House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Vesta laughed affectionately. “Poor Mama. I’ll bet you were mad!”

  “Oh, I was! And no way to blow off steam! You can’t quarrel with Jenny, or the children; and when I scolded June or Banquo they just said ‘Yas’m’ in that miserable way a half-frozen negro talks. Then at daylight we came to the river; and the mud in the bottoms was knee-deep, so we all tried to ride; but the wagon bogged down and we had to get out and push. Luckily the ford had a hard bottom; but I thought we were lost! I’d have given my eyeteeth for a man to take charge, even a Yankee! Yes, even Redford Streean!”

  “That reminds me.” Vesta told her mother about Streean’s letter, and Dolly’s shameful widowhood, and her departure from Wilmington with Captain Pew.

  Cinda listened almost absently. “That poor, lost young one!” For a moment she forgot all else in memories of Dolly, so lovely and so gay. “She’s on my conscience, Vesta! I’ve always been ashamed of despising her as I did. Do you suppose if we’d been nicer to her she’d have turned out better, somehow?”

  “I always liked her.”

  “Oh, you like everyone!”

  The girl laughed. “Heavens, Mama, you make me sound awfully wishy-washy. Go on. You were all in the wagon.”

  “Oh bother! I hoped you’d let me forget that. Well, let me see. I think we were three days in that accursed wagon, plodding on and on. The roads are all red clay, and the houses all that graceless sort, two stories high, no veranda, one room deep from front to back, and a kitchen wing behind. And every one was full of refugees, or else deserted and empty. There were roads leading in all directions, and Banquo got lost. He finally brought us into Salisbury, instead of Statesville.

  “But that was really lucky, because when we drove into town, there was a train for Greensboro puffing away to get up its courage to start. Jenny and I each grabbed one of the children and made for the cars, and June and Banquo and Anarchy and Kyle came racing after us, and by the grace of pushing and fighting we got on!”

  Vesta drew a deep breath. “And here you are!”

  Cinda laughed. “It wasn’t as simple as that, my dear! The Piedmont Railroad must be a thousand miles long. Actually, we were three full days on their miserable train, while it wandered across fields and through woods and up and down hills and everywhere but on the tracks. It did every conceivable thing trains shouldn’t do!”

  “Papa says all the food the army gets has to come by that road.”

  “I know! We gave a man forty dollars in gold to let us ride in a car full of barrels of flour; and once a snakehead came up—–”

  “What’s a snakehead?”

  “A broken rail, I think. Anyway, that’s what the men called it. It came up through the bottom of our car and burst a barrel open and stopped us so short the barrels were all toppling over and rolling around and bursting open. I was afraid for our lives. Banquo managed to keep the barrels from crushing us; but I’ve breathed in so much flour—the air was full of it—I never want to taste bread again as long as I live!”

  Vesta laughed in a swift amusement. “I’m glad to hear it. You’ve come to a flourless household. There are some prices I simply refuse to pay!”

  “I don’t care if I starve, now that I’m home.” Memories suddenly flooded Cinda’s eyes with tears. “Oh, Vesta, Vesta, the things Sherman and his men have done to us! I think he’s just decided to destroy everything we own, houses, food, everything.”

  “Sheridan’s done the same thing in the Valley, and in Northern Virginia.”

