House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Riding back to Yorktown his thoughts returned to Enid. To protect his mother he had warned Enid to silence about himself and Nell, but for Enid as against Trav a good deal might be said. Tony knew well enough that there was a pagan in Nell, and probably in her daughter, too; and he could not imagine a man like Trav meeting that pagan halfway. These dozen years of her marriage to Trav must have been for Enid a long exasperation. Tony was sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do, except perhaps to advise Trav to come home as often as he could.

  The letter he wrote Trav said little enough. Mama was fine, Enid and the children were well, Lucy was beginning to grow up, was prettier every day. Enid was devoting herself to keeping Mama happy; but probably she was pretty lonesome. He and Brett and Julian frequently rode over; but of course that was not the same for Enid as seeing her husband. It was too bad Trav was so far away.

  He hoped Trav would read between the lines, and when a fortnight later he heard from Julian that Trav had been at Great Oak, it pleased him to think his letter was responsible.

  The occasional crisp days of early fall reminded Tony that the six months for which his company had enlisted would presently end, and he felt a deep regret. This service, this sense of being useful, this exercise of authority bestowed without his seeking had been sweet to him; he would be sorry to see it end. But early in November the regiment of which his company was a part moved by detachments from Yorktown to Richmond. Tony arrived there on the eighth of November, the Friday after the first election since the formation of the Confederacy; and when he called at Cinda’s he found her indignant over the defeat of Mr. Macfarland, the president of the Farmers’ Bank, who had been a candidate for Congress.

  “It just shows what we must expect,” she declared, “now that we’re letting all that ragtag and bobtail vote. I don’t see any sense in letting a man vote unless he has proved he amounts to something!”

  Tony smiled. “You mean, unless he has made money?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, they’re coming to it all over the South,” he reminded her. “Till ten years ago, a man had to have at least a little property before he could vote in Virginia; and in North Carolina till five years ago no one could vote for state senators unless he owned fifty acres of land. But now any man who pays taxes at all can vote, and I supposed pretty soon he won’t even have to pay taxes.”

  “Well, I think when we started the Confederacy we ought to have stopped all that. Why should white trash vote, I’d like to know.” And she said hotly: “Mr. Dewain says that’s the worst thing about Lincoln. He wants to let ordinary men vote and run things. That’s why he’s so dangerous. It’s mountebanks like him who’ve ruined us.”

  “Who beat Mr. Macfarland?”

  “Mr. Tyler. Oh, of course he’s all right; but the Examiner said anybody who voted for Mr. Macfarland was just hoping to borrow money from his bank. As if he’d lend any one money just for voting for him! It makes me boil! You’d think being rich was a crime!”

  “I suppose everyone voted for President Davis.”

  “Oh, yes—no one ran against him. But I do feel badly for Mr. Macfarland. He’s such a fine man.”

  Tony lodged with Cinda till Tuesday when the regiment was mustered out of the Confederate service. Julian too was there, but the night before that formality he disappeared immediately after supper, leaving Tony with Cinda and Vesta and Jenny.

  “Julian’s gone to see Anne Tudor,” Cinda told them. “He’s in love with her, as much in love as a boy of sixteen can be—and that’s a lot.” And she asked: “Well, Tony, what will you do, now the regiment’s broken up?”

  “I haven’t decided,” he confessed. “This experience has meant a lot to me. I’m sorry it’s over.”

  “Will the men enlist again?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll be shipped back to North Carolina, and I’ll go with them. We’ll all go home to Martinston and talk it over there.”

  “Will you—stay with them? I mean, if they stay in the army?”

  “I will if they want me. Yet I’m really too old for active soldiering. I tire too easily.” He smiled. “I remember something you said to me once, Cinda. It was years ago. You wanted me to do something or other, and I said I wasn’t well enough, and you said I talked like a woman in a delicate condition. You said it was a woman’s privilege to plead a headache, or anything of that sort, but that when a man usurped that feminine prerogative he raised in the minds of others a doubt of his real sex! Remember?”

  “You used to infuriate me,” she admitted. “You were always apt to whine a little when you didn’t get your own way, like a dog that limps when you scold it.”

