This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4)

by Brainard Cheney

  Adam was dashed. “Aw now, ma, you needn’t bring him up!”

  She waved the mug around. “Whut difference do he make to you? You never seed ‘im, nor knowd ‘im. He ‘uz just a couldn’t-help-it, so far as you concerned.”

  Adam’s grimace ended in a dim vindictive smile. “I reckon I couldn’t holp hit, for sho’!” he said and emptied his cup.

  “Yeah,” she pursued, “look like Paley, but bigger and more of a man—more devil, too!”

  Adam sought to divert her. “Talkin’ about egg-suckin’ dawgs! You ought to have seen Hinshaw Slappy back off, like a rattlesnake had buzzed ‘im, when I tried to hand ‘im this half-a-hundred dollar bill. He damned nigh run back in the house!”

  Again she cackled grimly. “Ole Henstraw Sneaky!” she crooned in a cracked voice. . ..”And ole Coon-face! Whut did ole Coon-face say?”

  Smiling, Adam reflected. “He didn’t say so much,” he began, after a pause. “But he looked awful hacked. And worried.” Staring reminiscently into the fireplace, he added, “I don’t think Mr. Milt knew whut they were goin’ to do with his money when he contributed.”

  “Hah!” Electra said sharply, lifting her Indian-like features. “He white man just like the rest of ‘em!”

  Adam shook his head. “I wouldn’t ’ve thought of ‘im ag’in for nothin’—not even for the other half of that big money!” she said and poured herself another mug of wine. She turned stiffly and a little unsteadily, her dark face held high. “But, son, you done put a plaster on your ma’s ole sore, you done poultice her carbuncle!” She drank to it.

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t know, ma. I kept ‘em from drownin’ me—the low, white-trash sons-of-bitches! That’s all I know.” He took a gulp from his cup. “If’n that helps you, I’m glad.”

  “You kain’t know how hit do help! You ain’t lived long enough. And you didn’t start livin’ soon enough.” She looked into her cup and raised the pitch of her voice. “You ain’t never had no white man to say to you, and you a green careful-brought-up girl. ‘Lay down, wench, and spread your legs!’ and when he git through, kick you off’n the lounge, there in he office!”

  Adam jerked up out of his chair. “Here, ma, cut that out!”

  “Well hit happen, happen to me—your ma. In slavery.” She went on, looking into the blaze, rocking with her cup. “He looked at you one time. Took you in his hand. ‘Got me a yellow baby, didn’t I?’ he say. Then he never would look at you no mo’. Made me send you off, when he took to comin’ to my shack in the night. ‘Keep that little yellow bastard out’n my sight,’ he say, ‘if’n you don’t I’m goin’ to feed ‘im to the hawgs!’”

  Adam spoke gruffly, from the open doorway, where he stood, peering into the gray pall on the night’s blackness. “N-now, ma! You adding somethin’ to hit!”

  “Hit true! Hit true! I just wouldn’t never tell you before.”

  Adam jerked around, as if to retort, but only took a drink from his mug and turned back to the darkness.

  “I got back at him though, I got back at him,” Electra went on in her singsong tone. “Tellin’ ‘im that I give Miss Minnie a brew and conjure her so she couldn’t have no babies. He make like he don’t believe hit, ’ceptin’ sometime when he drunk. But I use to tell ‘im, ‘Well, if’n you don’t believe it, why don’t you git you one?’ Then he beat me!” She threw up her head and uttered her high thin laughter.

  Adam shuddered and walked out on the porch. Bending over in the half-light and putting out his hand, he said, “Here Bo’s pet coon . . .” He turned back to the door. “Come on in, little coon!” he said, inviting it in.

  His mother was still rocking before the hearth. “Yeah, Miss Minnie triflin’ and weak in the head, like Malinda!” she said, as if to herself.

  “You leave Malinda out of this!” Adam said sharply. . . .He came back to the fireplace and leaned against the mantel. “She dead now, and you kin leave ‘er alone!”

  This seemed to give Electra pause for a time. She filled both cups again. Then she muttered, taking up the conversation where it was broken off. “I don’t know whether she so dead; you ain’t doin’ nothin’ ‘bout Babe!” Adam did not respond and, after a moment, she added, “Goin’ to find you another woman, I reckon, now you done bigged this one!. . .Course she don’t deserve no better!” She laughed and lifted her cup. “Whut that puke, Paley say? ‘Naw, not me! He work for Henstraw!’”

