[Part 14] "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈𝐈.

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COLD WEATHER SET IN ABRUPTLY with a killing frost.

Chilling winds swept beneath the doorsills and rattled the loose windowpanes with a monotonous tinkling sound.

The last of the leaves fell from the bare trees and only the pines stood clothed, black and cold against pale skies.

The rutted red roads were frozen to flintiness and hunger rode the winds through Georgia.

Scarlett recalled bitterly her conversation with Grandma Fontaine.

On that afternoon two months ago, which now seemed years in the past, she had told the old lady she had already known the worst which could possibly happen to her, and she had spoken from the bottom of her heart.

Now that remark sounded like schoolgirl hyperbole.

Before Sherman’s men came through Tara the second time, she had her small riches of food and money, she had neighbors more fortunate than she and she had the cotton which would tide her over until spring.

Now the cotton was gone, the food was gone, the money was of no use to her, for there was no food to buy with it, and the neighbors were in worse plight than she.

At least, she had the cow and the calf, a few shoats and the horse, and the neighbors had nothing but the little they had been able to hide in the woods and bury in the ground.

Fairhill, the Tarleton home, was burned to the foundations, and Mrs. Tarleton and the four girls were existing in the overseer’s house.

The Munroe house near Lovejoy was leveled too.

The wooden wing of Mimosa had burned and only the thick resistant stucco of the main house and the frenzied work of the Fontaine women and their slaves with wet blankets and quilts had saved it.

The Calverts’ house had again been spared, due to the intercession of Hilton, the Yankee overseer, but there was not a head of livestock, not a fowl, not an ear of corn left on the place.

At Tara and throughout the County, the problem was food.

Most of the families had nothing at all but the remains of their yam crops and their peanuts and such game as they could catch in the woods.

What they had, each shared with less fortunate friends, as they had done in more prosperous days.

But the time soon came when there was nothing to share.

At Tara, they ate rabbit and possum and catfish, if Pork was lucky.

On other days a small amount of milk, hickory nuts, roasted acorns and yams.

They were always hungry.

To Scarlett it seemed that at every turn she met outstretched hands, pleading eyes.

The sight of them drove her almost to madness, for she was as hungry as they.

She ordered the calf killed, because he drank so much of the precious milk, and that night everyone ate so much fresh veal all of them were ill.

She knew that she should kill one of the shoats but she put it off from day to day, hoping to raise them to maturity.

They were so small.

There would be so little of them to eat if they were killed now and so much more if they could be saved a little longer.

Nightly she debated with Melanie the advisability of sending Pork abroad on the horse with some greenbacks to try to buy food.

But the fear that the horse might be captured and the money taken from Pork deterred them.

They did not know where the Yankees were.

They might be a thousand miles away or only across the river.

Once, Scarlett, in desperation, started to ride out herself to search for food, but the hysterical outbursts of the whole family fearful of the Yankees made her abandon the plan.

Pork foraged far, at times not coming home all night, and Scarlett did not ask him where he went.

Sometimes he returned with game, sometimes with a few ears of corn, a bag of dried peas.

Once he brought home a rooster which he said he found in the woods.

The family ate it with relish but a sense of guilt, knowing very well Pork had stolen it, as he had stolen the peas and corn.

One night soon after this, he tapped on Scarlett’s door long after the house was asleep and sheepishly exhibited a leg peppered with small shot.

As she bandaged it for him, he explained awkwardly that when attempting to get into a hen coop at Fayetteville, he had been discovered.

Scarlett did not ask whose hen coop but patted Pork’s shoulder gently, tears in her eyes.

Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was loyalty in them that money couldn’t buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks which made them risk their lives to keep food on the table.

In other days Pork’s pilferings would have been a serious matter, probably calling for a whipping.

In other days she would have been forced at least to reprimand him severely.

“Always remember, dear,” Ellen had said, “you are responsible for the moral as well as the physical welfare of the darkies God has intrusted to your care.

You must realize that they are like children and must be guarded from themselves like children, and you must always set them a good example.”

But now, Scarlett pushed that admonition into the back of her mind.

That she was encouraging theft, and perhaps theft from people worse off than she, was no longer a matter for conscience.

In fact the morals of the affair weighed lightly upon her.

Instead of punishment or reproof, she only regretted he had been shot.

“You must be more careful, Pork.

We don’t want to lose you.

What would we do without you?

You’ve been mighty good and faithful and when we get some money again, I’m going to buy you a big gold watch and engrave on it something out of the Bible, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”

Pork beamed under the praise and gingerly rubbed his bandaged leg.

“Dat soun’ mighty fine, Miss Scarlett.

W’en you speckin’ ter git dat money?”

“I don’t know, Pork, but I’m going to get it some time, somehow.”

She bent on him an unseeing glance that was so passionately bitter he stirred uneasily.

“Some day, when this war is over, I’m going to have lots of money, and when I do I’ll never be hungry or cold again.

None of us will ever be hungry or cold.

We’ll all wear fine clothes and have fried chicken every day and—”

Then she stopped.

The strictest rule at Tara, one which she herself had made and which she rigidly enforced, was that no one should ever talk of the fine meals they had eaten in the past or what they would eat now, if they had the opportunity.

Pork slipped from the room as she remained staring moodily into the distance.

In the old days, now dead and gone, life had been so complex, so full of intricate and complicated problems.

There had been the problem of trying to win Ashley’s love and trying to keep a dozen other beaux dangling and unhappy.

There had been small breaches of conduct to be concealed from her elders, jealous girls to be flouted or placated, styles of dresses and materials to be chosen, different coiffures to be tried and, oh, so many, many other matters to be decided!

Now life was so amazingly simple.

Now all that mattered was food enough to keep off starvation, clothing enough to prevent freezing and a roof overhead which did not leak too much.

It was during these days that Scarlett dreamed and dreamed again the nightmare which was to haunt her for years.

It was always the same dream, the details never varied, but the terror of it mounted each time it came to her and the fear of experiencing it again troubled even her waking hours.

She remembered so well the incidents of the day when she had first dreamed it.

Cold rain had fallen for days and the house was chill with drafts and dampness.

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The logs in the fireplace were wet and smoky and gave little heat.

There had been nothing to eat except milk since breakfast, for the yams were exhausted and Pork’s snares and fishlines had yielded nothing.

One of the shoats would have to be killed the next day if they were to eat at all.

Strained and hungry faces, black and white, were staring at her, mutely asking her to provide food.

She would have to risk losing the horse and send Pork out to buy something.

And to make matters worse, Wade was ill with a sore throat and a raging fever and there was neither doctor nor medicine for him.

Hungry, weary with watching her child, Scarlett left him to Melanie’s care for a while and lay down on her bed to nap.

Her feet icy, she twisted and turned, unable to sleep, weighed down with fear and despair.

Again and again, she thought: “What shall I do?

Where shall I turn?

Isn’t there anybody in the world who can help me?”

Where had all the security of the world gone?

Why wasn’t there someone, some strong wise person to take the burdens from her?

She wasn’t made to carry them.

She did not know how to carry them.

And then she fell into an uneasy doze.

She was in a wild strange country so thick with swirling mist she could not see her hand before her face.

The earth beneath her feet was uneasy.

It was a haunted land, still with a terrible stillness, and she was lost in it, lost and terrified as a child in the night.

She was bitterly cold and hungry and so fearful of what lurked in the mists about her that she tried to scream and could not.

There were things in the fog reaching out fingers to pluck at her skirt, to drag her down into the uneasy quaking earth on which she stood, silent, relentless, spectral hands.

Then, she knew that somewhere in the opaque gloom about her there was shelter, help, a haven of refuge and warmth.

But where was it?

Could she reach it before the hands clutched her and dragged her down into the quicksands?

Suddenly she was running, running through the mist like a mad thing, crying and screaming, throwing out her arms to clutch only empty air and wet mist.

Where was the haven?

It eluded her but it was there, hidden, somewhere.

If she could only reach it!

If she could only reach it she would be safe!

But terror was weakening her legs, hunger making her faint.

She gave one despairing cry and awoke to find Melanie’s worried face above her and Melanie’s hand shaking her to wakefulness.

The dream returned again and again, whenever she went to sleep with an empty stomach.

And that was frequently enough.

It so frightened her that she feared to sleep, although she feverishly told herself there was nothing in such a dream to be afraid of.

There was nothing in a dream about fog to scare her so.

Nothing at all—yet the thought of dropping off into that mist-filled country so terrified her she began sleeping with Melanie, who would wake her up when her moaning and twitching revealed that she was again in the clutch of the dream.

Under the strain she grew white and thin.

The pretty roundness left her face, throwing her cheek bones into prominence, emphasizing her slanting green eyes and giving her the look of a prowling, hungry cat.

“Daytime is enough like a nightmare without my dreaming things,” she thought desperately and began hoarding her daily ration to eat it just before she went to sleep.

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At Christmas time Frank Kennedy and a small troop from the commissary department jogged up to Tara on a futile hunt for grain and animals for the army.

They were a ragged and ruffianly appearing crew, mounted on lame and heaving horses which obviously were in too bad condition to be used for more active service.

Like their animals the men had been invalided out of the front-line forces and, except for Frank, all of them had an arm missing or an eye gone or stiffened joints.

Most of them wore blue overcoats of captured Yankees and, for a brief instant of horror, those at Tara thought Sherman’s men had returned.

They stayed the night on the plantation, sleeping on the floor in the parlor, luxuriating as they stretched themselves on the velvet rug, for it had been weeks since they had slept under a roof or on anything softer than pine needles and hard earth.

For all their dirty beards and tatters they were a well-bred crowd, full of pleasant small talk, jokes and compliments and very glad to be spending Christmas Eve in a big house, surrounded by pretty women as they had been accustomed to do in days long past.

They refused to be serious about the war, told outrageous lies to make the girls laugh and brought to the bare and looted house the first lightness, the first hint of festivity it had known in many a day.

“It’s almost like the old days when we had house parties, isn’t it?” whispered Suellen happily to Scarlett.

Suellen was raised to the skies by having a beau of her own in the house again and she could hardly take her eyes off Frank Kennedy.

Scarlett was surprised to see that Suellen could be almost pretty, despite the thinness which had persisted since her illness.

Her cheeks were flushed and there was a soft luminous look in her eyes.

“She really must care about him,” thought Scarlett in contempt.

“And I guess she’d be almost human if she ever had a husband of her own, even if her husband was old fuss-budget Frank.”

Carreen had brightened a little too, and some of the sleepwalking look left her eyes that night.

She had found that one of the men had known Brent Tarleton and had been with him the day he was killed, and she promised herself a long private talk with him after supper.

At supper Melanie surprised them all by forcing herself out of her timidity and being almost vivacious.

She laughed and joked and almost but not quite coquetted with a one-eyed soldier who gladly repaid her efforts with extravagant gallantries.

Scarlett knew the effort this involved both mentally and physically, for Melanie suffered torments of shyness in the presence of anything male.

Moreover she was far from well.

She insisted she was strong and did more work even than Dilcey but Scarlett knew she was sick.

When she lifted things her face went white and she had a way of sitting down suddenly after exertions, as if her legs would no longer support her.

But tonight, she, like Suellen and Carreen, was doing everything possible to make the soldiers enjoy their Christmas Eve.

Scarlett alone took no pleasure in the guests.

