This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  Slappy, pausing, shifted to a sidling approach and his voice lowered and became cajoling, “And you know, Adam, while the clay deposits seem important to the widow now, ‘cause she heard it from the Colonel, the things that made ‘em worth somethin’ ain’t there any more. I mean the Colonel himself and that railroad—it’s for sho’ now goin’ through way below us on the other side of the lower river.” His face clouding, Adam had turned away as Slappy drew near him. Now Slappy stood close, talking into his ear with conviction. “If she ever tried to do anything about that clay, which I doubt that she will, she’ll quick find out it ain’t worth a dime. Hit sho’ ain’t worth ruinin’ the sale over! And as for that oil slick—hell, you know there ain’t no oil in this here country!”

  Adam turned his back to Slappy resolutely, opening the gate. “I don’t know nothin’!” he said.

  Slappy pursued him, still at his ear, like a hound that has treed his quarry. “Listen, Adam, he’s goin’ to give us little land holders six dollars an acre, fee simple, and five dollars for our slash pine—cash! Cash on the barrel head, Adam, think of that!”

  Adam moved through the gateway hastily, shaking his head. “I got-a git on up toward the house,” he said.

  Slappy started to follow him through, then ran back to pick up his rifle, saying the while, in a raised voice that shook with honest unction, “But we kain’t sell without her, Adam! He’s not interested in us little chinquapin holders unless the widow’ll sell her thousand acres, fee simple, and six hundred acres, lease. She’s the main deal, we’re just the fill-outs!” He put his hand on Adam’s shoulder, like an act of love. “Hit could mean better’n six hundred dollars for me—six hundred dollars cold cash! That’s more money than I’ve ever before bin able to git together at one time in my whole life!”

  Adam moved toward his house, against the straight rows of the fields on either side of him, as if he were ploughing up the ground with his feet. And Slappy pursued him—it was almost as if Adam were the plow behind a team of relentless invisible mules and Hinshaw were an unsure plowboy, trying to keep up with it; but the whining voice held them hard upon the furrow. “Adam, if’n you lose the Wyche field your bonanza’s busted—I don’t have to tell you that! Your good times’ll be over. And you’re a-throwin’ hit away too—for nothin’, nothin’. That damned Philadelphia Yankee don’t know nothin’ ‘bout cotton land—don’t know how scarce hit is around here—and don’t give a good Continental damn!”

  When they reached the second gate, the gate by the barn, Slappy was before Adam and blocked their progress by holding onto the latch. “Listen to me, Adam, this thing means the most to me and you, both of us, both of us! And we got the clue to it!”

  His back to the gate rails to catch his breath, Adam drew out his handkerchief and mopped a face drawn as if in pain, his wide, dancing eyes evading Slappy’s look. At last he breathed out heavily, “Hinshaw, we kain’t git away with nothin’ like that—you’ll just git us in trouble!”

  Slappy’s ravaged face had an ugly twist on it and his voice shook. “Look Adam, where’s old man Mort Sumner now? Dead! And the Colonel’s dead, too. Everbody’s dead who knew anything about the wrong line, or the right line twixt the low swamp lots and the hill lots—everybody, ‘ceptin’ me and you—me and you, Adam!”

  Cold sweat stood out on Adam’s now gray face, but he finally met Slappy’s gaze. He looked like a man who had swallowed poison, but he spoke collectedly. “They ain’t as dead as you think, Mr. Slappy—they ain’t as dead as you think!”

  Slappy’s tightened features slumped, sagging into a look of raddled frustration. He released the gate latch and reached into his jumper pocket for his chewing tobacco.

  On the following Friday, Adam pushed open the beveled glass door of Riverton’s dim house of finance and, before it could close behind him, Banker Littleton’s voice bellowed out: “What’s this I hear about you getting the widow Hightower mixed up on her land lines?”

  Adam, blinking fast, scanned the lobby to see that there was no one else to answer but himself. He got out without too much stuttering: “I—I don’t know whut you hear, Mr. Littleton, but the Widow ain’t asked me ‘bout no lines, since this big land deal come up—I reckon that’s whut you talkin’ about?—and I ain’t told her ‘bout none.”

