She entered the next room and, mercifully, the door shut tight and its lock still worked. Inside she unfurled a flannel blanket she’d kept in her travel bag, expecting the beds out here to lack such luxuries. Instead the room lacked the luxury of a bed. She folded the blanket over to double the comfort, such as it was.
She lay down but found it impossible to sleep.
If she’d had a lantern, she would’ve read through the night, but she could hardly even make out the shape of the travel bag right beside her head. She had to remind herself that’s all it was—a travel bag—or her imagination would turn it into a living thing, a wild creature snuck into her room to feed. It didn’t help to hear the coyotes out on the plains now. They cackled and cried in a nearly human tone.
Glenville Henry had a terrible reading voice, but Adelaide adored the sound of her father reading to her. If she closed her eyes, she could hear that voice even now, and so, in a way, her father kept her company through the night.
For a moment she felt herself between her mother’s knees, hair being combed and set with firm delicacy, oil rubbed into her scalp with a forefinger. Her mind took her back to Lucerne Valley. Her mother’s fingers in her hair, listening to her father reading Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
“ ‘You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827,’ ” Glenville read, the opening lines of the novel. How many times had he read that book to her and Eleanor? No other book had been studied more by the Henry family, not even the Holy Bible.
“ ‘My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in-shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel.’ ”
Queer folk. That’s what they say about the Henrys.
Maybe that’s why the rumors began. Because they attended church but half-heartedly and, eventually, not at all. Because the family prayed but without fervor. As if the three of them were unconvinced that anyone or anything was listening.
Instead, when the evenings were free and the family had eaten, they opened other books. The Hound of the Baskervilles and Up from Slavery; Helen Keller’s autobiography and Iola Leroy. Eleanor insisted Glenville read books like these, stories, otherwise he would’ve happily read to them from the seed catalogs he collected.
And from the first day her father read them The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that was a wrap for Adelaide. Could her parents have understood why this had been her favorite novel in the world? How the first lines of that story weren’t about some British man, but about her?
My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in-shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel.
On the last day, the very last one they’d ever share, Glenville had been the one to volunteer a reading. This time, Adelaide sat in the chair and Eleanor on the floor. Her mother’s hair had been thinning. Going gray for years, but this time, as Adelaide combed it, she realized her mother’s hair was falling out.
In seeing the passage of time written across her mother’s scalp, she also felt her own. Her father read from the novel and she rubbed oil into her mother’s skin as gently as she could and Adelaide Henry realized she was thirty-one years old. Of course, she knew this, but this time it registered differently, like taking in too much air all at once.
Her mother’s hair was gray and her father’s reading voice sounded feebler than it ever had before and when they died she would inherit this farm and the family responsibilities and she would never leave this place. She would be shackled to this farm until she, too, passed on.
She’d had a strange sensation—impossible but it was there anyway—that her mother understood what Adelaide had been thinking just then, as if the message had been transmitted through her fingertips and into her mother’s mind. Eleanor reached up just then and patted her daughter’s wrist as if to say, A woman is a mule. Remember. I told you. A woman is…
By the next morning Eleanor and Glenville were dead.
A day after that Adelaide set their bodies on fire and fled.