This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  “Why yes,” she said, “Yes, I will!”

  Adam stood at the far end of the director’s table, in the back room of the bank, holding his hat respectfully in his right hand. His left he rested on the back of a chair, about three inches above the top of the head of Marse Hightower, who was sitting in it.

  Facing them from the other end of the table was banker Littleton with the lawyer, Colonel Duke, at his side. Ranged along the left were Peter and David Bright and John Hightower. They wore, each in his own way, the mask of deliberate casualness and detached curiosity. With the exception of the elder Hightower, they could scarcely have felt more uncomfortable if they had been facing a ghost.

  Putting the flat of his hand on the table and gazing toward Adam and Marse puzzledly, Littleton said, with the sound of a grunt about it, “Mrs. Hightower probably got it mixed up?”

  Adam shook his head. “I—I doubt it!” he said, “hit’s the curious-est thing ever happen to me!” His voice held a certain meek dignity. If his phrase curious-est thing had a double-edged meaning it was only dimly suggested, but his manner did not urge them to believe what he was saying.

  Duke said, in a tone of cross-examination. “Did you say this Highpockets” (he glanced toward the Brights) “What’s his name? You say he jumped out of the boat?”

  Adam lowered his gaze toward the table, not pausing but a little increasing his deliberation and gave way to a dim wry smile. “I-I didn’t say hit,” he said positively—and now he did pause—“but I will.”

  Adam’s ambiguity registered. Peter Bright frowned over Duke’s head and Littleton shifted his hand on the table abruptly. Duke subsided.

  “Just where ‘bouts did it happen, Adam?” David Bright asked meekly.

  Adam spoke in a factual manner. “Just off those willow piles on the Injun side, there above the old ferry landing.”

  John Hightower, who had already smiled a couple of times at Adam and Marse and who seemed more openly excited than the others, spoke up. “I thought Steele didn’t seem up to his usual gab when you all came by me, there above Burnt Island!”

  Peter Bright interrupted. “I-I was sorry I missed you all.” He nodded at Adam and, without being more explicit, absorbed himself in fumbling through his pockets. He eventually brought out his pipe.

  Adam seemed to be in no hurry. “Yessuh,” he said with ease and great clarity and without stuttering. “Nothin’ like it ever happen to me befo’! We ‘uz setting there in that green snub-nose boat of Mr. Slappy’s”—he sounded as if he were deliberately spinning a yarn. “I had just got a good bite and was watchin’ my cork.” He changed his tone to interpolate. “I had done said a time or two: ‘Brother Kiger’, we ‘uz in the same Corinthian lodge—‘Brother Kiger, you might quiet today!’ Sort of ridin’ ‘im, you know?” Adam paused to look around the table. John Hightower nodded his agreement blandly, but all of the rest evaded his gaze and looked uncomfortable. “And he didn’t have no come-back a-tall. He just turned it off with a shake of his head.”

  Adam glanced down at Marse, who seemed to be absorbed in watching the men at the table. “I reckon there wuz ‘bout another hour’s sun, when it happen. Hit waun’t dark yit when you and Bo come down to the Landing, wuz it, Mr. Marse?”

  “That’s right!” Marse said, looking up at him, surprised, his mouth loosening, as if for a grin.

  “I waun’t watchin’ ‘im,” Adam went on, cutting off Marse’s impulse to levity. (For he knew why: he had never called the boy Mister Marse before.) “As I told ye, I’d just had a bite. And I heard ‘im say, ‘Adam.’” (He paused again to interpolate, again glancing around the table with his look of innocent, submissive, pretending-otherwise knowingness.) “As I told you, I had my eye on my cork, not lookin’ at Kiger when he said this. ‘Adam,’ he said, ‘I’m in bad trouble!’ ”

  Peter Bright clamped his pipe stem in his jaws, David shuffled his feet under the table. And Duke blurted out a question. All of them at once. “What trouble?” Duke had said. . .

  Peter began smoking with absorption; David glanced over his shoulder through the doorway beyond him and Littleton frowned dourly at the table. The question lay between them, like a spewing fire cracker, in the lengthening pause.

  Adam blinked in astonishment, then looked slowly, questioningly at the faces around the circle once more, as if he had not heard distinctly or could not comprehend. He shook his head gently and an ineffable twinkle came in his eyes. “Adam Atwell’s not the man to tell you,” he said.

