House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Trav could not meet Brett’s eyes. “Is that so? I’ve never seen that.”

  “I’ll take you some time,” Peter promised. “They hung a man yesterday, in the gully back of the Almshouse. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there. A man prayed with him for a long time, sitting on his coffin in the cart, and then they hung him, and he kept kicking and squirming so they had to pull down on his legs to make his neck snap. The handkerchief fell off his face so you could see the faces he was making. They’ll hang somebody else pretty soon, probably. It’s awfully exciting, Papa. The crowd hoots and hollers, and women laugh and yell.”

  “Well, next time, you tell me,” Trav suggested. He added: “But I wouldn’t tell Mama, if I were you. It might make her unhappy.”

  After the youngster left them, he looked at Brett in an uncertain way. “I didn’t know just what to say,” he admitted. “But I hate the thought of his—seeing that sort of thing.”

  “Richmond’s full of criminals,” Brett commented. “Scoundrels from all over the South, and the North too, I suppose. Castle Thunder and Castle Lightning never have an empty cell—and it’s mostly soldiers locked up there. Being a soldier makes a thief out of a man in short order, of course. War has a lot to answer for besides its bloody battles—and what it does to children like Peter is as bad as anything.”

  “They play soldiers,” Trav told him. “Peter seems to have memorized Hardee’s Tactics. He’s the drill master of his crowd.” It occurred to him later that this fact gave him a cue; so when he next talked to Peter it was to suggest to the youngster that being an officer meant much more than just knowing how to give orders. “Unless you’re the right kind of boy, or man, your men won’t readily obey your orders; so you have to be sure you behave like an officer in other ways, even when you’re not drilling them.” He added suggestively: “I suppose your boy friends in Butchertown go to all the hangings too?”

  “Yes sirree! They never miss one.”

  “Do you ever see any gentlemen there?” Trav inquired.

  “Why, no, sir,” Peter decided, after a moment; and there was manifest disappointment in his tone.

  “I suppose not,” Trav agreed. “So probably I’d better not go to one with you. I’m an officer, so I have to be careful how I behave.” He did not labor the point, but he hoped Peter would understand.

  Late in August, with no word from Cinda, Brett and the Howitzers departed. Next day Trav had a caller: James Fiddler, who at Chimneys had been for so many years his friend and his right hand. Trav welcomed him warmly. The overseer said in affectionate concern that Trav was looking thin and pale, and Trav laughed and retorted:

  “You’d not think so if you had seen me a month ago. By comparison, I’m as big as a horse now, and twice as strong.” He began to ask eager questions about his old friends in Martinston. Ed Blandy? Ed was in the army, in South Carolina, Fiddler thought. Jeremy Blackstone? Jeremy was at home, hiding from the provost men; and so were Nat Emerson, and Joe Merritt, and Alex Spain.

  “Deserters?” Trav asked.

  “Why, they came home on furlough and stayed. Someone has to make a crop to feed their families, Mr. Currain.”

  “I know.” Trav spoke other names. “Chelmsford Lowman? Bob Grimm?”

  “Bob’s in the army—with only one arm.” Lonn Tyler, Fiddler said, was still a soldier too; and Jim Tunstill’s oldest boy, young Jim. “Jim died of measles, you know.” Trav had not known this. As though defensively, Fiddler added: “The ones that have sons old enough to work their farms, they’re mostly away in the fighting somewhere.”

  Trav began to suspect that there was some sorrow in James Fiddler, but he hesitated to ask any direct question. “You haven’t gone and got married yet, have you?” he hazarded.

  Fiddler shook his head. “No. No, I don’t know as I’m ever likely to.” He hesitated. “I’ve gone on the notion that I was needed at Chimneys, Mr. Currain. I never looked to leave there. You and me put a lot of ourselves into that place.” He seemed about to say more, then asked emptily: “How’d you do at Great Oak?”

  So Trav recited what he had done and what he had planned. “But we couldn’t stay there after the Yankees came, so they’ll reap what we sowed.” And he tried to prompt the other to say what was in his mind. “Must be a change for you to come to Richmond this way. I don’t remember you ever did before.”