The troop had added their ration of parched corn and side meat to the supper of dried peas, stewed dried apples and peanuts which Mammy set before them and they declared it was the best meal they had had in months.

Scarlett watched them eat and she was uneasy.

She not only begrudged them every mouthful they ate but she was on tenterhooks lest they discover somehow that Pork had slaughtered one of the shoats the day before.

It now hung in the pantry and she had grimly promised her household that she would scratch out the eyes of anyone who mentioned the shoat to their guests or the presence of the dead pig’s sisters and brothers, safe in their pen in the swamp.

These hungry men could devour the whole shoat at one meal and, if they knew of the live hogs, they could commandeer them for the army.

She was alarmed, too, for the cow and the horse and wished they were hidden in the swamp, instead of tied in the woods at the bottom of the pasture.

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If the commissary took her stock, Tara could not possibly live through the winter.

There would be no way of replacing them.

As to what the army would eat, she did not care.

Let the army feed the army—if it could.

It was hard enough for her to feed her own.

The men added as dessert some “ramrod rolls” from their knapsacks, and this was the first time Scarlett had ever seen this Confederate article of diet about which there were almost as many jokes as about lice.

They were charred spirals of what appeared to be wood.

The men dared her to take a bite and, when she did, she discovered that beneath the smoke-blackened surface was unsalted corn bread.

The soldiers mixed their ration of corn meal with water, and salt too when they could get it, wrapped the thick paste about their ramrods and roasted the mess over camp fires.

It was as hard as rock candy and as tasteless as sawdust and after one bite Scarlett hastily handed it back amid roars of laughter.

She met Melanie’s eyes and the same thought was plain in both faces….

“How can they go on fighting if they have only this stuff to eat?”

The meal was gay enough and even Gerald, presiding absently at the head of the table, managed to evoke from the back of his dim mind some of the manner of a host and an uncertain smile.

The men talked, the women smiled and flattered—but Scarlett turning suddenly to Frank Kennedy to ask him news of Miss Pittypat, caught an expression on his face which made her forget what she intended to say.

His eyes had left Suellen’s and were wandering about the room, to Gerald’s childlike puzzled eyes, to the floor, bare of rugs, to the mantelpiece denuded of its ornaments, the sagging springs and torn upholstery into which Yankee bayonets had ripped, the cracked mirror above the sideboard, the unfaded squares on the wall where pictures had hung before the looters came, the scant table service, the decently mended but old dresses of the girls, the flour sack which had been made into a kilt for Wade.

Frank was remembering the Tara he had known before the war and on his face was a hurt look, a look of tired impotent anger.

He loved Suellen, liked her sisters, respected Gerald and had a genuine fondness for the plantation.

Since Sherman had swept through Georgia, Frank had seen many appalling sights as he rode about the state trying to collect supplies, but nothing had gone to his heart as Tara did now.

He wanted to do something for the O’Haras, especially Suellen, and there was nothing he could do.

He was unconsciously wagging his whiskered head in pity and clicking his tongue against his teeth when Scarlett caught his eye.

He saw the flame of indignant pride in them and he dropped his gaze quickly to his plate in embarrassment.

The girls were hungry for news.

There had been no mail service since Atlanta fell, now four months past, and they were in complete ignorance as to where the Yankees were, how the Confederate Army was faring, what had happened to Atlanta and to old friends.

Frank, whose work took him all over the section, was as good as a newspaper, better even, for he was kin to or knew almost everyone from Macon north to Atlanta, and he could supply bits of interesting personal gossip which the papers always omitted.

To cover his embarrassment at being caught by Scarlett, he plunged hastily into a recital of news.

The Confederates, he told them, had retaken Atlanta after Sherman marched out, but it was a valueless prize as Sherman had burned it completely.

“But I thought Atlanta burned the night I left,” cried Scarlett, bewildered.

“I thought our boys burned it!”

“Oh, no, Miss Scarlett!” cried Frank, shocked.

“We’d never burn one of our own towns with our own folks in it!

What you saw burning was the warehouses and the supplies we didn’t want the Yankees to capture and the foundries and the ammunition.

But that was all.

When Sherman took the town the houses and stores were standing there as pretty as you please.

And he quartered his men in them.”

“But what happened to the people?

Did he—did he kill them?”

“He killed some—but not with bullets,” said the one-eyed soldier grimly.

“Soon’s he marched into Atlanta he told the mayor that all the people in town would have to march out, every living soul.

And there were plenty of old folks that couldn’t stand the trip and sick folks that ought not to have been moved either.

And he moved them out in the biggest rainstorm you ever saw, hundreds and hundreds of them, and dumped them in the woods near Rough and Ready and sent word to General Hood to come and get them.

And a plenty of the folks died of pneumonia and not being able to stand that sort of treatment.”

“Oh, but why did he do that?

They couldn’t have done him any harm,” cried Melanie.

“He said he wanted the town to rest his men and horses in,” said Frank.

“And he rested them there till the middle of November and then he lit out.

And he set fire to the whole town when he left and burned everything.”

“Oh, surely not everything!” cried the girls in dismay.

It was inconceivable that the bustling town they knew, so full of people, so crowded with soldiers, was gone.

All the lovely homes beneath shady trees, all the big stores and the fine hotels—surely they couldn’t be gone!

Melanie seemed ready to burst into tears, for she had been born there and knew no other home.

Scarlett’s heart sank because she had come to love the place second only to Tara.

“Well, almost everything,” Frank amended hastily, disturbed by the expressions on their faces.

He tried to look cheerful, for he did not believe in upsetting ladies.

Upset ladies always upset him and made him feel helpless.

He could not bring himself to tell them the worst.

Let them find out from some one else.

He could not tell them what the army saw when it marched back into Atlanta, the acres and acres of chimneys standing blackly above ashes, piles of half-burned rubbish and tumbled heaps of brick clogging the streets, old trees dying from fire, their charred limbs tumbling to the ground in the cold wind.

He remembered how the sight had turned him sick, remembered the bitter curses of the Confederates when they saw the remains of the town.

He hoped the ladies would never hear of the horrors of the looted cemetery, for they’d never get over that.

Charlie Hamilton and Melanie’s mother and father were buried there.

The sight of that cemetery still gave Frank nightmares.

Hoping to find jewelry buried with the dead, the Yankee soldiers had broken open vaults, dug up graves.

They had robbed the bodies, stripped from the coffins gold and silver name plates, silver trimmings and silver handles.

The skeletons and corpses, flung helter-skelter among their splintered caskets, lay exposed and so pitiful.

And Frank couldn’t tell them about the dogs and the cats.

Ladies set such a store by pets.

But the thousands of starving animals, left homeless when their masters had been so rudely evacuated, had shocked him almost as much as the cemetery, for Frank loved cats and dogs.

The animals had been frightened, cold, ravenous, wild as forest creatures, the strong attacking the weak, the weak waiting for the weaker to die so they could eat them.

And, above the ruined town, the buzzards splotched the wintry sky with graceful, sinister bodies.

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Frank cast about in his mind for some mitigating information that would make the ladies feel better.

“There’s some houses still standing,” he said, “houses that set on big lots away from other houses and didn’t catch fire.

And the churches and the Masonic hall are left.

And a few stores too.

But the business section and all along the railroad tracks and at Five Points—well, ladies, that part of town is flat on the ground.”

“Then,” cried Scarlett bitterly, “that warehouse Charlie left me, down on the tracks, it’s gone too?”

“If it was near the tracks, it’s gone, but—”

Suddenly he smiled.

Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

“Cheer up, ladies!

Your Aunt Pitty’s house is still standing.

It’s kind of damaged but there it is.”

“Oh, how did it escape?”

“Well, it’s made of brick and it’s got about the only slate roof in Atlanta and that kept the sparks from setting it afire, I guess.

And then it’s about the last house on the north end of town and the fire wasn’t so bad over that way.

Of course, the Yankees quartered there tore it up aplenty.

They even burned the baseboard and the mahogany stair rail for firewood, but shucks!

It’s in good shape.

When I saw Miss Pitty last week in Macon—”

“You saw her?

How is she?”

“Just fine.

Just fine.

When I told her her house was still standing, she made up her mind to come home right away.

That is—if the old darky, Peter, will let her come.

Lots of the Atlanta people have already come back, because they got nervous about Macon.

Sherman didn’t take Macon but everybody is afraid Wilson’s raiders will get there soon and he’s worse than Sherman.”

“But how silly of them to come back if there aren’t any houses!

Where do they live?”

“Miss Scarlett, they’re living in tents and shacks and log cabins and doubling up six and seven families in the few houses still standing.

And they’re trying to rebuild.

Now, Miss Scarlett, don’t say they are silly.

You know Atlanta folks as well as I do.

They are plumb set on that town, most as bad as Charlestonians are about Charleston, and it’ll take more than Yankees and a burning to keep them away.

Atlanta folks are—begging your pardon, Miss Melly—as stubborn as mules about Atlanta.

I don’t know why, for I always thought that town a mighty pushy, impudent sort of place.

But then, I’m a countryman born and I don’t like any town.

And let me tell you, the ones who are getting back first are the smart ones.

The ones who come back last won’t find a stick or stone or brick of their houses, because everybody’s out salvaging things all over town to rebuild their houses.

Just day before yesterday, I saw Mrs. Merriwether and Miss Maybelle and their old darky woman out collecting brick in a wheelbarrow.

And Mrs. Meade told me she was thinking about building a log cabin when the doctor comes back to help her.

She said she lived in a log cabin when she first came to Atlanta, when it was Marthasville, and it wouldn’t bother her none to do it again.

’Course, she was only joking but that shows you how they feel about it.”

“I think they’ve got a lot of spirit,” said Melanie proudly.

“Don’t you, Scarlett?”

Scarlett nodded, a grim pleasure and pride in her adopted town filling her.

As Frank said, it was a pushy, impudent place and that was why she liked it.

It wasn’t hidebound and stick-in-the-muddish like the older towns and it had a brash exuberance that matched her own.

“I’m like Atlanta,” she thought.

“It takes more than Yankees or a burning to keep me down.”

“If Aunt Pitty is going back to Atlanta, we’d better go back and stay with her, Scarlett,” said Melanie, interrupting her train of thought.

“She’ll die of fright alone.”

“Now, how can I leave here, Melly?” Scarlett asked crossly.

“If you are so anxious to go, go.

I won’t stop you.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, darling,” cried Melanie, flushing with distress.

“How thoughtless of me!

Of course, you can’t leave Tara and—and I guess Uncle Peter and Cookie can take care of Auntie.”

“There’s nothing to keep you from going,” Scarlett pointed out, shortly.

“You know I wouldn’t leave you,” answered Melanie.

“And I—I would be just frightened to death without you.”

“Suit yourself.

Besides, you wouldn’t catch me going back to Atlanta.

Just as soon as they get a few houses up, Sherman will come back and burn it again.”

“He won’t be back,” said Frank and, despite his efforts, his face drooped.

“He’s gone on through the state to the coast.

Savannah was captured this week and they say the Yankees are going on up into South Carolina.”

“Savannah taken!”

“Yes.

Why, ladies, Savannah couldn’t help but fall.

They didn’t have enough men to hold it, though they used every man they could get—every man who could drag one foot after another.

Do you know that when the Yankees were marching on Milledgeville, they called out all the cadets from the military academies, no matter how young they were, and even opened the state penitentiary to get fresh troops?

