He dropped his gaze, in an effort to come up with some sort of smile, saying, “I s-still ain’t got no l-lease!” But it sounded truculent.
She shook her head. A frown impressed her cheeks, tightening the lines at her eyes and mouth with concern. “Why Mr. Slater said he was going to leave it for us to sign! Today. I had just been waiting word from you, or the woodsman, Mr. Kitchin!” She stared on at Adam for a moment, a disturbed questioning look on her face then turned aside. “He said that Mr. Kitchin and the surveyor had gone out yesterday to get a description of the field’s location, and you weren’t there?”
“That’s right,” Adam agreed, “but they didn’t tell me they ‘uz comin’!”
She went on. “But I understand that the surveyor got what he needed and Slater was to draw up the lease, to be read to us. And I could sign and you make your mark and he would be back in a week or ten days to sign for Mr. Lincoln.”
Adam had finally got a smile to the surface, his mouth in a set twist that did not match his smouldering eyes. “T-that whut Slater tell you last night?” He shrugged. “Well, this morning, Mr. Kitchin tell me they didn’t get no d-dee-scription of it and ain’t no lease bin drawn!”
She turned back to him, with her questioning gaze again. “I don’t like the look of this, Adam. . But there at the bank, when we were closing the deal, Mr. Lincoln made it all sound plausible. And Mr. Littleton agreed with him. There were other fields involved, too. He said he had to have accurate description of their location.”
Gloom swallowed Adam’s smile. “Mr. Kitchin say he don’t know nothin’ ‘bout whether Mr. Slater be back a-tall!”
“Oh, come now!” She lifted her chin. “Mr. Kitchin must have been joking with you?”
He shrugged and said soberly, “I don’t like that kind of jokin’, if he wuz. Hit’s a po’ sort-a joke that two kain’t laugh at!” He could have said more. He could have told her about what he overheard in the livery stable, but he held himself to a dubious toss of his head and a dour look.
“How did it happen that you weren’t home yesterday, Adam?” she said mildly.
But Adam spoke vindictively in reply, striding along by the steps. “There at the bank they said the next day—they was goin’ to be out to the place, the next day—which wuz Wednesday. . .I stayed there at home, waitin’ for ‘em all day Wednesday and all day Thursday! . . .They never showed up. And they never said nothin’ ‘bout comin’ Friday!”
“I guess they expected you to be on the place, pulling fodder now,” she ventured. “But your swamp crop’s so late and the other’s already pulled.”
“Yessum,” he said ambiguously and began to subside. When he stood before her again, a low fire still in his eyes, he said, “I had to take ma over to Deadman’s.”
Automatically, she drew her hand from the pocket, saying, “What’s wrong over at Deadman’s?”
“ ‘Twaunt nothin’ wrong at Deadman’s. H-hit ‘uz Ma!”
“Oh! How’s that?”
Adam shook his head a couple of times and his vindictiveness receded in a twisted smile, a reminiscent look of tried patience. “Seem like we kain’t suit Ma no mo’! And she got so contrary she wuz real hard for us to live with. But she went on her own accord. She said she waun’t goin’ to stay there no longer.”
“Well, old folks do get notionate at times!” She put her hand deep into the pocket again, turning it upward from the bottom.
Adam spoke with slightly exaggerated casualness. “L-look like she taken exception to me and Babe gittin’ married—after her talkin’ for h-hit so long!”
Mrs. Hightower blinked, then broke into a hearty smile. “Why, Adam! And you hadn’t told us a thing about it!” she said warmly, yet with correct detachment. “Congratulations!”
Adam’s smile grew very dry, his eyes squinting and the cloudiness of a blush coming over his face. “Yessum!”. . .He wagged his head. “You said I ought to go ahead and git married ag’in,” he said sheepishly, in self-justification.
She shrugged, thinking, And probably none too soon. But aloud, she said, “Well, I’m glad you took my advice. When did this all happen?”
“Yed-yed-yessum,” he said, in sudden obscure excitement. His jaw began to jerk and a pleased, but in some indefinable way, unmanned look come over him. “We ‘uz married Sunday afternoon, by our regular preacher. Mr. Arthur got me the licenses.”
