This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  “My wife would lay it to his family background. She says that I ought never to have believed that I could make a gentleman out of a poor white—but I don’t know . . . .I’m not convinced of that and after all his folks were not all white trash—his old mother was a good woman.

  “But anyway Paley has alienated himself from us. Mr. DeBow, of course, knows it, but this fact is not generally known. I have told my wife. And I tell you now, Adam, for a reason.

  “I know that, at sixty, I could not count on many more years of activity, my boy is still a child, and I had expected to lean on Oswald...I tell you for a reason, Adam. My wife—poor Lucy! I’ve never discussed business matters with her—in our whole married life. She doesn’t even know how to make out a check. I’m troubled, Adam, troubled. She is utterly unprepared to manage the property I’m leaving. All sorts of people will try to take advantage of her. She doesn’t even know anything about managing a farm. I always wanted to do everything for her, and now it seems that I have only robbed her of the experience that would have equipped her to take care of herself and our children!” He shut his eyes tight, and turned a little on one side and lay there silent for awhile. Then he resumed:

  “Now I’ve got to leave her future, their future, in God’s hands—where, God have mercy on us, it has always been, of course. But I can do mighty little about it; however, the Almighty expects us to do our part always—all that we are humanly capable of, within the bounds of honesty and decency. And I must make what practical plans for her future that I can. . . It’s so little, so little!”

  He managed to raise his head off the pillow. “But, Adam, I hope I can depend on you with the farming and timbering on the homeplace. I am counting on you to advise her the best you know how and look after the place, regardless of who comes on it. I know it won’t be easy, because of your color and your station. There will be a lot of barbed wire and picked padlocks in this—it will put you to the test many times. . . . There are others, it should be said, more properly placed to take this responsibility, but I confess to you that I don’t have confidence in them. I’ve tested you, Adam: you take responsibility—and you know as much about the homeplace as anybody. . . .It’s my last request.”

  Adam had come near the bed to hear better by that time and was bending over to him. But the promise had been easy. What else could he do? He couldn’t fail the Colonel and he had never had any notion of failing him. It was what the Colonel had said at the last, after he lay back on his pillows.

  “There are things that count more than money, Adam. There are things that are worse than not having enough to wear and to eat—and I’ve known want. . .when you come to die. . .I know now that where I made my mistake was in not taking it into my calculations.”

  Then he had turned away on his pillow, pressing his head into it until his nose was bent, and three days later he was dead. . .

  “Whu’ a-matter, son?”

  His mother appeared at the edge of his vision, still fixed on the dying fire in the west. Not turning his head, he replied, in the same low voice, “She goin’ ter sell the swamp.”

  “Wyche field, too?”

  There was a sudden chill on the air, coming from where his mother stood like a dark foreboding shadow. Adam shuddered and repeated, “Wyche field, too.” But as the words came off his tongue, the yellow mud plot of cleared river swamp seemed to him a tenuous, a chancy, a slight assurance to the future. Calculations! What was it that the Colonel had been talking about?

  3.

  LUCY HIGHTOWER, her Sunday dress protected by a blue checked apron, swung the swing in which she sat on her front porch. Its short, sharp oscillations seemed to increase in tension and then relax, like the jumping of an irresolute diver on a springboard. But she was aware of no impulse to leap out into the dusk gathering over her lawn. She would not have conceived of any leap as taking her out of her responsibilities. Her pale reserved face was set in emotion compounded of aggravated annoyance and restrained alarm. A little distance away, dimly outlined by a white dress, Elinor, her elder daughter, faced the trellis of wisteria vines, in a motionless armchair. Their silence grew more ominous as they waited.

  Finally, two small, dim, hurrying figures paused in the distance beyond the fence at the far corner of the lawn. There was a half-audible sound of boys’ voices on the air for an instant. Then one of the dark blots beyond the pickets moved rapidly down the street and the other climbed over the fence at the corner and began trotting across the lawn, in the general direction of the front porch entrance.

