House Divided (141 page)

Pudrick's Negro who was their warden and their master had outrun the three white men. He sat his mule a little to one side, drooped and still. “He'll tell around what we do to Sam,” Pudrick explained. “It makes the others slow to run away.” He rode nearer the tree and spoke in calm tones to the fugitive. “Sam,” he said, “you might as well come down.”

Tony stared at that frightened thing, more animal than man, in the tree above them; and his throat was hot with rage. That and Sapphira? He wished he had brought a pistol, one of those revolving pistols that would ram slug after slug into the nigger. No man, white or black, should touch Sapphira, should lay even a thought upon her.
He heard the click of a lock, and saw Pudrick with a pistol in his hand.

“Are you going to kill him?” he asked.

“No, no; just wing him, shoot him out of the tree, let the dogs tear him a little.” And Mr. Pudrick said: “Here, take my lantern. Hold it so I can see.” He spoke to Darrell. “Hold yours up too. I don't want to spoil him, break any bones.” He gave Tony the lantern, urged his horse around the tree. “I'll get a side shot, burn his rump,” he said.

The tree was small. Pudrick on his horse was only a few feet below the Negro. The fugitive had heard Pudrick's word. He tried to scramble around the slender trunk, to keep his face to the slave dealer; but the tree bowed under his weight. Then suddenly the Negro screamed and flung himself outward like a bat, arms and legs wide.

Pudrick, too late, tried to spur aside; Sam descended upon him, had his throat. They slid sidewise off the horse together. Mr. Pudrick's horse danced away from the rolling heap, white man and black, on the ground almost under his feet. The dogs with dutiful cries found black flesh and began to tear. The Negro was making a worrying, unearthly sound, but Mr. Pudrick was silent. Clearly, Sam had him by the throat.

Darrell laughed aloud. “Damnedest funniest thing I ever saw,” he said; and he moved his horse in among the dogs, his pistol now in hand, the lantern in his other hand held low. The flash of the pistol for a moment blinded Tony; its smoke briefly blurred the scene. Then the dogs were worrying something under a screen of smoke that thinned and drifted away.

Pudrick yelled with pain and anger. He rolled Sam's body aside and kicked his way to his feet, kicked the dogs. “The God-damned hounds bit me!” he roared, shocked and scandalized. Darrell bowed in his saddle, weak with laughter; and Pudrick raged at him. “Your powder flash singed my ear!”

Darrell, his pistol lightly balanced, asked in icy tones: “Do you object, Mr. Pudrick?”

“Eh? No! Oh no, not at all!” Mr. Pudrick spoke in quick appeasement. His Negro came to pull the hounds away from dead Sam and put them on leash again. Pudrick counted rents in coat and trousers;
he inspected a gashed leg. “Bet I won't sit easy for a month,” he grumbled.

“You'll be able to take nourishment, at least,” Darrell reminded him. Pudrick touched his throat.

“I feel as though I'd been half-hanged!” He mounted, looked down at the dead Negro. “Four thousand dollars for the buzzards!” he said disgustedly. “Well, that's all there is to that.” He kicked his horse and moved away.

Tony stayed a moment longer, looking at the Negro on the ground. That and Sapphira? That buzzard bait? Why, good enough. This was the due of any man who looked at her.

He rode after the others, and when he overtook them Darrell turned in his saddle with a question. “Uncle Tony, is there any better way up through these woods? They're thick riding in the dark.”

“Wait for light,” Tony suggested. “It won't be long. The night's nearly gone.”

This seemed wise. They dismounted, and Mr. Pudrick found a little stream and bathed his wounds. “By God, Mr. Streean,” he cried, “you've burned half my hair away, and blistered my ear. Can't you shoot straighter than that?”

Darrell turned toward him. “By daylight, yes, I think so, Mr. Pudrick,” he said coldly. “If I see a target still at hand.”

For a moment silence lay among them. “Eh?” said Mr. Pudrick. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Darrell explained, “that the business that brought you here is done. Why should you stay?” Tony held his tongue. This might lead to something. Mr. Pudrick did not seem like a man who would submit to such dictation. Darrell, a chuckle in his tone, added: “Unless, of course, you wish to make a really extended stay.”

There was a long silence, while Mr. Pudrick, pressing his handkerchief against his burned ear, seemed to consider. The handkerchief was in his right hand, while Darrell's hands were free; so he was at a disadvantage. This may have influenced him, for when he spoke it was peaceably enough. “Why, perhaps you're right,” he agreed. “If Mr. Currain here will forgive my somewhat unceremonious departure, I have in fact affairs which require my prompt return.” His Negro was near, with the leashed hounds sleeping about the feet of the mule he
rode. Mr. Pudrick mounted his horse. There were no more words. The horse, the mule, the men, the dogs, receded into darkness. Hoof beats muffled on the sodden ground departed into silence and were gone.

