There was in her gaze, to be sure, a hint of a deep distraction that may have contributed to her feeling about Riverton. Her thoughts by duty and habit were given to a review of the state of dues payment in the missionary society. But behind this conscious downstage activity of her mind there loomed an affective backdrop of a mingled emotional texture. It heightened for her the drama of everything she was doing and brought her occupations to issues as means toward the end of resolving her dilemma. Almost three weeks had passed since she had received Edward Louthan’s proposal of marriage, and she was still torn between the desire and reasoning that would take her and her children back to Charleston and a fear of what this might do for her son, Marcellus, and his future commitment to the Hightower holding, to his father’s dream.
When she had finished her hair, she glanced behind her at the nickel-plated clock on the mantelpiece. Turning back, she hurriedly opened the top drawer to the bureau and drew out a chamois skin to dab her face with chalk dust. In new vim she lifted the white lawn shirtwaist from the back of a chair and put it on, fastening the high net collar, supported by two bone stays around her neck, whose thinness she was self-conscious about. From the clothes closet across the room she brought a white gabardine skirt with mother-of-pearl buttons down one side, stepped into it and, with practiced economy, drew it about her hips, fastened and straightened it. She took a leghorn hat from a closet shelf and, circling by the mirror, pinned it on top of her pompadoured hair in two tries.
A minute later, she emerged from her front door, an airy lavender scarf about her shoulders, a pair of white silk gloves in her hands and the missionary society account and minutes books under her arm. She drew on the gloves between the steps and the front gate and, facing left on the sidewalk beyond it, she began to move at a firm, decorous step along the thoroughfare split by the railroad tracks.
The distance to Mrs. McLester’s house, where the Methodist ladies would gather, was no more than a quarter of a mile and the direst hazard along the irregular, grass-bordered, sandy path to it—since the sun was descending a flawless amethyst sky—would seem to be getting dust on her white shoes. Mrs. Hightower, nevertheless, proceeding with modest aloofness, was aware of other perils on the streets of Riverton.
She did not glance toward the Cranford house as she passed, because, like her own, it sat sufficiently far back from the street for the passer-by not to be expected to recognize anyone sitting on the porch. Moreover, on one occasion, she had unguardedly allowed her eye to take in the porch and Mrs. Cranford, in wrapper and boudoir cap, from the bench swing, had called out to her in a strident voice. Her own voice was too weak to make itself heard! And really the distance was too great for an exchange of greetings! But beyond Cranfords, Mrs. Hightower, moved by sympathy to less caution, gazed at the bare, gray, boxlike dwelling that sat in the middle of an unkempt yard. She did not expect to greet the woman who lived there, though the front porch was in speaking distance. The poor, ill-dressed mother of affliction in the gray house never spoke or never even appeared in view if she could help it. Mrs. Hightower’s glance had been impulsive and uncalculated.
Yet, out of an experienced wariness, she assured herself thereby that the woman’s idiot son, who sometimes stood at the fence and yelled obscenities at passers-by, was not in sight. Even so she quickened her pace a little. She wondered again, as she had often before, about poor little Victor. The long-headed, well-built child would be actually handsome but for the confused tortured look on his face. He did not look like an idiot. She suspected that something could be done for him if he were anywhere except Riverton!
She was not past the yard. But she slowed her gait only to hear a moment later, from the railroad tracks to her right, a shrill whistle and a shouted word, which, though she had never heard it before, she sensed was obscene.
From the corner of her eye she saw, standing amid the tracks with his back toward her, a man in overalls and a workman’s cap. Before she could resist the impulse, her glance had already gone beyond in the direction he faced and she saw on the street across the tracks a young mulatto woman, moving away—saw, below straight unfaltering back, her hips suddenly wiggle in an assenting response. She heard the man laugh.
Mrs. Hightower shrugged and shook her head, and fixed her gaze steadfastly on the distant clump of chinaberry trees in the street ahead of her that marked her destination. She shook her head again. Surely, there were negro prostitutes and licentious workmen in other places, she told herself, but only in Riverton would a person know (and she did) the brakeman, whom she recognized even with his back turned and who had children in the public school. And only in Riverton would one be acquainted with the prostitute, whom she knew even at a distance to be the chambermaid—and a good one—at the Riverton hotel!
