House Divided (139 page)

Tony thought Mr. Dean sometimes seemed to forget he was not on the platform. He made no promises, but a day or two later he rode into Martinston, and again and again, tied into the buttonholes of men there, he marked a bit of red string. He himself wore no such sign. If he wished to do so, Sapphira would say a tag end of string was an unsuitable adornment; but it was heartening to think he could be one with all these men, bound by a common purpose and a common loyalty.

And to unite with them was the part of wisdom, too. When the North won, a heavy vengeance would descend on those who had been her enemies, on Richmond and Charleston and the seaboard cities that had resisted her. This was in his mind when Brett wrote proposing that all the Currain funds be put into Confederate bonds. Tony replied that the others could do as they chose, that if Trav would deed him Chimneys in return for a deed to Great Oak, he would make no other claim on the estate. Trav's assent pleased him. Here at Chimneys he would be safe, protected against the Yankees by the loyalty to the Union which his membership in Mr. Holden's order attested;
and when the Piedmont Railroad was completed from Greensboro to Danville, the markets in Lynchburg and in Petersburg and Richmond would be more easily reached, and Chimneys would be an increasingly valuable property!

 

Toward the end of September, passing the Blandy farm, Tony saw Ed in the door yard and pulled up his horse; and Ed came hesitantly to the gate to exchange a word or two. Behind him, Mrs. Blandy and one of the children appeared for a moment in the doorway, then disappeared again; and Tony felt a faint stir of anger at this mute evidence of her reprobation. The women were worse than the men.

“Well, Mr. Blandy,” he said, “I'm glad to see you. Home to stay?”

“No, sir, I'm on furlough.”

“Some of your neighbors make their furloughs long ones.”

“A lot of that's Mr. Holden's doings, Captain Currain.” Ed's tone was hard, but Tony heard with pleasure that title of which he had once been so proud.

“It's not all Mr. Holden,” he remarked. “A soldier's pay for a month won't buy a good meal for his family, the way prices are. And he doesn't get his pay half the time.”

“I reckon sometimes the Gov'ment has a hard time to find the money.” There was a stubborn set to Ed's jaw. “No, I'm going back to duty. Mis' Blandy's made a good crop, and with the young ones to help she'll get along.”

“All the same, I expect she'll be glad when this is over, so you can come home to take the hard work off her hands.” Tony rode on, anger in him. Ed's words were like a rebuke. Damn the man! Damn that wife of his, too! A woman no better than a field hand, working the summer long, sweating like a nigger! What right had she to set herself above Sapphira? Why, Sapphira in beauty and intelligence was a match for any lady in the South, to say nothing of a poor farm drudge!

 

One day not long after this encounter with Ed, when Tony and Peg-leg returned from their morning survey of the place, Tony found a fat little man with something sleek about him sitting on the veranda drinking one of 'Phemy's juleps and smoking a cigar. “Thomas
Cosby, Mr. Currain,” the stranger explained. “Commissary agent. Mr. Dean in Raleigh told me to make myself known to you.”

Tony saw the red string in the other's lapel, and he wondered whether, if Mr. Cosby began that series of questions and answers that Mr. Dean had recited, he could remember the rejoinders; but since his visitor did not speak he said graciously: “Ah, Mr. Cosby. You're welcome. I see your wants have been attended to.”

“Yes sir.”

“Then if you will excuse me briefly, it will soon be the dinner hour.”

At dinner, the commissary agent explained his errand. “I've come to impress supplies for General Lee's army,” he told Tony. “My wagons will reach Martinston tomorrow.” He looked a little smug. “A painful duty, Mr. Currain! If I were not allowed a military escort, my life would be in danger. These extortionate farmers yield only to compulsion, flatly refuse to sell at the government price unless they must. Why, sir, they would let the army starve!”

“I suppose government prices are below the market.”

“To be sure, to be sure. Speculators have run market prices to the skies, five or six times the government price. But our orders are to take at the fixed price horses, wagons, hogs, cattle, everything; to leave only what is necessary to subsistence.”

“Do I understand that you propose to empty my corn cribs, my smoke houses, my cattle pens?”

