Gone With the Wind (79 page)

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 teachings 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 somethin’ 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 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.

Part Four

CHAPTER XXXI

ON A COLD January 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.

“Miss Scarlett,” he questioned, “just how much cash money have you got?”

“Are you going to try to marry me for my money, Will?” she asked somewhat crossly.

“No, Ma’m. But I just wanted to know.”

She stared at him inquiringly. Will didn’t look serious, but then he never looked serious. However, she felt that something was wrong.

“I’ve got ten dollars in gold,” she said. “The last of that Yankee’s money.”

“Well, Ma’m, that won’t be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough for the taxes,” he answered and, stumping over to the fireplace, he leaned down and held his red hands to the blaze.

“Taxes?” she repeated. “Name of God, Will! We’ve already paid the taxes.”

“Yes’m. But they say you didn’t pay enough. I heard about it today over to Jonesboro.”

“But, Will, I can’t understand. What do you mean?”

“Miss Scarlett, I sure hate to bother you with more trouble when you’ve had your share but I’ve got to tell you. They say you ought to paid lots more taxes than you did. They’re runnin’ the assessment up on Tara sky high—higher than any in the County, I’ll be bound.”

“But they can’t make us pay more taxes when we’ve already paid them once.”

“Miss Scarlett, you don’t never go to Jonesboro often and I’m glad you don’t. It ain’t no place for a lady these days. But if you’d been there much, you’d know there’s a mighty rough bunch of Scallawags and Republicans and Carpetbaggers been runnin’ things recently. They’d make you mad enough to pop. And then, too, niggers pushin’ white folks off the sidewalks and—”

“But what’s that got to do with our taxes?”

“I’m gettin’ to it, Miss Scarlett. For some reason the rascals have histed the taxes on Tara till you’d think it was a thousand-bale place. After I heard about it, I sorter oozed around the barrooms pickin’ up gossip and I found out that somebody wants to buy in Tara cheap at the sheriffs sale, if you can’t pay the extra taxes. And everybody knows pretty well that you can’t pay them. I don’t know yet who it is wants this place. I couldn’t find out. But I think that pusillanimous feller, Hilton, that married Miss Cathleen knows, because he laughed kind of nasty when I tried to sound him out.”

Will sat down on the sofa and rubbed the stump of his leg. It ached in cold weather and the wooden peg was neither well padded nor comfortable. Scarlett looked at him wildly. His manner was so casual when he was sounding the death knell of Tara. Sold out at the sheriff’s sale? Where would they all go? And Tara belonging to some one else! No, that was unthinkable!

She had been so engrossed with the job of making Tara produce she had paid little heed to what was going on in the world outside. Now that she had Will and Ashley to attend to whatever business she might have in Jonesboro and Fayetteville, she seldom left the plantation. And even as she had listened with deaf ears to her father’s war talk in the days before the war came, so she had paid little heed to Will and Ashley’s discussions around the table after supper about the beginnings of Reconstruction.

Oh, of course, she knew about the Scalawags—Southerners who had turned Republican very profitably—and the Carpetbaggers, those Yankees who came South like buzzards after the surrender with all their worldly possessions in one carpetbag. And she had had a few unpleasant experiences with the Freedmen’s Bureau. She had gathered, also, that some of the free negroes were getting quite insolent. This last she could hardly believe, for she had never seen an insolent negro in her life.