This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  And that is what he did! But it would only have been a broad joke at her expense, if she could have convinced herself that Caroline had not run him off and if Marcellus could only have seen the seriousness of the situation. She, a bride and a new mistress by coup d’etat, was being made ridiculous in her own house. To top it off, the cook left too!

  Lucy, probably, was not quite serious herself, when she first broached the subject of their moving away to Mr. Hightower. But his amusement over it greatly annoyed her. Feeling herself made light of, she did take it up seriously then. She eventually told him, and with all the earnestness at her command, that so long as his older sister lived and other members of his family regarded the place as home, she wanted Caroline to keep it there for them. (Technically, the whole plantation was hers, Lucy’s, for in a gesture of devotion at the time of their marriage—and sadly, in his desire to give two things most dear to him closer union—he had deeded the homeplace to her.) She, Lucy, wanted it to remain the Hightower homeplace, she said, but she and Caroline could not run it together.

  He confronted her with, for him, an unanswerable question, But where else would either of you go?

  Lucy went home. To be more exact, she went first to Charleston to visit Lizzie Murchison; and, on leaving her husband, she in no way intimated that she would not return. She did not even intimate such a thing to herself, though she packed up all of her trousseau and took her trunks with her. And, after two weeks in Charleston, she went on to see her mother and father in Aiken.

  She was still there two months later, when Marcellus came for her. He didn’t ask her whether she intended to come back with him, or not. He didn’t in any way intimate that such a thing had crossed his mind. But he began, on the first evening he was there, by telling her that a giant land company and sawmill enterprise in the new town of Lancaster had put him on a large retainer and had given him so much business that he felt it important to their future to move to Lancaster.

  There had been only one moment of revelation: when, after they had settled the question of making Lancaster their new home, she told him that she was going into her fourth month of pregnancy. He steadied himself with the back of a rocking-chair. He was a full-blooded man and wore no beard then, only a mustache, and his cheeks were smooth and a little florid, but as he stared down at her, where she lay back on the pillows of their bed—for they had gone to their room—his face got white and drawn and he was speechless for a full second, before he cried out in delight. . .

  Mrs. Hightower heard a brief indeterminate noise beyond her hall door and, turning with lifted face after a pause, called, “What is it, Marse?” And to the mumbled response, she said, “Yes, you can have it. And light the oil stove and put on the tea kettle!” Then she sighed and shook herself and, reaching into a box of white linen stationary drew out a sheaf of it and laid it on the board before her. But after writing the heading and date of her letter and the salutation, “Dear Edward,” she ceased. She began to make cross hatches on a piece of scrap paper and shook her head. “Our lives!” she murmured. Our lives—then she had had her inning.

  They had been married eight years, and could anyone have been happier! Lancaster was a small town, but there was considerable wealth in it and quite a few interesting people. The Coventry’s big sawmills in the suburban village of Pineville had brought other Yankee capital to new Coventry County that bore their name and a new people to the newly-established resort hotel at Lancaster, the county site, to bask there, in southern sunshine and the salutary airs of pine forests, to entertain themselves and to look for profitable investments. There was opportunity, there was enterprise, and there was a cultivated community.

  She could not have been happier anywhere this side of Charleston! They now owned a nice, new, comfortable house on the best street in town. Her mother and father—the vineyard venture at Aiken had not proven profitable and they had had no ties there since her marriage—had come on to live with them and were a great comfort to and company for her. Her father was practicing medicine, with an office at the house and no night calls and, at seventy, had more practice than he would well attend to. And even Mr. Hightower was not out of the circuit so much and was more at home during those days than ever before. He enjoyed the parents, too—especially her father. Of course everyone admired him, he was a good doctor. But Mr. Hightower never ceased to remark his enterprise, at seventy, and his agility. “Dr. Morrow can get up, turn around and sit back down, while I’m (of course he was twice as big) getting up out of a chair!” he used to say.