 

Tony, his horse's reins knotted to a low-hanging bough, set his shoulders against a tree to wait for dawn. This hour had left him drained and very tired; but Darrell, sitting against another tree, talked casually of many things. He remarked that Tony seldom came to Richmond. “You should, you know. Things happen there. I sometimes think, for instance, that Aunt Enid has fallen out of love with Uncle Trav. Do you suppose that's true?” Tony did not reply, and Darrell asked: “And had you heard, Uncle Tony, that Uncle Faunt has taken up with your old light-o'-love?” Tony thought someone would throw a bullet into Darrell, one of these days. Pudrick, a while ago, had wanted to, had not dared. Tony wished Pudrick had dared. If Darrell stayed at Chimneys, how long would it be before he knew Sapphira was hidden there? Darrell's mocking voice went on and on.

When they came back to Chimneys, Peg-leg reported that someone in the night had tried to wrench the lock off the smoke house door, prying at the staples with an inexpert hand; that someone had loosened a board on the corn crib and laboriously extracted a few ears. Tony, listening abstractedly, thought that probably Sam, who now was buzzard bait over in the next valley, had tried before he fled to lay hand on some provisions. He decided not to ask Peg-leg or 'Phemy or Sapphira about Sam. If they had sheltered Sam, he did not want to know it. Besides, if they had hid his presence, they would lie now; and you couldn't make a nigger tell the truth unless he wanted to. Buzzards circling in the next valley, miles away, would not be noticed here; and a day or two would finish that. Let Sam be forgotten.

“Put on a stronger lock,” he directed. “And nail up the corn cribs so they're tight.”

Darrell said: “Wait a minute, Uncle Tony. Who'd be thieving here? Don't you feed your people?”

“Certainly. It might have been—” Better not speak of Sam at all, in Peg-leg's hearing. “It might have been some of these white trash farmers around here.”

Darrell seemed pleased. “Why, that's mighty interesting. Maybe I can find a way to protect you, Uncle Tony. I don't like thieves.”

Tony, moving toward the house in a fog of weariness, and hungry for sleep, hardly heard him. He went to his room and to bed, and he slept till dark, and to avoid seeing Darrell he kept his bed and let 'Phemy bring him supper. Perhaps Darrell would be gone tomorrow.

In the morning 'Phemy said Darrell had ridden off to Martinston. “Anyways, he say he do.” Tony read the warning in her words, so he did not ask for Sapphira, and this was fortunate, for in midfore-noon Darrell came casually down through the orchard behind the house and up the back steps and was in the house before 'Phemy knew he was near.

“Oh, I was in the mood for a stroll,” he replied, to Tony's question. “Send someone to bring my horse. He's a mile or so away toward Martinston, tied in the edge of the woods.”

Tony shivered to think what might have happened if Darrell had returned and found Sapphira with him here. For the week that followed he felt like a man besieged. Darrell made no move to depart, yet during the daylight hours he was seldom at the house. He disappeared without saying where he was going, returned without forewarning. Usually in the evening he insisted on cards, and Tony lost enormous sums, inattentive to the game, searching his wits for some way to be rid of this young man so that he and Sapphira could once more be at ease. He was sure by this time that Darrell suspected or knew she was somewhere here, but the young man asked no questions, never provoked an issue. Yet Tony felt the other's watchfulness. Even after he went to bed, Darrell was apt to sit for hours, perhaps idling over a book, before the fire in the big room across the hall from which he could see Tony's closed door; and Tony, though he sometimes tried to stay awake, inevitably fell asleep before he heard his unwelcome guest go upstairs.

Darrell was waiting to tire him out, waiting for Sapphira to appear, waiting for something; of this he was sure. Tony settled grimly to the necessity of patience. If Darrell could wait, then so could he.

On the eighth night, hard asleep, he was roused by the heavy roar of a gun. The sound was muffled, as though the explosion were somehow confined. Before he could move, he heard Darrell's window, in
the room above his, flung open; and he heard Darrell's pistol speak twice, heard the young man's exultant cry. That first shot had come from the direction of the smoke house, beyond the kitchen wing. Tony scrambled to his window and looked out, but though the stars were shining he could see nothing clearly. He touched a spill to the coals on the hearth and lighted a candle, and as he did so he heard Darrell coming at a run down the stairs. He was pulling on his trousers over his night shirt when Darrell, without knocking, opened his door.