  Littleton shrugged, his big belly making the table quiver, and Duke’s face worked nervously, but Adam did not give them time to speak. “Kiger said he was in trouble with some white mens!”

  “What white men?” Duke said, with open annoyance and in a dim tone of defiance.

  Adam dropped his hat. “Excuse me, please,” he said, as if Duke had made an unmentionable slip of the tongue, “I-I dropped my hat.” He shook his head apologetically and stooped deliberately and picked it up. But, as he straightened again, he heard the scrape of feet on the back steps and glanced at the doorway to see the glum figure of Oswald Paley entering.

  Paley was wearing a white linen suit, white shirt, and collar and tie, but carried his coat under his arm. Dark hair, roached back on his narrow head, and bisters about his eyes emphasized the pallor of his sallow face. These disguised his youth and with his hump-backed nose and receding chin, gave him a ghoulish look.

  But Adam gazed at him with relish. “Here, Mr. Paley!” he said, lifting his voice. He nodded toward the door. “How you, suh? How you?. . .I ‘spect he want to hear this ‘bout Kiger Steele drownin’ hisself” Adam caught Paley’s grape-like eye. “He had worked some for you, hadn’t he, Mr. Paley?”

  Paley, looking a little confused, darted an alarmed glance about the group. “No,” he said vindictively, moving toward the table, “he didn’t work for me! It was Slappy he worked for.”

  Littleton grunted, Duke’s lips gave a dry twist and John Hightower chuckled aloud.

  Adam’s voice wouldn’t cut butter when he went on. “Where is Mr. S-slappy, Mr. Paley? I had s-sort-a hoped he would be here.” There was the first touch of insistence in the softness of his voice.

  Paley looked at Duke, who apparently had been about to ask the same question. “I tried to get him to come back with me,” he said, still nervously eyeing Duke. “He said he didn’t have time. He had to get home.”

  Adam could see in the tail of his eye that Marse was gripping the arms of his chair rigidly to hold back his amusement. “Yed-yed-yessuh!” Adam said meekly, with an implicit irony that was lost on no one.

  Littleton, turning his head, said, “Come around and have a chair!”

  He nodded toward two empty chairs across the table from the Brights.

  Adam raised his voice. “I ‘uz just tellin’ ‘em, Mr. Paley, just ‘fore he left us.” Adam looked about the room apologetically, asking for an indulgence which both knew no one dared deny him. “He said, ‘I tried, I tried! But look like I kain’t settle it no other way.’ He said, ‘I’ll just settle it this way!’ And he grab a railroad angle plate in the bottom of the boat and jumped out in the river!”

  An impulsive look of relief coming into Paley’s eyes; he repeated automatically, “Well, he didn’t work for me!”

  Duke shifted in his seat impatiently and banker Littleton, putting his hands on his chair arms, as if to get up, said, “Well?” in his usual manner of dismissal, though not too gruffly.

  Adam, turning to him, raised his voice again and the insistence was plainer. “There wuz just one more thing!”

  Peter Bright leaned back in his chair wearily and the uncomfortableness came back to all of their faces, as Adam paused. He shifted his hat to the other hand. “Kiger never at no time say who the white mens wuz,” he reiterated, reaching into the pocket in the bib of his overalls. “He never say. . .And he never say who give ‘im this”—Adam dug in the hole with his fingers—“he just left it on the seat under the edg
e of the bait bucket.” He drew forth a short piece of paper money and tossed it onto the middle of the table. The men at the other end blinked at it. And Duke leaned over and spread it out. It was half of a hundred-dollar bill.

  Littleton remained fixed, with his hands on the arms of his chair, sweat popping out on his nose and upper lip. Red splotches crept into Peter Bright’s cheeks, Duke squirmed self-consciously back into his seat. But Paley, under whose nose it lay, turned livid and his heavy breathing filled the room as he stared.

  “The thing is,” Adam said finally and now his voice had thickened and his own face had darkened with blood. “The thing is, I-I don’t know whose hit mought be!” He paused and got control of the shaking in his voice. “Hit ain’t mine, to be sho’!” He swallowed hard. “M-mr. Littleton, whut you think I ought to do with hit?”

  Littleton grunted, belched and heaved himself up rapidly from his seat. Others pushed back their chairs, too. “Keep it!” he said brusquely, “the coroner might want to see it.”