  The banker’s long nose and gray forelock picketed the wicket. “Why is it then that she keeps saying she’s got to reserve the rights to her clay deposits? Ain’t they on the lease lots?” But before Adam could begin, even if he had been eager to answer, Mr. Littleton added, “Look, the land buyer’s lawyer, Colonel Slater, is over at Colonel Duke’s office now—this thing is causing trouble—they want to talk to you and see if we can’t straighten it out.” He pointed a finger through the window. “Go on over there! And tell ‘em I’ll be along after awhile, if I can get away.”

  Adam turned back toward the door with reluctance. Peter Bright had sent him word to meet him at the bank. Had sent him word by Hinshaw Slappy. The word was that old man Peter was going to have to have his money from Adam in July—payment on the rest of his mortgage loan, since it looked like the land deal wasn’t going through. Adam had got the significance of it, all right, would have understood the threat in it, even if old man Peter hadn’t used Slappy to bring it to him. He had figured that Hinshaw would tote his land-line tale to take the Widow’s clay deposits out of the deal around to their neighbors; he had even figured that most of them would want to believe it enough to swallow such a flying-frog story. But he hadn’t expected banker Littleton to go for it! He still had six hundred dollars in the bank, even though he had his crop to make yet. He had counted on help from Littleton. Adam paused for a moment, as he held open the glassed, gold-lettered, weighty portal, to glance back at the wicket, but the banker had not relaxed his forward pitch. Adam shrugged and released the door.

  He approached the squat, white, frame building up the side street from the bank with misgiving. The banker’s words disturbed him deeply. Mr. Littleton ought to know better than to believe Hinshaw Slappy! Could it be that he would let the others do in the Widow on her clay deposits just to get the deal through? Who was Mr. Littleton for in this thing, anyhow? Picking his way across the low porch that fronted it, Adam stood before a glassed door with words painted on it in black. Who was this they that wanted to talk to him? Wasn’t it enough that he had to sacrifice his own interest in the Wyche field and to make an enemy out of a white man and neighbor to keep his word to the Colonel—without this? They, whoever they were, would all be white men in on the deal and anxious to believe Slappy’s story too! Adam’s eyes narrowed. He supposed the black marks on the door said, COLONEL DUKE. He had never been in the office of the Yankee lawyer, who mostly represented the big sawmill in Riverton, and he had never even laid eyes on the land buyer’s lawyer, who would doubtless be a quick-talking Yankee, too. How did lawyers get in on such a thing as this?

  Uncertain whether he should knock, loath to enter at all, he knocked twice and waited for the second sharp call to Come in! before he opened the door. The same voice called again, “In here!” And he found his way across the dark, empty front room and through an open door into a back room.

  His eyes widened and his hat slipped out of his hand. His misgivings had not prepared him for what confronted him. The room blazed with blinding light from an electric lamp suspended from the ceiling at the center of it and beyond the ball of brightness, posted against an unpainted, tongue-and-groove wall, their faces almost like it in color and stiffness, were seated a row of white men that ran all the way around the room. Adam bent down to pick up his hat. He took his time in straightening up to get hold of himself.

  The same voice he had heard before, said briskly, “Get you a chair out of the waiting room!”

  As he came upright, Adam made out to his left the Yankee lawyer, Colonel Duke, in a swivel chair, backed up against a roller top desk. He was young and smooth looking. His fine store clothes had a special cut to them, and he wor
e a vest with a little gold chain across the front of it. He said again in a flat cheery voice, “Get you a chair!”

  Adam backed automatically toward the doorway he had just entered. With a single spasmodic jerk of his jaw, he got out, “Dat’s all right, I kin stand up.” But fenced in and his eyes dazzled, like this, he couldn’t tell who any of these white men were. It was like facing a law-jury, a jury that had already made up its mind and all put one face on it!

  “Adam, I guess you know why we sent for you?” The bright brown eyes in Duke’s tinted face seemed to Adam to leer at him in a mercenary way. “My clients here believe that Mrs. Hightower may have got her erroneous misconception from you. Mr. Bright remembers your telling him—”

  A bugle-like voice sprang at Adam from across the room. “Swamp field’s above the river lots, ain’t it, Adam?”

  The smile on Duke’s face hardened as he sat up in his chair to single out the questioner.

