Since it was almost supper time, Vesta led him away upstairs to rid himself of travel stains; but at supper and afterward, all of them together, there was more long talk; and before they went up to bed, Jenny asked a question.
“Rollin, how did you get home? Are the cars running?”
“I rode,” he said. “I came slowly, to let Prince get some strength back.”
Jenny repeated her unanswered question. “Are the cars running, Rollin? Or the stages?”
“Some, I think,” he said. “But of course the tracks are torn up wherever the Yankees got at them. Why?”
“I was—wondering,” Jenny said, and said no more that night; but next day she spoke to Cinda alone. “Mama, as soon as I can, I’m going back to the Plains. Do you think Papa might want to go? He needs something to do.”
Cinda started to protest, for of course Jenny could not go back to the Plains. Yet Brett might go. If he were busy, he would presently be happy too.
“But what can he do there, Jenny?” she asked.
“Make a crop.”
“With no negroes?”
“I expect most of them are still there, unless Sherman’s men burned the house. And even if they did, Banquo wouldn’t run away, nor old James, nor—well, lots of them; and I know Mr. Peters would keep them all at work if he could.” She added, with a shy pride: “We made some cotton last summer, and Mr. Peters had the people gin it with the old treadle gins, and pressed it in our own screw and baled it and hid it in the deep woods away from the house. If the Yankees didn’t find it, Papa could sell it now.”
“I suppose he might go,” Cinda reflected. “But of course you couldn’t.”
Jenny answered quickly: “Yes, I could. You and Aunt Tilda stay here and keep the children, and Papa and I will go.”
Cinda shivered in sudden fear. “Oh no! I’ll never let Brett Dewain out of my sight again!”
“You will if it’s the best thing to do.”
“He’ll soon be all right here,” Cinda argued, trying to persuade herself. “He goes to see his business friends, and they talk about reopening the banks and starting to run the railroads.” But she knew Jenny was right. It would do Brett good to go back to the Plains; and she found herself longing for the old fine years of quiet peace and deep contenting there.
On the Sunday after Rollin’s return the vanguard of Grant’s victorious army marched through Richmond, crossing the pontoon bridge at Seventeenth Street and passing in review before General Meade and General Halleck at City Hall. Rollin and Julian went to see that spectacle, but Brett stayed indoors.
“They say there were fifty thousand of them,” Rollin reported when he came home. “It was a sight.”
Brett said thoughtfully: “Lee hadn’t that many men in his whole army, not after the first of January; and this was less than half of Grant’s army. But we kept them busy for a while, all the same.” Cinda heard something new in his tone, an awakening pride; and when next day a reward of one hundred thousand dollars was offered for the capture of President Davis, and twenty-five thousand dollars for each of a considerable list of Confederate leaders, Brett said jocosely: “Now there’s a real business opportunity, Cinda! I think I’ll go win that reward and restore our fallen fortunes.”
She laughed with him, happy that now at last he began to be able to jest; and the day after, when he decided to stroll as far as Capitol Square, she kept him company.
She and Brett walked down Franklin Street and entered the Square at the gate by the Bell Tower. She kept her eyes straight ahead, pretending not to see the blue uniforms everywhere; but there were men in gray too, and to each she gave an eager smile. Negroes by ones and twos and dozens sat in the sun or swarmed across the sidewalks; the shrill laughter of the wenches and the hoarse mirth of the men filled the air. But the Square was alien ground, with Yankee sentries at the Governor’s mansion, and around the Capitol and across in front of the City Hall; so Cinda suggested they walk out Twelfth Street and call on Anne and the baby. Brett agreed, and she told him about seeing President Lincoln pass this way.
“And thousands of negroes following him. June was here. I saw her kneel in front of him; and after he passed, she kissed the ground he stepped on.” Brett did not speak, and she said: “Brett Dewain, I never believed before that day that our people wanted to be free.”
“I suppose we never let ourselves believe it. We couldn’t very well believe it and keep our self-respect, so we pretended it wasn’t true.” He met her eyes. “But June has stayed with you,” he reminded her.