  But the center of the household then, the center of everybody’s thought and devotion, was their two daughters, Patricia, six, with yellow curls to her waist and as fair as an angel; and Miranda, four, with black ringlets over her head and Irish blue eyes. (Although, since she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, they had given the elder daughter the Irish recognition.)

  Their first-born, a son whom they had named for her father—their first-born who had only lived two days and of whom she had had so little impression after his birth, because she herself was in precarious condition and was not told of his death until after he had been buried—their first-born had been replaced.

  If Marcellus Hightower ever sorrowed for that son, he never allowed her to see it. He was utterly devoted to his two young daughters and in the instance of Miranda, that winsome child with mischievous eyes and deceptive dimples, it amounted to infatuation.

  But everybody was taken with Miranda. Her invalid grandmother, in whose bedroom slippers she might hide a spool that would break a toe, could not be annoyed with her when the child ran out from behind the door to throw her little arms about her neck and say, “Miranda loves you, Grandma!” Nor did her sister’s stiffly mannered playmate, Fanesta, feel hurt when Miranda would imitate her gestures and tone of voice, sharing the family’s amused astonishment. For Miranda always ended her act with her arms about Fanesta. Her father she met at the front gate at dinnertime, with her mother’s apron around her shoulders like a frock coat, her mother’s handbag carried like a portmanteau, matching her father’s ponderous stride with her plump little legs.

  Lucy was sure that Marcellus would not have been able to eat his meal, if he had not found her there to cry, “Co’t’s A’jown!” as he opened the gate and she put her arms up to him. Sometimes this make-believe with her father went on throughout the meal and, to his unallayed amazement, she remembered from day to day the things he taught her. It was precocious in a four-year-old.

  The child was brought to her father’s office by its mother. They came in a spring wagon from the mill settlement in Pineville. He had a sore throat and had lost his breakfast. The symptoms might have signified any one of a dozen complaints. Since the little boy was running a temperature, her father gave him something to reduce the fever and instructed the mother to put him to bed. Since he had not recovered by the next day, her father called on the child on the day after. He found him broken out with a rash.

  She, Lucy, had not known of the existence of the patient up to this point. Afterward, she did recall glimpsing the mule and spring wagon at the hitching post before their gate. But, before her father told her, he had called in the other three doctors in Lancaster and they all had agreed with his diagnosis. Together the doctors consulted the Ordinary at the Courthouse and had the little boy and his family quarantined.

  Scarlet Fever.

  The terror of those two words, even now, made them almost unpronounceable for Lucy.

  In telling her about the case, her father took care to assure her that he had taken every precaution in examining the patient. His office had its own outside entrance at the side of the house, and the boy and his mother had not come into the other part of their dwelling.

  Four days after the quarantine began, the little boy died, and three new cases were discovered in the Pineville school and one in the Academy at Lancaster, and the Academy there had been suspended too.

  On the day the Pineville school closed down, her father had
removed to the hotel to live, and he began sharing the office of another doctor, as a precautionary measure for her children. For he was the most experienced physician in town with the disease—and he was fearless and extremely conscientious. And, in spite of his years, he went night and day during the epidemic.

  But it was the most virulent epidemic anybody had ever heard of. Children kept dying within two or three days from the time they were stricken. Parents, moved by mortal terror, burned smudge pots in their yards and in one case, the house burned, too. Some of them guarded their premises against the scourge with shotguns, others tried to run away from it. There was a story of a ten-year-old boy seized on the train and dying in the car seat. By the end of the second week eight children had died in Lancaster and Pineville, and there were thirty cases of the dread disease in the county.

  The academy had been closed and Patricia had been home almost a week, when it came on her: the sore throat and the vomiting after breakfast. Lucy put the child to bed immediately and sent for her father. She committed Miranda to the care of her mother and Susan, the colored nurse, with strict instructions that they keep her downstairs. She took up her own post in Patricia’s room. And she telegraphed Mr. Hightower.

