House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Mrs. Currain remembered that she had not used that chest of drawers since before Anthony died. Once it had been his wardrobe, had held his linen; but some of the glass handles were cracked, and when the leg was broken, Anthonv bought a new chest and had the old one put away in the attic.

  Tilda’s voice ran on. “The first letter was written sometime in seventeen eighty-one. How old was Papa then, Mama?”

  Mrs. Currain had no need to speak, for Travis answered. “He was born in seventeen sixty-five. He’d have been sixteen in ’eighty-one.”

  “Well, anyway,” Tilda repeated, “this is the first letter.” She held the paper nearer her eyes, peering at the sometimes faded ink. Mrs. Currain thought Tilda, despite her pretense of shocked dismay, was happy as she read. The old woman listened with only half her mind. The letter was to someone called “Dear Tony.” That must have been Anthony. Something about Mike’s Run, and Patterson Creek, and a man named Cavett, and Tilda was saying the letter was badly spelled, and something about a little girl who loved Tony, but whose Papa would shoot Tony, but who would die if Tony didn’t come to her pretty soon. Tilda was giggling as she read, in a silly, embarrassed way, and the letter was signed Lucy Hanks, and as Tilda finished, Faunt took it from Tilda’s hands and looked at it and said Lucy was spelled L-u-c-e-y, and Tony said in a puzzled tone that the name was vaguely familiar, that he had heard of a girl named Lucy Hanks somewhere, and Tilda began to read another letter.

  “This one is marked seventeen eighty-four,” she said; and Mrs. Currain came back from her memories to listen.

  “‘Tony, dear husband, because you are, for me anyway, because we said so to each other is all that matters. Tony, Pa is going west taking us. He don’t even speak to me because I stand up to him. He’s got the misry in his jynts.’” Tilda’s exaggerated mispronunciation made the spelling clear. “‘Tony, our baby is sweet——’ ”

  Cinda cried in quick protest: “Baby?” She came protectingly to her mother’s side. “Mama, don’t you believe a word of it!”

  Mrs. Currain smiled reassuringly. “Oh, that was long ago, Cinda, before I ever knew him. Why I wasn’t even born, in seventeen eighty-four. And your father told me about this girl. He used to say, to tease me, that he fell in love with me because my name was Lucy; that his first sweetheart had been a girl named Lucy.”

  Cinda protested: “But did he tell you she’d had a baby?”

  “Not in words,” Mrs. Currain admitted. Memories for a moment swept her away, little moments came back to her. “But I was sure she had, from—well, from the way he spoke of her.” Travis, concern in his tones, urged again that they start their journey and wait till they came to Richmond to read the other letters; but Mrs. Currain said: “No, we’re all together here, and there’s no knowing when we’ll be together again. Go on, Tilda.”

  She heard Tilda repeat that phrase Cinda had interrupted. “‘Tony, our baby is sweet, a little girl.’” Her thoughts drifted back through the years, returned again when Tilda read: “‘I have named her Nancy after Ma.’” That made Mrs. Currain wince with unconquerable pain; for when her own little girl was born—her third baby, the one before Travis, the one who died when she was four months old—Anthony had insisted that they name her Nancy. Probably that was why he was so wretched and blamed himself so bitterly when that baby died.

  Through Mrs. Currain’s memories came Tilda’s dramatic cry: “And this time she signed the letter: ‘Your loving wife, Lucy Currain.’”

  Mrs. Currain felt all their eyes turn questioningly upon her. She said serenely: “They were never married. I’m sure of that. He would have told me.”

  Cinda by her mother’s side stirred in protective impatience. “Go on, Tilda. Finish.”

  “Well, this next one, she wrote herself,” Tilda explained. “It’s a terrible scrawl, but it’s short.” She read: “‘Tony, husband, see I can write good now.’ She spells it r-i-t-e,” Tilda added, and went on: “‘Pa brung us to Kentucky in Nelson County here a month now. Mister Booth come with us is going back to Virginny will take this so please be sartin and come here soon to yore Lucy.’” Tilda added: “Lucy’s L-u-c-e-y. Her spelling is just ridiculous, with no caoital letters at all. or they’re in the wrong places. Look at it!”

  Cinda took the letter, but Mrs. Currain said gently: “Poor child. Your father never went to Kentucky.”

