House Divided (5 page)

“Thought you could marry me?”

“Oh, I never thought that.”

He asked curiously: “Were you ever in love with me, Nell?”

“Enough. I needed you.” She laughed lightly. “I hadn't a penny, you see.”

He grinned with sudden malice in his eyes. “Speaking of pennies, Nell, reminds me why I came tonight. The turn of the cards at Merrihay's
took my last one. My last penny. And—you're an expensive luxury, my dear.”

The attack was so sudden that for a moment she lost her composure. “You've always Great Oak!”

“Oh, it hasn't paid its way for years.” He laughed briefly. “Normally I'd go to Cinda's husband. Brett Dewain's the banker of the family, handles all the Currain money. I've had to stand up to his cross-examinations in the past. But now—well, he and Cinda are abroad, won't be back till October. No, this is final, Nell.”

There was a racing panic in her; she had so long depended on him, could not easily accept this overturn of her world, sought some expedient. “If you need money, sell some negroes South.”

“We Currains don't sell our people.”

“You virtuous Currains!” She was frightened and angry too. “Then take Chimneys away from Trav. Enid says it's prosperous, and it's yours as much as his.”

“It's Mama's, not Trav's,” he corrected. “She's willed Great Oak to me, and Chimneys to Trav, and Faunt gets Belle Vue, and Cinda the Plains; but they're all Mama's as long as she lives. And she may live for years.”

“You can get around her!” She fought to hold him. “I'll go to Chimneys with you.” His eyes met hers in a sardonic glance that warned her his decision was made. “But I suppose you have some other plan?” He grinned. “I see.” He was flicking her with a light lash, playing one of his cruel games, thinking she would weep, threaten, cajole. “You want to—want us to part, Tony?” He wished to savor her flattering supplications; but pride came to her rescue, steadied her tones. “Why, very well, if that's what you want!”

She saw that her easy assent had shaken him. From the bottle beside him he poured the last drop, tilted the glass to his lips, spilled a little, took his handkerchief, touched his chin and beard. She watched him coldly. What had he expected? She was no snivelling, love-sick child.

“What will you do?” His words were faintly blurred.

“Why, I've thought of going to Washington.” She spoke as though she had long considered the question, wishing to hurt him if she could. “I hear so much politics talked by the gentlemen who call upon me. It interests me. And Washington is the place for politics.”

He mumbled drowsily, his eyelids drooped with sleep; and for a long time, while Mrs. Albion watched him with level glance, he sat with bent head, his inhalations becoming audible. The fumes of brandy and of wine suddenly had overwhelmed him. Occasionally in the past she had seen him thus succumb, with little or no warning, going in an instant from a surface sobriety to sodden slumber; and sometimes she had been amused. But not tonight. She watched him with narrowed eyes, a little desperate; he had been her reliance for so long. Fear made her angry now. She spoke at last in sharp tones to rouse him.

“Yes, Tony, I'll go to Washington.”

His lids opened and hurriedly closed again, as though light hurt his eyes. “Washington, eh? Well then go.” He grunted and chuckled. “Joke on me! I thought you'd make a great fuss.”

“Really? Why, Tony, you should know me better.” She wished to provoke him to discussion, but his muttering voice trailed into silence, and his head sagged forward. The flicker of the dying fire laid shadows on his bony countenance; he looked like a bearded skull. For a while she sat where she was, her eyes on him, her thoughts casting backward. Had she sold ten years of her life to this old man?

With a quick motion at last she rose. It was high time she was rid of him. She went into the hall.

“Tessie! Tessie!”

From below came Tessie's drowsy answer. “Yes, ma'am?”

Nell had meant to bid Tessie hustle him into the street; but she hesitated, her fingernail tapping her teeth, looking back through the open door at him asleep in his chair. He was old, yes; yet if he had Chimneys he would be rich again, and lean years had taught her to value riches, and in the long run she could always manage him. She might speak to him again of Chimneys, and more urgently, in the morning. Her anger faded; she called to Tessie:

“Come help me put Mr. Currain to bed.”

