House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  CINDA would all her life remember the month of April in 1864 as a peaceful interlude, the happier by contrast with the bloodstained summer of darkening despair that was to follow. In April Julian and Anne were radiant with expectation; and Vesta too was shining with an inner content, dwelling on the threshold of realization. So April was a happy time, and Anne’s baby boy was born on the last day of the month, and named for Brett Dewain.

  But that same day came a foreshadowing of greater griefs when little Joe Davis, the President’s son, left for a moment unattended by his nurse, fell from the low balcony of the White House and was killed. All Richmond shared that sorrow, and it came close to Cinda. She liked Mrs. Davis, and if they were not intimates yet they were friends; and she knew the Davis children, rioting and handsome and lively youngsters. Cinda and Vesta went together to the White House to offer sympathy; and the day the baby was buried Cinda wept to see the President and Mrs. Davis standing erect and steadfast beside the open grave.

  There was a great crowd; it seemed that everyone in Richmond, and certainly every child in Richmond, was there. “And everybody so sorry for them,” Cinda said to Vesta afterward. “But a week from now they’ll turn on Mr. Davis again, blame him for all our troubles.”

  “Well, of course, everyone loves babies, and everyone’s sorry for people who lose them; but just because his baby died doesn’t make Mr. Davis a good president!” Vesta spoke strongly. “Hungry people have to blame somebody, when flour costs three or four hundred dollars a barrel!”

  “Oh I know! And of course it’s silly to be sad over just one little baby being killed, when the armies will soon be killing each other again.”

  Vesta tucked her hand through her mother’s arm. “We can’t stop them, Mama.”

  “Can’t anyone stop them?” Cinda cried, but she answered her own question. “No. I know....”

  On the Wednesday following they heard the first rumble of the coming storm. Tilda stopped at the house on Fifth Street to say there was a dispatch from General Lee, that Grant’s army was moving. “And that means work for all of us,” Tilda pointed out. “The trains of wounded will be coming.”

  “We’ll be as ready as we can be,” Cinda promised. “As long as men are bound to fight, that’s all women can do.”

  That day too they heard gunfire toward York River, and next day Yankee troops were landing on the Peninsula; and the day after, two or three score enemy vessels put men ashore by the thousands at Bermuda Hundred. There was skirmishing along the Chickahominy, and the local militia marched to the defenses; but the peril at Richmond’s very door was averted, and Saturday’s dispatches from Lee reported successful battle against Grant’s tremendous army.

  At the hospital Cinda heard that Longstreet had been wounded. “Badly, they say,” she told Vesta, when she brought the news home. Vesta wished to cheer her.

  “Pooh! The Yankees can’t really hurt that big man!”

  Cinda herself had had that same unreasonable certainty that Cousin Jeems was invulnerable; so to know that he had been shot was a shaking thing. If he could be hurt, then no one was safe. She tried not to think of Brett and Burr; yet they too must have faced the Yankee fire.

  At church on Sunday they heard that Grant’s first advance had been thrown back with heavy loss; but that evening the wounded came in a thickening flood. Some of the hurt men were not only wounded but terribly burned, and the wards were pitiful with their groans. From those who were able to talk Cinda heard of the fire that swept the battlefield, when helpless men could only lie and watch the greedy little flames run among the dried leaves to gnaw at them. There was one boy, a Texan, a fair-haired child still in his ’teens, with a mercifully broken back so that though his feet and legs were charred like dead sticks he felt no pain.

  “The woods were all smoke,” he said. “You couldn’t see what you were doing. That’s how it happened Old Pete was shot. The old Bull-of-the-Woods rode into a cross fire from our own men.” Cinda, listening to this boy, thought of his mother, his father; of what his home must be. They were fine people certainly to have so fine a son. She knew by his unnatural loquacity that he would not live the night, so since he was full of talk she stayed with him. “Bullets flying everywhere,” he said with shining eyes. “I guess half the men in the Texas brigade were hit, but we smashed them, drove them back. I was lucky. Some of us couldn’t get away from the fire, but my arms were all right, so I dragged myself over to the road.” His quick tongue ran a while, till she saw his feverish color fade and his lips pale. When his words began to lag, she touched his head, said he must sleep; and he smiled and promised and closed his eyes. She turned to leave him, but as she did so his mouth opened in a strained stiff way, as though he wished to speak, or as though something choked him. His jaw locked with a little click; and while she stood beside him his closed eyes half opened. He was a slender, bright-haired youngster, very much like Julian; but she turned away. Living men needed her now.