  Cinda nodded. “I suppose they’ve decided that’s the only way to beat us. Ladies told me of nights when they could see houses burning in all directions around them while they hid in the woods with their children. Mr. Hayne said the night they burned Columbia he was at Meek’s Mill and he could see the fire from there, the whole city burning. Mrs. Poppenheim at Liberty Hill says they poured into her house and took all her silver and smashed everything, even the furniture, looking for money. If ladies pleaded with them, they were sworn at. The Yankees all said the same thing, as if they’d been taught. They said it was the ladies who egged the men on to keep fighting. You know they burned the Ursuline Convent school at Columbia; and before they did it, the soldiers played the piano and danced, and they broke into the nuns’ rooms and smashed open their trunks and searched everything. Twenty women must have told me about soldiers stripping rings off their fingers. One girl had some money in a belt around her waist, and when they burned her father’s ears with spills she told them, and they cut off her stays to get at it.” She said honestly: “Some of our own men in Wheeler’s cavalry were almost as bad, stealing everything. I suppose they learned it from Sherman’s men. Sherman’s soldiers hung old men to make them tell where their money was. They’d pull them up off the floor till they were choking, and keep doing it till they told, or till they died. On his line of march from Atlanta to Savannah there are just the chimneys standing, no houses at all, for a path fifty miles wide. Sometimes they’d send spies ahead, men pretending to be hungry Confederate soldiers, and people would feed them and get their help in hiding things and then when the soldiers came, the spies would know where everything was. They drank all the liquor they found. At the Clifford place near Walhalla they drank up dozens of bottles of Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, and all got sick.” Vesta smiled faintly, and Cinda said: “Oh, yes, there’ve been some funny things. Remember poor dear old Miss Cartin in Columbia? She put on all her dresses, one on top of the other, and packed her silver in her bustle, and it made her so heavy she couldn’t climb on the cars, and when she was lifted on, she couldn’t sit down because the forks and knives hurt her.” Vesta laughed aloud, and Cinda went on in an even tone: “But it wasn’t funny very often. At Mrs. Parremore’s, the Yankees saw some fresh-dug earth and thought they’d find silver buried there. Actually it was a grave, a little negro baby, the grandson of Mrs. Parremore’s cook. They dug him up, and threw him to one side,—I suppose they thought there might be some silver buried under him—and hogs ate him. But of course even human beings will eat anything if they’re hungry enough.” She saw Vesta’s lips white with pain and came back from hideous memories. “Forgive me, Honey. I shouldn’t tell you all these things. You’re going to have to live in the same nation with these people till you die.”

  “Oh, Mama, why do they do it?”

  Cinda shrugged. “Why, to make us love them, Vesta!” She spoke in a weary sarcasm. “To make us want to come back into the Union. Yet I suppose they’ll wonder, by and by, why we’re slow to make friends with them again.”

  That long spate of talk eased her, yet Cinda for a few days was content to stay quietly at home, to spend long mornings abed. She held a sort of court there, and after the first day Tilda came every morning before leaving the house; and Julian came, and Anne, and Enid and her children. The first Sunday after her return, Trav stopped in. She thought he had grown older in the weeks since she saw him. His shoulders were as broad, but they stooped more than she remembered; and his cheeks were hollowed, and deep lines framed his mouth, and hair and beard showed a sprinkling of gray. She told him he looked fine, and he said he was well. “Most people are,” he remarked. “Maybe short rations are good for us.”

  “How’s Cousin Jeems?”

  “He still carries his arm in a sling, but he can write a little now.” He added: “He’s sent for Cousin Louisa. She’d have been here before this if Sheridan weren’t so near Lynchburg.” Sheridan at Waynesboro had scattered General Early’s little army that not so long ago had been strong enough to march to the outer defenses of Washington itself. “She’s going to have another baby this summer.”

  “Really? Is that why he sent for her?”

  “Partly, I think. But there was a plan for her to go see Mrs. Grant, to see if that wouldn’t lead to a meeting between General Grant and General Lee. The whole thing fell through. General Lee asked Grant for an interview to discuss peace; but Grant said he couldn’t discuss anything but a military surrender.”
/>   “Are we as near as that to giving up?”

  Trav said honestly: “Yes. Some of us have given up already. Major Walton—he’s on the staff—has taken a transfer to Mississippi, so when the end comes he’ll be that much nearer his home.”

  “Why is it so hopeless, Trav? Oh I know it is, but why?”

