes pushed herself between us and took my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Stop that screaming up in your nose. You are working now. Grunt. Low, low down in your throat.” She growled at me and patted my collarbone.

I growled back, low. The next wave of pain began, but I rode it, pushed behind it, not at its mercy, not drowning anymore. Again and again. I pushed and growled and grunted and pushed and growled. Granny Paynes knelt on the bed down between my legs. I felt her rubbing me, massaging my perineum between the pains. Then she held up three fingers. “Three more times,” she said. “Maybe two.”

I took “two” as a challenge and began pushing before the next contraction. After the second one, both she and Adam hunched between my legs, staring. I pushed again. I felt the slither of shoulders, hips, and feet. Then the first newborn bleat.

Silence followed. Everything stopped. Adam and Granny Paynes peered down at the baby. I closed my eyes and saw a featureless face in the mud.

When I opened my eyes, Adam smiled at me. Tears ran down his face and he nodded. All I could see of the baby was the top of her wrinkled head and her waving arms as Granny Paynes held her between my legs. The skin on her scalp appeared strange.

“Tell me,” I said.

“The Lord have mercy.” Each word out of Granny Paynes’s mouth rang separate.

Suddenly, I felt very cold and dizzy. I held my voice as steady as I could. “Boy or girl?” I pulled myself up against the headboard to see. Adam looked to her and she shook her head.

Granny Paynes cut and tied the cord. They quickly dried the baby, wrapped her, and slipped a knit cap over her head. Adam brought her up to me. He gazed at our child enraptured. Everything still seemed fuzzy in the dim light, but I could see that the baby’s facial features were oddly flat. Still, all the parts were there—ears, nose, mouth, and, when she opened them, clear blue eyes. I counted fingers. Ten. I began singing “Amazing Grace,” but my voice cracked out from under me.

I lifted the blanket and tried, through the fog of exhaustion, to focus. “A girl?” I blinked. She looked like a girl, but in the shadowed lamplight, there seemed to be too much there between her legs.

“More girl than boy, I’d say,” Granny Paynes agreed. “We need to keep her wrapped against the cold.” She pressed on my belly for the afterbirth. “This is not a birthing problem. Nothing could have been done. You gonna have to let a doctor look at her. Maybe they can do something.”

“She’s beautiful. Our Grace.” The certainty and resonance in Adam’s voice calmed me.

My fear subsided as I surrendered to my fatigue. My child was whole and well. I touched his jaw, but he did not take his eyes off our baby. A strong final contraction hit me. The dense, thick odor of blood filled the room.

“A big, healthy afterbirth and all there.” Granny Paynes dropped it into a basin and turned her attention to the baby. She laid the baby on the bed beside me, unwrapped the blankets, and took a long look. “I have to tell you, I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” she said.

She lifted Grace up by her little fists, then turned her and looked at her back, her neck, and skull. Grace’s arms shot out when Granny Paynes laid her back down and she began a full-throated wail, her face flushing dark pink. Granny Paynes worked the baby’s arms and legs, looked in her mouth, and then announced, over Grace’s diminishing cries, “She might not be quite right when it comes to learning—only time will tell you that. But everything else seems to be working fine. Specially her lungs. She’s not at all early and she’s strong. Born so close to Christ’s day, she’ll be a good one.”

She diapered and swaddled Grace then pressed her against my breast. “We need to see how she sucks,” she said.

Grace latched on immediately. A visceral, sharp tenderness radiated up my body into my breasts. The three of us watched as she sucked and grunted, her fists working under her chin. I was happy. She looked better than I had feared, but I wanted to see more. I motioned for Adam to turn on the overhead light.

I fought an impulse to flinch and cover my eyes as the harsh yellow light flooded the room. Her slightly jaundiced skin did not have the rough swirled texture of her father’s when I first pulled him from the clay. Rather she resembled Addie on the second or third day. Every surface of her was oddly dimpled, like fat under the skin on a woman’s thighs. Her neck, face, shoulders. Individually, her features were normal. Tiny reddish brows, puffy newborn eyelids and lips. Bridgeless button nose. Toothless, shallow jaw. But the total effect was off. Was that my imagination? I held her close. Everything was there!

“She’ll be okay, Granny Paynes. I know she will,” I mumbled. Then, to Adam, “And, yes, she is beautiful.”

To him, she may have been pretty. The texture of her skin might have been deeply familiar to him. He now had someone who was truly his own flesh and blood, however much his flesh might now resemble another man’s.

For what seemed like hours, Granny Paynes cleaned me and the bed up—though there was far less mess than I had expected. She sent Adam into the kitchen to make a tea from some herbs she pulled out of her bag.

“It’s got catnip and some other good stuff in it. Good for your blood and the baby’s.” She spooned warm drops of it onto Gracie’s lips.

She announced that she would be at my side until I could relieve myself. The four of us sat in silence, one new life among us and the odor of blood iron in the air. Granny Paynes eyed us as we gazed at the baby. She must have been surprised at our peculiar relief at having had such an ugly, sexually ambiguous child.

After she sent Adam out of the room and helped me with the chamber pot, she gathered her things and gave me instructions. She made me promise that I would drink more of her tea, take the baby to a doctor as soon as I could, and not let my man at me for six weeks. Then she gave me some homemade salve for the baby’s cord, lit a pipe of something foul-smelling, and walked out the door.

She and Adam talked softly in the kitchen. The tea tin where we kept the money since I’d broken the cookie jar clattered gently when Adam opened it to pay her. It was four in the morning on December 23, 1950. Almost four years since I’d found Addie.

“Merry Christmas! Jesus be with you,” Granny Paynes called down the hall to me before she left with Adam.

The next thing I knew, winter sun blazed through the bedroom window. I studied the baby’s sleeping face in the bright morning light. Already, she looked smoother. I remembered the shadowy, profuse genitals I’d seen earlier. I wanted to take her diaper off but the room was colder now, she was sleeping, and I wanted Adam with me when I looked. I ran my finger gently over her cheek, which felt smooth and soft as any baby’s. She grunted and turned instinctively toward my finger, her mouth open. Her eyes opened a slit, then wider. She focused.

In that simple, clear moment of focus, I saw Addie’s first glance.

I got out of bed stiffly and went looking for Adam, first thinking I would leave the baby asleep on the bed and then finding that the cord, though cut, remained strong. I turned, halfway down the hall, and shuffled back for her.

The clock chimed nine times. Everything had changed for me and Adam. Our child had arrived. I held my daughter up so she could get her first look at her home. I tried to imagine all that would occur in those rooms—the parlor, the kitchen, the hall. She would do and say and think things in those rooms that I could not imagine. She was the first daughter of Adam, who was not a man.

At the back door, I called Adam out of the barn. Our baby stared up blinking, undisturbed by the cold or my shouts to her father.

Adam came and stood on the step below me and I handed him his daughter. They were beautiful.

“Let’s do name her Grace,” he said. For weeks we had tossed names around. Grace had been his favorite.

“Let’s take a close look at how things are going first. Make sure that we don’t have a Gary,” I said. Adam took her inside and I followed, waddling down the hall, anxiety rising in my chest.

