This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  “Yes. She’s still unconscious, the night letter said, but they think she will live.” This turn of thought (and his deliberation) seemed to give Mrs. Hightower more self-control. The tone of her voice was grateful. She went on speaking of her sister, lowering the hand with the watch. “She is ten years older than I am, but there are only the two of us. I have no other immediate family, on my side, except her and her three children.”

  Adam nodded and resolutely picked up his hat from the top of the milk box, where he had laid it. “W-well, you ain’t got no time for me and my troubles here this morning. You better git packed to git on that train. You don’t wanta git left. Just tell me whut you want me to do while you’re gone.” He paused with the hat held to his bosom. “Whut’s going to happen ‘bout the Land Deal?”

  “Oh, the Land Deal, Adam!” Mrs. Hightower’s upsetting excitement seemed to come back, making the hand with the watch rise up shakily. “The Land Deal’s called off! That is, it’s postponed. We’re not going to try to do anything about it today.”

  Adam lowered the hat to his knee, in a surprise that turned to puzzlement. He finally asked, “You mean, nothing ‘til you git back, don’t ye?”

  “Well—” Mrs. Hightower’s lips pursed, as her loosened jaw hesitated, faltered. She stared at Adam. Then her gaze lifted above his head and she swallowed, the hard lump going down her throat visibly and bringing a heave to her bosom. “Well,” she said again, blinking as she paused. “Well, yes and no! There will be nothing done, all right—‘til I get back—if then!” Faint pink streaks began to show in her face, just below the cheekbones and her eyes glittered and, in shifting her stance, she somehow appeared to be trying to keep her balance above uncertain footing. “I am thinking—that is, we. . . Something has come up. . .”

  Her effort broke down with these words and she stood in silence for a few moments, finally focusing her gaze again on Adam. This time her long, serious eyes were assured. “I would like to tell you something confidentially, Adam,” she said in forced quiet.

  His gaze and the barest nod of his head gave assent.

  She went on, still collecting herself. “It is in strict confidence, for what I am about to tell you is now known only to Mr. Lincoln, his lawyer, and myself.” She took a preparatory breath. “For my own purposes, yesterday afternoon before last night’s meeting to get ready to consummate the deal today—before the meeting to which Mr. Littleton was a party, I talked to Mr. Lincoln by himself and told him about our Okefenokee swamp land. . .You remember about it, don’t you, Adam? You’ve heard me refer to the fabulous twenty-five thousand acre holding in the Okefenokee swamp that Mr. Hightower bought what he believed were the best existing titles to, haven’t you?”

  Adam nodded. “I—I remember the Colonel going down there to, he said, ‘splore it. Tole me he’d a-took me with ‘im, could he a-got me word in time.” Adam’s eyes twinkled reflectively. “That’s whur he crawled up on a log to sleep at night because they waun’t no dry land, and found a twelve-foot ’gator up there to ‘spute it with ‘im!”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hightower agreed, with a smile that vanished quickly as she resumed her confidence. “I told Mr. Lincoln about the big stand of cypress on it, that there were big sawmills operating around the outer edges of the swamp and that Mr. Hightower had always believed that our cypress would become very valuable as soon as these sawmills began to exhaust the timber around the edges and moved deeper into the swamp. He had believed it enough, and believed in those titles enough, to pay fifteen thousand dollars for them—and you know there wasn’t a better land lawyer in south Georgia.”

  Mrs. Hightower seemed to take so much interest in these details that Adam began to wonder if she were trying to postpone telling him something else about the deal. “Y-yessum,” he said, “hit ought to be worth somethin’.”

  She went on. “Well, Mr. Lincoln’s lawyer made a preliminary examination of our chain of title and was impressed, and Mr. Lincoln said he might be very much interested in that timber and. . .and—” Mrs. Hightower paused and looked about her, as if she had unexpectedly come to the end of her way and was searching for another foothold to leap to. “And he wanted to have it cruised right away and it was he who suggested that we take no action in the other deal until he could consider the Okefenokee property and possibly make me. . . make me”—Mrs. Hightower halted again to look about her—“I suppose you would say an overall offer.”

