House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  So she prolonged his convalescence as much as possible, refusing to let him move. “Your wound is still open, Cousin Faunt. You mustn’t. I won’t let you.” He smiled at her pretty insistence, and his smile was sunshine, warming her; she kept him a prisoner of tenderness, watching to see him smile again.

  The fact that his strength was slow in returning helped her keep him in bed; but by the end of February he was able occasionally to sit up in the great chair in his room. At first, five minutes of this exhausted him; but he was presently well enough to go for a drive with Enid and his mother in the fine carriage that had been Mrs. Currain’s Christmas present a year and more ago, and that was her delight and pride. He could walk across the lawns toward the river; and since Lucy and Peter were alike devoted to him and were apt to trail along, Enid no longer had him wholly to herself. She tried bidding April keep the children away, but he asked for them; so on these strolls together she accepted their company, even though this meant that they, not she, had most of his attention. He told them endless, fearfully fascinating stories. They loved to hear of the old Negro woman at Belle Vue who had known how to brew in the still and secret night the dreadful African poison which took six months to kill its victim.

  “No one knows what she puts in it,” he declared. “Not just frogs’ heads, and stewed snakes, and lizards’ tails and ordinary things like that, but awful secret things. And whoever takes the poison has the worst stomach ache you can imagine, and he has bad dreams and wakes up screaming in the night, and he thinks someone is shooting arrows through him, and after months and months, he dies!”

  Peter delighted in these grisly terrors, but Lucy declared she didn’t believe a word. “I guess if there was any such poison, white folks would know about it. I guess we’re smarter than the people!”

  He wagged his head, arguing the point with her. “When horses have knots in their manes in the morning, white folks think it’s just accident; but it’s really where witches have made stirrups to go night-riding. The people know that.”

  “There isn’t any such thing as witches!”

  “Then why are some horses that are locked in their stalls all night sweaty in the morning, if it wasn’t witches who rode them?” And Faunt insisted: “Why, you don’t even know what it means when a hen crows like a rooster.”

  “I don’t believe a hen ever did!”

  “They do sometimes, and it’s always bad luck! Ask April! She’ll tell you.”

  Lucy refused to be shaken. “Everything’s bad luck for someone. You can call anything a bad sign if you want to.”

  Faunt seemed to enjoy her skepticism as much as he did Peter’s delighted terror; but not all his talk with them was of these dreadful mysteries. He taught them to soak in vinegar the balls full of powdery black dust that dropped from the oak trees, and thus make a satisfying ink. He showed them the miracle of making fire with a bit of punk and a sun glass, and how to make a cat saddle—four hands clasping four wrists in a square—to carry someone hurt or weary. He and Enid carried Peter thus from the bluff to the house, and Enid was deeply moved by this contact of his hands and hers; because he was so charming with the children, she loved him more and more. If he, instead of Trav, were their father, how different her life would be!

  Early in March, Brett and the Howitzers left their camp on Mulberry Island and marched to King’s Mill Wharf to take the steamer to City Point. They were ordered to Suffolk, and Brett would no longer be able to come to Great Oak as often as in the past. Enid welcomed his departure, since now she would have Faunt more completely to herself; but Faunt as he grew stronger began to fret at long inaction. One day they heard guns far away down the river, and again the day after; and though he was himself too weak to ride, he sent Big Mill to Williamsburg for information. Thus they heard the great deeds the Merrimac had done against the Yankee warships at Newport News, and Faunt’s eyes glowed.

  He began to speak of returning to duty. The Blues, after their surrender at Roanoke, had been paroled and sent to Richmond to await exchange; but till they were free to serve again a skeleton company was recruited and drilled in camp near the Richmond Reservoir. Faunt wrote Lieutenant Colonel Richardson, commanding the regiment, to report that he was on the way to recovery and would rejoin the company as soon as his strength sufficiently returned.

  A few days after the Merrimac’s exploit, an hour before dinner, Brett and Tony rode up to the door. Faunt and Enid and Mrs. Currain were all downstairs to meet them; and Faunt asked what brought them, but they made no direct reply. Brett said Trav was on their heels. “He stopped to talk to Big Mill,” he explained.