  “Why, no, I never did, Mr. Currain.” So after a moment the truth at last came out. “I kind of had to, now. I’m going into the fighting; but I couldn’t come away and leave Chimneys without I let you know.”

  Trav said understandingly: “It was the same with me. I thought at first I could let other folks do the fighting, but I had to get into it by and by.”

  “Well, I could have stayed,” Fiddler admitted. “I kind of felt like if I stayed there I’d be working for you; but it got so I couldn’t take no more.”

  So Trav guessed a part of the truth. “You and Mr. Currain?” he asked. “I thought you all liked him there.”

  “He’s changed, sir. He’s changed mightily,” said Fiddler. He said this much and no more; but this was more eloquent than many words. Trav felt no surprise. They were all changed since that night at Great Oak when Tilda found the letters from poor Lucy Hanks. He himself certainly was not the same man. The old Trav could never have used violence toward Enid, could never have compelled her submission and obedience; the old Trav could never have known that stormy madness which had driven him at Seven Pines and on that day by the Charles River Road when—cutting and thrusting till his bright blade was one red smear—he had stabbed and slain. Yes, he was changed. They were all changed—and Tony too.

  He would not question James Fiddler, would question no one about his brother. He must go to Chimneys, to see for himself. Enid wanted some of the Negroes brought to Richmond; here was pretext enough.

  “You’ll be missed there,” he told James Fiddler courteously. “But the South needs good men, and you’ll be a good man at any job you take in hand.”

  Of Tony they said no more than this, and Fiddler presently said good-by; but as soon as he felt fit to do so, Trav set out upon that journey. It would be good to go back to Chimneys again, no matter what he found.

  15

  May-August, 1862

  TO TONY, Tilda’s discovery that night at Great Oak was a mocking jest—of which he was the butt. Into that weariness and that slowing of the blood which came to him in his early fifties, his life at Chimneys had brought rest and peace and a content he had never known; the respectful liking of the men who were his neighbors awoke pride in himself and in his heritage. But these men had trusted him because he was Trav’s brother, Anthony Currain’s son, finely bred, a gentleman. Now the name of Currain, if the truth were known, would be accursed in every corner of the South; so the name became a stigma, something of which to be ashamed, and the pride he had learned to feel was an illusion.

  At first he laughed to hide his pain, and like a boy hungry for comforting he turned to Nell. When she dismissed him, for lack of any other target for his cruel anger he rode his horse to death; and he turned then to the bottle and the gaming table till his fury spent itself and he could laugh again. The suggestion that he take his mother home to Chimneys amused him, and on the journey he led her to long talk of his father whose old sins now returned to haunt them all. The fact that she spoke of that other Anthony Currain with an unchanged fondness seemed to him to point the jest.

  At Martinston and at Chimneys there was a welcome for him. In Martinston this was a little guarded, a little wary; but James Fiddler was unstintedly glad of his return, and Tony spoke to the overseer of this reticence in the manner of the men in the village. “Nat Emerson saw me talking with Chelmsford Lowman and dodged away out of sight,” he said. “And when I asked Lowman why, he said maybe it wasn’t Nat I’d seen. And Joe Merritt was full of questions about why I’d come. You’d think I was a horse thief they were watching.”

  Fiddler told him the expla
nation. “They were afraid you’d turn them over to the conscript officers. Nat Emerson and several of the men in your old company are hiding out around here.”

  “Deserters?”

  “Well, in a way, yes. Anyway, they’re staying home long enough to make a crop. If they don’t feed their families, no one will.”

  Tony laughed. “Why, good for them!” he said cheerfully. “They’ve nothing to fear from me. I’d not fight—nor send any other man to fight.” He felt Fiddler’s eye on him, clapped the other’s shoulder. “That sounds like treason to you, eh?”

  “No,” Fiddler said. “No, I don’t blame the men.” Yet his tone held an undercurrent of disapproval; and Tony said in a sardonic tone:

  “If you’re feeling warlike, I’d not want to tie you down here, Fiddler.”

