Read Online House Divided by Ben Ames Williams - Free Book Online Page A

she’s just as pretty and charming as she ever was.” Then in quick delight: “Honey, you’re red as a brick! I declare, I
wish you could see yourself! You look so funny, all blushing and embarrassed!”
    He remembered Mrs. Albion as a pretty woman with a possessiveness in her manner which had in the past at once flattered and alarmed him; and he dreaded the six- or seven-mile ride home from Martinston alone with her. On his way to town to meet her he stopped to talk with Ed Blandy and with Lonn Tyler and Jeremy Blackstone and other farmers along the way, postponing as long as possible his arrival at the tavern where the stage would halt. A baking summer sun lay across the land, and Trav drove slowly, appraising with an expert eye the condition of the crops in each man’s clearing, smiling at the children playing around each cabin. He overtook an occasional wagon, or a man and woman on horseback with bulging saddlebags, the woman’s cotton wrap-around riding skirt whipping in the light breeze, her face hidden under her sunbonnet. Once he alighted to drink where a spout-spring came down from the mountainside, then watered his horses in the hollowed gum log which the spring fed. While they drank with cool sucking sounds he heard in the wood the log-cock’s pounding tattoo, heard the drum of a grouse; and twice before he drove into the village he saw turkeys, and once a deer crossed the road a quarter-mile in front of the carriage.
    At the tavern, on the long veranda shaded by an overhanging second story supported by slender brick pillars, a dozen men were awaiting the arrival of the stage. He joined them, for they were his friends. They sat along the benches or in tipped-back chairs, their voices easy in the midday heat. Judge Meynell and Miss Mary were here to take the stage when it should arrive. The Judge, high-dressed for the coming journey, was hot and sweating; but Miss Mary sat demurely, her bonnet box upon her knee, her cheeks pink with the excitement of the occasion. Trav sat down beside the Judge and they fell into talk together, and other men drew near to listen to the discussion; for Trav, as the only big planter for many a mile, and Judge Meynell, on his way now to Quarter Sessions, were men whose words were heeded. Judge Meynell was a justice of the peace and a person of authority. He and his fellow justices, sitting as the County Court, not only heard petty legal causes but they appointed the sheriff and the road overseers, and decided where bridges should replace fords, and where schools were
needed, and who should stand for the Assembly. But Judge Meynell never acted against Trav’s advice and counsel.
    The abolitionists up North were bound to make trouble, the Judge suggested; but Trav said the politicians down in the Cotton States were quite as bad in their way. “Little boys calling names on both sides,” he and Judge Meynell agreed. Except for Trav and for the Judge, who owned an old house servant, none of the men in the group on the veranda owned slaves; and when Trav said slavery was not worth getting mad about, most of them nodded. But Matt Resor, sprawling on the stoop, added a word.
    â€œI’d admire to git my sights on one of them Republican abolitionists, all the same. Anyone says I got to have niggers pulling up to my table, marrying my gals!” He spat with listless violence.
    Trav was careful not to smile. Matt was one of those individuals who never stood when he could sit, never sat when he could lie down. Most farmers hereabouts were thrifty and hard-working men; but Matt never did a lick. Trav thought any Negro who sat at Matt’s table would be still hungry when he rose; and of course Matt had no daughters. Many white men were poor, but Matt was ‘poor white,’ a very different thing. Such men as he had nothing except their white skins of which to boast, so they hated Negroes and abolitionists with an equal venom. “Well, I doubt