House Divided (76 page)

But after that they heard no more from any of their menfolk for a while. Through the days of steady battle, when a rising tide of victory woke jubilation that mingled with stricken grief for those who died, Cinda and Vesta were seldom at home. They came only when exhaustion drove them, to sleep, to fill hampers with Madeira and sherry and brandy, to set the people preparing food in all the bounty that was possible. Enid protested that it was ridiculous to wear themselves out.

“There are plenty to help without you,” she urged. “I can't walk along Franklin Street without bumping into ladies carrying waiters full of food. You're all just working like so many niggers. Whatever do you find to do?”

Cinda said quietly: “There's really plenty to do, Enid, even if it's only mopping bloody floors.”

Enid shivered. “Br-r-r! Just thinking of it makes me sick. Honestly, Cousin Cinda, I don't see how you stand it!”

Cinda's eyes shadowed. “I heard today that once when the cannon fire was specially bad General Lee asked General Jackson if his men could stand it; and General Jackson said his men could stand anything. I suppose that's the only answer, really. You can stand anything, if you want to.”

Enid said indignantly: “Well, maybe, but I don't even want to.”

Cinda nodded. “That's all right, dear. I'm glad you can be here with Jenny and Barbara.”

 

Sunday and Monday the occasional sound of distant guns and the dust clouds that marked marching columns told Richmond that the battle was moving southward toward the James River. Monday at noon a boy came to the house with another note from Brett. McClellan was in retreat. The Howitzer company had crossed and recrossed the Chickahominy and marched south, passing within two or three miles of Richmond to take the Darbytown road and intercept McClellan's army and destroy it. Brett added a postscript: Trav was all right.

Cinda and Vesta came home a few minutes after the young messenger had gone. Enid resented as an indictment of her inactivity their weariness, the redness of their sleep-hungry eyes, their hoarse voices, their stony countenances; but if they chose to make idiots of themselves it was certainly not her fault! She was being sensible, that was all. Besides, her children needed her; and to prove this, she made a great to-do over the fact that Peter seemed to be coming down with a cold. With a certain elaboration she put him to bed and kept him there.

Late Tuesday morning an ambulance stopped at the door. Caesar answered the ring, and summoned Enid and Jenny. “Hit's Mistuh Trav,” he explained. “Dey done fotch him home.”

They ran together into the street, and Enid peered into the ambulance and saw Trav lying there with closed eyes, his cheek drained white. “Oh, is he dead?” she cried, woeful with mysterious grief. It was terrible to see him so helpless and so still.

The driver, a tall, raw-boned, slow-spoken man, said: “Yas'm. So fur, anyways; but I reckon he might come to life again.”

“But we can't take care of him!” Enid protested, weeping with fear and woe. “We can't do anything! You must take him to the hospital!”

Jenny touched Enid's arm in reassurance, and the driver explained: “I done that. Had a load of 'em like him. But a lady there knowed him, and she said to bring him here, said she was Mis' Dewain, said to tell you she'd come quick as she could git a doctor to come along with her.”

Enid wrung her hands, helpless with tears, but Jenny took command. Caesar and the driver carried Trav indoors. The task was an awkward one, because Trav clasped in his two hands his naked sword, for half its length a bloody smear; and when Jenny tried to take it from him, his fingers tightened so that the hilt could not be freed. The driver of the ambulance drawled:

“Be a mite keerful, ma'am. I took a fancy to that sword myself, but seems like he don't aim to let go his holt of it at all.”

The sword was bloody, and there was a dark stain of blood on Trav's coat. Dust had settled on it and had become a reddish mud which as the blood clotted was overlaid with dust again; but when they moved him, in the center of this dusty patch a spot of brighter crimson slowly spread. At the driver's advice they laid him on the floor in the hall, and the children came on tiptoe and Peter asked in a whisper:

“Mama, is Papa dead?”

“Oh for Heaven's sake!” Enid cried, hysterical with bewildering compassion and tenderness and fear. “I don't know!” She began to sob in a deep, retching fashion. “Jenny, can't we do something? Can't we get a doctor?”

“Mama will bring someone. You go lie down, dear. June and I will take care of him.” She spoke to Lucy. “Lucy, take your Mama upstairs and put her to bed.”

Enid submitted, and Lucy led her sweetly away, mothering her in loving kindness, and she brought a cold compress to lay across Enid's eyes. “There, Mama, you'll feel better soon. Rest now and be ready, so you can take care of Papa.”

