House Divided (189 page)

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 Cinda 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.”

Wednesday the
Republic
printed an account of the capture. Mr. Davis had been taken at Irwinsville, Georgia; and in an attempt to escape he had disguised himself in woman's clothes. Cinda refused to believe that. “Mr. Davis wouldn't humiliate himself!”

Vesta had brought the
Republic
home, and she urged: “It's right here in the paper, Mama!”

“Newspapers have printed so many lies these four years, I'll never believe them again.”

Vesta laughed. “Well, you can read for yourself.”

Cinda could not resist doing so. She still held to her disbelief; but apart from the lies about Mr. Davis, there were things in the paper worth reading, and believing. Yankee patrols, finding idle Negroes pitching pennies in Third Street, where young people used to walk out to Gamble's Hill, had marched them away and put them to work at cleaning streets. A good thing! She saw an advertisement which said that Stone and Rosston's circus was performing in a rain-proof pavilion at Main and Third. Probably the circus had attracted the Negroes to the neighborhood. There were other advertisements eloquent and sad. People sought to sell watches or jewelry, or they offered extravagant security to borrow money; a hundred dollars or a thousand or ten thousand. She thought she could guess the identity of some of the advertisers, and wished to weep for them. There were columns of testimony from the trial of Mrs. Surratt and those men who had conspired to kill Mr. Lincoln. It would be like the Yankees to hang a woman! The paper said carts and wagons were dumping garbage into the ravine at Fourth and Leigh, and the foul odor made noisome the whole neighborhood. Portable houses two stories high, which could be erected in a few hours, were being put up in the burned district. There were many burglaries reported, and a man named William Tyree saw a Negro in a Second Street market selling onions, and complained to the Provost Marshal that the onions had been stolen from his garden, and positively identified them as his. The Provost Marshal gave Mr. Tyree back his onions; but Cinda thought the Yankee officer would enjoy telling his friends in the North about the Virginia man who could identify his own onions! Probably when the story came to be told, Mr. Tyree would be described as a Southern gentleman, an FFV at the very least. Cinda went to tell the others
this jest, finding herself moved to a mirth almost hysterical. She could not remember when she had laughed so hard and so long

That laughter marked for her the return of a more buoyant heart. After all, life seemed to go on. They had little or no money, but the big house, except that it was impossible to get glass to repair the broken windows, was as cool and comfortable and beautiful as ever. People had used to predict that when the Yankees came no one would be safe; they would all be murdered in their beds, and robbery, arson, insult would be commonplace. But none of these predictions proved true. Probably not even the prophets of woe had believed their own predictions.

She could laugh now at things that a month ago would have made her hot with anger. Richmond was full of gaping, vulgar Yankees come to peer and pry and wander through the city and gloat over the marks of suffering. Tilda every day brought stories of these visitors and their ape-like behavior; and once she spoke of a group from some little town in New York State.

“Six men and two ladies,” she said. “They stayed at the Spottswood, and they went to the Capitol, and one of them sat in the Speaker's chair and pulled out some hair from the seat and took it as a souvenir!”

Cinda smiled. “Mercy! Are we so wonderful they worship what we sit on?”

“Oh, they were crazy for souvenirs. They split pieces off doorways, and whittled walls. They went to the White House and tried all the chairs and sofas; and everywhere they went, they gloated over the ruins, and kept saying at the tops of their voices that we got what we deserved. Even the Yankee officers who had to escort them were ashamed. One of the officers told Mr. Harrison—I saw Mrs. Harrison today—that at Brandon they stole handfuls of letters out of desks in the house, and they broke whole branches off the magnolia trees, and trampled the strawberry beds. In Mrs. Harrison's place I'd have been furious, but she said she didn't blame them any more than she'd have blamed so many hogs; said they didn't know any better.”

Cinda nodded understandingly. Small wrongs were forgotten in the shadow of greater sorrow. Then too it was reassuring to be reminded that Yankees, despite their numbers and their wealth and now their
victory, were a poking, thieving lot, no better than so many meddlesome monkeys. Let them take their stolen souvenirs and go home!

 

Brett was planning departure to the Plains. He had consulted the Yankee officers at the Freedmen's Bureau, and he reported to Cinda what they told him. “We're expected to make contracts with our people. The negroes agree to go on working just as they always have, and we agree to feed them and house them and take care of them. The only difference is that after the crop is made they get a third of it. I suggested that negroes don't know what a contract is, and of course they can't read or write; but the Bureau says they can make their mark, and if any of them don't do their work we can take them to the Provost Court and have them punished.”