  The overseer hesitated. “The South will need all the food we can raise, sir,” he remarked. “You and I can do more here than we could do in the army.”

  “To be sure, to be sure,” Tony assented. “And the enrolling officers won’t touch you here. The law allows one white man exempt for every twenty slaves on the place. That will cover both of us.”

  Fiddler nodded. “I know. The folks here say the planters made that law so they and their sons wouldn’t be conscripted. Planter’s war, poor man’s fight” And he added thoughtfully: “Even clear off down here, we know Richmond’s full of details and exempts. The men on furlough see them on the streets there and bring the stories home.”

  They were in the office, that comfortable ground-floor room with timbers showing in the plastered walls, and Tony had a bottle near his hand. He filled his glass again, emptying the bottle, and rolled the brandy in the glass and savored it across his tongue; he hiccoughed amiably and called for Joseph, and Pegleg came tapping along the hall, to take the empty bottle and bring a fresh one. When he was gone Tony looked after him, and he said to Fiddler:

  “That wench of Joseph’s is good enough for a one-legged man; but she’s a slut around the house. Chewing that damned snuff stick, dribbling down her chin.”

  “Vigil was always in the house,” Fiddler reminded him.

  “I know, I know,” Tony said heedlessly. “But send her to the fields. Mama likes house servants to be tidy.”

  “I’ll speak to Maria,” Fiddler assented. Maria ruled the kitchen and the house; an incredibly old and withered woman with the hoarse voice of a man. She had among the people the name of knowing many a dark secret, and she held them in the bonds of deadly fear. Joseph no less than the others yielded to her authority. Tony nodded inattentively, his head drooping in alcoholic drowsiness, and the overseer presently left him alone.

  During the first weeks after his return to Chimneys Tony usually rode with Fiddler every morning, listening to the other’s reports and his proposals; but after dinner when his mother went for her nap he was likely to sit on the shaded veranda with a julep beside him, or the brandy bottle, till he fell asleep; and if as was her habit she went early to bed he sometimes rode to Martinston to sit tippling in the tavern there. His horse brought him home at any hour of the night, and Joseph, sleeping in the chair in the hall till his master returned, waked by the sound of hoof beats, was always ready to meet him, to catch him as he slid off his horse, to help him up the wide steps to the veranda and so to bed.

  The lame man had accepted Vigil’s banishing without protest. He gave Tony the unquestioning loyalty of a fine dog, accepting abuse or casual blows with a cheerful grin. To replace Vigil, Maria brought into the house a woman whose tight-kinked hair was already streaked with gray, a saddle-brown mulatto. She immediately proved her worth. The big house thereafter was immaculately kept, and the change, even to Tony’s uncritical eye, was welcome. When Tony questioned her, she said her work had been to manage the poultry yards, till Mr. Fiddler put her in charge in the loom house, receiving the wool when the sheep were sheared and carrying it through the intervening processes and seeing it woven at last into blankets or into closer stuff fit for fabrication.

  He had never noticed her in these occupations, but now he was puzzled by something vaguely familiar. “What’s your name?”

  “ ’Phemy.”

  He poured a finger of brandy into his glass and looked up at her again, and memories came more clearly. “Weren’t you at Great Oak, ten, twenty years ago?”

  He caught an amused gleam in her eyes as she answered him. “ ‘Sho wuz! Twell you done packed me off tuh Chimbleys, befoah I come to mah time.”

  So Tony remembered, and his thoughts turned back to sultry nights scented with the fragrance of woodland blossoms and turbulent with barbaric lusts. Yes, he remembered now. That saddle-brown skin of ’Phemy’s like stained old leather now had seemed in those days the warm hue of dulled gold. While his thoughts cast backward she stood waiting, and he wondered where she had acquired that dignity she wore. He wondered too whence came that diluted blood of hers, not altogether black. Probably from his own father, who had been so profligate in sprinkling the Currain blood under any hedge row; from that father in whom he had been for a while so weak as to take pride.

  He nodded at his own conjecture, sure of that which could never by any chance be proved. ’Phemy—he would have wagered on it—’Phemy was his father’s daughter, a half sister to that Nancy Hanks who mothered Abraham Lincoln. Yes, and she was his own half sister, too. He laughed in a mockery of mirth. Well—he remembered a phrase his mother sometimes used—well, so mote it be!

