This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  When he pushed inward one of the heavy portals with the beveled glass in them and the gold letters on the glass, he let it swing to behind him while he stood for a moment, as he always did, a little dazzled and trying to get his bearings. The magnificence of the marble slabs, the golden oak paneling and frosted glass behind which the banker and his money bags were caged, the fancy white-shaded electric lamps, the ridged and crinkled white ceiling—made of enameled sheet iron, Adam had been told—and the fine high tables where town people made out their drafts on the bank and, above all, the little barred windows with marble slabs for sills from behind one of which Banker Littleton usually sang out before he had got his eyesight re-aimed to where he could see through them—in short, the high and rarefied atmosphere of the bank always put him to a test.

  But this morning he was able to steady himself, remove his hat and approach the front window, before Mr. Littleton spoke. Indeed, he stood at the window for some moments, unnoticed; during which he eyed the fat piles of leather ledgers, and, on the desks, open ones at which the two men in their vests, black false shirt-sleeves and white collars and ties were working; during which he picked out the human and tobacco smell of the men from the heady odor of money and banking; during which he scrutinized the bright steel frame, with its thick, studded, steel door, open on the dark doorway to the treasure vault, itself—and he felt himself, with his seven hundred dollars in that vault (or working for the bank somewhere just as safe) a part of this strong top world.

  Finally, the big banker looked up from his desk. “Who’s that?” he called, in his big hard voice, peering over his spectacles, then added, as recognition came, “Oh hello there, Adam! What do you want?” But, without waiting, he pushed his chair back and heaved himself up—a huge man of rubber—ring chins and balloon belly. But he advanced to the window, with sure-footed ease and, leaning on the counter, pushed his long nose close to the wicket. His voice having put off some of its ballast, he said: “You’d like to get a little cash?” more in statement than question, and picked up a pad of counter checks and, with light, graceful strokes of his pen, wrote on the line in the top right corner, “March 21,” and after the figure nineteen in the next blank, the figure “10,” in fine flourishing script, and on the Pay to blank-line he wrote the word, “Cash.”

  “How much?” he said: his voice had taken back on some of its stone.

  Adam looked up sharply, with a flash of eye-whites. His mouth worked convulsively and, after a moment, he got out: “Yeh suh!” In the pause that followed, it could not have been said whether it was due to his impediment of speech, or his considering the banker’s question, or the banker.

  But the voice did not put him off. Adam remembered a time four years ago, when Banker Littleton had cashed a big cotton check for him and would not let him stay at the window to count his money. But he had taken it a little way down the hall and had knelt down on the floor and counted it, twice. Then he had got in line and come back up to the window and said to the banker, “I think you done made a mistake.”

  The big hard voice broke out: “We don’t correct any mistakes after you leave the window!”

  And he had come back, “All right then, that suits me fine—”

  But the banker had pitched ballast fast and called him back in another tone of voice. Yeah he even thanked him: it had saved him twenty dollars!

  Now Adam’s eyes twinkled with a dim ambiguity. “Reckon yuh better let me have ‘bout fifty dollars,” he said.

  The long nose seemed about to stick out between the wire palings and the sloping forehead wrinkled up under a stiff forelock of graying hair. The voice demanded brusquely, “What do you want with so much cash, here in March?”

  Adam’s two knuckled fingers resting on the window slab remained motionless. The smile on his face broadened good-humoredly. “W-well you kain’t always tell by what a fellow sez. I mought be gwine to pitch a bender, go on a spree!”

  After an instant, in which he stared into Adam’s face, Mr. Littleton, gradually withdrew his nose, saying in a vindictive tone, “If you bought liquor with all that money, we’d have to spend another fifty to bury you!”

  Adam chuckled and took his time, but he noted well that Mr. Littleton still looked at him questioningly. Finally he said, not without a hint of pride in his voice, “I pays cash for my furt’lizer.”

  Mr. Littleton erupted: “You don’t use all that fertilizer, down there on those swamp fields you’re tending?”