Enid said wretchedly: “Oh Lucy, he's going to die.” He mustn't die! “I don't know what to do, Lucy,” she wailed. “I don't know how to take care of hurt people!”

“You took awful good care of Uncle Faunt!”

Enid shook her head. Taking care of Faunt had been beautiful and contenting, like a noble adventure, but she always knew he would get well. Trav was surely going to die! And Faunt after all was only her brother-in-law; Trav was her husband! An hour ago she would have said she wished him dead; but not now, not if he were really going to die!

July—August, 1862

 

 

W
HEN the battle came to the very threshold of Richmond, the flood of wounded poured into the city in a crimson torrent. Cinda welcomed the toil this imposed upon her. To be tired to the point of exhaustion helped her forget the terrible and endless and futile wondering about Julian. Was he alive? Was he dead? Was his body rotting in some shallow, unmarked grave? How had he died? Had death come with a merciful quickness; or had he perhaps lain long hours on the night-cloaked battlefield, too weak to cry out for help, conscious yet mute, seeing rescuers near and unable to summon them? What did a boy think about when he lay dying a tormented death alone? How long did suffering endure before the approaching end eased and dulled his pain?

She worked at first under Miss Tompkins in the big house at the corner of Third and Main, only three blocks from home. When the wounded began to arrive, there were already some sick men there, brought from the camps outside the city. To make room for the newcomers whose needs were more acute, these sick were moved, hidden away in nooks and corners where they were sometimes forgotten. One day Cinda, passing the dark doorway of a closet, heard from inside a feverish mumbling. She brought a candle and lighted it, and found a boy no older than Julian, who seemed to have been laid on the bare floor there and forgotten. His eyes were swollen shut and gummed with scabs of wax and his ears were running, and they must be abscessed, because even in his delirium he cried out with pain.

She called the nearest surgeon, who said the boy was dying. “Measles and pneumonia. No chance for him at all.”

“If I took him away, took care of him?”

“Oh, possibly. But there's only the slimmest hope for him; and there are so many who can be helped, Mrs. Dewain.”

“I know, but I want to help him.” Cinda wished to take him home, but with the children there she dared not. Their lives were precious too. She arranged with Dr. Gwathmey's wife to move him to the Soldiers' Home on Clay Street. There, if he must die, he could at least die in decency; for there ladies from near-by homes made it their duty and their happiness to keep everything immaculate, beds draped with fresh linen, curtains at the windows, the floors mopped, flies screened away.

One day she and Vesta were summoned in haste to help convert a public warehouse on Eighth Street to hospital uses. When they reached the warehouse, fifty or sixty wounded men had already been brought in, but there was no one in charge and the ladies who like them had answered this call were milling confusedly, uncertain how to begin. For lack of beds, the men, some groaning and twisting with pain, some stoically silent, some too weak to move, lay helter-skelter where the ambulance drivers had deposited them before returning toward the battlefields.

Cinda, thus thrown on her own resources, took command. Since there was no one else to give orders, she did so. She sent messengers to bring mattresses, clean water, bandages, blankets, food, wine. She bade them summon any surgeons who could come, and a desperate hour or two of confused effort began to bring some order and system out of the original chaos. When a new train of laden ambulances arrived, she went out to direct the work of bringing in the men.

It was thus she discovered Trav. When she recognized him, senseless in the ambulance, her throat constricted with grief and terror; but he, at least, need not lie with these others on wretched pallets, smothered by swarms of flies attracted by the blood smell, helplessly waiting for easement or for death. She sent the ambulance to Fifth Street. Enid was there, and Jenny; and Jenny was a rock, a firm foundation. Jenny would know what to do.

She wished to go with him, but she could not be spared. When she had seen the ambulance lurch away, she turned back inside, and a hurt man coughed and a thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his
mouth. She lifted his head and shoulders and turned his head sidewise to let his throat clear itself of the blood that was strangling him; but when he coughed again a great burst of blood, as though his coughing had opened some fountain in his body, poured out of his mouth, and he died. she laid him down almost roughly. It was the living who had need of her. Moving to her tasks she passed near Vesta and spoke to her.

“I just saw Uncle Travis. He's hurt. I sent him home.”

“Oh Mama—shouldn't we go?”

“Jenny and Enid will take care of him. One of us can take a surgeon to the house when there's time.”

