“Scarlett,” she whispered, “we must get him out of here and bury him. He may not be alone and if they find him here-” She steadied herself on Scarlett’s arm.
“He must be alone,” said Scarlett. “I didn’t see anyone else from the upstairs window. He must be a deserter.”
“Even if he is alone, no one must know about it. The negroes might talk and then they’d come and get you. Scarlett, we must get him hidden before the folks come back from the swamp.”
Her mind prodded to action by the feverish urgency of Melanie’s voice, Scarlett thought hard.
“I could bury him in the corner of the garden under the arbor-the ground is soft there where Pork dug up the whisky barrel. But how will I get him there?”
“We’ll both take a leg and drag him,” said Melanie firmly.
Reluctantly, Scarlett’s admiration went still higher.
“You couldn’t drag a cat. I’ll drag him,” she said roughly. “You go back to bed. You’ll kill yourself. Don’t dare try to help me either or I’ll carry you upstairs myself.”
Melanie’s white face broke into a sweet understanding smile. “You are very dear, Scarlett,” she said and softly brushed her lips against Scarlett’s cheek. Before Scarlett could recover from her surprise, Melanie went on: “If you can drag him out, I’ll mop up the-the mess before the folks get home, and Scarlett-”
“Yes?”
“Do you suppose it would be dishonest to go through his knapsack? He might have something to eat.”
“I do not,” said Scarlett, annoyed that she had not thought of this herself. “You take the knapsack and I’ll go through his pockets.”
Stooping over the dead man with distaste, she unbuttoned the remaining buttons of his jacket and systematically began rifling his pockets.
“Dear God,” she whispered, pulling out a bulging wallet, wrapped about with a rag. “Melanie-Melly, I think it’s full of money!”
Melanie said nothing but abruptly sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall.
“You look,” she said shakily. “I’m feeling a little weak.”
Scarlett tore off the rag and with trembling hands opened the leather folds.
“Look, Melly-just look!”
Melanie looked and her eyes dilated. Jumbled together was a mass of bills, United States greenbacks mingling with Confederate money and, glinting from between them, were one ten-dollar gold piece and two five-dollar gold pieces.
“Don’t stop to count it now,” said Melanie as Scarlett began fingering the bills. “We haven’t time-”
“Do you realize, Melanie, that this money means that we’ll eat?”
“Yes, yes, dear. I know but we haven’t time now. You look in his other pockets and I’ll take the knapsack.”
Scarlett was loath to put down the wallet. Bright vistas opened before her-real money, the Yankee’s horse, food! There was a God after all, and He did provide, even if He did take very odd ways of providing. She sat on her haunches and stared at the wallet smiling. Food! Melanie plucked it from her hands-
“Hurry!” she said.
The trouser pockets yielded nothing except a candle end, a jackknife, a plug of tobacco and a bit of twine. Melanie removed from the knapsack a small package of coffee which she sniffed as if it were the sweetest of perfumes, hardtack and, her face changing, a miniature of a little girl in a gold frame set with seed pearls, a garnet brooch, two broad gold bracelets with tiny dangling gold chains, a gold thimble, a small silver baby’s cup, gold embroidery scissors, a diamond solitaire ring and a pair of earrings with pendant pear-shaped diamonds, which even their unpracticed eyes could tell were well over a carat each.
“A thief!” whispered Melanie, recoiling from the still body. “Scarlett, he must have stolen all of this!”
“Of course,” said Scarlett. “And he came here hoping to steal more from us.”
“I’m glad you killed him,” said Melanie her gentle eyes hard. “Now hurry, darling, and get him out of here.”
Scarlett bent over, caught the dead man by his boots and tugged. How heavy he was and how weak she suddenly felt. Suppose she shouldn’t be able to move him? Turning so that she backed the corpse, she caught a heavy boot under each arm and threw her weight forward. He moved and she jerked again. Her sore foot, forgotten in the excitement, now gave a tremendous throb that made her grit her teeth and shift her weight to the heel. Tugging and straining, perspiration dripping from her forehead, she dragged him down the hall, a red stain following her path.