  She became inured to hideous sights and sounds and smells; and she had long ago learned to do tasks of which she would once have been incapable. These helpless men were as dependent as babies. To make them as clean and as comfortable as possible was no harder than to do the same for a baby, once you set your heart to the task. It was your heart, not your physical body, which gave you the needed strength. There were nights when she did not go home at all. She had a room, no more than a closet, where she had sometimes slept; but so many wounded needed beds that she gave up her cot to them. There was always a chair, or perhaps a bed from which some poor body had just been borne to the death house, where she could drop down for a moment’s rest and rise again.

  Wounded from the Wilderness were still arriving when a new host came from the first clash at Spottsylvania. Since there was no room for them indoors they were lifted out and laid on the ground while the ambulances departed for a fresh load. Tilda and the ladies she mustered were busy at the depot where, when a train arrived, the wounded men were unloaded and left on the pavement to await transportation to the hospitals, while the emptied cars rattled away to the northward to bring back another load. Day and night the trains came, and while the hurt men waited, ladies gave them what comforts were possible, working under broiling sun or by the smoky glare of pine-knot torches held high in dark hands, providing blankets against the night cold, shade against the sun, some fashion of pillow for the weary heads, and always water, water, water for the parched and thirst-burned throats. There was need for such attendance at the hospitals, too; for when the wards were full, men must wait again, in the hot sun under clouds of ravenous flies or in merciful night that made the flies sluggish with cold. Sometimes the surgeons worked among them where they lay. Once Cinda, stepping out of her ward for a moment’s breath, saw Tilda with a severed arm and an amputated leg hugged like babies to her bosom as she trudged toward the refuse trench; and Cinda had an insane desire to laugh at this obscene horror. Tilda was so awkward, and so smeared with blood and grime, and so absorbed in her efforts not to trip over the helpless men among whom she picked her way. God bless her!

  There was so much to do: keep the flies away; see to it that water dripped steadily upon the bandages; go constantly from man to man to watch for those in need of sudden care. Vesta, though Cinda wished her to stay at home where she might be sheltered from these terrors, came to help as she could.

  “But I’m not much good,” she told Cinda, smiling through tears. “I just blunder along. They’re very patient with us, aren’t they?—the men, I mean. I wanted to do something for one of them and he said he was all right, and I said: ‘Let me wash your face. You’ll be so much cooler,’ and he grinned and said: ‘Why, all right, ma’am; but you’ll be the ninth lady that’s washed my face today.’”

  Once Cinda saw the girl kneeling beside a pallet on the floor where a man lay dying; and Cinda went to her and Vesta whispered: “He’s French, Mama; talking French. I don’t know enough French even to comfort him.”

  Cinda leaned
nearer the man tossing restlessly in burning fever; she murmured uncertainly: “Notre père, qui est en ciel—” The man instantly was motionless, seeming to listen, his lips soundlessly following the words to the end: “A toi soit la pouvoir, la gloire à jamais.” With the last words his lips were still, and a little parted. Cinda waited, Vesta standing beside her, till after a moment she was sure. She stood up, pressing her hands to her temples; but you must not let yourself feel anything. She called the nearest orderly.

  “Take him to the death house,” she said.

  Vesta cried in an anguished protest: “Oh, Mama!”

  “Hush, Honey,” Cinda warned her. “There are seventeen men lying on the ground outside waiting for a bed.”

  The day after, Cinda persuaded the girl to stay at home; but toward sunset she saw Vesta in the doorway, some warning in her eyes, and went quickly toward her. Vesta tried to smile reassurance.

  “It’s all right, Mama. I’m sure it’s all right. But Burr’s home.”

  Cinda crossed her arms, wiping her hands on her sleeves. “He is hurt?”