Mrs. Hightower was prepared for the ordeal of passing the hotel. The spread-out, rambling, two-story, frame building, painted gray with white trimming, faced, from across the railroad tracks, the town’s main street. A bannistered porch extended the length of its front, only a few feet from the way she must come. Here drummers, loafers, and gossipy old men sat with their feet propped up on the railing, smoking and chewing tobacco and spitting across the grass plot onto the sidewalk, and making their half-audible remarks, chorused by chuckles or guffaws, about the women who happened to walk by. The porch was now lined with them, but Mrs. Hightower, with the missionary society books under her arm, passed at her prudent gait, giving no evidence that she knew she was being remarked on, or even observed. And she overheard no word, nor chuckle.
She had got quite beyond the hotel and along the picket fence that framed the McLester lawn, when the unseemly side of Riverton emerged again. Seeing men whom she knew, on the walk before the gate in unusual attitudes, she was puzzled. They were bending over with hands on knees, kneeling down on the ground and squatting on their haunches. As she drew nearer the wide stretch of hard ground under the shade of the chinaberry trees, she discovered to her astonishment that they were playing marbles.
. . .Marbles! Mrs. Hightower stopped and stared.
She saw a big-bellied fellow rise from his squat with surprising agility: Mr. Johnson, the butcher! And there was Wallace Bender, the turpentine ‘stiller and the town’s wealthiest bachelor—baldheaded and bay-windowed—getting up and down like a bandy-legged baby. Though he was using a gold-headed cane to help. Then she determined that the oversized hulk on the ground, squirming about to get a prop on his elbow, was the sawmill superintendent’s six-foot-three-inch son, engaged to be married—trying to thump a marble at a hole half the size of his hand. And beyond him, the town’s mayor, on all fours, was drawing an X (as she had seen Marse and his playmates do) before the hole to hex the shot.
Again Mrs. Hightower shook her head. Only in Riverton could grown men so far forget themselves.
But at this point a florid, jowlish, baggy-eyed young man, whose face seemed creased by lines from laughter, bounced up from a squatting position and, taking a step in her direction, bowed with easy informality. “Hello, Mrs. Hightower!” He smiled on the scene at his feet good-humoredly and went on in a deliberate, soft, yet carrying voice. “Don’t mind us, Ma’am! Come right on by!”
She nodded and sidled toward the gate, lowering her gaze, as if she would ignore the whole thing.
The man’s china-blue eyes were bloodshot and the flush on his face was obviously alcoholic, but his manner was unperturbed. He spoke in amiable deprecation. “Looks like the boys wouldn’t’ve picked this spot for their marble game this afternoon! They are going to scandalize mommer!” He implied that the matter was something over which he had no control. Then he met her gaze, his eyes suddenly filling with a twinkle as if with tears and he chuckled softly.
Mrs. Hightower shook her head again. This was Mrs. McLester’s oldest son: in his middle thirties. The town’s hardest drinker and chief idler. “Do! Robin!” She managed a wry smile. “You all are not playing marbles?”
He shrugged and moved to open the gat
e, while some of the others rose to bow, or merely nodded at her from the ground. He said, with a jesting air of confession, “Well it’s the only thing mommer would let us play, over here under her chinaberry trees!”
Mrs. Hightower’s gaze withheld approval as she passed on through the gateway, but she turned back to respond to his nonsense. “And I suppose you picked this afternoon for your game, just to please her, too?”
He lifted his chin with gravity. “Mrs. Hightower, it’s a critical moment! You might not believe it, but we are playing for the world championship! We’re the challengers.” A twinkle glimmered in his eyes, as he nodded at Bender. “And we are now four holes ahead of those bullies!”
There was general laughter, but Mrs. Hightower did not join in. She was about to turn away, when Robin spoke again.
“Mrs. Hightower?”
“Yes, Robin?”
“You missionary ladies needn’t spend your efforts on China this time. You can begin the work of salvation right here at your gate. This Bender bunch ain’t going to have anything left to save when the game’s over but their souls!” He laughed.
And Mrs. Hightower smiled in complicity, but her face sobered as she spoke. “I’m afraid you all are hardened cases.”
