House Divided (60 page)

They did not speak and she began to puzzle out the letter in her hand. Her husband had written at the top the year, 1790. There was no salutation.

Mrs. Currain's eyes closed. “Dark complected like you and lanky and gray eyes like you and a bulgy forrid.” The words brought to life that Anthony who had been her husband; through her closed lids she seemed to see him. He too was dark and tall, as dark and tall as Tony;
and both Tony and Tilda had inherited that slightly protuberant forehead.

Cinda touched her hand. “Mama, don't—hurt yourself so! Let's just tear them up!”

“Oh, I'm all right.” Mrs. Currain finished the letter at a glance.

The letter was signed: ‘Lucey Hanks the Fornikater.' Mrs. Currain handed it to Cinda. “It won't hurt any of you to read it,” she said. There was one letter more; she looked at it absently. The date “1809,” in her dead husband's hand, was nineteen years later than the letter she had just read. “No reason you shouldn't read all of them,” she repeated. “You're adults. And—he was your father, and this baby of his was your sister, in a left-handed fashion.”

Cinda asked wonderingly: “Do you believe all this, Mama?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Currain assured them. “Your father was no saint. And he was—well, a weakling, in many ways. I always knew that, no matter how much I loved him.” She smiled a little. “This other Lucy seems to have been a high-headed, strong-willed young woman. If he'd had the courage to marry her, she might have made a man out of him.”

While the others, grouping in the candlelight, puzzled out among them the letter she had just read to herself, she scanned the last one of all.

Her eyes, at that word, closed again. Grandchildren? Swarming thoughts flew like darting swallows through her mind. Grandchildren? Then Anthony's daughter, that “dark-complected” Nancy, had had children; and she herself was their step-grandmother, just as she was grandmother to Trav's children, and to Cinda's, and to Tilda's. She groped through degrees of kinship. Were they cousins, half-cousins,
step-cousins? No matter; they were all blood kin. Anthony was the link that bound them all together, for “dark-complected” Nancy Hanks was half-sister to Cinda and Tilda, to Tony and Travis and Faunt.

Mrs. Currain nodded and read another line, two lines.

 

“Nancy got married to Tom Lincoln here two years ago.”

 

Tom Lincoln? Mrs. Currain paused again. In these terrible months, this year just past, she had heard more than she admitted of the talk around her. Lincoln? This man whom they all hated so bitterly was named Lincoln. But not Tom Lincoln. She was glad of that. The man they hated was not Tom Lincoln. It was Abraham Lincoln they abhorred. Reassured, her eyes returned to the letter.

Mrs. Currain noted absently that this girl had learned to spell, even while she read the last three lines again, stunned by the impact of that name. Abraham? Why, then the baby's name was Abraham Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!

She came slowly to comprehension, touched with sharp terror. Abraham Lincoln, born to a bony, dark-complected somebody who married Tom Lincoln when he turned to second-best; Abraham Lincoln whom these children of hers held responsible for all their present griefs; that Abraham Lincoln was her dead husband's grandson!

What would these her children do when they knew? What would this knowledge do to them? To Tony, all his life so dissolute and shameful in his ways, till in these late years he had somehow acquired a belated manhood; to Trav, so steady and dependable; to Cinda, so admirably strong and wise, so sharp of tongue to hide her tender heart; to Tilda, affectedly humble yet rotted with a canker of envy she could not wholly hide; to Faunt, so gentle, so fine, and yet with a strain of self-pity and an egotistic and sentimental weakness long since recognized.

What would this knowledge do to them? An overwhelming billow of fear for them swept Mrs. Currain's strength away. The letter slipped from her limp fingers to the floor, and Faunt stooped and picked it up and began to read it. The others gathered around him, reading over his shoulders. She might bid them stop and thus protect them against this revelation; but—they were grown men and women, not children dependent on her tender guardianship.

Let them read, let them know. It was too late, now, to snatch the truth away.

 

After a moment, breaking through her weary thoughts, came their sudden stir, their sharp and startled words. Cinda was first to speak. “Abraham! Abraham Lincoln! Oh, Travis!” How like Cinda in that first anguish to cry out Travis' name! These two had always been closest joined of any of her children.

Then Tilda: “Heavens and earth! Mama, how terrible!” Yet even in that moment Mrs. Currain thought there was malicious joy in Tilda's tone.

Then Faunt, in a hoarse voice: “Great God Almighty!” Such rage in him that his words seemed to sear the air.

Then Trav, steady as always, turning as always to the solace of figures. “Eighteen-nine, this letter says. That would make him fifty-one now. Does anyone know how old he is? Tony, remember that book you had about Lincoln, before he was elected? Did it say—wait! It said his mother's name was Lucy, Lucy Hanks. Not Nancy. Not if the book was right.”

Tony laughed, and Mrs. Currain thought his sudden empty mirth was like the derisive laughter of the old, shameful Tony. “Probably
they didn't know who his mother was—any more than they knew who his grandfather was!” His eye went mockingly from one to another.

Faunt tried to speak; then as though his mouth was full of bitterness, he spat, stepping toward the hearth. Cinda appealed to Mrs, Currain.

“Mama, you don't believe it, do you?”

