This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  Table of Contents

  This is Adam by Brainard Cheney

  Titles by the Author

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  THIS

  IS

  ADAM

  A novel by Brainard Cheney

  MM John Welda BookHouse

  2012

  By the same author:

  Lightwood

  River Rogue

  Devil’s Elbow

  ©Copyright 1958 by Brainard Cheney

  ©Estate of Brainard Cheney, Roy Neel

  Published by permission 2012 by MM John Welda BookHouse

  P.O. Box 111, Eastman, Georgia 31023

  All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-9839365-5-8 for Ebook Edition

  The Lightwood History Collection: Book 4

  For more information Email: books@lightwood.com

  http://www.lightwood.com

  To the Memory of

  ROBIN BESS

  (Whose character and works inspired this story)

  1.

  BALANCING THE LAST and largest lightwood log on his shoulder long enough to lift the end above the level of the board fence, the good-sized Negro man, like a dancer in a stately quadrille, turned with it and pitched it from his wagon onto the woodpile in the back yard. Then, picking up his hat and a large fish from the wagon seat, he got over the fence himself. He moved across the yard toward the big chinaberry trees at the back porch of the house, with the same upright, deliberate dignity. Flourishing a blue bandanna handkerchief, he pushed his broad-brimmed black wool hat onto the back of his head and mopped his face, a glistening ginger color in the bright morning sun. He approached the empty porch above the back steps under the trees, as assuredly and almost as ceremoniously as an actor advancing to the front of the stage to take a bow. As he halted at the foot of the stairs, he brought a jack knife from his jumper pocket and, bending over, rapped smartly on a step with it. “Here’s Adam,” he called in a raised, toneless, measured voice, “Adam Atwell.”

  Almost as if they had been waiting in the wings, a slender, black-clad white woman and a boy, looking out around her shoulder, were poised for an instant in the doorway to nod to Adam. Then the red-haired boy, in a striped blouse and knickerbockers, brushed past his mother and hurried forward.

  In one automatic gesture, Adam took off his hat and lifted aloft the fish. Strung from a palmetto thong, the sleek white shad, with closed mauve fins and quiet tail, manifested a sacrificial assent to the offering. “Hit’s the last un, I reckon,” Adam said.

  The small boy took the fish, a look of eager responsibility on his pale freckled face, and retreated through the doorway, with a flash of bare legs.

  “Have they started work over on the Ridge yet?” the woman said, advancing to the top of the steps. There she halted, to glance matter-of-factly down at the man in clean blue denim meeting her gaze from the yard, his hat clasped to his knee, unconsciously, his stance, as unrestrained and straight as that of a pine tree.

  He lowered his chin to emphasize his deliberation, and a light came into his luminous brown eyes that softened the gravity of his face and suggested detached humor. With a preparatory jerk of his jaw, he broke into speech. “N-nome. I-I ain’t seen no signs of farming over on the Ridge—by black nor white!” His lips, obscured by a scraggly mustache, worked convulsively for an instant, then he continued without stammering, “But there’s still time.” He resumed his attitude of grave calm.

  Mrs. Hightower shook her lifted head, shrugging her shoulders so that the edge of the short, black cape she wore about them fluttered to reveal a flash of the white shirt-waist above her black skirt. It was a gesture of tried patience. The frown gathering on her slim face drew up her cheeks about her eyes to accent further a fine but rather long nose. She wished she had the Peavys out of there.

  Looking up mildly, Adam spoke the lines of a familiar dialogue, his guttural bass rising to a key of protest and subsiding into depths again. He has seen Mr. Peavy over at McIntosh shops with a broke-down wagon, when he came by bringing his cow to the bull on Thursday. Mr. Peavy had been laid up some, had been laid up.

  For a moment Mrs. Hightower glanced askance at the eerily moving shadow skeletons of the trees on the hard-swept yard with her long, serious, gray-blue eyes. Her silver-streaked brown hair was coiled on top of her head in a pompadour, baring a high, well-moulded forehead that gave her face composure, and her long fine features, in repose, presented an aspect of disciplined resignation. But now her lip trembled, and she turned quickly and moved toward an upright pipe to a faucet and, reaching over, cut down the stream of water flowing from it into a covered wooden milk box at the edge of the porch. She regarded the box for an instant with distaste, before she straightened up again to her calm. She said she ought never to have let the Peavys come on the place, but, sighing, she came back to stand again at the head of the stairs.

  They were standing now as they had stood on most of the Saturday mornings since her husband, the late Colonel Marcellus Hightower, had died eighteen months before—exorcising a world across a flight of steps that separated them in manifest social accommodation and joined them in an inscrutable fate.

  Adam gave a ritual remonstrance, his voice breaking forth so suddenly that he did not stutter: the black folks on the Ridge were no better! He swiped the straight graying hair on his head with a claw hand and spat tobacco juice beyond the edge of the steps expertly to regain his composure. He had seen the widow Watson on Thursday, too. Her boys, she had revealed, were down in the swamp, fishing! He had made her get in the wagon with him and they had gone to the swamp after the boys, they had gone after them. This morning, when he came by on his way to town, the boys done had their big field half broke. He smiled, and the smile lighted up his eyes and his high smooth forehead with such a sign of detached ironic intelligence as seemed to belie his features and manner of speech.

