This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  But then, she thought, feeling out with her hand for some cover to put over her, her husband at sixteen, before he was seventeen—so his cousin Rufe said—was leading a company of other boys his own age and younger, through the smell of gun powder and fright at the Battle of Atlanta—Joe Brown’s Boys, armed only with pikes, because the Confederates had run out of guns. It was enough to curl his hair! And to have made a man of him, too—since he had come through it alive.

  Lucy Hightower opened her eyes and stared up at the gray painted ceiling, high above her. She had not known this about Mr. Hightower when she met him that first summer at Indian Springs, but there was that in his bearing that let her know he might have led a company, she reflected. She was a city girl then, fresh from Charleston, and this Georgia Colonel—she still sniffed a little at the ostentatious title that the rural, less educated people here conferred on a lawyer—should have been too loud, too crude, and too old for her taste, with his powder-gray politician’s hat, his already turning hair, and middle-aged paunch. But once she had met him, once he had spoken to her in that quiet, intense, musical voice of his, she never noticed these things again.

  She shifted in the bed, turning onto her left side. To be sure, before they got married, she had made him dispose of the hat and afterward, after she had his diet in her charge, she made him dispose of his paunch, too. Yet she was still a little shocked at herself—even twenty years later—marrying a country lawyer and coming out to the Georgia backwoods! It had shocked her father and mother and Charleston friends at the time, but she, she reflected, had been too ignorant then of what the backwoods was like to know what she was about.

  She found the handkerchief at the belt of her apron and blew her nose gently. They had not lived long at the Hightower plantation, however—though it came near being too long—and he had always done things; they had done things together, in Lancaster and later in the much bigger town of Leegrant. And small-town life for the wife of a leading lawyer was bearable. And then Riverton! But it all had ended in Riverton—yes, Riverton was the jumping off place!

  The Morrows were never a first family of Charleston, but her father had been highly respected in the medical profession and even more so in the Methodist Church which he had served as treasurer for twenty years, and their cramped circumstances had always afforded them three servants, adequate wardrobes for her older sister and herself, and summers at the beach and watering places. And they moved in literate, well-mannered, highly respectable circles. After all Edward Louthan, who had been her early sweetheart and to whom she had been engaged, was now principal of Charleston’s remarkable Boys High School. If she had married him, at least she would not now be a moneyless widow stranded in the rawest, roughest, most degenerate, most immoral small town she had ever encountered! Coarse Yankees, sawmill people, gamblers, drunkards, men living openly with disreputable women!

  She sat up wearily, but her head swam so that she put her hand to her brow and leaned over on her knees. What a surrounding for her boy to grow up in! How could she keep him away from such people? She forbade him going with the Kiger boy, but half the boys in his class at school were not much better! And the case was scarcely happier for her two girls. Lines of anxiety creased her face and she straightened up. “What will my boy grow up to be, if we stay here?” she murmured fearfully. . . . Wasn’t it time? She answered it herself. Surely it was time for her, for them, at last, to quit this country and go back? Memory of the pungent smell of fresh warm baker’s bread came to her, and the more pervasive, barely sensible smell of the harbor, and through her bedroom window, the sight of Walker, the butler, on the stoop, polishing the brass railing in the morning sunshine.

  Oh, if she could only afford to go back to Charleston, at least for her children’s education! If only the sale of the river swamp would bring her enough money. Eight thousand dollars seemed like a substantial sum, but was it enough for all four of them to stay four or five years in Charleston? Besides, Mr. Littleton had warned her not to live off her capital, but use it to open up more farms.

  She rose resolutely and strode over to the washstand and poured a little cold water from the pitcher into the basin to bathe her eyes. An uneasy thought arrested her hand as she set down the pitcher. At their meeting in the back room at the bank the other day, when she had said that she must reserve her mining rights to the swamp for Marse’s future and wanted to exempt the Wyche field from the sale, nobody had seemed to treat her exceptions seriously. Frowning, she told herself that she didn’t like this at all. And, as she put the wash cloth into the water, she resolved to have it out with them, with all of them, for even Mr. Littleton did not seem sufficiently impressed . . . . Think: five years in Charleston would put Marse through high school!