  At the sanded walk to the steps, the floating form deflected its course obliquely away from the house toward a gate in the fence between the front lawn and the back yard.

  Mrs. Hightower’s peremptory call cut through the silence. “Come here, Marcellus!”

  The dark blob of knickerbockers between pale extremities came to an abrupt halt, as if winged in the air, and stood still. Then out of the shadows a boy’s treble voice, trying to sound natural, cried: “Is that you, Mamma? I didn’t see you!”

  Mrs. Hightower came to her feet. At that moment, as if by prearrangement, the big electric arc lamp, swung between the poles over the street corner, glimmered and burst into a flood of light that uncovered the anxious face of her eleven-year-old son blinking and squinting at the foot of the steps.

  Her voice lowered but grew more peremptory. “What do you mean, coming home to milk at this time of night? . . . And there is no milk! You did not separate the cow and calf this morning!” Her mouth stretched ruefully and she paused for an instant to give her disclosure effect, then went on with sharp inflection. “And where have you been, that has kept you into the night, like this?”

  The boy shrank visibly before the inquisition. Rubbing one bare leg against the other automatically, he tried to give assurance to his voice. “Oh, Mamma, I think I separated them—I put the cow in the big field.”

  “And the calf with her! The gate is wide open!”

  He dropped his hand and after a pause mumbled, “Somebody must have . . .” his voice trailing off.

  “No,” Mrs. Hightower said relentlessly, “it is just as it was when you propped it open last night. . . .In your trifling, good-for-nothing way, you just didn’t go back down there after breakfast to put the calf in the chicken-yard!”

  “I’ll go right now!” he cried and he jerked the foot he was rubbing against his calf down to move at a jump.

  But she halted him. “No you won’t—not in your good Sunday clothes! You come in the house and put on your overalls!”

  He came up the steps warily and sped around her to keep out of her reach and, hurrying through the front door, started down the dark hall.

  She made no movement toward him from where she stood at the head of the steps, but she now called out, “Don’t you dare run from me!”

  And he came to a halt, yanking his cap off his head.

  She continued, as she approached him: “Here it is, after six o’clock at night! Where have you been?”

  Elinor had disappeared into the house unnoticed and now brought a lighted oil lamp into the hallway below them and placed it on the hall table beside the unabridged dictionary. The boy gave her a suspicious glance, before he turned back to his mother, assuming an elaborate air of surprise. “Where have I been?” he echoed, incredulously. “We just walked down to the Big River bridge! Me and Walter! And went across to look for flags in Brickyard bottom!”

  Her stiffened face showing no effect at this rhetoric, she pursued: “Who else was along?”

  Her son tried to add incomprehension to his incredulity, “Who else? What do you mean, Mamma?”

  “In the crowd?” she said, impatiently.

  He twirled his cap on his finger with measured deliberation. “Oh there was Robbie and Mack and Ray and Paul Douglas and a couple of others. . .”

  Her voice made the hard consonants accusatory: “And Cale Kiger!”

  Marcellus winced and looked sharply around at Elinor, disappearing
through the curtains to the rear hall. Struggling to keep a quaver out of his voice, he echoed, “Cale Kiger?”

  Mrs. Hightower detected the telltale flush rising to the freckled, roughened, thin skin of his pale broad face, and this confirmation tightened her lips. “Yes,” she said, revealing his complicity in a stricken tone, “and you went off into the woods with him, too—where there was a bunch of big boys and men—gambling!”

  His small, deepset eyes tightened and the flesh at his cheekbones blanched. He moved his stiffened lips once without sound before he got out feebly, “They were just playing setback!”

  “How do you know?” she said, insinuating further guilt. “Didn’t you see money on the ground in the circle? And a bottle of whisky?” These details were Mrs. Hightower’s own deduction, but they rang true. The little girl in the group of girls who had been following along behind the boys had only told Elinor that she got close enough to see those men sitting around in a ring. But Mrs. Hightower had heard before of these dissolute Sunday gatherings.