“She says there’s a difference between having to take care of me, and wanting to.”
When they reached the house they found only Anne at home. “Julian’s working,” she said proudly. “And Papa’s taken the carriage and driven out to the country to buy vegetables.”
“Vegetables!” Cinda echoed. “Whatever for?”
“Why, to eat, of course. But he buys all he can, and what we don’t need he sells to the market men!” She laughed at .her own words. “I really think he enjoys it! He makes fun of himself for turning huckster; but he loves to get out in the country, and he’s so proud to be earning some money.”
Brett nodded. “I know how he feels.”
“As soon as things settle down, he’s going to open an office again,” Anne told them. “And Julian’s going to read law with him. Papa says Julian will be a fine lawyer.” She went to bring the baby for them to admire. “Molly’s left,” she explained. “So I take care of him now, and I love it.”
Molly, granddaughter of old Sal who presided over the Judge’s kitchen, had been the baby’s nurse. “Where’s Molly gone?”
“She decided she was free.” Anne smiled. “Aunty Sal told her never to show her face around here again!”
“Sal hasn’t left?”
“Heavens, no! Papa told her she’d better, because we can’t pay her anything; but she told him to hush his mouth!” Brett laughed aloud, the first full-throated laughter Cinda had heard since he came home; and Anne said with twinkling eyes: “She told Papa she’d helped bring him into the world and she intended to be here to bury him!”
The baby, just a few days more than a year old, bounced on Cinda’s knee; and Brett said: “Here, give that young one to me!” Cinda watched him in a rising happiness.
When they started home, they walked along Clay Street to Ninth, and then along Marshall to Seventh, and so to Broad before turning into Fifth; and Cinda saw everywhere garbage and refuse in the gutters and the alleys and the streets. “I declare, Brett Dewain,” she cried, “we need a good housecleaning. I wouldn’t have believed so much filth could accumulate in a month. Where does it come from?”
“Richmond’s full of negroes,” he reminded her. “The Yankees are feeding twenty thousand of them, men and women and children.” And he said: “That will be worse before it’s better, too. The negroes don’t know what to do with freedom. They don’t know anything at all.” His tone was grave, but it was no longer dull and hopeless. “We’ve kept them ignorant and dependent. Whatever they are now is what we’ve made them. If they don’t know how to use their freedom, it’s our fault. And we’ll pay for it. They’ll always be here. Somehow we have to live with them.”
“The Yankees might at least make them clean up the streets!”
“The negroes shouldn’t be in Richmond. They ought to be working the farms.”
She hesitated, seized the moment. “Jenny thinks someone ought to go back to the Plains. She thinks if our people there are kept busy, they’ll stay on the place.”
He did not speak till they had crossed Broad Street and turned toward Fifth. “Yes, I’ve been thinking something of the kind,” he agreed. She waited, but he said no more.
At home Vesta declared their walk had done them good. “You both look like new people. Mama, your cheeks are as pink as a girl’s.”
Cinda smiled. “That’s temper! It made me mad to see the nastiness in the streets everywhere!”
Vesta
laughed. “Did you go by the Old Market? You can hardly get near it for the piles of fish heads and entrails and all sorts of garbage, and the swarms of flies. I hold my handkerchief over my nose.”
“Something ought to be done about it!”
“Oh, everybody’s too busy cleaning up after the fire, pulling down the old walls and cleaning bricks and laying foundations for new buildings. I like to walk along Main Street. You see so many gentlemen you know, scraping bricks like Julian, or mixing mortar, or learning how to be carpenters.” Vesta smiled. “Why, Mama, it’s as sociable as an evening promenade out to Gamble’s Hill used to be. You ought to come with me some time.”
But Cinda shook her head, and it was long before she again ventured out. Tilda and Vesta went somewhere almost every day. Tilda was busy. The Yankee commissary issued rations to indigent white women as well as to Negroes; but they must present certificates from a doctor or a minister, attesting that they were at once too poor to buy food, and too ill to work. Tilda and the ladies she directed spent their days marshalling these necessary proofs of need; and Vesta too seemed to have many matters to which she must attend. But Cinda stayed indoors. Thus at least she need not see all the tragedy which in Richmond now was a commonplace.
