Three years of stored cotton—one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,all in one blaze!
“And the fiah light up the place lak it wuz day—we wuz scared the house would buhn,too,and it wuz so bright in this hyah room that you could mos'pick a needle offen the flo.And w'en the light shine in the winder,it look lak it wake Miss Ellen up and she set right up in bed and cry out loud,time and agin:‘Feeleep!Feeleep!’I ain'never heerd no sech name but it wuz a name and she wuz callin'him.”
Mammy stood as though turned to stone glaring at Dilcey and Scarlett dropped her head into her hands.Philippe—who was he and what had he been to Mother that she died calling him?
The long road from Atlanta to Tara had ended,ended in a blank wall,the road that was to end in Ellen's arms.Never again could Scarlett lie down,as a child,secure beneath her father's roof with the protection of her mother's love wrapped about her like an eiderdown quilt.There was no security or haven to which she could turn now.No turning or twisting would avoid this dead end to which she had come.There was no one on whose shoulders she could rest her burdens.Her father was old and stunned,her sisters ill,Melanie frail and weak,the children helpless,and the negroes looking up to her with childlike faith,clinging to her skirts,knowing that Ellen's daughter would be the refuge Ellen had always been.
Through the window,in the faint light of the rising moon,Tara stretched before her,negroes gone,acres desolate,barns ruined,like a body bleeding under her eyes,like her own body,slowly bleeding.This was the end of the road,quivering old age,sickness,hungry mouths,helpless hands plucking at her skirts.And at the end of this road,there was nothing—nothing but Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton,nineteen years old,a widow with a little child.
What would she do with all of this?Aunt Pitty and the Burrs in Macon could take Melanie and her baby.If the girls recovered,Ellen's family would have to take them,whether they liked it or not.And she and Gerald could turn to Uncle James and Andrew.
She looked at the thin forms,tossing before her,the sheets about them moist and dark from dripping water.She did not like Suellen.She saw it now with a sudden clarity.She had never liked her.She did not especially love Carreen—she could not love anyone who was weak.But they were of her blood,part of Tara.No,she could not let them live out their lives in their aunts'homes as poor relations.An O'Hara a poor relation,living on charity bread and sufferance!Oh,never that!
Was there no escape from this dead end?Her tired brain moved so slowly.She raised her hands to her head as wearily as if the air were water against which her arms struggled.She took the gourd from between the glass and bottle and looked in it.There was some whisky left in the bottom,how much she could not tell in the uncertain light.Strange that the sharp smell did not offend her nostrils now.She drank slowly but this time the liquid did not burn,only a dull warmth followed.
She set down the empty gourd and looked about her.This was all a dream,this smoke-filled dim room,the scrawny girls,Mammy shapeless and huge crouching beside the bed,Dilcey a still bronze image with the sleeping pink morsel against her dark breast—all a dream from which she would awake,to smell bacon frying in the kitchen,hear the throaty laughter of the negroes and the creaking of wagons fieldward bound,and Ellen's gentle insistent hand upon her.
Then she discovered she was in her own room,on her own bed,faint moonlight pricking the darkness,and Mammy and Dilcey were undressing her.The torturing stays no longer pinched her waist and she could breathe deeply and quietly to the bottom of her lungs and her abdomen.She felt her stockings being stripped gently from her and heard Mammy murmuring indistinguishable comforting sounds as she bathed her blistered feet.How cool the water was,how good to lie here in softness,like a child.She sighed and relaxed and after a time which might have been a year or a second,she was alone and the room was brighter as the rays of the moon streamed in across the bed.
She did not know she was drunk,drunk with fatigue and whisky.She only knew she had left her tired body and floated somewhere above it where there was no pain and no weariness and her brain saw things with an inhuman clarity.
She was seeing things with new eyes for,somewhere along the long road to Tara,she had left her girlhood behind her.She was no longer plastic clay,yielding imprint to each new experience.The clay had hardened,some time in this indeterminate day which had lasted a thousand years.Tonight was the last time she would ever be ministered to as a child.She was a woman now and youth was gone.
No,she could not,would not,turn to Gerald's or Ellen's families.The O'Haras did not take charity.The O'Haras looked after their own.Her burdens were her own and burdens were for shoulders strong enough to bear them.She thought without surprise,looking down from her height,that her shoulders were strong enough to bear anything now,having borne the worst that could ever happen to her.She could not desert Tara;she belonged to the red acres far more than they could ever belong to her.Her roots went deep into the blood-colored soil and sucked up life,as did the cotton.She would stay at Tara and keep it,somehow,keep her father and her sisters,Melanie and Ashley's child,the negroes.Tomorrow—oh,tomorrow!Tomorrow she would fit the yoke about her neck.Tomorrow there would be so many things to do.Go to Twelve Oaks and the MacIntosh place and see if anything was left in the deserted gardens,go to the river swamps and beat them for straying hogs and chickens,go to Jonesboro and Lovejoy with Ellen's jewelry—there must be someone left there who would sell something to eat.Tomorrow—tomorrow—her brain ticked slowly and more slowly,like a clock running down,but the clarity of vision persisted.
