Gone with the Wind (103 page)

“You can have my horse,” said Frank calmly. “I've only ten dollars with me but if you can wait till morning—”

“Hell's afire, I can't wait!” said Tony emphatically but
jovially. “They're probably right behind me. I didn't get much of a start. If it hadn't been for Ashley dragging me out of there and making me get on my horse, I'd have stayed there like a fool and probably had my neck stretched by now. Good fellow, Ashley.”

So Ashley was mixed up in this frightening puzzle. Scarlett went cold, her hand at her throat. Did the Yankees have Ashley now? Why, why didn't Frank ask what it was all about? Why did he take it all so coolly, so much as a matter of course? She struggled to get the question to her lips.

“What—” she began. “Who—”

“Your father's old overseer—that damned—Jonas Wilkerson.”

“Did you—is he dead?”

“My God, Scarlett O'Hara!” said Tony peevishly. “When I start out to cut somebody up, you don't think I'd be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”

“Good,” said Frank casually. “I never liked the fellow.”

Scarlett looked at him. This was not the meek Frank she knew, the nervous beard clawer who she had learned could be bullied with such ease. There was an air about him that was crisp and cool and he was meeting the emergency with no unnecessary words. He was a man and Tony was a man and this situation of violence was men's business in which a woman had no part.

“But Ashley— Did he—”

“No. He wanted to kill him but I told him it was my right, because Sally is my sister-in-law, and he saw reason finally. He went into Jonesboro with me, in case Wilkerson got me first. But I don't think old Ash will get in any trouble about it. I hope not. Got any jam for
this corn pone? And can you wrap me up something to take with me?”

“I shall scream if you don't tell me everything.”

“Wait till I've gone and then scream if you've got to. I'll tell you about it while Frank saddles the horse. That damned—Wilkerson has caused enough trouble already. You know how he did you about your taxes. That's just one of his meannesses. But the worst thing was the way he kept the darkies stirred up. If anybody had told me I'd ever live to see the day when I'd hate darkies! Damn their black souls, they believe anything those scoundrels tell them and forget every living thing we've done for them. Now the Yankees are talking about letting the darkies vote. And they won't let us vote. Why, there's hardly a handful of Democrats in the whole County who aren't barred from voting, now that they've ruled out every man who fought in the Confederate Army. And if they give the negroes the vote, it's the end of us. Damn it, it's our state! It doesn't belong to the Yankees! By God, Scarlett, it isn't to be borne! And it won't be borne! We'll do something about it if it means another war. Soon we'll be having nigger judges, nigger legislators—black apes out of the jungle—”

“Please—hurry, tell me! What did you do?”

“Give me another mite of that pone before you wrap it up. Well, the word got around that Wilkerson had gone a bit too far with his nigger-equality business. Oh, yes, he talks it to those black fools by the hour. He had the gall—the—” Tony spluttered helplessly, “to say niggers had a right to—to—white women.”

“Oh, Tony, no!”

“By God, yes! I don't wonder you look sick. But hell's
afire, Scarlett, it can't be news to you. They've been telling it to them here in Atlanta.”

“I—I didn't know.”

“Well, Frank would have kept it from you. Anyway, after that, we all sort of thought we'd call on Mr. Wilkerson privately by night and tend to him, but before we could— You remember that black buck, Eustis, who used to be our foreman?”

“Yes.”

“Came to the kitchen door today while Sally was fixing dinner and—I don't know what he said to her. I guess I'll never know. But he said something and I heard her scream and I ran into the kitchen and there he was, drunk as a fiddler's bitch— I beg your pardon, Scarlett, it just slipped out.”

“Go on.”

“I shot him and when Mother ran in to take care of Sally, I got my horse and started to Jonesboro for Wilkerson. He was the one to blame. The damned black fool would never have thought of it but for him. And on the way past Tara, I met Ashley and, of course, he went with me. He said to let him do it because of the way Wilkerson acted about Tara and I said No, it was my place because Sally was my own dead brother's wife, and he went with me arguing the whole way. And when we got to town, by God, Scarlett, do you know I hadn't even brought my pistol. I'd left it in the stable. So mad I forgot—”

He paused and gnawed the tough pone and Scarlett shivered. The murderous rages of the Fontaines had made County history long before this chapter had opened.

“So I had to take my knife to him. I found him in the
barroom. I got him in a corner with Ashley holding back the others and I told him why before I lit into him. Why, it was over before I knew it,” said Tony reflecting. “First thing I knew, Ashley had me on my horse and told me to come to you folks. Ashley's a good man in a pinch. He keeps his head.”

Frank came in, his greatcoat over his arm, and handed it to Tony. It was his only heavy coat but Scarlett made no protest. She seemed so much on the outside of this affair, this purely masculine affair.

“But Tony—they need you at home. Surely, if you went back and explained—”

“Frank, you've married a fool,” said Tony with a grin, struggling into the coat. “She thinks the Yankees will reward a man for keeping niggers off his women folks. So they will, with a drumhead court and a rope. Give me a kiss, Scarlett. Frank won't mind and I may never see you again. Texas is a long way off. I won't dare write, so let the home folks know I got this far in safety.”

She let him kiss her and the two men went out into the driving rain and stood for a moment, talking on the back porch. Then she heard a sudden splashing of hooves and Tony was gone. She opened the door a crack and saw Frank leading a heaving, stumbling horse into the carriage house. She shut the door again and sat down, her knees trembling.