  “Mill’s better than any overseer we ever had,” Mrs. Currain assured them. “He’s been giving the hogs poke root mash, so we never have a sick hog now; and his kitchen garden is splendid. I don’t know about the field crops, but he put in his hot beds six weeks ago, and everything, cabbage, egg plant, lettuce, cucumbers, tomato plants, they’re just thriving, all the seedlings. He’s got the boys transplanting already. We’ll have enough broad beans to feed the whole place, and everything else imaginable; not just potatoes and cabbages, but sea kale, and rape, and chives, and horse radish, and leeks, and I don’t know what all.”

  Brett laughed at her enthusiasm. “I declare, Mama, you talk about vegetables as greedily as if you were a rabbit.”

  “Well, we need vegetables,” the old woman insisted. “I feed the people plenty of molasses and vegetables, and that’s the reason we never have typhoid fever. It’s eating nothing but fats and greases that makes people have the fever.” As was always the case when she was a little excited, a Highland burr crept into her speech, relic of her childhood long ago. “There! There’s Travis now.”

  They heard the hoof beats, and Trav came in; and he kissed his mother and turned to Enid, and she gave him her cold lips, and then it was time for dinner. Enid noticed that Brett’s face was lumpy and swollen and asked why.

  “Mosquitoes,” he said cheerfully. “Over around Suffolk they don’t just sting you! They bite a piece out of you and fly up in a tree and eat it before your eyes!” He asked Trav: “Are they bad where you are?”

  Trav nodded. “Yes, and flies.” Tony said flies kept him awake of nights, and Trav said seriously: “I keep slapping them till I’ve killed the ones hanging around me. It does seem to thin them out.”

  Brett laughed. “In our huts, if you kill one, ten others come to the funeral feast.”

  Mrs. Currain spoke chidingly. “You’re all forgetting what you were taught as children. Pennyroyal! It’s just as good to keep mosquitoes away as it is to make ticks let go.” She rose to go up for her nap. “Try it and see,” she advised them.

  After she was gone, Trav explained to Faunt why he and the others had come. He had met Brett in Richmond on recruiting service, found Tony there too.

  “And Faunt, I thought we’d better talk things over,” he said soberly. “You see, General Longstreet thinks McClellan will try to move up the Peninsula to Richmond; and McClellan can use the rivers to outflank any line we try to hold on the lower Peninsula, so the General thinks we’ll have to fall back. That means the place here will be in Yankee hands.” He hesitated. “It may not happen, but I thought we ought to decide what to do about Mama if it does.”

  Enid watched Faunt and saw him white with anger at the thought of this that might come upon them. He said in a low tone: “Mama will have to go to Richmond.”

  “I suppose so,” Trav agreed. “But what about the people?”

  Faunt hesitated, and Brett said: “They’ll have to be moved, or they’ll be taken as contraband of war. We’d better send them to Chimneys and the Plains.”

  Tony said there were more hands at Chimneys now than he could profitably use, and Brett said slowly: “We don’t need them at the Plains, either; but we have to take care of them. They’re used to trusting us. If you don’t need them at Chimneys, Tony, we’ll send them all to the Plains. I stocked up with supplies a year ago; enough, with what they
can raise, to feed them all for a while at least.”

  “Mill wants to stay here,” Trav said. They were sitting in the drawing room, Enid near Faunt and watching him. “He says they’ll all want to stay. They don’t want to leave their homes.”

  Faunt said in a harsh tone, “None of us want to leave our homes, Trav.” His hands, still thin and white from his long illness, clenched. “That damned ape!” he whispered. “That damned black Republican baboon!”

  After a moment Tony said slowly: “It’s all right to blame Lincoln. He’s an easy target. But it was people like your South Carolina neighbors, Brett, as much as the abolitionists in the North, who started all this.”

  Enid, remembering how Faunt in his delirium had raged at Lincoln, expected an explosion; and Brett must have seen Faunt’s color rise for he spoke quickly: “It’s too late now to argue how this began, too late to think about it. Once you’re in a war, it’s too late to think about who got you into it.” But he suggested that the hazard at Great Oak might not be so immediate as Trav feared. “I’m not so sure the Yankees can force their way up the James,” he urged. “We have seven or eight guns on Mulberry Island, and the Day’s Point battery on the south side of the river has seventeen. Then there are the guns on Jamestown Island. And don’t forget the Merrimac! She’s already taught them one lesson! I saw that business!”