  Adam nodded. “Y-yessum, I see,” he said, though he didn’t see entirely. “And do that have some effect on the clay deposits and the Wyche field?”

  Mrs. Hightower, her gaze roving, nodded energetically but mechanically, in what seemed to be an effort to gain time to reflect. She broke forth with the sudden impulse of decision. “Oh, yes, Adam—the Wyche field and the clay. I thought it had been decided that they are on lease lots!” She smiled. “Anyhow, they may drop out as an issue altogether. Just out of it.”

  “That’s fine!” Adam said, without much conviction. There were still red splotches over Mrs. Hightower’s cheekbones, as she ceased speaking and still some sort of agitation in her eyes.

  She could not quit talking. “Oh yes, and I got around to saying something about our having to have that swamp land line proven by the county surveyor to Mr. Littleton. He didn’t say anything, but wasn’t pleased.”

  Adam nodded again, with restraint. “That’s fine,” he said, turning away. “Well ‘um, wuz that all?” He raised his hat toward his head. Then he saw her eyes and abruptly lowered the hat again. They were wide and strained and seemed suddenly frantic. “Wuz they sumpin’ else, Mrs. Hightower?” he said with concern. He stared at her in apprehensive wonderment. . . .Then he exclaimed on dim impulse, “Oh yes!” He turned back. “Marse say somethin’ ‘bout coming out to the Oconee fishin’, with Mr. Robert Bruce’s youngest brother, when school out.”

  His words were telepathic. Mrs. Hightower responded in an eagerness that released her eyes from their bafflement to glisten brightly, and loosed her mouth in a tender smile. “Yes,” she said, “he and his little friend, Walter Bruce, were planning to come out Monday, I think. . .” Now she paused and looked distractedly at the watch again. Her other hand lifting as if she were intent on the message she sought in its face, she talked on to herself. “Monday. And I don’t see . . .I don’t see why they shouldn’t go on out there. A neighbor, Mrs. Walton, is coming over to stay here in my absence, but the girls could get along without him. . . . Why not out there? It might be better. . .” She came to herself, glancing down at him again now. “That is, of course, Adam, if you can put up with them, if you’re not too busy?”

  “I sho’ ain’t too busy,” Adam said abruptly. “My corn’s been plowed and I still kain’t git into the swamp. The Wyche field’s still under two foot of water.” Again he took his hat between his hands to put it on and moved along beside the milk box in the direction of the gate, but, turning his head, he saw that Mrs. Hightower, gaze afar, watch still in hand, and balancing uncertainly, was not yet willing to quit the porch. He decided to take the time to speak of his own concerns. “M-miz Hightower, anything happen about Malinda yet?”

  “Oh yes, Adam! I was coming to that.” She lowered her hand. “I wrote Arthur Adair, as I said I would. And I’ve just gotten a reply. It came this morning, too! I meant to bring it out here with me, but everything was in such a state of confusion. . . .”

  Adam interrupted. “That’s all right You kin tell me whut he said, kain’t ye?”

  “Yes, Adam. It’s this way.” Mrs. Hightower paused for an instant to collect herself to set off on this new train of thought. “He has written a letter to the superintendent of the asylum. I know what Malinda said about him in her letter, but Senator Adair says that under Georgia law there’s no way to get her out without the superintendent’s consent. He doesn’t take any stock in what Malinda says about that. He says that the superintendent will be only too glad to turn her loose, if she’s well enough to come out.”

&n
bsp; Adam glanced at the ground to drop a mouthful of ambeer near his foot. What Mrs. Hightower was saying did not come as news to him. All of it was what he had expected from a public man and a white man. And the facts were probably with Senator Adair, the official facts. But he, Adam, was not convinced—not convinced even though he would not dispute these facts. Adam’s eyes clouded over, his gaze moved off to the distance. . .As he looked back, the stammering tic seized both of his cheeks before he even moved his lips to speak, “I—I’d be willin’ to try her, out of there!” he finally got out.