“Now, Mama?”

“Not now. Travis wouldn't want that.” She tried to persuade herself she meant this; but when a little later she saw Vesta and Dr. Little go toward the door she did not interfere.

She was so busy that time lost its meaning, so she did not know how long it was till Vesta returned. Cinda was kneeling beside a man with a shattered jaw—she was thinking of Rollin Lyle, whose jaw had been broken by a pistol ball once upon a time, so long ago—feeding sips of brandy through the torn wound that was his mouth, hoping the fiery liquor would dull his pain. She saw someone's feet pause beside her, and looked up, and it was Vesta, and the girl said steadily:

“We saw Uncle Travis. The bullet went right through him. Dr. Little passed a silk handkerchief in through the hole in front and out the back. He has almost stopped bleeding. Dr. Little says he has to be kept quiet and”—her voice caught—“and prayed for.”

Cinda nodded, returning to her task. “Jenny can do that.” She added: “And Enid, of course.” She dared not let herself feel pain.

The steady flow of wounded from the bloody slopes of Malvern Hill never slacked all the long day, and at dusk it had not ceased; but Vesta was bowed with fatigue, and Cinda herself could do no more. At home she found Trav on a pallet on the floor in the drawing room, with Enid and old June beside him.

“I wanted them to carry him upstairs, Cousin Cinda,” Enid said, more like a complaint than an apology. “But Dr. Little said he shouldn't be moved.”

“It's all right,” Cinda assured her. “He can stay here. Where's Jenny?”

“She's asleep. She told me to wake her at midnight and she'd take my place.”

Cinda brushed her hand across her eyes and old June's arms enfolded her. “You come along, Honey. I'm gwine put you tuh bed!”

“How is he?” These old Negro women came to know so many mysteries.

“Mistuh Trav?” June tossed her head in cheerful reassurance. “He's jes' fine. On'y way de Yankees kin kill him is cut off his haid wid a axe. No, ma'am, don' you fret you'se'f account o' him. You come along to bed 'foah I gits out o' patience wid you.”

 

Cinda through the days that followed thought Richmond was half hospital, half charnel house. At home Trav lay in a muttering delirium; fever seared his flesh away, his cheeks sank, deep hollows formed behind his eyes. His wound was suppurating, and Dr. Little called it laudable pus; but he was become so thin, so frail, so pitiful. In the hospitals, men tossed and groaned under clouds of greedy flies which at any movement of their victim rose sluggishly, heavy with their gorging, and at once settled back to the feast again. The stench of mortifying flesh hung everywhere, and gangrene and erysipelas came to stalk like scavengers among the crowded cots. The hospitals were a horror so awful that to enter them deadened the senses; and there were so many wounded that even stores were filled with cots. Passers-by could look in through the wide windows and watch the busy surgeons and the suffering men; and every such window was jammed with small boys peering at the spectacle in morbid fascination. Now that the fighting was over for a while, there were no longer the trains of ambulances, from which came the groans and sometimes the screams of men tortured by the jolting vehicles; but instead there were the hearses and the carts loaded with coffins, trundling toward Hollywood. The humble dead went unattended, but muffled drums might accompany an officer to the waiting grave.

Tilda came one day to the warehouse where Cinda was at work; and she was full of petulant indignation at the horror of these funerals.
“Mrs. Brownlaw is simply furious,” she declared. “She's trying to make someone do something about it. There aren't enough grave diggers, and they don't work fast enough.” A morbid relish crept into her tones. “Why, half the time, Cinda, the carts just dump the coffins on the ground and they lie there all day, or even overnight, till the grave diggers get ready to bury them; and sometimes the bodies swell up and burst the coffins before they're buried.”

Cinda, kneeling beside a man whose leg was gangrenous, loosening the bandages so that the surgeon could sprinkle lead sulphate on the discolored stump, said in a low tone: “Please, Tilda, don't. You disturb the men.” She was glad when Tilda moved away. The surgeon was not yet ready here, so she waited to help him when he came. Luckily the man was delirious, so he could not have heard what Tilda said. With a leg as bad as his was, he himself would soon be in one of those rough wooden boxes.

Sunday she surrendered to fatigue, stayed all day abed. The children came to her; Kyle and Peter, and then Lucy. Lucy was making a scrapbook of pictures cut from newspapers. “So my children can see what the war was like, Aunt Cinda,” she explained. “Don't you want to look at it?”