  Adam’s eyes walling, he turned toward the sound. He leaned to one side to peer around the glare of the incandescent light, getting out in words that shook with eagerness as well as with stuttering, “Ain’t that you, Mr. Peter? Mr. Peter Bright?” Now he made out the white head, the lean face and thin nose and gray loosely twisted mustache, giving the mouth the seeming of a smile, that identified old Peter Bright for him. “Whut’d you say, Mr. Peter?”

  But the other white men around the room shuffled their feet and shifted in their chairs, staring at Bright censoriously, and he became stiff as a waxwork and looked away.

  “I will do the talking, Adam.”

  It was Duke again, but Adam did not yet turn to him. Retreating until his hams touched the door open against the wall adjacent to the roller-top desk, he found moral as well as physical backing in the support. He made another appeal to the circle of his white neighbors. “I know some of you white gentlemens, but they’s some more here I don’t believe I knows?”

  “That’s right, Adam.”

  Adam saw out of the corner of his eye that Duke had turned his chair toward him and was smiling up at him with an intense, smooth, cold smile. The faces in front of him gave back no recognition.

  Duke went on. “And to start with, let me introduce you to Colonel Slater here to my right. He has something to say.”

  The long, starchy man in gray serge and glittering pince-nez moved in his chair, as if to get up, lifting a hand, but when he saw that Adam did not budge from the door, he resumed his position, saying merely, “Martin Slater—not ‘Colonel Slater’! I’m Mr. Lincoln’s lawyer.” Taking an envelope from his breast pocket, he continued, “I have a letter here from Mr. Lincoln, who is now in Brunswick, and he is disturbed over the exemptions that Mrs. Hightower and Mr. Latrobe, I believe it is, down at Bell’s Ferry—he has asked to exempt a river field since he heard about Mrs. Hightower’s wanting to do so—Mr. Lincoln is disturbed over these proposals. And he writes me that he is on the point of abandoning the project altogether and, instead, buying a tract on Catherine Island where he won’t be bothered with reservations.” Amid a nervous shuffling of feet, the man refolded the letter with long-fingered, bloodless hands and returned it to his pocket, without ever having looked at it. Then, with a brief excuse to Duke, he nodded and left the room.

  Duke, who saw him to the door, took his stance between the white men and the negro, half-facing each, and addressed his questions to Adam as if he might have been a defendant on trial. “Present here is Dr. Parkerson, who, as you know, is one of Riverton’s most prominent druggists. Dr. Parkerson remembers that in conversation with you and Hinshaw Slappy one day more than a year ago, you told them that the field you tend, known as the Wyche field, was in the upper swamp.”

  Adam shifted first left, then right, peering around the lawyer and the light, to locate a pale, wide-faced man, in his shirt-sleeves, wearing a white collar and bow tie. “Kin you sort of refresh me on where we wuz when we had this conversation, Dr. Parkerson?” he asked, his air of honest perplexity in sharp contrast to Duke’s hortatory manner.

  The man addressed, whose curly hair drooped over his forehead, and purplish lids drooped over his eyes, and black mustache over his mouth, did not look up. “This is the first chance I’ve had to sell that cut-over swamp Pa left me,” he murmured, “and it may be the last!”

  “That has nothing to do with the case!” Duke said sharply, taken by surprise and too slow on the uptake to cut Parkerson off. He went on. “But we have others here, well known to you, who are even better informed about the lay of the land on the Hightower place. There’s Mr. Milt Murdock and his brother, Mr. Lou, over there. But to get to the heart of this thing, coming with the Brights here, is Mr. John Hightower, the late Colonel Hightower’s own brother, as you know, the only one remaining alive.” Duke moved nearer Adam to intercept the roving eye. “He recalls an old false land line set up by a man now dead that he believes may have confused you. He remembers that his father had a fight with this man about it, and it took the county surveyor to straighten it out.”

  Adam turned toward the lawyer and was on the point of asking him why, instead of all of this fuss, they didn’t call the county surveyor again, when he heard the nasal, mumbly, yet unmistakably Hightower voice of the Colonel’s youngest brother. “Old man named Browning—where Slappy lives now—”

  Adam’s mouth tightened. The timbre of John Hightower’s voice set up a trembling in his entrails and his leg quivered. He looked off above their heads and out of the rear window. It hurt him that that voice could be raised against—against whom? Yes, against the Colonel and his widow! That was what it came to. This was sorry business! Adam was cold and shaky but he felt his ribs swell and he spoke out to Duke. “T-tell Mr. Jawn I’d heard about that. But I hadn’t figgered it to holp us none!” Then he turned to the group, a wry smile limbering the scared look on his face, and thrust out his hands. “My Gawd, y’all don’t think I wants to quit tendin’ the Wyche field, do ye?”

