This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  Mrs. Hightower examined the large childlike but regular script a moment longer to get the hang of it, then lifted her gaze without altering her attitude. “I had heard she was at Milledgeville. I know how very distressing it must have been for you all to have to put her there!” She looked back at the letter and a firmness came on her face as her eyes focused on the writing. “I will begin reading,” she said and cleared her throat.

  “Dear Adam,

  “I am all right now. My mind’s been clear for a long time and I stay in good shape. I’m clean cured, for sure, but the superintendent keeps on keeping me in here, because they get paid so much a head for us—”

  Mrs. Hightower’s voice slowed for an instant and hesitated, but she resumed without commenting:

  “and they don’t want anybody to get out I know for a fact.”

  Mrs. Hightower lifted an eye to conjecture on the reasonableness of this, but the sight of Adam’s face halted her. It was swelling and he blinked reddened eyes. Her hands began shaking and her throat got tight. This unprecedented show of emotion in him upset her. She felt weak in the knees and turned away and took a step or two to regain her composure. She cleared her throat sharply and took off her glasses deliberately. “Now Adam, don’t get too disturbed,” she said, in a low voice. “I don’t think we can take everything at face value here. Remember she may still be sick.” She cleared her throat again and put on her glasses to read.

  “And they don’t give you nothing”—(“anything, that is,” she corrected the script tardily)—“to eat but mouldy cornbread and watery bean soup and black strap that ain’t fit for a dog to eat.”

  Mrs. Hightower paused, reacting to this grim intelligence with compressed lips and sharpened brows, but she did not hazard another look at Adam. Taking a deep breath, she read on in a forced monotone.

  “They work me hard, too, and I don’t get anything for it but abuse. I have to work in the fields and I’m past the time for it. I got a deep cough that don’t ever leave me and I ain’t fit for field work.”

  A suppressed sound, like the grunt a man gives when he’s been hit in the midriff, halted Mrs. Hightower and she heard the shuffling of Adam’s feet. She lifted her glance waveringly to see that he had turned his back to her to hide his disturbed feelings. She read on, her monotone grown crusty now, shaking a little.

  “Please get your white folks to get me out of here! I know the Colonel could do it.”

  Her voice caught on the last words and she had to stop completely. It seemed as if this family confidence for which Adam had had to blunt himself with whiskey was going to prove too much for both of them! She removed her glasses and took a turn across the landing and back before she tried to go on. She finished under a strain that made her voice harsh.

  “The doctor says I tried to kill you again was why I am back in here. It was in a spell if I did. And I ain’t had a spell for a long, long time now. I am well. Please get me out! Your loving wife, Malinda”

  Mrs. Hightower lowered the letter as if she had finished with it and moved over to the milk box, giving her attention to adjusting the flow of water from the spigot. She seemed absorbed in reflection on the letter’s painful appeal, but after a moment she glanced at the sheets of paper in her hand and said, “There’s a postscript. Shall I read that, too?”

  Adam was using his blue handkerchief and did not turnaround. His voice came to her as if from the bottom of a well, in a hard stammer. “Y-essum,” he said. “Read it all!”

  From beyond the water pipe, she covered her eyes again with the glitter of her pince-nez and resumed with the letter, now more collectedly.

  “I won’t mind your ma being there any more. It wasn’t your ma so much as the way I saw you looking at Babe one day that made me sick the last time. But I don’t care any more. I’m done past my time of caring. You can keep—”

  Mrs. Hightower halted abruptly, then after a pause, in a voice raised in protest, yet faltering, she said, “Adam, I don’t think I’d better go on with this. Obviously her mind is not right. There’s no sense in making you suffer needlessly. . . .”

  There was a silence, then Adam said in a hoarse, harsh voice. “Read it!” He turned about to confront her. His face was stiff and a bloodless gray, but it now wore the grim quiet of a man who has prepared himself for the doctor’s knife. “I got to hear it, Miz Hightower, please’m. She my wife, sick or no. If you can stand to read it, I got to hear it!”

