Scarlett (93 page)

“Now I will learn the answer, I believed. The seminary contains many holy books and holy men and all the wisdom of the Church. I studied and I prayed and I searched. I found ecstasy in prayer, knowledge in studies. But not the knowledge I was seeking. ‘Why?’ I asked my teachers, ‘why must little children die from hunger?’ But the only answer given me was, ‘Trust in God’s wisdom and have faith in His love.’ ”

Colum raised his arms above his tortured face, raised his voice to a shout. “God, my Father, I feel Your presence and Your almighty power. But I cannot see Your face. Why have You turned away from Your people the Irish?” His arms dropped.

“There is no answer, Scarlett,” he said brokenly, “there has never been an answer. But I saw a vision, and I have followed it. In my vision the starving children came together and their weakness was less weak in their numbers. They rose up in their thousands, their fleshless small arms reaching out, and they overturned the carts heaped with food, and they did not die. It is my vocation now to turn over those carts, to drive out the English from their banqueting tables, to give Ireland the love and mercy that God has denied her.”

Scarlett gasped at his blasphemy. “You’ll go to Hell.”

“I am in Hell! When I see soldiers mocking a mother who must beg to buy food for her children, it is a vision from Hell. When I see old men pushed into the muck of the street so that soldiers will have the sidewalks, I see Hell. When I see evictions, floggings, the groaning carts of grain passing the family with a square meter of potatoes to keep them from death, I say that all Ireland is Hell, and I will gladly suffer death and then torment for all eternity to spare the Irish one hour of Hell on earth.”

Scarlett was shaken by his vehemence. She groped for understanding. Suppose she hadn’t been there when the English came with the battering ram to Daniel’s house? Suppose all her money was gone, and Cat was hungry? Suppose the English soldiers really were like Yankees and stole her animals and burned the fields she’d watched greening?

She knew what it was to be helpless before an army. She knew the feeling of hunger. They were memories no amount of gold could ever quite erase.

“How can I help you?” she asked Colum. He was fighting for Ireland, and Ireland was the home of her people and her child.

T
he ship captain’s wife was a stout, red-faced woman who took one look at Cat and held out her arms. “Will she come to me?” Cat reached out in reply. Scarlett was sure Cat was interested in the eyeglasses hanging on a chain around the woman’s neck, but she didn’t say so. She loved to hear Cat admired, and the captain’s wife was doing just that. “What a little beauty she is—no, sweetheart, they go on your nose, not in your mouth—with such lovely olive skin. Was her father Spanish?”

Scarlett thought quickly. “Her grandmother,” she said.

“How nice.” She extracted the glasses from Cat’s fingers and substituted a ship’s biscuit.

“I’m a grandmother four times over, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. I started sailing with the captain when the children were grown because I couldn’t stand the empty house. But now there’s the added pleasure of the grandchildren. We’ll go to Philadelphia for cargo after Savannah, and I’ll have two days there with my daughter and her two.”

She’s going to talk me to death before we’re out of the bay, Scarlett thought. I’ll never be able to stand two weeks of this.

She discovered very soon that she needn’t have worried. The captain’s wife repeated the same things so often that Scarlett had only to nod and say “My goodness” at intervals without listening at all. And the older woman was wonderful with Cat. Scarlett could take her exercise on deck without worry about the baby.

She did her best thinking then, with the salt wind in her face. Mostly she planned. She had a lot to do. She had to find a buyer for her store. And there was the house on Peachtree Street. Rhett paid for the upkeep, but it was ridiculous to have it sitting there empty when she’d never use it again…

So she’d sell the Peachtree Street house and the store. And the saloon. That was sort of too bad. The saloon produced excellent income and was no trouble at all. But she’d made up her mind to cut herself free of Atlanta, and that included the saloon.

What about the houses she was building? She didn’t know anything at all about that project. She had to check and make sure the builder was still using Ashley’s lumber…

She had to make sure Ashley was all right. And Beau. She’d promised Melanie.

