Gone With the Wind (64 page)

Scarlett rose unsteadily and put a hand on Dilcey’s arm.

“It was good of you to stay, Dilcey.”

“How could I go off wid them trashy niggers, Miss Scarlett, after yo’ pa been so good to buy me and my little Prissy and yo’ ma been so kine?”

“Sit down, Dilcey. The baby can eat all right, then? And how is Miss Melanie?”

“Nuthin’ wrong wid this chile ‘cept he hongry, and what it take to feed a hongry chile I got. No’m, Miss Melanie is all right. She ain’ gwine die, Miss Scarlett. Doan you fret yo’seff. I seen too many, white and black, lak her. She mighty tired and nervous like and scared fo’ this baby. But I hesh her and give her some of whut was lef in that go’de and she sleepin’.”

So the corn whisky had been used by the whole family! Scarlett thought hysterically that perhaps she had better give a drink to little Wade and see if it would stop his hiccoughs— And Melanie would not die. And when Ashley came home—if he did come home … No, she would think of that later too. So much to think of—later! So many things to unravel—to decide. If only she could put off the hour of reckoning forever! She started suddenly as a creaking noise and a rhythmic “Ker-bunk—ker-bunk—” broke the stillness of the air outside.

“That’s Mammy gettin’ the water to sponge off the young Misses. They takes a heap of bathin’,” explained Dilcey, propping the gourd on the table between medicine bottles and a glass.

Scarlett laughed suddenly. Her nerves must be shredded if the noise of the well windlass, bound up in her earliest memories, could frighten her. Dilcey looked at her steadily as she laughed, her face immobile in its dignity, but Scarlett felt that Dilcey understood. She sank back in her chair. If she could only be rid of her tight stays, the collar that choked her and the slippers still full of sand and gravel that blistered her feet.

The windlass creaked slowly as the rope wound up, each creak bringing the bucket nearer the top. Soon Mammy would be with her—Ellen’s Mammy, her Mammy. She sat silent, intent on nothing, while the baby, already glutted with milk, whimpered because he had lost the friendly nipple. Dilcey, silent too, guided the child’s mouth back, quieting him in her arms as Scarlett listened to the slow scuffing of Mammy’s feet across the back yard. How still the night air was! The slightest sounds roared in her ears.

The upstairs hall seemed to shake as Mammy’s ponderous weight came toward the door. Then Mammy was in the room, Mammy with shoulders dragged down by two heavy wooden buckets, her kind black face sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey’s face.

Her eyes lighted up at the sight of Scarlett, her white teeth gleamed as she set down the buckets, and Scarlett ran to her, laying her head on the broad, sagging breasts which had held so many heads, black and white. Here was something of stability, thought Scarlett, something of the old life that was unchanging. But Mammy’s first words dispelled this illusion.

“Mammy’s chile is home! Oh, Miss Scarlett, now dat Miss Ellen’s in de grabe, whut is we gwine ter do? Oh, Miss Scarlett, effen Ah wuz jes’ daid longside Miss Ellen! Ah kain make out widout Miss Ellen. Ain’ nuthin’ lef now but mizry an’ trouble. Jes’ weery loads, honey, jes’ weery loads.”

As Scarlett lay with her head hugged close to Mammy’s breast, two words caught her attention, “weery loads.” Those were the words which had hummed in her brain that afternoon so monotonously they had sickened her. Now, she remembered the rest of the song, remembered with a sinking heart:

“Just a few more days for to tote the weary load!

No matter, ‘twill never be light!

Just a few more days till we totter in the road—”

“No matter, ‘twill never be light”—she took the words to her tired mind. Would her load never be light? Was coming home to Tara to mean, not blessed surcease, but only more loads to carry? She slipped from Mammy’s arms and, reaching up, patted the wrinkled black face.

“Honey, yo’ han’s!” Mammy took the small hands with their blisters and blood clots in hers and looked at them with horrified disapproval. “Miss Scarlett, Ah done tole you an’ tole you dat you kin allus tell a lady by her han’s an’—yo’ face sunbuhnt too!”

Poor Mammy, still the martinet about such unimportant things even though war and death had just passed over her head! In another moment she would be saying that young Misses with blistered hands and freckles most generally didn’t never catch husbands and Scarlett forestalled the remark.

“Mammy, I want you to tell me about Mother. I couldn’t bear to hear Pa talk about her.”

Tears started from Mammy’s eyes as she leaned down to pick up the buckets. In silence she carried them to the bedside and, turning down the sheet, began pulling up the night clothes of Suellen and Carreen. Scarlett, peering at her sisters in the dim flaring light, saw that Carreen wore a nightgown, clean but in tatters, and Suellen lay wrapped in an old negligee, a brown linen garment heavy with tagging ends of Irish lace. Mammy cried silently as she sponged the gaunt bodies, using the remnant of an old apron as a cloth.