The men all laughed boisterously at this.
As Lucy Hightower moved down the white sand path with its border of castellated brick, she glimpsed in the tail of her eye proof of her suspicion: two of the men had eased away from the group and were slipping into a small building at the far corner of the yard. Ostensibly it was a butcher shop, but as everybody in town knew except, she supposed, Robin McLester’s mother, it was a private bar for him and his cronies. It was just as she suspected: the marble game was only an excuse and a blind for their hanging around that butcher shop to drink!
Her glance swung to her left, off beyond the vine-covered summer house that obscured the farther view, where the hotel abutted the lawn. Here steps and a hall door in the gable end gave entrance—entrance that, she had been told, they used, under cover of darkness, for an intercourse even more immoral.
She fixed her gaze on the tall, magnolia-shaded dwelling in front of her. Beyond the front door, with its big frosted glass, set amid little dark blue and red and orange panes, giving forth its dim, rich, discreet glimmer, were gathered their wives and mothers—to bring Christianity to the Chinese! Here it was, assembled on one stage: Riverton! She gripped the missionary society books tightly against her side. Could the Hightower holding require this of Marse? And why should her girls have to grow up here? Could there be any reason sufficient to keep them here? Why did she hesitate?
When she had returned from the missionary society meeting an hour and a half later, Mrs. Hightower found it necessary to go to the barn in search of an egg for the charlotte russe. None of her children was at hand. She and Lena—before Lena left—had made the dessert for supper and put it in the milk box to chill, but they had not whipped the cream to put on top of it and she now found that the cream wouldn’t whip; she needed the white of an egg.
Mrs. Hightower changed her almost-new white shoes for old black ones for the trip. She would have changed all of her clothes on her arrival at home but for the fact that she expected visitors in after supper. Mr. Littleton was going to bring Mr. Lincoln and his attorney, Mr. Slater, around for a preliminary talk before what they hoped might be the closing of the big land deal on the morrow. To the old shoes she now added a straw hat of Marse’s to protect her pompadour against cobwebs. And, tightening the strings to the gingham apron she had put on earlier, she set forth.
As she reached the chicken yard, Mrs. Hightower was startled by a flash of lightning and looked up to find, to her astonishment, prodigious piles of dark, lowering clouds. Her surprise bore some realization that events might be making up about her of which she, in her absorption with the ills and contingencies of the moment, was unaware—indeed, that these events might be beginning to transpire. For she perceived the encircling gloom. But how could she have anticipated where the Light would lead her? A sense of the sky’s portentousness hastened her step across the chicken yard and hastily she opened the barnlot gate. At a distance, amid the bog of mud and manure about the cow brake by the back fence, she saw the empty milk bucket on the milking block, as on an altar, gleaming immaculately in the ghostly light. So that was why Marse hadn’t answered her call! But she saw merely the familiar bucket and turned away in her hurry, thinking only that it was early for him to be milking, and moved toward the first stable on the near side of the tall unpainted barn. She opened the door and looked in the hen nest under the feed trough, but it was empty. She made a similar search of two other stalls, as she moved toward the far end of the building.
Beyond the barn, she met the force of the storm and, glancing up, was frightened by the tossing tree. The outspreading boughs of the giant oak at the outside entrance of the barnlot churned tortuously and she—in her alarm, pausing for an instant to stare—saw Sook, the cow, beyond the paling gate of the tall framed gateway. She wondered where Marse could have got to, but another lightning flash, followed immediately by jarring thunder, spurred her on toward the stalls on the breezeway. Yet even as she moved she noticed that Rosa, the heifer, had not come up with the cow. She decided that Marse must have gone to look for her.
Mrs. Hightower was standing a little way inside the breezeway, facing the slatted front of the middle stable, when the next lightning bolt struck. The barn, the dim interior of the stall, blazed with that sudden, appalling fullness of light that illumines lightning strikes, nightmares, and apparitions and that, in the fraction of a second, etched on the retinas of her eyes this three-fold vision of Marse at Rosa’s head, holding onto her horns and looking backward with gaze possessed at the remote, high, livid, agonized face of Jerome Cranford—and in the remaining fragment of that same second the same lightning bolt knocked her to the ground and in an earthquake of sound that jarred enough loose hay through the hole in the loft above her to bury her in it. . . .
