Gone With the Wind (68 page)

Yes, he was dead. Undoubtedly. She had killed a man.

The smoke curled slowly to the ceiling and the red streams widened about her feet. For a timeless moment she stood there and in the still hot hush of the summer morning every irrelevant sound and scent seemed magnified, the quick thudding of her heart, like, a drumbeat, the slight rough rustling of the magnolia leaves, the far-off plaintive sound of a swamp bird and the sweet smell of the flowers outside the window.

She had killed a man, she who took care never to be in at the kill on a hunt, she who could not bear the squealing of a hog at slaughter or the squeak of a rabbit in a snare. Murder! she thought dully. I’ve done murder. Oh, this can’t be happening to me! Her eyes went to the stubby hairy hand on the floor so close to the sewing box and suddenly she was vitally alive again, vitally glad with a cool tigerish joy. She could have ground her heel into the gaping wound which had been his nose and taken sweet pleasure in the feel of his warm blood on her bare feet. She had struck a blow of revenge for Tara—and for Ellen.

There were hurried stumbling steps in the upper hall, a pause and then more steps, weak dragging steps now, punctuated by metallic clankings. A sense of time and reality coming back to her, Scarlett looked up and saw Melanie at the top of the stairs, clad only in the ragged chemise which served her as a nightgown, her weak arm weighed down with Charles’ saber. Melanie’s eyes took in the scene below in its entirety, the sprawling blue-clad body in the red pool, the sewing box beside him, Scarlett, barefooted and gray-faced, clutching the long pistol.

In silence her eyes met Scarlett’s. There was a glow of grim pride in her usually gentle face, approbation and a fierce joy in her smile that equaled the fiery tumult in Scarlett’s own bosom.

“Why—why—she’s like me! She understands how I feel!” thought Scarlett in that long moment “She’d have done the same thing!”

With a thrill she looked up at the frail swaying girl for whom she had never had any feelings but of dislike and contempt. Now, straggling against hatred for Ashley’s wife, there surged a feeling of admiration and comradeship. She saw in a flash of clarity untouched by any petty emotion that beneath the gentle voice and the dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel, felt too that there were banners and bugles of courage in Melanie’s quiet blood.

“Scarlett! Scarlett!” shrilled the weak frightened voices of Suellen and Carreen, muffled by their closed door, and Wade’s voice screamed “Auntee! Auntee!” Swiftly Melanie put her finger to her lips and, laying the sword on the top step, she painfully made her way down the upstairs hall and opened the door of the sick room.

“Don’t be scared, chickens!” came her voice with teasing gaiety. “Your big sister was trying to clean the rust off Charles’ pistol and it went off and nearly scared her to death!” … “Now, Wade Hampton, Mama just shot off your dear Papa’s pistol! When you are bigger, she will let you shoot it.”

“What a cool liar!” thought Scarlett with admiration. “I couldn’t have thought that quickly. But why lie? They’ve got to know I’ve done it.”

She looked down at the body again and now revulsion came over her as her rage and fright melted away, and her knees began to quiver with the reaction. Melanie dragged herself to the top step again and started down, holding onto the banisters, her pale lower lip caught between her teeth.

“Go back to bed, silly, you’ll kill yourself!” Scarlett cried, but the half-naked Melanie made her painful way down into the lower hall.

“Scarlett,” she whispered, “we must get him out of here and bury him. He may not be alone and if they find him here—” She steadied herself on Scarlett’s arm.

“He must be alone,” said Scarlett. “I didn’t see anyone else from the upstairs window. He must be a deserter.”

“Even if he is alone, no one must know about it. The negroes might talk and then they’d come and get you. Scarlett, we must get him hidden before the folks come back from the swamp.”

Her mind prodded to action by the feverish urgency of Melanie’s voice, Scarlett thought hard.

“I could bury him in the corner of the garden under the arbor—the ground is soft there where Pork dug up the whisky barrel. But how will I get him there?”

“We’ll both take a leg and drag him,” said Melanie firmly.

Reluctantly, Scarlett’s admiration went still higher.

“You couldn’t drag a cat. I’ll drag him,” she said roughly. “You go back to bed. You’ll kill yourself. Don’t dare try to help me either or I’ll carry you upstairs myself.”