“Well, I got your thief, Uncle Tony!” the young man cried exultantly. “I rigged a set gun in the smoke house, just inside the door. When the gun went off just now I jumped to my window. The charge didn't catch him square, because he was trying to crawl away; so I put a bullet through him. Come on.”

Tony, still dazed with sleep, drew on his boots. As they went out along the kitchen gallery, Peg-leg appeared from down toward the quarter with a pine torch flaring, hurrying toward them. In the torch light, Tony saw a shadow on the ground by the open smoke house door. As they approached, the shadow seemed to be the body of a small man, in clothes too big for him, sprawled on his face.

Darrell leaned down and caught one outflung hand to turn the dead man over; and then he checked, looking at the hand in his grasp, upon which now as Peg-leg stumped nearer the torch light began to play.

“By God, he's white, Uncle Tony,” he exclaimed. “It's just a boy!” He twitched the body over; the hat fell off, a mass of long hair tumbled loosely free. “It's a woman!” Darrell Streean cried.

Tony saw that this was true. It was a woman. It was Mrs. Blandy.

December
,
1863

 

 

C
INDA, when she let herself, had dreaded this Christmas. It when she let herself, had dreaded this Christmas. It would be the first without her mother; and though Brett might come home, Trav was off in Tennessee with Longstreet, and she knew there was no likelihood that Faunt or Tony would appear. Jenny and the children were at the Plains, and Barbara and her babies—little Burr had been born in October—were in Raleigh, so if big Burr had a furlough he would certainly go to them. Christmas had always been a day for family gatherings and a crowded dinner table loaded with good things to eat, but this year it promised to be a dreary, empty time.

It proved to be not so bad as she had feared. A week beforehand Burr arrived, with his hair cut so short it might have been shaved and his uniform in tatters; and he spent two days with them while June cleaned and mended his coat and trousers, and Caesar found a shoemaker to patch the soles of his boots, worn completely through. He was on his way to Raleigh, and Vesta warned him Barbara would laugh at that shorn head.

“Can't help it,” he said cheerfully. “This is what they call a ‘horse thief cut'; keeps you from having too many extra boarders.” He laughed. “You ought to see Tommy Waring. Joe Murr had the only pair of scissors in the regiment, so we kept him busy; and last Saturday he was cutting Tommy's hair and had one side of it pretty well off when a Yankee squadron came along, so we were busy for a while, and in the excitement Joe lost his scissors. Tommy's hair was still half on and half off when I left camp!”

They laughed at that and at many a tale he told, while Cinda
watched this son of hers and saw small changes in him; the faint lines around his mouth and eyes, the sudden twist of his lips as though at some sharp pain, the wrinkling frown that sometimes came and went as quickly as a dimple appears and disappears when a pretty girl smiles. They all laughed when he described that September day when Stuart, attacked from two sides, had his cannon firing breech to breech in opposite directions; and Colonel Grenfell, the Englishman who had attached himself to Stuart's staff, was so confused by this unconventional warfare that he bolted through a thicket, swam the river, galloped to Orange Court House and reported that Stuart and all his men were lost.

“When we rode back safe and sound,” Burr said, “he was so embarrassed that we haven't seen him since.”

He described a night when Stuart and his whole command, surrounded by heavy Yankee forces, spent the hushed hours till dawn within hearing distance of marching columns of the enemy. “We could even hear the officers telling the men to close up,” Burr declared. “We had a man at every mule's head to keep them from braying. That was the longest night I ever spent; but we pushed through them and came clear at dawn.” He spoke of their work on the march that led to the costly repulse at Bristoe Station. “General Lee hoped to flank the Yankees and hurt them, but Meade slipped away so cleverly we didn't even get any booty. I found one oilcloth, and that was all. I tell you, we were a disappointed lot. The cavalry likes to make a haul now and then, you know, even if it's from our own folks. The farmers up that way say they'd as soon see the Yankees come along as us; that the Yankees don't steal any more than we do.” He told them of that hilarious hour when Stuart and Fitz Lee's command trapped the Yankee cavalry and broke them and chased them for miles. “Near a little place called Bucklands,” he said. “We call that day the Bucklands Races.”

Vesta asked what General Stuart would do for Christmas; and Burr said: “Oh, Mrs. Stuart and General Jimmy Junior—he's only four—live near headquarters, so the General will be with them. He'll have a feast, too. Ladies have sent him everything from turkeys to oysters.” He laughed. “He has a party or a ball or something every chance he gets, you know. He loves to sing as well as he loves dancing.”