He laid her on the bed and unwrapped her, ceremoniously letting the diaper fall away. She kicked her spread legs and muttered at the cool air. We peered. Definitely a vulva, protruding and very ornate, swollen, open. At its peak, a mushroom nub of pink, covered in foreskin, too large to be a *oris. Bulging skin, unmistakably scrotal, framed the outer labia. She was both.

I sunk down onto the bed.

“Give her time. Hold her close to you. She’s our daughter, I’m sure.” Adam took my arm to help me sit. “She’s perfect.” He beamed at me. Then he pulled his waistband out and looked down at himself. He lifted my nightgown and made a show of examining me. “Yep, I’m pretty sure we don’t have a doolywhacker here. She’s Grace. Our Gracie.”

I laughed and swatted his hand away, pretending that I shared his confidence.

We re-pinned Gracie’s diaper, then lay down, one of us on each side of her. After a moment, Adam pressed our daughter against me as he slipped out of the bed. “I think she needs to be next to you now. That will help her be more girl. It worked with you and me, with Roy and me.”

I held my ambiguous daughter closer and, despite my anxiety about what I had just seen, I slept. I dreamed that I woke and found them both looking at me, one set of brown eyes, one of blue eyes regarding me with equal knowledge and wisdom.

I woke again with Adam offering me a cup of Granny Paynes’s tea. Gracie’s face seemed better. Her features were knitting themselves, her face seemed less flat, her skin smoother. Good enough to be just an ordinary ugly baby, I thought. I hoped the same was happening between her legs.

“Go get Momma. It’s time she knows Santa has arrived,” I told Adam. “Just Momma,” I thought to add before he got out the door. “Tell them just Momma tonight. We’ll all be down for Christmas.”

It felt wonderful to be moving, to have a much smaller belly, and be light on my feet again, but I moved slowly to keep from getting dizzy. I sat at the kitchen table, holding the baby and sipping a cup of Granny Paynes’s tea when Adam and Momma arrived. I handed my mother her new grandchild. “Grace Adele Hope,” I announced.

“Oh, my Lord,” she said, clutching at our arms. “You delivered her yourself, Adam?” she kept asking as if she could not believe a man could do such a thing. She fussed and went on about the fast birth and how good I looked and how pretty the baby would be as soon as she got a little older and “lost the newborn look,” as she kindly put it. I don’t know what shocked her most, Adam delivering Gracie or how Gracie looked, but she, uncharacteristically, did not seem to know what to do with herself.

Finally, she settled on making us a meal and starting on laundry. Soon the house filled with the smell of her corn bread and chicken soup. I napped again, curled up with my new baby in a warm bed, lulled by the voices of my mother and husband talking in the kitchen. There could not have been a better way to have a baby.

Christmas Day, Momma urged me to stay in bed and rest. Everyone could come see me, she insisted. But I didn’t want to miss Christmas dinner. I was tired, but not nearly as tired as I thought I would be. Finally, I convinced Momma that it would be easier on us and the baby if we did the visiting and came to Christmas dinner rather than everyone coming to see us.

By the time she met the rest of my family, Gracie looked normal. Only from certain angles did her skin have an unusual texture. Her genitals were more normal, less swollen. What had looked like a small penis had receded. The scrotal creases on the sides of her vulva had relaxed into a normal smoothness. She had a steady gaze, as intelligent as her father’s. Her fine down of hair glowed a faint copper in sunlight. We, of course, thought she was gorgeous. Still, I was gratified when Momma held her again and exclaimed, “Oh, her color’s better already. And she doesn’t look so newborn!” Gracie stared up at her grandmother. A calm, but very alert baby, she closed her eyes only to nurse and sleep. She went through all of the bustle and noise of Christmas dinner with those blue eyes wide-open, never complaining.

Again and again, I told the story of how fast she had come—told it at the supper table and then to everyone who came by from around the mill-village to see the baby and exchange Christmas visits. I didn’t like leaving Granny Paynes out of the story. She’d been good and patient with me. But I did, disloyal as it may have felt. It bothered me most to lie to Momma.

I did the majority of the talking. Adam basked quietly in the praise as he held the small bundle of Gracie upright against his chest.

“Why didn’t you just pick her up and cart her off to the doctor?” Uncle Otis asked Adam. “That’s what I’d’ve done. Just picked her up.” Being a bachelor, Otis was both squeamish and inexplicably knowledgeable about such situations. “Just hauled her out that door,” he added, “before she knew what was happening and got her to a doctor. A man shouldn’t deliver his own children.”

Adam leaned across the table toward Otis, but winked at me. “Otis, you and I both know nobody makes a McMurrough woman do something she does not want to do. Especially if she is hurting and feeling mean about it.”

Daddy agreed. “Lily Mae was mean then, too. If she had taken a notion to, I’d have had to let her have her babies in the middle of the railroad tracks.”

“I was not about to get in that old truck and go bumping down the road. It was too late for that,” I cut in.

“Does it really hurt that bad?” Rita asked, looking worried and tearful. That year everything made her giggle or weep. Nothing was neutral. Bertie leaned down the table, eyeing me and Mary skeptically as she listened for my reply.

Momma patted Rita’s hand and shot a look down the table at me and Mary to let us know we were not invited to share our pain. “Look around you. How bad can it be if everybody keeps having babies? And besides, Adam is right. We McMurrough women only do what we want to do.”

“I’ve heard you forget about the pain real fast,” Mary added and rolled her eyes at me.

Later, as we passed the first pie around, Uncle Grady’s sister, Lou, dropped in from down the street. Cole arrived with Eloise, now his wife and herself a few months pregnant. Cole gave Adam a bear hug of congratulations and kissed my cheek. He and Eloise were a sweet, warm contrast to Frank, who appeared soon after them, edgy and brusque as usual, his camera ready. We all crowded around the table, eating our slices of pie from little saucers, smiling for Frank’s snapshots.

Lou stood in the kitchen door, swaying back and forth with Gracie spread over her big bosom, ignoring the streak of spit-up on her blouse. “That’s how my second and third ones got here, just popped out before I could hardly get out of the bed. Getting them out doesn’t have to take much longer than it takes to get them started in there in the first place. I was lucky, I guess. Some have a lot of trouble on both ends of that one. But my last two boys turned out fine without a doctor.”

Silence rippled across the room as we suppressed our laughter and tried not to think of both ends of that one.

Even Frank smiled, his normal brooding stare gone for a moment.

Momma waved a warning at Joe, who gazed intently at the crumbs on his plate, his lips pressed shut. Rita looked puzzled, opened her mouth, but never asked whatever question Lou’s comments had brought to mind.

“Fine Christmas supper as usual, Lily. Fine pie,” Daddy announced, pretending to laugh at the pleasure of mincemeat and pumpkin.

I loved them all. My child was normal and whole. We were a family among family. I was a lucky, lucky woman.