  “I know. And there’ve been plenty of days this summer when I wanted to plead sick in order to escape duty. But I didn’t.” He added: “But the time will come when officers must stand up to hard marching, to hard living. I don’t believe I could do it; not in a real pinch. And I don’t want to fail men who trust me. So—I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “I don’t feel able to advise you.” He guessed that she was not quite convinced of his sincerity.

  “No. I’ll have to make the decision myself.” He added: “There’s Chimneys to consider, too. Last spring our planting all over the South was mostly done before we—before any of the men left home; yet even this summer, food has been scarce. As long as the war lasts, the South will have to raise less cotton and tobacco and more wheat and corn. I might do more good, be more useful, if I stayed at home and helped feed the army.” He hesitated. “I’ll do what the men want me to do, in the end.”

  He did not hurry the decision. At Raleigh, when they were discharged, some Martinston men joined other North Carolina regiments: so the company as a company ceased to exist. Those who went on to Martinston were of many minds. Chelmsford Lowman said he would stay at home. One of his sons had been in the company. had re-enlisted; another was fourteen.

  “And Mrs. Lowman says the boy wants to go into the army,” he told Tony. “Well, I won’t stop him, but I’ll stay home with her. Soldiering ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. I’ll let the young fellows do the fighting.”

  Jeremy Blackstone put this same decision more vehemently. He had a small farm between Martinston and Chimneys; a wife, two little girls. “I’ve had my belly full,” he declared. “I went to war looking for a fight. I like a good gouging as well as the next one. But all I get is my damned laigs marched off me! I’ve marched till I’ve wore my feet off pretty near up to the knees. Get up in the middle of the God-damned night to march. March to Hampton! March to Yorktown! March in parades! March in reviews! March off to Bethel! March to New Market Bridge! March back to Bethel! March to Yorktown! March off to Bethel again. Come down with chills and fever and get up and march some more. Why, if I’d marched in a straight line I’d be to the moon by now. March to Ship’s Point, march to Young’s Hill, march to Cockletown, march to Camp Rains, march to Bethel a couple of times for a change! Bethel! I never got so sick of a place in my born days! Jesus to Nancy, Captain, if I’d wanted to march I could have stayed home and walked the floor with a colicky young one! When I wasn’t down with the chills and fever I was marching, and when I wasn’t marching I was digging earthworks. I went into this shebang looking for a fight, but the nearest I came to it was laying behind some dirt while the Yankees shot bullets into it. No, sir, there ain’t enough fighting in a war to suit me. I’m staying home from now on. The old woman’ll give me all the war I want, right here at home!”

  But not all the company were of this mind. Tom Shadd and Ed Blandy took a middle ground, and many followed them.

  “I’m going to stay home the winter, anyway,” Ed admitted. “I sh’d judge I’d learned what there is to soldiering, only maybe the fighting part. We didn’t get much of a lesson at that. But right now. there’s soldiers enough. Won’t be any fighting in the mud this winter. It’ll hold off long enough for me to get my compost made and spread and my planting done, so Mrs. Blandy and the you
ng ’uns can make a crop next summer. Then if it looks to me I’m needed, I c’n sign up again.”

  Tom Shadd—he was a silent man, rarely speaking—nodded agreement; and so did others standing by. But Lonn Tyler dissented and with some violence.

  “They’ll never git me into it again,” he declared, “and I know a plenty that feel the same way. This here’s a planters’ war! Nothing against you personally, Captain Currain; but there it is. You all want us-uns to go out and git ourselves killed so you all kin keep your slaves. Well, it’s your having slaves that’s the trouble with us-uns, if you ask me. A poor man working by hisself can’t make a money crop. About the best he can do is raise enough to keep his family from starving to death. You rich men with your slaves that you don’t have to pay no wages to, you can raise a crop and sell it for less than it costs a poor man to raise it.”