  “Well, for one thing, General Lee hasn’t forty-five thousand men in his army, and Grant has a hundred thousand. Then our men get at most one square meal a week and Grant’s get three every day. We haven’t enough horses to move our guns, nor to mount our cavalry, but Grant has more horses than he can use. And Grant can collect an army of two hundred and fifty thousand men this summer, and General Lee will do well to get together fifty thousand, even including General Johnston’s army.”

  She almost smiled. “You and your figures.”

  “I’ve got so I hate figures. I wish I didn’t know two plus two. But I can’t get away from them.”

  “You say Cousin Jeems has sent for Cousin Louisa?”

  “Yes. As soon as it’s safe to travel. He wants her here if she can come. The river’s high, so Sheridan probably can’t cross; but north of the river there’s nothing to stop him between Lynchburg and our defenses here.”

  From Trav, from Vesta and Tilda and Julian, from the testimony of her own eyes, Cinda had evidence enough that the end was near. Richmond was beleaguered, the city and her defenders were half-starved. There was provision enough in North Carolina, but the broken-down railroad could not move it fast enough to feed the army, much less the hundred thousand people in the city. Civilians who could do so were leaving Richmond as eagerly as deserters left the army. There were daily rumors that Mr. Davis’s family and General Lee’s had gone or were preparing to go. Cinda, a little ashamed of wishing to make sure this was not so, walked down Franklin Street to call on Mrs. Lee, living now with her daughters in the narrow brick house only two or three blocks away. General Lee had had his Richmond office there since the first year of the war, and Custis Lee and some of his friends had used the house when they were on duty in Richmond; till Mrs. Lee came last fall to live there with the girls. Cinda found the General’s wife in her wheel chair on the second floor veranda, enjoying the warm spring day. As usual, she was knitting. May and Agnes were with her and as busy as she; and she was so serenely cheerful that Cinda as they chatted began to be ashamed of her own fears.

  “This has been good for me, Mrs. Lee,” she said when she rose to go “May I make a confession? I’d heard that you were leaving Richmond, and I came to see for myself.”

  “It has been decided to defend Richmond, Mrs. Dewain. Why should I leave?”

  “Do you think it can be defended?”

  Mrs. Lee’s eyes were stern. “I have never been so presumptuous as to doubt the mercy of God!”

  But though Mrs. Lee would stay, there were many who departed; and the talk was that every government official kept a horse saddled ready for instant flight. Rumors of a treaty with France or with England that might yet bring salvation gave the witless a breath of hope; and some thought enough Negroes might still be recruited to make an army strong enough to crush Grant. Why, three hundred thousand Negro soldiers could destroy the Yankee armies, march on Washington, bring the North to its knees!

  But Cinda was sickened by these childish follies. “We might save at least our dignity,” she told Julian. “To lose everything, even our lives, is better than this whining chatter.” She was weary of inaction and thought there might be work for her in the hospital, so she walked out to Chimborazo. Some impulse made her follow Main Street. The iron fence and low arches of the Farmers’ Bank always seemed to her to have a hint of the Oriental. Main Street was the financial center, the heart of the city. She wondered how long that heart would continue to beat. There were already visible symptoms of inanition and of decay. At the landings where Main Street crossed Shockoe Creek, a few barges lay idle and deserted; and a fisherman’s small sailboat was awash, hanging sluggish in her slack moorings. The creek was roofed over from Main Street upstream as far as Broad, and since it served as a sewer, its waters were noisome and repulsive. She turned up to Grace Street, wishing Richmond had not so many hills. She had never realized how numerous they were until she gave up the carriage and began to go afoot. She passed Miss Van Lew’s, fronting on Grace Street and with gardens and servants’ quarters extending down to Main. That extraordinary woman through these terrible years had openly avowed her loyalty to the Union. Probably she was happy now in the certainty that the end for which she had prayed was near.