Mrs. Currain nodded. “Yes. I remember so many little things your father told me. Yes, I'm sure it's true.”

Tilda cried: “We mustn't ever tell anyone!”

Faunt moved purposefully, and they watched him. With a rancorous deliberation he collected all the letters and he tore them in small bits, and crumpled them in a mass and laid them on the bare hearth. Then he wrenched a candle from the tall stand and touched the flame to the fragments; and with the candle end he stirred the bits of paper till they were all burning, the hot candle grease hissing and spitting as it dripped into the little blaze they made. No one spoke. When the last flame died, Faunt ground the black ashes to dust under his foot, then flung the still burning candle violently into the fireplace. It broke, the two halves held together by the wick rolling toward him in a crippled, uneven fashion like a man with a broken leg trying to crawl to safety. He kicked it furiously away. Mrs. Currain thought: Why, he's like a small boy in a temper!

Tony laughed again, and Faunt turned toward him with death in his eyes; but Mrs. Currain said quietly: “That will do. We should start for Richmond.”

She rose and drew her cloak around her; and under the familiar compulsion they followed her. Outside the door old Thomas waited by the carriage, young Tom standing at the horses' heads; and along the driveway those of the people who had not yet been sent away were gathered, ready to follow the carriage. Their eyeballs shone white in the glare of the torches made of lightwood splinters.

Mrs. Currain felt a surge of affection for these old friends. They would follow their white folks, preferring bondage to the freedom the Yankees might bring. They led a few mules; their small belongings were packed on the backs of the animals or in bundles ready to be swung over their own shoulders.

Big Mill had the horses, Trav's and Faunt's and Tony's. Trav
paused at the foot of the steps, and when he spoke Mrs. Currain thought she understood.

“I wish you'd started off for Richmond this morning,” he said. She supposed he meant that to have done so would have saved them from this revelation; but when he went on, she realized she was wrong, for he explained. “The whole army's on the move tonight. All the roads from Yorktown to Williamsburg are filled, and wagons were wheel-to-wheel in town, even on those wide streets, when I came through. They'll have to go single file on the stage road to Richmond, and if the carriage gets into that line it can't go any faster than they do.” He considered alternatives. “We might try Barrett's Ferry; but I think we can take the back road, hit the stage road at Six-Mile Ordinary and maybe be ahead of the trains.” He appealed to his brothers. “What do you think?”

Tony said carelessly: “Whatever you say!” Mrs. Currain felt a sharp pain stab her heart, for his voice held a tone she recognized. Faunt went to his horse and from the saddlebags ripped a small flask. She saw him tip it, drain it, hurl it splinteringly against the wall beside the door; and she thought again that he was like a small boy in a tantrum! The thought was almost comforting. Childish tempers quickly ran their course; Faunt would presently be himself again.

But Tony? When he spoke just now she had been reminded of the old, evil Tony who had brought her so much sorrow in the past. “Help me, Travis,” she said, and Trav handed her into the carriage; Tilda and Cinda took their places with her.

Trav told old Thomas: “Follow along after me.” The Negro assented, and Trav mounted, and Tony and Faunt too. Big Mill swung his great-bulk atop his mule. Through the open front door of the great house Mrs. Currain saw the candles still burning in the hall, and she called out of the carriage window that someone must make sure they were extinguished. Faunt answered her.

“I'll tend to it,” he said curtly. His horse reared under his hard hand upon the reins; he dismounted, strode into the lighted hall.

The carriage lumbered down the drive; the Negroes, mounted or afoot, swung in behind. The horses and mules moved slowly through the darkness; and Mrs. Currain heard the doleful murmur of the people,
heard a thin high wail of grief like a dirge rise from their mournful hearts at this departure that might be forever.

As they came from the drive to the road, Trav spoke through the carriage window. “All right, Mama?”

She saw some long object held crosswise in his hand, and she guessed it was his father's sword which she had bidden Cinda give him. Till that moment she had not accepted the departure as finality; but when she spoke her voice was steady. “Certainly, Travis.”

They began to ascend the winding road which Trav hoped would bring them to the Richmond pike ahead of the crawling trains. The horses moved at a foot pace, for the ruts were deep, the road muddy. The heavy carriage lurched and tipped and swayed.

As they climbed, Mrs. Currain became conscious of a ruddy brightness among the upper branches of the trees ahead; and she heard excited, wondering voices from behind them where the people followed, and heard pounding hoof beats as a horseman galloped up the hill to overtake them. Then Faunt was here, leaning down from the saddle to speak to her in accents thick and drunken.

“Look back, Mama!” he said hoarsely. “There's a beginning at wiping out this shame!”

She had already guessed the truth, but she obeyed him. Down behind them toward the river, hidden by the trees which mercifully shut off her vision, some great conflagration was growing like a weed. She saw the waxing glare of it, and the sparks soaring upward, and the tongue-tips of high-leaping flames. She had looked back not because Faunt bade her, but only to say farewell, and she felt no surprise at what he had done, nor any sadness. The resinous old heart-pine of floors and walls would burn swiftly and fiercely till they were consumed; and she nodded almost in approval. It was as well, perhaps, that the old house was gone; so many memories, some bright, some dark, all alike gone in the purging flame.