  He warmed to his theme. “Why, there ain’t two men in a hundred in the South that owns a slave—no, nor wants to. I talked to a Virginia man and he says the planters worked the land up there to death and the poor man has to take their leavings.” His voice rose. “Why, take it right in our company! You’ve got a flock of slaves at Chimneys, Captain Currain, and Judge Meynell he had one; but with the Judge dead there ain’t another man in the company has ary a one, or is likely to! Get rid of the slaves, say I, and then a white man’d have a chance to better hisself! As it is, the big planter gits the fresh meat and the gravy, and the poor man gits sowbelly and grits and thankful to git it! Me go to war to keep things so? Not if I know myself!”

  There were nods of agreement all around, and Ed Blandy—he was in many ways the best man among them—put the matter calmly. “There’s sense in that, Captain Currain. The way it’s been around Martinston, the heft of us had our own little places and worked them ourselves. We didn’t look to get ahead much, nor we didn’t; but we was satisfied to be let alone. Long as we knew that there wasn’t any man around good enough to push us out of his way and make us take it, we was satisfied. Some of us’d maybe ride with the paterollers if one of your people lit out for the woods, or to help keep the free niggers in their place; but we was still our own men and didn’t have to take nothing from nobody. We knowed you all was some smarter than us-uns, but we could stand up to you in a hoss race, or over a jug of corn whiskey, or in a shooting match, or in a fight if it came to that. So when you talked reasonable we’d listen, but your say-so didn’t make it so.”

  Tony said sincerely: “I’ve tried to find the right thing to say to you, but I don’t know what’s best for you to do now. If I did, if I was sure, I’d tell you.”

  “I sh’d judge you would,” Ed assented. “But there’s no way you can be sure. You and them like you, you’ve always had plenty to wait on you, plenty of anything you wanted. There ain’t so awful many of you all, but there’s a pile of us. And it looks to me like the pile of us is doing the fighting for you all.”

  “We’re fighting too,” Tony reminded him.

  “The heft of you are, certain. But, Captain, you’re fighting for something that’s yours and that you want to hang on to. What are we fighting for? Well, mostly to give you a hand, it looks to me. I be damned if I c’n see what we get out of it, win, lose, or draw.”

  Tony said thoughtfully that he supposed each man must answer the question for himself. With an unaccustomed insight he went on: “You all know my brother Travis. He’s commissary on Longstreet’s staff—if you call that fighting. He and my brother-in-law, Mr. Dewain, went to war because Virginia did, and for the same reason she did, because they wouldn’t fight against South Carolina. My other brother is fighting because he wants to keep the Yankees out of Virginia. Two of my nephews are fighting because they’re young, and all their friends are fighting. I went into it because you asked me to. My nephew Clayton, who was killed at Manassas, fought because he believed South Carolina had a right to leave the Union. But none of us really fight to defend slavery, to keep our slaves.”

  “All the same,” Ed insisted, “if it hadn’t been for you all and your slaves, there wouldn’t be any fighting.”

  Tony knew no way to answer him. What Lonn Tyler and now Ed had said was true. Only a small minority of Southerners owned slaves; but those without slaves could not compete with those who had them. Slaves were wealth, and they bred wealth. Maybe North Carolina wasn’t fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to secede, and to prevent coercion of seceding states; but from Ed’s point of view, it all rooted in slavery. You could obscure the truth with parroted phrases, but Ed and these others found for the riddle a simple answer. Without slavery there would have been no secession, without secession there would have been no coercion, without coercion neither North Carolina nor Virginia would have gone to war.

  And it was the slave states, the rich planting states where fortunes were made in a year, that had seceded; and it was to protect them against coercion that this war was being fought. But why should a North Carolina farmer with a few acres of land fight to defend the right of a Mississippi planter to make a two-hundred-thousand-dollar cotton crop with slave labor? Tony felt pretty sure there was an answer; but he did not know what that answer was.