  As she pressed toward him now, he backed away, dropping his cap. “I didn’t know what they were doing, Mamma, ‘til I got there,” he said, in a crumbly voice.

  She lifted a hand toward the door to his room on the hall. “Now you go in there and put on your overalls and go down to the lot and get that calf out of there and lock him up in the chickenyard—securely, securely: do you hear me?. . .And then come back to my room: I want to see you.”

  Mrs. Hightower moved down the hall to the door to the kitchen on her left and stuck her head into it. After a pause, she said in a husky, wrungout voice to her nine-year-old daughter, Lucinda Morrow, who was turning down the oil stove flame under the teapot, “Don’t put the toast in the oven yet, Row.” And, without awaiting an answer, she wheeled about and crossed the hall to her bedroom, closing the door behind her firmly and thumb-bolting it.

  In the sanctuary of her room, Lucy Hightower bent toward the shaded student’s lamp on the green baize-covered reading table beyond her bed, anxiously fingering an open Bible. Her sensitive brows were knit, her jaw loosened, her full bottom lip trembling, as she read the concluding lines of the Nineteenth Psalm, repeating in a whisper with her eyes closed, the last verse: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer!” Then she turned to the Ten Commandments, marked the place, and closed the book.

  She dropped to her knees at the side of her bed, where she prayed silently for a time, twice wracked by shuddering and once giving way to a sob. After which she rose, dried her eyes, and walked firmly to the door. Opening it upon her son, outside in the hall, leaning dejectedly against the clothes chest, she took him by the hand, not ungently, and led him in. They came to a stand beside the reading table and Mrs. Hightower, with a slight unconscious shrug, picked up the Bible and opened it, reading the marked passage.

  Marse’s face was drawn and pale and his freckles stood out on it, as he stared at her. He seemed appalled at the fate overshadowing him. His eyes cautiously searched the table, the bureau top, the bed, the mantelpiece. Honor thy Father and thy Mother, Thou shalt not—

  Mrs. Hightower closed the Bible resolutely, looked down at her son with a severe, sad countenance and began, “Marcellus, I can’t understand how you, in the way you’ve been brought up, could deliberately go off with such a boy as that Cale Kiger! Into the woods where reckless, godless men were at their debauchery!” She laid the book on the table. “You couldn’t help but know that it was wrong, that they were evil men, that you had no business there!”

  As she paused on the inflection, Marse swallowed the lump in his throat and said, “Mamma, I—I didn’t know—”

  She frowned and responded incredulously, “How could you stand there? How could you be with men of that sort?” She pressed upon him. “Why didn’t you run away when you saw what it was?”

  As his small vague eyes blinked automatically, confusion mixed with the apprehension on his face. “I—I don’t know, Mamma!”

  Straightening up, she shook her head and glanced aside.

  “I cannot understand you! I don’t know what has gotten into you! I suppose the devil got into you, but”—she turned dark, dilated, accusing eyes upon him—“you don’t care about anybody, or anything, but yourself. Your household duties, nothing makes any difference to you. Instead of taking responsibility, here you are, the only dependence your widowed mother has—instead of growing up like your father, who worked hard and took care of his mother and father, the whole family, and even sent his younger brothers and sisters off to college, where he hadn’t been able to go himself—yes, you, you walk off from here, leaving the cow and the calf together—so you won’t have to milk—or just simply because you haven’t got the wit to remember—or care!”

  The boy looked up at her, tight-eyed and bemused and made no response.

  She was just catching her breath and swept on at a higher pitch to her climax. “And you take up with gamblers and drunkards! You might have got shot and killed, even! And what would happen to you if you followed such a course in life is far worse! But you are not going to perdition because I have failed to do my duty, if I can help it, Marcellus! With God willing, I’m not going to fail you!” Her high chalk face now growing tinged at the cheekbones, she cried, “Go into that room and wait there!” She pointed beyond the washstand to the open door to his room, with the moving finger of Fate.

