This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  His pale pop eyes blinked and his long jaw dropped. “Is that so?” Slappy said. He took a dry tobacco cud out of his mouth, as if he were relieving himself of an impediment and cast it aside. “I believe I’ll just go down there and speak to Marse a minute. . . .” A moment later, beyond the end of his lowered pole, Adam saw Marse get up, gingerly stepping over his fishing tackle to shake hands with Slappy. And he could hear Hinshaw’s pious raised-in-meeting tone of voice. Yet there was harassment in it! Slappy was asking Marse about his aunt’s stroke—the one in South Carolina—and when his ma would be back. He hung around, as if he were going to ask him more. Marse’s back was turned to Adam, but he could tell by his stance and the stiffness of his neck that he wasn’t being very confidential. Hinshaw finally left without even going through the usual rigmarole about his friendship for the Colonel and how much Marse looked like him.

  As he approached Adam on the dam, returning, he called out, on a note of vague hostility, “Old woman, how come you to git so far away from home?”

  Adam glanced over his shoulder in surprise to see his mother coming toward them on the footbridge across the spillway. The small, upright figure advanced sedately, the boney face lifted in dark solemnity. She did not seem to hear the remark.

  Slappy spoke again brusquely, when she was near them. “You gittin’ deaf?. . .I said, you a long way from home.”

  She blinked barely discernible eyes in black caves and cupped a hand to her right ear. “Hunh?” she said.

  Passing a hand over his mouth, Adam looked away.

  Slappy shouted in irritation, “So, you’re gittin’ deaf?”

  She responded tranquilly. “Carp ain’t bitin’. Too much water here, too.” She sat down at their feet, in the sun, and threw her hook into the pond.

  He stared at her back with bulging eyes. “I didn’t know she’d got so deaf!” he muttered; then, staring on, his face grew empty. Abruptly he looked up at Adam his features twisting as if in pain, and beckoned with his head. “Come here a minute, Adam!” he said, moving away toward the footbridge. On the bridge, lowering gray eyelids in a blank face, Slappy abruptly raised a staring interrogative gaze to let Adam have it. “I reckon you know that the Land Deal is blowed up?”

  Adam blinked and stiffened. “Blowed up?” He examined Slappy’s countenance closely. “N-no. I didn’t know hit!”

  “Didn’t?” Hinshaw exclaimed. After a pause, he went on in an incredulous voice, “I ‘lowed you knowed all about hit. Seein’ as how you talked to the widow after the word came to us. Whut did ye talk about?”

  Adam eyed him steadily for a time. “H-hit don’t never pay to jump to no conclusions, Mr. Slappy,” he said.

  “What did y’all talk about when you went by there last Saturday mornin’, then,” Hinshaw persisted in a tone of sarcasm. “That’s all the rest of us could talk about!”

  Adam stood away from the railing, balancing evenly on his feet. “We talked about it some. She told me hit wuz put off ‘til she got back.” He looked away thoughtfully. “Whut’re y’all so r-roused up about? She couldn’t put her mind on no land deal, with her onliest sister on her death bed, there in South Ca’lina!”

  “Naw! Naw, that won’t do!” Hinshaw said in a voice of ridicule. “Banker Littleton done tole us different. Banker say hit wuz already done as good as put off in that secret meetin’ the night befo’.” He stared at Adam in open suspicion. “She didn’t tell you ‘bout that?”

  “No,” Adam said, but he paused to glance down at the swirling water slipping away from its brown depths under the bridge to fall into frothy whiteness beyond. Hinshaw’s intelligence did come as a surprise to him: the widow hadn’t taken Mr. Littleton into her confidence at all, sure enough! He hadn’t realized that she meant quite this. He spoke quietly. “How did banker Littleton tell it?”

  “Why tell you?” Hinshaw threw up his head in open indictment. “You know all about it!”

  “I don’t even know nothin’ of the sort, Mr. Slappy,” Adam said, in firm patience. “The widow just said it was put off. S-she believes for sho’ hit’s goin’ through, when she gits back here. Mr. Littleton must know somethin’ she don’t know?”

  “No. Banker Littleton said hit look like there might-a bin sometin’ going on between her and the Yankees, he didn’t know about. He said it looked like it, if’n he hadn’t a-knowed better!”