Yes, sir, they turned loose every convict who was willing to fight and promised him a pardon if he lived through the war.

It kind of gave me the creeps to see those little cadets in the ranks with thieves and cutthroats.”

“They turned loose the convicts on us!”

“Now, Miss Scarlett, don’t you get upset.

They’re a long way off from here, and furthermore they’re making good soldiers.

I guess being a thief don’t keep a man from being a good soldier, does it?”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Melanie softly.

“Well, I don’t,” said Scarlett flatly.

“There’s thieves enough running around the country anyway, what with the Yankees and—”

She caught herself in time but the men laughed.

“What with Yankees and our commissary department,” they finished and she flushed.

“But where’s General Hood’s army?” interposed Melanie hastily.

“Surely he could have held Savannah.”

“Why, Miss Melanie,” Frank was startled and reproachful, “General Hood hasn’t been down in that section at all.

He’s been fighting up in Tennessee, trying to draw the Yankees out of Georgia.”

“And didn’t his little scheme work well!” cried Scarlett sarcastically.

“He left the damn Yankees to go through us with nothing but schoolboys and convicts and Home Guards to protect us.”

“Daughter,” said Gerald rousing himself, “you are profane.

Your mother will be grieved.”

“They are damn Yankees!” cried Scarlett passionately.

“And I never expect to call them anything else.”

At the mention of Ellen everyone felt queer and conversation suddenly ceased.

Melanie again interposed.

“When you were in Macon did you see India and Honey Wilkes?

Did they—had they heard anything of Ashley?”

“Now, Miss Melly, you know if I’d had news of Ashley, I’d have ridden up here from Macon right away to tell you,” said Frank reproachfully.

“No, they didn’t have any news but—now, don’t you fret about Ashley, Miss Melly.

I know it’s been a long time since you heard from him, but you can’t expect to hear from a fellow when he’s in prison, can you?

And things aren’t as bad in Yankee prisons as they are in ours.

After all, the Yankees have plenty to eat and enough medicine and blankets.

They aren’t like we are—not having enough to feed ourselves, much less our prisoners.”

“Oh, the Yankees have got plenty,” cried Melanie, passionately bitter.

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“But they don’t give things to the prisoners.

You know they don’t, Mr. Kennedy.

You are just saying that to make me feel better.

You know that our boys freeze to death up there and starve too and die without doctors and medicine, simply because the Yankees hate us so much!

Oh, if we could just wipe every Yankee off the face of the earth!

Oh, I know that Ashley is—”

“Don’t say it!” cried Scarlett, her heart in her throat.

As long as no one said Ashley was dead, there persisted in her heart a faint hope that he lived, but she felt that if she heard the words pronounced, in that moment he would die.

“Now, Mrs. Wilkes, don’t you bother about your husband,” said the one-eyed man soothingly.

“I was captured after first Manassas and exchanged later and when I was in prison, they fed me off the fat of the land, fried chicken and hot biscuits—”

“I think you are a liar,” said Melanie with a faint smile and the first sign of spirit Scarlett had seen her display with a man.

“What do you think?”

“I think so too,” said the one-eyed man and slapped his leg with a laugh.

“If you’ll all come into the parlor, I’ll sing you some Christmas carols,” said Melanie, glad to change the subject.

“The piano was one thing the Yankees couldn’t carry away.

Is it terribly out of tune, Suellen?”

“Dreadfully,” answered Suellen, happily beckoning with a smile to Frank.

But as they all passed from the room, Frank hung back, tugging at Scarlett’s sleeve.

“May I speak to you alone?”

For an awful moment she feared he was going to ask about her livestock and she braced herself for a good lie.

When the room was cleared and they stood by the fire, all the false cheerfulness which had colored Frank’s face in front of the others passed and she saw that he looked like an old man.

His face was as dried and brown as the leaves that were blowing about the lawn of Tara and his ginger-colored whiskers were thin and scraggly and streaked with gray.

He clawed at them absently and cleared his throat in an annoying way before he spoke.

“I’m mighty sorry about your ma, Miss Scarlett.”

“Please don’t talk about it.”

“And your pa—Has he been this way since—?”

“Yes—he’s—he’s not himself, as you can see.”

“He sure set a store by her.”

“Oh, Mr. Kennedy, please don’t let’s talk—”

“I’m sorry, Miss Scarlett,” and he shuffled his feet nervously.

“The truth is I wanted to take up something with your pa and now I see it won’t do any good.”

“Perhaps I can help you, Mr. Kennedy.

You see—I’m the head of the house now.”

“Well, I,” began Frank and again clawed nervously at his beard.

“The truth is—Well, Miss Scarlett, I was aiming to ask him for Miss Suellen.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Scarlett in amused amazement, “that you haven’t yet asked Pa for Suellen?

And you’ve been courting her for years!”

He flushed and grinned embarrassedly and in general looked like a shy and sheepish boy.

“Well, I—I didn’t know if she’d have me.

I’m so much older than she is and—there were so many good-looking young bucks hanging around Tara—”

“Humph!” thought Scarlett, “they were hanging around me, not her!”

“And I don’t know yet if she’ll have me.

I’ve never asked her but she must know how I feel.

I—I thought I’d ask Mr. O’Hara’s permission and tell him the truth.

Miss Scarlett, I haven’t got a cent now.

I used to have a lot of money, if you’ll forgive me mentioning it, but right now all I own is my horse and the clothes I’ve got on.

You see, when I enlisted I sold most of my land and I put all my money in Confederate bonds and you know what they’re worth now.

Less than the paper they’re printed on.

And anyway, I haven’t got them now, because they burned up when the Yankees burned my sister’s house.

I know I’ve got gall asking for Miss Suellen now when I haven’t a cent but—well, it’s this way.

I got to thinking that we don’t know how things are going to turn out about this war.

It sure looks like the end of the world to me.

There’s nothing we can be sure of and—and I thought it would be a heap of comfort to me and maybe to her if we were engaged.

That would be something sure.

I wouldn’t ask to marry her till I could take care of her, Miss Scarlett, and I don’t know when that will be.

But if true love carries any weight with you, you can be certain Miss Suellen will be rich in that if nothing else.”

He spoke the last words with a simple dignity that touched Scarlett, even in her amusement.

It was beyond her comprehension that anyone could love Suellen.

Her sister seemed to her a monster of selfishness, of complaints and of what she could only describe as pure cussedness.

“Why, Mr. Kennedy,” she said kindly, “it’s quite all right.

I’m sure I can speak for Pa.

He always set a store by you and he always expected Suellen to marry you.”

“Did he now?” cried Frank, happiness in his face.

“Indeed yes,” answered Scarlett, concealing a grin as she remembered how frequently Gerald had rudely bellowed across the supper table to Suellen: “How now, Missy!

Hasn’t your ardent beau popped the question yet?

Shall I be asking him his intentions?”

“I shall ask her tonight,” he said, his face quivering, and he clutched her hand and shook it.

“You’re so kind, Miss Scarlett.”

“I’ll send her to you,” smiled Scarlett, starting for the parlor.

Melanie was beginning to play.

The piano was sadly out of tune but some of the chords were musical and Melanie was raising her voice to lead the others in “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!”

Scarlett paused.

It did not seem possible that war had swept over them twice, that they were living in a ravaged country, close to the border of starvation, when this old sweet Christmas hymn was being sung.

Abruptly she turned to Frank.

“What did you mean when you said it looked like the end of the world to you?”

“I’ll talk frankly,” he said slowly, “but I wouldn’t want you to be alarming the other ladies with what I say.

The war can’t go on much longer.

There aren’t any fresh men to fill the ranks and the desertions are running high—higher than the army likes to admit.

You see, the men can’t stand to be away from their families when they know they’re starving, so they go home to try to provide for them.

I can’t blame them but it weakens the army.

And the army can’t fight without food and there isn’t any food.

I know because, you see, getting food is my business.

I’ve been all up and down this section since we retook Atlanta and there isn’t enough to feed a jaybird.

It’s the same way for three hundred miles south to Savannah.

The folks are starving and the railroads are torn up and there aren’t any new rifles and the ammunition is giving out and there’s no leather at all for shoes….

So, you see, the end is almost here.”

But the fading hopes of the Confederacy weighed less heavily on Scarlett than his remark about the scarcity of food.

It had been her intention to send Pork out with the horse and wagon, the gold pieces and the United States money to scour the countryside for provisions and material for clothes.

But if what Frank said was true—

But Macon hadn’t fallen.

There must be food in Macon.

Just as soon as the commissary department was safely on its way, she’d start Pork for Macon and take the chance of having the precious horse picked up by the army.

She’d have to risk it.

“Well, let’s don’t talk about unpleasant things tonight, Mr. Kennedy,” she said.

“You go and sit in Mother’s little office and I’ll send Suellen to you so you can—well, so you’ll have a little privacy.”

Blushing, smiling, Frank slipped out of the room and Scarlett watched him go.

“What a pity he can’t marry her now,” she thought.

“That would be one less mouth to feed.”

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗𝐈𝐗.

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THE FOLLOWING APRIL GENERAL JOHNSTON, who had been given back the shattered remnants of his old command, surrendered them in North Carolina and the war was over.

But not until two weeks later did the news reach Tara.

There was too much to do at Tara for anyone to waste time traveling abroad and hearing gossip and, as the neighbors were just as busy as they, there was little visiting and news spread slowly.

Spring plowing was at its height and the cotton and garden seed Pork had brought from Macon were being put into the ground.

Pork had been almost worthless since the trip, so proud was he of returning safely with his wagonload of dress goods, seed, fowls, hams, side meat and meal.

Over and over, he told the story of his many narrow escapes, of the bypaths and country lanes he had taken on his return to Tara, the unfrequented roads, the old trails, the bridle paths.

He had been five weeks on the road, agonizing weeks for Scarlett.

But she did not upbraid him on his return, for she was happy that he had made the trip successfully and pleased that he brought back so much of the money she had given him.

She had a shrewd suspicion that the reason he had so much money left over was that he had not bought the fowls or most of the food.

Pork would have taken shame to himself had he spent her money when there were unguarded hen coops along the road and smokehouses handy.

Now that they had a little food, everyone at Tara was busy trying to restore some semblance of naturalness to life.

There was work for every pair of hands, too much work, never-ending work.

The withered stalks of last year’s cotton had to be removed to make way for this year’s seeds and the balky horse, unaccustomed to the plow, dragged unwillingly through the fields.

Weeds had to be pulled from the garden and the seeds planted, firewood had to be cut, a beginning had to be made toward replacing the pens and the miles and miles of fences so casually burned by the Yankees.

The snares Pork set for rabbits had to be visited twice a day and the fishlines in the river rebaited.

There were beds to be made and floors to be swept, food to be cooked and dishes washed, hogs and chickens to be fed and eggs gathered.

The cow had to be milked and pastured near the swamp and someone had to watch her all day for fear the Yankees or Frank Kennedy’s men would return and take her.

Even little Wade had his duties.

Every morning he went out importantly with a basket to pick up twigs and chips to start the fires with.

It was the Fontaine boys, the first of the County men home from the war, who brought the news of the surrender.

Alex, who still had boots, was walking and Tony, barefooted, was riding on the bare back of a mule.

Tony always managed to get the best of things in that family.