  He was away at court when the epidemic broke out. She had wired him about it then and that the children were all right. He had wanted to rush home at once, but since the Pineville school was closing down and a general quarantine was going into effect and her father was moving to the hotel that day, she had telegraphed him to stay beyond the confines of Lancaster, because the regulations might hold him there once he came.

  He was in Dublin, a town not too far away, but almost inaccessible by railroad. A telegram from him, urging her to bring the children to him there, reached her two days before Patricia was stricken, but she had been unable to make up her mind that this was the thing she should do. She did not believe in trying to run away from a disease—there was that much of her father in her! She could scarcely have left her invalid mother there alone in the house by herself, with only the servants, and her mother would not leave her husband. The trip would have been too much for her. There would have been a seven-hour lay-over in changing trains in one direction and a four-hour lay-over in the middle of the night in the other direction to get us to Dublin. She had not had a chance to ask her father’s advice about it beforehand, but he pointed out to her afterwards that Patricia undoubtedly was already infected and might even have come down with the fever on the trip. None of this, of course, had been any consolation to her later; but what was done was done!

  When he came in answer to her summons, Dr. Morrow did everything he knew how to do for Patricia. He said there wasn’t too much he could do—it was simply up to God, until she had passed the crisis. But, after this point, the treatment she got would make a great deal of difference in the after-effects of the malady. He spent more time and effort on Miranda’s isolation, standing guard over the food and water brought in to her, allowing no one to enter her room (it was really her grandparent’s room) except the grandmother and the nurse.

  It seemed there was so little that could be done, however, and even less time to do it in! On the morning following the night Mr. Hightower got there in the cars, Miranda went down with it, in spite of all they could do. At first Marcellus lost his head and wanted to take her to Macon to the hospital. She was so sick with vomiting and burning alive with fever and every minute calling on her papa to help her. That night she lost consciousness.

  Two days later, she was dead.

  She, Lucy, did not see Miranda alive after she was stricken. Indeed, she had not seen her younger daughter since she had taken up her duty in Patricia’s room. But it was some consolation to her that Marcellus had been able to be there with his ewe lamb, whatever the agony of those last two days.

  At the funeral, Lucy could scarcely recognize him. His face was a bluish gray; he had lost ten pounds and had aged ten years. Circumstances allowed for only the bare essentials in the last rites for Miranda and not quite all of them. There was no preacher available and Lucy’s father had had to say the burial ritual and there was no music. Still, she believed that Dr. Morrow was as near God as any of Lancaster’s men of the cloth.

  Marcellus had been bludgeoned and he was dazed, but he did not break. After Miranda’s death, he was there beside Lucy every minute—in the long watches at Patricia’s bedside, at the meal table, in their room—with his deep voice (the very vibrations of which were a support to her) and the clear steady light in his eyes. It was these that sustained her through the rest of the nightmare that held them in its thrall: while Patricia began to recover, during the period of her peeling (desquamation, the doctors call it) and convalescence, even then her condition still remained uncertain; and in the lightning-stroke aftermath.

  The final blow was almost as staggering as that of the scourge itself. After Patricia was out of bed, they fumigated the house, under Dr. Morrow’s direction. Parker, the stable boy, who was helping them, somehow let the carpet in the back hall catch fire and the fire burned through the floor and got under the house. The men—Marcellus, her father, and the boy—crawling under the building with buckets of water, were able to get it out, but in the process her father got drenched. He developed a cough before the end of the day that with his weak bronchials and in his run-down condition went into pneumonia in twenty-four hours. He who had done so much for others, who had lost only four patients out of the forty he had treated in the epidemic, was powerless to help himself. In forty-eight hours he was dead. . .

  Lucy lifted her face and drew in a long shuddering breath and shut tight her eyes. She sat in this position for some moments, holding onto the writing board, then she opened them and they came to rest on the small, thick envelope that had plummeted out of the ledger into her afternoon’s great intentions, to carry her off on this intractable train of thought. She shrugged and put the letter back into the stiff-backed book.

