House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  In the moving throng she and Dolly became separated, but Dolly could take care of herself. At home Enid found Jenny and Lucy and Peter anxious for her return. “We waited supper,” Jenny said. “I knew you’d be starved, so we’re having a heartier supper than usual.”

  “I was too excited to come home to dinner,” Enid declared. “We’ve been out on the hills beyond the creek. It was wonderful!” Peter asked some question, but she put him off. “For Heaven’s sake don’t pester me till I’ve had something to eat!”

  “I thought we’d eat in the dining room,” Jenny said. “Mama and Vesta came home for dinner, but Mrs. Brownlaw sent for them when the ambulances began to bring the wounded.”

  Peter, as soon as they were seated, renewed his questions, and Lucy too, so Enid began to tell them the little she had seen, enjoying their wonder and their eagerness. It was not often that they thus hung upon her every word. Trav was their hero, and this was more than ever true since he became a soldier; but tonight the things she had seen and done magnified her in their eyes. She told them every detail she could remember, and Peter asked at last: “Are they going to fight some more tomorrow, Mama?”

  “Oh I’m sure they will. And this time I’m going to get some place where I can see.”

  “Can I go with you?” he pleaded, and even Lucy, usually reserved, begged to go. “Can’t we all go, Mama? We can take some lunch with us, so you won’t get so hungry.”

  It would be exciting and delightful to take these babies with her. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  Jenny suggested that to take them might not be wise. “Tilda says General Lee ordered even President Davis off the battlefield today.”

  “Really? What did Mr. Davis do?”

  “Why, he obeyed! After all, when soldiers are busy fighting, they don’t want civilians in the way.”

  Peter, seeing his hopes endangered, urged: “Mama, we won’t be under foot, honestly. Can’t we go, please?”

  Enid put off decision. “There, we’ll see. It’s bed time for both of you.” She sent them away upstairs.

  Before Cinda and Vesta came wearily home, they had a grain of news; for a soldier on his way to the hospital with a bullet in his arm stopped with a note from Brett. Brett wrote that the Howitzers had been in reserve all day and were now at a blacksmith shop somewhere near the lines awaiting orders. He said Stuart, and therefore Burr, were away to the northeast guarding Jackson’s flank. He had seen Trav once during the day, a little before sunset, riding with Longstreet.

  But after that they heard no more from any of their menfolk for a while. Through the days of steady battle, when a rising tide of victory woke jubilation that mingled with stricken grief for those who died, Cinda and Vesta were seldom at home. They came only when exhaustion drove them, to sleep, to fill hampers with Madeira and sherry and brandy, to set the people preparing food in all the bounty that was possible. Enid protested that it was ridiculous to wear themselves out.

  “There are plenty to help without you,” she urged. “I can’t walk along Franklin Street without bumping into ladies carrying waiters full of food. You’re all just working like so many niggers. Whatever do you find to do?”

  Cinda said quietly: “There’s really plenty to do, Enid, even if it’s only mopping bloody floors.”

  Enid shivered. “Br-r-r! Just thinking of it makes me sick. Honestly, Cousin Cinda, I don’t see how you stand it!”

  Cinda’s eyes shadowed. “I heard today that once when the cannon fire was specially bad General Lee asked General Jackson if his men could stand it; and General Jackson said his men could stand anything. I suppose that’s the only answer, really. You can stand anything, if you want to.”

  Enid said indignantly: “Well, maybe, but I don’t even want to.”

  Cinda nodded. “That’s all right, dear. I’m glad you can be here with Jenny and Barbara.”

  Sunday and Monday the occasional sound of distant guns and the dust clouds that marked marching columns told Richmond that the battle was moving southward toward the James River. Monday at noon a boy came to the house with another note from Brett. McClellan was in retreat. The Howitzer company had crossed and recrossed the Chickahominy and marched south, passing within two or three miles of Richmond to take the Darbytown road and intercept McClellan’s army and destroy it. Brett added a postscript: Trav was all right.