“If he bleeds across the yard, we can’t hide it,” she gasped. “Give me your shimmy, Melanie, and I’ll wad it around his head.”
Melanie’s white face went crimson.
“Don’t be silly, I won’t look at you,” said Scarlett. “If I had on a petticoat or pantalets I’d use them.”
Crouching back against the wall, Melanie pulled the ragged linen garment over her head and silently tossed it to Scarlett, shielding herself as best she could with her arms.
“Thank God, I’m not that modest,” thought Scarlett, feeling rather than seeing Melanie’s agony of embarrassment, as she wrapped the ragged cloth about the shattered face.
By a series of limping jerks, she pulled the body down the hall toward the back porch and, pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand, glanced back toward Melanie, sitting against the wall hugging her thin knees to her bare breasts. How silly of Melanie to be bothering about modesty at a time like this, Scarlett thought irritably. It was just part of her nicey-nice way of acting which had always made Scarlett despise her. Then shame rose in her. After all-after all, Melanie had dragged herself from bed so soon after having a baby and had come to her aid with a weapon too heavy even for her to lift. That had taken courage, the kind of courage Scarlett honestly knew she herself did not possess, the thin-steel, spun-silk courage which had characterized Melanie on the terrible night Atlanta fell and on the long trip home. It was the same intangible, unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses possessed, a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which she gave grudging tribute.
“Go back to bed,” she threw over her shoulder. “You’ll be dead if you don’t. I’ll clean up the mess after I’ve buried him.”
“I’ll do it with one of the rag rugs,” whispered Melanie, looking at the pool of blood with a sick face.
“Well, kill yourself then and see if I care! And if any of the folks come back before I’m finished, keep them in the house and tell them the horse just walked in from nowhere.”
Melanie sat shivering in the morning sunlight and covered her ears against the sickening series of thuds as the dead man’s head bumped down the porch steps.
No one questioned whence the horse had come. It was so obvious he was a stray from the recent battle and they were well pleased to have him. The Yankee lay in the shallow pit Scarlett had scraped out under the scuppernong arbor. The uprights which held the thick vines were rotten and that night Scarlett hacked at them with the kitchen knife until they fell and the tangled mass ran wild over the grave. The replacing of these posts was one bit of repair work Scarlett did not suggest and, if the negroes knew why, they kept their silence.
No ghost rose from that shallow grave to haunt her in the long nights when she lay awake, too tired to sleep. No feeling of horror or remorse assailed her at the memory. She wondered why, knowing that even a month before she could never have done the deed. Pretty young Mrs. Hamilton, with her dimple and her jingling earbobs and her helpless little ways, blowing a man’s face to a pulp and then burying him in a hastily scratched-out hole! Scarlett grinned a little grimly thinking of the consternation such an idea would bring to those who knew her.
“I won’t think about it any more,” she decided. “It’s over and done with and I’d have been a ninny not to kill him. I reckon-I reckon I must have changed a little since coming home or else I couldn’t have done it.”
She did not think of it consciously but in the back of her mind, whenever she was confronted by an unpleasant and difficult task, the idea lurked giving her strength: “I’ve done murder and so I can surely do this.”
She had changed more than she knew and the shell of hardness which had begun to form about her heart when she lay in the slave garden at Twelve Oaks was slowly thickening.
Now that she had a horse, Scarlett could find out for herself what had happened to their neighbors. Since she came home she had wondered despairingly a thousand times: “Are we the only folks left in the County? Has everybody else been burned out? Have they all refugeed to Macon?” With the memory of the ruins of Twelve Oaks, the MacIntosh place and the Slattery shack fresh in her mind, she almost dreaded to discover the truth. But it was better to know the worst than to wonder. She decided to ride to the Fontaines’ first, not because they were the nearest neighbors but because old Dr. Fontaine might be there. Melanie needed a doctor. She was not recovering as she should and Scarlett was frightened by her white weakness.