  He saw that something like intimacy developed between his mother and ’Phemy. When Mrs. Currain went for her nap after dinner every day she took ’Phemy with her. “Nobody can rub the aches out of my old bones as ’Phemy can,” she explained. “You’re fortunate to have her in the house, Tony. She and Maria and Joseph work well together.”

  “She’s a superior nigger,” he agreed. His mother’s eyes dropped in that fashion which he had learned long ago to recognize as reproof. None of this uppity family of his ever spoke of the people as niggers; but facts weren’t changed by the names you gave them, and a nigger was a nigger. Yes and niggers were all right in their place, better than white folks, in certain secret ways.

  “Her mother was one of my mother’s people,” Mrs. Currain said. “And her grandmother, too. Her mother and grandmother came to Great Oak with me when I married your father.”

  “Were they black?” Tony asked, watching her quizzically.

  She answered simply. “Yes. Black.” That was a lesson Southern women learned, to ignore the fact that black wenches on their plantations sometimes had mulatto babies. He felt a brief sympathy for this frail little woman who had borne him; yet why could she not, as he must, face the truth; yes, and avow it? She must know ‘Phemy was her husband’s daughter; know it or guess it. He wondered sometimes how much ’Phemy had told her, in those hours they spent together. Women, even though their skins were of different colors, were closer to one another than men could ever be. But whatever ’Phemy dared tell her, Mrs. Currain would never admit she knew.

  ’Phemy proved her capacities, as the days passed, in many ways. It was she, informed through those mysterious channels which white folks could never understand, who forewarned Tony the day Redford Streean alighted from the stage in Martinston. An hour before Streean’s carriage drove up the hill, Tony knew he was on the road, and told his mother; and Mrs. Currain said politely: “How nice of him to call.”

  Tony chuckled, for he was nowadays easily amused. “Now Mama, you don’t like Streean any better than I do.”

  “But I always remember he’s Tilda’s husband,” she assured him. “After all, he’s one of the family.” That made Tony shout with easy laughter at this family of which she was so proud.

  Streean when he arrived spoke approvingly of the fine crops in the well-tended fields. “There’s a fortune in those bottoms down there,” he told Tony. “People next winter will pay any price for food—wheat and corn and sweet potatoes, beef and cattle and hogs.”

  Tony said Chimneys would be
hard put to it to raise food enough for its own needs. “We’re overstocked with niggers. A lot of the hands from Great Oak and Belle Vue were sent here. There’s not enough work to keep them all busy, so they’re hungry all the time. If we got rid of forty or fifty we’d be better off.”

  “Sell some of them,” Streean advised.

  Tony, secretly enjoying the pose, said severely: “The Currains don’t sell their people, Streean.”

  ‘Phemy brought them fresh juleps, and Streean watched her come and go. “That’s one who would fetch a good price if she were twenty years younger,’ he commented. ”She must have been a handsome wench.”

  “She was born at Great Oak,” Tony said; and he was about to add that she was probably one of his father’s bastards, but that was no business of Streean’s.

  It developed that Streean had come here not to pay a casual call but on business. He proposed to enlist Tony as a partner. With the authority of the Quartermaster’s department he could impress farm products at the set price, ship them to Richmond in government-controlled railroad cars, or on the Quartermaster’s wagons, and then dispose of them to greedy private buyers. He opened to Tony unsuspected vistas.

  “A man’s a fool not to fill his purse when he can,” he urged. “You and I can work together. When your crop is made, hold it. I’ll arrange for shipment to Richmond, and we’ll share what it brings.”

  Tony had always an appetite for money. The machinery of the proposed transaction confused him, but the prospect of gain was attractive; and Streean, as though seeing this, spoke again of the high prices some of the surplus Negroes would bring. “Better sell them,” he advised. “Put the money to work, or put it into things that can’t get away. Some men buy diamonds. They’re small, easily hidden, always saleable.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to buy diamonds if I had the money.”