  Tilda echoed: “‘Poor child’ indeed! If you think she deserves sympathy just listen to this next one! I was reading it when you called me. It was written in seventeen eighty-seven; I guess it was Papa who put the dates on them. She wrote it herself, and she’d learned a little about spelling by that time, but not much. Just listen!” No one interrupted her and she read rapidly, pausing now and then to puzzle over words.

  “‘Well, Tony, Mister Maynard came from Virginny—’” Her emphatic mispronunciation was eloquent. “‘Came from Virginny says you got married to a put on lady with fine airs ...’”

  Tilda looked at her mother with questioning eyes, and Mrs. Currain said gently: “She means Sally Williber. Seventeen eighty-seven? Yes, that’s the year they were married.”

  “I knew she didn’t mean you, Mama,” Tilda agreed, and repeated: “‘To a put on lady with fine airs so this is a curse on you Tony from her who loved you. First off I had an idy—’ She spells ‘idea’ that way, i-d-y. ‘An idy to drownd myself but I ain’t one to cry over a no good dog. If you come now I would let Pa shoot you and laugh only to waste good powder and shot on a pore stink skunk like you. Well I’ve got your hedge baby Nancy and she’ll have plenty of brothers and sisters I’ll get the same way I got her because I can find plenty of men to—’” Tilda blushed. “I can’t read some of this! It’s horrible.” Yet Mrs. Currain thought her eyes skimmed the lines with an avid eagerness before she continued. “She says: ‘If I’ve got the name I’ll have the game. I set out to drownd Nancy but she’s so cute I couldn’t but if she ever shows any signs of you I’ll drownd her like a sick kitty. You’ll not be the only man with me from now on, and every last one of them I’ll tell them to spit on the ground and step on it, and that’s for you. I hope you rot and—’ Oh, I can’t! Here, Trav, you read it.”

  So Trav took the letter, and found her place and read in flat, expressionless tones: “‘I hope you rot and scab over and your children put you out to starve. I’ll put a witch curse on you the rest of your life.’” He paused, looking at the letter in his hands. “That’s enough, No need of reading what she says at the end.”

  Mrs. Currain nodded understandingly. “Poor Anthony. I can see now that he never forgot this bitter, heartbroken letter. When our son died—the baby after you, Tony—and then our daughter two years after that, he told me there was a curse on him. This must be what he meant. But when Trav was born and then you, Cinda, he cheered up wonderfully. I suppose he thought the old curse had been lifted.”

  Tilda, already scanning another letter in her hand, cried out in dismay. “Oh, this one is even worse. I can’t—here, Trav!”

  She thrust the sheet of paper at Trav, yet Mrs. Currain thought Tilda was reluctant at thus surrendering the limelight. Cinda urged: “Let’s just tear them all up and forget about them, Mama!” Trav was scanning the yellowed sheet in his hand. “Is it awful, Travis?”

  “Why, yes,” he admitted. “I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but there’s no sense in reading it.”

  Mrs. Currain said calmly: “Give them to me, Travis.” He obeyed her. “There are two more,” she commented, added in a faint teasing chuckle: “I’ll read them myself, make sure there’s nothing here you children shouldn’t hear.” She added in a low tone, her head tipped back and resting against the tall chair: “I remember the day your father died. We thought he was asleep, and left him alone, and then found him dead at the head of the attic stairs. He had lighted the fire in his room. I suppose he tried to go up and get these letters and burn them before he died, but climbing the stairs was too much for him. He must have kept them hidden away al
l those years.”

  They did not speak and she began to puzzle out the letter in her hand. Her husband had written at the top the year, 1790. There was no salutation.

  “Well, Tony, the grand jury presented me for fornikation I told you Id pay you off and I done it. Pa disoned me sez he cut me out of his will long ago account of you, but theres good men in the world in spite of you mister Sparrow is a good man and aims to marry me and Ill let him I signed the sertificut to marry him so there wont be any more bastuds like your Nancy after all. I aint gethered enny yet but it want for lack of trying but I have to wait a year to marry mister Sparrow and I hope you lay awake nites swetting wundering what I’m doing Nancy takes after you only shes reel sweet and good, only shes dark complected like you and lanky and gray eyes like you and a bulgy forrid.”