  The boy’s mouth began to work and he broke out imploringly, “Oh, Mamma, don’t whip me—it won’t happen again!”

  “Go!” she decreed, still pointing.

  As he quit the room reluctantly, she stepped to her bureau and took out of the top drawer a bottle of hart-shorn, sniffed it and put the bottle in her apron pocket, then she hurried out of the room to her wardrobe in the hall and after a moment, returned with a bone-handled ladies’ riding whip. She moved swiftly and grimly to her duty.

  When she collared him, in the dim small room, he began to blubber and, as she raised the whip to strike, he fell to the floor and slid his bare legs under the bed. “Get up, Marcellus!” she commanded and, irritation giving her a sudden access of strength, she yanked him from under it. “You begin crying and I haven’t struck you with a blow!” And she whaled away on his shoulders. “But I’ll give you something to cry for!” Her breath held, her face drawn up bitterly, she brought the whip down again and again.

  “Oh, Mamma, oh Mamma, I don’t know why you do this to me!” he yelled and his voice rose agonizingly, “Oh, I do-on-n’t!”

  The sound of it penetrated her like pain, stirring her anguish, her disgust, her fear. Why, why did she? Her stomach sank sickeningly, and her loins began to quake. It was as if she were striking into her own vitals and the whip wavered and paused. “Oh, God, give me strength!” She groaned and brought the whip down, down on his back again. And again she had to drag him out from under the bed.

  When the lash struck his bare legs, he bellowed so loudly, so inordinately, and scrambled so frantically to get back under the bed, that her anger rose again and she found the strength to lay on the riding whip thoroughly and without faltering at the excess of his outcries, until she was out of breath. Holding the whip at last, panting, her brow wet with perspiration and two red spots flaring on her drawn cheeks, she leaned over him and said, between gasps, “Marcellus, I hope this teaches you a lesson!. . . I hope you know that I did it only for your own good?”

  He did not respond, but lay heaving and sobbing on the floor, and she turned away and quit the room, shutting the door behind her.

  As she came through the screened inset for bathing, athwart the passage from the boy’s room into the main part of the long room that served as family sittingroom as well as her bedroom, she tossed her worn stubby whip, with its jaunty bone handle in the shape of a horse’s foreleg and hoof, onto the bed, with some of the old imperiousness of her riding days—though this was a reflex act not in her consciousness. She moved, still bre
athing heavily. Here weariness descended on her like a pass, and she turned back and strode unsteadily to the mantelpiece where she fingered among its numerous oddments for her heart pills. Getting the round pasteboard box open and fumbling with the tiny strychnine pellet, she wondered if the boy was worth it all. A moment later, as she sank on the bed, she tried to raise the voice of duty to discountenance her doubt, but allowed herself to relax numbly on the pillow without answering.

  Lying there, stretched out on her back, her hands folded on her breast and on her face the pallor of death, she looked like the corpse she felt herself about to become. But thought stirred uneasily, the voice of doubt pursued her. Would Marcellus ever grow up? Could she make a man of him? Half a feeling, hardly a thought, was her sense of repugnance in knowing that he had all of her weaknesses, and—the breath of a frown touched her brows—he was stupid on top of it! It was not merely in size and looks that he was unlike his father!

  She stirred on the bed and thrust clenched hands down by her sides. How could she know this wasn’t only her own mean irritability? To think such a thing! His father had not been depressed by his—his backwardness—maybe not really backwardness, but lack of ambition, laziness, triflingness and wool-gathering wits! When she had almost thrown the book at the boy’s head over his slowness with his reading, Mr. Hightower had said with a smile, “We Hightowers take our time!” And when the boys at school had taunted and even hazed Marcellus and he didn’t fight back, his father had not been the least bit disturbed about it. “We Hightowers are slow to wrath,” he had said. “However, if there has to be a fight, we don’t run away!” But Mr. Hightower was so absurd! He insisted that the boy’s hair, that now looked like bristles on his head, would begin to curl when he was sixteen—said his had been the same way.