By the time Christmas visits were over, everyone had made their comments and told us their stories of babies being born. Depending on the point of view and the sex of the friend or relation, Adam was foolish and henpecked for not having made me go to a hospital for decent care. Or he was a hero, a man able and unafraid to do what needed to be done. The women in the family liked him better for calmly delivering his own child. That, and the way he cradled her so comfortably in his arms. He got almost as much attention as Gracie. I, on the other hand, became the butt of jokes about my exaggerated meanness and ability to intimidate. I felt sore and I tired quickly, but I would not have missed Christmas dinner in the mill-village for anything. I had just given birth to the world’s most beautiful child. How could I have kept her at home?

Within two days, she appeared completely normal. Beautiful. Her skin as smooth as any baby’s and her genitals, though still puffy, had taken on the normal cleft of a female.

Gracie was a good baby, calm and watchful, always moving but never frantic. To my relief, she walked and talked very early. When Adam came in from the stables or home from a job, she would roll back her head, stretch out her arms, and give a gleeful screech of welcome. He called her “my girl” so often that when she began to speak, she introduced herself as My-Girl-Gracie. We did not spoil her. She, in her good-natured and cooperative way, spoiled us.

From the time of Gracie’s birth, we were an ordinary family. Like most ordinary families in the 1950s, we were making a living and making babies, not much else. I spent more time in the house and Adam spent more time in the stables. He had made a solid business of training, boarding, rehabilitating, and sweetening horses. We were down to one cow, but even then there was not room for all the horses. Building the new stable was our first major change at the farm, outside of plumbing and wiring for the house. Adam and I owned the farm free and clear by then. Momma had signed the deed over to us on our first wedding anniversary. The stable was our only debt.

Gracie was almost two years old when she had her first cold. Normally an easygoing child, she became demanding and whiny. I’d been up with her the night before and was happy to have Rita come help. Late in the morning, I found them both asleep on Gracie’s narrow bed.

I went looking for Adam. Between family and carpenters working on the new stable and Gracie being sick, the only time Adam and I had alone was at night, when we were both exhausted. We had not made love for days.

For the first time that week, there were no cars or trucks in the driveway. All the workmen were gone. I found Adam in the clean, virgin stable, spreading sawdust and hay in the empty stalls. The odors of fresh wood filled the stable—no scent of sweat, manure, or leather yet. I came up quietly behind him, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and slipped my hands across his bare belly, then down to that flat, smooth spot I loved so much where his legs joined his hips. That was all it took—for either of us. Moments later, I conceived Rosie in the third stall on the left, on a bed of sweet, fresh hay.

We went through the same process, meeting with Granny Paynes at Pearl’s for the preliminary examination. Adam waited outside, holding a slab of wrapped ribs with Gracie perched on his shoulders. He handed Gracie over to Granny Paynes. “See what you started?”

“Don’t go blaming me for this here,” she chuckled and held Gracie up to get a better look at her. “You sure this is the same baby? You didn’t switch her for a pretty one?”

Adam ran his hand through Gracie’s bright red curls. “Where would we have found another one like this?”

Gracie smiled and patted Granny Paynes on the cheek.

Like Gracie, Rosie was big, healthy, and delivered by Granny Paynes. An easy, fast delivery that Adam once again got credit for. She came into the world faster and with more bustle than her sister. Granny Paynes barely got there in time. Gracie woke midway through the delivery. Adam dashed out of the room to get her and returned with her in his arms. “She won’t go back to sleep,” he apologized. Solemn and sleepy, she witnessed her sister’s birth. Rosie emerged with a full head of deep auburn hair and blinking, bright blue eyes.

As ugly and unformed as Gracie had been at birth, Rosie took her first good look at the world and began a scream that lasted for months. Granny Paynes looked at Rosie and then nodded toward Gracie, who had fallen asleep, again, in Adam’s arms as soon as her sister began to wail. “This one’s a girl, too, I reckon, and as ugly as her sister was, only she’s mad about it.”

Adam and I laughed.

She was a cute, normal-looking baby girl within a couple days of birth. Fair-skinned redhead, with blue eyes that shaded toward green after a few weeks.

But Rosie was also colicky. She woke every two hours and suckled as if there was a time limit and a long line of other babies waiting for my breast, then she screamed till sleep took her, then woke again to feed and restart the cycle. In the evenings, I passed her off to Adam. He adapted a blanket into a sling and, with Rosie secured to his chest, he rode Becky the old plow horse around the corral. She plodded slowly along, while he sang in his normal voice, below the lyrics, a low, steady hum. Gradually, Rosie’s crying would stop. Her father’s voice and the motion of the horse were more effective than me in a rocking chair. After Adam brought her in, she would sleep for hours. Soon she outgrew the sling.

When she woke in the night, he would bring her to me, then take her again when she had fed and we knew the screams would begin. Often I rose from sleep to find them in the parlor, him rocking her across his knee or high on his chest. But always he motioned me back to bed and held up whatever book he was reading to show me he had entertainment. There were many mornings when I woke to find him slumped in the rocking chair or sprawled across the couch, his book on the floor and his daughter bundled on his chest, the glow of her hair brighter in the light of his reading lamp.

Rosie’s first word was “horse.” As soon as she mastered walking, she learned to scoot one of the dining chairs up to the back door and pull herself up to stand on it. “Hoss, hoss!” she demanded, pointing toward the stable, one hand on her hip. For what seemed like years, this was our morning ritual. She ate her breakfast in tears and red-faced frustration, inconsolable.

One day, her cries for “hoss” lasted through breakfast and into the afternoon. After lunch, I thought I had finally gotten her down for a nap, and I went out to clean the back porch and steps. A set of small footprints in the remains of the morning’s snowfall led down the steps, across the yard, and straight to the barn. Too small to be Gracie. Adam had stabled a new boarder horse, an aggressive sorrel, in the barn to separate him from the other horses in the stable. I ran to the barn. As I opened the door, the door on the other side opened, too. Adam led Darling in.

“You seen Rosie?” I asked.

Before he could answer, we spotted her.

She crouched on the top rail of the back stall, facing the sorrel, her arms spread gleefully above her head. Adam shoved Darling aside. He jerked the sorrel’s stall open and slid in as Rosie whooped joyfully and leapt toward the horse.

The sorrel screamed.

Adam shouted as he threw himself between the horse and Rosie. Not his regular voice but a deep, percussive blast of alarm.

He caught Rosie midway between the horse’s flank and the floor. The horse pivoted, blocking them into the corner of the stall.

Rosie wailed.

The horse erupted, neighing violently. Ears back, eyes rolling, he reared. Hooves smacked the stall wall. Adam clutched Rosie to his chest. He spun to keep his back to the horse.

In the adjoining stall, I pulled myself up to stand on the bottom slat so Adam could pass Rosie over the wall to me. I held my arms out to take her.

But Adam did not seem to see me. He pulled Rosie tighter and took a deep breath. His face changed from alarm to concentration.

A sweet, pure tone undulated through the barn. Then the timbre of his voice shifted through the warm tones into a firm command. Calm and powerful. Solid as flesh.

I clutched the rail to keep from falling. Inches from me, Rosie closed her eyes. Her grip on Adam’s shirt relaxed.