  “Yes. But not badly. But I thought maybe one of the surgeons—thought maybe you could come.”

  Burr was more than all these others. “What is his hurt?”

  “Why, both his hands.” Vesta spoke uncertainly. “He says some of his fingers are gone.”

  Cinda nodded, cold and calm. A surgeon would be needed. Dr. Mason, chief surgeon of the Department of Richmond, happened at the moment to be in her ward. She appealed to him, and he said he would come when he could. His office was in Belvin’s Block on Twelfth Street, opposite the end of Bank Street; to stop would not take him out of his way. Cinda thanked him. Vesta had brought the carriage, Diamond held the reins. “We’ll have to give up the carriage,” Cinda thought, as she climbed in. “We mustn’t keep horses when they’re needed so.” She said: “Diamond, hurry.”

  At home she found Burr lying on the sofa in her room, and he was white with pain. Cinda knew that a wound in the hand meant a peak of anguish; yet she faced him smiling. He was her son, but she could do as much for him as she had done for the sons of other women. She kissed him, carefully casual. To be casual was to be strong.

  “Now let me look at them, Sonny.”

  His hands were bundles of twisted, filthy rags; he himself was dirty, worn, gaunt, his eyes red with sleeplessness. She would not let herself see this. His hands first. When the soiled bandage came stickily away, color drained out of his cheeks.

  “June gave me brandy, Mama,” he said carefully. “Can I have some more?”

  “Of course, all you like.” Brandy was the next best thing to chloroform.

  Vesta held the glass to his lips while Cinda plucked the last wrapping off his right hand. The thumb was cleanly gone, the forefinger shattered and dangling by a thread. She felt a moment’s gratitude; such a wound might make it impossible for him to fight again. He could never hold a sabre, or pull a trigger; she was sure of that. Under her quiet direction, old June brought hot water, castile soap, scissors, clean linen. Vesta began to scrape lint.

  The oozing blood would do no harm. Cut away the proud flesh; then fresh bandages. Cinda worked in a steady concentration. There, that hand would do till Dr. Mason came. Now the other.

  “More, Vesta,” Burr whispered, and gulped the brandy she gave him.

  On the left hand, thumb and forefinger were untouched, but the other fingers were shattered. “Well,” Cinda commented, “put both hands together and you’ve a whole one, Burr.”

  The brandy loosed his tongue. “One bullet did it all,” he said. “It just happened to catch both my hands in line. It tore my reins out of this one and my pistol out of the other. I wrapped them up as well as I could and came home.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Out at Yellow Tavern, not far from here. Their cavalry rode around us and headed for Richmond, and we had to race to catch them. General Stuart’s wounded, Mama.”

  Fresh bandages were in place. “There! Dr. Mason will come as soon as he can. Now we’ll give you a bath, put you to bed.”

  “I can sleep for a week.” On the way to his room, their hands under his arms, he talked in volleys. That was the brandy. Good. Morphine was better, but brandy would help. While he lay half-asleep, Cinda and June undressed him and bathed him from head to foot; and Cinda yearned over his lean young body, the ribs stretching the skin. When they were done he slept as quickly as a tired dog.

  Downstairs, Vesta asked: “Mama, did you hear him say General Stuart’s hurt?” But Cinda only nodded. Burr was more than Jeb Stuart with his laughter and his fine uniforms and his flowing plumes. Every woman in the South loved Jeb Stuart, but Burr was Cinda’s own.

  Dr. Mason was cheerfully reassuring. “As good as ever in a week or two,” he promised. Not quite, Cinda thought; not with those maimed hands. Yet it was true that his hurts were mercifully slight. Anguish of torn nerves and smashed bone could be endured if life were safe. Dr. Mason spoke gravely of Stuart’s hurt. “The Yankee cavalry were heading for Richmond,” he said. “He held them long enough to give time to man our defenses toward Ashland. They’re bringing him to Dr. Brewer’s home.” That was almost in the country, half a mile out Grace Street.

  Vesta asked: “Is he badly hurt?”

  “Fatally, I fear.”

  In the morning Burr made light of his own injuries. “I can still handle reins and sabre, or at least a pistol.” He said that in the Wilderness the cavalry was not heavily engaged. “But then we had to hold Grant’s advance at Spottsylvania till the First Corps could come up.”

