The black swan (24 page)

The door to the cabin was open, and he could hear her voice. He entered the cabin as though he were its owner, as he intended he should be. Johnnie Mae turned from the hearth fire. Near her sat a thin, rangy man, at ease and proprietary on the fur-covered chair.

"Adam, be it truly ye come back?" she asked, and got to her feet.

Adam's eyes never left the man. "I want to see you, Johnnie Mae."

"Oi be right in front o' ye, dereling."

"No, I mean I want to talk to you . . . alone."

The man stirred and came to stand behind Johnnie Mae. His hands rested lightly on her shoulders. *This be yere highborn man, Johnnie Mae?"

"This yere is Adam, Roy. He be a bootiful man, be'n't he?"

"Aye. He be."

"Johnnie Mae . . ." Adam began. "I want to talk to you. Is this your brother?" Sure of the answer, Adam put out his hand for Roy to shake.

A cracked smile crossed the man's thin face. "She be tellin' ye faws effen she say Oi be brother to 'er. She sez ye has queer notions 'bout alius bein' alone. Guess that be the curse of the highborn. Oi be goin' over to Lolly's. Oi be there when ye be a-wantin' me."

Roy sauntered off, the long piece of grass still dangling from his lips. Adam looked after him. "What did he mean you told me false? Isn't he your brother?"

Already her hands were all over him, probing inside his shirt and down the front of his trousers. "Oi be wie'out ye fer so long a span o' moons done rode the sky and was lost. Be'n't ye a-wantin' me, Adam? Be it ye've forgotten yere Eve?"

He could scarcely breathe, let alone talk, but he wanted her. As he touched her, he remembered how it had felt to touch a girl who wore nothing under her shift. Johnnie Mae's breasts fit perfectly into the cup of his hands as he gently rubbed her nipples erect.

Confident once more and wanting to play, Johnnie Mae crossed the small room, removing her shift as she walked. Her body shone in the glow from the fireplace. She stood there as he remembered her best in his fantasies alone at school, posing for him. He lay down on the rope bed, watching her, waiting for her. Johnnie Mae, hips thrust forward, rotating slightly as she came near him, walked to the bed. Adam sat up, kissing her breasts. Her hands ran through his hair, pressing him against her as she rubbed her soft, warm belly against his chest. In one motion they lay back on the bed together, Johnnie Mae straddling him and coming down on top of him.

In the dusky firelight Adam's eyes grew dark with passion. With long, slow thrusts he moved with her and against her until her body shone with the same thin coating of sweat as his own. He rolled over until she lay beneath him, his to do with as he wished. He listened as she cried his name, murmuring in her strange dialect the words of wanting and endearment she spoke too quickly and breathlessly for him to discern. But he knew their meaning, and as he trembled and held her close, he knew she was completely his.

They slept, content in each other's arms. Late in the evening she got up to fix them something to eat. She brought it back to the bed, where she sat cross-legged, feeding him a bite at a time.

"Will ye be a-stayin' wie me fer a time, Adam?"

"I want to be with you always. Would you like that Johnnie Mae?"

Head to one side, she smiled at him. "Mayhap ye not be a-likin' me iffen Oi be there fer ye anytime. Mayhap it be better a sometime lovin*."

"I'm askin' you to be my wife, Johnnie Mae."

She lay back, her laughter deep and throaty. "Ye be wantin' me to wed ye, Adam? Be'n't ye a-knowin', man, Oi be wed these many years to another?"

"What are you talking about? You're not marriedl"

"Aye. I be wed."

Bewildered, he glanced aroimd the cabin. "But who . . • Where's your husband?"

"Me man be Roy. Yere a fine man, Adam, but Oi— **

Adam was off the bed in a moment. "RoyI You said he was your brother! What are you playing at, Johnnie Mae? No man is going to turn you over to another if you are rightly his!"

"Be ye riled wie me, Adam?"

"Hell, yes, I'm riled with you. What are you trying to do?"

"Oi be a-tellin' ye Oi kinna wed ye. But Oi be a-likin' yere lovin'. Yere a good man wie yere cock, Adam. Oi be a-likin' thet."

"Holy God! That's all it meant to you?"

"Aye. What more be there?"

"But I thought. .." He shook his head in angry disappointment, turning from her and collecting his clotiies like a scolded schoolboy.