“My dear sir!” Mr. Cosby protested. “Don't imagine such a thing for a moment! Why, our depots are already full of provisions spoiling for lack of cars to move them to Richmond. It requires constant work to collect enough to take the place of what spoils. Sweet potatoes are particularly perishable. You'll hardly believe me, but there are thousands of bushels of sweet potatoes rotting in depots between Wilmington and Richmond right now for lack of transportation. Of course we must replace them, keep the depots supplied; but that does not compel us to harass gentlemen!” He laughed. “It's the little farmers who make the trouble.”

“I know they resent the tax-in-kind,” Tony agreed. “I suppose they resent impressment equally.”

“Yes, yes! We could hardly accomplish anything if it weren't that
so many men are away in the army. Women may scold and complain, but they're not so ready to resort to violence, though I could tell you some incredible stories.” He added casually: “By the way, Mr. Currain, I'm commissioned by some gentlemen in Richmond to buy any surplus produce you may have for their personal account. At a fair price, of course. If you care to sell.”

“A fair price? You mean the government prices?”

“Oh not at all, not at all. The price I can pay depends on the article.” Mr. Cosby crossed his pudgy knees. “Take bacon, for instance. I'll be frank with you, Mr. Currain. If you wished to buy a pound of bacon in Richmond, it might cost you two dollars and a half. A bushel of meal? Say twenty dollars. I can offer you no such prices. Captain Warner, whose agent I am, has many expenses.” He smiled. “My commission, for one; and then, he must lay out a little here and a little there to secure space on the cars to transport his purchases; and of course he must be generous to his friends. But I can pay you a dollar a pound for prime bacon, and for other things in proportion. That's only a fraction of the market price in Richmond, to be sure; yet it's three or four times the government maximum for what I impress.” Tony did not speak. The price seemed to him, considering the difficulty of transporting anything over the long and roundabout way to Richmond, an astonishingly good one. As though reading his thought, Mr. Cosby added: “Frankly, Mr. Currain, I'm not always so openhanded; but—” He hesitated, looked at Tony's lapel, said in a questioning tone: “Three?”

Tony for a moment did not understand. “Eh?”

Mr. Cosby repeated, more sharply: “Three?”

So Tony remembered. “Oh, to be sure! Dogs,” he replied.

The other man smiled with relief. “Exactly! As I was saying, I'm not always so openhanded; but I always pay liberally for anything that comes in a parcel tied up with red string!” He lifted his glass. “Your very good health, Mr. Currain.”

Tony lifted his. “And yours, sir,” he agreed.

 

The commissary agent was Tony's guest for several days, while the soldiers who served as escort for the wagons he brought and for those he seized camped by the branch below the mill. Mr. Cosby
complained of the difficulties of his task. “This region's full of organized deserters, dangerous men,” he declared. “The Government should send a regiment or two to teach them manners. I'm careful not to provoke them too far, though of course I must take what I need.”

Tony felt no sympathy for these neighbors who suffered under Mr. Cosby's demands. If they were his friends, he might save them now; since they had elected to be his enemies, he would not lift his hand.

Two or three weeks after Mr. Cosby's departure, Tony was sitting on the veranda after dinner, Sapphira beside him in fresh-starched white, when they saw Mrs. Blandy trudging up the road. Sapphira went at once into the house. Tony called to her:

“No, no. Stay! You're mistress here!” But Sapphira only smiled and disappeared, and Tony admitted to himself that she was right. If she dared stay with him to receive a white woman as an equal, her own life might hang in the balance.

He himself, when Mrs. Blandy came near, rose and descended the wide steps to meet her with the utmost courtesy. He invited her to join him on the veranda; but she declined. “Thank you kindly, sir.” In sunbonnet and worn and faded calico, dusty from the road, barefooted, she faced him doubtfully. “Mr. Currain, please, sir, could you sell me a bag of corn meal and maybe a piece of hog meat?”

Tony thought with a malicious satisfaction that she must be reduced to desperate straits. Before coming to appeal to him, she would have tried every other resource. Obviously she had tried and failed. Oh, these people who had treated him so scornfully would regret it! “But Mrs. Blandy,” he said gravely, “Mr. Blandy told me you had made a good crop.”

She nodded, and her lips were white. “Yes sir, we did, with the young ones and me all working at it. But now the impressment men done took our mule, and emptied our corn crib and our smoke house.”

“Now surely not! Their orders were to leave you enough for your subsistence.”

“I reckon they thought we didn't eat more than birds.”

“But at least, they paid you,” he insisted.