So on the first day when her foot had healed enough to stand a slipper, she mounted the Yankee’s horse. One foot in the shortened stirrup and the other leg crooked about the pommel in an approximation of a side saddle, she set out across the fields toward Mimosa, steeling herself to find it burned.
To her surprise and pleasure, she saw the faded yellow-stucco house standing amid the mimosa trees, looking as it had always looked. Warm happiness, happiness that almost brought tears, flooded her when the three Fontaine women came out of the house to welcome her with kisses and cries of joy.
But when the first exclamations of affectionate greeting were over and they all had trooped into the dining room to sit down, Scarlett felt a chill. The Yankees had not reached Mimosa because it was far off the main road. And so the Fontaines still had their stock and their provisions, but Mimosa was held by the same strange silence that hung over Tara, over the whole countryside. All the slaves except four women house servants had run away, frightened by the approach of the Yankees. There was not a man on the place unless Sally’s little boy, Joe, hardly out of diapers, could be counted as a man. Alone in the big house were Grandma Fontaine, in her seventies, her daughter-in-law who would always be known as Young Miss, though she was in her fifties, and Sally, who had barely turned twenty. They were far away from neighbors and unprotected, but if they were afraid it did not show on their faces. Probably, thought Scarlett, because Sally and Young Miss were too afraid of the porcelain-frail but indomitable old Grandma to dare voice any qualms. Scarlett herself was afraid of the old lady, for she had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and Scarlett had felt them both in the past.
Though unrelated by blood and far apart in age, there was a kinship of spirit and experience binding these women together. All three wore home-dyed mourning, all were worn, sad, worried, all bitter with a bitterness that did not sulk or complain but, nevertheless, peered out from behind their smiles and their words of welcome. For their slaves were gone, their money was worthless, Sally’s husband, Joe, had died at Gettysburg and Young Miss was also a widow, for young Dr. Fontaine had died of dysentery at Vicksburg. The other two boys, Alex and Tony, were somewhere in Virginia and nobody knew whether they were alive or dead; and old Dr. Fontaine was off somewhere with Wheeler’s cavalry.
“And the old fool is seventy-three years old though he tries to act younger and he’s as full of rheumatism as a hog is of fleas,” said Grandma, proud of her husband, the light in her eyes belying her sharp words.
“Have you all had any news of what’s been happening in Atlanta?” asked Scarlett when they were comfortably settled. “We’re completely buried at Tara.”
“Law, child,” said Old Miss, taking charge of the conversation, as was her habit, “we’re in the same fix as you are. We don’t know a thing except that Sherman finally got the town.”
“So he did get it. What’s he doing now? Where’s the fighting now?”
“And how would three lone women out here in the country know about the war when we haven’t seen a letter or a newspaper m weeks?” said the old lady tartly. “One of our darkies talked to a darky who’d seen a darky who’d been to Jonesboro, and except for that we haven’t heard anything. What they said was that the Yankees were just squatting in Atlanta resting up their men and their horses, but whether it’s true or not you’re as good a judge as I am. Not that they wouldn’t need a rest, after the fight we gave them.”
“To think you’ve been at Tara all this time and we didn’t know!” Young Miss broke in. “Oh, how I blame myself for not riding over to see! But there’s been so much to do here with most all the darkies gone that I just couldn’t get away. But I should have made time to go. It wasn’t neighborly of me. But, of course, we thought the Yankees had burned Tara like they did Twelve Oaks and the MacIntosh house and that your folks had gone to Macon. And we never dreamed you were home, Scarlett.”
“Well, how were we to know different when Mr. O’Hara’s darkies came through here so scared they were popeyed and told us the Yankees were going to burn Tara?” Grandma interrupted.
“And we could see-” Sally began.
“I’m telling this, please,” said Old Miss shortly. “And they said the Yankees were camped all over Tara and your folks were fixing to go to Macon. And then that night we saw the glare of fire over toward Tara and it lasted for hours and it scared our fool darkies so bad they all ran off. What burned?”
“All our cotton-a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth,” said Scarlett bitterly.