  Adam nodded and moved deliberately to pick up the piece of money which he did with obvious relish. He noticed that Paley had not been able to rise from his chair with the others, but he checked an impulse to speak to him again. Taking his hand from the chair back, he turned toward Marse and winked at him solemnly.

  It was after midnight when Adam got home on Tuesday. He had been to a lodge meeting, where his appetite for telling his Kiger story had taken him. The yard about his house was filled with low-lying smoke from smudge fires against the August mosquitos. And smoke, with all the doors and windows open, had got inside the dwelling, too. He had sat down before his fireplace to lay on a splinter for a little light to go to bed by, before he discovered his mother there, nodding in her chair.

  She had waited up for him. And he was grateful. He hadn’t been home much since his now fabulous fishing trip with Kiger Steele. And when he was there he had not had a chance to talk to her, without Babe and the boys around. He wasn’t sleepy, anyhow. He didn’t want to go to bed. He felt wound up for the night. But telling his whip-‘em-whopper to his lodge brethren was a tepid sort of thing. He had to talk a parable. He could tell it all to ma! The lightwood blazed up and he shook her chair. “Ma?” he said, looking at her fondly, “Ma, wake up! H-hit’s time for us to talk.”

  He had not, he supposed, ever before gone so far with a thing like this, nor done so much about it, without first consulting her. But he had not had a chance this time. He had had to take it like it came, when it got there. That afternoon when he arrived at the Landing with Kiger, he had found Marse with Bo and Jake there, baiting a trot line, paddling that old plank boat of his. He had to decide right then what he was going to tell them. He had already made up his mind what he was going to do with Kiger, while he poled the three miles back. He had pried into him some as they came along. Adam had tried to make Kiger tell him who the white men were who had hired him to drown him. Kiger wouldn’t talk. Adam at first thought he would beat it out of Kiger, then he changed his mind. By that time Kiger was scareder of his white friends than he was of him, Adam. It was liable to get Kiger killed. It might even get both of them killed. And he didn’t really need Kiger to tell him, for him to find out, anyhow.

  His mother had sat up and shaken her head, without saying anything. Now she rose and went off into the next room.

  Adam, looking after her, decided that she was going to wash her face. When he got to the Landing he had already made up his mind to hide Kiger and make like he had drowned himself. To keep any of the white men, whoever they were, from killing him, before he, Adam, could get to use him in court—if it came to that.

  He had figured out where to hide him too: at the swamp shack of his old rafting crony, Guv Troupe, in Black Ankle, down on the Altamaha. Guv had hidden them before. But it was a long way down there. And a whole lot longer way back, paddling a boat. And he needed to get back before Hinshaw Slappy could work up enough nerve to come on the Hightower holding again.

  He, of course, had needed Jake’s help, for that long pull back. And he wouldn’t have Bo around for any purpose! But it would surely never have occurred to him to take Marse along, if he hadn’t spoken up about it. It was an outlandish thing for him to have done! But Marse was so much in for the trip, and he had always believed that the boy could keep his mouth shut. So far Marse had done fine. He couldn’t really say, however, what had made him take Marse. A fragment came back to him. “Look, Adam, I’m in this, too!”—the lines of Marse’s freckled face, pure and sure. . . And he had taken instruction like a soldier. He was glad now that he had let him come along.

  “Whut’d you take that white boy along down the river for? That waun’t no thing to do!”

  Adam raised his head to find his mother sitting at his elbow. He frowned. She could always read his thoughts!. . .He was in no mood now for the superstitious carping. “Aw, hold your tongue, ma, and listen!”

  She stiffened, staring at him. “You ought not’ve done it and you know it!”

  Adam scarcely heard her comment, as he sat gazing into the small bright fire before him with rapt gleaming eyes. He said in a guttural tone that was almost a laugh in itself, “I finally caught old Hinshaw Slappy at home tonight! On my way to the lodge.”

  She continued to eye him for a moment unresponsively, then sniffing spoke in still disaffected tones, “Whut about ole Coon-face?”

  Adam turned to her, pausing quizzically before he spoke, his cheek slick in the firelight. “Coon-face?”

  She snorted and rocked a little on her stool. “That’s whut I call Milt Murdock,” she said, in an even humor again.