“Miss Scarlett, it wuz dem Slatterys, dem trashy, no-good, low-down po’-w’ite Slatterys dat kilt Miss Ellen. Ah done tole her an’ tole her it doan do no good doin’ things fer trashy folks, but Miss Ellen wuz so sot in her ways an’ her heart so sof’ she couldn’ never say no ter nobody whut needed her.”

“Slatterys?” questioned Scarlett, bewildered. “How do they come in?”

“Dey wuz sick wid disyere thing,” Mammy gestured with her rag to the two naked girls, dripping with water on their damp sheet. “Ole Miss Slattery’s gal, Emmie, come down wid it an’ Miss Slattery come hotfootin’ it up hyah affer Miss Ellen, lak she allus done w’en anything wrong. Why din’ she nuss her own? Miss Ellen had mo’n she could tote anyways. But Miss Ellen she went down dar an’ she nuss Emmie. An’ Miss Ellen wuzn’ well a-tall her-seff, Miss Scarlett. Yo’ ma hadn’ been well fer de longes’. Dey ain’ been too much ter eat roun’ hyah, wid de commissary stealin’ eve’y thing us growed. An’ Miss Ellen eat lak a bird anyways. An’ Ah tole her an’ tole her ter let dem w’ite trash alone, but she din’ pay me no mine. Well’m, “bout de time Emmie look lak she gittin’ better, Miss Carreen come down wid it. Yas’m, de typhoy fly right up de road an’ ketch Miss Carreen, an’ den down come Miss Suellen. So Miss Ellen, she tuck an’ nuss dem too.

“Wid all de fightin’ up de road an’ de Yankees ‘cross de river an’ us not knowin’ whut wuz gwine ter happen ter us an’ de fe’el han’s runnin” off eve’y night, Ah’s ‘bout crazy. But Miss Ellen jes’ as cool as a cucumber. ‘Cept she wuz worried ter a ghos’ ‘bout de young Misses kase we couldn’ git no medicines nor nuthin’. An’ one night she say ter me affer we done sponge off de young Misses ‘bout ten times, she say, ‘Mammy, effen Ah could sell mah soul, Ah’d sell it fer some ice ter put on mah gals’ haids.’

“She wouldn’t let Mist’ Gerald come in hyah, nor Rosa nor Teena, nobody but me, kase Ah done had de typhoy. An’ den it tuck her, Miss Scarlett, an’ Ah seed right off dat twarnt no use.”

Mammy straightened up and, raising her apron, dried her streaming eyes.

“She went fas’, Miss Scarlett, an’ even dat nice Yankee doctah couldn’ do nuthin’ fer her. She din’ know nuthin’ a-tall. Ah call ter her an’ talk ter her but she din’ even know her own Mammy.”

“Did she—did she ever mention me—call for me?”

“No, honey. She think she is lil gal back in Savannah, She din’ call nobody by name.”

Dilcey stirred and laid the sleeping baby across her knees.

“Yes’m, she did. She did call somebody.”

“You hesh yo’ mouf, you Injun-nigger!” Mammy turned with threatening violence on Dilcey.

“Hush, Mammy! Who did she call, Dilcey? Pa?”

“No’m. Not yo’ pa. It wuz the night the cotton buhnt—”

“Has the cotton gone—tell me quickly!”

“Yes’m, it buhnt up. The sojers rolls it out of the shed into the back yard and hollers, ‘Here the bigges’ bonfiah in Georgia,’ and tech it off.”

Three years of stored cotton—one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all in one blaze!

“And the fiah light up the place lak it wuz day—we wuz scared the house would buhn, too, and it wuz so bright in this hyah room that you could mos’ pick a needle offen the flo’. And w’en the light shine in the winder, it look lak it wake Miss Ellen up and she set right up in bed and cry out loud, time and again: “Feeleep! Feeleep!’ I ain’ never heerd no sech name but it wuz a name and she wuz callin’ him.”

Mammy stood as though turned to stone glaring at Dilcey but Scarlett dropped her head into her hands. Philippe—who was he and what had he been to Mother that she died calling him?

The long road from Atlanta to Tara had ended, ended in a blank wall, the road that was to end in Ellen’s arms. Never again could Scarlett lie down, as a child, secure beneath her father’s roof with the protection of her mother’s love wrapped about her like an eiderdown quilt. There was no security or haven to which she could turn now. No turning or twisting would avoid this dead end to which she had come. There was no one on whose shoulders she could rest her burdens. Her father was old and stunned, her sisters ill, Melanie frail and weak, the children helpless, and the negroes looking up. to her with childlike faith, clinging to her skirts, knowing that Ellen’s daughter would be the refuge Ellen had always been.