Then silence. The quiet of alert, listening animals followed. One motionless second passed, then the cow muttered. Darling, still standing where Adam left her, whickered. The sorrel lowered his head. His tail swished gently.

Adam handed Rosie up and over to me. She burrowed her face into my shoulder, her weight soft in my arms.

“Shit, that was close,” Adam whispered. He slouched, his head against the top rail as he reached over and touched my head, then Rosie’s.

“You okay?” I asked. He looked up, nodded, and motioned for me to take Rosie in. Then he turned and spread his hands on the sorrel, who now regarded us complacently as he chewed.

Rosie took a long nap and was quieter than usual for the rest of the day.

After that, she shifted from demanding a ride to asking for permission to ride, and though she was still several days from her third birthday, Adam began brief, well-supervised lessons to teach her riding, grooming, and better barn etiquette. I thought she was too young, but Adam insisted, “If we can’t keep her away from the horses, then we need to make sure she knows how to be around them.”

A ride became part of her bedtime ritual. While Gracie bathed, Adam and Rosie rode double. Becky, the mildest of our horses, walked a slow, stately pace. Around and around the corral they went, Rosie leaning back against Adam’s chest, her face solemn and attentive.

The time with Rosie and the sorrel was the first time I heard that sudden percussion and command in Adam’s voice. Except for our pleasure in bed, I’d seldom heard his unique voice. Sometimes, usually during a rare, unexpected moment of quiet at the table or when we tucked the girls in for the night, I felt rather than heard a low hum in the room, warm, content, and seemingly without source, like the vibrations of a motor running in another part of the house. Occasionally, at Marge and Freddie’s, Momma’s, or the church, I sensed a subtle shift in the room. I would look at him for confirmation, and he would simply smile back.

Whatever charms Adam had with animals, he had with people, too. Carolina blue-collar folk and farmers in the 1950s and ’60s were not a people inclined to physical contact. But, as it had been with Addie, people liked to touch Adam. Children crawled into his lap.

With women, he had the advantage of an unnatural understanding. They turned toward him when he walked near. Old women smoothed his collar or plucked lint off him as if he were their son. At church suppers, women pressed their fried chicken and beans on him, gratified by his appreciation and the gusto with which he ate. He sucked the juices off the rib bones. He had delivered his own daughters and would go elbow-deep into a mare to deliver a foal, all without flinching. Nothing of the body made him turn away. Not every woman knew all of this about him, but they could all read the musk of it on him.

Most men liked him as much as the women did, slapping him on the back or shaking his hand when they met him. Younger men sparred with him, punching and jabbing in mock fights. A few of the younger husbands seemed uncomfortable near him, stiffening in resolve when he was near, but that ceased as they got to know him.

I still expected someone to sense how truly different he was, to step forward and point a finger. But no one ever seemed to suspect anything. In the crush of our family and daily life, weeks could pass without me thinking of the difference. Except at night in bed. Always then his voice filled me, reminding me of what set him apart. As I listened to the last vibration of it vanish, I did not know him as an ordinary man.

I listened to our daughters, too. At times of contentment, they made soft, purring moans that were endearing but not out of the ordinary. As babies, both had an unusually high-pitched scream that, when they were very upset, rose almost to the limits of human hearing and bounced back painfully from the corners of the room. Gracie rarely got to that point, but Rosie’s tantrums rose straight to the peak volume, especially when Gracie took one of her toys. When this happened, Gracie would quickly return the toy and flee. But for both of them, the power and pitch of that scream seemed to diminish as they grew from toddlers to little girls, and I’d heard nothing that sounded like Adam’s voice.

I looked for other signs, too, examining their bodies for any changes beyond normal growth, indications that their facial features or genitals were slipping out of form. I felt twinges of guilt, as if such inspections showed a lack of gratitude, an affront to Adam’s and their obvious perfections.

I found nothing. They were normal, healthy girls. Beautiful and round-faced. They were slim and muscular, with masses of curly red hair. Within months of birth, their blue eyes changed to shades of green. Except for Rosie’s colic, they had suffered nothing more than a few mild winter colds. They, like their sisters who followed, were preternaturally agile and fast learners, but nothing stood out beyond that. In fact, I could see little of Adam’s—or Roy Hope’s—features in them. They looked like my baby pictures.

One night, after I had put the girls to bed, Adam and I heard the stabled horses neighing in alarm. He ran out with a flashlight to see what had spooked them. I followed in my nightgown, holding Hobo and the new dog, Gabby, back by their collars.

An owl, luminous in the moonlight when Adam opened the stable door, turned its smooth, heart-shaped face toward us. It skipped sideways and fluttered a few feet into the air before falling back to the stable floor, its left wing dragging. The horses whinnied. The dogs pulled and barked.

Adam took off his shirt and threw it over the owl. “Get the dogs out of the stable. I’ll take care of it,” he told me. I shut the door on the faint, soothing rise of his voice.

As I tucked the girls in, I considered, for the first time, that his voice might have qualities beyond what I heard and felt. Could he use it to heal? Was that what I’d heard him doing with the owl?

When he came in from the stable, my question seemed to surprise him. “No. Nothing like that. It’s just a different kind of voice.”

“Just a different kind of voice?” I echoed.

He grinned. “I admit it’s a good voice, a useful tool. A calm animal doesn’t fight what you need to do. I had to strap a splint to the owl’s wing.” He cupped his hands as if holding the bird. “He was so strong and light, Evelyn. I think he’ll be okay.”

“You really don’t know what you have, do you?”

“Oh, I know.” He lifted my hair off my shoulder and kissed my neck. “I know.”

In the morning, he fashioned a cage out of two crates and chicken wire. The girls were in charge of the mousetraps. Gracie set the traps and Rosie dropped the dead mice into the cage. On the days we caught no mice, we fed the owl meat or scraps from the table. The cats, one as pale as the owl, the other a pregnant calico, sometimes perched on top of the cage and hung their heads over the side, peering upside down at the owl that stared blankly back at them.

After a month, we freed the owl. Rosie had had her ride and both girls were ready for bed. The girls and I clustered outside in our pajamas under a bright moon. Adam held up the thick stick of the perch the owl clung to. He removed the makeshift hood. For a moment, the owl did not move. Turning its face toward Adam, it took one long, unblinking look, hopped from the stick to his gloved wrist, then, slowly lifting its wings, took silent flight. The girls oohed beside me. The white speck of the owl vanished quickly into the dark, distant bank of trees.

For once, the girls went to bed without protest. I kissed them, and Adam began singing for them—two songs, one for each girl. As I climbed into bed, I heard the familiar refrain of “Amazing Grace,” which Gracie considered her song. “Silent Night,” Rosie’s choice, followed.

I listened as Adam came down the hall, then felt him get in bed and spoon up behind me. He held me, but we did not sleep. It seemed to me that we were listening for something. Finally, I turned to him and he lifted my nightgown. I did not reach for the rubbers. I thought of the owl, of the impossible, silent lift of it into the air, as I drew my husband to me.

The owl, in all its wisdom, did not go far from the barn and stable mice. And it did not forget the curious cats. Not long after we freed it, I saw it hunched in the stable rafters when I took coffee out to the stable for Adam.