  Reluctantly Mrs. Hightower straightened up again and lifted the letter to read, as if it were an instrument of torture. She sighed.

  “. . .Babe.”

  She completed the sentence she had broken off, without going back to reread it. She sighed again

  “Just don’t let me stay in this jail full of crazy people any longer, please, Adam, please.”

  “Another postscript,” Mrs. Hightower said, going on.

  “If your ma would take that hex off of me, I would have already done been out of here. Please, please, get the Colonel to. . .”

  “That’s all of it, Adam,” Mrs. Hightower said, dropping the hand with the letter in it to her side. She turned away and, shaking her head slowly, she walked back and forth across the porch, gazing at the floor boards thoughtfully. She found Adam’s situation baffling. His show of emotion—Adam whom she had never seen give way before at all!—distressed her deeply. And he seemed to take his wife’s illness all upon himself, in moral blame! Insanity was always disturbing to contemplate, whatever your relation to the victim. But she would doubt that Adam had any responsibility; indeed, she thought it very likely that he did not have any part in her mental sickness. The chances were that it was the effect of the dread social disease that was so prevalent among them. Though her father had once told her that suffering of the brain was a rare thing among negroes!

  “Course it kain’t be the Colonel; but you reckon they ain’t some way we kin git her out?” Adam’s voice bore the hollow, wrung-out calm that follows hard suffering.

  Mrs. Hightower came back to the head of the steps reluctantly, not knowing how to begin. She said in mild protest, “But, Adam, she may not be well, at all! What makes you think that she is well?”

  Lifting his head, Adam blinked only once. His voice had not lost its calm, but was now assured. “Hit’s the fust letter she ever writ me from there. Least ways, the fust one I ever got from her. She at herself in that letter, all right!” He laid a foot on the bottom step and looked down at the rough, worn cowhide encasing it, as if to reassure himself of its familiarity. “Don’t you think she sounded all right?”

  Mrs. Hightower observed the shoe, too. “I don’t know her, have never seen her. Of course it would be hard for me to tell.” She paused and looked up at him and said crisply, “Do you believe that your mother has her hexed, as she says?”

  Adam shrugged, taking his foot off the step. He smiled feebly. “No’m. But she may believe that.” He looked off into the distance. “They’s somethin’ curious between ‘em. They never did get along. Yet they never quarreled nuther. Ma ain’t the quarreling kind.”

  “But that may have been the result, not the cause, of your wife’s condition.”

  Adam straightened up, shaking his head. After a pause he said, “She had some hard times with us back there in the beginning.”

  Mrs. Hightower’s mouth compressed and her brows gathered and she turned away to cover the difficulty she felt. She saw that he meant “times” that were somehow the responsibility of himself and his mother. How could she get at the business of telling him better? “My father, Adam, was a doctor, and a good one. He practiced in Charleston.” She faced him again. “He once told me that insanity was a disease, like—like smallpox. Sometimes it was inherited, he said, but most of the time it came about as an after-effect of a physical disease. Like smallpox,” she repeated.

  She paused, her mouth tightening and her hand automatically drawing forth her glasses on their chain, as if she were going to put them on. She felt reasonably sure
that Adam understood the disease to which she thus obliquely referred and which propriety forbade her to mention. From her reasserted distance, pince-nez before her pedagogically, she resumed in a tone of patient deliberation. “Now think. Did your wife ever have any physical disease back yonder? Any organic trouble, like with her kidneys or heart? Or any rheumatism that the doctor said was incurable?”

  Adam shook his head. “She never had no doctor for nothing’, ceptin’ this last boy of our’n. She never were sick.”

  Frowning, Mrs. Hightower let go the glasses and stared off into the leafy cloister of the chinaberry trees. . . .Of course Adam’s report on it proved nothing! She said firmly, “Adam, I would doubt very seriously that anything you or your mother ever said or did to your wife had the least thing to do with her mental sickness, despite your not remembering her having the disease. The fact is, she might have had it without its ever having any noticeable ill effects on her, until her mind was affected. She might well have become infected with the disease before you ever knew her. The fact that she tried to kill you and your mother doesn’t prove anything, except that she was insane.”