  Adam eyed her in surprise—she was showing her liquor, but he joined in her laughter. “Paley see that Judas money, hit like to pull ‘e eyes outn’ ‘e head!” he crowed thickly. “And Sneaky run like a rattlesnake after ‘im!” They went on laughing.

  After a silence, she looked up at Adam unsteadily, and had again grown querulous. “Still you oughtn’t to took that white boy along down the river!”

  Adam shrugged and frowned. “Listen, ma, why you call Marse ‘that white boy’? He bin out here ‘nuff for you to know ‘im good!”

  She lifted high her face and glared at him. “He white, ain’t ‘e?” She reeled a little on her stool, losing her composure.

  This softened Adam’s face. He grinned. “You done got drunk, ma!”

  “ ’E white, ain’t ‘e?” she repeated angrily. “And so is that ‘oman on the back porch!” Electra wobbled. “’E white, too!” She grabbed Adam by the leg to pull herself up. “And you better leave ‘er alone!” She held on precariously and Adam was about to give her support, when she broke away and wobbled into the middle of the room. Adam was shocked. He had never seen her drunk before. He moved toward her to grab her before she fell. But she was raising her mug and she threw it, as he reached for her arm, and this made him miss her. She sat flat on the floor, amid a crash of broken glass.

  Adam stood over her. Then he looked through the wavering light and haze across the room. She had broken the wedding picture of Malinda and him!

  For a moment he was stirred with revulsion for the small, shriveled, bundle of bones on the floor. He shook his head. Then he picked her up carefully and carried her to the head of the big double bed, pulled down the cover, and laid her between the sheets.

  She muttered once more, “’E white, ain’t ‘e?” and fell asleep.

  Adam came back to the hearth, in a fit of coughing and almost stepped on the coon. He suddenly realized that he was getting drunk himself. He felt nausea coming on him and he sat down again in his chair. He turned to the coon, sitting on his haunches, with his paws clasped before him, gazing at Adam warily. Adam extended him a finger. “Yessuh, Brother Coon,” he said, “H-hit’s ‘bout time you took over—ag’in!”

  The coon hesitantly took hold of his finger and looked up at him.

  Adam’s eyes wavered as he tried to fix his gaze on the right coon. “Lead me to that place, little coon!” he said before he stretched out to sleep.

  23.

  MARTIN SLATER, the land buyer’s lawyer, placed the long envelope on the table before him, in the back room of the bank at Riverton. Lifting his lean crisp face, his thin nostrils curving faintly, he relaxed the dry line of his mouth in what for him was a smile. “Mrs. Hightower!” He looked across the table at the widow, gentlewomanly, in her white pleated-muslin shirtwaist, with its high net collar. Then he turned to Adam, seated beside his landlord, the widow, at a distance of three feet, and dressed in fresh-washed denim shirt and overalls. “I believe they address you as Adam?” he said, nodding. He glanced up at the banker, at the table-end, last. “You are, as we know, Mr. Littleton, Mrs. Hightower’s unofficial adviser in the negotiations we have had.”

  He took hold of the letter with his long fingers, lifting it above a white cuff that extended stiffly from the gray sleeve of his alpaca coat, in defiance of the August weather. “Before I discuss this with you, I would like to transmit Mr. Lincoln’s greetings and good wishes and make an introductory remark.” He glanced about in inquiry and they nodded in response.

  Mr. Slater’s cheeks visibly convolved and his eyelids, behind his p
ince-nez, flickered in what was almost a second smile. “When Mr. Lincoln and I came south early last spring to buy timberland,” he began, “we were prepared to encounter some new experiences—even though I had been representing him in buying land for fifteen years. But we had not expected such a—” he lowered his gaze to the envelope carefully—“such a mystery, I suppose you could call it?” He looked up at them. “Not one that would involve us, to be sure!”