Mrs. Hightower never quite knew how she got back to the house, but she was wet with rain and so out of breath from running when she entered her room that she thought she was going to collapse on the floor in spite of herself before she could get a heart pill out of the box on her mantelpiece and swallow it and fall on her bed. For ten minutes she lay there on the white counterpane, staring at the ceiling, her eyes wide and her face bloodless, as if she were in a trance. Then abruptly she rose up and walked to the telephone in the back hall. She rang the Riverton hotel and got Mr. Lincoln, the land buyer, on the line. “This is Mrs. Hightower, Mr. Lincoln,” she said stiffly. “Mr. Lincoln, this may sound extraordinary to you and I will apologize beforehand for presuming on your courtesy, but can you come to my house at once, alone, for a private talk with me, now, before the meeting tonight? I assure you my reasons are extraordinary!” After a short pause, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Lincoln! I believe the rain is already beginning to hold up.”
13.
ADAM ARRIVED at the back steps in a state of morose anxiety. His wife Malinda might or might not still be crazy, but he suffered to think of her being behind stone walls and iron bars. And with the suffering had come resentment. It was when he wasn’t directly thinking about it that resentment most rode him—resentment, it would seem, at the whole world around him. On top of him, would more aptly describe his feeling about it. At some unguarded moments he even felt his situation like that grim childhood time of slavery that he knew through his mother. And he was moved almost to open anger at white jails for colored people.
But, as he waited for Mrs. Hightower to come out on the porch, he sobered his feelings with the practical consideration that not very much could have been accomplished in Malinda’s behalf in a week’s time. His wait was long and he began to move about under the chinaberry trees, fanning himself with his black hat.
When Mrs. Hightower finally hurried through the back door and out onto the landing, he saw at a glance that something se
rious had happened to her. As he took in her pale, tightened face—brows gathered, her full lower lip flatly set and her abstracted gaze politely trying to focus on him—momentarily, he felt betrayed. At this hour, her crimped and netted pompadour against her loose house dress made him think she must be dressing for a trip. And an urgent one, since she was holding her gold watch out in her hand. His eyes widened in concern. With only a slight reluctance left in him, he moved toward the foot of the stairway above which she stood. His jaw convulsed and he jerked out in an anxious guttural voice, “You had bad news, Mrs. Hightower?”
“Oh Adam, we’re so upset! I’ve just had word that my sister in Summerville has had a stroke!” Mrs. Hightower’s gaze finally gave him recognition.
Adam shook his head, his face wincing sympathetically. “That’s sho’ bad!” he said.
Mrs. Hightower looked at her watch. “Yes. We got a telegram only about two hours ago. It happened last night.” Her voice was raised, carrying in it a note of harassment. “She’s my only sister. I’m trying to get off on the one-thirty train.”
Adam continued to shake his head and repeat his words of commiseration.
Suddenly, before him, Mrs. Hightower lost control, her features twisting in pain and beads of perspiration popping out on her brow. “And it comes on top of everything else!” she said, in a tone of desperation. “Your trouble, Adam! And the plague-take-it old Land Deal! And. . .and Marse! And I—I don’t know what all. It just couldn’t be worse!”
But even as he sympathized Adam’s face set and he backed away a little. It was too much! He was suddenly conscious of her odor, the thin, sickly-sweet odor of white people. It set off or rose out of some deep inner conflict that seemed to be going on inside him through his senses. He couldn’t catch hold of it with his mind, but it was there. Then Adam brought himself to a halt. He straightened upright, his mouth tightening in an act of will that disregarded the smell and the inimical appearance of her face. He wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, took out his tobacco plug and bit off a chew. Thinking back over the past, he recalled that he had not been conscious of the white man’s odor for a long time. . .a long time. He recalled, too, that way back when he was a boy in North Carolina and lived for a while in the Atwell house to build fires and run errands, he had come to be conscious of the negro odor of the field hands, in their shanties. He carefully turned the chew over in his jaw and spoke sedately. “T-t-this the sister, live in South Ca’lina?”
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 15
