The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,3

as some did.”

She stopped dusting, as if expecting an answer, then continued, “Land’s a terrible thing to waste, Evelyn. We’ve felt the lack of Eva’s work this year. Your brother and sisters are still growing. The government didn’t have growing kids in mind when it started the rationing.”

I understood then where she was going.

“We need at least a good garden crop this coming spring. Somebody needs to tend the house and barn, slop the hogs, and milk the cows. This war will be over one day and we don’t know how things will be then. Jobs can be lost. Wages can go down. But land will keep giving, if you work it. We may need every ounce this farm can give.”

Through the small, cobwebbed basement window, I saw the apple tree and the wild brown tangle of the roses Eva had abandoned in her grief.

“We’ll all come up to help. Until your cousin Ricky gets back—if he gets back—it’s this or the mill, Evelyn.”

We looked at each other. I was seventeen. It was 1944. I was a farmer.

We went outside to watch Joe and Daddy burn the stuffing and upholstery they had pulled off the sofa Eva died on. Momma held her hand up to shade her eyes, as if the fire was the sun, as if restricting her vision would diminish the stench of burning horse hair, the loss of her aunt.

“I know we are all flesh—as much as the hogs and chickens we eat. And we go to dust. But it was hard finding her that way. A hard reminder,” Momma said softly as she stepped sideways to loop her arm through Daddy’s.

Though I wasn’t cold, I stood near the fire and held my hands out to its heat. The smoke wafted up. Parts of Eva were in that fire and smoke—probably a hair or two from her head, a sliver of fingernail, a thread from one of her dresses, along with what had drained out of her while she lay dead on the sofa. All of that rose above us, spread out, and joined the sky.

The next day was a Sunday. After supper, I carefully packed my clothes, my Bible, and the few possessions that I did not share with my siblings. Everything I owned fit into a bushel basket and two small suitcases.

Momma walked me to the car, carrying the last suitcase. Daddy waited, the motor running. She took my arm as she slid the suitcase into the backseat. “You’ll be fine, Evelyn. The land on Eva’s farm is tough, but better than most of the farms around here, and you know that farm better than you know your own bedroom. Eva always told me how hard you worked. Your daddy or I will come up with your brother and sisters every Saturday to help you. Sundays you’ll be at church and then have supper here.” She kissed my cheek.

I hated the monotony of the mill work and was happy to leave it, but the farm was now the means to fulfill a responsibility, not the solace it had once been. Later that evening, I folded my clothes and put them away in the newly emptied wardrobe Aunt Eva and Uncle Lester had shared for decades.

Soon, it became clear to me how much of Eva’s work I had taken for granted. The stove was cold when I got up in the mornings, the kitchen pump stiff or frozen. I had to do the milking and feeding both morning and night. The garden needed to be revived. The dead were a heavy absence.

Not long after I moved onto the farm, a man in uniform showed up at the back door, his hand raised, ready to knock when I spotted him. Before he spoke, I knew the news. Ricky wasn’t coming back; my laughing blond cousin was gone. There was no son to take over the farm.

The farm had always been the farm to my family. It lay an hour’s walk outside of Clarion, and about twenty-five miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the rest of my family, the Roes and the McMurroughs, lived. If you took Clear Lake Road from the mill and, when it veered west, continued up the narrow dirt road ahead, you crossed a creek. Then the simple clapboard house appeared perched on a small cliff formed by the railroad cutaway. At the end of the steep driveway, between the well-kept, generous barn and the creek, were Aunt Eva’s three-acre kitchen garden of table