  If her father had lived, if things had been different, she could not say what Mr. Hightower’s reaction to their tragedy might have been. He never got over Miranda’s death. He was never the same again. But he never faltered. At no time over the years had he ever questioned her father’s course of action in the epidemic. At no time, had he ever brought up with her the fact that the fever’s first case came to her father’s office, in their house. He never mentioned the circumstance of her parents living with them. He never, even once, suggested that his telegram to her to bring the children to him might in any way have altered their fate. And he never once, over all the years, allowed her to condemn herself in his presence, in any way for any of these things.

  He had always hushed her with the invariable comment: “Everybody did the best they knew how. Things were taken out of our hands. Don’t question the ways of the Almighty!”

  Never, yes, never! For even when the invisible thief took its final exaction of them—when, six years later, after they had moved to another place (to Leegrant) into a new world, where they had built a new life and God had sent them three other children—when, on a cloudless, quiet, calm Sabbath morning, without their having had any premonition or the slightest preparation, they found Patricia dead in her bed (little Elinor, who had slept the night with her, came crying to their door, “Mamma, I can’t wake Big Sister up!”), when this last and incalculable blow had fallen on them and, she, Lucy, had sunk under it into melancholia; it was Marcellus’ words—those same words—in his quiet voice, under his steady eyes, that had reached into the morbid and destroying shadows to her and brought her back.

  Everybody did the best they knew how. Don’t question the ways of the Almighty!

  11.

  THE ODOR OF WHISKEY assailed her keen nostrils, and Mrs. Hightower, without shifting her position at the steps before Adam, drew up into a posture of more reserve. She was astonished and a little disturbed. Except on Thanksgiving and at Christmas-time, he never came to the house with drink in him. But she took the letter.

 
Adam, a foot on the bottom step, was extending it toward her, though he seemed to look off beyond her shoulder. His eyes were puffy; a swelling throat darkened his face with blood; a peculiar cloudiness covered his ginger-colored skin.

  He said: “H-hope you don’t mind to read it to me, please’m? My boy Jake sez its postmarked Milledgeville. That’s whur my wife Malinda is in the asylum. I ain’t never done this befo’, but hit didn’t seem right to let them chillun read after theah po’ sick ma. Didn’t want to take it to Mr. Slappy, or Mr. Peter Bright. Hope you don’t mind? You know I ain’t never axed you nothin’ like this befo’.” The convulsed jaw had opened and the words had flown out of his mouth like a flushed covey of quail.

  “Well of course not, Adam!” Mrs. Hightower said, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. Then, as if the words had hit her eardrums in an unintelligible clump and were only now unfolding their meaning, she blinked and looked down at him abruptly and audibly released her breath. He had drunk only to nerve himself to seek her help! “I’ll be glad to read it to you, Adam,” she said and, turning it over in her hand, took a hair pin out of her hair and slit it open.

  Adam had withdrawn his foot from the steps to take an upright stance, his face uplifted to listen, but he had not yet mastered his embarrassment in making the request and his jaw worked convulsively again and he got out, “Y-you knows I sho’ wouldn’t a-dun it, if I could read it myself.”

  Mrs. Hightower looked at him sympathetically, as she took the letter out of the envelope, and the restraint about her mouth softened to release a quiver in her lower lip. “I appreciate the mark of your confidence, Adam,” she said quietly. Unfolding the sheets, she added, “And you can rest assured I will never mention it to anyone at all.” She drew forth her glasses from the spring button at her shoulder.

  Adam scrutinized her face, as she glanced diffidently down the page of lined tablet paper. Then he looked abruptly away, his mouth beginning to work again. “Hit’s a hard thing! We wouldn’t-a put ‘er there, ‘cept she tried to kill me and ma, both—gone clean out’n her head. It wuz the Court put ‘er there.”