One morning, before the milking, I stopped to say hello to Darling. The cat had had her kittens by then, a bunch of orange tabbies and calicos that flickered around the barn. I found the bloody tail and most of the spine of an orange kitten draped over the corner post of Darling’s stall. I couldn’t imagine how it got there. Then I looked up. Our barn owl peered down, ghostly in the rafters. I banged the milk pail against the barn wall in protest. The owl simply tilted its wide, flat face down and stared impassively.

Outside, I bent over to bury the little spine so the girls would not find it. Bile surged up my throat. I dropped to my knees to vomit and recognized the particular nausea of early pregnancy. I’d had morning sickness with the other girls, but nothing this bad. The powerful waves of nausea ripped through me, the first indication that this pregnancy was different, not one but two babies.

I saw Granny Paynes once at Pearl’s when I was about five months along. She nodded tersely at my swollen belly and said, “Looks like you carrying one too many. You need to go to the hospital.”

Months later, deep in anesthesia and dead to the world, I was delivered of twins at Mercy Hospital in Charlotte. This time, I was not afraid. Gracie and Rosie were normal and bright. There was no need for subterfuge.

In the hospital, hours after the birth, I emerged from my twilight sleep of drugs to find Adam and Momma in the room with me. Momma dozed in a chair at the foot of the bed. A silken evening light shone through a break in the drawn curtains. From a chair next to the bed, Adam leaned into the column of light. He held up two fingers. “The doctors are not sure. But I saw them. We have two more girls. Like Gracie and Rosie, like you,” he whispered.

The moldy cotton of anesthesia filled my mouth. I shook my head and croaked, “Like you. Bet they’re ugly like you.”

He held a cup of water to my lips and nodded. “They’re healthy and all there. But, yes, they look like Gracie and Rosie did, only a little smaller and skinnier.”

The tepid, chlorinated water did little to slake my thirst. “What do the doctors say?” I tried to sit up straight, but felt the soreness in my bottom and slouched back down again.

“They had to stitch you up. You tore some. You okay?”

I nodded.

“They want to keep the babies for observation,” he continued. “They’re puzzled, of course.”

“I want to go home. I want them with me.”

“You should all stay for a few days and rest. Momma and I can take care of the girls at home. Rita and Bertie are with them now.”

Momma stirred, woke with a startle, then oriented herself. Adam stood up to let her sit on the bed beside me. She smoothed my hair away from my face and took my hand. “Has Adam told you?”

He cleared his throat and spoke up. “Evelyn, the doctors are very puzzled. They think something may be wrong with the girls.” He spoke in a level and serious voice as he grinned over Momma’s shoulder.

I hiccupped and stifled a smile.

“Oh, honey.” Momma rubbed my hand. I felt terrible. The moment should have been a joy for her.

I slid back into sleep and woke later, to a darkened room. Momma was gone. Adam snored softly in a recliner next to my bed, his hat tipped over his face.

The next morning, Adam and Momma brought Gracie and Rosie to see their new sisters. The five of us stood looking in the nursery window at a row of babies sleeping in plastic bassinets. Pink, not blue, blankets swaddled Jennie and Lillian—a good sign. The doctors agreed with Adam on the sex of the babies. I pressed my face to the glass and stood on my tiptoes to get a better view. Both of them slept. Not much was visible between their blankets and the knit caps. But their cheeks had the same roughly dimpled skin I had seen on Addie and their two older sisters.

“Are they all right, Momma?” Gracie leaned against me and put her arm around my hip. Momma had pulled her hair back in a single tight braid. She looked up at me, her broad face solemn.

“Of course they are. They’re fine. Perfect like you and Rosie were when you were born,” I said.

“Maybe we got a bad one, so they gave us another one to make up for it,” Rosie volunteered, hopping up and down beside us.

Adam and I laughed. Momma rubbed Gracie’s shoulders sympathetically.

Two nurses in surgical masks came into the nursery and picked up the twins. The younger nurse gave us a brief, anxious glance.

Adam put his hand on my back. “They were early, Evelyn. It may take a day or two longer to lose the newborn look.” The two nurses took the twins into an adjoining room and shut the door.

“Adam, I need to have them close to me. I need to hold them like I did Gracie and Rosie. Like I held you. I want them,” I whispered.

“Wait here,” Adam said.

Still a little groggy from the anesthetic, I let him go without further comment. My engorged breasts ached. I wanted to hold my babies. Momma and the girls, exclaiming over the other babies, hadn’t noticed Adam leaving.

Across the nursery, another glass wall revealed a parallel hall. Adam appeared opposite us on the other side of the nursery and knocked at a glass door near the room the nurses had taken our babies into. The nurses came back out without the twins and went to the door where Adam stood. He said something. The younger nurse looked at the older one, who shook her head at Adam. The older nurse pointed back to the room where they’d left the twins; she began to shut the door. Adam put his hand out to stop her, his brow furrowed in protest. He stepped into the nursery. Both nurses stepped back.

“Back in a minute, Momma,” I said.

She looked up and saw Adam, too. I waved away her question.

I waddled over to the other side of the nursery to join Adam.

An unfamiliar hardness resonated in his voice. “No blood tests. We don’t want any blood tests. No tests of any kind. My daughters are fine. You can’t do that to our children without our consent.”

The nurses exchanged looks. The older one brushed past us as she strode out of the nursery and down the hall. The remaining nurse smiled weakly and said, “Twins.”

The older nurse returned with a doctor. He held a chart and seemed surprised when Adam reached out to shake his hand and formally introduce himself. “I’m Adam Hope, father of the twins your nurses are examining. There’s no need for any tests.”

The doctor shook his head and raised his hand, dismissing Adam’s objection.

But Adam continued. “Their reflexes are normal. Lungs and heart normal. They have taken some formula.”

The doctor’s face hardened with each statement as Adam’s voice grew more firm. “Mr. Hope, I am not even sure your children are female. We need to discuss some options. There are procedures for children like yours.”

“They are girls. They look exactly like our other two daughters did when they were born.” This registered in the doctor’s eyes, but his face remained set. One of the nurses shifted beside us and cleared her throat softly.

I squeezed Adam’s arm to shut him up. It took effort to think through the lingering veil of anesthesia, but his tone alarmed me.

“We don’t want blood tests. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I lied.

The doctor snorted. “No tests,” he said to the nurses.

“They’re fine.” Adam’s voice dropped. “And we want to take them home.”

I slipped my hand into Adam’s. “As soon as possible.” I stared back at the doctor, who regarded us as if we were demented.

The doctor opened his mouth, snapped it shut, then quickly scrawled something across the chart. “These babies should be examined by pediatric urology. But I’m signing for early dismissal. Tomorrow.” He thrust the chart at the nurses and marched away.

I went back to my room while Adam stayed to argue the nurses into letting me keep Jennie and Lil with me for the night.

They were good babies, crying so softly and infrequently that they did not wake the newly delivered woman who shared the room with me. I ignored the bottled milk and let them relieve me. I held them close, willing them to become normal girls.

