This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  (Lucy caught her breath and glanced aside briefly before she read on.)

  Since you cannot properly operate it, it would seem to me, sensible for you to sell your property there, or lease it, if you can get anything like fair terms.

  (She sniffed, almost without sound, and automatically stroked her nose.)

  And of course, there is only one place in the world for you to return to, Lucy: Charleston, your home.

  (She paused to glance away, and her jaws tightened until the muscles moved in her cheeks. After a moment, she shook her head and resumed reading.)

  I saw Lizzie M. (now W., of course) at church last Sunday and we were talking about your situation and she fully agrees with me (and Julia W., as I said in my last letter) that there is nothing left for you to do but to come back home to Charleston. She told me that she was going to write you to that effect within the next few days.

  Lizzie has grown a little stouter, of course, but she is still the same old Lizzie of yore, who, for a lark, unconscionably led your father and the Texas bishop each to believe the other was deaf that time! She is just as full of fun and outrageousness and as big of heart and, believe me, she is just as devoted to you, as she ever was.

  (Lucy’s face limbered briefly, as if she were beginning a smile, but she only wet her lips and read on at a quickening glance.)

  But the purpose and intent of all the foregoing, dear Lucy, is merely to set the stage for your sympathy and to stir within you, I hope, fond memories. For Lucy, there is one realm in which time does stand still, changes not at all.

  The night you first kissed me, Wade Hampton marching by (when you were ten and I was eleven), till the next time, when I kissed you, on the evening you were graduated from Meminger (in the side garden of the Morrow home), till the more mutual occasion on the Murchison’s moonlit front porch on Sullivan’s Island, when you made me certain undated and as yet unfulfilled promises, is all one day, in the freehold of my heart. And that day is the unending NOW of my love for you, Lucy.

  (She drew a quick, sharp breath and held it, as color began to fill her cheeks.)

  Why do you think I have remained unmarried these twenty long years? I have always loved you, Lucy, and I always will.

  If you will marry me now, . . .

  (Lucy stared at the words, ceasing her reading, letting out her breath, while tears welled up in her eyes and blinded her. After a time she shook her head and reached for her handkerchief in the band of her apron, looking around self-consciously to see that no one else was in the room to observe her. She dried her eyes and began the sentence over again.)

  If you will marry me now, I will provide a home for you and your children here, back where you belong—where all of you belong! True it must be a modest one, but in circumstances not unfamiliar to you once and now I could make you comfortable and secure.

  And once you were back in Charleston you would find that you have not been away so long, my dear—not too long at any rate.

  With affectionate devotion,

  As ever,

  Edward.

  Lucy stared on at the name signed at the bottom of the page distractedly, her eyes beginning to dance. “I’ll go! Edward, Heaven alive, I’ll just go!” she whispered. All of them together. Go. Just get out of this Godforsaken town! She folded the letter, then opened it out again and reread the last page. Edward did love her! And he had a right to love her! Why shouldn’t she marry him now? Now? It wasn’t too late! She got up from her chair, feeling suddenly invigorated. But she must put the letter up for the present! Pushing it into a pigeonhole, she lifted the writing board to close up the secretary and its litter of papers. Adam should be coming shortly to make his report and she better see how Lena was getting on with poisoning the bedsteads before he got here. She pushed the lid of the paper-stuffed desk shut and, taking a bunch of keys from her apron pocket, locked it, then turned on her heel briskly. Last Saturday, after Adam left she had been reduced to shedding tears, she had been so depressed and uneasy over her situation, and nowhere at all to turn! She smiled secretly. Well, if it got too much for her now she could just move out!

  But, after Lucy Hightower had, in the middle bedroom off the hall, for a time watched Lena dip the long turkey feather into the bottle of poison and apply it to the joints and corners of the bedsteads, just to be sure that no unmentionable and unbearable insect life got into them, and had given Lena a few more specific and general instructions, she found herself around on the side porch, in the big rocking-chair, behind the trumpet vines, again thinking about the letter. She did not review Edward Louthan’s words, or think about Edward Louthan. She did not, indeed, reflect on the letter at all. She just enjoyed the warm secure feeling she got from its being there, locked up in her desk, like a gold nugget to be kept in reserve against an emergency. And to be sure, to be given a fuller consideration later.

  But now she did not feel inclined to cry when she thought of the dark and devious Land Deal, so deeply involving her and on which so much depended. She suspected that every man connected with it was trying to take advantage of her. Unless it was poor Adam, and he was scared, too—like herself! In her ignorance, she could not quite make out just how they intended to do her in, but there was something smelly about the behavior of every one of them. She recalled Peter Bright’s lank face at the meeting at the bank, when she had asked how they all happened to have heard her clay was in the upper swamp, and his mustache had actually taken on an ironic twist, as he looked past her at Littleton with a dead blue evasive eye. None of the others selling their land would be frank with her, either; none of them was really friendly with her. And when Mr. Littleton spoke up for them there was an oversoft core in his big bluff voice. She rocked the big chair and looked beyond the green screen of leaves away into the sky. This change of attitude of Mr. Littleton about her clay deposits, what did it mean? Could the land buyer be trying to dupe her about the clay deposits? Even Littleton, her supposed friend, seemed to be in on it, somehow! Or could this, this whatever it was, be something Oswald Paley was trying to pull off—could it be a Paley plot? Was Mr. Littleton taken in by Paley? Or was it all just the emotionality of an ignorant, frightened woman? She sighed and stopped rocking. Still she could not but believe there was something, something! And all of them were in on it—all of them, except Adam.