There was a concealed air of triumph in her cheerfulness. “Well, fine, Adam! That calls for a wedding present. It certainly does!” She stood for a moment, blinking, her shining eyes fixed on him, but absently, as she turned over in her mind what it might be. Her head jerked in an unconscious half-shake a couple of times, but she hit upon it finally and, whirling about, cried, “Oh, I know!” and left the porch.
Adam turned aside, still flushed and smiling and took two quickened steps, then slowed down. He had not told her the whole story about his mother’s contrariness. Look like she never quite got over that bad night they got so drunk together. And she kept talking about Marse, sulking and quarreling every time he came on the place. Adam had not sent her to Deadman’s, but he had not tried to keep her from going, either. He shook his head and turned abruptly toward the garden fence a little way behind the chinaberry trees, staring at it absently. But what about Marse? And his, his outlandish boy’s notions! Adam recalled his words of the previous evening, in the twilight, on the river vividly.
The thing still shocked him. He wondered now if there wasn’t something to his ma’s superstition!
Mrs. Hightower was returning to the porch and Adam came back to the steps.
She held in her hands a covered, deep, brown earthenware dish, in a metal frame, her eyes bright and tender, as if she had just brushed away tears. “This is a new thing I received from Atlanta, day before yesterday. I got it on sale there. Just to see what it was like. It is very much in style now. It’s called a casserole and is used for deep dish baking, macaroni and things. And you can put it on the table.” She came down a step or two, taking off the lid. “I put a recipe for candied sweet potatoes in there for Babe to try out, in it. It’s a wonderful way to cook potatoes. Have you ever eaten them candied, Adam?”
“No’m,” Adam said, wagging his head gratefully, taking the wedding gift from her hands.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have time to do it up properly,” she said, looking after it, as he laid it down on top of the milkbox, beside his hat. There was a pleased, yet faraway look in her eyes, as she lifted them that was a little sad. “But I wanted, too, to show you the recipe and tell you about it,” she added, turning away reluctantly, resuming her place above the steps, her features straightening. “Oh, I know!” she suddenly exclaimed, impulsive recollection bringing to her face a fleeting, half-formed look of torture, “I know where there’s something I can put it in!” She whirled about again and was gone before Adam’s surprised and tardy “Oh, Miz Hightower, you don’t need to do that!” could have reached her.
She brought back a cardboard hat box and an armful of straw. “This excelsior will protect it and fill up the box, too,” she said, wearing a pleased, but-still-not-finally-quit-of-it-look about her. “That hat box came from Charleston!” she murmured, in a tone of fond melancholy.
He ducked his head a couple of times in appreciation and said, with a reserve that came in unconscious reaction to her surprising demonstration “Well, we’ll be proud to have it!” He set it on the milkbox beside the dish and turned away, moving back to the middle of the entrance, in deliberate, driving steps. He looked up, “Miz Hightower, I wanted to tell you somethin’ that’s bin on my mind.”
“Yes, Adam.” Eyeing him quizzically, she edged away in unconscious caution, in the direction whence he had come.
“I reckon I ought to tell you ‘bout this,” he went on, looking after her, with an air of admitting what she must have already guessed. “I, course, knows where Kiger Steele is. Kiger’s hidin’ out to keep out of mo’ trouble.” He walked counterclockwise.
‘With those white mens. .. .Er-ah, when you bring up your case ag’in Mr. Paley, he’ll make us a good witness. I kin git ‘im here any time, with a court order.”
“Adam, I don’t know now–about the Paley matter!” she said, with resistance, still facing away from him. When she turned, her countenance had clouded and she went on reluctantly, “I-I debated it a long time, Adam. I wanted to be sure about my public duty, of course. But you remember how it was, there at the bank, Tuesday, when we closed the deal?” Her cheeks convolved and her mouth twisted with distaste. “It was positively disgusting! They had been glad to do what he suggested all of these months. Conspiring with him, until he was exposed. Then they came to me there, pretending to be shocked—Peter Bright and even Mr. Murdock. Prosecute, they said. Yes, they were all for it, since they had escaped exposure.”
“M-maybe we git ‘em yit, in court!”he broke in.