Melanie’s white face broke into a sweet understanding smile. “You are very dear, Scarlett,” she said and softly brushed her lips against Scarlett’s cheek. Before Scarlett could recover from her surprise, Melanie went on: “If you can drag him out, I’ll mop up the—the mess before the folks get home, and Scarlett—”

“Yes?”

“Do you suppose it would be dishonest to go through his knapsack? He might have something to eat.”

“I do not,” said Scarlett, annoyed that she had not thought of this herself. “You take the knapsack and I’ll go through his pockets.”

Stooping over the dead man with distaste, she unbuttoned the remaining buttons of his jacket and systematically began rifling his pockets.

“Dear God,” she whispered, pulling out a bulging wallet, wrapped about with a rag. “Melanie—Melly, I think it’s full of money!”

Melanie said nothing but abruptly sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall.

“You look,” she said shakily. I’m feeling a little weak.”

Scarlett tore off the rag and with trembling hands opened the leather folds.

“Look, Melly—just look!”

Melanie looked and her eyes dilated. Jumbled together was a mass of bills, United States greenbacks mingling with Confederate money and, glinting from between them, were one ten-dollar gold piece and two five-dollar gold pieces.

“Don’t stop to count it now,” said Melanie as Scarlett began fingering the bills. “We haven’t time—”

“Do you realize, Melanie, that this money means that we’ll eat?”

“Yes, yes, dear. I know but we haven’t time now. You look in his other pockets and I’ll take the knapsack.”

Scarlett was loath to put down the wallet. Bright vistas opened before her—real money, the Yankee’s horse, food! There was a God after all, and He did provide, even if He did take very odd ways of providing. She sat on her haunches and stared at the wallet smiling. Food! Melanie plucked it from her hands—

“Hurry!” she said.

The trouser pockets yielded nothing except a candle end, a jackknife, a plug of tobacco and a bit of twine. Melanie removed from the knapsack a small package of coffee which she sniffed as if it were the sweetest of perfumes, hardtack and, her face changing, a miniature of a little girl in a gold frame set with seed pearls, a garnet brooch, two broad gold bracelets with tiny dangling gold chains, a gold thimble, a small silver baby’s cup, gold embroidery scissors, a diamond solitaire ring and a pair of earrings with pendant pear-shaped diamonds, which even their unpracticed eyes could tell were well over a carat each.

“A thief!” whispered Melanie, recoiling from the still body. “Scarlett, he must have stolen all of this!”

“Of course,” said Scarlett. “And he came here hoping to steal more from us.”

“I’m glad you killed him,” said Melanie her gentle eyes hard. “Now hurry, darling, and get him out of here.”

Scarlett bent over, caught the dead man by his boots and tugged. How heavy he was and how weak she suddenly felt. Suppose she shouldn’t be able to move him? Turning so that she backed the corpse, she caught a heavy boot under each arm and threw her weight forward. He moved and she jerked again. Her sore foot, forgotten in the excitement, now gave a tremendous throb that made her grit her teeth and shift her weight to the heel. Tugging and straining, perspiration dripping from her forehead, she dragged him down the hall, a red stain following her path.

“If he bleeds across the yard, we can’t hide it,” she gasped. “Give me your shimmy, Melanie, and I’ll wad it around his head.”

Melanie’s white face went crimson.

“Don’t be silly, I won’t look at you,” said Scarlett “If I had on a petticoat or pantalets I’d use them.”

Crouching back against the wall, Melanie pulled the ragged linen garment over her head and silently tossed it to Scarlett, shielding herself as best she could with her arms.

“Thank God, I’m not that modest,” thought Scarlett, feeling rather than seeing Melanie’s agony of embarrassment, as she wrapped the ragged cloth about the shattered face.

By a series of limping jerks, she pulled the body down the hall toward the back porch and, pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand, glanced back toward Melanie, sitting against the wall hugging her thin knees to her bare breasts. How silly of Melanie to be bothering about modesty at a time like this, Scarlett thought irritably. It was just part of her nicey-nice way of acting which had always made Scarlett despise her. Then shame rose in her. After all—after all, Melanie had dragged herself from bed so soon after having a baby and had come to her aid with a weapon too heavy even for her to lift. That had taken courage, the kind of courage Scarlett honestly knew she herself did not possess, the thin-steel, spun silk courage which had characterized Melanie on the terrible night Atlanta fell and on the long trip home. It was the same intangible, unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses possessed, a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which she gave grudging tribute.