  “Saw it?” Faunt spoke in quickened attention. “I’d have given a lot to see that. Where were you?”

  “General Randolph had sent me to Norfolk with dispatches,” Brett explained. “Everyone knew what was going to happen, and we all rode out to Sewell’s Point to watch. The Merrimac—she’s been rechristened the Virginia, but people stick to the old name—came out past Craney’s Island; and all the Yankee transports and tugs slipped anchor and scurried to get away. She headed for Newport News to attack their warships, so we were too far away to see much; but we could see the smoke and hear the guns, and those who had glasses could see and could tell us what was happening. She rammed the Cumberland and sank her, and then drove the Congress aground, and sank some transports tied to the wharves. The Minnesota went aground, too. When the Merrimac finally anchored for the night, right off the Point, we could see the Congress burning.” Faunt uttered an exclamation of satisfaction, and Brett said. “Yes, everyone felt that way, Faunt. We had a real celebration that night, and everyone was sure she’d go on next day and sink every ship in sight; but next day the Yankees had this craft they call the Monitor. She mostly stayed in shallow water where we couldn’t get at her to ram her; and our guns didn’t hurt her any more than hers hurt us.” He added: “But one thing’s sure; the Yankees can’t send ordinary gunboats or transports up the James River as long as we’ve got the Merrimac waiting for them.”

  Trav said after a moment: “There was a celebration in Richmond, too, till you’d think we’d won the war. Of course, if we’d sunk the Yankee fleet, we could have steamed up the Potomac and bombarded Washington; but as it is—well, Brett, it seems to me we’re just where we were before. And even if they can’t force the James, the Yankees can land as large an army as they need to march up past here to Richmond.”

  Faunt asked: “Can’t we stop them?”

  Trav hesitated. “I don’t know, Faunt. We’ll try. General Johnston has already drawn back below the Rappahannock, getting ready to move down here if he has to.”

  “Ah! Then the Yankees are at Belle Vue.” Faunt’s tone was expressionless; but Enid knew how heavy was this long-expected blow.

  “Oh, Trav, how could you!” she cried furiously. “To hurt him so!”

  They looked at her in surprise; but Trav said stubbornly: “Well, it’s true. We’ve left no troops north of the Rappahannock. We started on the ninth, moving stores back from Centerville, destroying what we couldn’t move. I hated seeing all the rations wasted.”

  “You make me so mad! Can’t you ever think of anything but things to eat?”

  “Well, rations are my job.”

  “You and your old job!” For Faunt’s sake, Enid was too angry to remember the others listening. “If you amounted to anything you’d help fight, instead of being just a teamster!”

  A moment’s silence fell upon her words; then Brett spoke, returning to the problem they must face. “Well, I take it we’ll move the people to Chimneys and the Plains. Tony, you’re the only one of us free to attend to that. Will you do it?” Tony nodded assent, and Brett said: “And we might as well make up our minds that sooner or later Mama will have to go to Richmond.”

  Trav said: “The General will warn me in plenty of time.”

  Brett asked: “How is he?”

  “Why, he’s changed since the children died. He used to be full of fun. He’s different now. There’s no more singing, no more poker games at headquarters; just drill, drill, drill. He’s the only general who drills the whole division as a unit.”

  Faunt said bitterly: “I suppose it was Mr. Benjamin’s idea to give up Northern Virginia. Just as he betrayed Roanoke.”

  Brett answered him. “I’m not sure of that, Faunt. I hear that Colonel Randolph will be Secretary of War in Mr. Benjamin’s place, but Mr. Benjamin will be Secretary of State.”

  “Secretary of State!” Faunt’s color rose. “I’d help pull the rope to hang him!”