  Mrs. Currain’s eyes closed. “Dark complected like you and lanky and gray eyes like you and a bulgy forrid.” The words brought to life that Anthony who had been her husband; through her closed lids she seemed to see him. He too was dark and tall, as dark and tall as Tony; and both Tony and Tilda had inherited that slightly protuberant forehead.

  Cinda touched her hand. “Mama, don’t—hurt yourself so! Let’s just tear them up!”

  “Oh, I’m all right.” Mrs. Currain finished the letter at a glance.

  “Shes six years old now. I never put your name on her nobuddy knows it here Pa nor enny of us ever named you. You aint worth a name only a bad one.”

  The letter was signed: ‘Lucey Hanks the Fornikater.’ Mrs. Currain handed it to Cinda. “It won’t hurt any of you to read it,” she said. There was one letter more; she looked at it absently. The date “1809,” in her dead husband’s hand, was nineteen years later than the letter she had just read. “No reason you shouldn’t read all of them,” she repeated. “You’re adults. And—he was your father, and this baby of his was your sister, in a left-handed fashion.”

  Cinda asked wonderingly: “Do you believe all this, Mama?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Currain assured them. “Your father was no saint. And he was—well, a weakling, in many ways. I always knew that, no matter how much I loved him.” She smiled a little. “This other Lucy seems to have been a high-headed, strong-willed young woman. If he’d had the courage to marry her, she might have made a man out of him.”

  While the others, grouping in the candlelight, puzzled out among them the letter she had just read to herself, she scanned the last one of all.

  “Well Tony I guess I’ve got over hating you so I thought Id rite you a few lines to tell you youve got two grandchildren out here in Kentucky.”

  Her eyes, at that word, closed again. Grandchildren? Swarming thoughts flew like darting swallows through her mind. Grandchildren? Then Anthony’s daughter, that “dark-complected” Nancy, had had children; and she herself was their step-grandmother, just as she was grandmother to Trav’s children, and to Cinda’s, and to Tilda’s. She groped through degrees of kinship. Were they cousins, half-cousins, step-cousins? No matter; they were all blood kin. Anthony was the link that bound them all together, for “dark-complected” Nancy Hanks was half-sister to Cinda and Tilda, to Tony and Travis and Faunt.

  Mrs. Currain nodded and read another line, two lines.

  “Nancy got married to Tom Lincoln here two years ago.”

  Tom Lincoln? Mrs. Currain paused again. In these terrible months, this year just past, she had heard more than she admitted of the talk around her. Lincoln? This man whom they all hated so bitterly was named Lincoln. But not Tom Lincoln. She was glad of that. The man they hated was not Tom Lincoln. It was Abraham Lincoln they abhorred. Reassured, her eyes returned to the letter.

  “Tom worked with Joe my brother carpentering and got to know her that way. They live an all day walk from here so I don’t see her much. She waited longer than most to git married. Nobody wanted her. She’s kind of bony and not much to look at, and she don’t laugh for days on end, only other times shes full of jokes and fun. She was second choice for Tom. He wanted Sarah Bush, but Sarah married Dan Johnson so he took up with Nancy to show Sarah she werent the only one but they named their first one Sarah all the same, and Marm Peggy Walters come by last week one day and said shed helped Nancy have her second. She says its as ugly a young one as she ever did see, all black and scrawny. They named it Abraham after Toms father. I married Mister Sparrow like I told you. Weve a houseful now.

  “Lucy Sparrow”

  Mrs. Currain noted absently that this girl had learned to spell, even while she read the last three lines again, stunned by the impact of that name. Abraham? Why, then the baby’s name was Abraham Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!

  She came slowly to comprehension, touched with sharp terror. Abraham Lincoln, born to a bony, dark-complected somebody who married Tom Lincoln when he turned to second-best; Abraham Lincoln whom these children of hers held responsible for all their present griefs; that Abraham Lincoln was her dead husband’s grandson!

  What would these her children do when they knew? What would this knowledge do to them? To Tony, all his life so dissolute and shameful in his ways, till in these late years he had somehow acquired a belated manhood; to Trav, so steady and dependable; to Cinda, so admirably strong and wise, so sharp of tongue to hide her tender heart; to Tilda, affectedly humble yet rotted with a canker of envy she could not wholly hide; to Faunt, so gentle, so fine, and yet with a strain of self-pity and an egotistic and sentimental weakness long since recognized.