They were swarthier than ever from four years’ exposure to sun and storm, thinner, more wiry, and the wild black beards they brought back from the war made them seem like strangers.

On their way to Mimosa and eager for home, they only stopped a moment at Tara to kiss the girls and give them news of the surrender.

It was all over, they said, all finished, and they did not seem to care much or want to talk about it.

All they wanted to know was whether Mimosa had been burned.

On the way south from Atlanta, they had passed chimney after chimney where the homes of friends had stood and it seemed almost too much to hope that their own house had been spared.

They sighed with relief at the welcome news and laughed, slapping their thighs when Scarlett told them of Sally’s wild ride and how neatly she had cleared their hedge.

“She’s a spunky girl,” said Tony, “and it’s rotten luck for her, Joe getting killed.

You all got any chewing tobacco, Scarlett?”

“Nothing but rabbit tobacco.

Pa smokes it in a corn cob.”

“I haven’t fallen that low yet,” said Tony, “but I’ll probably come to it.”

“Is Dimity Munroe all right?” asked Alex, eagerly but a little embarrassed, and Scarlett recalled vaguely that he had been sweet on Sally’s younger sister.

“Oh, yes.

She’s living with her aunt over in Fayetteville now.

You know their house in Lovejoy was burned.

And the rest of her folks are in Macon.”

“What he means is—has Dimity married some brave colonel in the Home Guard?” jeered Tony, and Alex turned furious eyes upon him.

“Of course, she isn’t married,” said Scarlett, amused.

“Maybe it would be better if she had,” said Alex gloomily.

“How the hell—I beg your pardon, Scarlett.

But how can a man ask a girl to marry him when his darkies are all freed and his stock gone and he hasn’t got a cent in his pockets?”

“You know that wouldn’t bother Dimity,” said Scarlett.

She could afford to be loyal to Dimity and say nice things about her, for Alex Fontaine had never been one of her own beaux.

“Hell’s afire—Well, I beg your pardon again.

I’ll have to quit swearing or Grandma will sure tan my hide.

I’m not asking any girl to marry a pauper.

It mightn’t bother her but it would bother me.”

While Scarlett talked to the boys on the front porch, Melanie, Suellen and Carreen slipped silently into the house as soon as they heard the news of the surrender.

After the boys had gone, cutting across the back fields of Tara toward home, Scarlett went inside and heard the girls sobbing together on the sofa in Ellen’s little office.

It was all over, the bright beautiful dream they had loved and hoped for, the Cause which had taken their friends, lovers, husbands and beggared their families.

The Cause they had thought could never fall had fallen forever.

But for Scarlett, there were no tears.

In the first moment when she heard the news she thought: Thank God!

Now the cow won’t be stolen.

Now the horse is safe.

Now we can take the silver out of the well and everybody can have a knife and fork.

Now I won’t be afraid to drive round the country looking for something to eat.

What a relief!

Never again would she start in fear at the sound of hooves.

Never again would she wake in the dark nights, holding her breath to listen, wondering if it were reality or only a dream that she heard in the yard the rattle of bits, the stamping of hooves and the harsh crying of orders by the Yankees.

And, best of all, Tara was safe!

Now her worst nightmare would never come true.

Now she would never have to stand on the lawn and see smoke billowing from the beloved house and hear the roar of flames as the roof fell in.

Yes, the Cause was dead but war had always seemed foolish to her and peace was better.

She had never stood starry eyed when the Stars and Bars ran up a pole or felt cold chills when “Dixie” sounded.

She had not been sustained through privations, the sickening duties of nursing, the fears of the siege and the hunger of the last few months by the fanatic glow which made all these things endurable to others, if only the Cause prospered.

It was all over and done with and she was not going to cry about it.

All over!

The war which had seemed so endless, the war which, unbidden and unwanted, had cut her life in two, had made so clean a cleavage that it was difficult to remember those other care-free days.

She could look back, unmoved, at the pretty Scarlett with her fragile green morocco slippers and her flounces fragrant with lavender but she wondered if she could be that same girl.

Scarlett O’Hara, with the County at her feet, a hundred slaves to do her bidding, the wealth of Tara like a wall behind her and doting parents anxious to grant any desire of her heart.

Spoiled, careless Scarlett who had never known an ungratified wish except where Ashley was concerned.

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Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers had slipped away and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

As she stood in the hall, listening to the girls sobbing, her mind was busy.

“We’ll plant more cotton, lots more.

I’ll send Pork to Macon tomorrow to buy more seed.

Now the Yankees won’t burn it and our troops won’t need it.

Good Lord!

Cotton ought to go sky high this fall!”

She went into the little office and, disregarding the weeping girls on the sofa, seated herself at the secretary and picked up a quill to balance the cost of more cotton seed against her remaining cash.

“The war is over,” she thought and suddenly she dropped the quill as a wild happiness flooded her.

The war was over and Ashley—if Ashley was alive he’d be coming home!

She wondered if Melanie, in the midst of mourning for the lost Cause, had thought of this.

“Soon we’ll get a letter—no, not a letter.

We can’t get letters.

But soon—oh, somehow he’ll let us know!”

But the days passed into weeks and there was no news from Ashley.

The mail service in the South was uncertain and in the rural districts there was none at all.

Occasionally a passing traveler from Atlanta brought a note from Aunt Pitty tearfully begging the girls to come back.

But never news of Ashley.

********

After the surrender, an ever-present feud over the horse smoldered between Scarlett and Suellen.

Now that there was no danger of Yankees, Suellen wanted to go calling on the neighbors.

Lonely and missing the happy sociability of the old days, Suellen longed to visit friends, if for no other reason than to assure herself that the rest of the County was as bad off as Tara.

But Scarlett was adamant.

The horse was for work, to drag logs from the woods, to plow and for Pork to ride in search of food.

On Sundays he had earned the right to graze in the pasture and rest.

If Suellen wanted to go visiting she could go afoot.

Before the last year Suellen had never walked a hundred yards in her life and this prospect was anything but pleasing.

So she stayed at home and nagged and cried and said, once too often: “Oh, if only Mother was here!”

At that, Scarlett gave her the long-promised slap, hitting her so hard it knocked her screaming to the bed and caused great consternation throughout the house.

Thereafter, Suellen whined the less, at least in Scarlett’s presence.

Scarlett spoke truthfully when she said she wanted the horse to rest but that was only half of the truth.

The other half was that she had paid one round of calls on the County in the first month after the surrender and the sight of old friends and old plantations had shaken her courage more than she liked to admit.

The Fontaines had fared best of any, thanks to Sally’s hard ride, but it was flourishing only by comparison with the desperate situation of the other neighbors.

Grandma Fontaine had never completely recovered from the heart attack she had the day she led the others in beating out the flames and saving the house.

Old Dr. Fontaine was convalescing slowly from an amputated arm.

Alex and Tony were turning awkward hands to plows and hoe handles.

They leaned over the fence rail to shake hands with Scarlett when she called and they laughed at her rickety wagon, their black eyes bitter, for they were laughing at themselves as well as her.

She asked to buy seed corn from them and they promised it and fell to discussing farm problems.

They had twelve chickens, two cows, five hogs and the mule they brought home from the war.

One of the hogs had just died and they were worried about losing the others.

At hearing such serious words about hogs from these ex-dandies who had never given life a more serious thought than which cravat was most fashionable, Scarlett laughed and this time her laugh was bitter too.

They had all made her welcome at Mimosa and had insisted on giving, not selling, her the seed corn.

The quick Fontaine tempers flared when she put a greenback on the table and they flatly refused payment.

Scarlett took the corn and privately slipped a dollar bill into Sally’s hand.

Sally looked like a different person from the girl who had greeted her eight months before when Scarlett first came home to Tara.

Then she had been pale and sad but there had been a buoyancy about her.

Now that buoyancy had gone, as if the surrender had taken all hope from her.

“Scarlett,” she whispered as she clutched the bill, “what was the good of it all?

Why did we ever fight?

Oh, my poor Joe!

Oh, my poor baby!”

“I don’t know why we fought and I don’t care,” said Scarlett.

“And I’m not interested.

I never was interested.

War is a man’s business, not a woman’s.

All I’m interested in now is a good cotton crop.

Now take this dollar and buy little Joe a dress.

God knows, he needs it.

I’m not going to rob you of your corn, for all Alex and Tony’s politeness.”

The boys followed her to the wagon and assisted her in, courtly for all their rags, gay with the volatile Fontaine gaiety, but with the picture of their destitution in her eyes, she shivered as she drove away from Mimosa.

She was so tired of poverty and pinching.

What a pleasure it would be to know people who were rich and not worried as to where the next meal was coming from!

Cade Calvert was at home at Pine Bloom and, as Scarlett came up the steps of the old house in which she had danced so often in happier days, she saw that death was in his face.

He was emaciated and he coughed as he lay in an easy chair in the sunshine with a shawl across his knees, but his face lit up when he saw her.

Just a little cold which had settled in his chest, he said, trying to rise to greet her.

Got it from sleeping so much in the rain.

But it would be gone soon and then he’d lend a hand in the work.

Cathleen Calvert, who came out of the house at the sound of voices, met Scarlett’s eyes above her brother’s head and in them Scarlett read knowledge and bitter despair.

Cade might not know but Cathleen knew.

Pine Bloom looked straggly and overgrown with weeds, seedling pines were beginning to show in the fields and the house was sagging and untidy.

Cathleen was thin and taut.

The two of them, with their Yankee stepmother, their four little half-sisters, and Hilton, the Yankee overseer, remained in the silent, oddly echoing house.

Scarlett had never liked Hilton any more than she liked their own overseer Jonas Wilkerson, and she liked him even less now, as he sauntered forward and greeted her like an equal.

Formerly he had the same combination of servility and impertinence which Wilkerson possessed but now, with Mr. Calvert and Raiford dead in the war and Cade sick, he had dropped all servility.

The second Mrs. Calvert had never known how to compel respect from negro servants and it was not to be expected that she could get it from a white man.

“Mr. Hilton has been so kind about staying with us through these difficult times,” said Mrs. Calvert nervously, casting quick glances at her silent stepdaughter.

“Very kind.

I suppose you heard how he saved our house twice when Sherman was here.

I’m sure I don’t know how we would have managed without him, with no money and Cade—”

A flush went over Cade’s white face and Cathleen’s long lashes veiled her eyes as her mouth hardened.

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Scarlett knew their souls were writhing in helpless rage at being under obligations to their Yankee overseer.

Mrs. Calvert seemed ready to weep.

She had somehow made a blunder.

She was always blundering.

She just couldn’t understand Southerners, for all that she had lived in Georgia twenty years.

She never knew what not to say to her stepchildren and, no matter what she said or did, they were always so exquisitely polite to her.

Silently she vowed she would go North to her own people, taking her children with her, and leave these puzzling stiff-necked strangers.

After these visits, Scarlett had no desire to see the Tarletons.

Now that the four boys were gone, the house burned and the family cramped in the overseer’s cottage, she could not bring herself to go.

But Suellen and Carreen begged and Melanie said it would be unneighborly not to call and welcome Mr. Tarleton back from the war, so one Sunday they went.

This was the worst of all.

As they drove up by the ruins of the house, they saw Beatrice Tarleton dressed in a worn riding habit, a crop under her arm, sitting on the top rail of the fence about the paddock, staring moodily at nothing.