Brett began to wear a new abstraction, and Cinda knew that once or twice he had long conversations with Jenny. He, like Tilda, usually left the house for a while every morning; and one day when he returned he said he had called on Mr. Daniel, the president of the Fredericksburg railroad.
“He’s hopeful,” he told her. “But of course the road is a ruin. Most of the bridges have been burned, tracks torn up, engines and cars worn out. And they’ve nothing in the treasury but Confederate bonds and Confederate money. But he believes they can sell their bonds in Philadelphia and New York to finance rebuilding.”
“I should think he’d hate asking Northerners for money.”
“Well, of course no Southerners have any credit now. Technically we’re all outlaws, so we can’t sell anything, can’t give good title; and naturally we can’t borrow, not while all our property is still liable to confiscation. There’ve been confiscations in Louisiana.” His lips twisted in a mirthless smile. “And the confiscated lands have been sold or leased to negroes, forty acres to a man. I suppose that’s what will happen to the Plains.” He added: “Mr. Daniel hears from Charleston that the rice swamps are all ruined, dams and levees broken, the swamps grown up to brush and weeds. I don’t suppose anyone will ever raise rice again down there; not without slaves. The negroes always dreaded working in the swamps because so many of them sickened and died. They certainly won’t do it now when they no longer have to.”
“That means Rollin’s family is ruined, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I believe since his father died his mother has tried to keep things going; but it’s hopeless. The rice planters are even worse off than we. We at least have land that can be used to make a crop; and Mr. Daniel thinks if we can raise cotton it will bring tremendous prices.” She guessed he was about decided to return to the Plains, but he went on to speak of a projected trip to Great Oak. “Rollin wants to go down,” he explained. “He and Vesta plan to try to farm there. Vesta says Rooney Lee and his cousin John are going back to White House, build a cabin, make a home. Rollin wants to live in Virginia, bring his mother here.”
Cinda felt a sudden homesick longing. “Great Oak seems a thousand miles away.”
“We can take the carriage. My mare and Rollin’s horse will have to get used to working in harness. We’ll go through New Market, cross at Barrett’s Ferry.” He added, watching her: “Vesta says she’s going.”
She nodded. “So am I.”
Cinda would regret that decision, and not only because the journey was hard and wearying. Along the way to New Market, she caught glimpses of the fortifications which here on the North Side Longstreet and his men had held so long; and she saw broken guns and wagons, and sometimes the smell of carrion lay sickly sweet upon the morning air. Beyond New Market, across the Strawberry Plains, the marks of battle were not so numerous; but at Turkey Creek the bridge was broken, and they had to retrace their way and take the Quaker Road and then climb the gentle slopes of Malvern Hill, where three years ago so many Southern men had died under McClellan’s guns. Cinda saw bleached bones half-hidden in the new grass; and she took refuge from sick grief in empty questions.
“Brett Dewain, I always supposed Malvern Hill was steep and terrible; but I don’t think we’ve climbed fifty feet in half a mile. Why was it so hard?”
“Our men had no cover.” Brett spoke half to himself. “The Yankee guns were massed along the crest here, and our men had to come across open fields all the way from the woods back there.” And he said: “Steep slopes are easier to attack than gentle ones, Cinda. If they’re steep enough, the guns can’t point down at the men. At Fredericksburg, and at Gettysburg there was no real climb, nothing you’d notice if you were just taking a stroll. But it’s different when you’re marching into cannon fire, with not even a ditch or a tree where you can hide for a minute from the bullets and the shells.”
She was glad when the road dipped down into deep woods toward the river; and weariness helped her sleep the slow miles away. She woke at Barrett’s Ferry and her heart quickened, for their goal was near.