July, 1859

 

T
HE CURRAINS, through their Courdain forebears, had been Virginians for a hundred and fifty years, since in 1703 Jules Courdain immigrated from French vineyards and set himself up as a victualler, distilling the spirits which he sold, and prospered thriftily. His son Jules married Annette Harrison, and their second son they named Antoine. When he became a man that son Antoine, at behest of pretty Molly O'Hara whom he wished to wed, changed his name to Anthony, and to Currain.

In that first Anthony Currain, the wholesome blends of good peasant stock came to strong fruition. He turned to the soil, to the planting of tobacco; and he sought always more land to replace that which his ruthless cropping impoverished. Ten years after the Revolution, anticipating the decline in Virginia agriculture which would at last leave Mount Vernon a waste and reduce Thomas Jefferson in his old age to destitution, he set out to investigate the wilderness beyond the mountains. He proposed to follow the new trail through Danville and Salisbury and on southwesterly; but he turned aside to see and to admire the solid brick houses built by the Moravians who had come down from Pennsylvania to establish a religious colony at Betharaba and Salem and Bethania. When he resumed his journey, riding westward through forest broken by an occasional farm, he caught now and then glimpses from some mild eminence of a bold peak off to the north, twenty or thirty or forty miles away. Its shape reminded him of a camel with two humps, one of them jutting confidently upward against the sky; and he remembered that he had been told to look for Pilot Knob as a landmark useful to travellers hereabouts.

He rode slowly, and came into a region where farms were more numerous; and as the sun dropped down the western sky he emerged from a belt of forest into a ten-acre clearing under good cultivation. To his left, set among oaks and junipers on a low saddleback that paralleled his road, a neat and spacious house promised hospitality. He turned aside. The lane led between a grassy meadow and a garden hedged with junipers to the door.

His chance host proved to be an old acquaintance. Colonel Joseph Williams, commanding the Surry County militia, had served well through the Revolution; and Anthony Currain had met him at Yorktown. So there was a warm welcome waiting. In the cool of that first evening the two friends walked together in the garden, and Colonel Williams showed Anthony Currain the small shoots of box brought from Hanover County in Virginia to outline the garden beds.

“And these along the hedge are tree box,” he said. “They will grow tall to replace the junipers by and by. And that sapling yonder will be a fine magnolia some day. Just savor the fragrance of this rose, if you please, Mr. Currain. I propose to make a pleasant garden here, with lanes and vistas, and an arbor of scuppernongs, and fruit trees well nurtured.”

He was a man of many plans and projects; and he led Anthony Currain beyond the garden to a small walled enclosure. “The bricks in that wall were made on the place, sir, like the bricks in the house,” he said quietly. “When I no longer sleep in the house, I shall come to sleep in this lovely spot, and my generations after me.”

They leaned on the farther wall to watch a doe and two fawns in the glade below. “I call that my deer pasture, Mr. Currain,” the Colonel explained. “They come to drink at the springs. We never molest them, and they seem to know themselves secure against man; yes, and against panthers, too. This is Panther Creek, but the beasts seldom approach the house.”

Anthony Currain liked the remote peace and the gentle beauty of the spot, and he lingered, listening to his host's stories of the day in February 1781, when Cornwallis and his army crossed the Yadkin at the ford a mile northwest of the house. When he told his errand, Colonel Williams eagerly displayed all the beauty and the promise of
this region, urging that if it was land the other wanted, here was his perfect goal.

“Fifty years from now, sir,” the enthusiast predicted, “all along the Yadkin here will be strung, like beads on a rosary, scores of rich and fruitful farms. Anything a man can want this soil will produce. It's only necessary to girdle the trees and drop a few seeds. I began to build here before the Revolution, but I never found time to finish my house till after Cornwallis surrendered.” He chuckled. “In fact, it's not yet finished. The walls bulge every time my family increases. And this is a land for good increase, Mr. Currain. Stay here and you'll be glad all your days.”

“I had a thought to pass the mountains and see what lies beyond,” Anthony Currain confessed; and after hours of talk the Colonel saw he could not be shaken.