  “Dat’s right, Mr. Littleton!” Adam said, as if it were a pleasure to admit it. “But then I wanted to git me some hemp rope and cant hooks and have sompin’ to pay a little loggin’ wages with.”

  “Where you going to log?”

  It was, as he had hoped, the inevitable question, the one for which he had waited. The colonel had said one time: Bankers want to talk to you like it’s their money: just remember it’s the money that talks and it ain’t their money! Adam straightened up from his bent over position at the window and said with casual assurance, “There’s still good timber in that cut-over cypress in the Hightower swamp. I reckon the Colonel’s widow’ll let me cut it.”

  Mr. Littleton unloaded himself on the slab again, his face at the wicket. “I reckon she won’t—not if I have any weight in advising her! She’s got the chance of a lifetime to sell it, right away.”

  “She is!” Adam counterfeited surprise. “How’s that?”

  “There’s a big buyer here from up North, represents big moneyed interests in Philadelphia. He says he wants to buy five thousand acres of swamp, if he can get it together without too much trouble. And, of course, we don’t mind taking a little trouble to help him. It would be a big thing to get that much money in here now.”

  As he gazed through the bars at the banker, Adam’s face sobered and his eyes widened, like a man seeing a storm flag hoisted. “Y-you think they really mean business? They really got the money and want the swamp?”

  “They’ve got the money, all right—I know that. Buying land is the man’s business.” Mr. Littleton put his pen behind his ear and canted his head with a redistribution of his double chins to squint at Adam. “How come Mrs. Hightower didn’t mention it to you, when you asked about cutting that cypress?”

  Adam turned away from the window and stared abstractly across the bank lobby and fumblingly let go his grip on the marble slab. Finally he said, without looking back, “I-I ain’t axt’er. . . .I hyur her sayin’ sompin’, but I didn’t ketch on.”

  The banker followed Adam with a shrewd gaze, and, after a moment’s speculation, stepped back into the interior, returning to the window with a filing case. He spun the accordion pockets with deft fingers and took out a slip of paper. “Adam,” he said, looking down at it, “I believe the second note you gave Bright on that piece of land you’re buying falls due the first of July: I have a notation on it here. If that’s going to press you too hard, we’ll pay it off for you and take over the mortgage?”

  Adam turned back in surprise. He looked incredulously at the banker, his countenance kindling with an impulsive warmth for an instant before his loosened lips righted themselves in a wry smile. His regarding the solicitous massive face seemed to buck him up. He laughed out loud and, taking hold of the wicket, he looked down at the pad with the check on it that Mr. Littleton had not finished filling out. “You better let me make my mark and git my money and go,” he said, in high humor. “That money of yourn too high priced for me!”

  The banker ignored his amusement and, leaning toward him over the counter, continued in an objective manner to utter his professional verdict. “You’ve got enough here on time deposit to take care of the mortgage this summer, but you’ve got to have the cash to make your crop with, too.”

  “Y-yessuh?” Adam agreed ambiguously, but he could not keep back his satisfied smile. “Hit don’t cost so much to make a crop on cash, Mr. Littleton!” Cavalierly, he reached through the bars and touched the end of the pen and picked up his money. Holding it in hi
s left hand like a glove, he walked, at his strolling gait, to the door before he began to count it.

  Beyond Riverton, when his team had clattered across the bridge spanning the little river that separated town and country, the question jumped at him from the silence of the sandy road: Why did you have to be so big Ike about your money in the bank? Now the banker’s face, with the chopped-off-and-sewed-up look that came on it as he left the window, rose before him disturbingly. He squinted across the glare of a white sand bank in the afternoon sun to the greening black-jack oaks beyond.

  A banker was always out to hook you for something if he could (especially if your skin was black) but you had to live with him. The money that he had in the bank—and it wasn’t so much—might be gone by July, when his note came due—might be gone, in this uncertain world he lived in now! Yeah, so big! He didn’t even count his fifty dollars cash til he got plumb out of the bank—it would have served him right if the banker had short-changed him!