Beside her perched the bow-legged little negro who had trained her horses and he looked as glum as his mistress.

The paddock, once full of frolicking colts and placid brood mares, was empty now except for one mule, the mule Mr. Tarleton had ridden home from the surrender.

“I swear I don’t know what to do with myself now that my darlings are gone,” said Mrs. Tarleton, climbing down from the fence.

A stranger might have thought she spoke of her four dead sons, but the girls from Tara knew her horses were in her mind.

“All my beautiful horses dead.

And oh, my poor Nellie!

If I just had Nellie!

And nothing but a damned mule on the place.

A damned mule,” she repeated, looking indignantly at the scrawny beast.

“It’s an insult to the memory of my blooded darlings to have a mule in their paddock.

Mules are misbegotten, unnatural critters and it ought to be illegal to breed them.”

Jim Tarleton, completely disguised by a bushy beard, came out of the overseer’s house to welcome and kiss the girls and his four red-haired daughters in mended dresses streamed out behind him, tripping over the dozen black and tan hounds which ran barking to the door at the sound of strange voices.

There was an air of studied and determined cheerfulness about the whole family which brought a colder chill to Scarlett’s bones than the bitterness of Mimosa or the deathly brooding of Pine Bloom.

The Tarletons insisted that the girls stay for dinner, saying they had so few guests these days and wanted to hear all the news.

Scarlett did not want to linger, for the atmosphere oppressed her, but Melanie and her two sisters were anxious for a longer visit, so the four stayed for dinner and ate sparingly of the side meat and dried peas which were served them.

There was laughter about the skimpy fare and the Tarleton girls giggled as they told of makeshifts for clothes, as if they were telling the most amusing of jokes.

Melanie met them halfway, surprising Scarlett with her unexpected vivacity as she told of trials at Tara, making light of hardships.

Scarlett could hardly speak at all.

The room seemed so empty without the four great Tarleton boys, lounging and smoking and teasing.

And if it seemed empty to her, what must it seem to the Tarletons who were offering a smiling front to their neighbors?

Carreen had said little during the meal but when it was over she slipped over to Mrs. Tarleton’s side and whispered something.

Mrs. Tarleton’s face changed and the brittle smile left her lips as she put her arm around Carreen’s slender waist.

They left the room, and Scarlett, who felt she could not endure the house another minute, followed them.

They went down the path through the garden and Scarlett saw they were going toward the burying ground.

Well, she couldn’t go back to the house now.

It would seem too rude.

But what on earth did Carreen mean dragging Mrs. Tarleton out to the boys’ graves when Beatrice was trying so hard to be brave?

There were two new marble markers in the brick-inclosed lot under the funereal cedars—so new that no rain had splashed them with red dust.

“We got them last week,” said Mrs. Tarleton proudly.

“Mr. Tarleton went to Macon and brought them home in the wagon.”

Tombstones!

And what they must have cost!

Suddenly Scarlett did not feel as sorry for the Tarletons as she had at first.

Anybody who would waste precious money on tombstones when food was so dear, so almost unattainable, didn’t deserve sympathy.

And there were several lines carved on each of the stones.

The more carving, the more money.

The whole family must be crazy!

And it had cost money, too, to bring the three boys’ bodies home.

They had never found Boyd or any trace of him.

Between the graves of Brent and Stuart was a stone which read: “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”

On the other stone were the names of Boyd and Tom with something in Latin which began “Dulce et—” but it meant nothing to Scarlett who had managed to evade Latin at the Fayetteville Academy.

All that money for tombstones!

Why, they were fools!

She felt as indignant as if her own money had been squandered.

Carreen’s eyes were shining oddly.

“I think it’s lovely,” she whispered pointing to the first stone.

Carreen would think it lovely.

Anything sentimental stirred her.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Tarleton and her voice was soft, “we thought it very fitting—they died almost at the same time, Stuart first and then Brent who caught up the flag he dropped.”

As the girls drove back to Tara, Scarlett was silent for a while, thinking of what she had seen in the various homes, remembering against her will the County in its glory, with visitors at all the big houses and money plentiful, negroes crowding the quarters and the well-tended fields glorious with cotton.

“In another year, there’ll be little pines all over these fields,” she thought and looking toward the encircling forest she shuddered.

“Without the darkies, it will be all we can do to keep body and soul together.

Nobody can run a big plantation without the darkies, and lots of the fields won’t be cultivated at all and the woods will take over the fields again.

Nobody can plant much cotton, and what will we do then?

What’ll become of country folks?

Town folks can manage somehow.

They’ve always managed.

But we country folks will go back a hundred years like the pioneers who had little cabins and just scratched a few acres—and barely existed.

“No—” she thought grimly, “Tara isn’t going to be like that.

Not even if I have to plow myself.

This whole section, this whole state can go back to woods if it wants to, but I won’t let Tara go.

And I don’t intend to waste my money on tombstones or my time crying about the war.

We can make out somehow.

I know we could make out somehow if the men weren’t all dead.

Losing the darkies isn’t the worst part about this.

It’s the loss of the men, the young men.”

She thought again of the four Tarletons and Joe Fontaine, of Raiford Calvert and the Munroe brothers and all the boys from Fayetteville and Jonesboro whose names she had read on the casualty lists.

“If there were just enough men left, we could manage somehow but—”

Another thought struck her—suppose she wanted to marry again.

Of course, she didn’t want to marry again.

Once was certainly enough.

Besides, the only man she’d ever wanted was Ashley and he was married if he was still living.

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But suppose she should want to marry.

Who would there be to marry her?

The thought was appalling.

“Melly,” she said, “what’s going to happen to Southern girls?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say.

What’s going to happen to them?

There’s no one to marry them.

Why, Melly, with all the boys dead, there’ll be thousands of girls all over the South who’ll die old maids.”

“And never have any children,” added Melanie, to whom this was the most important thing.

Evidently the thought was not new to Suellen who sat in the back of the wagon, for she suddenly began to cry.

She had not heard from Frank Kennedy since Christmas.

She did not know if the lack of mail service was the cause, or if he had merely trifled with her affections and then forgotten her.

Or maybe he had been killed in the last days of the war!

The latter would have been infinitely preferable to his forgetting her, for at least there was some dignity about a dead love, such as Carreen and India Wilkes had, but none about a deserted fiancée.

“Oh, in the name of God, hush!” said Scarlett.

“Oh, you can talk,” sobbed Suellen, “because you’ve been married and had a baby and everybody knows some man wanted you.

But look at me!

And you’ve got to be mean and throw it up to me that I’m an old maid when I can’t help myself.

I think you’re hateful.”

“Oh, hush!

You know how I hate people who bawl all the time.

You know perfectly well old Ginger Whiskers isn’t dead and that he’ll come back and marry you.

He hasn’t any better sense.

But personally, I’d rather be an old maid than marry him.”

There was silence from the back of the wagon for a while and Carreen comforted her sister with absent-minded pats, for her mind was a long way off, riding paths three years old with Brent Tarleton beside her.

There was a glow, an exaltation in her eyes.

“Ah,” said Melanie sadly, “what will the South be like without all our fine boys?

What would the South have been if they had lived?

We could use their courage and their energy and their brains.

Scarlett, all of us with little boys must raise them to take the places of the men who are gone, to be brave men like them.”

“There will never again be men like them,” said Carreen softly.

“No one can take their places.”

They drove home the rest of the way in silence.

********

One day not long after this, Cathleen Calvert rode up to Tara at sunset.

Her sidesaddle was strapped on as sorry a mule as Scarlett had ever seen, a flop-eared lame brute, and Cathleen was almost as sorry looking as the animal she rode.

Her dress was of faded gingham of the type once worn only by house servants, and her sunbonnet was secured under her chin by a piece of twine.

She rode up to the front porch but did not dismount, and Scarlett and Melanie, who had been watching the sunset, went down the steps to meet her.

Cathleen was as white as Cade had been the day Scarlett called, white and hard and brittle, as if her face would shatter if she spoke.

But her back was erect and her head was high as she nodded to them.

Scarlett suddenly remembered the day of the Wilkes barbecue when she and Cathleen had whispered together about Rhett Butler.

How pretty and fresh Cathleen had been that day in a swirl of blue organdie with fragrant roses at her sash and little black velvet slippers laced about her small ankles.

And now there was not a trace of that girl in the stiff figure sitting on the mule.

“I won’t get down, thank you,” she said.

“I just came to tell you that I’m going to be married.”

“What!”

“Who to?”

“Cathy, how grand!”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” said Cathleen quietly and there was something in her voice which took the eager smiles from their faces.

“I came to tell you that I’m going to be married tomorrow, in Jonesboro—and I’m not inviting you all to come.”

They digested this in silence, looking up at her, puzzled.

Then Melanie spoke.

“Is it someone we know, dear?”

“Yes,” said Cathleen, shortly.

“It’s Mr. Hilton.”

“Mr. Hilton?”

“Yes, Mr. Hilton, our overseer.”

Scarlett could not even find voice to say “Oh!” but Cathleen, peering down suddenly at Melanie, said in a low savage voice: “If you cry, Melly, I can’t stand it.

I shall die!”

Melanie said nothing but patted the foot in its awkward home-made shoe which hung from the stirrup.

Her head was low.

“And don’t pat me!

I can’t stand that either.”

Melanie dropped her hand but still did not look up.

“Well, I must go.

I only came to tell you.”

The white brittle mask was back again and she picked up the reins.

“How is Cade?” asked Scarlett, utterly at a loss but fumbling for some words to break the awkward silence.

“He is dying,” said Cathleen shortly.

There seemed to be no feeling in her voice.

“And he is going to die in some comfort and peace if I can manage it, without worry about who will take care of me when he’s gone.

You see, my stepmother and the children are going North for good, tomorrow.

Well, I must be going.”

Melanie looked up and met Cathleen’s hard eyes.

There were bright tears on Melanie’s lashes and understanding in her eyes, and before them, Cathleen’s lips curved into the crooked smile of a brave child who tries not to cry.

It was all very bewildering to Scarlett who was still trying to grasp the idea that Cathleen Calvert was going to marry an overseer—Cathleen, daughter of a rich planter, Cathleen who, next to Scarlett, had had more beaux than any girl in the County.

Cathleen bent down and Melanie tiptoed.

They kissed.

Then Cathleen flapped the bridle reins sharply and the old mule moved off.

Melanie looked after her, the tears streaming down her face.

Scarlett stared, still dazed.

“Melly, is she crazy?

You know she can’t be in love with him.”

“In love?

Oh, Scarlett, don’t even suggest such a horrid thing!

Oh, poor Cathleen!

Poor Cade!”

“Fiddle-dee-dee!” cried Scarlett, beginning to be irritated.

It was annoying that Melanie always seemed to grasp more of situations than she herself did.

Cathleen’s plight seemed to her more startling than catastrophic.

Of course it was no pleasant thought, marrying Yankee white trash, but after all a girl couldn’t live alone on a plantation; she had to have a husband to help her run it.

“Melly, it’s like I said the other day.

There isn’t anybody for girls to marry and they’ve got to marry someone.”

“Oh, they don’t have to marry!

There’s nothing shameful in being a spinster.

Look at Aunt Pitty.

Oh, I’d rather see Cathleen dead!

I know Cade would rather see her dead.