“Go back to bed,” she threw over her shoulder. “You’ll be dead if you don’t. I’ll clean up the mess after I’ve buried him.”

“I’ll do it with one of the rag rugs,” whispered Melanie, looking at the pool of blood with a sick face.

“Well, kill yourself then and see if I care! And if any of the folks come back before I’m finished, keep them in the house and tell them the horse just walked in from nowhere.”

Melanie sat shivering in the morning sunlight and covered her ears against the sickening series of thuds as the dead man’s head bumped down the porch steps.

No one questioned whence the horse had come. It was so obvious he was a stray from the recent battle and they were well pleased to have him. The Yankee lay in the shallow pit Scarlett had scraped out under the scuppernong arbor. The uprights which held the thick vines were rotten and that night Scarlett hacked at them with the kitchen knife until they fell and the tangled mass ran wild over the grave. The replacing of these posts was one bit of repair work Scarlett did not suggest and, if the negroes knew why, they kept their silence.

No ghost rose from that shallow grave to haunt her in the long nights when she lay awake, too tired to sleep. No feeling of horror or remorse assailed her at the memory. She wondered why, knowing that even a month before she could never have done the deed. Pretty young Mrs. Hamilton, with her dimple and her jingling earbobs and her helpless little ways, blowing a man’s face to a pulp and then burying him in a hastily scratched-out hole! Scarlett grinned a little grimly thinking of die consternation such an idea would bring to those who knew her.

“I won’t think about it any more,” she decided. “It’s over and done with and I’d have been a ninny not to kill him. I reckon—I reckon I must have changed a little since coming home or else I couldn’t have done it.”

She did not think of it consciously but in the back of her mind, whenever she was confronted by an unpleasant and difficult task, the idea lurked giving her strength: I’ve done murder and so I can surely do this.”

She had changed more than she knew and the shell of hardness which had begun to form about her heart when she lay in the slave garden at Twelve Oaks was slowly thickening.

Now that she had a horse, Scarlett could find out for herself what had happened to their neighbors. Since she came home she had wondered despairingly a thousand times: “Are we the only folks left in the County? Has everybody else been burned out? Have they all refugeed to Macon?” With the memory of the ruins of Twelve Oaks, the Macintosh place and the Slattery shack fresh in her mind, she almost dreaded to discover the truth. But it was better to know the worst than to wonder. She decided to ride to the Fontaines’ first, not because they were the nearest neighbors but because old Dr. Fontaine might be there. Melanie needed a doctor. She was not recovering as she should and Scarlett was frightened by her white weakness.

So on the first day when her foot had healed enough to stand a slipper, she mounted the Yankee’s horse. One foot in the shortened stirrup and the other leg crooked about the pommel in an approximation of a side saddle, she set out across the fields toward Mimosa, steeling herself to find it burned.

To her surprise and pleasure, she saw the faded yellow-stucco house standing amid the mimosa trees, looking as it had always looked. Warm happiness, happiness that almost brought tears, flooded her when the three Fontaine women came out of the house to welcome her with kisses and cries of joy.

But when the first exclamations of affectionate greeting were over and they all had trooped into the dining room to sit down, Scarlett felt a chill. The Yankees had not reached Mimosa because it was far off the main road. And so the Fontaines still had their stock and their provisions, but Mimosa was held by the same strange silence that hung over Tara, over the whole countryside. All the slaves except four women house servants had run away, frightened by the approach of the Yankees. There was not a man on the place unless Sally’s little boy, Joe, hardly out of diapers, could be counted as a man. Alone in the big house were Grandma Fontaine, in her seventies, her daughter-in-law who would always be known as Young Miss, though she was in her fifties, and Sally, who had barely turned twenty. They were far away from neighbors and unprotected, but if they were afraid it did not show on their faces. Probably, thought Scarlett, because Sally and Young Miss were too afraid of the porcelain-frail but indomitable old Grandma to dare voice any qualms. Scarlett herself was afraid of the old lady, for she had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and Scarlett had felt them both in the past.