  At the hospital Cinda found her old ward almost empty. The soldiers were so sadly undernourished that even a slight wound often proved fatal, and most of those who came to the hospital soon died, and there was not much hard fighting in early March to fill the empty beds. So, finding nothing here for her to do, Cinda turned homeward, following Broad Street. When she crossed the creek, she saw on the slopes of the ravine toward the White House young grass and new green; but it was still too early for the Scotch broom to clothe those slopes in bright golden blossoms. At Fourteenth Street she waited for a brigade of soldiers to pass. The marching men were thin and weary, gaunt shadows shambling through the city to strengthen some threatened point in the long defensive lines.

  At home she found Julian just arrived with news that Fitz Lee’s men were marching through the city to meet Sheridan; and he and Cinda and Vesta hurried to see them pass and to watch for Burr. At their call, Burr swung his skeleton of a horse to where they scood, and dismounted for a swift embrace and a moment’s breathless talk. When he was gone Vesta wept with pity for him.

  “Oh, Mama, he’s just a shadow,” she cried. “Just skin and bones!”

  Cinda nodded. “So is his horse,” she commented. “I wonder what the horses think about this war. I’m sorrier for them, sometimes, than I am for the men. The men at least know what they’re doing, and why.”

  Sheridan’s horsemen passed north of Richmond, and after he was gone across the Pamunkey, a new trickle of refugees from Ashland and from as far as Gordonsville brought the familiar stories of Yankee thievery and waste: of earrings, brooches, rings, snatched from their wearers; of barns and smoke houses and storage bins and houses burned; of cattle killed and left to rot. To hear of these new depredations awoke in many sympathetic listeners a hysterical mania for sacrifice; and Tilda reported that ladies were begging the privilege of giving anything that might help feed the army and thus defeat the brutal enemy. “They even talk of cutting off their hair and selling it to the wig makers in Paris to buy bread,” she said. “As if a suit of hair in Paris, even if you could get it there, would make a soldier in the trenches at Petersburg any less hungry.”

  “They’re trying to ease their own heartbreak a little by parading it in public,” Cinda commented. “I’m as sad as any of them, I suppose; but there’s a line in the Bible, a good rule for anyone who is grieving: ‘Rend your hearts and not your garments.’”

  Vesta, who kept her spirits high, laughed. “Well, that’s mighty good advice,” she declared. “I’ve only about two dresses to my name. If I start rending my garments where will I be?”

  In mid-March the weather turned bright and fair, and occasional frosty mornings accented the beauty of the fine warm days. Brett came for dear and heartening hours at home. “But I shouldn’t have come,” he confessed. “We’ve so few men left that the breastworks in front of us are just held by a skirmish line. The Yankees can march through us any time.” He added: “And I should have walked instead of riding. Our horses are too worn out to carry us to town and back unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Not enough men, not enough horses, not enough food!” Cinda spoke in dull sorrow.

  “Not enough anything,” Brett assented. “Not even enough bullets, Cinda. General Lee sent word to Colonel Mosby the other day to pick up all the lead he can find on the old battlefields in Northern Virginia. We work every day cutting down trees along our lines and burning them a
nd then sifting the melted bullets out of the ashes.”

  “The Yankees need lead, too,” she remembered, and she told him of those Atlanta ladies who lived by collecting bullets and trading them for food at Sherman’s commissary.

  “Well, they’ve enough to finish us with,” he said.

  Next day Mrs. Longstreet came to call. She was just from Lynchburg; and since so many had already fled from Richmond, the General had been able to find her a room at the Spottswood. She told them of Lynchburg’s perils now past. “When Sheridan came, General Early’s cavalry had mostly deserted,” she said. “And at Waynesboro, General Early was just about the only one in his army who got away. Sheridan wrecked the railroad all the way to Amherst, and the canal locks at Duguidsville; but the river was so high he couldn’t cross, and the next thing we knew he’d gone away toward Richmond.” She tossed her head. “So I came to be with Jeems.”

  Cinda smiled, knowing the tender bond between these two. “Cousin Jeems can whip Grant’s whole army by himself, with you here,” she declared. “Trav says he’s miserable away from you.”