Now she knew what Reconstruction meant, knew as well as if the house were ringed about by naked savages, squatting in breech clouts. Now there came rushing to her mind many things to which she had given little thought recently, conversations she had heard but to which she had not listened, masculine talk which had been checked half finished when she came into rooms,
small incidents in which she had seen no significance at the time, Frank's futile warnings to her against driving out to the mill with only the feeble Uncle Peter to protect her. Now they fitted themselves together into one horrifying picture.

The negroes were on top and behind them were the Yankee bayonets. She could be killed, she could be raped and, very probably, nothing would ever be done about it. And anyone who avenged her would be hanged by the Yankees, hanged without benefit of trial by judge and jury. Yankee officers who knew nothing of law and cared less for the circumstances of the crime could go through the motions of holding a trial and put a rope around a Southerner's neck.

“What can we do?” she thought, wringing her hands in an agony of helpless fear. “What can we do with devils who'd hang a nice boy like Tony just for killing a drunken buck and a scoundrelly Scallawag to protect his women folks?”

“It isn't to be borne!” Tony had cried and he was right. It couldn't be borne. But what could they do except bear it, helpless as they were? She fell to trembling and, for the first time in her life, she saw people and events as something apart from herself, saw clearly that Scarlett O'Hara, frightened and helpless, was not all that mattered. There were thousands of women like her, all over the South, who were frightened and helpless. And thousands of men, who had laid down their arms at Appomattox, had taken them up again and stood ready to risk their necks on a minute's notice to protect those women.

There had been something in Tony's face which had been mirrored in Frank's, an expression she had seen recently on the faces of other men in Atlanta, a look she
had noticed but had not troubled to analyze. It was an expression vastly different from the tired helplessness she had seen in the faces of men coming home from the war after the surrender. Those men had not cared about anything except getting home. Now they were caring about something again, numbed nerves were coming back to life and the old spirit was beginning to burn. They were caring again with a cold ruthless bitterness. And, like Tony, they were thinking: “It isn't to be borne!”

She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting. But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her—fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing.

For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn't to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant negroes drunk with whisky and freedom.

As she thought of Tony's sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family. Gerald's blood was in her, violent blood. She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous
exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath—murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being “uppity to a lady.”

When Frank came in dripping with rain and coughing, she leaped to her feet.

“Oh, Frank, how long will it be like this?”

“As long as the Yankees hate us so, Sugar.”

“Is there nothing anybody can do?”

Frank passed a tired hand over his wet beard. “We are doing things.”

“What?”

“Why talk of them till we have accomplished something? It may take years. Perhaps—perhaps the South will always be like this.”

“Oh, no!”

“Sugar, come to bed. You must be chilled. You are shaking.”

“When will it all end?”

“When we can all vote again, Sugar. When every man who fought for the South can put a ballot in the box for a Southerner and a Democrat.”

“A ballot?” she cried despairingly. “What good's a ballot when the darkies have lost their minds—when the Yankees have poisoned them against us?”

Frank went on to explain in his patient manner, but the idea that ballots would cure the trouble was too complicated for her to follow. She was thinking gratefully that Jonas Wilkerson would never again be a menace to Tara and she was thinking about Tony.

“Oh, the poor Fontaines!” she exclaimed. “Only Alex left and so much to do at Mimosa. Why didn't Tony have
sense enough to—to do it at night when no one would know who it was? A sight more good he'd do helping with the spring plowing than in Texas.”

Frank put an arm about her. Usually he was gingerly when he did this, as if he anticipated being impatiently shaken off, but tonight there was a far-off look in his eyes and his arm was firm about her waist.

“There are things more important now than plowing, Sugar. And scaring the darkies and teaching the Scallawags a lesson is one of them. As long as there are fine boys like Tony left, I guess we won't need to worry about the South too much. Come to bed.”

“But, Frank—”

“If we just stand together and don't give an inch to the Yankees, we'll win, some day. Don't you bother your pretty head about it, Sugar. You let your men folks worry about it. Maybe it won't come in our time, but surely it will come some day. The Yankees will get tired of pestering us when they see they can't even dent us, and then we'll have a decent world to live in and raise our children in.”

She thought of Wade and the secret she had carried silently for some days. No, she didn't want her children raised in this welter of hate and uncertainty, of bitterness and violence lurking just below the surface, of poverty and grinding hardships and insecurity. She never wanted children of hers to know what all this was like. She wanted a secure and well-ordered world in which she could look forward and know there was a safe future ahead for them, a world where her children would know only softness and warmth and good clothes and fine food.

Frank thought this could be accomplished by voting. Voting? What did votes matter? Nice people in the
South would never have the vote again. There was only one thing in the world that was a certain bulwark against any calamity which fate could bring, and that was money. She thought feverishly that they must have money, lots of it to keep them safe against disaster.

Abruptly, she told him she was going to have a baby.

*     *     *

For weeks after Tony's escape, Aunt Pitty's house was subjected to repeated searches by parties of Yankee soldiers. They invaded the house at all hours and without warning. They swarmed through the rooms, asking questions, opening closets, prodding clothes hampers, peering under beds. The military authorities had heard that Tony had been advised to go to Miss Pitty's house, and they were certain he was still hiding there or somewhere in the neighborhood.

As a result, Aunt Pitty was chronically in what Uncle Peter called a “state,” never knowing when her bedroom would be entered by an officer and a squad of men. Neither Frank nor Scarlett had mentioned Tony's brief visit, so the old lady could have revealed nothing, even had she been so inclined. She was entirely honest in her fluttery protestations that she had seen Tony Fontaine only once in her life and that was at Christmas time in 1862.