Then, when she was done with Atlanta, she would go to Tara. That must be last. Because once Wade and Ella learned they were going home with her, they’d be anxious to get going. It wouldn’t be fair to keep them dangling. And saying goodbye to Tara would be the hardest thing she had to do. Best to do it quickly; it wouldn’t hurt so much then. Oh, how she longed to see it.

The long slow miles up the Savannah River from the sea to the city seemed to go on forever. The ship had to be towed by a steam-powered tugboat through the channel. Scarlett walked restlessly from one side of the deck to the other with Cat in her arms, trying to enjoy the baby’s excited reaction to the marsh birds’ sudden eruption into flight. They were so close now, why couldn’t they get there? She wanted to see America, hear American voices.

At last. There was the city. And the docks. “Oh, and listen, Cat, listen to the singing. Those are black folks’ songs, this is the South, feel the sun? It will last for days and days. Oh, my darling, my Cat, Momma’s home.”

Maureen’s kitchen was just as it had been, nothing had changed. The family was the same. The affection. The swarms of O’Hara children. Patricia’s baby was a boy, almost a year old, and Katie was pregnant. Cat was embraced at once into the daily rhythms of the three-house home. She regarded the other children with curiosity, pulled their hair, submitted to hers being pulled, became one of them.

Scarlett was jealous. She won’t miss me at all, and I cannot bear to leave her, but I have to. Too many people in Atlanta know Rhett and might tell him about her. I’d kill him before I’d let him take her from me. I can’t take her with me. I have no choice. The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. And I’ll bring her own brother and sister as a gift for her.

She sent telegrams to Uncle Henry Hamilton at his office, and to Pansy at the house on Peachtree Street, and took the train for Atlanta on the twelfth of May. She was both excited and nervous. She’d been gone so long—anything might have happened. She wouldn’t fret about it now, she’d find out soon enough. In the meantime she’d simply enjoy the hot Georgia sun and the pleasure of being all dressed up. She’d had to wear mourning on the ship, but now she was radiant in emerald green Irish linen.

But Scarlett had forgotten how dirty American trains were. The spittoons at each end of the car were soon surrounded by evil-smelling tobacco juice. The aisle became a filthy debris trap before twenty miles were done. A drunk lurched unevenly past her seat and she suddenly realized that she should not be travelling alone. Why, anybody at all could move my little hand valise and sit next to me! We do things an awful lot better in Ireland. First Class means what it says. Nobody intrudes on you in your own little compartment. She opened the Savannah newspaper as a shield. Her pretty linen suit was already rumpled and dusty.

The hubbub at the Atlanta Depot and the shouting daredevil drivers in the maelstrom at Five Points made Scarlett’s heart race with excitement, and she forgot the grime of the train. How alive it all was, and vital, and always changing. There were buildings she’d never seen before, new names above old storefronts, noise and hurry and push.

She looked eagerly out the window of her carriage at the houses on Peachtree Street, identifying the owners to herself, noting the signs of better times for them. The Merriwethers had a new roof, the Meades a new color paint. Things weren’t nearly as shabby as they’d been when she left a year and a half back.

And there was her house! Oh. I don’t remember it being so crowded on the lot like that. There’s hardly any yard at all. Was it always so close to the street? For pity’s sake, I’m just being silly. What difference does it make? I’ve already decided to sell it anyhow.

This was no time to sell, said Uncle Henry Hamilton. The depression was no better, business was bad everywhere. The hardest hit market of all was real estate, and the hardest hit real estate was the big places like hers. People were moving down, not up.

The little houses, now, like the ones she’d been building on the edge of town, they were selling as fast as people could put them up. She was making a fortune there. Why did she want to sell anyhow? It wasn’t as if the house cost her anything, Rhett paid all the bills with money left over, too.

He’s looking at me like I smelled bad or something, Scarlett thought. He blames me for the divorce. For a moment she felt like protesting, telling her side of the story, telling what had really happened. Uncle Henry was the only one left who was on my side. Without him there won’t be a soul in Atlanta who doesn’t look down on me.