  He tossed his head. “I-I talk to him last night.” He looked musingly into the blaze for a while, then sniffed. “He see that half-a-hundred-dollar bill. That the one time his inside music box stop runnin’!”

  She stared at Adam impassively for a time, then throwing up her head she loosed a high thin peal of laughter. Her gaze settled upon the fire again and she bent toward it with absorption. . . When she spoke her usually dried face looked swollen and there was the force of suppressed excitement in her voice. “Whut about the big un at the bank?”

  Adam snorted and turned to her smiling. He looked back at the blaze to ruminate, and seemed to have dismissed her question. Then he slid his chair about so that he was facing her. He held his hands to his thighs, as if he had them on chair arms, pitching forward to get up and stared at the end of his nose. “Take it to the cor’ner!” he said, with assumed bass gruffness.

  There was the lone high, but not loud peal of her laughter again.

  “Yes suh,” Adam was moved to add, “he stared at that half-a-hundred-dollar bill ‘til sweat run off’n the end of he long nose, but he wouldn’t tech hit!”

  “You ought to told ‘im to tear up that mortgage!” she said chuckling.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, adding parenthetically, “only he ain’t got it no more. . . .” He sat on in the flickering light, smiling in the fullness of his sense of righteous power, both his temple and his throat pulsing with its thrust in his blood. “Yeah,” he said thickly, as if to himself. “They all sit around the table there at the bank, nodding their heads to Adam. I say, ‘Kiger jumped in.’ And they say, ‘He did!’ just like they believed hit!” Adam laughed brusquely. “They know no nigger goin’ to commit suicide! They think I mought’ve drowned ‘im. Least-wise, they hope I did! But they don’t dare ‘spute my word!” He laughed again contemptuously. “Those low, common, thievin’ white mens! Do anythin’ for a dollar!” He hawked and spat on the blaze. “They ain’t anything too low down for them to do, and they kin git a nigger to do hit for ‘em!”

  “Here, I got somethin’ for us!” She turned around on her chair into the shadow and after a moment turned back with a large white coffee mug.

  He took it and tasted it. It seemed, at first, to have a flat salty flavor, but he got more in the aftertaste. He swallowed it at a gulp. It was scuppernong wine.

  She held up a cup, too,
and cackled, her high-cheekboned face taking on a painful look. “Ole tub-o-guts say, ‘Take it to the cor’ner!’”

  Adam snorted. “That wuz one piece of money he wouldn’t tech!” He drained his cup and looked into it. “There at the start, I’m tellin’ ‘em whut Kiger suppose to say. That fast-talkin’ lawyer, Duke, he bin tryin’ to put me on the witness stand. He kin talk faster’n he kin think. . . .I’m takin’ my time. I say, Kiger he say, ‘Adam, I’m in’—I kin see the muscle in old man Pete’s jaws a-shakin’, where he tryin’ to hold onto he pipe—‘Adam, I’m in bad trouble.’ Ole slick-tongue attorney, he blurt out, ‘Whut trouble?’

  “I thought Ole Pete had done bit his pipe in two!” Adam gestured with his cup, grinning. “And that club-footed boy of his’n kick around under the table like a mule tryin’ to git out’n a stall! And ole Bigger-ton, he heave way down inside he belly and grunt, like he sayin’, ‘You blame fool, he might haul off’n tell us!’”

  They both rocked in their chairs with laughter.

  When they had simmered down into silence she took a swallow from her mug. “Whut about that pissant Paley boy?”

  Adam laughed. “Paley!” he cried out, straightening up, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “That slippery, lyin’ little puke got pinned in his tracks one time! He couldn’t even squirm!” Adam laughed again.

  She echoed his laughter and refilled the mugs, pulling the straw-covered demijohn around into the firelight now.

  “Whut did he say?”

  “He say”—Adam slumped over in token of Paley’s posture and imitated his voice—“‘He didn’t work for me, he work for Slappy!’—talkin’ ‘bout Kiger. Dawg to the last,” he added, “an egg-suckin’ dawg!”

  “Yeah,” she said, quaffing her drink, “Yeah, Dawg.” Resting the cup on her knee, she stared at the blaze, a harsh look coming over her swollen face and her eyeballs gleaming white. She said, in a bitter tone of revelation, “He done growed up to look like Sinclair Cauldwell!”