Scarlett (7 page)

T
he Fontaine plantation was named Mimosa, for the grove of trees that surrounded the faded yellow stucco house. The trees’ feathery pink flowers had fallen at summer’s end, but the fern-like leaves were still vivid green on the boughs. They swayed like dancers in the light wind, making shifting patterns of shadow on the mottled walls of the butter-colored house. It looked warm and welcoming in the low, slanting sunlight.

Oh, I hope Tony hasn’t changed too much, Scarlett thought nervously. Seven years is such a long time. Her feet dragged when Will lifted her down from the buggy. Suppose Tony looked old and tired and—well—defeated, like Ashley. It would be more than she could bear. She lagged behind Will and Suellen on the path to the door.

Then the door swung open with a bang and all her apprehension vanished. “Who’s that strolling up like they were going to church? Don’t you know enough to rush in and welcome a hero when he comes home?” Tony’s voice was full of laughter, just the way it had always been, his hair and eyes as black as ever, his wide grin as bright and mischievous.

“Tony!” Scarlett cried. “You look just the same.”

“Is that you, Scarlett? Come and give me a kiss. You, too, Suellen. You weren’t generous with kisses like Scarlett in the old days, but Will must have taught you a few things after you married. I intend to kiss every female over six years old in the whole state of Georgia now that I’m back.”

Suellen giggled nervously and looked at Will. A slight smile on his placid thin face granted her permission, but Tony hadn’t bothered to wait for it. He grabbed her around her thickened waist and planted a smacking kiss on her lips. She was pink with confusion and pleasure when he released her. The dashing Fontaine brothers had paid Suellen little attention in the pre-War years of beaux and belles. Will put a warm, steadying arm around her shoulders.

“Scarlett, honey,” Tony shouted, his arms held wide. Scarlett stepped into his embrace, hugged him tight around the neck.

“You got a lot taller in Texas,” she exclaimed. Tony was laughing as he kissed her offered lips. Then he lifted his trouser leg to show them all the high-heeled boots he was wearing. Everyone got taller in Texas, he said; he wouldn’t be surprised if it was a law there.

Alex Fontaine smiled over Tony’s shoulder. “You’ll hear more about Texas than anybody rightly needs to know,” he drawled, “that is, if Tony lets you come in the house. He’s forgotten about things like that. In Texas they all live around campfires under the stars instead of having walls and a roof.” Alex was glowing with happiness. He looks like he’d like to hug and kiss Tony himself, thought Scarlett, and why not? They were close as two fingers on a hand the whole time they were growing up. Alex must have missed him something awful. Sudden tears pricked her eyes. Tony’s exuberant return home was the first joyful event in the County since Sherman’s troops had devastated the land and the lives of its people. She hardly knew how to respond to such a rush of happiness.

Alex’s wife, Sally, took her by the hand when she entered the shabby living room. “I know just how you feel, Scarlett,” she whispered. “We’d nearly forgot how to have fun. There’s been more laughing in this house today than in the past ten years put together. We’ll make the rafters ring tonight.” Sally’s eyes were full of tears, too.

Then the rafters began to ring. The Tarletons had arrived. “Thank heaven you’re back in one piece, boy,” Beatrice Tarleton greeted Tony. “You can have the pick of any one of my three girls. I’ve only got one grandchild, and I’m not getting any younger.”

“Oh, Ma!” moaned Hetty and Camilla and Miranda Tarleton in chorus. Then they laughed. Their mother’s preoccupation with breeding horses and people was too well-known in the County for them to pretend embarrassment. But Tony was blushing crimson.

Scarlett and Sally hooted.

Before the light ebbed, Beatrice Tarleton insisted on seeing the horses Tony had brought with him from Texas, and the argument about the merits of Eastern thoroughbreds versus Western mustangs raged until everyone else begged for a truce. “And a drink,” said Alex. “I’ve even found some real whiskey for the celebration instead of ’shine.”