"Didna Oi pleasure ye, Adam? Why be ye wroth wie me? Why be ye a-leavin*?" She got up from the bed, unbuttoning his shirt as he fastened his trousers, then unfastening his trousers as he tried to rebutton the shut, "Stop it, Johnnie Mae. I thought you cared. I thought you loved me. Thank Roy for the use of his bed," he said sarcastically.

His sarcasm and anger were lost on Johnnie Mae. She stood before him, not understanding why he should behave in so peculiar a fashion. She decided that this too must be a fancy of the highborn.

Hurt and humiliated, Adam ran from the cabin. He went to the house in Smithville, spending a quiet, sullen evening with his mother. Next morning he returned to school, vowing never to come home or to see Johnnie Mae again. She was a liar and a cheat And he was a fool.

During his last year at the university he studied hard and played even harder. Venturing far and wide, his reputation increasing as his escapades grew wilder and the trail of doting young women he left behind grew longer.

Somewhere among the long list of women's names and the half-remembered nights and the small gifts of trinkets and rings he had been given rested the memories of Johnnie Mae, long repressed and unconsidered

Chapter Fifteen

In the spring of 1859, Captain Adam Tremain, temporary master of the Reliable, stood on deck as the ship entered the main channel of the Cape Fear River. It was the end of a voyage that would deliver the Reliable to her permanent master. Captain Tyrone Armbrister—a voyage during which Adam had begun to think his boyish dreams of saving the blacks were no more than dreams, until he once more saw the coasts of his homeland.

After a short stint as midshipman Adam got his second mate's papers. Not only was second mate a dog's-body job, Adam had the misfortune of serving under Captain Israel Sloan on a ship plying trade between Norfolk and India. He had felt Sloan's brutal bullying and been educated in the back alley, dockside brawling of Bombay. As quickly as possible he got his first mate's papers, and from then on, experienced a far easier life at sea as well as a quick rise to his captaincy. He had warm memories of good companionship and adventurous travel—^Tokyo with^its quaint gardens and houses; Rio de Janeiro, brilliant in sun; Nova Scotia smoky green in her mists and turbulent seacoast.

All along the Cape Fear were signs of progress and signs that nothing had changed at all. Great tracts of once stately pines stood denuded and scarred by the turpentiner's

ax. In their place were loblollies, eking their existence from soil that would support no other tree.

In fields of cotton, rice, and indigo he saw teams of Negroes laboring in great gangs. But now there were more fields whose yield was sparse, more land that was not under cultivation but lay barren and naked in the hot sun. Men had continued to consume the bounty of the Southland too fast for natural recovery.

Adam had traveled to many countries in the past four years, but nowhere had the land been devastated with such speed as in his home country. Still, men looked upon the open, untouched areas of the South as though the treasure would have no end. For the Southerner, the price of land was cheaper than the price of flesh. Both were expendable.

Being home was to Adam both a joy and a sadness. Memories of bygone days along the Cape Fear and in the Green Swamp crowded in on him. It all seemed long ago and gilded with a golden haze of peace and young contentment

Once the ship had docked and his papers were in order, Adam rented a pirogue. He felt foolish, perched long-legged and wearing the uniform of a ship's master in the small boat. But he was coming home the same way he had left it. He had had no great ship then. None of the exotic sights of the world had clouded his vision then. And they wouldn't now. To go back to the beginning where he had first placed his foot on the road to becoming what he was seemed a valid and urgent thing for him to do.

His powerful shoulders guided the boat into the once familiar channel through the Green Swamp that would take him to the swimming creek of six years ago. He moored the boat near the swimming hole. By the bank there was a small pile of stones, no longer a cairn. The wind or some creature had knocked it over. The stones held together with primitive cement clung tenaciously in dejected clumps, much like his memories of Johnnie Mae. They were no longer a unit in his mind. There were scattered moments of goodness and bitterness, but they had clung together, bringing back to him a time that seemed lost, and in the losing seemed valuable.

In place of himself and Johnnie Mae swimming, there were three children making mud houses along the bank. They were no more than three or four years old. They

stopped playing as he came up, staring wide-eyed at the tall man all dressed in dark blue. He smiled, his teeth showing the whiter for the heavy dark moustache that covered his upper lip. Like scurrying pups they dived for the cover of a hideaway in the bushes. Three pale-eyed faces peeped out from the covering of golden hair and green leaf that shadowed their features.