  As his mules leaned against their harness to climb the sand hill ahead of them, he considered their rumps: he didn’t have the Colonel to speak for him now! Then, reflectively: the Colonel wouldn’t have let it puff him up, like that! His favorite image of the Colonel trod the warm air above the sand hill: a big, erect man in a linen suit and a panama hat, bearing his gray cavalryman’s beard and bold high-bridged nose tilted up a little, and above his florid cheeks, the small blue eyes that looked into you so sharp and calm and took everything that happened so unshaken—the quietest, easiest voice so big a man ever had.

  He had seen the Colonel mad, but he had never seen him puffed up—though he walked like he might be that way all the time. The Colonel would have thought about all sides of it. But then the banker wouldn’t have tried such a trick on the Colonel!

  As the wagon topped the hill, another hill, higher and crookedly seamed with still deeper sand ruts, rose beyond him. With the weight of the wagon now on the mules, they broke into a trot downhill and across the bottom and, beginning to mount the farther slope, they threw themselves stubbornly against the harness. About half-way up, Adam got down from his seat and walked beside his team, because of the load of guano he had on the wagon. He pushed his wool hat onto the back of his head, as sweat ran down on his forehead.

  Well hadn’t the Colonel been tricked after all? He was dead! That was one thing he hadn’t figured on! In pain, Adam yanked the hat back down on his head. He plodded on beside the wagon to the top of the hill and, mounting the hub of a wheel, he climbed up again. But when he was on the seat his chest still ached with his frustration and sense of loss.

  It had been to settle down and make money that he had come to the Hightower place, ten years ago, after his wife went off to stay the first time. But he had been ready to come a good while before that. He had done caught up on turpentining and rafting timber and sleeping with strange women. He had already found out, in turpentining, that a fellow feel big, but it still didn’t make him rich. And an honest rafthand never got anything for all his trouble, except frozen feet and wet butt and sun stroke—even a rogue never got hold of anything that stayed with him. And he had come to see that it wasn’t only his ma that made Malinda leave him. He had caught up on being the best man in the woods, on the water, and in the weeds. “It waun’t nothing but ‘gaitor-bellering and gopher money!”

  The Colonel had already talked to him a couple of times about coming on the holding and opening up a new farm. But when the big house on the homeplace burned, and he offered to rent the homeplace to him, Adam had appreciated that he was giving him his chance. The Wyche field then was nothing but a crab-apple thicket, but the Colonel had given him three years in which to bring it back. He had told Adam that the old swamp field would put the power to the cotton roots, but that had not prepared Adam for what came to pass; it had not prepared him for the yearly snow-storm of cotton bolls that rose up out of that yellow river mud!

  “Stay with me, Adam, and I’ll make us all rich!” was the way the Colonel had put it, pulling at his beard and giving him that sharp clear look that got inside you.

  That had been four years ago, late of an afternoon, as he spoke from his buggy to Adam standing against the wheel. And during the twelve months following there had been a stream of men who had come out to the Hightower property. There had been clay men, brought there by the Paley boy, now grown to be a man, and he, Adam, had led them through the swamp. They had dug a hundred holes, it seemed, to test out where the kaolin and terra cotta deposits lay. Then there had been the crew of railroad surveyors, and old man Christian DeBow, one of the Colonel’s partners, with them—they ran lines clean from the Riverton Corporation to the Oconee River bank.

  The next year the Colonel himself moved, lock, stock and barrel, from where he’d been practicing law, to Riverton. Then he and Mr. DeBow and another man—a little squeaky-voiced fellow who the Colonel once said was going to put up the money to open his clay works—took to coming out together and he, Adam, had heard and overheard talk of big things. Big things! The railroad crew began to cut out the right-of-way—a railroad to run, they said, all the way from Anniston, Alabama, to the city of Savannah.

  It was during this time that the Colonel had said to him that he would make him, Adam, a foreman in his clay works. It would have paid him seventy-five dollars a month cash! With Jake and Reuben, his oldest boys, big enough to tend to the farming, under his watch, they would be able to keep the Wyche field turning out as much cotton as ever. It looked like what the Colonel had promised was just about to happen. It looked like they were going to get rich.