  Mrs. Hightower nodded sympathetically. “Yes, I know how you feel, Adam. Let me tell you that I impressed it on Arthur that we wanted to get her out. And he said this: he said he would go up there personally, if we wanted him to. He said he would talk to Malinda and the superintendent both!” Mrs. Hightower nodded her head and her voice asked for a sign of his approval. “Now that’s something, isn’t it, Adam? That’s something.”

  “Ye-yessum, yessum!” Adam responded with more noise than feeling. Suddenly he was oppressed with a dim sense of his having made a deep mistake to bring Mrs. Hightower into his domestic trouble.

  She was turning away, back to the hall door, when he saw her shoulders give a convulsive heave and heard her catch her breath. “Marse!” she moaned, with a quivering elongation of the word. And abruptly she was facing him again with pain twisting her face. She spoke out of irrepressible need. “I don’t know, Adam!. . . I’m so worried about him!. . . I hate to leave here now!” It was a painful, impulsive confession. She strode slowly across the porch, towards the far landing post, gazing at the floor boards. “At the same time I—I feel so unequal to his situation. . .He—he so much needs a father right now—just at his age, eleven years old, going on twelve. I—I don’t know!. . .”

  She had lapsed into silence, still moving slowly over the boards and Adam continued to study her face. He looked away reflectively, then after a moment, he shrugged. His voice limbered and he spoke in a reassuring, gruff, half-amused tone, without stuttering.

  “Mrs. Hightower, you wouldn’t know, of course, but boys Marse’s age—and I kin tell you, color don’t make no difference ‘tween ‘em at ‘leven and twelve—I tell yuh, a boy at dat age, he ain’t quite a beast and he ain’t quite a man. . .Don’t take it too serious if’n he acts scandalous! Against Nature, even!”

  Their eyes met and were jointed in an intimate recognition. There was no absence of the usual reserve in the glance they exchanged. There was not sexual consciousness in it. Yet there was confidentiality on Adam’s part and tender appreciation in Lucy Hightower’s moist gaze. In a common human communion, they confronted elemental human experience.

  She nodded. “Yes?” she said.

  Adam went on. “They can do things, make you wonder what it is you done brought into this world!” He shook his head, with a brief grim smile on his face.

  And she responded wryly, saying again, “Yes?”

  He resumed. “But if’n they don’t go crazy or kill somebody, if’n they git a chance to come along like they oughter, along with right thinkin’ people, they’ll grow out of that kind of thing.”

  Mrs. Hightower stared, first shaking her head slowly, then slowly nodding it—nodding her understanding. “Yes,” she said. “Adam, I believe you—believe you know!. . .”

  Abruptly she lowered her gaze and resumed her slow stride back and forth. She walked the length of the milk box and, on her return, half-pausing at the spigot, cut down the stream of water. Then she resumed her position on the landing, at the middle of the steps and drew herself up collectedly. Her eyes were wide and dark and glistening with excitement, and she breathed audibly and her lip trembled when she went to speak. But there was a calm on her face. “Adam, why couldn’t I leave Marse out there on the homeplace with you, ‘til I get back?” Adam ducked and glanced away. Her voice pursued him with inflection. “It will be no more than a week. The little Bruce boy will be with him. They can camp in your yard at night.”

  Adam shrugged. “Sho’!” he responded, not looking at her. . . . “They can sleep in the old wine house—hit’ll keep ‘em dry.”

  She lowered her gaze, too, and said distantly, “And if you think anything should be said, maybe you could talk to him, Adam?”

  “Sho’!” Adam said again and nodded stiffly, without lifting his glance. . .He moved off toward the gate, still holding his hat in his hand, still staring at the ground with a troubled, uneasy gaze. Suddenly the white smell was at him again, anathema in his nostrils.

  14.

  THEY WERE FISHING in Murdock’s millpond, a wide, creek-fed oval of clear water that grew reddish brown in its depths. Adam stood in the sun on the earthen dam, near the spillway, with a short line on his pole, trying to snag a pike. His two white charges were with Bo, in the shade of the sweetgum trees that rimmed the sides of the pond. Marse and Walter Bruce sat in comfort on the slant, root-clutched bank with their poles stuck in the ground at their feet, watching the corks on their fishing lines, floating on the placid surface. Beyond the spillway, on the far side, at the foot of a big tupelo tree that overspread the water, sat Adam’s mother.