“Be thankful it wasn’t your house,” said Grandma, leaning her chin on her cane. “You can always grow more cotton and you can’t grow a house. By the bye, had you all started picking your cotton?”
“No,” said Scarlett, “and now most of it is ruined. I don’t imagine there’s more than three bales left standing, in the far field in the creek bottom, and what earthly good will it do? All our field hands are gone and there’s nobody to pick it.”
“Mercy me, all our field hands are gone and there’s nobody to pick it!” mimicked Grandma and bent a satiric glance on Scarlett. “What’s wrong with your own pretty paws, Miss, and those of your sisters?”
“Me? Pick cotton?” cried Scarlett aghast, as if Grandma had been suggesting some repulsive crime. “Like a field hand? Like white trash? Like the Slattery women?”
“White trash, indeed! Well, isn’t this generation soft and ladylike! Let me tell you, Miss, when I was a girl my father lost all his money and I wasn’t above doing honest work with my hands and in the fields too, till Pa got enough money to buy some more darkies. I’ve hoed my row and I’ve picked my cotton and I can do it again if I have to. And it looks like I’ll have to. White trash, indeed!”
“Oh, but Mama Fontaine,” cried her daughter-in-law, casting imploring glances at the two girls, urging them to help her smooth the old lady’s feathers. “That was so long ago, a different day entirely, and times have changed.”
“Times never change when there’s a need for honest work to be done,” stated the sharp-eyed old lady, refusing to be soothed. “And I’m ashamed for your mother, Scarlett, to hear you stand there and talk as though honest work made white trash out of nice people. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’-”
To change the subject, Scarlett hastily questioned: “What about the Tarletons and the Calverts? Were they burned out? Have they refugeed to Macon?”
“The Yankees never got to the Tarletons. They’re off the main road, like we are, but they did get to the Calverts and they stole all their stock and poultry and got all the darkies to run off with them-” Sally began.
Grandma interrupted.
“Hah! They promised all the black wenches silk dresses and gold earbobs-that’s what they did. And Cathleen Calvert said some of the troopers went off with the black fools behind them on their saddles. Well, all they’ll get will be yellow babies and I can’t say that Yankee blood will improve the stock.”
“Oh, Mama Fontaine!”
“Don’t pull such a shocked face, Jane. We’re all married, aren’t we? And, God knows, we’ve seen mulatto babies before this.”
“Why didn’t they burn the Calverts’ house?”
“The house was saved by the combined accents of the second Mrs. Calvert and that Yankee overseer of hers, Hilton,” said Old Miss, who always referred to the ex-governess as the “second Mrs. Calvert,” although the first Mrs. Calvert had been dead twenty years.
“’We are staunch Union sympathizers,’” mimicked the old lady, twanging the words through her long thin nose. “Cathleen said the two of them swore up hill and down dale that the whole passel of Calverts were Yankees. And Mr. Calvert dead in the Wilderness! And Raiford at Gettysburg and Cade in Virginia with the army! Cathleen was so mortified she said she’d rather the house had been burned. She said Cade would bust when he came home and heard about it. But then, that’s what a man gets for marrying a Yankee woman-no pride, no decency, always thinking about their own skins… How come they didn’t burn Tara, Scarlett?”
For a moment Scarlett paused before answering. She knew the very next question would be: “And how are all your folks? And how is your dear mother?” She knew she could not tell them Ellen was dead. She knew that if she spoke those words or even let herself think of them in the presence of these sympathetic women, she would burst into a storm of tears and cry until she was sick. And she could not let herself cry. She had not really cried since she came home and she knew that if she once let down the floodgates, her closely husbanded courage would all be gone. But she knew, too, looking with confusion at the friendly faces about her, that if she withheld the news of Ellen’s death, the Fontaines would never forgive her. Grandma in particular was devoted to Ellen and there were very few people in the County for whom the old lady gave a snap of her skinny fingers.
“Well, speak up,” said Grandma, looking sharply at her. “Don’t you know, Miss?”