  The only visible reaction her words brought to Adam’s face, now natural looking except for its hollow-eyed, tear-stained appearance, was a steady blinking of his eyes. After a pause, he spoke with detachment. “Ma said I treated Malinda mighty mean back there right after we ‘uz married.” He turned aside and strode along by the steps. “I’ve thought on it, too, and I reckon now that I did. Though I didn’t think about it that-a-way then. Because I never give Malinda a short word at no time. But I was raftin’ timber durin’ them years and I was gone on the river most of the time. Howsomever, it waun’t just that!” He paused and stroking his jaw, studied the ground, obviously under constraint as to how to speak with propriety about his behavior to Mrs. Hightower. “W-when I-I was away from her, which was most of the time, I didn’t act like no husband, I know now. And I reckon she knew it then, or suspicioned it.” A wry, mirthless smile rose dimly to his eyes. “I reckon I’d a knowed hit then, too, if’n I’d stopped to think about it. But the ole River give a feller a rough loose life back in them days.”

  Mrs. Hightower responded with a like smile, gingerly. She felt at sea. But she recalled something her husband had once told her of Adam’s wife and she felt curious about it. “Adam, Mr. Hightower, once told me that your wife, Malinda, was a widow with a child when she married you. And that she was five years older than you?”

  “Y-yessum,” he said. “Dat chile was Babe. You’ve seen ‘er.” His face-clouded with an ambiguous constraint and he looked away. “Malinda was always a jealous woman. Right from the start. It seemed to eat on ‘er!”

  Mrs. Hightower pursued her point obliviously. “But it puzzles me to know why you, Adam, should have married a widow with a child, a widow five years older than yourself.”

  Adam raised his eyebrows, astonished at the question. But not because the answer was obvious or came easy to him. He seemed embarrassed and uncertain. After a pause, he shrugged to muster a show of detachment, of humor. ‘W-well, for one thing, she wuz a school teacher. I reckon I aimed for her to teach me how to read and write.” Hitching up a shoulder and thrusting a hand into his hip pocket, he pulled out his tobacco plug and bit off a chew, all in one automatic motion. “But somehow we never did come to it.” He turned the tobacco over in his jaw. “And then, her bein’ a widow . . .maybe!. . .My ma, you’d say, was a widow.” He chewed vigorously for a moment and dropped a mouthful of ambeer carefully beside his foot. “C-course, I don’t know! Who knows ‘bout a thing like that? I didn’t, to say, think about it one way or tother. I just thought I wanted to marry her.”

  He continued to chew on the tobacco, obviously unconscious that he did so (he rarely took a chew of tobacco in her presence), caught up in his own thoughts. He did not stutter as he talked on. “I was full of myself then—full of doing, not thinking. I took more rafts down to Darien one year back there than any other man on the Oconee. I didn’t see what was coming up. Until I come home to Long Pond one day after I’d been gone for ‘bout three weeks—hung up in the Narrows, not far above the Nightingale plantation with the chillun—her’n and our’n. She’d gone back to her folks over in Coffee County.”

  Gazing at her now lean and middle-aged overseer, talking on in his dignified composure, Mrs. Hightower began to see, with some astonishment, the reckless young river rover of twenty years before—the champion axman, raftsman, shot, who accepted the favors of women (their color made them more, not the less, women) along the river bank, doubtless on the Nightingale plantation and in Darien—a visiting hero. Yes, that would harass an older wife at home alone—black or white!

  “It was then I sent for ma, to come live with us and keep her company. I began to think about getting’ off the River, too. But I didn’t do it for another five years.

  “Ma’s being there, I come to find out, only made it worse. Malinda suspicioned ma doing ever sort of thing to her, or tryin’ to. And of always taking my part. And I had to be showed the hard way that I was wrong, and not treating Malinda right. Two years before we come on the Hightower place she went out’n her head the fust time and tried to kill ma over a wash pot with a stick of stove wood. All on account of me, she said. She tried to kill me, too, and two or three more, before we got her committed.”