Scarlett wished—not for the first time—that taking a drink was not a pleasure from which ladies were automatically excluded. She would have enjoyed one. Even more, she would have enjoyed talking with the men instead of being exiled to the other side of the room for women’s talk of babies and household management. She had never understood or accepted the traditional segregation of the sexes. But it was the way things were done, always had been done, and she resigned herself to it. At least she could amuse herself by watching the Tarleton girls pretend that they weren’t thinking along exactly the same lines as their mother: If only Tony would look their way instead of being so wrapped up in whatever the men were talking about!

“Little Joe must be thrilled half to death to have his uncle home,” Hetty Tarleton was saying to Sally. Hetty could afford to ignore the men. Her fat one-armed husband was one of them.

Sally replied with details about her little boy that bored Scarlett silly. She wondered how soon they’d have supper. It couldn’t be too very long; all the men were farmers and would have to be up the next morning at dawn. That meant an early end to the evening’s festivities.

She was right about an early supper; the men announced that they were ready for it after only one drink. But she was wrong about the early close to the party. Everyone was enjoying it too much to let it end. Tony fascinated them with stories of his adventures. “It was hardly a week before I hooked up with the Texas Rangers,” he said with a roar of laughter. “The state was under Yankee military rule, like every place else in the South, but hell—apologies, ladies—those bluecoats didn’t have the first idea what to do about the Indians. The Rangers had been fighting ’em all along, and the only hope the ranchers had was that the Rangers would keep on protecting them. So that’s what they did. I knew right off that I’d found my kind of people, and I joined up. It was glorious! No uniforms, no marching on an empty stomach to where some fool general wants you to go, no drilling, no sir! You jump on your horse and head out with a bunch of your fellows and go find the fighting.”

Tony’s black eyes sparkled with excitement. Alex’s matched them. The Fontaines had always loved a good fight. And hated discipline.

“What are the Indians like?” asked one of the Tarleton girls. “Do they really torture people?”

“You don’t want to hear about that,” said Tony, his laughing eyes suddenly dull. Then he smiled. “They’re smart as paint when it comes to fighting. The Rangers learned early on that if they were going to beat the red devils, they’d have to learn their way of doing things. Why, we can track a man or an animal across bare rock or even water, better than any hound dog. And live on spit and bleached bones if that’s all there is. There’s nothing can beat a Texas Ranger or get away from him.”

“Show everybody your six-shooters, Tony,” urged Alex.

“Aw, not now. Tomorrow, maybe, or the next day. Sally don’t want me putting holes in her walls.”

“I didn’t say shoot them, I said show them.” Alex grinned at his friends. “They’ve got carved ivory handles,” he boasted, “and just wait till my little brother rides over to visit you on the big old Western saddle of his. It’s got so much silver on it you’ll half go blind from the shine of it.”

Scarlett smiled. She might have known. Tony and Alex had always been the most dandified men in all North Georgia. Tony obviously hadn’t changed a bit. High heels on fancy boots and silver on his saddle. She’d be willing to bet he came home with his pockets as empty as when he left on the run from the hangman. It was major foolishness to have silver saddles when the house at Mimosa really needed a new roof. But for Tony it was right. It meant that he was still Tony. And Alex was as proud of him as if he’d come with a wagon-load of gold. How she loved them, both of them! They might be left with nothing but a farm that they had to work themselves, but the Yankees hadn’t beaten the Fontaines, they hadn’t even been able to put a dent in them.

“Lord, wouldn’t the boys have loved to prance around tall as a tree and polish silver with their bottoms,” said Beatrice Tarleton. “I can see the twins now, they’d just eat it up.”

Scarlett caught her breath. Why did Mrs. Tarleton have to ruin everything that way? Why ruin such a happy time by reminding everybody that almost all of their old friends were dead?

But nothing was ruined. “They wouldn’t be able to keep their saddles for a week, Miss Beatrice, you know that,” Alex said. “They’d either lose them in a poker game or sell them to buy champagne for a party that was running out of steam. Remember when Brent sold all the furniture in his room at the University and bought dollar cigars for all the boys who’d never tried smoking?”

“And when Stuart lost his dress suit cutting cards and had to skulk away from that cotillion wrapped in a rug?” Tony added.