But to arrive was worse than the journey. When they came to where the big house had been, the chimneys were standing; but that was all. The Yankees—McClellan’s men or Butler’s—had had a depot here; and they had left their mark. The fences were gone, and every outside building had been wrecked and ravaged by soldiers seeking wood for their fires. The tremendous oak which gave the place its name stood unharmed; but all around it, wagons crossing the lawns toward the river had rutted the deep sod, and a road had been cut at an angle down the bluff to the landing. Garbage and filth were scattered everywhere. The largest accumulations were marked by clumps of weeds; and the air was sour with a stale smell of men and of rotten meat and of decay. The gardens were trampled, and even the lovely clumps of bush box were hacked and torn, or scorched by campfires built heedlessly near. From the top of the bluff, thousands of bottles had been thrown down toward the river, and an enormous confusion of rubbish dumped atop them. The heap of bottles and of broken glass and of worn out harnesses and old newspapers and rusted muskets and rotting garbage was higher than a man’s head. Cinda saw rats appear and disappear from every cranny in the pile, loping sluggishly away to hide at their approach, peering out at them with beady eyes. When the Union soldiers departed they had set fire to a mountain of stores not worth removal; and in the ash heap that remained rats had tunnelled to reach the barrels and boxes charred but not consumed. Even the wells had been made useless. In one the swollen carcass of a pig still floated. Where the house had stood and for a quarter-mile on either side, every yard of ground was desolated and defiled.
But away from the house lay a promise and a challenge; for though the fields were grown to weeds among which pine saplings already began to lift their heads, Brett thought they could be brought back. “Trav can give you good advice on that, Rollin. He’s a real farmer.”
Vesta was eager, but Rollin had his doubts. “It would be hard for you, Honey.”
“I’ll love it!” She smiled at him and kissed him. “Don’t try to pack me up in cotton and put me on a shelf, Rollin! rm as strong as a horse really. You’ll get lots of good hard work out of me.”
“We’ve no place to live! There’s not a roof that will keep out the rain.”
“We’ll build one! It doesn’t have to be a big one, not at first.” Cinda, listening, loved this dear daughter of hers; she saw Rollin begin to catch fire. Oh, they were young, young, young; and she and Brett were old. But perhaps she and Brett could borrow strength from them.
When the others returned to Richmond, Rollin stayed behind to make a place ready for Vesta’s coming. The third day after they came home again, Sherman’s army marched through Richmond, northward bound; and for Cind
a that departure was a lifting of old burdens. Sherman had left bitterness in every Southern heart, to persist long after the ashes and destruction which marked his path were covered and hidden by healing time. Homes burned, women insulted, old men tortured, houses pillaged, money and jewels as well as worthless knickknacks stolen—these things would be remembered and reported to generations yet unborn. But at least now his army of robbers and torturers was gone out of the land they had looted and laid waste, and their bloodstained boots no longer defiled the beloved Southern soil.
Sunday morning, boys came racing through the streets selling extra editions of the new paper, the Republic, which had been allowed to begin publication the Wednesday before. The news they cried seemed to Cinda somehow to draw a curtain across the past, for President Davis was captured. This was the real end, even more definite than the surrender of the armies. So long as Mr. Davis was free, he in his person was still the Confederacy.
But now he was a prisoner, so now the hanging would begin. She was fiercely anxious for Brett to leave Richmond, to go to the Plains or somewhere far away; for here the Terror would have its center. She urged him to go at once; but Brett refused to believe that there would be the wholesale arrests which she expected.
“Because after all, there are some sensible people in the North,” he argued. “President Johnson is a rascally renegade, a turncoat Democrat, beneath contempt; but he will be controlled by wiser heads.”
“He says they’ll hang Mr. Davis,” Cinda reminded him.
“I doubt it.” Brett added, half-smiling: “In fact I suspect they’re already wishing they hadn’t caught him. President Davis had come to be the most hated man in the Confederacy. He bore the blame for all our failures. If he had escaped, like the scapegoat the Hebrews used to chase away into the wilderness, he’d have taken our sins with him and we’d have felt ourselves absolved; but now we’ll make a martyr out of him, or at least the Yankees will. If they hang him, he’ll be deified by the South, to be worshipped in our secret hearts forever. So they won’t. Some of them are wise enough to know that.”
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