And it doesn’t matter a bit. The idea burst in her mind like a Roman candle. Henry Hamilton’s wrong in judging me just like everybody else in Atlanta was wrong in judging me. I’m not like them, and I don’t want to be. I’m different, I’m me. I’m The O’Hara.

“If you don’t want to bother with selling my property, I won’t take it against you, Henry,” she said. “Just tell me so.” There was a simple dignity in her manner.

“I’m an old man, Scarlett. It would probably be better for you to hook up with a younger lawyer.”

Scarlett rose from her chair, held out her hand, smiled with real fondness for him.

It was only after she was gone that he could put words to the difference in her. “Scarlett’s grown up. She didn’t call me ‘Uncle Henry.’ ”

“Is Mrs. Butler at home?”

Scarlett recognized Ashley’s voice immediately. She hurried from the sitting room into the hall; a quick gesture of her hand dismissed the maid who’d answered the door. “Ashley, dear, I’m so happy to see you.” She held out both her hands to him.

He clasped them tightly in his, looking down at her. “Scarlett, you’ve never looked lovelier. Foreign climates agree with you. Tell me where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing. Uncle Henry said you’d gone to Savannah, then he lost touch. We all wondered.”

I’ll just bet you all wondered, especially your adder-tongued old sister, she thought. “Come in and sit down,” she said, “I’m dying to hear all the news.”

The maid was hovering to one side. Scarlett said quietly as she passed her, “Bring us a pot of coffee and some cakes.”

She led the way into the sitting room, took one corner of a settee, patted the seat beside her. “Sit here beside me, Ashley, do. I want to look at you.” Thank the Lord, he’s lost that hangdog look he had. Henry Hamilton must have been right when he said that Ashley was doing fine. Scarlett studied him through lowered lashes while she busied herself clearing room on a table for the coffee tray. Ashley Wilkes was still a handsome man. His thin aristocratic features had become more distinguished with age. But he looked older than his years. He can’t be more than forty, Scarlett thought, and his hair’s more silver than gold. He must spend a lot more time in the lumberyard than he used to, he’s got a nice color to his skin, not that office gray look he had before. She looked up with a smile. It was good to see him. Especially looking so fit. Her obligation to Melanie didn’t seem so burdensome now.

“How’s Aunt Pitty? And India? And Beau? He must be practically a grown man!”

Pitty and India were just the same, said Ashley with a quirk of his lips. Pitty got the vapors at every passing shadow and India was very busy with committee work to improve the moral tone of Atlanta. They spoiled him abominably, two spinsters trying to see which one was the best mother hen. They tried to spoil Beau, too, but he’d have none of it. Ashley’s gray eyes lit up with pride. Beau was a real little man. He’d be twelve soon, but you’d take him for almost fifteen. He was president of a sort of club the neighborhood boys had formed. They’d built a tree house in Pitty’s backyard, made from the best lumber the mill turned out, too. Beau had seen to that; he already knew more about the lumber business than his father, said Ashley with a mixture of ruefulness and admiration. And, he added with intensified pride, the boy might have the makings of a scholar. He’d already won a school prize for Latin composition, and he was reading books far above his age level—

“But you must be bored by all this, Scarlett. Proud fathers can be very tedious.”

“Not a bit, Ashley,” Scarlett lied. Books, books, books, that was exactly what was wrong with the Wilkeses. They did all their living out of books, not life. But maybe the boy would be all right. If he knew lumber already, there was hope for him. Now, if Ashley would just not get all stiff-necked, she had one more promise to Melly that she could settle. Scarlett put her hand on Ashley’s sleeve. “I’ve got a big favor to beg,” she said. Her eyes were wide with entreaty.

“Anything, Scarlett, you should know that.” Ashley covered her hand with his.

“I’d like for you to promise that you’ll let me send Beau to University and then with Wade on a Grand Tour. It would mean a lot to me—after all, I think about him as practically my son, too, seeing that I was there when he was born. And I’ve come into really a lot of money lately, so that’s no problem. You can’t be so mean that you’d say no.”