  An olden land line! Not only Mr. John, but Mr. Peter and Mr. David Bright.

  The words of her negro overseer came back to her and Lucy felt disturbed. She saw again Adam’s troubled, wry face, as he stood at the steps, uttering the sounds, tocsins that betrayed even his inveterate reserve, “White mens. . . all together!”

  She sat upright, her face gathering in an anxious frown. Adam seemed to be under real pressure! He had not wanted even to intimate anything against those white men. She turned a gravely inquiring face, her fine nostrils dilating, on the blankness of the shuttered doors at the end of the porch to her left. Of course it was characteristic of him never to say anything against white people, and she had not thought of it then, but could it be possible that those white men had been trying to scare Adam, somehow?. . .

  Lucy had grasped the chair-arms and was on the point of coming up out of her seat, when she heard a sudden, small, penetrating sound. She halted abruptly, recognizing it as the whir of the wings of a hummingbird, and, easing back into the rocker, guardedly turned toward the deep screen of vines. Her glance found the bird. Within the dim cloister, he hovered, a small feathered missile of changeable green and gray to scarlet, poised between two dark blurs of wings before an open red trumpet flower. Unmindful of her gaze, driven by his whirring power, he gracefully thrust with his long, slender, black beak down into the blossom. Then out again he darted, moving backward with the same swift grace, to poise in air. And, cocking his small head toward her, his tiny black beads of sight met her tender eyes in the white, still face, in an instant of mysterious recognition. Abruptly, the humming of the wings changed and he was gone.

  Lucy smile
d and began to rock the big chair back and forth. Wade Hampton marching by! she repeated to herself absently, her previous anxiety now out of her mind. She might not have remembered the incident but for Edward’s poem about it later. Yet she did recall the day. She was wearing her hair in curls down her back (having had it up in papers the night before) and a long-waisted black velvet dress. For it happened to be poor Russell’s birthday: the day General Hampton paraded through Charleston streets in the campaign that made him Governor and finally ended the night patrol in the city, ended Reconstruction. Her gentle younger brother’s birthday, and none of them suspected then that it would be his last! And it was Edward’s birthday, too. That was how he happened to be at their house.

  After their party was over, she and Russell were walking piece-the-way home with Edward, who lived just over on Market Street. They were loitering in the edge of the little park across the street from the Morrow house, trying to blow a tune with a willow leaf held between the thumbs, when a troop of horsemen clattered by, bearing torches, though it was not yet dark. It was only a short parade and seemed to be made up largely of negroes mounted on mules, but there, near the end of it, Wade Hampton rode on a milk white charger, sure enough, great-bearded, grand and gentle. He waved to her—or them, for the three of them stood on the sidewalk by themselves and just a few feet away from him, wringing their hands off, in their excitement.

  And when the parade had passed on by, they turned to congratulate each other, and she suddenly swelled with the bigness of the moment and the nearness of heroism and threw her arms about her brother and kissed him. And when she turned to Edward he looked so forlorn, standing there and it was his birthday, too—that she flung her arms around his neck.

  And they had all laughed and danced around in a circle and she would probably not have remembered it but for his verse later.

  The Louthans were, like the Morrows, German, and Edward’s father was a steward at Trinity Church, where her father was treasurer, and the families were old friends. She and Edward were more like brother and sister than sweethearts. Indeed, she even felt older than him, in some ways. Though not intellectually, to be sure! At school she worked hard and managed to keep within hailing distance of him, but she knew that she was no where near as bright as Edward. He was so quick and he remembered everything! It was a foregone conclusion that he was going to be valedictorian at Boys High and he finished almost two points ahead of the rest of his class. She had made salutatorian at her school, where the competition was not so keen, but by the hardest work and only with his help and inspiration.

  Rocking her chair, Lucy fixed an absent gaze on the red trumpet flower recently invaded by the hummingbird. She could remember the second one, too; when, as Edward said, he had first kissed her. Lucy, would you kiss me, if I were still eleven? That was the refrain. She had received his verses that day, along with the silver wishbone broach that he gave her as a graduation present. The poem sounded a little like Wordsworth, his favorite poet.

  Two of us our birthday marked

  And one came straight from Heaven,

  Wade Hampton, passing, dropped a spark—

  Lucy, would you kiss me now, if I were still eleven?

  There were several more stanzas but she could not remember them now.

  He had kissed her that night when he escorted her home from the graduation reception, kissed her at the bottom of the Morrow side garden by the big jessamine bush. He had been awkward, but so had she!