“Well, you see, I didn’t get home till the day after the battle,” she answered hastily. “The Yankees were all gone then. Pa-Pa told me that-that he got them not to burn the house because Suellen and Carreen were so ill with typhoid they couldn’t be moved.”
“That’s the first time I ever heard of a Yankee doing a decent thing,” said Grandma, as if she regretted hearing anything good about the invaders. “And how are the girls now?”
“Oh, they are better, much better, almost well but quite weak,” answered Scarlett. Then, seeing the question she feared hovering on the old lady’s lips, she cast hastily about for some other topic of conversation.
“I-I wonder if you could lend us something to eat? The Yankees cleaned us out like a swarm of locusts. But, if you are on short rations, just tell me so plainly and-”
“Send over Pork with a wagon and you shall have half of what we’ve got, rice, meal, ham, some chickens,” said Old Miss, giving Scarlett a sudden keen look.
“Oh, that’s too much! Really, I-”
“Not a word! I won’t hear it. What are neighbors for?”
“You are so kind that I can’t-But I have to be going now. The folks at home will be worrying about me.”
Grandma rose abruptly and took Scarlett by the arm.
“You two stay here,” she commanded, pushing Scarlett toward the back porch. “I have a private word for this child. Help me down the steps, Scarlett.”
Young Miss and Sally said good-by and promised to come calling soon. They were devoured by curiosity as to what Grandma had to say to Scarlett but unless she chose to tell them, they would never know. Old ladies were so difficult, Young Miss whispered to Sally as they went back to their sewing.
Scarlett stood with her hand on the horse’s bridle, a dull feeling at her heart.
“Now,” said Grandma, peering into her face, “what’s wrong at Tara? What are you keeping back?”
Scarlett looked up into the keen old eyes and knew she could tell the truth, without tears. No one could cry in the presence of Grandma Fontaine without her express permission.
“Mother is dead,” she said flatly.
The hand on her arm tightened until it pinched and the wrinkled lids over the yellow eyes blinked.
“Did the Yankees kill her?”
“She died of typhoid. Died-the day before I came home.”
“Don’t think about it,” said Grandma sternly and Scarlett saw her swallow. “And your Pa?”
“Pa is-Pa is not himself.”
“What do you mean? Speak up. Is he ill?”
“The shock-he is so strange-he is not-”
“Don’t tell me he’s not himself. Do you mean his mind is unhinged?”
It was a relief to hear the truth put so baldly. How good the old lady was to offer no sympathy that would make her cry.
“Yes,” she said dully, “he’s lost his mind. He acts dazed and sometimes he can’t seem to remember that Mother is dead. Oh, Old Miss, it’s more than I can stand to see him sit by the hour, waiting for her and so patiently too, and he used to have no more patience than a child. But it’s worse when he does remember that she’s gone. Every now and then, after he’s sat still with his ear cocked listening for her, he jumps up suddenly and stumps out of the house and down to the burying ground. And then he comes dragging back with the tears all over his face and he says over and over till I could scream: ‘Katie Scarlett, Mrs. O’Hara is dead. Your mother is dead,’ and it’s just like I was hearing it again for the first time. And sometimes, late at night, I hear him calling her and I get out of bed and go to him and tell him she’s down at the quarters with a sick darky. And he fusses because she’s always tiring herself out nursing people. And it’s so hard to get him back to bed. He’s like a child. Oh, I wish Dr. Fontaine was here! I know he could do something for Pa! And Melanie needs a doctor too. She isn’t getting over her baby like she should-”
“Melly-a baby? And she’s with you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s Melly doing with you? Why isn’t she in Macon with her aunt and her kinfolks? I never thought you liked her any too well, Miss, for all she was Charles’ sister. Now, tell me all about it.”
“It’s a long story, Old Miss. Don’t you want to go back in the house and sit down?”
“I can stand,” said Grandma shortly. “And if you told your story in front of the others, they’d be bawling and making you feel sorry for yourself. Now, let’s have it.”