The next morning, we checked out of the hospital without blood tests and without incident. Tired, sore, and happy, I took my ugly carrot-tops home.

Then the shit hit the fan of domestic life—the shit and the laundry and the spit-up and the spills and the scraped knees and the shoes and the holidays and the biscuits and the grits and the cats and the dogs and the rain and the manure and the weeds. We had tilted toward chaos with two kids, a farm, and a stable full of horses, but the addition of twins tipped things straight into the gutter. The next years were a blur of babies and work. They were probably the happiest years of my life.

We needed more assistance on the farm than family could supply. For the first time, we hired regular help, Wallace, Granny Paynes’s nephew. A natural stable hand and an otherwise quiet man, he muttered to the horses as he worked, a deep, rhythmic chatter that calmed them. His daughter, Macy, sometimes helped me in the house.

In temperament, Lil and Jennie fluctuated between Gracie’s calm and Rosie’s natural-born outrage. More than any of the other girls, they were left to their own devices. All energy and wide eyes, they calmed and excited each other in turns. As babies, they burbled contentedly at each other for hours until one of them bit, hit, or scratched the other and all hell broke loose. Each added to the other’s wails in an endless cycle. If they were left unattended, their cries reached a crescendo at which they gagged then threw up. Together. On each other. Their mutual mess provided immediate distraction and they grew quiet again. Quite the team.

Before they were two years old, Jennie and Lil learned to pull themselves up the side of their crib, crawl over the top, and slide down the rails to the floor. Soon they began appearing everywhere—in the barn, under the house, in the chicken coop. Like me, they wandered fearlessly as toddlers, but they were doubly bold and agile. Wallace often called to me from the back door, the two bright-haired, squirming girls in his dark arms and an apology on his lips, as if he were to blame for being unable to bear them underfoot in the stable.

One day, Adam spotted them at the end of the driveway. Their bright curly mop tops disappearing as they descended, heading for the railroad tracks. He bolted after them. I found the curtains of their bedroom fluttering out the window and the screen on the ground below. Adam trudged back to the house, the girls struggling, unharmed, in his arms. That evening he and Wallace screwed all the screens into the window frames and began work on fencing. By the end of the week, the front and side of the house were fenced and the driveway gated.

In rebellion against their terrible confinement, Lil and Jennie made their own playhouse. With help from Adam, they built it out of scraps and anything they could successfully filch from the house or the barn. They were good thieves and scavengers. The playhouse held a collection of bottle caps, empty birds’ nests, a stinking fox skull, and a seemingly continuous litter of kittens. A semicircle of little rocks at the entrance forbade anyone else entry. They worked out complex fantasies in their little playhouse. At the supper table, they embellished the stories in dual chattering blasts of an English patois known only to the two of them, a peculiar Southern drawl sprinkled with nasal, Asian intonations.

On our tenth wedding anniversary, Momma took care of the girls while Adam and I went to a restaurant and a movie, a rare night out for us. When we returned, rather than going inside, I waited by the car while Adam checked the stable. Lil and Jennie would be asleep, maybe Rosie, too. But Gracie’s voice carried through the windows, followed by Momma’s reply. A faint breeze crossed the yard. I leaned back over the hood of the car and scanned the thick field of stars vibrating above. A beautiful, clear night. Adam joined me.

I took his hand. “Let’s not go in yet. We haven’t been outside alone at night in years. Let’s take a walk.”

But when we passed the twins’ house, he stooped and pulled me in after him. Some small animal scurried away. We leaned against the trunk of the oak that was a corner support and kissed. We made love there on the dirt floor. The sweet voice of his pleasure echoed against the tin walls. What should have been a safe time of the month was, instead, Sarah, our fifth child.

Her birth was uneventful. I had not even bothered consulting Granny Paynes, who had grown frail in the last few years. The hospital nurses were concerned. But the doctor, after I repeated my lie about being Jehovah’s Witnesses, was nonchalant about our daughter’s oddity and our confident refusal of his services.

The quietest of the girls, Sarah spent her first months content among her cavorting sisters and the daily chaos. Watchful and calm, she reminded me of Addie. She grew in leaps, seeming to develop skills overnight. Standing one day and running the next, babbling incoherently, then suddenly speaking in complete sentences. She learned to hold a crayon one day and covered the walls with smiling faces and stick-figure horses the next. Only in her quest for art supplies did she exhibit Lil and Jennie’s gift for theft and deception. For her, a crayon or pen was incomparable for fixing the boo-boos and injustices of being the youngest of five daughters. Gradually rising smudges, gray fingerprints, and crayon drawings on every wall marked her growth.

With her, we were done. No more children. I felt it in my heart.

By the time Sarah learned to walk, the focus of the farm had shifted from the fields to the stable of horses. Except for a few acres of feed crops and the kitchen garden, the farm was pasture and a riding arena now. We kept a cow and the chickens, too. I became the bookkeeper and part-time secretary for the horse business, often taking calls with a baby on my hip.

Wallace was our full-time, all-the-time stable hand and groom. We sometimes hired a second part-time man to help him. In a pinch, Cole also helped us. He and Adam were not the partners he and Addie had been, but they were still a good team when occasion arose.

Cole, his wife, Eloise, and their two boys often joined us on the Fridays when Lloyd, the farrier, was on the farm and stayed for dinner. With Lloyd, Cole, and Wallace, there were enough men for post-dinner poker in the barn. Sometimes Joe or Freddie joined them. If the wives came too, we women would let the kids run amok while we retired to the front porch for iced tea. I loved those evenings on the porch with the women, especially when Eloise and my sister-in-law, Mary, both came. When the men came alone, their voices drifted out the open barn door. I loved their unhurried masculine conversation, the quiet rhythm of the game punctuated by an occasional question or a laugh.

We boarded mostly normal horses, but some that came through our stable were the fine-bred, splendid, and damaged animals of the wealthy and obsessed, brought to Adam, often as a last-ditch effort to reclaim them. People from Charlotte and Louisville with contrary horses showed up or called on a regular basis. Often, they paid Adam to come to them. Sometimes, we organized small groups of riders for “classes.” On those days, the pasture filled with horse trailers, the larger, round pen we eventually built, crowded with riders and horses come to learn good manners. Adam continued refining his philosophy of horsemanship, urging the riders to true themselves. Calm, balance, lead. Willingness, not will.

He spent a lot of time observing horses, particularly the troublesome ones. His methods with them varied. But there was a pattern to his process of sweetening a colt. Before the saddle went on, a subtle seduction began. Adam and the horse regarded each other, then turned slightly away. His gaze was expectant then but without the tensions of anticipation, his whole being a simple, upright announcement: I am here. Adam possessed a special kind of stillness then, stalwart and open. He blinked, a single, slow blink. Though I heard nothing, I could tell by the turn of the horse’s ears when Adam’s unique voice came into play. The young horse would sniff with added curiosity and stretch his neck. Gradually, Adam moved toward the horse, then the interaction of touch began. Within minutes, the colt would follow him around as if drawn by some invisible line. If at any point the horse balked, backing away from the blanket or saddle, Adam’s stillness returned. Sometimes then, as he paused, waiting briefly for the horse to reflect his calm, I would feel a slight hum in the air, a feathery drone as if he’d changed pitch or tone.