Through the window, in the faint light of the rising moon, Tara stretched before her, negroes gone, acres desolate, barns ruined, like a body bleeding under her eyes, like her own body, slowly bleeding. This was the end of the road, quivering old age, sickness, hungry mouths, helpless hands plucking at her skirts. And at the end of this road, there was nothing—nothing but Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton, nineteen years old, a widow with a little child.

What would she do with all of this? Aunt Pitty and the Burrs in Macon could take Melanie and her baby. If the girls recovered, Ellen’s family would have to take them, whether they liked it or not. And she and Gerald could turn to Uncle James and Andrew.

She looked at the thin forms, tossing before her, the sheets about them moist and dark from dripping water. She did not like Suellen. She saw it now with a sudden clarity. She had never liked her. She did not especially love Carreen—she could not love anyone who was weak. But they were of her blood, part of Tara. No, she could not let them live out their lives in their aunts’ homes as poor relations. An O’Hara a poor relation, living on charity bread and sufferance! Oh, never that!

Was there no escape from this dead end? Her tired brain moved so slowly. She raised her hands to her head as wearily as if the air were water against which her arms struggled. She took the gourd from between the glass and bottle and looked in it. There was some whisky left in the bottom, how much she could not tell in the uncertain light. Strange that the sharp smell did not offend her nostrils now. She drank slowly but this time the liquid did not burn, only a dull warmth followed.

She set down the empty gourd and looked about her. This was all a dream, this smoke-filled dim room, the scrawny girls, Mammy shapeless and huge crouching beside the bed, Dilcey a still bronze image with the sleeping pink morsel against her dark breast—all a dream from which she would awake, to smell bacon frying in the kitchen, hear the throaty laughter of the negroes and the creaking of wagons fieldward bound, and Ellen’s gentle insistent hand upon her.

Then she discovered she was in her own room, on her own bed, faint moonlight pricking the darkness, and Mammy and Dilcey were undressing her. The torturing stays no longer pinched her waist and she could breathe deeply and quietly to the bottom of her lungs and her abdomen. She felt her stockings being stripped gently from her and heard Mammy murmuring indistinguishable comforting sounds as she bathed her blistered feet. How cool the water was, how good to lie here in softness, like a child. She sighed and relaxed and after a time which might have been a year or a second, she was alone and the room was brighter as the rays of the moon streamed in across the bed.

She did not know she was drunk, drunk with fatigue and whisky. She only knew she had left her tired body and floated somewhere above it where there was no pain and weariness and her brain saw things with an inhuman clarity.

She was seeing things with new eyes for, somewhere along the long road to Tara, she had left her girlhood behind her. She was no longer plastic clay, yielding imprint to each new experience. The clay had hardened, some time in this indeterminate day which had lasted a thousand years. Tonight was the last time she would ever be ministered to as a child. She was a woman now and youth was gone.

No, she could not, would not, turn to Gerald’s or Ellen’s families. The O’Haras did not take charity. The O’Haras looked after their own. Her burdens were her own and burdens were for shoulders strong enough to bear them. She thought without surprise, looking down from her height, that her shoulders were strong enough to bear anything now, having borne the worst that could ever happen to her. She could not desert Tara; she belonged to the red acres far more than they could ever belong to her. Her roots went deep into the blood-colored soil and sucked up life, as did the cotton. She would stay at Tara and keep it, somehow, keep her father and her sisters, Melanie and Ashley’s child, the negroes. Tomorrow—oh, tomorrow! Tomorrow she would fit the yoke about her neck. Tomorrow there would be so many things to do. Go to Twelve Oaks and the Macintosh place and see if anything was left in the deserted gardens, go to the river swamps and beat them for straying hogs and chickens, go to Jonesboro and Lovejoy with Ellen’s jewelry—there must be someone left there who would sell something to eat. Tomorrow—tomorrow—her brain ticked slowly and more slowly, like a clock running down, but the clarity of vision persisted.

Of a sudden, the oft-told family tales to which she had listened since babyhood, listened half-bored, impatient and but partly comprehending, were crystal clear. Gerald, penniless, had raised Tara; Ellen had risen above some mysterious sorrow; Grandfather Robillard. surviving the wreck of Napoleon’s throne, had founded his fortunes anew on the fertile Georgia coast; Great-grandfather Prudhomme had carved a small kingdom out of the dark jungles of Haiti, lost it, and lived to see his name honored in Savannah. There were the Scarletts who had fought with the Irish Volunteers for a free Ireland and been hanged for their pains and the O’Haras who died at the Boyne, battling to the end for what was theirs.