  Could such a situation drive a woman actually insane? Mrs. Hightower went on with her thoughts, as she listened, obscurely disturbed by the sound of his voice. What did his mother do? What was old auntie’s dark part in this—this unwitting domestic tragedy? Could she, Lucy, dare believe his story?

  “Then, just before I moved on the place, I went to Milledgeville to see her and she seemed alright. The Colonel holped me git her out.”

  Would Mr. Hightower have done this if she had had softening of the brain? Would the hospital have let her go?

  “Ma stayed over on the other side of the River and lived with my brother Deadman, when we first come to the Hightower holding. She stay there. She didn’t cross the River ‘til our last child, DeBow, was born a year later and Malinda had so much trouble. Ma come on to nurse her then.

  “Hit was about four years a’ter that she went off ag’in—trying to kill ma and me both with an ax she had hid under the bed, accusing me about Babe, who waun’t more’n twelve or fourteen then. Accusing ma of hexing her with conjure pills and breathin’ down her back when she was asleep. . .Malinda!”

  As he halted, Mrs. Hightower’s long gray-blue eyes were rounded in hypnotic staring. She was in the woman’s skin. She felt familiar fear-filled shadows enveloping her. She, Lucy, had not suffered syphilis. It has been Life—and death. It had been the action of others, when she succumbed to melancholia! As the pause lengthened, she started and shook herself and abruptly turned away. She said in a sharp voice, “I don’t believe it!”

  After a silence Adam’s surprised, mystified words reached her. “But she in there, aint’ she?”

  Mrs. Hightower faced him, “Yes, but I don’t believe that you and your mother put her there.”

  Adam’s face suddenly suffused with blood and his eyes watered. With a heaving catch of his breath, he turned away, unable to utter a sound. He began to walk up and down and finally to speak. “But she in there, Miz Hightower. Behind those windows with iron bars in ‘em and those walls! She bein’ mistreated! She nigh starvin’ and sick!”

  Mrs. Hightower drew herself up firmly on the landing and spoke sharply. “Now stop that, Adam, and listen to me! Your wife is sick—still mentally sick, I believe. If she were not, why would they keep her there? There are hundreds of other mentally sick people being crowded back into county poor houses because there’s not room for them at Milledgeville. There’s great demand for space there. They wouldn’t keep her if she weren’t sick!”

  “Behind them walls!” he ejaculated, still walking.

  She grew brusque. “Now stop it, Adam! This is not like you!”

  Adam brought ou
t his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, his body jerking a couple of times with heaving, then he turned toward her. He stood for a time very still, upright and stiff-faced, blinking his eyes. He said finally, quietly and very carefully, without stuttering, “Miz Hightower, you may be right and more’n apt you are. But things don’t always happen like they oughter, in this world. ‘Specially for colored folks.”

  Lucy’s countenance clouded for a moment, as if in pain, and her body relaxed. After a pause, she said gently, “I know, Adam, I know.” She looked away. “Besides, neither of us could ever sleep again at night with that letter on our minds and our not doing anything about it.” She lifted the sheets of tablet paper which she still held in her hand and looked at them once more briefly and folded them and, taking the envelope out of her pocket, restored them to their encasement. “Arthur Adair is our state senator and he’ll be running for re-election soon,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll write to him today.”

  12.

  THE THING THAT PROVIDENCE made Lucy Hightower a witness to must, in any event, have driven her to do what she did; though the incidents of that Friday afternoon piled up to convince her that it would only have happened in Riverton. She had no premonition of the approaching crisis, or of the day or the hour, as she sat, in petticoat and corset cover, before the marble-top bureau, in the privacy of her bedroom, fixing her hair. It was a first Friday and she was dressing to attend, at three o’clock, a meeting of the Methodist missionary society of which she was secretary and treasurer, and she gazed into her looking glass alertly.