  She could remember the houseparty on Sullivan’s Island, too. That had been three years later, and he had just graduated from the College of Charleston. They had been pretty far gone on each other that summer—yet not too far gone, because she knew that he could not marry her. He had got his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, and a fellowship and was planning to go on in the fall to get his master’s degree. Yes, the kissing had been more mutual on the houseparty, but not without a sense of responsibility, at least on her part. He had talked about their going on and getting married, but she had known better, she had kept her promises strictly undated—his father and mother would never have forgiven her! Really it had not been her concern about them so much, however, as her own pride in Edward. It was obvious that he had a brilliant academic future ahead of him. If she had diverted him then, or held him back, she would never have forgiven herself.

  And he had fulfilled his promise. Doctor of Philosophy from Johns Hopkins at twenty-four, an assistant professorship, full professorship and finally the chair of Latin and Greek at a university in the North—even though it was Catholic—all before he was thirty-six! Over the years, the news of it had thrilled her! Of course his taking a place at Boys High was merely a way to get back to Charleston, though likely the principalship paid him more than the Catholic university had.

  She had thought when she urged him to go on to get his master’s degree that she was committed to waiting on him to finish his education. She had grown up on that idea, you might say. It hadn’t occurred to her that her father’s health might break down. Although, it was hard now for her to see why it didn’t occur to her, for her poor father had been moving from his bed to his patient’s beds for years! Her most characteristic memory of him was in lying down on the hall couch with his graceful thin hands on his chest holding onto a big silver watch to get five minutes sleep between calls—to be able to keep going!

  “Heaven alive!” she said aloud and, giving the chair an abrupt rock forward, got to her feet. She couldn’t have waited on Edward! Who could have? She moved toward the slatted doors at the end of the porch. At the doorway she paused and looked back. Marry him now? But he hadn’t waited! Too much had happened to her in the last twenty years! And to him, too, probably. She opened the shutters and entered the house. To her: six children, for one thing. And the deaths of three of them!. . .

  “Lawd-a-Mussy! Miz Hightower! Miz Hightower!” The raised, moaning voice of the quiet cook, Lena, floated down the hall. “Come heah quick! I’m scared Marse done hurt hisself in that autymobile!”

  Lucy Hightower clutched at her throat, for an instant transfixed, then hurried across her room and ran up the long hallway. At the front door she met her saturnine flat-nosed cook whose usually black face was ashen. Wall-eyed, Lena pointed toward the railroad embankment in front of the house a hundred yards away. “I just seen ‘im as he went over it!”

  Lucy caught on. Both women then ran down the porch steps and over the lawn to the front fence.

  Across the sand road, on the wide grass-grown shoulder of the railroad cut, stood a half-dazed boy who stared at them in white-faced fright and mumbled defensively, “He liked to run over me!”

  Beyond the embankment, Lucy glimpsed the corner of the black canvass top of an automobile. She gripped the pickets to steady herself, then falteringly summoned her resolution and moved toward the front gate.

  But even as she fumbled with the gate latch, up over the edge of the cut climbed Marse: small, and white-faced, his freckles standing out and his stiff red hair standing up on top of his head. He got to his feet and came gingerly across the green to the edge of the road and halted, looking very much like a fly that has just swallowed a frog. “I don’t think it’s hurt much, Mamma,” he said ruefully, “it went over easy!”

  Lucy swallowed, taking her hand down from her throat. She found speech still difficult, but wetting her lips, she summoned what firmness she could to ask, “Are you hurt, Marse?”

  One of the legs of his overalls was gaping at the knee. He discovered it with astonishment and felt of the knee. “No, Ma’am, Mamma, I ain’t hurt a bit!” He added, with a hint of professional familiarity in his voice, “I was just creeping along in low gear.”

  Tightening her hold on the pickets she gripped in each hand, Lucy stood speechless for a few moments while color came back into her face. Finally, she said with resolution, even sharpness, “Marcellus, I can scarcely believe my eyes and ears!”

  He hung his head and with automatic swiftness rubbed
a bare foot up and down the denim-covered calf of his other leg. “We were just going to run it a little along the green here!”

  Lucy leaned on her support and, frowning, managed a tone of indignation. “The idea! The i-de-a!” She shifted her glance briefly toward the visible part of the overturned car. “Do you know whose automobile you have torn up?” She turned her head to include the other boy, “Jerome, do you know?”

  The boy backed away, shrugging. “I just cranked it! Marse said he knew how to run it.”

  Lucy Hightower allowed her face to show only a grave concern, but resentment began to stir inside her. She suspected this Cranford boy, who, living next door, was always coming over without invitation. His father was the town’s leading doctor, but there was gossip about his mother, an obviously underbred woman, whose behavior supported such talk. And all of the Cranford children, girls and boys, and there were seven of them, were wild. She frowned. She was sure Marse would never have thought of taking over somebody else’s property in such fashion, if Jerome Cranford hadn’t suggested it! She spoke with a hint of severity. “I asked if you knew whose automobile it is, or was, before it was wrecked?”

  Jerome loosened himself assertively, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his navy blue knickerbockers, and even trying a grin, though it didn’t come off. “Old Halley McGrew’s,” he blurted out, half as if she ought to have known and yet in pride of the revelation, too. “He left it out here last night, with a flat tire.”