To think you’ve been at Tara all this time and we didn’t know!” Young Miss broke in. “Oh, how I blame myself for not riding over to see! But there’s been so much to do here with most all the darkies gone that I just couldn’t get away. But I should have made time to go. It wasn’t neighborly of me. But, of course, we thought the Yankees had burned Tara like they did Twelve Oaks and the Macintosh house and that your folks had gone to Macon. And we never dreamed you were home, Scarlett.”
“Well, how were we to know different when Mr. O’Hara’s darkies came through here so scared they were popeyed and told us the Yankees were going to burn Tara?” Grandma interrupted.
“And we could see—” Sally began.
“I’m telling this, please,” said Old Miss shortly. “And they said the Yankees were camped all over Tara and your folks were fixing to go to Macon. And then that night we saw the glare of fire over toward Tara and it lasted for hours and it scared our fool darkies so bad they all ran off. What burned?”
“All our cotton—a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth,” said Scarlett bitterly.
“Be thankful it wasn’t your house,” said Grandma, leaning her chin on her cane. “You can always grow more cotton and you can’t grow a house. By the bye, had you all started picking your cotton?”
“No,” said Scarlett, “and now most of it is ruined. I don’t imagine there’s more than three bales left standing, in the far field in the creek bottom, and what earthly good will it do? All our field hands are gone and there’s nobody to pick it.”
“Mercy me, all our field hands are gone and there’s nobody to pick it!” mimicked Grandma and bent a satiric glance on Scarlett “What’s wrong with your own pretty paws, Miss, and those of your sisters?”
“Me? Pick cotton?” cried Scarlett aghast, as if Grandma had been suggesting some repulsive crime. “Like a field hand? Like white trash? Like the Slattery women?”
“White trash, indeed! Well, isn’t this generation soft and ladylike! Let me tell you, Miss, when I was a girl my father lost all his money and I wasn’t above doing honest work with my hands and in the fields too, till Pa got enough money to buy some more darkies. I’ve hoed my row and I’ve picked my cotton and I can do it again if I have to. And it looks like I’ll have to. White trash, indeed!”
“Oh, but Mama Fontaine,” cried her daughter-in-law, casting imploring glances at the two girls, urging them to help her smooth the old lady’s feathers. “That was so long ago, a different day entirely, and times have changed.”
“Times never change when there’s a need for honest work to be done,” stated the sharp-eyed old lady, refusing to be soothed. “And I’m ashamed for your mother, Scarlett, to hear you stand there and talk as though honest work made white trash out of nice people. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’—”
To change the subject, Scarlett hastily questioned: “What about the Tarletons and the Calverts? Were they burned out? Have they refugeed to Macon?”
“The Yankees never got to the Tarletons. They’re off the main road, like we are, but they did get to the Calverts and they stole all their stock and poultry and got all the darkies to run off with them—” Sally began.
Grandma interrupted.
“Hah! They promised all the black wenches silk dresses and gold earbobs—that’s what they did. And Cathleen Calvert said some of the troopers went off with the black fools behind them on their saddles. Well, all they’ll get will be yellow babies and I can’t say that Yankee blood will improve the stock.”
“Oh, Mama Fontaine!”
“Don’t pull such a shocked face, Jane. We’re all married, aren’t we? And, God knows, we’ve seen mulatto babies before this.”
“Why didn’t they burn the Calverts’ house?”
“The house was saved by the combined accents of the second Mrs. Calvert and that Yankee overseer of hers, Hilton,” said Old Miss, who always referred to the ex-governess as the “second Mrs. Calvert,” although the first Mrs. Calvert had been dead twenty years.
“ ‘We are staunch Union sympathizers,’ ” mimicked the old lady, twanging the words through her long thin nose. “Cathleen said the two of them swore up hill and down dale that the whole passel of Calverts were Yankees. And Mr. Calvert dead in the Wilderness! And Raiford at Gettysburg and Cade in Virginia with the army! Cathleen was so mortified she said she’d rather the house had been burned. She said Cade would bust when he came home and heard about it. But then, that’s what a man gets for marrying a Yankee woman—no pride, no decency, always thinking about their own skins. … How come they didn’t burn Tara, Scarlett?”
For a moment Scarlett paused before answering. She knew the very next question would be: “And how are all your folks? And how is your dear mother?” She knew she could not tell them Ellen was dead. She knew that if she spoke those words or even let herself think of them in the presence of these sympathetic women, she would burst into a storm of tears and cry until she was sick. And she could not let herself cry. She had not really cried since she came home and she knew that if she once let down the floodgates, her closely husbanded courage would all be gone. But she knew, too, looking with confusion at the friendly faces about her, that if she withheld the news of Ellen’s death, the Fontaines would never forgive her. Grandma in particular was devoted to Ellen and there were very few people in the County for whom the old lady gave a snap of her skinny fingers.
“Well, speak up,” said Grandma, looking sharply at her. “Don’t you know, Miss?”
“Well, you see, I didn’t get home till the day after the battle,” she answered hastily. The Yankees were all gone then. Pa— Pa told me that—that he got them not to burn the house because Suellen and Carreen were so ill with typhoid they couldn’t be moved.”
“That’s the first time I ever heard of a Yankee doing a decent thing,” said Grandma, as if she regretted hearing anything good about the invaders. “And how are the girls now?”