  Cinda and Vesta came home a few minutes after the young messenger had gone. Enid resented as an indictment of her inactivity their weariness, the redness of their sleep-hungry eyes, their hoarse voices, their stony countenances; but if they chose to make idiots of themselves it was certainly not her fault! She was being sensible, that was all. Besides, her children needed her; and to prove this, she made a great to-do over the fact that Peter seemed to be coming down with a cold. With a certain elaboration she put him to bed and kept him there.

  Late Tuesday morning an ambulance stopped at the door. Caesar answered the ring, and summoned Enid and Jenny. “Hit’s Mistuh Trav,” he explained. “Dey done fotch him home.”

  They ran together into the street, and Enid peered into the ambulance and saw Trav lying there with closed eyes, his cheek drained white. “Oh, is he dead?” she cried, woeful with mysterious grief. It was terrible to see him so helpless and so still.

  The driver, a tall, raw-boned, slow-spoken man, said: “Yas’m. So fur, anyways; but I reckon he might come to life again.”

  “But we can’t take care of him!” Enid protested, weeping with fear and woe. “We can’t do anything! You must take him to the hospital!”

  Jenny touched Enid’s arm in reassurance, and the driver explained: “I done that. Had a load of ’em like him. But a lady there knowed him, and she said to bring him here, said she was Mis’ Dewain, said to tell you she’d come quick as she could git a doctor to come along with her.”

  Enid wrung her hands, helpless with tears, but Jenny took command. Caesar and the driver carried Trav indoors. The task was an awkward one, because Trav clasped in his two hands his naked sword, for half its length a bloody smear; and when Jenny tried to take it from him, his fingers tightened so that the hilt could not be freed. The driver of the ambulance drawled:

  “Be a mite keerful, ma’am. I took a fancy to that sword myself, but seems like he don’t aim to let go his holt of it at all.”

  The sword was bloody, and there was a dark stain of blood on Trav’s coat. Dust had settled on it and had become a reddish mud which as the blood clotted was overlaid with dust again; but when they moved him, in the center of this dusty patch a spot of brighter crimson slowly spread. At the driver’s advice they laid him on the floor in the hall, and the children came on tiptoe and Peter asked in a whisper:

  “Mama, is Papa dead?”

  “Oh for Heaven’s sake!” Enid cried, hysterical with bewildering compassion and tenderness and fear. “I don’t know!” She began to sob in a deep, retching fashion. “Jenny, can’t we do something? Can’t we get a doctor?”

  “Mama will bring someone. You go lie down, dear. June and I will take care of him.” She spoke to Lucy. “Lucy, take your Mama upstairs and put her to bed.”

  Enid submitted, and Lucy led her sweetly away, mothering her in loving kindness, and she brought a cold compress to lay across Enid’s eyes. “There, Mama, you’ll feel better soon. Rest now and be ready, so you can take care of Papa.”

  Enid said wretchedly: “Oh Lucy, he’s going to die.” He mustn’t die! “I don’t know what to do, Lucy,” she wailed. “I don’t know how to take care of hurt people!”

  “You took awful good care of Uncle Faunt!”

  Enid shook her head. Taking care of Faunt had been beautiful and contenting, like a noble adventure, but she always knew he would get well. Trav was surely going to die! And Faunt after all was only her brother-in-law; Trav was her husband! An hour ago she would have said she wished him dead; but not now, not if he were really going to die!

  13

  July—August, 1862

 
; WHEN the battle came to the very threshold of Richmond, the flood of wounded poured into the city in a crimson torrent. Cinda welcomed the toil this imposed upon her. To be tired to the point of exhaustion helped her forget the terrible and endless and futile wondering about Julian. Was he alive? Was he dead? Was his body rotting in some shallow, unmarked grave? How had he died? Had death come with a merciful quickness; or had he perhaps lain long hours on the night-cloaked battlefield, too weak to cry out for help, conscious yet mute, seeing rescuers near and unable to summon them? What did a boy think about when he lay dying a tormented death alone? How long did suffering endure before the approaching end eased and dulled his pain?

