Gone with the Wind (82 page)

“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. 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.

O
N A COLD
J
ANUARY AFTERNOON IN 1866
, Scarlett sat in the office writing a letter to Aunt Pitty, explaining in detail for the tenth time why neither she, Melanie nor Ashley could come back to Atlanta to live with her. She wrote impatiently because she knew Aunt Pitty would read no farther than the opening lines and then write her again, wailing: “But I'm afraid to live by myself!”

Her hands were chilled and she paused to rub them together and to scuff her feet deeper into the strip of old quilting wrapped about them. The soles of her slippers were practically gone and were reinforced with pieces of carpet. The carpet kept her feet off the floor but did little to keep them warm. That morning Will had taken the horse to Jonesboro to get him shod. Scarlett thought grimly that things were indeed at a pretty pass when horses had shoes and people's feet were as bare as yard dogs'.

She picked up her quill to resume her writing but laid it down when she heard Will coming in at the back door. She heard the thump-thump of his wooden leg in the hall outside the office and then he stopped. She waited for a moment for him to enter and when he made no move she called to him. He came in, his ears red from the cold, his pinkish hair awry, and stood looking down at her, a faintly humorous smile on his lips.