  A soft knock came on her hall door and she said, “Yes, Elinor?” and went on to bathe her eyes with the cloth.

  A muffled voice said, “Mamma, we have some hot toast and tea for you.”

  “Thank you—just a minute!” Mrs. Hightower emptied the basin, moved to the door and, taking off the thumbbolt, opened it.

  Elinor stood with a steaming pot of tea and cups and saucers on a waiter and behind her stood her small sister with a tray of buttered toast and a jar of preserves. “Come on in!” said Mrs. Hightower, smiling mildly as they moved in to the table with the green baize on it and began setting three places for supper.

  Approaching them, she added, “You’d better put on another plate for Marse—he ought to eat something—you know we’ve got to go to church tonight.” She sighed, shutting her eyes, thinking: Riverton does keep us on our guard! And Marse loves the singing.

  The younger sister, in the act of placing the linen napkins around, shook her bobbed, tow-haired head, without looking up, and said, “I think he’s in the diningroom now, Mamma.”

  Mrs. Hightower’s mouth tightened automatically, then relaxed in a smile of relief.

  4.

  “THAT’S A MESS OF CARP you got there!” said the familiar voice. Adam, in the bow of the bateau at the edge of the wilderness-bound river, looked up from the fish he had just strung to inspect the low bluff above him. On it stood the tall, ramshackle, black-hatted figure of Hinshaw Slappy, his nearest white neighbor.

  “Hit’s a good mess,” Adam agreed, running the wooden needle through the gills and out of the mouth of the foot-long fish to let it slide down the string to the gasping pile. “But then I hadn’t fished my baskets in two, three days.” He shifted his gaze again to Slappy, seeking to find out why he had come. The long, loose-lipped, pallid face seemed prepensely empty. Adam detected the .22 calibre rifle that Slappy held against his off side, half-concealed by the loose leg of his faded overalls—detected it, not so much by sight of it, as by Hinshaw’s familiar posture and his own knowledge that Hinshaw rarely went to the woods without it. “H-how kin you tell a he squirrel from a she squirrel in these high trees this time of year?” Adam said with loaded casualness. At this season the females were carrying their young, and responsible hunters didn’t take a chance.

  After a poker-faced pause, Hinshaw Slappy said, “I hain’t tried to.”

  Adam could not discover the weight or bulge of game in jumper or pants pockets and nodded in a confirmatory manner, but what brought Slappy to the bluff? After a moment he ejaculated, “Y-you fished your baskets this mornin’, didn’t you?”

  Slappy’s face relaxing, the bags under his pop eyes loosened, and his mouth sagged to return the ravaged look that it usually wore. With an odd mixture of a rogue’s taciturnity and an undertaker’s unction, he began to talk in a drawl that seemed long and lachrymose even in South Georgia. “Somethin’ bin after my chickens, Adam—hit looked like a mink—I come off to the woods a-trailin’ him.” He lifted his rifle to view, making the belated gesture of disclosure with a vague air of apology. He lowered it. “I was just a-thinkin’—walkin’ along, Adam, about that swamp line we run out back there in 1903, before old man Sumner died.”

  Adam lifted his gaze from th
e fish in his hand deliberately, glancing at Slappy before he let it settle on the broad expanse of the river to his left that moved past in tense stillness, its muddy waters purpled by the sinking sun. Slappy’s land lines again? That one undersized lot of land of Slappy’s had, with its various owners, been the cause of more trouble than all the other land bordering the Hightower place put together! “Yeah?” he said.

  Slappy’s pale eyes had bulged ambiguously as he stared at the noncommittal negro; now he reluctantly smiled and said, “You ‘uz there, waun’t you, Adam?”

  Adam put his fish on the string. “I did the chopping and blazing for Mr. Sumner.”

  “I was a-looking’ round down there at the bottom of our lot and found the old line this mornin’—walked right to it.” Slappy carefully disengaged his glance and, using the muzzle of his rifle as a pointer, began to demonstrate on the ground before him the position of the imaginary line—“a runnin’ east and west. Then I stepped it off. Hit passes just a hundred and ninety-six steps below our hog killin’ grounds.”