  She worked at first under Miss Tompkins in the big house at the corner of Third and Main, only three blocks from home. When the wounded began to arrive, there were already some sick men there, brought from the camps outside the city. To make room for the newcomers whose needs were more acute, these sick were moved, hidden away in nooks and corners where they were sometimes forgotten. One day Cinda, passing the dark doorway of a closet, heard from inside a feverish mumbling. She brought a candle and lighted it, and found a boy no older than Julian, who seemed to have been laid on the bare floor there and forgotten. His eyes were swollen shut and gummed with scabs of wax and his ears were running, and they must be abscessed, because even in his delirium he cried out with pain.

  She called the nearest surgeon, who said the boy was dying. “Measles and pneumonia. No chance for him at all.”

  “If I took him away, took care of him?”

  “Oh, possibly. But there’s only the slimmest hope for him; and there are so many who can be helped, Mrs. Dewain.”

  “I know, but I want to help him.” Cinda wished to take him home, but with the children there she dared not. Their lives were precious too. She arranged with Dr. Gwathmey’s wife to move him to the Soldiers’ Home on Clay Street. There, if he must die, he could at least die in decency; for there ladies from near-by homes made it their duty and their happiness to keep everything immaculate, beds draped with fresh linen, curtains at the windows, the floors mopped, flies screened away.

  One day she and Vesta were summoned in haste to help convert a public warehouse on Eighth Street to hospital uses. When they reached the warehouse, fifty or sixty wounded men had already been brought in, but there was no one in charge and the ladies who like them had answered this call were milling confusedly, uncertain how to begin. For lack of beds, the men, some groaning and twisting with pain, some stoically silent, some too weak to move, lay helter-skelter where the ambulance drivers had deposited them before returning toward the battlefields.

  Cinda, thus thrown on her own resources, took command. Since there was no one else to give orders, she did so. She sent messengers to bring mattresses, clean water, bandages, blankets, food, wine. She bade them summon any surgeons who could come, and a desperate hour or two of confused effort began to bring some order and system out of the original chaos. When a new train of laden ambulances arrived, she went out to direct the work of bringing in the men.

  It was thus she discovered Trav. When she recognized him, senseless in the ambulance, her throat constricted with grief and terror; but he, at least, need not lie with these others on wretched pallets, smothered by swarms of flies attracted by the blood smell, helplessly waiting for easement or for death. She sent the ambulance to Fifth Street. Enid was there, and Jenny; and Jenny was a rock, a firm foundation. Jenny would know what to do.

  She wished to go with him, but she could not be spared. When she had seen the ambulance lurch away, she turned back inside, and a hurt man coughed and a thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. She lifted his head and shoulders and turned his head sidewise to let his throat clear itself of the blood that was strangling him; but when he coughed again a great burst of blood, as though his coughing had opened some fountain in his body, poured out of his mouth, and he died. she laid him down almost roughly. It was the living who had need of her. Moving to her tasks she passed near Vesta and spoke to her.

  “I just saw Uncle Travis. He’s hurt. I sent him home.”

  “Oh Mama—shouldn’t we go?”

  “Jenny and Enid will take care of him. One of us can take a surgeon to the house when there’s time.”

  “Now, Mama?”

  “Not now. Travis wouldn’t want that.” She tried to persuade herself she meant this; but when a little later she saw Vesta and Dr. Little go toward the door she did not interfere.

  She was so busy that time lost its meaning, so she did not know how long it was till Vesta returned. Cinda was kneeling beside a man with a shattered jaw—she was thinking of Rollin Lyle, whose jaw had been broken by a pistol ball once upon a time, so long ago—feeding sips of brandy through the torn wound that was his mouth, hoping the fiery liquor would dull his pain. She saw someone’s feet pause beside her, and looked up, and it was Vesta, and the girl said steadily:

  “We saw Uncle Travis. The bullet went right through him. Dr. Little passed a silk handkerchief in through the hole in front and out the back. He has almost stopped bleeding. Dr. Little says he has to be kept quiet and”—her voice caught—“and prayed for.”

  Cinda nodded, returning to her task. “Jenny can do that.” She added: “And Enid, of course.” She dared not let herself feel pain.