It’s the end of the Calverts.

Just think what her—what their children will be.

Oh, Scarlett, have Pork saddle the horse quickly and you ride after her and tell her to come live with us!”

“Good Lord!” cried Scarlett, shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which Melanie was offering Tara.

Scarlett certainly had no intention of feeding another mouth.

She started to say this but something in Melanie’s stricken face halted the words.

“She wouldn’t come, Melly,” she amended.

“You know she wouldn’t.

She’s so proud and she’d think it was charity.”

“That’s true, that’s true!” said Melanie distractedly, watching the small cloud of red dust disappear down the road.

“You’ve been with me for months,” thought Scarlett grimly, looking at her sister-in-law, “and it’s never occurred to you that it’s charity you’re living on.

And I guess it never will.

You’re one of those people the war didn’t change and you go right on thinking and acting just like nothing had happened—like we were still rich as Croesus and had more food than we knew what to do with and guests didn’t matter.

I guess I’ve got you on my neck for the rest of my life.

But I won’t have Cathleen too.”

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗𝐗.

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IN THAT WARM SUMMER AFTER PEACE CAME, Tara suddenly lost its isolation.

And for months thereafter a stream of scarecrows, bearded, ragged, footsore and always hungry, toiled up the red hill to Tara and came to rest on the shady front steps, wanting food and a night’s lodging.

They were Confederate soldiers walking home.

The railroad had carried the remains of Johnston’s army from North Carolina to Atlanta and dumped them there, and from Atlanta they began their pilgrimages afoot.

When the wave of Johnston’s men had passed, the weary veterans from the Army of Virginia arrived and then men from the Western troops, beating their way south toward homes which might not exist and families which might be scattered or dead.

Most of them were walking, a few fortunate ones rode bony horses and mules which the terms of the surrender had permitted them to keep, gaunt animals which even an untrained eye could tell would never reach far-away Florida and south Georgia.

Going home!

Going home!

That was the only thought in the soldiers’ minds.

Some were sad and silent, others gay and contemptuous of hardships, but the thought that it was all over and they were going home was the one thing that sustained them.

Few of them were bitter.

They left bitterness to their women and their old people.

They had fought a good fight, had been licked and were willing to settle down peaceably to plowing beneath the flag they had fought.

Going home!

Going home!

They could talk of nothing else, neither battles nor wounds, nor imprisonment nor the future.

Later, they would refight battles and tell children and grandchildren of pranks and forays and charges, of hunger, forced marches and wounds, but not now.

Some of them lacked an arm or a leg or an eye, many had scars which would ache in rainy weather if they lived for seventy years but these seemed small matters now.

Later it would be different.

Old and young, talkative and taciturn, rich planter and sallow Cracker, they all had two things in common, lice and dysentery.

The Confederate soldier was so accustomed to his verminous state he did not give it a thought and scratched unconcernedly even in the presence of ladies.

As for dysentery—the “bloody flux” as the ladies delicately called it—it seemed to have spared no one from private to general.

Four years of half-starvation, four years of rations which were coarse or green or half-putrefied, had done its work with them and every soldier who stopped at Tara was either just recovering or was actively suffering from it.

“Dey ain’ a soun’ set of bowels in de whole Confedrut ahmy,” observed Mammy darkly as she sweated over the fire, brewing a bitter concoction of blackberry roots which had been Ellen’s sovereign remedy for such afflictions.

“It’s mah notion dat ’twarn’t de Yankees whut beat our gempmum.

’Twuz dey own innards.

Kain no gempmum fight wid his bowels tuhnin’ ter water.”

One and all, Mammy dosed them, never waiting to ask foolish questions about the state of their organs and, one and all, they drank her doses meekly and with wry faces, remembering perhaps, other stern black faces in far-off places and other inexorable black hands holding medicine spoons.

In the matter of “comp’ny” Mammy was equally adamant.

No lice-ridden soldier should come into Tara.

She marched them behind a clump of thick bushes, relieved them of their uniforms, gave them a basin of water and strong lye soap to wash with and provided them with quilts and blankets to cover their nakedness, while she boiled their clothing in her huge wash pot.

It was useless for the girls to argue hotly that such conduct humiliated the soldiers.

Mammy replied that the girls would be a sight more humiliated if they found lice upon themselves.

When the soldiers began arriving almost daily, Mammy protested against their being allowed to use the bedrooms.

Always she feared lest some louse had escaped her.

Rather than argue the matter, Scarlett turned the parlor with its deep velvet rug into a dormitory.

Mammy cried out equally loudly at the sacrilege of soldiers being permitted to sleep on Miss Ellen’s rug but Scarlett was firm.

They had to sleep somewhere.

And, in the months after the surrender, the deep soft nap began to show signs of wear and finally the heavy warp and woof showed through in spots where heels had worn it and spurs dug carelessly.

Of each soldier, they asked eagerly of Ashley.

Suellen, bridling, always asked news of Mr. Kennedy.

But none of the soldiers had ever heard of them nor were they inclined to talk about the missing.

It was enough that they themselves were alive, and they did not care to think of the thousands in unmarked graves who would never come home.

The family tried to bolster Melanie’s courage after each of these disappointments.

Of course, Ashley hadn’t died in prison.

Some Yankee chaplain would have written if this were true.

Of course, he was coming home but his prison was so far away.

Why, goodness, it took days riding on a train to make the trip and if Ashley was walking, like these men…

Why hadn’t he written?

Well, darling, you know what the mails are now—so uncertain and slipshod even where mail routes are re-established.

But suppose—suppose he had died on the way home.

Now, Melanie, some Yankee woman would have surely written us about it!…

Yankee women!

Bah!…

Melly, there are some nice Yankee women.

Oh, yes, there are!

God couldn’t make a whole nation without having some nice women in it!

Scarlett, you remember we did meet a nice Yankee woman at Saratoga that time—Scarlett, tell Melly about her!

“Nice, my foot!” replied Scarlett.

“She asked me how many bloodhounds we kept to chase our darkies with!

I agree with Melly.

I never saw a nice Yankee, male or female.

But don’t cry, Melly!

Ashley’ll come home.

It’s a long walk and maybe—maybe he hasn’t got any boots.”

Then at the thought of Ashley barefooted, Scarlett could have cried.

Let other soldiers limp by in rags with their feet tied up in sacks and strips of carpet, but not Ashley.

He should come home on a prancing horse, dressed in fine clothes and shining boots, a plume in his hat.

It was the final degradation for her to think of Ashley reduced to the state of these other soldiers.

One afternoon in June when everyone at Tara was assembled on the back porch eagerly watching Pork cut the first half-ripe watermelon of the season, they heard hooves on the gravel of the front drive.

Prissy started languidly toward the front door, while those left behind argued hotly as to whether they should hide the melon or keep it for supper, should the caller at the door prove to be a soldier.

Melly and Carreen whispered that the soldier guest should have a share and Scarlett, backed by Suellen and Mammy, hissed to Pork to hide it quickly.

“Don’t be a goose, girls!

There’s not enough for us as it is and if there are two or three famished soldiers out there, none of us will even get a taste,” said Scarlett.

While Pork stood with the little melon clutched to him, uncertain as to the final decision, they heard Prissy cry out.

“Gawdlmighty!

Miss Scarlett!

Miss Melly!

Come quick!”

“Who is it?” cried Scarlett, leaping up from the steps and racing through the hall with Melly at her shoulder and the others streaming after her.

Ashley!

she thought.

Oh, perhaps—

“It’s Uncle Peter!

Miss Pittypat’s Uncle Peter!”

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They all ran out to the front porch and saw the tall grizzled old despot of Aunt Pitty’s house climbing down from a rat-tailed nag on which a section of quilting had been strapped.

On his wide black face, accustomed dignity strove with delight at seeing old friends, with the result that his brow was furrowed in a frown but his mouth was hanging open like a happy toothless old hound’s.

Everyone ran down the steps to greet him, black and white shaking his hand and asking questions, but Melly’s voice rose above them all.

“Auntie isn’t sick, is she?”

“No’m.

She’s po’ly, thank God,” answered Peter, fastening a severe look first on Melly and then on Scarlett, so that they suddenly felt guilty but could think of no reason why.

“She’s po’ly but she is plum outdone wid you young Misses, an’ ef it come right down to it, Ah is too!”

“Why, Uncle Peter!

What on earth—”

“Ya’ll nee’n try ter ’scuse yo’seffs.

Ain’ Miss Pitty writ you an’ writ you ter come home?

Ain’ Ah seed her write an’ seed her a-cryin’ w’en y’all writ her back dat you got too much ter do on disyere ole farm ter come home?”

“But, Uncle Peter—”

“Huccome you leave Miss Pitty by herseff lak dis w’en she so scary lak?

You knows well’s Ah do Miss Pitty ain’ never live by herseff an’ she been shakin’ in her lil shoes ever since she come back frum Macon.

She say fer me ter tell y’all plain as Ah knows how dat she jes’ kain unnerstan’ y’all desertin’ her in her hour of need.”

“Now, hesh!” said Mammy tartly, for it sat ill upon her to hear Tara referred to as an “ole farm.”

Trust an ignorant city-bred darky not to know the difference between a farm and a plantation.

“Ain’ us got no hours of need?

Ain’ us needin’ Miss Scarlett an’ Miss Melly right hyah an’ needin’ dem bad?

Huccome Miss Pitty doan ast her brudder fer ’sistance, does she need any?”

Uncle Peter gave her a withering look.

“Us ain’ had nuthin’ ter do wid Mist’ Henry fer y’ars, an’ us is too ole ter start now.”

He turned back to the girls, who were trying to suppress their smiles.

“You young Misses ought ter tek shame, leavin’ po’ Miss Pitty ’lone, wid half her frens daid an’ de other half in Macom, an’ ’Lanta full of Yankee sojers an’ trashy free issue niggers.”

The two girls had borne the castigation with straight faces as long as they could, but the thought of Aunt Pitty sending Peter to scold them and bring them back bodily to Atlanta was too much for their control.

They burst into laughter and hung on each other’s shoulders for support.

Naturally, Pork and Dilcey and Mammy gave vent to loud guffaws at hearing the detractor of their beloved Tara set at naught.

Suellen and Carreen giggled and even Gerald’s face wore a vague smile.

Everyone laughed except Peter, who shifted from one large splayed foot to the other in mounting indignation.

“Whut’s wrong wid you, nigger?” inquired Mammy with a grin.

“Is you gittin’ too ole ter perteck yo’ own Missus?”

Peter was outraged.

“Too ole!

Me too ole?

No, Ma’m!

Ah kin perteck Miss Pitty lak Ah allus done.

Ain’ Ah perteck her down ter Macom when us refugeed?

Ain’ Ah perteck her w’en de Yankees come ter Macom an’ she so sceered she faintin’ all de time?

An’ ain’ Ah ’quire disyere nag ter bring her back ter ’Lanta an’ perteck her an’ her pa’s silver all de way?”

Peter drew himself to his full height as he vindicated himself.

“Ah ain’ talkin’ about perteckin’.

Ah’s talkin’ ’bout how it look.”

“How who look?”

“Ah’m talkin’ ’bout how it look ter folks, seein’ Miss Pitty livin’ ’lone.