“Ride on, then,” he agreed. “But I know a place will hold you. It's a long day's ride due west, in the friendly hills. Cross at Shallow Ford and go on; but avoid the road to Wilkesboro. Mulberry Field Meeting-House, we used to call it, but they're making a town there now, and you and I have no love for towns. Ask your way to a place called Chimneys. Any man you meet will direct you. It's a great house, all of brick, with twin chimneys at the ends. Thomas Brettany came from Betharaba to build it and brought his bride there; but she and their first-born died together, and now the place is ashes in his mouth. He'd sell for the merest song.”

So Anthony Currain made his farewells and rode on; and at the day's end, following many words of direction, he came up a winding drive to a great house that looked off for miles south and west: southward over the long swell of gently rolling hills, westward across fertile bottom lands and past the flank of an isolated mountain mass to where many lesser heights rose in a crescendo to the pale distant silhouette of tall peaks against the setting sun.

There he found that lonely man of whom Colonel Williams had spoken, and Thomas Brettany would sell, so Anthony Currain looked no further. He bought Chimneys and established there his younger son, and he himself went home to Great Oak and lived and died. When that younger son of his died childless, Chimneys fell back into
the weak hands of the second Anthony Currain, who sold it on terms to two brothers named Higpen. They made rapacious play with the rich bottoms till in the 1830's the gold rush to placer workings in the mountains a few miles southeastward lured them away; and the discoveries around Gold Hill kept them enchanted there till they were penniless. When the second Anthony Currain died, their unpaid debt put the place back in his widow's hands, and greedy tenants worked the land till Tony—the third Anthony Currain—persuaded his mother to send Travis, his younger brother, there to take charge.

For Trav the move was promising; the prospect of freedom from Tony's many impositions was an attractive one. Two passions were strong in him: a passion for keeping good land healthy and at work, and a love for the poetry of numbers. When one of his tutors while he was still a boy introduced him to
Welch's Improved American Arithmetic,
Trav read it through as one reads a novel, hungrily; he turned back to pore over it page by page. What was alligation? Why were some fractions vulgar? What was double fellowship, the rule of three, tare, tret, cloff, suttle?

The answers led him inevitably to an exploration of the plantation ledgers; he became their custodian. But at Great Oak, Tony and a succession of sloven overseers made the crops, and Trav had only the figures to set down. At Chimneys the double responsibility would be his. He welcomed it, and since then a dozen years had failed to bring satiety.

 

Riding homeward in the late afternoon Travis checked his horse on a rise of ground and turned to look out across the low hills clad in pine and chestnut through which many little streams hurried to fatten the south fork of the Yadkin a few miles away. He and James Fiddler had gone toward his eastern bounds to inspect a sandy slope where a young vineyard of scuppernongs began to show fine promise; and now the overseer reined in beside him. Trav was a big man in his early forties, heavy-shouldered so that he seemed to stoop, with soft brown hair thinning a little, eyes mildly blue. He was close shaven; and even on this hot evening in early July, after a long day in the saddle, there was cleanness about him. The dust upon his garments and his boots and
heavy on the brim of his soft old hat, and the sweat that darkened his shirt were superficial; the shirt had been fresh that morning, the boots scrupulously polished.

His eyes swept this his domain, and James Fiddler's too. The over seer's father had been one of the tenant farmers here, greedy and improvident; James himself had stayed on, at first to rob Trav, then to love him. Their horses cropped the dry grass, willing to pause a while; and Trav spoke without turning, contentedly. “We've made a change here, James, in these years.”

“Yes.”

“I remember well how it was when I came; all the old fields gone to sedge and pine. But we've put them back to work, one way or another; wheat and corn, tobacco, the orchards, and the vineyard now. All the land that's workable is working, or resting to be put to work another year.” James Fiddler looked at him in a way that suggested the comradeship between these two, and Trav spoke half to himself. “And always something new to do. It's a full, rich way of life.”

The other spoke of what they both knew. “I used to plan to get what I could and go away. Now I want nothing but to go on here with you.”

“The place is more than me or you.”