  The steady flow of wounded from the bloody slopes of Malvern Hill never slacked all the long day, and at dusk it had not ceased; but Vesta was bowed with fatigue, and Cinda herself could do no more. At home she found Trav on a pallet on the floor in the drawing room, with Enid and old June beside him.

  “I wanted them to carry him upstairs, Cousin Cinda,” Enid said, more like a complaint than an apology. “But Dr. Little said he shouldn’t be moved.”

  “It’s all right,” Cinda assured her. “He can stay here. Where’s Jenny?”

  “She’s asleep. She told me to wake her at midnight and she’d take my place.”

  Cinda brushed her hand across her eyes and old June’s arms enfolded her. “You come along, Honey. I’m gwine put you tuh bed!”

  “How is he?” These old Negro women came to know so many mysteries.

  “Mistuh Trav?” June tossed her head in cheerful reassurance. “He’s jes’ fine. On’y way de Yankees kin kill him is cut off his haid wid a axe. No, ma’am, don’ you fret you’se’f account o’ him. You come along to bed ’foah I gits out o’ patience wid you.”

  Cinda through the days that followed thought Richmond was half hospital, half charnel house. At home Trav lay in a muttering delirium; fever seared his flesh away, his cheeks sank, deep hollows formed behind his eyes. His wound was suppurating, and Dr. Little called it laudable pus; but he was become so thin, so frail, so pitiful. In the hospitals, men tossed and groaned under clouds of greedy flies which at any movement of their victim rose sluggishly, heavy with their gorging, and at once settled back to the feast again. The stench of mortifying flesh hung everywhere, and gangrene and erysipelas came to stalk like scavengers among the crowded cots. The hospitals were a horror so awful that to enter them deadened the senses; and there were so many wounded that even stores were filled with cots. Passers-by could look in through the wide windows and watch the busy surgeons and the suffering men; and every such window was jammed with small boys peering at the spectacle in morbid fascination. Now that the fighting was over for a while, there were no longer the trains of ambulances, from which came the groans and sometimes the screams of men tortured by the jolting vehicles; but instead there were the hearses and the carts loaded with coffins, trundling toward Hollywood. The humble dead went unattended, but muffled drums might accompany an officer to the waiting grave.

  Tilda came one day to the warehouse where Cinda was at work; and she was full of petulant indignation at the horror of these funerals. “Mrs. Brownlaw is simply furious,” she declared. “She’s trying to make someone do something about it. There aren’t enough grave diggers, and they don’t work fast enough.” A morbid
relish crept into her tones. “Why, half the time, Cinda, the carts just dump the coffins on the ground and they lie there all day, or even overnight, till the grave diggers get ready to bury them; and sometimes the bodies swell up and burst the coffins before they’re buried.”

  Cinda, kneeling beside a man whose leg was gangrenous, loosening the bandages so that the surgeon could sprinkle lead sulphate on the discolored stump, said in a low tone: “Please, Tilda, don’t. You disturb the men.” She was glad when Tilda moved away. The surgeon was not yet ready here, so she waited to help him when he came. Luckily the man was delirious, so he could not have heard what Tilda said. With a leg as bad as his was, he himself would soon be in one of those rough wooden boxes.

  Sunday she surrendered to fatigue, stayed all day abed. The children came to her; Kyle and Peter, and then Lucy. Lucy was making a scrapbook of pictures cut from newspapers. “So my children can see what the war was like, Aunt Cinda,” she explained. “Don’t you want to look at it?”

  Cinda forced herself to do so, and Peter came to see the pictures with her; and he was always impatient to turn the next page, and the next, lifting the edges of each one to peer at what was to come; till suddenly he snatched the book away and threw it on the floor and cried in boyish fury:

  “That’s him! That’s old Abe!”

  He jumped up and down on the open scrapbook, and Lucy ran around the bed to rescue it, and their voices rose in violence and anger, and Cinda was too tired to interfere. Even the children hated Lincoln. Well, should they not? Was it not he who had riddled and shattered and maimed and slain all these hundreds and thousands?

  “Hush, Peter,” she said at last. “You needn’t look at the pictures unless you want to; but you musn’t tear Lucy’s book.”