She ignored his remark. “And I think Mr. Littleton had some of the taint on him, too, somehow!” She moved against his direction. “And Mr. Lincoln, for that matter. It is certainly not my public duty to prosecute Paley!”
Adam stopped in the middle, staring at her with uneasy eyes. His jaw worked convulsively. “W-whut you mean, Mrs. Hightower?”
She took hold of the post near the milkbox firmly and turned toward him. “Adam, I prayed about it night and morning for three days. . .Only Paley and, of course, Hinshaw Slappy, set out to steal from me. The others connived out of selfishness and weakness and because I was easy prey.” She smiled wryly. “But those are common human frailties, Adam. We are all subject to them.”
His teeth chattering, he broke in, with a throaty bark, “Whut about whut that Paley did to the Colonel?”
She went on, as she had not heard him. “And, then, I thought about my own shortcomings, Adam.” She glanced downward, then raised an accusatory gaze on the vacant air. “Yes, didn’t I give them a right to be alarmed and upset? I threw the whole deal up in the air, by my private conference with Mr. Lincoln and my Okefenokee proposal. And I did it out of personal selfish motives—without considering its effect on them. So, I’m not spotless, either, in this sorry passage in human affairs!”
“They’d kill me!” he barked hoarsely, bafflement rooting him to the ground. His stomach burned, his chest was swelling painfully. What, in the name of God! had come over her?. . .In slavery to your hate: Marse’s words flashing through his mind, tore him with pain and anger. “They-ey t-t-tried to”—he couldn’t get it out. . . .
She summoned her strength, with a lift of her shoulders and met his glance. (He saw she had not considered, had not heard his words.) “Adam, yesterday afternoon, I wrote Oswald Paley a note, telling him that I knew what he had been up to and that I had been saddened by it. I told him that most of his former co-conspirators and others had advised me to prosecute him on the basis of evidence in hand, but that I declined to prosecute him and forgave him. And I returned to him the letters that Mr. Slater gave me.”
Adam’s eyes bugged out and his mouth flew open.
“You-oo-oo did whut?”
“I returned the letters!” she said positively, clinging to the post.
He jerked himself loose from the ground, wringing his hands. “Oh, Mrs. Hightower, Mrs. Hightower, Mrs. Hightower! Whut you gone and done!” He was crying angrily. His face was a swollen gray-blue, and his bloodshot eyes strained at their sockets, like chained bears. “You done ruint me! Ruint me!!” he yelled hoarsely, not knowing, in his pain, what he said or even that he said it.
Under his gaze, spell-bound, the current of their dependence blazing across the steps and a responsive anger stripping her will naked, also, she cried, “You ruined me, too! Charleston’s gone!”
He flung himself away from her, his shoulders heaving, staggering as if he were drunk.
“Oh, Edward!” she sighed and turned away, shuddering convulsively.
As he stumbled forward, Adam felt that the earth had been tilted and he was falling off of it. And fragments of painful images hit him in the face, like blowing hail—as he moved on toward bodily explosion: the moment in the green punt when he realized that Kiger was going to try to drown him, the jealous anger he glimpsed in Littleton’s face as he was rising from his chair in the back room of the bank, Paley’s profile at the back window of the lawyer Duke’s office when the white men had him surrounded, his mother’s hard, dark visage, saying “He remind me of Sinclair Cauldwell,” Peter Bright peering through the slats of his barnlot gate: ‘I had to sell that paper of your’n’, the white men’s faces in the courtroom at Lancaster that denied him a human hide, and again in lawyer Duke’s office that look, Hinshaw Slappy walking across the room: ‘lines mixed up, which uns which,’ the night after the Lancaster riot, the white man in the flat straw hat, hitting him over the head: ‘Maybe that’ll wake you up, Goddamn you!’ the whirl of darkness and strands of dim light as he and Kiger were turned end over end by the current at the bottom of the river. End over end.