“General Lee's been here,” Vesta told him. “Mrs. Lee and the girls came back from the Warm Springs in October and rented a little house on Leigh Street. It's just big enough for her and Agnes and Mildred, so they can't have Charlotte with them.” Charlotte was Rooney Lee's wife, her husband a Yankee prisoner. “Mrs. Lee's been sick, you know, and Charlotte is ill, and General Lee looks terribly. His hair's just perfectly white, and his beard too.”

“I know. I see him occasionally.”

“He was in church last Sunday,” Cinda said. “When the service was over we all stood in our pews while he walked out, to show him our—love.”

“The girls thought surely he'd stay for Christmas,” Vesta added. “But he's gone back to headquarters. Agnes told me yesterday they don't believe Charlotte will live till Rooney's exchanged; and she says her father has a terrible pain in his side all the time, and Rooney is in prison, and Mrs. Lee hardly ever gets out of her wheel chair. It just doesn't seem fair they should have so much trouble.”

Cinda picked up her knitting. “We all do,” she said quietly. “When I think of the promises Mr. Rhett and Mr. Yancey and Roger Pryor made us, how secession was going to bring us liberty and peace and prosperity and all sorts of good things, I'd like to kill them.”

“Mr. Yancey's already dead, Mama,” Vesta reminded her. “And nobody in South Carolina listens to Mr. Rhett now.”

“I wish someone would shoot him!”

They laughed, as they were likely to laugh at Cinda's explosions; but she did not smile. While she knitted, her eyes searched every line of Burr's young countenance. She saw weariness in him, and a deep hurt; and she remembered the charming, gentle boy he had been, and thought that Burr would never take easily to the ruthless, rushing business of killing. In one of the pauses in this conversation, she said affectionately: “You know, Burr, I'm glad you're not an officer.” He looked at her as though suspecting she sought to cover her disappointment at his failure to win promotion, but she said: “No, I mean it, Honey. You wouldn't like making other men do the things you have to do.”

“That's right,” he admitted. “No, I'd never make a good officer,
Mama. I can ride and holler and pop off my pistol as well as anyone; but that's all.”

She knew proudly that this was true. He was too gentle and too kindly for the duties of command, too eager to please others. Why, even Barbara could twist him around her finger whenever she chose. If Barbara wasn't good to this darling boy, Cinda told herself she would —well, of course there was nothing she could do!

 

The night before Burr was to leave for Raleigh, Brett came home. Cinda, taking his first kiss, felt the weakness in him; and to her anxious question he said with a chuckle: “Why, I'm on sick leave, Honey, but don't look so scared! I'm about the healthiest sick man you ever saw. Ellis Bird says all I need is some home cooking. He told me to come home and get it, stay till I'd had enough.”

“You look so thin and ill!”

“You should have seen me two or three days ago. I really felt sick then.” He would not, as she urged, let her put him at once to bed. “Not yet. Can't spoil my first evening.”

He and Burr came to quick talk, matching their experiences. Brett said the Howitzers had been kept on the move so much that they felt like cavalry. “Colonel Long's our commander now; and he's a West Pointer and never forgets it. In camp we're up at daylight for roll call, and it's hurry, hurry, hurry all day long. Curry horses for an hour, feed them, eat our own breakfast, if we have anything to eat; then put the horses out to grass, police camp, drill. Another roll call at noon. Another drill at three o'clock. Catch up the horses and water them and wish we had some grain for them. They're just walking skeletons. Another roll call at six, and another at eight.” He laughed. “I tell you it's a relief to have a forced march now and then, to stop that program for a while.”

Cinda asked: “Are you really short of food?”

He grinned. “Short? If one old cottontail hops through camp, every man in sight helps run him down and we stew him and have a feast. If it weren't for persimmons I don't know what we'd do.”

“I'd hate to live on persimmons,” Vesta protested, and he said smilingly:

“That's our favorite joke, Honey; we say they pucker us up so we're
not hungry any more.” And he added more seriously: “Yes, the men are half-starved. The ration's a pint of meal a day, and a quarter of a pound of pork—when you get it. And the meal's just ground-up corn cobs and dust, and so sour you can hardly eat it. Being hungry all the time makes the men look like animals after a while; hard greedy eyes, and cheeks so hollow their faces seem to come to a point, like a fox or a dog. Sometimes we don't get the pork. Once in a while we get a few dried peas, or a spoonful or two of sugar, and once we got coffee! I counted mine. Seventeen beans!” He laughed. “One of our games is to sit around and order imaginary dinners, but of course that just makes us hungrier! The queer thing is that we stay healthy. I'm the only man in our company who's been sick at all, this winter. And a lot of men are getting religion. Every camp has built at least one church, and when there's no chaplain, somebody reads the Bible and prays as well as he can. That's happening all through the army. Regular revivals whenever there's a real preacher, lots of men professing.” He said gravely: “I think they're sincere; but some of the skeptics say they're just feeding their souls because they can't feed their stomachs.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Vesta said: “People are hungry in Richmond too, Papa. Can you imagine, a hundred and ten dollars a barrel for flour?”