  He shook his head, glancing wryly at Littleton, then at Adam. “I probably have not heard all of it yet. . . . Perhaps, no one knows all of it!” He turned the letter lengthwise. “But a recent extraordinary occurrence on the Oconee River has brought things to a climax, and to resolution, so to speak. It has, also, put into perspective this letter, about which I’m going to speak in a minute, and which has had us greatly disturbed. Indeed, it is responsible for my return here at this time!”

  He wagged his head and looked at Adam, with a hint of sly humor on his face. “A peculiarity of our mystery seems to be that it is really a comedy of errors—need not have happened—has revolved about palpable circumstances that could easily have been cleared up. . . .But so are most mysteries in retrospect, I suppose.”

  He now picked up the envelope and drew the letter from it. “Our first business here this morning is this communication.” Lowering it to look at them, he continued, “But first let me say that this is the only one of several that we received from the sender. This one is the climax of the series and may possibly be incriminating for him. The writer began by giving us vague warnings of unspecified things in connection with the Land Deal through which we were, he said, being taken in. We didn’t know quite what to make of it. Whether this man was a crank, or what. It is still possible that he is a crank. But we doubt it.”

  He looked at Mrs. Hightower. “That is why I asked you to bring Adam. I want, first, to question him on certain claims about him, made in the letter, to establish the substantiality of them. Otherwise, we would not bother you about them at all.” He glanced at Littleton. “Do you agree to this?”

  The widow’s adviser bobbed his head demonstratively, heaving himself from his chins to his bulging shirt-front, with specks of ambeer stain on it.

  Slater took in Mrs. Hightower and Adam in one glance, saying, “Adam, will you answer some questions?”

  Adam, graver than the rest, sitting upright and apart in his chair, said simply, “I’ll t-try.”

  After a few qualifying questions, in correct legal order, Slater said, a certain sharpening curiosity in his face, “Adam, do you know where the deposits of clay are located on the Hightower property?”

  Adam blinked at the table top, then lifted his gaze firmly. “Yessuh,” he said.

  Slater cleared his throat. “How long have you had this knowledge?”

  “I wuz with the Colonel and his engineer when they made the borings—ever one of ‘em,” Adam said, without stuttering, without a quiver in his face or relaxation of his gaze.

  “Adam, which lots are they located on?”

  “Lots a hundred and forty-five, a hundred and forty-fo’ and a hundred and forty-three, on the river.” Adam said.

  There was a stir about the table. Littleton broke his subdued quiet with a grunt. The widow caught her breath and let it out in a soft sigh. And Slater took off his pince-nez.

  He spoke again, raising his eyebrows. “Do you know that the uncertainty about the location of that clay has been a delaying complication in this deal? And that you contributed to it?”

  “Yessuh,” Adam said simply.

  “Why?” Slater said, with a clarity of tone that amounted to almost sharpness, “Why didn’t you say where the clay was long ago?”

  In a visage otherwise grim, a dim smile showed in Adam’s eyes. “F-for one thing, nobody axed me to.”

  This created further stir, though almost soundless, as the others looked at each other in surprise.

  He went on. “Not directly, they didn’t. And, not any way at all, and them wantin’ me to tell the truth.”

  “Why, Adam!” the widow exclaimed.

  “Course, I don’t mean you, Mrs. Hightower. . . .That ‘uz just h-hit!”

  Suddenly Slater had the letter in his hand, restoring his glasses. “Yes,” he said, glancing over the page before him. “Adam, does Mr. Paley or anyone connected with him now exercise, or in the past have they exercised any”—he fixed his gaze on the paper—“persuasion and control over you?”

  Relaxing his sharpened attention, Adam nodded that he got it. He then shook his head in bafflement. Finally he slipped down in his seat, smiling wryly. “That’s a big ‘un!” he said shrugging. “I don’t knows whether I knows whut you means, per-ekzackly. . .I-I couldn’t say for certain.” He lifted a struggling face toward the banker, gazing just off his shoulder. “I could-a-say, I ain’t bin under his c-control”—he halted uncertainly—“ceptin’, you might say, just long enough for me to h-hit the water and come up.” His glance swept the group self-consciously. The widow was frowning at him in puzzlement, Littleton was glowering, Slater seemed drily amused. He shook himself and straightened in his chair. “But there wuz a time when Mr. Paley persuaded me pretty powerful.” Adam scratched his head. “Couldn’t say whether he exercised it, or no. But he sho’ used other people to put the persuader to me!”