But he did not explode. He took off from the ground, began to float in the air. And other feelings and images boiled up around him, bearing him upward. There was the little one-eyed trusty at Lost Mountain Prison: ‘You can get out, but you can’t get nowheres else.’ And, the Colonel, on his death bed, turning away on his pillow to make Adam realize, finally, that his dream of riches was fading on the air. And, Kiger, puking up the water and beginning to breathe. And, his ma, limp on the floor before the picture broken by her mug. And, Babe’s plump, child-like hand in his own, as the preacher put it there and his realizing that it had never been there before that he could remember. And, the pale face of the white boy, killed in the Lancaster riot, the purple scar at his throat. And, old Mr. Adam’s soft wheezy voice: ‘Son, you can’t countenance the devil.’ And, the curious little coon, leading him along in the night-wood, gnawing at his hand. And, Marse’s owl eyes above the words that hung in the air: ‘You’re in slavery—’
And, suddenly he discovered that these words didn’t hurt, didn’t anger him any more, and that he was beginning to find out which end was up, even up in the air. And he realized that there had been behind him all of the time, through the storm, like a mooring mast, the dim shadow of a black caped-and-skirted woman—a blackness that somehow cast a light through his balloon-like transparence, now shriveling and expiring.
And suddenly Adam was standing on the ground again, in the clear August morning sun, wringing wet, and limp and weak, standing about twenty steps away from the porch, facing the storehouse. But he knew, without thinking, that he was clean of anger and hate—hate of Paley or anybody else—and he felt within him, a mild, sweet buoyancy. He turned and saw the widow, leaning against the post, where he had left her. He shrugged and, shaking his head, walked back to the foot of the steps.
He said, not stuttering, “This thing never happened to me before in my life. It’s real embarrassing to have it come on me here in front of you, Ma’am.” But somehow his embarrassment did not seem to him to be the most important thing that had taken place. He shrugged. “I didn’t know h-hit wuz in me so hard!” And he thought how right Marse had been.
She moved away from the post and seemed spent, herself, but there was a quiet resignation in her long serious eyes and tranquil mouth. “Let’s not dwell on the devil, after we’ve subdued him,” she said.
She now stood midway and at the top of the stairs and he faced her from the bottom. They both gazed at the five gray steps, considering the geometry that separated them and joined them. She said, only a little rhetorically, “For now we see through a glass darkly, Adam.” And she thought how strange it had all turned out. How she had thought she hated Riverton so much she could not possibly stay another day, if she ever had the means to leave it. How, for twenty years, she had endured her Georgia exile by the light of her dream of returning to Charleston. The celestial city!. . . Her youth? Her throat constricted and she shut her eyes to the rising image of Edward. There was to be no Indian summer for her. Her title to w
ild land on the banks of the Oconee had carried an irrevocable commitment! This was Hightower country, father and son, and Marse must grow up in it. Raw, rough, dark land, but somehow it was vital. And not the least of its vitality was in the illiterate mixed negro before her, torn from the womb of sin and slavery and curiously shaped in God’s image, the only man alive she had complete confidence in, her son’s foster father!
“We wouldn’t see a-tall, if’n w-waunt for you on the top of them steps, Miz Hightower!” Adam said. And he mused, I know now I’m going to lose the Wyche field. Mr. Kitchin said Mr. Lincoln didn’t want me to have that lease. But I see now what the Colonel saw, lying there in his bed so close to the door. There are more important things! And you don’t have to die to find that out but it helps. One of ‘em’s God’s freedom.
They nodded at each other formally. And Mrs. Hightower stepped over and cut down the water flowing into the milkbox, while Adam picked up his hat and his wedding present and departed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
From the 1958 edition
Brainard Cheney was born in 1900 in Fitzgerald, Georgia. He spent his formative years in Lumber City, a small sawmill town on the Ocmulgee River, in the piney woods region of that state. His father, a lawyer and a veteran (at 16) of the Civil War, died when he was eight years old, leaving him the only male in a widow’s brood of three. His friendship from boyhood with the negro overseer of the family holdings, to the memory of whom This is Adam is dedicated, was a vital influence in his life.
He attended college at the Citadel, in Charleston, S.C., Georgia and Vanderbilt Universities. As a young man, he worked as a bank clerk, taught school, ran a timber camp. He married Frances Neel, a grandniece of Sam Davis, the Boy Hero of the Confederacy. He went to work as a police reporter on The Nashville Banner in 1925 and, after three years, became a political writer for the newspaper. He left this position in 1942 to serve a United States Senator as Secretary. During the past six years he has been attached to the present Governor of Tennessee as a public relations man.
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 29