The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,2

laughing and bouncing on my feet. The roar of the train swelled into a moving wall of sound as the long line of freight cars passed below. The ground shook.

The roar diminished as the train disappeared toward the mill and the quiet returned.

When Daddy called, I followed his voice to the parlor. He had maneuvered the sofa to the door and waited for my help. “It’s ruined. She must have lost control in the end.”

I held my hand up to shush him, a gesture my father normally would not have accepted from one of his children. I picked up my end and we worked the sofa down the hall. The smell was awful. Even in the dim light, the dark stain that ran half the length of the sofa was visible.

I kept my eyes on Daddy. Moving furniture was something he would normally do with my brother. Outside of his work at the mill, he was sedentary with his pipe and his rocking chair, already middle-aged, though still in his thirties. His strength and competence as we carried the big sofa through the kitchen surprised and pleased me. Sweat stuck my dress to my back by the time we got the heavy old sofa outside and, turning from the sight and smell of it, dropped it on the hard, bare clay beside the back porch.

A few minutes later, we drove away in the glow of the dashboard light. The dark shapes of trees slipped by in the dusk. I glanced at my father. His hands were on the wheel. Immutable and endlessly taciturn, he peered at the road ahead.

All my life, I had heard stories about my mother, both from her and her family. Illustrations of her stellar memory for numbers, her sly stubbornness, or her random gullibility. My youngest sister, Rita, pale and skittish as a feral cat, had always been transparent to me. Bertie, three years younger, was more complex but guileless and always willing to announce what was on her mind. My brother, Joe, born only eleven months after me and resembling Daddy as much as I resembled Momma, I knew in the thoughtless, unconscious way one knows a close sibling.

My father was a different story. I sometimes saw him laughing with other men, but at home he sat detached, his face vague behind the smoke of his pipe. Only blatant insubordination or dangerous stupidity on the part of us kids could animate him into flashes of authority. I never heard him tell a story.

Riding home from Eva’s, I glanced at him again. I wanted something from him, some sign of being touched by the same loss, a token of kinship. But we did not even look like kin. I had red, wavy hair and freckles. Like all the women of my mother’s family, I was tall. He was clear-skinned and compact, his dark hair straight.

We drove home in silence.

After the funeral, Momma and I crowded into the small basement of the farmhouse, pulling dusty jars of Eva’s beans, jams, and relishes off the shelves, sniffing and checking them to make sure they were still good. The small room smelled of mold and dust. Shelves of jars lined each wall.

“This farm kept us alive during the Depression,” Momma said. From her tone, I knew this was not idle chatter.

For me, the Depression was the dim past of my early childhood. I thought instead of how the war—which, at first, had seemed like a big, bright party—was taking everything. I had done my share for the war effort: helped neighbors in their victory gardens, donated my pennies, and collected cans, newspaper, toothpaste tubes, and grease. But these seemed like such small things. In the year before her death, when I should have been helping Eva, I’d worked the mill instead, standing in deafening noise, watching the birth of thread for the war effort. At night, I’d pulled cotton from my hair and the creases of my neck. In the mornings, I pinned my underwear to my skirts because all the rubber for elastic went to the war.

Momma raised her voice to get my attention. “Careful, Evelyn. We don’t have rations for more jars.” She motioned for me to remove the jars from the next shelf. “During the Depression everybody helped everybody else. And we traded what we could. But it was Eva and Lester who gave us the most, and they could afford to only because they had the farm. You kids didn’t get so skinny or quiet