  “I never liked Mr. Benjamin,” Brett agreed. “He’s too calm to suit me, smiles too much.” He laughed. “Cinda hates him. But George Randolph—well, there’s no one any better, for my taste; and General Lee is back from South Carolina. He’s been fortifying Charleston; but now he’ll be a sort of military assistant to President Davis. With Colonel Randolph and him in charge, things should go better.”

  Brett left that night, but Trav stayed to help Tony start the people on the long journey to Chimneys and the Plains. Not all would go. Uncle Josh, April, old Thomas the Coachman and young Tom his son, Cilly and the other house servants, and Viry who was the queen of the kitchen; all these aristocrats of the plantation and their underlings would for the present remain. Big Mill would stay; and so would those old people who preferred to live out their lives in their small cabins here. But most of the hands, including those who had come from Belle Vue, were in the long caravan which presently set out to travel afoot to Richmond, where they would be herded into cars to continue their journey. They went for the most part with light hearts, men and women and children in picnic humor as they began this great adventure.

  When they were gone, Trav and Tony departing with them, Enid had Faunt to herself again. He was presently able to mount and ride a little, and a little more each day. Enid rode with him, beautiful and bright; but—soon now he would go back to duty, and these blissful hours would end. How empty her life then would be; how empty and how intolerable!

  Once, but for his demeanor which warned her to silence, she would have spoken her heart. The day had been hot and still, and they delayed till the sun set before they rode abroad. They took the Barrett’s Ferry road toward the Chickahominy and turned off by a fishing trail through the swamp to come out on a low bluff above the grass marsh and the curlew ground. A flock of white herons rose in squawking alarm, their wings drifting snowflakes in the twilight; and Enid heard the silver whistle of circling yellowlegs and the “cre-e-ek” of a snipe. It was already dark enough so that a great star shone pale in the western sky, and she asked what it was. “Jupiter,” he said. “It’s been the evening star for three or four nights now.”

  They sat their horses, silent in the thickening dusk, and Enid’s pulses pounded faster, and her thoughts found words. “Oh, Faunt, please don’t ever go away from here.”

  She hardly knew she had spoken till his dark eye turned to her in long regard. After a moment he said simply: “It’s hard to leave a spot like this.”

  “To leave me, Faunt?” Her voice was a whispered prayer.

  “To leave Great Oak and Mama and those fine children of yours.” Then in casual affection: “Yes, and you too, of course, Enid. You’ve been mighty good to
me.”

  “I loved taking care of you; you so hurt and ill.”

  “You ladies are like angels tending our sick, wounded men.”

  “I couldn’t do it for anyone but you.”

  He looked at her, in his eyes something monitory which she could not fail to heed. “I’ll always be grateful to you and Mama. You couldn’t have been kinder to me if I’d been Trav.”

  His reminder was enough to silence her; but that night, tossing on her sleepless bed, pounding at her pillows with her small clenched hands, in a sweat of longing, she hated him as much as she loved him. For he would ride away, perhaps never to return; ride away and leave her desolate. What then? What then for her?

  Why, a lifetime married to Trav.

  Before she slept she knew that if this were all that remained for her in life, she would rather die. She set her teeth. Yes, die!

  And soon, soon to tell Trav so.

  32

  March–pril, 1862

  LATE in March, Julian and Tommy Cloyd came to Richmond together. Vesta, clinging to Tommy in the rapture of welcome, saw over his shoulder a delighted pride in Julian’s eyes. She turned, her arm linked in Tommy’s. “Julian,” she demanded, “what are you so excited about?”

  “I? What makes you think I’m excited?”

  “I can tell! Now don’t be provoking! What is it, Julian?”

  “Well, don’t look at me!” he protested. “You could see, yourself, if you weren’t blind!”

  Vesta saw Tommy red and grinning, and she cried in a fine exasperation: “Oh, you’re a pair, you two! What is it?”

  “Look at his collar!” Julian told her. “Look at his sleeve!”

  So she did, and so at last she saw the two short lateral bars on either side of his collar, the braid in a Hungarian knot on his sleeve; and in a rush of happiness she rose on tiptoes to kiss him, and Julian proudly explained: “Lieutenant Potter died of scarlet fever just before we fell back to the line of Rappahannock, so Tommy’s company had to elect a new lieutenant, and they elected Tommy!”