  All the homeward way from Raleigh, on the cars and then afoot, marching in straggling files the last few miles, there was much debate and no decision. Tony, however, observed that in each group the loudest talkers were all for staying at home. It was they who seized and held the floor; but when he himself questioned these same men alone they were not so positive. Thus Chelmsford Lowman, in an almost shamefaced fashion, said: “Matter of fact, Captain, I wouldn’t be much good chasing Yankees. My knees are too stiff. But if they needed someone to lay in one place and rest his musket on a log and do some shooting, why, I can still bark a squirrel any time I hanker after a stew for supper, and like as not I could put a bullet into a Yankee.” Jeremy Blackstone was another who wavered. “It’s the God-damned marching I’m sick of! If a fight was to come my way and I didn’t have to march from here to Tidewater to get into it, I might cut myself off enough for a chaw!” Even Lonn Tyler admitted that he might change his mind. “I guess I got some politician blood in me. I like to hear myself talk. But like as not I’ll go making a fool of myself again before I’m through.” And Ed Blandy said: “There ain’t no sense to it; but if you set out to go back into it, Captain Currain, I wouldn’t want to see you go alone.”

  Tony reflected that most men in a crowd, while ready enough to boast about their vices, were slow to admit their virtues; and, thinking back through his fifty years, he remembered how often he had heard a man confess a drunken bout, or a staggering loss at a gaming table, or an excursion to the quarter where some yellow wench was the attraction; how seldom he had heard one boast of a good and gracious action. A man advertised his vices; his virtues he concealed like crimes.

  Safely back at Chimneys among familiar sights and sounds, he found himself suddenly profoundly tired of camp routine, marches and fleeting rumors and alarms. The blue cloud shadows drifting across the mountains, the rolling contours of the hills now in winter’s bleak garb, the icy streams, the rich fragrance from the kitchen, the smell of wood smoke in the evening air, the far sound of Negroes singing in the quarter, the steady strong tones of James Fiddler as he made report of his stewardship; these were peace, this was home, the war was far away.

  Fiddler gave him the news of the community. Little Miss Mary Meynell was dead. Somehow, when White’s Creek was in flood, she had fallen off the foot bridge. No one saw her fall; her body, battered by the rocks in the steep gorge below the bridge, was found half a mile downstream.

  “Happened just last week,” James Fiddler said. “About the time we began to look for you all to come home.”

  Tony, when he heard this, felt his mouth fill with the bitter juice of wrath. One of these days Darrell would have a long score to pay. “Had she been well?” he asked guardedly, wondering how much was known.

  “Why, she hadn’t been herself, no; not since the Jud
ge—died.”

  Tony understood that hesitation, knew the overseer was too kindly to remind him that Judge Meynell’s death had been at Darrell’s hand. If Darrell weren’t my sister’s son, Tony thought, I’d shoot him on sight.

  But if he did so, people would—might—guess the truth; and that ought not to happen. Let pretty little Miss Mary rest; let her sleep. Let no tongue touch her name.

  27

  September, 1861

  ENID would be thirty years old on the twenty-sixth of this September; and for weeks beforehand and afterward this fact lay always in the background of her unhappy thoughts. Life was behind her, and how miserly of the treasures it might have bestowed her life had been. Her father’s death had made her childhood a desperate time when she and her mother lived on the generous hospitality of friends and must always try to please. Marriage to Trav, though in prospect it promised happiness, had robbed her of her girlhood; the only change in her estate was that instead of trying to please a succession of hostesses she had then to please a husband. By the removal to Great Oak she only exchanged one jailer for another; for instead of Trav, or in addition to Trav, she must now please Mrs. Currain and all the in-laws. Thus had run her life, years of trying to please others, never a time when she could please herself. And now she was thirty, an old woman!

  She blamed Trav for all her woes. In the beginning of their marriage she had tried to be all he desired, gay and affectionate and tender, and she delighted in those moments when under her spell he forgot dignity and cast aside his years and became as merrily irresponsible as she. But then Lucy was coming, and Enid was physically wretched; and after Lucy was born Trav settled down to being a stodgy old man, caring for nothing but the land he loved, tolerant of Enid’s demonstrative affection but no longer so easily won to a recaptured youthfulness. When under pretense of prudence he rebuffed her, she was hurt as a child is hurt, and she took refuge in a pretended aloofness. That he did not seek to break down the barriers she thus raised was a new grievance against him; her own fear of pregnancy helped to convince her at last that she hated him. When she rebuffed him, her self-pity was sharpened by his submissive acceptance of these rebuffs. Surely if he loved her, he would laugh away her coldness, sweep her into his arms, make her adore him! When he went back to duty she wept because he no longer loved her, and hated him the more.