  Adam eyed Hinshaw intently. “Whut did Mr. Littleton say c-caused the deal to blow up at the night meetin’? W-whut caused it?”

  Hinshaw winced and looked away. “I reckon you know that, too,” he said after a moment. “You sho’ ought to! Hit wuz because of her wantin’ to have the surveyor run out that land line, you got her started on!”

  Adam spoke impulsively. “Hit couldn’t’ve bin!”

  “Yes, hit wuz! Banker Littleton say they were sittin’ there in her parlor—Lincoln and his lawyer, Banker and the widow. They were sort of fumblin’ around, the lawyer talking’ in them legal terms, gittin’ ready to git down to brass tacks. When suddenly she come out with hit.”

  “Come out with whut?”

  “Yes. She come out with hit, seemin’ to say hit to him, Banker said.”

  Adam gazed into the depths of the pond. “To him! S-sez whut to him? I don’t get it!”

  “And the Lincoln lawyer sez, ‘Well, Mrs. Hightower, that’s your own business. If you want to have the county surveyor run out that line on your own responsibility that’s all right by my client. But I want you to know that we will not share in the expense of it.” Hinshaw raised his voice “Yes, they sho’ waun’t goin’t to pay no part of hit!”

  Adam turned back, keen-eyed, to press him further. “And what happened next?”

  Hinshaw’s face flushed a brownish-yellow and his voice shook. “Well, you damn well know! Don’t you?”

  Adam shook his head positively, patiently, persistently. “N-no. No, I don’t, Mr. Slappy. I don’t know.”

  “This lawyer said then that Mrs. Hightower had better go ahead and git the line run out before they tried to close the deal. That’s whut he said!” Hinshaw’s face took on an ugly twist. “And I want you to know, you’re the cause of this whole thing, Adam!”

  Adam’s face stiffened. He frowned and the eyes he now lowered to the water wore a troubled look. But finally he shook his head with the detachment of a justice unbeguiled and turned back to Slappy. His mouth was grim, but he said evenly, softly. “Hit’s my job to look out for the Widow’s property. . .If’n the deal fall through, Hinshaw, you ain’t got nobody to bl-blame but yo’self!”

  That night it hailed for an hour. The roar of it waked Adam. He built up his fire, put on his clothes and ran through the outlandish storm across the yard to the old wine house. On the backside, where the door was off, the hail was beating in bad. Marse and the little Bruce boy had abandoned their blankets and buried themselves in a pile of cotton seed at the far end of the room.

  Adam took them to his house.

  Babe and his mother were in by the fire when they got there. He could see that his ma had made up the big double bed with clean sheets and turned the covers back. The women remained awhile to talk about the storm. His mother had seen it snow six inches deep in June once. Then they went back into the room on the other side of the chimney.

  The boys sat on, around the hearth, Marse next to Adam and his chum beyond him, looking at the fire and listening to the hail hit the tin roof. The lightwood blaze illuminated the whole room, giving a golden tint to the old newspapers with which the walls and ceilings were papered and silvering his mother’s sand figures on the floor, polishing the varnished beds and the bureau and making luminous the waxen flowers under glass on the taboret. From an easel between the beds, the glow was reflected by the glass in the large, white-framed, photographic enlargement of Malinda and Adam, at the time of their marriage.

  Marse, who was more familiar with his surroundings, only took a sidelong glance now and then at the room’s strange litter. But Walter, h
is jaunty nose uplifted, gazed about him in unselfconscious curiosity. The two small boys, in the duck-legged chairs, below the high dim mantelpiece, their bright hair, freckled faces and blue eyes transfigured by the firelight, constituted a curiously burdensome angelic visitation for Adam. He had never before given roof for the night to a Hightower. It was an honor. But he had not bargained for so much when he took on for a week Marse’s guardianship. Adam frowned. For it was, also, an intrusion.

  Marse cut his eyes, a little uncomfortably, at the white sheets of the turned down cover on the bed behind him. And Adam, seeing it, got to his feet. He took his pipe off the mantel and turned back to look down at the boys, his mouth limbering. “That ole wine house got pretty cold, hey?”

  Marse nodded.

  Gathering loose tobacco from an old cigar box, he began to fill his pipe. “C-cotton seed make cold cover?”

  “I like it better here,” Marse said.

  “Does that phonograph play?” Walter asked, pointing at a varnished mahogany box with a large morning-glory horn about it, in the far corner of the room. He turned solemn, still chubby cheeks toward Adam.