Scarlett began haltingly with the siege and Melanie’s condition, but as her story progressed beneath the sharp old eyes which never faltered in their gaze, she found words, words of power and horror. It all came back to her, the sickeningly hot day of the baby’s birth, the agony of fear, the flight and Rhett’s desertion. She spoke of the wild darkness of the night, the blazing camp fires which might be friends or foes, the gaunt chimneys which met her gaze in the morning sun, the dead men and horses along the road, the hunger, the desolation, the fear that Tara had been burned.
“I thought if I could just get home to Mother, she could manage everything and I could lay down the weary load. On the way home I thought the worst had already happened to me, but when I knew she was dead I knew what the worst really was.”
She dropped her eyes to the ground and waited for Grandma to speak. The silence was so prolonged she wondered if Grandma could have failed to comprehend her desperate plight. Finally the old voice spoke and her tones were kind, kinder than Scarlett had ever heard her use in addressing anyone.
“Child, it’s a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she’s faced the worst she can’t ever really fear anything again. And it’s very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something. You think I don’t understand what you’ve told me-what you’ve been through? Well, I understand very well. When I was about your age I was in the Creek uprising, right after the Fort Mims massacre-yes,” she said in a far-away voice, “just about your age for that was fifty-odd years ago. And I managed to get into the bushes and hide and I lay there and saw our house burn and I saw the Indians scalp my brothers and sisters. And I could only lie there and pray that the light of the flames wouldn’t show up my hiding place. And they dragged Mother out and killed her about twenty feet from where I was lying. And scalped her too. And ever so often one Indian would go back to her and sink his tommyhawk into her skull again. I-I was my mother’s pet and I lay there and saw it all. And in the morning I set out for the nearest settlement and it was thirty miles away. It took me three days to get there, through the swamps and the Indians, and afterward they thought I’d lose my mind… That’s where I met Dr. Fontaine. He looked after me… Ah, well, that’s been fifty years ago, as I said, and since that time I’ve never been afraid of anything or anybody because I’d known the worst that could happen to me. And that lack of fear has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of happiness. God intended women to be timid frightened creatures and there’s something unnatural about a woman who isn’t afraid… Scarlett, always save something to fear-even as you save something to love… ”
Her voice trailed off and she stood silent with eyes looking back over half a century to the day when she had been afraid. Scarlett moved impatiently. She had thought Grandma was going to understand and perhaps show her some way to solve her problems. But like all old people she’d gotten to talking about things that happened before anyone was born, things no one was interested in. Scarlett wished she had not confided in her.
“Well, go home, child, or they’ll be worrying about you,” she said suddenly. “Send Pork with the wagon this afternoon… And don’t think you can lay down the load, ever. Because you can’t. I know.”
Indian summer lingered into November that year and the warm days were bright days for those at Tara. The worst was over. They had a horse now and they could ride instead of walk. They had fried eggs for breakfast and fried ham for supper to vary the monotony of the yams, peanuts and dried apples, and on one festal occasion they even had roast chicken. The old sow had finally been captured and she and her brood rooted and grunted happily under the house where they were penned. Sometimes they squealed so loudly no one in the house could talk but it was a pleasant sound. It meant fresh pork for the white folks and chitterlings for the negroes when cold weather and hog-killing time should arrive, and it meant food for the winter for all.
Scarlett’s visit to the Fontaines had heartened her more than she realized. Just the knowledge that she had neighbors, that some of the family friends and old homes had survived, drove out the terrible loss and alone feeling which had oppressed her in her first weeks at Tara. And the Fontaines and Tarletons, whose plantations had not been in the path of the army, were most generous in sharing what little they had. It was the tradition of the County that neighbor helped neighbor and they refused to accept a penny from Scarlett, telling her that she would do the same for them and she could pay them back, in kind, next year when Tara was again producing.
Scarlett now had food for her household, she had a horse, she had the money and jewelry taken from the Yankee straggler, and the greatest need was new clothing. She knew it would be risky business sending Pork south to buy clothes, when the horse might be captured by either Yankees or Confederates. But, at least, she had the money with which to buy the clothes, a horse and wagon for the trip, and perhaps Pork could make the trip without getting caught. Yes, the worst was over.
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