“Remember when they pawned Boyd’s law books?” said Jim Tarleton. “I thought you’d skin them alive, Beatrice.”

“They always grew back the skin,” Mrs. Tarleton said, smiling. “I tried to break their legs when they set the ice house on fire, but they ran too fast for me to catch them.”

“That was the time they came over to Lovejoy and hid in our barn,” said Sally. “The cows went dry for a week when the twins tried to get themselves a pail of milk to drink.”

Everyone had a story about the Tarleton twins, and those stories led to others about their friends and older brothers—Lafe Munroe, Cade and Raiford Calvert, Tom and Boyd Tarleton, Joe Fontaine—all the boys who’d never come home. The stories were the shared wealth of memory and of love, and as they were told the shadows in the corners of the room became populated with the smiling, shining youth of those who were dead but now—at last—no longer lost because they could be remembered with fond laughter instead of desperate bitterness.

The older generation wasn’t forgotten, either. All those around the table had rich memories of Old Miss Fontaine, Alex and Tony’s sharp-tongued, soft-hearted grandmother. And of their mother, called Young Miss until the day she died on her sixtieth birthday. Scarlett discovered that she could even share the affectionate chuckling about her father’s tell-tale habit of singing Irish songs of rebellion when he had, as he put it, “taken a drop or two,” and even hear her mother’s kindness spoken of without the heartbreak that had always before been her immediate response to the mention of Ellen O’Hara’s name.

Hour after hour, long after plates were empty and the fire only embers on the hearth, still the talk went on, and the dozen survivors brought back to life all those loved ones who could not be there to welcome Tony home. It was a happy time, a healing time. The dim, flickering light of the oil lamp in the center of the table showed none of the scars of Sherman’s men in the smoke-stained room and its mended furniture. The faces around the table were without lines, the clothes without patches. For these sweet moments of illusion, it was as if Mimosa was transported to a timeless place and hour where there was no pain and there had never been a War.

Many years before, Scarlett had vowed to herself that she would never look back. Remembering the halcyon pre-War days, mourning them, yearning for them would only hurt and weaken her, and she needed all her strength and determination to survive and to protect her family. But the shared memories in the dining room at Mimosa were not at all a source of weakness. They gave her courage; they were proof that good people could suffer every kind of loss and still retain the capacity for love and laughter. She was proud to be included in their number, proud to call them her friends, proud that they were what they were.

Will walked in front of the buggy on the way home, carrying a pitch pine torch and leading the horse. It was a dark night, and it was very late. Overhead the stars were bright in a cloudless sky, so bright that the quarter-moon looked almost transparently pale. The only sound was the slow clop-clop of the horse’s hooves.

Suellen dozed off, but Scarlett fought her sleepiness. She didn’t want the evening to end, she wanted the warm comfort and happiness of it to last forever. How strong Tony looked! And so full of life, so pleased with his funny boots, with himself, with everything. The Tarleton girls acted like a bunch of red-haired tabby kittens looking at a bowl of cream. I wonder which one will catch him. Beatrice Tarleton’s sure going to see to it that one of them does!

An owl in the woods beside the road said “whoo, whoo?” and Scarlett giggled to herself.

They were more than halfway to Tara before she realized that she hadn’t thought about Rhett for hours. Then melancholy and worry clamped down on her like lead weights, and she noticed for the first time that the night air was cold and her body was chilled. She pulled her shawl close around her and silently urged Will to hurry.

I don’t want to think about anything, not tonight. I don’t want to spoil the good time I had. Hurry, Will, it’s cold and it’s dark.

The next morning Scarlett and Suellen drove the children over in the wagon to Mimosa. Wade was shiny-eyed with hero worship when Tony showed off his six-guns. Even Scarlett’s jaw dropped in astounded delight when Tony twirled them around his fingers in unison, sent them circling in the air, then caught them and dropped them in the holsters that hung low on his hips from a fancy silver-trimmed leather belt.

“Do they shoot, too?” Wade asked.

“Yes, sir, they do. And when you get a little older I’ll teach you how to use them.”