  “H-hit ain’t made music in many a year,” Adam said, bending down to get a blazing splinter.

  Relaxed by the fire, Marse leaned back in his chair. As he gazed into the flames, his nostrils spread meditatively. “I didn’t know Babe was married, Adam,” he said at length. “Where’s her husband?”

  Automatically Adam caught his breath and pulled hard on his pipe. His face became the mask of a deaf man and he sat down.

  Marse looked over at him uncertainly and said, “I just hadn’t seen ‘im anywhere?” Walter was interested, too.

  Adam tossed his head and took out his pipe. He turned a gruff face to them. But his liquid eyes shimmered in an ambiguous smile. “He around,” he said.

  Marse’s small deep-set eyes fixed Adam with a naked interrogative stare, then turned quickly away. His thin skin, transparently white under his freckles, began to color faintly in embarrassment. “Oh!” he said under his breath.

  Walter leaned forward, lifting his nose. “Look, look!” he said, “Adam is pulling our leg. I’ll bet Babe hasn’t got any husband!”

  Marse thrust out a hand to stop him, but he ignored it. He comically pursed his lips and puffed his cheeks, and said to taunt, “I’ll bet Adam couldn’t get her a husband!”

  Adam stared into the blaze grimly for a moment, then turned a wry face to the boys. (Walter now sensed that his humor was misplaced and his puffed cheeks grew red.)

  “Sometimes girls does have babies, without husbands,” he began matter-of-factly. “S-specially with colored folks.”

  He pulled on his pipe, turning back to the fire. “Maybe Babe ain’t got no husband she kin lay c-claim to. . . .Maybe I ain’t took time to git her fixed up right.” He glanced back at them distantly, speculatively. “Maybe I ain’t h-had time—or mind for it. . . .But it ain’t the worst thing kin happen to a”—he gave ambiguous emphasis to the words —‘she critter’!”

  He turned and addressed his remarks to Marse. “Maybe I bin too busy worryin’ ‘bout my livestock, here and whut’s gone to Riverton, too.” He said with loaded emphasis, pausing to add in a way that asked for an answer, “not enough time to look after ‘em.”

  Marse’s gaze shifted to the fire prepensely, self-consciously. But before he could speak or give clear evidence that he apprehended Adam’s meaning, Walter had filled in the breach. “What’s been after your livestock?” he said with interest.

  Adam waited for Marse to look up at him, then he fixed him with a dim, grim, glint of a smile. “Little boys have been after my livestock,” he said. “They bin abusin’ my heifers!”

  “You don’t’ say!” Walter returned unsuspiciously. “What they do to them?”

  “ ‘Bused ‘em!” Adam repeated with a communicative glance. “Got where nobody kin hardly git nigh ‘em for the kind of business people supposed to have with livestock.”

  Marse grinned hard, taking it for a rough joke, yet his face reddened guiltily. He said, “Aw, go on!”

  But Walter had more curiosity. “What did you do to those boys?” he asked unselfconsciously.

  “Had ‘em arrested,” Adam said ominously.

  Looking away, Marse blurted out, “Aw hell!”

  “I didn’t know you could have anybody arrested for that?” said Walter.

  Adam waited until Marse looked up. He said solemnly, “It’s ag’in the law of God and man.”

  Fright rose in Marse’s eyes and they shifted quickly back to the hearth, as his broad face swelled in redness.

  Adam did not look at him, but after a pause he murmured on in a mellow, detached voice. “Yeah, some boys may think a cow you milk, hit don’t make much difference. . .just a cow-lot trick to take the pressure off yo’ pecker. . . .You’d better-a grab an ax handle or plow handles and work hit off!. . .They’s mens in the penitentiary serving ten years on the rock pile for that. And they ain’t black nuther!”

  Marse gave him a brief, appalled glance.

  When the boys, in their shirt-waits and drawers, in Adam’s double bed, were sound asleep, his old mother flickered noiselessly into the room and onto a low stool beside him. Marse had been shy about sleeping in Adam’s bed, at first. He had insisted that he and Walter could just roll up in their blankets—which they had brought along, wrapping themselves in them to run through the storm—and lie before the fire. They didn’t want to rob Adam of his bed, he said politely. Adam had assured him that he didn’t ordinarily sleep in the double bed, anyhow, but in the other single bed that was also in the room. If they didn’t mind sharing the room with him, he would keep the single bed and let them have the big bed. By that time Marse, obviously, had adjusted himself to the idea. Both boys were asleep within three minutes after they slid between the sheets.