In the early mornings, when I took coffee out to Adam, the snort and shuffle of horses and the clean odors of large animal health filled the stable. On winter mornings, when I stepped into their animal warmth from the cold yard, my head still thick with sleep, the horses seemed like an animal extension of my dreams, an animate den of horseness that I moved through. I loved them then, for that unconscious availing of themselves. I admired the sleekness of their hide, the powerful depth of their chests and legs, and the whiskery velvet of their inquisitive mouths. The rare times I had alone with them in pasture when they were at rest, I felt honored by their indifference and the glimpse they offered of the herd’s solace. Their grace at play in pastures never failed to stop me and hold me for a moment.

But for all my developing appreciation, I never became a good horsewoman. I remained most content among horses rather than on them. My attempts at honing my skills had been constantly interrupted by pregnancy, and I could never quite be convinced any animal wanted me on its back, that it preferred me to the open sky above.

All the girls eventually became respectful and skilled on the back of a horse. Adam made certain of that. Gracie, like me, appreciated the horses’ company but was the least interested in riding. She often carried a chair out to the stable and read, her back to the light of the open door. She’d glance occasionally from her book to the horses as she read. Jennie and Lil dressed the milder horses in scarves. They loved to steal away on Darling together, but their interest was not deep. Sarah drew them, of course, and, as soon as her vocabulary was equal to the task, began to advise Adam. He’d listen patiently to her analysis of a horse’s emotional state, his head cocked to one side. She was often right, he told me. Rosie remained the most interested in the horses. She lived in the stable, apprenticing herself to her father, and became his chief riding partner. Nights when she wanted refuge from the antics of her younger sisters, she slept in the stable. More than once she missed a day of school after being up all night with Adam nursing a sick horse or a mare in foal.

Once, when Sarah was still a baby, I passed the corral on my way back from picking squash and paused to watch Adam deep in his own observation of a fearful, volatile mare that had been brought to him for social repair. He stood a few yards from the corral fence, his hands relaxed at his side, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I was thinking about what was under his clothes—his shoulders and the slope from his back to his waist. He turned, smiled, and then crooked his finger, calling me over. “What kind of horse is this?”

I gave him a blank look. The horse circled the corral, her eyes darting back and forth.

“Is she scared, content, nervous, healthy?”

I shook my head and shrugged.

He raised his eyebrows. “Look. The kind of horse she is shows right there on her skin and how she moves.” Then he began a recitation, pointing at her ears, the tension in her neck, how she held her tail, the balance of her spine, and the condition of her skin. “She’s been poorly groomed and someone beat her,” he announced. He waved his beautiful hands, tracing the horse’s back and the curve of her neck in the air. He entered the corral and raised his right arm. Immediately, the horse stopped circling the corral and began an agitated pace opposite him, neighing sharply.

Later that evening, while Adam finished in the stable, I got the girls ready for bed. I squatted by the bathtub bathing Sarah, who, completely soaped, wiggled in my hands and struggled to climb the shower curtain. Lil and Jennie perched on the sides of the sink, peering into the drain, their heated debate about toothpaste bringing them close to blows. Gracie sat on the toilet, peeing and tracing my spine with her toes. Rosie rushed in, accused Gracie of stealing her favorite stuffed horse, then bit her sister. Suddenly, the four of them were in full skirmish behind me. Sarah rubbed soap into her eyes and screamed. I calculated whether I’d be able to let go of her and have time to knock the others’ heads together before she drowned. “Out!” I shouted. “Everybody out!”

Adam popped his head into the bathroom.

“What kind of girls are these?” I snapped at him over the ruckus.

“Huh?”

“What kind of children are these?” I shouted. “It’s on their skin and how they move.”

He grinned. “Children with a mad momma, children with a tired momma.”

From then on, when Adam or I wanted the other to pay attention to someone or something, we played the question game. The girls caught on and the game expanded. What kind of blossom is that? What kind of sky is that? What kind of report card is this? The questions might be a simple invitation to curiosity, a request for praise, a lesson, or a warning.

I loved the playfulness of the question game. But there were times it seemed to be shadowed by the questions I did not ask, the questions now less urgent, subsumed by normal daily life. What kind of man is my husband? How are our daughters like him?

Addie’s solo mountain trip became an annual ritual with Adam. He would leave just after morning chores on a Sunday and come back two or three days later. Many men did the same, going hunting or fishing. But Adam always went alone and brought home nothing. His trips were dependent on the seasons and our work. But they always seemed sudden, imperative. Tension built in him the weeks before he left. I felt uneasy as he packed for his trips. But each time, he returned refreshed and ready for work.

One Sunday, after church and dinner, the girls and I were still at Momma’s. Daddy, Momma’s brother, Otis, and another old guy from the mill sat on her back porch, smoking and spitting. I leaned on the porch rail nearby, watching the kids playing in the mill yard. I paid little attention to what the men said until Otis raised his voice to be heard over the girls. “ . . . Just like a woman keening, the most gawd-awful thing a man would want to hear.” I turned at the strange comment.

Otis’s buddy shook his head and spat off the edge of the porch. “No, weren’t no wolf. Besides, it sounded pretty sometimes. Like singing, but no words. That old hill farmer said it was a haint.”

Otis nodded in agreement. “A queer sound. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to lie down and sleep to it or go out and shoot it. We didn’t see sign one of deer, fowl, or squirrel out there. And it peak season.”

“Not the first time you’ve come home empty-handed,” Daddy said and they all laughed.

Cigarette smoke wafted out the back door. Frank’s voice muttered behind me, “How ’bout your Adam? He hear anything up there?”

I remembered Frank’s smell in the farmhouse years before and his disturbing photos. I pulled my sweater up closer around my shoulders. I herded the girls onto the porch, past Frank, and down the hall to Momma’s warm kitchen, leaving the old men to their tobacco and gossip.

That night, I asked Adam what he did in the mountains. “Molt,” he said simply, but with a grin. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more, but he continued. “I go up the mountain as far as I can and just listen to whatever there is to hear—the mountain, the air, the ginseng growing.”

“You don’t just listen.”

“Well, sometimes I talk back, too. It’s like any other conversation, Evelyn. No one does all the listening. Why are you asking now?”

“Uncle Otis and one of his buddies heard you. Some people think you’re a ‘haint.’ ”

He laughed the sweet, big laugh I always found irresistible. “The deer—some of them let me touch them. They’re strong as a horse but it’s a different strength. Lighter, with more spring. And there are places where the mountain answers. Like an echo, but there’s always something in it that didn’t come from me.” He pressed his fist to his chest.

“You pet deer and sing to the mountain?”

“Not to. With.”

Through the Winter and Spring that followed, the image of Adam’s solitary howl in the mountains stayed with me. I imagined his voice filling the hollows and slopes, the deer docile and the mountain dwellers puzzled. But when the heat of summer settled over the farm, taking up residence in our un-air-conditioned house, and Adam suggested we take the girls up into the mountains, I thought only of the blessed cool relief.