“They called it pay, but the gov'ment money ain't wuth anything. But that and what Mr. Blandy give me, all his pay he'd saved, has to git us through some way.”

Tony made a sympathetic sound. “Dear, dear! I'm very sorry to hear of your distress.” He said regretfully: “But they levied on me too, you know. They left me only enough for our needs. I can't starve my people.”

In her eyes meeting his a slow flame burned. “White folks git as hungry as colored people.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. This war is hard on all of us. If we were sensible we'd end it.”

Her head was high. She said proudly: “Mr. Blandy's doing his best to end it the way it'd ought to be ended.”

“I know. I know. I honor him for it. Yet I sometimes think a man's first duty is to his family.”

She held him with her eyes. “Mr. Blandy knows what's right to do. I didn't come to talk about it. I come to see if I could buy from you.”

“Why, I've really nothing at all to spare,” he assured her. “So many mouths to feed, you know. I might give you a——”

“I ain't asking anything to be give.” Her tones were level. “I'm wanting to buy.”

So she was not yet humbled! “Well, let me see. Meal, you say? And pork? The latest Richmond papers put fat shoulder at two dollars and a half a pound, and meal at twenty dollars a bushel. I might spare a little at those prices.”

Her lips twitched and then were still again. “The commissary man paid me twenty cents for prime bacon. He give me six dollars for the meal in the chest, and there was all of four bushels.”

“My dear Mrs. Blandy, I'm afraid he imposed on you. You should keep informed on Richmond prices.”

“He said it was the gov‘ment price. He said I could take it or not, but he was going to 'press what he wanted anyway.”

“Ah yes. Well, too bad. But you say you don't want me to give you anything. It seems only fair, if you wish to buy, that you should pay the market price; don't you think so?” Her hard eyes on his were like a bruising blow; he smiled. “After all, this is a matter of business.”

“We had enough put away to feed us all winter,” she said evenly. “But all he give for it and all Mr. Blandy's back pay put together
wouldn't buy enough to keep us a month from starving. Not paying your prices.”

He said nothing, waiting. If she wanted charity, let her beg! But after a moment, with no other word, she turned away. He watched her, resisting the impulse to call her back. Let her go! When her children were hungry enough she would come again. She passed out of sight, and he returned to his comfortable chair, and Sapphira rejoined him. Wanting reassurance, he told her Mrs. Blandy's errand, using words to fan the flame of his own anger and thus burn away his guilty shame. “A fine piece of impudence! She's so hoity-toity she'd look down her nose at you, but she's not too high and mighty to want favors.”

Sapphira gave him no comfort. “You could be generous, Mr. Currain.”

“Generous, be damned! You're as good as she is.”

She spoke without bitterness. “No, I'm not. She's white. I'm a colored person.”

“Abe Lincoln says that makes no difference. And by God I believe he's right!”

“Mr. Lincoln is a great, good man,” she said simply. “But he's wrong. He doesn't know. Colored people know.” He felt the firm compulsion of her level intelligence, half understood the tragedy of life for such a woman. An almost impersonal tenderness awoke in him; her thoughts must often be such sad and hopeless ones.

 

November was well sped and winter near when into his existence here without forewarning Darrell suddenly intruded. The day was stormy with a cold drizzle falling; and Tony's first hint of Darrell's coming was his hail, calling for a boy to take his horse. At the moment, Sapphira was safely in the kitchen with 'Phemy, so no immediate harm was done. Tony opened the door and saw Darrell and another man dismounting at the steps, while a Negro on a mule, with four long-eared, sad-eyed dogs on leash, sat dejected at a little distance, drooping in the rain. As they came up the steps, Tony recognized the other man as Mr. Pudrick, the slave dealer whom Darrell had brought here a year ago last summer.

He gave them a grudging welcome; but Darrell made himself cheerfully
at home, stripping off his cloak, warming himself before the roaring fire. Mr. Pudrick bowed and said politely: “Servant, sir!” 'Phemy brought them warming drinks, and a scuttling wench fed the fire, and Darrell gave 'Phemy orders. Bring in the saddlebags. Lay out some dry clothes. These they wore were to be cleaned and dried. Tony's anger, as he listened, left a bitter taste in his mouth. You might have thought Darrell, not he, was master here. But at least Sapphira would keep out of Darrell's sight. On such occasions as this she stayed invisible in 'Phemy's quarters.