  For a long time Adam and his mother sat in silence, each staring at the crumbling lightwood and oak reflectively. Finally she spat into the coals and murmured in low gutturals. “Hit needn’t to-a-happen to ye, and you had any respectability about you!”

  Adam glanced toward his mother, eyeing her for a moment, then spoke gruffly. “I waun’t just talkin’. I’d promised his ma I’d say somethin’ to ‘im, if’n I got a chance.”

  She shook a head of gray splayed pigtails. “Hit wuz a mean chance, and you a’makin’ hit!”

  Adam knocked out his pipe on a brick on the hearth. There was a note of impatience in his voice when he spoke. “Look, Ma, I know whut’s on you’ mind. You want to git at me to marry Babe. But I’m already married by law. I kain’t marry Babe!”

  The old woman snorted. “Married!” She took up a short, burned broom-handle poker and jabbed at the gray crust and red coals. “Out’n her head and in the ‘sylum six year. And bin there befo’! Whut sort of wife that?” She turned on her stool to look up at him. “And whut sort of married is you? Hit ain’t no real marriage!”

  Adam shrugged and straightened up, glancing downward in her direction, in assumed astonishment. His face was wooden, except for the tenderness in his eyes. “How you know so much about marryin’, Lectra?” he said, calling his mother by the strange name her mistress had baptized her with, back in slavery times. “You never did try hit none!”

  She drew up on her dignity, like an aged sable pigeon, a hand on the poker, before her, as on a staff. But she deigned not to defend herself by word.

  Adam shrugged and bent over on his knees. “All right, ma!” he sighed, in laconic apology. He gazed into the red pit of coals beneath the back log. He was not laughing at his mother’s early misfortune—to be taken by her white master. He wasn’t making small of the old story. How, back there in North Carolina, old Mr. Adam’s daughter, Minerva, married a big planter with Lectra as her maid and part of her dowry. How inside of three years that hard man—drinking to fight and abusing everybody dependent on him—made Lectra his open concubine. How Lectra behaved so that when freedom came and she could quit
her shame, she went back to the old Atwell plantation and Mr. Adam took them in. . .“B-but just the same, you never did try hit,” Adam, at length, repeated.

  She shrugged and turned away. Poking at the charred log ends and coals, she spoke to the fire. “Didn’t do so bad, without marryin’,” she said, “Got you and Deadman, didn’t I?”

  Suddenly shuddering, Adam said to himself, You sure hell did! And he glared at his mother’s silhouette before him, hovering over the coals, as small as a child and as black and gray as the burnt back log in the chimney. Yet Adam had to reckon with the fact that he owed a debt to Sinclair Cauldwell, his outrageous father, whom he never saw to know or remember and who would never have admitted that he was his son. . .He sighed. And Lectra had given his father something, too—else he wouldn’t have kept her as long as he did! He raised up and glanced back at the mops of yellow and red hair on the pillows of his double bed and laughed. It was a short, crusty, baffled chuckle. He wiped a tear out of his eye with the back of his hand and leaned forward again. “I hopin’ to bring Malinda back home, well and cured, befo’ too long,” he said.

  His mother sat up, startled. “Bring Malinda back?” she echoed.

  “I got Mr. Arthur Adair workin’ on it.”

  There was a silence, while they sat motionless. After a time she lifted a gaunt, distant face, turning her head, as if to catch a sound, the tight pigtails quivering like antennae. Then Adam detected a soft padding of feet on the porch outside their room. He stiffened, too. They both turned toward the door. After a moment Adam heard a muffled knock. It was repeated, harder. Then Adam decided that it came low down, only a couple of feet from the floor. He shrugged and chuckled. “H-hit the coon! Hit Bo’s pet coon, done seen the fire through the cracks and want to git in!”

  She shook her head slowly. Then looked at Adam and shook it again. He started to get up and she raised a hand to stay him. “Don’t let hit in,” she said, “hit’s too close now!”

  Adam stared hard at the face, now mask-like to him and felt the hair stiffen on the back of his neck. “Whut too close, Ma?” he said, “whut too close?”