  Slater’s jaw dropped, his mouth opened and he uttered a token laughter. “Heh-heh-heh!” he said. “What did happen to you, Adam?”

  Adam lowered his head and sat in silence for a time, then said, “I-I-I’druther not say!”

  Mrs. Hightower interrupted. “Tell him about Kiger Steele, coming to you with Paley’s letters from Mr. Lincoln!”

  Slater bridled a little, his face growing cold. “Any letters Paley showed anyone involving us in his scheme,” he said in a tone of official disclaimer, “were a forgery, let me say!” He added, sotto voce, “We did acknowledge a few of his early warnings trying to find out what he was talking about.” He began folding the sheet of paper. “But we needn’t go into it any further. There are obviously substantial circumstances to make this letter legal evidence.” He looked at the widow. “We will turn it and three others over to you. . . .I think they constitute a basis for prosecuting Oswald Paley for attempted larceny by trick.” He put the folded missive in its jacket, drew others from his breast pocket and extended them toward her. “I am not your attorney and, of course, won’t advise you what to do, but I think you have a good case.”

  The widow took them uncertainly and a little reluctantly. “This explains many things. But it is almost as upsetting,” she said directing her words at Slater, “as the long silence of you people.”

  Littleton looked at the letters in her hands and shook his massive head, a hesitation coming into his eyes that bordered on confusion. He said, “I owe you an apology, Mrs. Hightower!” His forehead reddened and sweat broke out on the bridge of his nose. He continued, in a downright tone of admission, “Though I don’t know whether a man can apologize for being a fool!” He laughed gustily. “I was sure taken in!. . .I suppose I was too eager for the deal to go through!” He shrugged and his voice gathered assurance. “I never dreamed that Paley—well, what he was up to! Not in the least. He had seemed to me just an enterprising young man and I wanted to help him along.” His voice gathered an edge of vindictiveness. “I am outraged at the way he has abused my confidence! If he’s guilty of violating the law, he ought to be brought to account. I wash my hands of him! Go ahead and prosecute him!”

  Mrs. Hightower said, “Thank you, Mr. Littleton!” in a noncommittal voice and laid the letters down on the table.

  And Slater, without giving the interruption more pause, resumed. “About our long silence, Mrs. Hightower, let me say that you must share the responsibility with us! This proposal of yours about your Okefenokee Swamp timber has kept us busy every minute of the time. And let me tell you, we have cruised the timber in a general way. There is a very valuable stand of cypress on your holding. But clearin
g the titles presents a major difficulty. All of those Okefenokee Swamp titles are clouded. We would have to go into court. It will take a minimum of eighteen months, probably two years.”

  “Two years!” the widow, the banker, and Adam exclaimed, in one breath.

  “So,” said Slater, “we want to urge you to go ahead with the Oconee deal and let’s wind it up. Mr. Lincoln is prepared to be here by the first of next week.”

  Mrs. Hightower nodded. “Yes, indeed!” she said.

  Slater went on. “And I’m prepared to clear up the points of contention between us, if you please?”

  The widow nodded, saying, “Terms, not contention!”

  “All right,” Slater said, “by whatever name. . . .We had of course, already arrived at the conclusion from Paley’s letters, but we are quite willing to accept your overseer’s word as final on the location of the clay”—he smiled drily—“despite Paley’s blueprint! And, on the swamp field, too.”

  Mrs. Hightower said, “That clears the air.”

  He went on. “And Mr. Lincoln is quite prepared to grant your exemption on the mineral rights to the land you are selling us. That’s simple enough. We’re in the timber business. Not interested in clay.” He put the ends of his long fingers together before him, in an orderly measure of his grasp.

  “What about the Wyche field?” she urged.

  His face clouded and he shook his head. “We recognize it’s on one of the fee simple lots, all right. But the field would be an exemption of a very different order,” he said. “Entirely different! You would be holding out thirty acres, right in the heart of our timber holding. Think about what kind of thievery that would expose us to—if the field changed hands. Then there are three other such fields—”

  “Yes,” the widow said, her mouth stretching drily. “I’ve heard all this before!”

  “Mrs. Hightower, you cannot expect us to grant an exemption that would make it practically impossible for us to resell the property?”