  ‘Y-you mean the old pit that’s always bin there?” Adam said. Not looking up, Slappy nodded his head, and Adam stared at him for a long moment speculatively, then snorted. “You ain’t found no east-west line, no hundred and ninety-six steps below that old pit, Mr. Slappy. That line runs right by the pit.”

  Slappy looked away, his brow knitting, while Adam spoke. He met his gaze with pious earnestness now. “Yes, I did, Adam. I found the old chops and blazes, overgrown!”

  Adam shrugged, then stood up carefully in the boat. “That must be the old wrong line by which your paw-in-law cut the Colonel’s timber, til Mr. Sumner got us straightened out on the right line. It must be the line Old Bull Brownin’ made up way back yonder!”

  “Naw,” Slappy said, “there’s a jog in the deestrict line beyond us and hit carries through on our bottom line, carries through to Rison Creek—cuts all them lots on the River short.” He added vindictively, “Even old man Sumner admitted to that!”

  Adam listened attentively. Now he spoke to his twelve-year-old son in the stern of the bateau, as if he might be consulting him about the disputed line, but he said, “Steady it, Bo!” He stepped out of the boat to the bank, with a quick shift of his weight, then turned and put a foot on the prow to hold it for the oversized, lumbering boy, in knee-length, cut-down overalls, saying the while, “They’re short, all right, but the River do that.” He faced Slappy with a remonstrative smile and his jaw worked convulsively before he jerked out, “Whut you tryin’ to tell me, man! That jog in the deestrict line is on the top side of your place—I’ve seen the plat. Don’t you remember when Mr. Sumner showed us all the plat? And don’t you know I wouldn’t forgit it?”

  Slappy waited till Adam had climbed the bank, then he resumed in an argumentative, whining drawl, “I couldn’t be that much off, Adam! And then I found the old marks. I knocked a knot off of a big old sycamore tree and found a blaze with a date burnt into it—I could just barely make it out—‘1857’!”

  “Burnt into it!” Adam repeated, in surprise, now handing the long string of fish he had borne up the bluff to his son, to give close attention to the white man whose purpose he did not yet understand. As they began to move away from the river, he said, “That must be the corner old Bull Browning made up when he and the Colonel’s pappy, Mr. Zach Hightower, fit over the line that time the Colonel told about. Didn’t you hear him tell it?”

  Slappy paused, bridling suspiciously as if he would scarcely have admitted to his own name; then he resumed motion, cautiously picking his way along the faint wilderness trace without speaking.

  After a speculative glance at him, Adam gazed off, off into the trackless gray swamp as if it were tapestries of history, and pursued his story. “The Colonel told us about it that day Mr. Sumner had the plat there at the Hightower place showing it to us. The Colonel said he was there when they fit and separated ‘em. It happen a few years after the War when he was just grown.

  “He said his paw was a tall, keen-built feller, dark like a Frenchman and like to joke. Browning was a big fleshy feller, weighed over two hundred pounds, and talked loud. He liked to bully folks and he claimed that the jog in the deestrict line was on the lower side of Lot 133, just like you bin sayin—the county surveyor and them along with him had run the lower line sure-cuttin’ trees in the way and only off-settin’ where he had to, choppin’ and a-blazin’—slap across the Hightower holdin’ from the far deestrict line and hit come through right past that hog killin’ pit, like I said. The county surveyor then was a man named McArthur. He told old man Brownin’, No, the corner waun’t where he had put his blazes, but further up, that he just had ‘im a shallow lot. The Colonel said Bull Brownin’ wanted to argue about it.

  “They stood there where the surveyor said the corner was and Bull kept walkin’ back toward the wrong corner he had sot up, looking at all them fine trees he was going to lose and he said, “Hightower, you brought this man by your wine house before you all started, damn you! He’s tryin’ to take my best timber away from me!’

  “Old Zach laugh and say, ‘Bull, the pasture always looks greener to you across the fence—what you mean is that he is tryin’ to take my best timber away from you!’

  “And Bull beller, ‘I won’t take that off’n nobody!’

  “Then, the fit. . . .”

  The two men fell into single file to walk a footlog over a slough that mired the road, and the boy, who was lagging behind, now bearing the string of fish on his back, hurried to catch up with them. They all crossed silently, in the towering silence of the swamp.