  What would this knowledge do to them? An overwhelming billow of fear for them swept Mrs. Currain’s strength away. The letter slipped from her limp fingers to the floor, and Faunt stooped and picked it up and began to read it. The others gathered around him, reading over his shoulders. She might bid them stop and thus protect them against this revelation; but—they were grown men and women, not children dependent on her tender guardianship.

  Let them read, let them know. It was too late, now, to snatch the truth away.

  After a moment, breaking through her weary thoughts, came their sudden stir, their sharp and startled words. Cinda was first to speak. “Abraham! Abraham Lincoln! Oh, Travis!” How like Cinda in that first anguish to cry out Travis’ name! These two had always been closest joined of any of her children.

  Then Tilda: “Heavens and earth! Mama, how terrible!” Yet even in that moment Mrs. Currain thought there was malicious joy in Tilda’s tone.

  Then Faunt, in a hoarse voice: “Great God Almighty!” Such rage in him that his words seemed to sear the air.

  Then Trav, steady as always, turning as always to the solace of figures. “Eighteen-nine, this letter says. That would make him fifty-one now. Does anyone know how old he is? Tony, remember that book you had about Lincoln, before he was elected? Did it say—wait! It said his mother’s name was Lucy, Lucy Hanks. Not Nancy. Not if the book was right.”

  Tony laughed, and Mrs. Currain thought his sudden empty mirth was like the derisive laughter of the old, shameful Tony. “Probably they didn’t know who his mother was—any more than they knew who his grandfather was!” His eye went mockingly from one to another.

  Faunt tried to speak; then as though his mouth was full of bitterness, he spat, stepping toward the hearth. Cinda appealed to Mrs, Currain.

  “Mama, you don’t believe it, do you?”

  Mrs. Currain nodded. “Yes. I remember so many little things your father told me. Yes, I’m sure it’s true.”

  Tilda cried: “We mustn’t ever tell anyone!”

  Faunt moved purposefully, and they watched him. With a rancorous deliberation he collected all the letters and he tore them in small bits, and crumpled them in a mass and laid them on the bare hearth. Then he wrenched a candle from the tall stand and touched the flame to the fragments; and with the candle end he stirred the bits of paper till they were all burning, the hot candle grease hissing and spitting as it dripped into the little blaze they made. No one spoke. When the last flame died, Faunt ground the black ashes to dust under his foot, then flung the st
ill burning candle violently into the fireplace. It broke, the two halves held together by the wick rolling toward him in a crippled, uneven fashion like a man with a broken leg trying to crawl to safety. He kicked it furiously away. Mrs. Currain thought: Why, he’s like a small boy in a temper!

  Tony laughed again, and Faunt turned toward him with death in his eyes; but Mrs. Currain said quietly: “That will do. We should start for Richmond.”

  She rose and drew her cloak around her; and under the familiar compulsion they followed her. Outside the door old Thomas waited by the carriage, young Tom standing at the horses’ heads; and along the driveway those of the people who had not yet been sent away were gathered, ready to follow the carriage. Their eyeballs shone white in the glare of the torches made of lightwood splinters.

  Mrs. Currain felt a surge of affection for these old friends. They would follow their white folks, preferring bondage to the freedom the Yankees might bring. They led a few mules; their small belongings were packed on the backs of the animals or in bundles ready to be swung over their own shoulders.

  Big Mill had the horses, Trav’s and Faunt’s and Tony’s. Trav paused at the foot of the steps, and when he spoke Mrs. Currain thought she understood.

  “I wish you’d started off for Richmond this morning,” he said. She supposed he meant that to have done so would have saved them from this revelation; but when he went on, she realized she was wrong, for he explained. “The whole army’s on the move tonight. All the roads from Yorktown to Williamsburg are filled, and wagons were wheel-to-wheel in town, even on those wide streets, when I came through. They’ll have to go single file on the stage road to Richmond, and if the carriage gets into that line it can’t go any faster than they do.” He considered alternatives. “We might try Barrett’s Ferry; but I think we can take the back road, hit the stage road at Six-Mile Ordinary and maybe be ahead of the trains.” He appealed to his brothers. “What do you think?”