He laughed. “I don't call that much! I've seen times when I'd give a thousand dollars for one good biscuit! A whole barrel of flour? Why, Vesta, that's worth ten thousand.”

She came to her feet. “Are you hungry? I'll get you a piece right now!”

But Brett declined. “No, give me a good night's sleep first; then I'll be able to stand the shock of eating again!”

Alone with him at last Cinda asked: “Can you really stay a while?”

“I'm to stay till I'm well again,” he assured her, and she felt the high happiness in him. “And I'm certainly going to make a mighty slow recovery, my dear.” So, even though Burr must leave tomorrow morning, Christmas would be merry after all.

When they went upstairs, she had said Brett must go right to bed; but he protested: “No, no; not yet. Go on and tell me things.”

“What things?”

“Anything but the war. We hear all that in camp.” Yet he added gravely: “Do you realize, Cinda, that the fight on Missionary Ridge was the first big battle we've lost because our soldiers broke and ran?”

“They needed Cousin Jeems that day. He really won the battle at Chickamauga. But our western victories never seem to do us any good.” He had said she must not talk about the war. “Cousin Louisa's baby's fine. They're naming it after General Lee. Cousin Jeems must have been simply wild, not being here with her.”

“I suppose so. And probably he was furious at having to serve under Bragg. Longstreet's a fighting man, but Bragg's a fool. President Davis should have removed him long ago.” Brett spoke with a slow sadness. “Cinda, our great weakness is at the top! We've mismanaged everything—finances, commissary, conscription, impressment. We've nursed treacherous delusions; that the North wouldn't fight, that we could whip them if they did, that England would let us lead her by the nose with a cotton string! It's a wonder we've held out so long!”

“Don't get excited! Please. Let's go to bed.” He began to undress, and she saw a red patch on the seat of his trousers, neatly square; and tears stung her eyes. “Poor man,” she laughed. “Has to mend his own britches!”

“Oh, that!” He chuckled. “You ought to see some of us. We cut up our drawers to patch our pants, and some men are pretty fancy about it. They cut the red flannel in patterns; a heart with an arrow through it, or a spread eagle, or a cow, or a horse. Colonel Long says we'll never dare turn our backs to the enemy. They couldn't miss such shining marks.”

Even when they were abed he was wakeful; and he spoke again of the mismanagement on the part of Mr. Davis and his appointees, from which the army suffered so. “Why, half the men are barefoot, Cinda,” he declared. “That's why General Lee had to stop trying to bring Meade to battle this fall. The men's feet gave out. They couldn't march.” And he said: “I suppose part of the trouble is that everyone's money-mad. Even the bankers are speculating with the currency, selling Northern money at a thousand-percent premium, pushing the value of our own money down and down.”

She saw he must talk himself to exhaustion. “I never did understand about money. I never had to, of course, when we had plenty.”

“Probably I was a fool to put all ours into Confederate bonds,” he reflected. “But I'm glad I did. I don't want to be one of those who make money out of this war! I don't even want to keep what we have. If the South is ruined—well, I want us to be ruined too.”

“I'm not as brave as you; but I'll always want what you want, Brett Dewain. And we can get along, one way or another, even if we have to sell things. There are auctions all the time now, with everything imaginable being sold; rolls of ribbon and groceries and books and furniture and cavalry boots and rum and brandy and old wine and silver and jewels. Some of our friends have had to do that, sell things they've always treasured; but no one complains, and neither will we.”

For a moment he did not speak. “We see newspapers in camp,” he said then. “But they always make things either better or worse than they are. Do you get enough to eat? Is food as scarce as the papers say?”

She hesitated. “I suppose it is, for poor people. If you pay enough, you can buy most things.” She added: “We have a windfall now and then. You remember Major Tarrington? He used to live in Columbia, and he's in the commissary now; and sometimes he lets Vesta buy things at the government price, and he sends us presents. He sent us a great cut of beef one day and wouldn't let us pay for it. He said his butcher had given him a whole quarter, more than he could use.”