“Hard to think of Chimneys without you!”

Trav smiled contentedly. “Yes. I've set my roots here now.”

He turned his horse to go on. The trail, following a meandering branch, dipped into the grateful shade of oaks undergrown with dogwood and haw and scattering redbud. The horses jogged serenely till Trav, leading, turned up hill along another trail. Then his beast sheered in protest at this departure from the homeward way, and Trav spoke chidingly and urged the horse to an easy canter, while James Fiddler dropped far enough behind to be clear of the pebbles thrown up by flying hoofs. They came over a rise and down into a cove among the hills, to a triangular clearing in the bottoms where a man with a mule on a jerk rein was plowing between freshly sprouted rows of corn while at his heels a boy of eight or nine dropped black-eyed peas in the fresh furrows. Ed Blandy had here a few well-tilled acres, a saddlebag log house which his hands had built, and a wife and four youngsters.

He came toward them; and he and Trav spoke together like old friends of the need of rain, and why there were always more pests to eat the crops in a dry season, and how corn depleted a piece of land if you planted it year after year. Their voices were hushed by the quiet peace of the ending day. Trav saw Ed's boy waiting yonder by the flap-eared mule and said his own Peter would soon be old enough to ride the rounds with him. “Lucy—” She was his daughter, ten years old, named for his mother. “Lucy comes along sometimes, now, when I'm not going too far.”

Blandy had killed a young buck deer down by the branch that morning, and he went to fetch a haunch from the spring house. With the venison hung to his saddle, Trav led James Fiddler homeward, the horses fretting because they must walk the last mile to cool off quietly. They came up past the saw mill toward the house, and when they emerged from the woods Trav saw scores of swallows and martins circling above the corn cribs, and bull bats on whickering wing high in the sky.

“A flight of weevils coming out of the old corn,” he said. “Let's empty the cribs for a good brushing and scrubbing before we put the new crop in.”

Fiddler assented. At the stables, Negro boys raced to take the reins, and Trav moved on alone toward the big house. He approached it from the rear, past the smithy where black Sam was still at work, a fountain of sparks rising from his ringing hammer blows; past the poultry yards where roosters scratched and geese hissed and strutting gobblers made their stiff wings scrape the ground and guineas pot-racked nervously and 'Phemy, the mulatto woman whose charges they were, was stuffing the young turkeys with pepper corns; past the idle windlass of the horse-powered thresher, and the shoemaker's shop; past the log house wherein wool from his own sheep was spun and woven.

This was his world, complete in itself; and he loved it. He entered the big house by a side door on the ground level, coming directly into what—before he added a separate wing—had been the kitchen. This was a low-ceiled room, its walls and ceiling half-timbered, the spaces between the timbers filled with straw and clay nogging. Always cool in summer, a deep hearth gave ample heat when heat was needed. Here were his ledgers and his letter press and all the meticulously kept
farm records; here were James Fiddler's desk and his own; to this sanctuary he could always retreat when he wished to escape Enid's fretful complaints which might whine like a nagging wind through the house above. Here, except himself and James Fiddler and a servant to bring lightwood for the fireplace and to brush up the floor, no one ever came.

When Trav took off his hat, his forehead, always shaded against the sun, showed white; his cheek and chin were dark saddle brown from much exposure. He slapped dust from his trousers and his boots and disposed of the crumb of tobacco in his cheek and ascended narrow stairs into the cross hall of the floor above. A Negro with one foot gone, his knee bent back and strapped into the home-made peg he wore, came to meet him; and Trav said in a friendly tone: “Joseph, I left a haunch of venison on my saddle. Don't let it go to waste.” He had accepted the gift to please Ed Blandy; but Enid did not like wild meat, and Trav avoided argument with her. The Negro's teeth shone. “Yassuh! Nawsuh!” Joseph had worked in the saw mill down by the branch till a rolling log tripped him into the saw, and after his leg healed Trav brought him into the big house to easier service. Enid objected to the tap of his peg, to his general awkwardness; she said he ought to be kept in the fields; but Trav, without answering her fretful protests, nevertheless ignored them.