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.