Laughing softly, he walked down the path to Johnnie Mae's cabin. Less well kept than it once was, it stood in its solitary simplicity in the small clearing of jungle tangle. As it used to, the front door stood open, revealing little of the dusky interior. He came to stand at the stoop. His knock was light. Johnnie Mae stood just inside the door, a tarnished dream that hurt Adam far more than finding her married ever had.

With lackluster eyes she looked at the stranger at her door. "Who be ye?" she asked harshly. At her sagging naked breast rested the head of a contented infant, its small hand patting in a possessive search for her nipple.

As Adam stepped inside, Johnnie Mae reached for the musket. With one hand clutching the baby and the musket held firmly in the other, she faced him. "Oi be a-wantin* to know yere bizness, man. Who be ye?" The gun was pointed at his midsection.

"You don't remember me, Johnnie Mae?"

She stopped all motion; not even her chest moved with breathing. Slowly she smiled, blinking rapidly. The crooked tooth that had made her smile so endearing was gone. "Ye kinna be Adam," she said softly. "Ye kinna be. Ye was gone these many years. Ye be a thing o* the past"

He smiled at her, taking the musket from her. Then he laughed. "I guess maybe I am a thing of the past today." He didn't bother to tell her why he said it or why he had come back to her. She wouldn't have understood, or cared. "You didn't think I'd ever forget you, did you?"

Her head cocked on one side, she looked hard at him. "There be nowt o' the lad left in ye. Me Adam be gone fer aye," she said softly. She looked away, more aware than he of the change in her. "An' yere Eve, she be lost as well. We be like the rain seed, Adam, we let out freshet, an* the mawnin' gloam done smoothed us from the heavens.'*

He couldn't speak. The sunshine of Johnnie Mae was gone. It was hard and painful to look at this woman, used up and spent by Roy's utilitarian attentions, or to remem-

ber her posing for him. She was Johnnie Mae, someone special; and he had clung to her image as a last vestige of youth, never expecting her to change.

"Be ye hungry, Adam?" The baby still in her arms, she shoved aside dishes from the last meal. Memories flooded in on Johnnie Mae as well as Adam. Flustered, she glanced about the messy cabin room. She cleaned a chair of its pile of children's garments. "There be time fer doin' nowt but see to the bairns," she said defensively.

Adam's hand caressed the side of her cheek. She pulled away from him. "Oi be'n't the lass Oi was, Adam."

"Nor I the lad. Put the baby down, Johnnie Mae. Come sit beside me."

Warily she eyed him but moved to do as he asked. She sat on a ladder-backed chair, facing him. She was nearly prim, sitting there with her knees tight, her arms crossed protectively.

Adam lounged in long-legged comfort over the large fur-covered chair. Where once he had had the rangy, long-limbed appearance of a boy, he now had the massive compactness of a large man. Every muscle in his hard body bespoke power. Too many years and too many nights of drunken abuse at Roy's hands had passed for Johnnie Mae not to view this tall, heavily muscled creature before her with fright. That she had ever had the youthful strength to carry him up a ladder to a hammock in the loft seemed a fantasy too fantastic even for Johnnie Mae's freedom-seeking mind. Everything about Adam seemed beyond her.

He saw her uncertainty and fear. "Come sit beside me, Johnnie Mae," he said softly. "Play you're the lady and I'm the gentleman come to call."

The tears in her eyes were instant. She shook her head and held herself more tightly. "Oi kinna play at bein' a loidy no more. Oi kinna do it."

"But you can." With a large white handkerchief he wiped away her tears, drew her hair back from her face, and buttoned the front of her dress. "Now, my lady, call in your eldest to watch your baby. You're going out for the afternoon with your gentleman caller."

She shook her head.

"Do as I tell you, Johnnie Mae."

Johnnie Mae called her children, telling them exactly what Adam had told her to say. The oldest girl looked with fascination from her mother to Adam.

"Where be ye a-goin'. Ma? Who be the big man? Why kinna we go?"

"A gentleman be one a-needm' privacy fer his doin's, Lily. Mind ye keep good watch on the baim." She turned to Adam. "Oi be ready, but Oi'll not be a-thankin' ye fer this, Adam."

He took her arm. Together they walked down the winding path. On the way he cut boughs from the flowering trees. As he placed the greenery in the boat to form a carpet, she looked confusedly at him.

"What be ye a-doin', Adam?" Again tears sprang to her eyes. "What be ye a-wantin' wie a pore ol' critter like meself, Adam? Ye be a-makin' a foolery o' me."