Cinda forced herself to do so, and Peter came to see the pictures with her; and he was always impatient to turn the next page, and the next, lifting the edges of each one to peer at what was to come; till suddenly he snatched the book away and threw it on the floor and cried in boyish fury:

“That's him! That's old Abe!”

He jumped up and down on the open scrapbook, and Lucy ran around the bed to rescue it, and their voices rose in violence and anger, and Cinda was too tired to interfere. Even the children hated Lincoln. Well, should they not? Was it not he who had riddled and shattered and maimed and slain all these hundreds and thousands?

“Hush, Peter,” she said at last. “You needn't look at the pictures unless you want to; but you musn't tear Lucy's book.”

So Peter, still angry, stalked out of the room, and Lucy came to perch upon the bed again, turning page by page; and Cinda pretended to look and to listen and she spoke approving words.

But she was thinking of little Peter, and of his rage at the sight of
that sketch of Abraham Lincoln; and Peter's wrath made her remember how angry Faunt had been that night at Great Oak. She had never before realized how like each other in temper were these two, Peter and Faunt. The same blood ran in them—as it did in Lincoln. Had President Lincoln too his moments of unbridled rage?

She turned back the pages of Lucy's scrapbook to look at that rough-drawn face again, trying to appraise and to understand the man himself, the person whose likeness was there portrayed; and she re-remembered her remark long ago to Brett that Tony looked a little like Lincoln. Make Tony's hair black, instead of dark brown now heavily touched with gray, give him a beard like Lincoln's instead of that little spike of whisker which he wore; change his mouth a little—yes, it would be easy to point up the resemblance. Of course there was no hint of strength in Tony's countenance; Abraham Lincoln, whatever his vices, looked like a man.

She sent Lucy away at last, wishing to sleep; and her eyes were closed when something made her open them and she saw Brett standing in the door. At first it was hard to believe that this was he, till he smiled and came toward her and sat down on the bed beside her and touched her hand.

“Well, Mrs. Dewain,” he said in a low tone.

“Well, Mr. Dewain.”

He kissed her; her limp arms rose to draw him for a moment close. “Too bad I woke you,” he said.

“I wasn't asleep. Just—resting.”

He said: “Burr is fine, and Faunt. I haven't seen them, but Burr sent word. They're watching the enemy at Harrison's Landing. Our company is back in camp.” And he said: “How does Trav seem?”

“He hasn't taken any food, but Dr. Little thinks he will—recover. And so does June.”

“I brought Cousin Jeems to dinner.”

“Oh I must come down.” But she did not move.

“I'll bring him up. You're old enough friends to receive him in undress. He'll tell you about Trav.”

She nodded in submission, but she did not wish to hear how Trav got his wound. Why must men always relive these terrors in talk, talk, talk! Why must she be forced to listen to them? But when
Brett returned with Longstreet, it was good to see Cousin Jeems. He bowed over her hand and kissed her fingertips, not gallantly but with a gentleness that was somehow comforting. She had never thought of him as a gentle, tender man; yet there was a woman's tenderness in him now. He seemed to her now more like an abashed small boy than like the god of battles. She suspected in faint amusement that he was embarrassed at being in her bedroom. Men were so easily embarrassed, so amazingly modest in these little ways.

She asked for Cousin Louisa. He said Mrs. Longstreet was with her family, on Garland Hill in Lynchburg. She inquired for little Garland. Oh he was fine, and no longer so little. He was fourteen, and beginning to distress his mother with talk about being old enough to become a soldier.

“Oh no,” said Cinda quickly. “Not the children, Cousin Jeems.” Yet Julian was—had been—no more than a child. She asked: “Will Louisa come back to Richmond to be near you, now that the Yankees are gone?”

“I'm afraid not,” he said. “Not Richmond.” Cinda understood him. Cousin Louisa would not wish to return here where her children died. Cinda found it hard to realize that it was so short a time, only four or five months, since that dreadful tragedy. She saw the shadow in his eyes, and said, to distract him:

“You've won a splendid victory, Cousin Jeems.”

“It should have been more complete,” he said, his brow clouding. “McClellan's army might have been destroyed; but Huger, Magruder, yes and even Jackson, each did less than they might have done.” He added: “Richmond is made safe, it's true; but—our loss was heavy. I fear our loss was heavier even than McClellan's.”