  “Longstreet’s men?”

  “Yes, General Anderson commanding. Then after the First Corps was up, we heard that Sheridan had gone around our right toward Richmond, so we rode to catch them. We were in the saddle most of the time from Sunday afternoon till today—most of three days and nights. We got in front of them at Yellow Tavern. They hit us about noon yesterday. That was when I got this.”

  Cinda bade him rest. Burr wished to know how Stuart did, and Vesta volunteered to go and ask. Stuart died that night. The rumble of guns a few miles away, where his men still fought Sheridan’s, tolled the hours of the death watch till dawn. Next day word came that the Yankees had withdrawn.

  “They might as well,” Burr said sorrowfully. “Short of capturing Richmond, killing General Stuart is the greatest victory they could hope to win.”

  He insisted on going to the funeral services in St. James’s Church, and on following his old commander’s body to Hollywood. All Richmond mourned, that day; and Cinda, thinking of the hundreds of others dying or dead in the hospitals, and on the battlefields to the northward, wondered that any one man’s death could summon from eyes drained dry by grief so many tears.

  Yet Stuart was more than a man. Yes, he was more than a thousand men. Jackson was gone, and Cousin Jeems was wounded, and Stuart was dead. Of the great men only Lee remained. For these who were gone, where would a worthy substitute be found?

  It was from an officer with an amputated leg that she heard how Longstreet had been wounded, shot by his own men just as Jackson had been, and not far from the same spot. “The woods were full of smoke,” the officer explained. “He and some others rode right across the front of our advance and our men gave them a volley. Before that, he had flanked the Union line and broken it. If he hadn’t been hurt I think we’d have driven them back across the Rapidan that night.”

  So this was another of those mischances which sometimes made it seem that God Himself did not intend the Confederacy to win! It was bitter to come again and again to the very threshold of victory, only to be turned back; bitter and terrible to feel that they must go wearily on into the black valley of despair.

  Sunday she was too tired to go to church; but Anne and Julian, Anne still pale but very lovely, came to dinner and brought the baby; and before Vesta and Burr returned from church, Rollin Lyle rang the bell. He had come north with Trenholm’s squadron of the Seventh South Carol
ina Cavalry, assigned to Hampton’s Division.

  “We’re in camp on the Chickahominy, with headquarters at Drewry’s Bluff,” he said. “We’ve been busy picketing, and scouting Butler’s Yankees. We gave them a licking last Monday, just for practice.”

  Julian said an exultant word, but Cinda heard the heaviness in Rollin’s tones. “Is something wrong?”

  “Why—my father’s dead,” he said reluctantly.

  “Oh, Rollin!”

  “He’d been working too hard, Mama thinks. He died in his sleep.” He hesitated. “I had a chance to go home. She was glad to see me.”

  Cinda knew Mrs. Lyle from occasional meetings in Charleston; a delicate little woman, seeming as utterly helpless as she was charming. “Where is she?”

  “At Fallow Fields. That’s up on the Peedee, in North Carolina. We’ve had to give up the plantations nearer the coast.”

  “What will she do?”

  “Manage Fallow Fields.” He added proudly: “Mama’s strong, you know. She’s little, but nothing can beat her down.”

  Before they could say more, Vesta appeared; and his eyes turned to her and never left her. Cinda decided it was for him to tell Vesta of his father’s death, and she was glad when Julian and Anne did not speak of it at dinner. Afterward, to give Rollin and Vesta a chance to be together, she sent Vesta on an unnecessary errand to Tilda, sent Rollin to keep her company. When they were gone, Burr looked at her with a smile.

  “That looked like some of your managing, Mama.”

  “Why not?” she demanded. Anne laughed softly and asked whether Burr was blind, and he said in a puzzled tone:

  “I thought Rollin never looked at anyone but Dolly!”

  “But Dolly’s married, Burr!”

  He had not known that, so Cinda told him what there was to tell, and Julian said Bruce Kenyon was a fine boy, and Burr said that if that was true he was much too good for Dolly. He asked where Darrell was.