Folks talks scan’lous ’bout maiden ladies dat lives by deyseff,” continued Peter, and it was obvious to his listeners that Pittypat, in his mind, was still a plump and charming miss of sixteen who must be sheltered against evil tongues.

“An’ Ah ain’ figgerin’ on havin’ folks criticize her.

No, Ma’m….

An’ Ah ain’ figgerin’ on her takin’ in no bo’ders, jes’ for comp’ny needer.

Ah done tole her dat.

‘Not w’ile you got yo’ flesh an’ blood dat belongs wid you,’ Ah says.

An’ now her flesh an’ blood denyin’ her.

Miss Pitty ain’ nuthin’ but a chile an’—”

At this, Scarlett and Melly whooped louder and sank down to the steps.

Finally Melly wiped tears of mirth from her eyes.

“Poor Uncle Peter!

I’m sorry I laughed.

Really and truly.

There!

Do forgive me.

Miss Scarlett and I just can’t come home now.

Maybe I’ll come in September after the cotton is picked.

Did Auntie send you all the way down here just to bring us back on that bag of bones?”

At this question, Peter’s jaw suddenly dropped and guilt and consternation swept over his wrinkled black face.

His protruding underlip retreated to normal as swiftly as a turtle withdraws its head beneath its shell.

“Miss Melly, Ah is gittin’ ole, Ah spec’, ’cause Ah clean fergit fer de moment whut she sent me fer, an’ it’s important too.

Ah got a letter fer you.

Miss Pitty wouldn’t trust de mails or nobody but me ter bring it an’—”

“A letter?

For me?

Who from?”

“Well’m, it’s—Miss Pitty, she says ter me, ‘You, Peter, you brek it gen’ly ter Miss Melly,’ an’ Ah say—”

Melly rose from the steps, her hand at her heart.

“Ashley!

Ashley!

He’s dead!”

“No’m!

No’m!” cried Peter, his voice rising to a shrill bawl, as he fumbled in the breast pocket of his ragged coat.

“He’s ’live!

Disyere a letter frum him.

He comin’ home.

He—Gawdlmighty!

Ketch her, Mammy!

Lemme—”

“Doan you tech her, you ole fool!” thundered Mammy, struggling to keep Melanie’s sagging body from falling to the ground.

“You pious black ape!

Brek it gen’ly!

You, Poke, tek her feet.

Miss Carreen, steady her haid.

Lessus lay her on de sofa in de parlor.”

There was a tumult of sound as everyone but Scarlett swarmed about the fainting Melanie, everyone crying out in alarm, scurrying into the house for water and pillows, and in a moment Scarlett and Uncle Peter were left standing alone on the walk.

She stood rooted, unable to move from the position to which she had leaped when she heard his words, staring at the old man who stood feebly waving a letter.

His old black face was as pitiful as a child’s under its mother’s disapproval, his dignity collapsed.

For a moment she could not speak or move, and though her mind shouted: “He isn’t dead; he’s coming home!” the knowledge brought neither joy nor excitement, only a stunned immobility.

Uncle Peter’s voice came as from a far distance, plaintive, placating.

“Mist’ Willie Burr frum Macom whut is kin ter us, he brung it ter Miss Pitty.

Mist’ Willie he in de same jail house wid Mist’ Ashley.

Mist’ Willie he got a hawse an’ he got hyah soon.

But Mist’ Ashley he a-walkin’ an’—”

Scarlett snatched the letter from his hand.

It was addressed to Melly in Miss Pitty’s writing but that did not make her hesitate a moment.

She ripped it open and Miss Pitty’s inclosed note fell to the ground.

Within the envelope there was a piece of folded paper, grimy from the dirty pocket in which it had been carried, creased and ragged about the edges.

It bore the inscription in Ashley’s hand: “Mrs. George Ashley Wilkes, Care Miss Sarah Jane Hamilton, Atlanta, or Twelve Oaks, Jonesboro, Ga.”

With fingers that shook she opened it and read: “Beloved, I am coming home to you—”

Tears began to stream down her face so that she could not read and her heart swelled up until she felt she could not bear the joy of it.

Clutching the letter to her, she raced up the porch steps and down the hall, past the parlor where all the inhabitants of Tara were getting in one another’s way as they worked over the unconscious Melanie, and into Ellen’s office.

She shut the door and locked it and flung herself down on the sagging old sofa crying, laughing, kissing the letter.

“Beloved,” she whispered, “I am coming home to you.”

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Common sense told them that unless Ashley developed wings, it would be weeks or even months before he could travel from Illinois to Georgia, but hearts nevertheless beat wildly whenever a soldier turned into the avenue at Tara.

Each bearded scarecrow might be Ashley.

And if it were not Ashley, perhaps the soldier would have news of him or a letter from Aunt Pitty about him.

Black and white, they rushed to the front door every time they heard footsteps.

The sight of a uniform was enough to bring everyone flying from the woodpile, the pasture and the cotton patch.

For a month after the letter came, work was almost at a standstill.

No one wanted to be out of the house when he arrived, Scarlett least of all.

And she could not insist on the others attending to their duties when she so neglected hers.

But when the weeks crawled by and Ashley did not come or any news of him, Tara settled back into its old routine.

Longing hearts could only stand so much of longing.

An uneasy fear crept into Scarlett’s mind that something had happened to him along the way.

Rock Island was so far away and he might have been weak or sick when released from prison.

And he had no money and was tramping through a country where Confederates were hated.

If only she knew where he was, she would send money to him, send every penny she had and let the family go hungry, so he could come home swiftly on the train.

“Beloved, I am coming home to you.”

In the first rush of joy when her eyes met those words, they had meant only that Ashley was coming home to her.

Now, in the light of cooler reason, it was Melanie to whom he was returning, Melanie who went about the house these days singing with joy.

Occasionally, Scarlett wondered bitterly why Melanie could not have died in childbirth in Atlanta.

That would have made things perfect.

Then she could have married Ashley after a decent interval and made little Beau a good stepmother too.

When such thoughts came she did not pray hastily to God, telling Him she did not mean it.

God did not frighten her any more.

Soldiers came singly and in pairs and dozens and they were always hungry.

Scarlett thought despairingly that a plague of locusts would be more welcome.

She cursed again the old custom of hospitality which had flowered in the era of plenty, the custom which would not permit any traveler, great or humble, to go on his journey without a night’s lodging, food for himself and his horse and the utmost courtesy the house could give.

She knew that era had passed forever, but the rest of the household did not, nor did the soldiers, and each soldier was welcomed as if he were a long-awaited guest.

As the never-ending line went by, her heart hardened.

They were eating the food meant for the mouths of Tara, vegetables over whose long rows she had wearied her back, food she had driven endless miles to buy.

Food was so hard to get and the money in the Yankee’s wallet would not last forever.

Only a few greenbacks and the two gold pieces were left now.

Why should she feed this horde of hungry men?

The war was over.

They would never again stand between her and danger.

So, she gave orders to Pork that when soldiers were in the house, the table should be set sparely.

This order prevailed until she noticed that Melanie, who had never been strong since Beau was born, was inducing Pork to put only dabs of food on her plate and giving her share to the soldiers.

“You’ll have to stop it, Melanie,” she scolded.

“You’re half sick yourself and if you don’t eat more, you’ll be sick in bed and we’ll have to nurse you.

Let these men go hungry.

They can stand it.

They’ve stood it for four years and it won’t hurt them to stand it a little while longer.”

Melanie turned to her and on her face was the first expression of naked emotion Scarlett had ever seen in those serene eyes.

“Oh, Scarlett, don’t scold me!

Let me do it.

You don’t know how it helps me.

Every time I give some poor man my share I think that maybe, somewhere on the road up north, some woman is giving my Ashley a share of her dinner and it’s helping him to get home to me!”

“My Ashley.”

“Beloved, I am coming home to you.”

Scarlett turned away, wordless.

After that, Melanie noticed there was more food on the table when guests were present, even though Scarlett might grudge them every mouthful.

When the soldiers were too ill to go on, and there were many such, Scarlett put them to bed with none too good grace.

Each sick man meant another mouth to feed.

Someone had to nurse him and that meant one less worker at the business of fence building, hoeing, weeding and plowing.

One boy, on whose face a blond fuzz had just begun to sprout, was dumped on the front porch by a mounted soldier bound for Fayetteville.

He had found him unconscious by the roadside and had brought him, across his saddle, to Tara, the nearest house.

The girls thought he must be one of the little cadets who had been called out of military school when Sherman approached Milledgeville but they never knew, for he died without regaining consciousness and a search of his pockets yielded no information.

A nice-looking boy, obviously a gentleman, and somewhere to the south, some woman was watching the roads, wondering where he was and when he was coming home, just as she and Melanie, with a wild hope in their hearts, watched every bearded figure that came up their walk.

They buried the cadet in the family burying ground, next to the three little O’Hara boys, and Melanie cried sharply as Pork filled in the grave wondering in her heart if strangers were doing this same thing to the tall body of Ashley.

Will Benteen was another soldier, like the nameless boy, who arrived unconscious across the saddle of a comrade.

Will was acutely ill with pneumonia and when the girls put him to bed, they feared he would soon join the boy in the burying ground.

He had the sallow malarial face of the south Georgia Cracker, pale pinkish hair and washed-out blue eyes which even in delirium were patient and mild.

One of his legs was gone at the knee and to the stump was fitted a roughly whittled wooden peg.

He was obviously a Cracker, just as the boy they had buried so short a while ago was obviously a planter’s son.

Just how the girls knew this they could not say.

Certainly Will was no dirtier, no more hairy, no more lice infested than many fine gentlemen who came to Tara.

Certainly the language he used in his delirium was no less grammatical than that of the Tarleton twins.

But they knew instinctively, as they knew thoroughbred horses from scrubs, that he was not of their class.

But this knowledge did not keep them from laboring to save him.

Emaciated from a year in a Yankee prison, exhausted by his long tramp on his ill-fitting wooden peg, he had little strength to combat pneumonia and for days he lay in the bed moaning, trying to get up, fighting battles over again.

Never once did he call for mother, wife, sister or sweetheart and this omission worried Carreen.

“A man ought to have some folks,” she said.

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“And he sounds like he didn’t have a soul in the world.”

For all his lankiness he was tough, and good nursing pulled him through.

The day came when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her Rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her fair hair.

“Then you warn’t a dream, after all,” he said, in his flat toneless voice.

“I hope I ain’t troubled you too much, Ma’m.”

His convalescence was a long one and he lay quietly looking out of the window at the magnolias and causing very little trouble to anyone.

Carreen liked him because of his placid and unembarrassed silences.

She would sit beside him through the long hot afternoons, fanning him and saying nothing.

Carreen had very little to say these days as she moved, delicate and wraith-like, about the tasks which were within her strength.

She prayed a good deal, for when Scarlett came into her room without knocking, she always found her on her knees by her bed.

The sight never failed to annoy her, for Scarlett felt that the time for prayer had passed.

If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers.

Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.

She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.

God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.

And whenever she found Carreen on her knees when she should have been taking an afternoon nap or doing the mending, she felt that Carreen was shirking her share of the burdens.

She said as much to Will Benteen one afternoon when he was able to sit up in a chair and was startled when he said in his flat voice: “Let her be, Miss Scarlett.

It comforts her.”

“Comforts her?”

“Yes, she’s prayin’ for your ma and him.”

“Who is ‘him’?”