  Mrs. Hightower shared it but wryly, resuming where she had left off, resuming, with lifted gaze, where she had resumed many times before. It did look like she would have known better—would have absorbed something over the years she had lived out here—better than to take them on the place—and, of all of them, anywhere, the Peavys!

  Adam’s smile faded but a wraith remained, as he spoke with tempered reassurance, propitiatory words. Mrs. Hightower, the old man would put in a crop, even if the boys didn’t help him and he was late getting it in the ground—he would put in a crop. He turned aside, his glance lowering, and formally paused, reviewing the ground before him, to be full fair about it. It was not too late yet! A rhetorical note came into his voice as he went on. Look at Adam Atwell! He had got in his corn in the Sand field, but what about the swamp? Yessir, the river was still in the swamp and the Wyche field was under three foot of water. He looked at her for a moment almost as if he expected her to reply, then a soft amused smile wrinkled his face and he went on. Ordina
rily, it didn’t get dry enough to plow the swamp field till later than this. He had planted cotton there as late as June and made a crop! His face began to glow, and he lifted his arm and the hat, like the soaring wing of an eagle. Yessir, he had catfish gnaw his corn off the cobs in the old Wyche field and then replanted and made a crop. He smiled with an absorption oblivious of the point he had set out to prove. But then, to be sure, there was not another piece of ground in this end of the county like the Wyche field!

  Mrs. Hightower had not been drawn into his admiration of the prodigious field, but looked off into the distance in perplexity. She was glad that it wasn’t yet too late to plant, but she still did not know how she was going to get the Peavys at it.

  Adam calmed down, lowering his soaring wing, and nodded thoughtfully. He had been studying about it coming to town. And again his attitude was invocatory. Couldn’t they put a sleight to it, maybe? Mr. Peavy never had brought her that syrup from last fall that he was supposed to bring, had he? Why didn’t she drive out there to get it—she could be coming on to the homeplace too, to draw off some scuppernong wine, and then she could be plum thunderstruck to find out that they hadn’t broken their ground yet. Of course she wouldn’t get any syrup, but that would put them to work.

  The Peavys didn’t make good syrup, anyhow, Mrs. Hightower murmured abstractedly and turned away. Then, lifting a remote face, she gazed off into space, in a way that gave her slim, black-caped-and-skirted figure, a sibylline appearance.

  Adam’s smile straightened and he glanced at her sidewise. She had that far-off look now two or three times!

  Feeling the inquiry of his eyes, she glanced down abruptly, remembering something she had been about to forget. She got an envelope from her pocketbook and drew pince-nez glasses on a fine chain from under her cape and fixed them on her nose to give her countenance a formidable intellectual glitter.

  Adam, as she read aloud, stared at her face as if afraid of missing a syllable, then dropped his head to ponder the ground. One hundred and seventy-eight trees: was that everything, everything the sawmiller reported? he asked. He seemed almost obstinate about it. Well, then, it ought to have been just a hundred more.

  Mrs. Hightower’s nostrils quivered and her bearing stiffened, as if in fright, as she balanced above the steps. Severely, she asked Adam if he were sure, absolutely sure. A saddened expression took over her face, as his response reached her.

  His mouth stretching ruefully, he stuttered with a formal reluctance, like a man admitting error, “Y-yessum!” He was sure. He dropped his hat, picked it up, and thoughtfully laid it on the steps. Finding a chip, he brought out his knife. He turned the wood edge up and skimmed a thin shaving off before his deliberate blade. He would have to take it that Mr. Berry’s hands just hadn’t reported the stumpage over in the bay, he said. He looked up, meeting in her face a propriety that half concealed ironic amusement. He said, a twitch of his mustache dimly reflecting this, “Put a sleight to it, Mrs. Hightower. Send the check back to him and tell him you had rather have it all at one time!”

  They nodded at each other ceremoniously.

  They might have been a priestess and the petitioner for a profane commons, for all of their unconscious formality and devotion to the business in hand. Although, at that time, in south Georgia their ritual was not uncommon.

  When Mrs. Hightower had laughed softly, her face momentarily looking young, and restored the tally sheet and the check to the envelope and the envelope to her pocketbook, she hovered over it for a moment, as if she had something more to bring forth. Finally, she drew herself up at the top of the steps, taking off her pince-nez and holding them out in her hand and clearing her throat. “It may not amount to anything, of course,” she began, giving forth the words guardedly, but unable quite to check her quickened breathing. She glanced past Adam’s sharpened face and repeated, “It may not amount to anything, but there’s a big land buyer from Philadelphia in town, with his attorney and woodsmen, and he has sent me word through the bank that he is interested in buying my swamp.”