  Whatever the ups and downs, things had always gone finally the way he figured it out: the price of cotton, timber, and corn, the weather, the crops. Before, he had never failed to do what he said he would do. Never! Way back, on that rough day, when the judge had sent Adam to the Mines, the Colonel had said: “Go along and be a good boy, Adam, and I’ll get you out after awhile.” And he had kept his word then. . .

  Adam left his team in the lane, before the barn, for the boys to take out the mules and unload the guano, and passed through a paling gate toward his four-room, weathered-gray house that squatted behind its boxwood-bordered porch on the hand-swept, gray surface of the yard, like a duck asleep on a pond. When he had reached the great water oak with the pump under it, a little way beyond the gate, he encountered his mother, with an empty bucket in her hand, approaching from the stand of wash tubs at the edge of the clearing.

  Though old and thin and no bigger than a child, she walked with upright bearing, the same sedately strolling gait with which Adam walked. She halted when she saw him and stood regarding him from deep eye-sockets, with a dignity that was increased, not diminished, by her dull leathery skin and the gray, plaited pigtails splayed over her head. After a pause, she said with a sharp certainty of voice, “Whu’ a-matter, son?”

  He had halted too, and returned her gaze. Now he frowned, and beginning to move again, said, “Nothin’, ma, nothin’. . . .Heah, le’ me have that bucket and I’ll fill it for yuh!”

  After he had pumped it full, she moved off with it toward the tubs, but continued to regard him over her shoulder from time to time.

  Adam filled the gourd dipper with cold water and, taking off his hat, squatted down at the roots of the big oak to drink it. When he lowered the empty gourd from his mouth, his gaze was arrested by a torrid, cloud-spattered, blaze of sunset, sending its orange rays through the scuppernong arbors and across the yard toward him. He stared with an uneasy stomach. . .

  Such a curious sunset had been lighting up the side porch, just beyond where he stood inside the Colonel’s sickroom that last time he saw him alive.

  “I may not make it, Adam,” he had said, when they were finally alone together in the long room.

  It was August and so hot that they had all the sashes up in the bay window and the doors to the back and side porches open to make a draft. And he (Adam) was fanning hard with his hat, as he shook his head in response, but swea
t filled his eyes, anyhow.

  “Oh, there’s no use to deceive ourselves,” the Colonel told him, from the mound of pillows that propped up his head, his face white with beard, except for the bluish washes of cheek on either side of his gaunt nose and the glint from his pale eyelids. “Every man has to die. Man proposes and God disposes.”

  His voice was low, but it carried.

  “Still it couldn’t come at a worse time. . . Always before I’ve been able to stay with a thing ‘til I could make it work or save the investment, or get out from under. But this time is different.

  “McClosky was the third man I had interested in putting up money to develop the clay works—he lost a hundred thousand dollars on his olive groves—today he’s just about broke. Yet I might have found another backer if it hadn’t been for the railroad reverse. . .You can’t get new railroad projects started every day. . .” He paused to catch his breath.

  When he recommenced, his voice was more edged with anxiety. “Paley came up on my blind side, I guess—every man has a blind spot. I was completely deceived in him. He was a smart, hard-working boy, and I thought he had character. I spent a couple of thousand dollars on his education, I guess—sent him to Pennsylvania to study ceramics, helped his family while he was in school. . . .”

  (Adam had thought that he might have told him different about Paley, any time had he asked him.)

  “But he really fixed us! Mr. DeBow and I together could have raised twenty-five thousand dollars on our timber. And that would have been enough on which to shoe-string it—if Paley hadn’t betrayed us to the Filcher faction among the railroad backers.

  “It is a little hard now to see why—it sunk him along with us. He won’t be able to go it alone—he certainly won’t have the confidence of the men to whom he betrayed us.” The Colonel’s cheeks twitched, and for a moment, he tried to raise his head. “I-I-it’s hard. . . .” He let his head ease back on the pillows, and after a pause, went on. “But I must harbor no hate against Oswald. . . I don’t. I guess he has his blind spot, too: over-ambition. It made him blind to gratitude, to loyalty, to honor, and finally to good judgment and his own interest.