His faded blue eyes looked at her from under sandy lashes without surprise.

Nothing seemed to surprise or excite him.

Perhaps he had seen too much of the unexpected ever to be startled again.

That Scarlett did not know what was in her sister’s heart did not seem odd to him.

He took it as naturally as he did the fact that Carreen had found comfort in talking to him, a stranger.

“Her beau, that boy Brent something-or-other who was killed at Gettysburg.”

“Her beau?” said Scarlett shortly.

“Her beau, nothing!

He and his brother were my beaux.”

“Yes, so she told me.

Looks like most of the County was your beaux.

But, all the same, he was her beau after you turned him down, because when he come home on his last furlough they got engaged.

She said he was the only boy she’d ever cared about and so it kind of comforts her to pray for him.”

“Well, fiddle-dee-dee!” said Scarlett, a very small dart of jealousy entering her.

She looked curiously at this lanky man with his bony stooped shoulders, his pinkish hair and calm unwavering eyes.

So he knew things about her own family which she had not troubled to discover.

So that was why Carreen mooned about, praying all the time.

Well, she’d get over it.

Lots of girls got over dead sweethearts, yes, dead husbands, too.

She’d certainly gotten over Charles.

And she knew one girl in Atlanta who had been widowed three times by the war and was still able to take notice of men.

She said as much to Will but he shook his head.

“Not Miss Carreen,” he said with finality.

Will was pleasant to talk to because he had so little to say and yet was so understanding a listener.

She told him about her problems of weeding and hoeing and planting, of fattening the hogs and breeding the cow, and he gave good advice for he had owned a small farm in south Georgia and two negroes.

He knew his slaves were free now and the farm gone to weeds and seedling pines.

His sister, his only relative, had moved to Texas with her husband years ago and he was alone in the world.

Yet, none of these things seemed to bother him any more than the leg he had left in Virginia.

Yes, Will was a comfort to Scarlett after hard days when the negroes muttered and Suellen nagged and cried and Gerald asked too frequently where Ellen was.

She could tell Will anything.

She even told him of killing the Yankee and glowed with pride when he commented briefly: “Good work!”

Eventually all the family found their way to Will’s room to air their troubles—even Mammy, who had at first been distant with him because he was not quality and had owned only two slaves.

When he was able to totter about the house, he turned his hands to weaving baskets of split oak and mending the furniture ruined by the Yankees.

He was clever at whittling and Wade was constantly by his side, for he whittled out toys for him, the only toys the little boy had.

With Will in the house, everyone felt safe in leaving Wade and the two babies while they went about their tasks, for he could care for them as deftly as Mammy and only Melly surpassed him at soothing the screaming black and white babies.

“You’ve been mighty good to me, Miss Scarlett,” he said, “and me a stranger and nothin’ to you all.

I’ve caused you a heap of trouble and worry and if it’s all the same to you, I’m goin’ to stay here and help you all with the work till I’ve paid you back some for your trouble.

I can’t ever pay it all, ’cause there ain’t no payment a man can give for his life.”

So he stayed and, gradually, unobtrusively, a large part of the burden of Tara shifted from Scarlett’s shoulders to the bony shoulders of Will Benteen.

********

It was September and time to pick the cotton.

Will Benteen sat on the front steps at Scarlett’s feet in the pleasant sunshine of the early autumn afternoon and his flat voice went on and on languidly about the exorbitant costs of ginning the cotton at the new gin near Fayetteville.

However, he had learned that day in Fayetteville that he could cut this expense a fourth by lending the horse and wagon for two weeks to the gin owner.

He had delayed closing the bargain until he discussed it with Scarlett.

She looked at the lank figure leaning against the porch column, chewing a straw.

Undoubtedly, as Mammy frequently declared, Will was something the Lord had provided and Scarlett often wondered how Tara could have lived through the last few months without him.

He never had much to say, never displayed any energy, never seemed to take much interest in anything that went on about him, but he knew everything about everybody at Tara.

And he did things.

He did them silently, patiently and competently.

Though he had only one leg, he could work faster than Pork.

And he could get work out of Pork, which was, to Scarlett, a marvelous thing.

When the cow had the colic and the horse fell ill with a mysterious ailment which threatened to remove him permanently from them, Will sat up nights with them and saved them.

That he was a shrewd trader brought him Scarlett’s respect, for he could ride out in the mornings with a bushel or two of apples, sweet potatoes and other vegetables and return with seeds, lengths of cloth, flour and other necessities which she knew she could never have acquired, good trader though she was.

He had gradually slipped into the status of a member of the family and slept on a cot in the little dressing room off Gerald’s room.

He said nothing of leaving Tara, and Scarlett was careful not to question him, fearful that he might leave them.

Sometimes, she thought that if he were anybody and had any gumption he would go home, even if he no longer had a home.

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But even with this thought, she would pray fervently that he would remain indefinitely.

It was so convenient to have a man about the house.

She thought too, that if Carreen had the sense of a mouse she would see that Will cared for her.

Scarlett would have been eternally grateful to Will, had he asked her for Carreen’s hand.

Of course, before the war, Will would certainly not have been an eligible suitor.

He was not of the planter class at all, though he was not poor white.

He was just plain Cracker, a small farmer, half-educated, prone to grammatical errors and ignorant of some of the finer manners the O’Haras were accustomed to in gentlemen.

In fact, Scarlett wondered if he could be called a gentleman at all and decided that he couldn’t.

Melanie hotly defended him, saying that anyone who had Will’s kind heart and thoughtfulness of others was of gentle birth.

Scarlett knew that Ellen would have fainted at the thought of a daughter of hers marrying such a man, but now Scarlett had been by necessity forced too far away from Ellen’s teaching to let that worry her.

Men were scarce, girls had to marry someone and Tara had to have a man.

But Carreen, deeper and deeper immersed in her prayer book and every day losing more of her touch with the world of realities, treated Will as gently as a brother and took him as much for granted as she did Pork.

“If Carreen had any sense of gratitude to me for what I’ve done for her, she’d marry him and not let him get away from here,” Scarlett thought indignantly.

“But no, she must spend her time mooning about a silly boy who probably never gave her a serious thought.”

So Will remained at Tara, for what reason she did not know and she found his businesslike man-to-man attitude with her both pleasant and helpful.

He was gravely deferential to the vague Gerald but it was to Scarlett that he turned as the real head of the house.

She gave her approval to the plan of hiring out the horse even though it meant the family would be without any means of transportation temporarily.

Suellen would be especially grieved at this.

Her greatest joy lay in going to Jonesboro or Fayetteville with Will when he drove over on business.

Adorned in the assembled best of the family, she called on old friends, heard all the gossip of the County and felt herself again Miss O’Hara of Tara.

Suellen never missed the opportunity to leave the plantation and give herself airs among people who did not know she weeded the garden and made beds.

Miss Fine Airs will just have to do without gadding for two weeks, thought Scarlett, and we’ll have to put up with her nagging and her bawling.

Melanie joined them on the veranda, the baby in her arms, and spreading an old blanket on the floor, set little Beau down to crawl.

Since Ashley’s letter Melanie had divided her time between glowing, singing happiness and anxious longing.

But happy or depressed, she was too thin, too white.

She did her share of the work uncomplainingly but she was always ailing.

Old Dr. Fontaine diagnosed her trouble as female complaint and concurred with Dr. Meade in saying she should never have had Beau.

And he said frankly that another baby would kill her.

“When I was over to Fayetteville today,” said Will, “I found somthin’ right cute that I thought would interest you ladies and I brought it home.”

He fumbled in his back pants pocket and brought out the wallet of calico, stiffened with bark, which Carreen had made him.

From it, he drew a Confederate bill.

“If you think Confederate money is cute, Will, I certainly don’t,” said Scarlett shortly, for the very sight of Confederate money made her mad.

“We’ve got three thousand dollars of it in Pa’s trunk this minute, and Mammy’s after me to let her paste it over the holes in the attic walls so the draft won’t get her.

And I think I’ll do it.

Then it’ll be good for something.”

“‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,’” said Melanie with a sad smile.

“Don’t do that, Scarlett.

Keep it for Wade.

He’ll be proud of it some day.”

“Well, I don’t know nothin’ about imperious Caesar,” said Will, patiently, “but what I’ve got is in line with what you’ve just said about Wade, Miss Melly.

It’s a poem, pasted on the back of this bill.

I know Miss Scarlett ain’t much on poems but I thought this might interest her.”

He turned the bill over.

On its back was pasted a strip of coarse brown wrapping paper, inscribed in pale homemade ink.

Will cleared his throat and read slowly and with difficulty.

“The name is ‘Lines on the Back of a Confederate Note,’” he said.

“Representing nothing on God’s earth now And naught in the waters below it—

As the pledge of a nation that’s passed away Keep it, dear friend, and show it.

“Show it to those who will lend an ear To the tale this trifle will tell Of Liberty, born of patriots’ dream, Of a storm-cradled nation that fell.”

“Oh, how beautiful!

How touching!” cried Melanie.

“Scarlett, you mustn’t give the money to Mammy to paste in the attic.

It’s more than paper—just like this poem said: ‘The pledge of a nation that’s passed away’!”

“Oh, Melly, don’t be sentimental!

Paper is paper and we’ve got little enough of it and I’m tired of hearing Mammy grumble about the cracks in the attic.

I hope when Wade grows up I’ll have plenty of greenbacks to give him instead of Confederate trash.”

Will, who had been enticing little Beau across the blanket with the bill during this argument, looked up and, shading his eyes, glanced down the driveway.

“More company,” he said, squinting in the sun.

“Another soldier.”

Scarlett followed his gaze and saw a familiar sight, a bearded man coming slowly up the avenue under the cedars, a man clad in a ragged mixture of blue and gray uniforms, head bowed tiredly, feet dragging slowly.

“I thought we were about through with soldiers,” she said.

“I hope this one isn’t very hungry.”

“He’ll be hungry,” said Will briefly.

Melanie rose.

“I’d better tell Dilcey to set an extra plate,” she said, “and warn Mammy not to get the poor thing’s clothes off his back too abruptly and—”

She stopped so suddenly that Scarlett turned to look at her.

Melanie’s thin hand was at her throat, clutching it as if it was torn with pain, and Scarlett could see the veins beneath the white skin throbbing swiftly.

Her face went whiter and her brown eyes dilated enormously.

She’s going to faint, thought Scarlett, leaping to her feet and catching her arm.

But, in an instant, Melanie threw off her hand and was down the steps.

Down the graveled path she flew, skimming lightly as a bird, her faded skirts streaming behind her, her arms outstretched.

Then, Scarlett knew the truth, with the impact of a blow.

She reeled back against an upright of the porch as the man lifted a face covered with a dirty blond beard and stopped still, looking toward the house as if he was too weary to take another step.

Her heart leaped and stopped and then began racing, as Melly with incoherent cries threw herself into the dirty soldier’s arms and his head bent down toward hers.

With rapture, Scarlett took two running steps forward but was checked when Will’s hand closed upon her skirt.

“Don’t spoil it,” he said quietly.

“Turn me loose, you fool!

Turn me loose!

It’s Ashley!”

He did not relax his grip.

“After all, he’s her husband, ain’t he?” Will asked calmly and, looking down at him in a confusion of joy and impotent fury, Scarlett saw in the quiet depths of his eyes understanding and pity.