  She wore an apron of blue checked calico and, of the same material, a shovel bonnet, out of which came smoke from a clay pipe. Her knotty black hands worked with the mixture of corn meal mush and lint cotton in her lap, making balls of it to put on her hook. She was fishing for carp. Between Bo and Marse stood a bucket of minnows and between Marse and “Little Walter,” as Mrs. Hightower called him—he was as big as Marse but three years younger—sat a can of wiggle-tails and a perforated box filled with grasshoppers, crickets, and catalpa worms. And on a tree root over the water alertly squatted Bo’s pet coon. The boys were fishing for anything that would bite.

  Adam kept the scene in the corner of his eye. In the corner of his consciousness trouble clouds kept him company. But above him was a cloudless June sky and about him, the bursting summer. Cattails, with their sharp, green, sword-like leaves thrust at his feet along the edge of the dam. And mixed with their velvety brown clubs were white blooms of arrowhead and the blue of day-flowers. The big bed of Cherokee roses against the millhouse behind him sent him a smell of fresh sweetness. His senses were filled with the immediate pleasure of being.

  Bo yelled out. There was a burst of scuffling on the right bank and Marse, teetering on the brink of the pond, brought up his bending pole with such commitment that, bursting from the water, the small sailing fish on the end of his line went up into the trees and stuck there. In the hubbub that followed, both Marse and Bo tried to disentangle the line. Then Marse threw off his hat and grappled the trunk of the big gum that held his fish.

  “Hold on a minute!” Adam called. He had already laid his pole down on the dam and he hurried along the water’s edge to the boys. “We might have to fish for you, and you f-fall out’n that tree!”

  Marse continued his scrambling embrace of the tree and moved upward laboriously, but his efforts did not bring him near the bottom limbs. By the time Adam reached him, he was winded and sliding back down.

  “Gi’ me the pole, Bo!” Adam said, taking it out of his son’s hands. He swung the end of it out in the direction whence it had come and examined the tangle of line around the tip of the pole, saying “H-hit pays to take yo’ time. G-go easy ‘bout it.” Gradually he shortened the line until the pole was tight against the tangle, then he used the pole to lift and draw the line from the leafy branches.

  Just as he brought down the line, the fish fell free. There was a shout and a scuffle. The three boys slammed into each other, grabbing for the fish.

  But the coon, quicker, went in under them. The coon came off with the catch. Back on his tree root he washed his paws and lifted it finically to his mouth. The black bars in his ruff beyond his muzzle looked like an exaggerated smile as he eyed them. Bo tried to console Marse about it. “T’waunt nuthin’ but a little ole stump-knocker!” he said.

  When Adam got back to his pol
e, he found Hinshaw Slappy coming across the footbridge from the millhouse. “Are they bitin’ any this mornin’, Adam?” he called out, in his sad-sounding drawl.

  Adam wondered whether Milt Murdock had sent Slappy word he was here. He saw that Hinshaw carried the .22 rifle at his side. “M-mighty little,” Adam replied, with a train caller’s tonelessness.

  Abreast of him now, Slappy smiled dimly, in painful affability. “Ain’t this a long way from the Hightower place for you to be fishin’?”

  Adam took his remark to be more than casual, detecting an undertone of agitation in Slappy’s voice. He picked up his pole. “A-anywhere’s a long way for me to go a’fishin’,” he said. “But we come out here because of the high water in the swamp.” He stood, removing water moss from the bunched fish hooks on the end of his line. “They’re not b-bitin’ here,” he said finally. “I bin tryin’ to snag a pike.”

  Slappy swung the small rifle across his shoulder and looked with vague anxiety out across the pond. His loose features tightened. “Who those white boys ye got with ye?”

  “That’s young M-marcellus Hightower and Mr. Robert Bruce’s littlest brother.” Adam lowered his hook into the water, managing to keep the glum, lank figure in view.