The seven of us drove up out of the clotted summer heat until Adam found the special spot he wanted to show us on Mount Mitchell. We hiked down a short distance from the narrow dirt road to a creek. The girls scattered like pups as soon as they heard water. At the creek, the forest opened. An outcropping of boulders sent the water in a sharp turn and created a short waterfall. The girls stripped to their panties and plunged, screaming, into the water. They splashed and swam until they began to shiver, then leapt out of the water to make water angels on the flat, warm rocks. Once the sun warmed them, they plunged back into the water.

While I prepared our lunch, Adam found a patch of ginseng and cut us each a piece for dessert. The girls, their lips still tinted blue from the cold water, wrapped themselves in towels. Their panties and hair dripped onto the rocks as we ate our sandwiches.

When we finished eating, Adam pointed up the mountain. “There is a beautiful waterfall east of us. Not as good a swimming spot as this one, but the view is amazing.”

I rolled my pedal-pushers up a little higher and waded into the icy water. Adam stripped to his boxers and the girls dragged him into the water. Gracie held back a little, shy to see her father almost naked.

She had shot up that summer. Change would come soon, but for now, she shouted and dodged with the other girls as Adam splashed them with icy water.

I climbed up the trail to put away our leftovers. On my way back, ducking the overhanging branches, my arms full of fresh, dry towels, I felt a vibration through the rocks under my feet, like an approaching train. Puzzled, I stopped and listened.

Below me, Adam lay spread on the large, flat boulder—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man encircled by daughters. Sarah curled up on his chest, her hands tucked under her belly, her eyes shut. Gracie and Rosie lay parallel to him, their heads pillowed on his outstretched arms. Jennie and Lil draped across their father’s legs. The four of them had their eyes closed, too. They appeared to be napping, but something in their posture suggested anticipation. Adam stared up at the sky.

Carefully, I made my way to the edge of the clearing a few feet above them. A pure, sweet tone lilted, threading through the sound of falling water. Adam’s voice, but not the sharp crescendo of his pleasure with me at night. A broad, tender tone, undulant, almost narrative.

Everything, save the sensation of his voice, seemed to have stopped. The girls were motionless. Adam’s eyes were still open, but he did not seem to be present.

The distance between me and them seemed enormous. I was outside their circle. Adam was the different one, the outsider. But here, alone with my family, I realized I was the different one.

His voice, undulating up to me, filling the air, seemed to be the manifestation of my difference from him, from them. Suddenly, I wanted to fight its seduction, to stop my ears and cover my chest. I stooped to pick up the towels I’d dropped.

My breath drew short. Then a single word flooded me: No. I shivered and pushed away my resistance.

Abandoning the towels, I climbed down and circled the rock they lay on. I knelt near Adam, a knee on either side of his head, my hands softly on his temples.

My legs tingled. The vibrato changed, sweeping up and down, seeming to fall into the timbre of the waterfall and reemerge over and over. Shimmering, joyful.

Gradually, his voice vanished as if withdrawing into the rocks and water. No one moved. A bird called nearby, and then a single-note retort followed down creek. Adam reached up and touched my wrist. He tilted his face up at me and we looked upside down at each other. The girls stirred. The spell broke.

Jennie looked up, drunkenly, and announced, “Momma, Daddy’s right, if we get very still and listen for a long time, the rocks sing.”

Sarah looked up from Adam’s chest, first at her sister and then at me. I saw in her eyes, so like her father’s then, that she knew it was not the rocks. I pointed out the towels for Gracie. She retrieved them and passed them out. The girls and Adam dressed. Speechless, we moved slowly. As if underwater, we gathered our things and returned to the car.

Sarah slept in the front seat with me and Adam. Gracie and Rosie stared out the windows. Lil and Jennie snored between them. Adam drove us down the winding mountain road, his face soft and relaxed.

As the road grew flat and straighter, the girls began to wake from their stupor, fidgeting and mumbling. I didn’t want to think or talk. I started singing “Red River Valley.” The girls picked up on the chorus, their voices harmonizing perfectly from the backseat.

Once home, they were unusually subdued. We all went to our homework and chores. I fixed us a quick late dinner of eggs and grits.

Later that evening, Sarah, the last to bathe and the only one still young enough to need help, stood naked in the tub, her arms at her sides. I poured a final rinse over her smooth shoulders and down her back. “It was Daddy singing today. He sang with his mouth shut. Not the rocks,” she said.

“I know, honey. But it was the mountains. Daddy can only do that in the mountains.”

She stared at me dubiously.

“It’s true, baby. Some places are special. Some things can happen one place, but not another.”

More staring and silence. Then she held her arms up for me to lift her out of the bath. “I want to live in the mountains then,” she declared while I toweled her back.

That night, in bed, I asked Adam if he had ever “made the rocks sing” for the girls before.

“No, not like that. But I realized we were alone and I could do it without disturbing anyone else. Besides, the mountains do echo my voice in ways that the open land here doesn’t. The mountains do sing.”

“What was their reaction at first, before I got there?”

“Same as when you were there: they listened. I don’t know what they can do. How much like me they are.”

“Sarah reminds me of you as Addie in some way. She knows things.”

He sighed and pulled me toward him. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The girls will be okay.”

Until then, I was the only person who had heard his other voice. I remembered the power of his voice the day he came back in the skin of Roy Hope. Anxiety thickened in my diaphragm and I took a deep breath. Adam spooned up against me, then rolled over me, as his voice had earlier.

The girls never mentioned what he did that day. Perhaps they saw Adam’s explanation of singing rocks as just another adult charade, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Or maybe the relative isolation of the farm made it easier for them to assume that we were the norm, that all fathers in the privacy of their families could make the rocks sing.

Either way, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For them to question or to change.

As Gracie reached puberty, my fears about how normal the girls were returned. How would they cope with their changing bodies, would Adam’s genes mitigate or amplify the normal or somehow pull it offtrack?

That year, Gracie had grown almost five inches. We marked the girls’ growth on the door frame of Gracie’s and Rosie’s bedroom. Gracie’s height marks were always at the top. The other girls followed in stair-step clusters of names and dates. Recently, Gracie had passed five and a half feet and was now within inches of the mark indicating my height. Her chest also popped out, first in pink, puffed buds, then small, round breasts. She began to lock the bathroom door when she bathed.

Months before her thirteenth birthday, she called me into the bathroom one afternoon to show me the bloody stain on her underwear. We were prepared. I’d shown her the sanitary pads and how to attach them to the elastic belt I bought for her. I felt the buoyancy of relief as I sent her off to her room to change while I washed her first pair of bloody panties in the bathroom sink. She was a normal woman.

A few weeks later, she passed through the kitchen as Adam helped me unpack a load of groceries. He handed Gracie the toilet paper. “Take this to the bathroom on your way.” Then he held up a box of pads. “These, too.” He stacked the box on top of the toilet paper in Gracie’s arms. “So much better than those rags, aren’t they?” he commented with the certainty of experience.

Gracie nodded enthusiastically at her father. Then frowned, puzzled, and turned abruptly, striding off to the bathroom.