  Finally Slappy spoke, a note of protest turning his drawl into a whine, “Who would have burnt that date into a corner blaze? Who, except the man who bought it from the old original Mr. Hightower back there? It must have been done when they run out that inside line for the first time.”

  Adam, now in the lead, did not pause or respond until he reached a point where the road began to ascend higher ground. Here a dim trail branched off to his left to crook its way out of sight around a rusty, abandoned steamboat boiler, half-sunk in the mud and overgrown with vines. He turned back to confront Slappy, for a moment gazing about him at the low swamp that surrounded them with endless spaced trees whose big gray boles were made identical by the pale mark of high water and made a misty maze by straggling tails of Spanish moss on the sunless saplings that grew between them. He glanced down beside him.

  “Heah the old steamboat boiler,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. “The line we bin talkin’ about a-comin’ ‘cross the Hightower place, runs by just above us, yonder”—he indicated the spot by a nod—“and hit ain’t more’n a mile from here to your corner. I still know where every chop and blaze is Mr. Sumner had me put there—I kin walk the line out with you?” Adam waited til Slappy came abreast of him and repeated, “I kin walk it out wit you, right now?”

  But the lanky white man did not alter his loose swinging gait, as he moved past Adam, up the main road. “Ain’t got time now,” he muttered over his shoulder.

  Adam fell in behind him, and they continued to walk in silence for several minutes, until they climbed a hill to emerge from the upper swamp into open piney woods and, a little further along, came to the gate to the lane that bisected a large field and, in the distance, passed Adam’s house. Slappy halted at the gate for Adam to open it. And, as he undid the latch, Adam turned back to confront him:

  “How come you so worked up over that line now? I ain’t heard you mention it befo’ since Mr. Sumner got it all straightened out, seven year ago!” Slappy moved as if to go through the gate, but Adam did not get out of his way. “What’s this all about?” Adam said.

  Slappy grew still. Leaning back against the wire fence, he relaxed, pushing his wool hat onto the back of his head with his gun muzzle and then allowing the rifle to slide to the ground, its butt beside his foot. His face took on an odd look of uncertainty that seemed to mingle amusement and pain, but his voice wa
s matter-of-fact. “That land buyer, Adam, ain’t the least bit interested in the widow’s clay deposits, nor that oil slick—nor the Wyche field, for that matter. But she says she’s going to hold ’em out on the deal and he won’t stand for that. He’s buyin’ to sell and he don’t want his titles all cumbered up. He won’t buy! He don’t have to—he’ll back out!”

  Adam, blinking, frowned; then glancing up at his boy who was standing a little apart, listening, he opened the gate to him saying, “Go on now, Bo! Take them fish on up to the house!” Then, he turned back to Slappy. “Whut makes you think he won’t buy?”

  “He’s done said so—said it to me and to Peter Bright, in the presence of Banker Littleton!”

  Adam closed the gate thoughtfully and latched it and leaned against the gatepost before he spoke. “So you calculate to put ‘em above the line to the land he’s buyin’—the deposits, the oil slick and the Wyche field? But hell, Hinshaw, there never was any line like that comin’ back through the Colonel’s swamp—never bin claimed there wuz—wrong or not! And the blazes and chops on the true line can still be found!”

  Slappy shook his head and came upright from the fence, leaving his gun behind. Without shortening his drawl, his voice took on a surprising drive. “Sho’. That won’t make no difference, Adam, no difference, ‘cause that upper line of the swamp land this Philadelphia feller wants to buy fee simple ain’t ever goin’ to be run out. That’s ‘cause he wants to lease the adjoinin’ lots, too, for the slash pine in the upper swamp and bays—wants twenty-five year leases—neither, me nor you’ll be here, likely, when that time comes! And he don’t give a damn ‘bout no land line for the sake of the land—what he’s after is timber!” Adam, who had been holding Slappy’s gaze, now lowered his face meditatively, and Slappy began automatically to advance on him, his voice rising, “What he’s after is timber, I say, and he’ll have that, fee simple and lease! And hit won’t make no difference to him which.”