  A blowsy, empty laugh swept the room. Someone cried, “It wouldn’t make sense if you did!” There was more laughter at this, Adam joining in, and someone else said, “Where’s Hinshaw Slappy, anyhow?” Adam had been wondering about Slappy.

  At this instant the telephone on the wall beside Duke’s desk rang to interrupt them. In a moment, Duke, who had moved to answer it, turned back from the mouthpiece and said to the gathering. “It’s Mr. Littleton—he doesn’t see how he can get down here—he wants to know how it’s going?”

  A dark, bony-faced man with a lean red nose spoke out in a raised voice, modulated by an inner merriment, “Tell him it’s not going (he imitated Duke’s voice elaborately) a’tall: it’s gwine and it seems to me hit’s gwine fine.” His bright raccoon eyes caught Adam’s gaze and he smiled artlessly. “How about it, Adam?”

  Adam felt embarrassed. Milt Murdock was an honest, kind-hearted man. But what could he do? He looked helplessly about the circle: the white men’s faces all wore a quizzical, expectant air. His insides slipped his grip and his head began to float. He gave them a wrenching, ambiguous grin. “S-sort-a looks like I’m outcounted!”

  Duke spoke for them. “Well, what do you say then, Adam?”

  Adam’s wry grin widened, but his voice, when it came, was as soft and bland and uncertain as custard, “Look’s like ya’ll done decided ‘bout de line—”

  Accepting this as assent, Duke turned back to the telephone and said, “Say there—I believe we may have just got an agreement.” When he turned to the room again, he reported, “Littleton says not to forget there’s forty thousand dollars cash involved in this deal!” He walked back to his chair.

  But the others in the room continued to stare questioningly at Adam.

  In the pause, the door in the side wall opened and Hinshaw Slappy entered the room. Looking in Adam’s direction but avoiding his eye, he called, “Hey there, Adam, I told them I thought you just got mixed up betwixt which wuz which line!” He turned toward the room with an exaggerated manner of speaking confident
ially, “You know fellers, I saidst to myself awhilst we wuz a-talkin’ about hit and a-arguin’, I’ll bet he’s just got his lines mixed up, whichun’s which!. .”

  Adam stared at them, as if Slappy had swallowed fire before them, and would at any moment drop dead.

  In the tightening silence that followed, Slappy clomped awkwardly across the room to a vacant chair without looking back; old Peter Bright reached in his hip pocket for his chewing tobacco evading Adam’s gaze; and the lawyer, Duke, studied his fingernails.

  Swaying, Adam shifted his stance to steady himself. He saw on their faces that they all knew that Slappy was lying. And, wincing, he saw more: he saw that, though ashamed of it, they meant for him to pretend to believe Slappy, too! Then his shifting gaze came to a halt. What he saw through the rear window made his back prickle and his eyeballs burn: the hook-nosed profile of Oswald Paley, as he disappeared around the corner of the building. He had been in the other room with Slappy! Paley was in on this thing! Sweat ran down Adam’s face and he got out his handkerchief. Paley’s being around made the thing look rotten as well as rough!

  Somebody said, “We all got to be together on this!”

  Duke leaned toward Adam, holding out his hand. “This understanding is going to be better for everybody,” he said, and his smile seemed almost genuine.

  Adam looked at the proffered hand, feeling the wall of pressure bearing down on him.

  “I-I ho-hope so!” he stammered, wondering what he meant.

  There was a laugh and someone said, “Shore as shoutin!” And the white men began to shove back their chairs and get up.

  But Adam did not take Duke’s hand. Instead he abruptly lowered his own hands to his sides and stood there trembling, his ginger-colored face, gray and pinched with fear, his eye-whites shoaling up. Bracing against the door, he said, in an intense smooth monotone: “Why don’t y’all git the county surveyor to prove that line, white fo’ks?”