  “Swamp?” Adam exclaimed, in empty astonishment.

  “Yes. Mr. Littleton at the bank says the man means business. His name is Lincoln and he represents big money. Big money.” Her deliberation vanishing, Mrs. Hightower’s words were now coming rapidly, in spite of herself, and round red spots showed at the cheekbones of her pale face. “I’m to meet him soon.”

  Suddenly buck-eyed and buck ague in his voice, Adam groaned, “S-swamp!”

  Scarcely hearing him, allowing her glasses to zip up the gold chain and out of sight under her cape, she went on. “Yes, Mr. Littleton says the deal will run into thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars! that it should give us some capital to open up several farms and make the place profitable and, of course, I need the money, Goodness knows! My older daughter will be ready to go off to college before long and I don’t know what all . . .” She checked herself with a wry smile and drew her hands together on her bosom, under the cape. “Of course, I’m just talking on: nobody has offered me anything at all yet and we don’t know that they will—anything that we can accept.” She paused to look at Adam, as if expecting his reply, yet immediately resuming, “But I thought you ought to know about it, in case you ran into any strange men out there, cruising the woods.” Now she halted and tightened her lips and blinked at him inquiringly, resting her chin upon her clasped hands under the cape. But before he could speak, she added, “Cruising the woods—of course they will be looking you up, probably, to show them the land lines!”

  Adam backed up a pace or two, clawing his hair, his jaw trembling uncontrollably. He got out: “Yed-yed-yes-sum! Yessum!” As he struggled to speak, his neck swelled and his ginger-colored face darkened with blood. “You ain’t gettin’ ready to sell the Wyche field, is you?” he asked, with a smile poised shakily between humor and fear.

  “The Wyche field?” Mrs. Hightower swayed a moment in surprise and dropped her hands down to balance herself. “The Wyche field!” She hastened to reassure him. “Oh no, of course not, Adam. I don’t intend to get rid of the Wyche field—they wouldn’t want it anyhow: they’re after timber.” Her head bent a little forward, as if over a plate of fine promise, eyes glistening, cheeks convolving, she went on confidently. “And I’ll reserve the clay deposits . . .”

  “And the oil slick?” Adam put in.

  “Yes,” she said, “and the oil slick—all of the mining rights. We’ll put a sleight to it,” she concluded triumphantly.

  At this point, the red-haired boy came back and stood beside her and she put her arm about his shoulders. Rubbing one bare leg against the other, he interrupted them. “Adam, that shad had the most roe in ‘im I ever saw—biggest shad I ever saw—sure a fine shad!”

  She ran her fingers through the boy’s hair and gave him a proprietary inspection. “Oh, yes,” she said, turning back to Adam, “we surely do appreciate the white shad!”

  The Negro was picking up his hat from the steps and he straightened up before he spoke. “H-he ‘uz the last un—the season’s bin gone. I had kept ‘im in a basket.” He turned away deliberately and moved toward his mule-team and wagon outside the gate.

  2.

  ADAM SMACKED THE RUMP of his gray mule with the rope reins, as his team pulled the wagon into the road between broad shoulders of carpet grass, to pass the long, gray, gabled house with its encircling trellised porches that he had just quit. He muttered: “Git in there, you contrary scamp, and pull!” But, as the gray tightened the trace chains beside his young red mule and they broke into a rattling trot over the silencing sand of the three-path thoroughfare, Adam sat back on his plank seat and enjoyed the sight of the finery of Riverton. The team took the dip, with Adam grabbing onto his hat, and bounced across the tracks of the railroad that bisected the village and turned into a broader grassless street along which, on the side opposite the shallow channel of steel rails, stood a flat-topped, two-story brick house, with grilled iron porches and a fountain in the
yard. It was the town’s finest, and he always liked to drive by and look at it. A rich steamboat captain who owned three boats lived there and sometimes he was on the porch and spoke to Adam, who had known him on the river. It was said that he was a hard but fair man.

  Beyond at the depot, on the railroad side, the bearded stationmaster, standing on the freight platform, called to him by name and Adam bowed and lifted his hat, and with the same motion thrust his hand into his overalls for his chewing tobacco. “When you comin’ back to the bight fishin’?” he yelled, as the team moved past. The stationmaster shook his head and his beard and nose bobbed up and down, like the features of a puppet Punch, without carrying any sound to Adam.

  At the hitching racks, behind the stores, a half-dozen country men, taking out their animals to water and feed them, saluted Adam. Three of them were white and three Negro. To the one group he touched his hat, to the other he raised a hand, with the same easy enjoyment, as he crossed the dung-strewn, hoof-pitted common at his sedately strolling gait.

  He came out onto Riverton’s Main Street, at the corner of a long row of brick stores fronted by a covered sidewalk. Turning away from them, he crossed the intersection toward the Riverton Bank, a corniced, cream-colored brick building (the town’s only one), that sat back from the street. He entered its columned archway, stepping carefully over the tiny colored marble tiles to the recessed doors.