Betsy Tarleton hovered beside her mother to avoid her fat, ill-natured husband.
Beatrice paid Betsy no mind.
Suellen O'Hara Benteen glared at Scarlett. Will had told his wife Scarlett would be staying at Tara after the funeral.
As her marriage disintegrated month by month, week by week — sometimes Scarlett believed, hour by hour — Scarlett had found refuge investing money. She'd always been shrewd. Hadn't she built the two most profitable sawmills in Atlanta? Rhett had insisted the railroads were overextended, that more track had been built than there were passengers, or freight.
She'd show him! She'd bought Northern Pacific bonds.
After Bonnie died, Rhett had vanished into another world — a world she could not enter. Nothing she said seemed to touch him. Her sincerest promises were as ineffective as her tantrums. Rhett had looked at his wife with tired, sad eyes and abandoned her to sit beside Melanie Wilkes's deathbed.
When Scarlett's regrets and self-recriminations were too much for her, she'd gone downtown to her broker. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific Railroad had been the sole happiness in Scarlett's life. With no effort and no suffering on her part, Northern Pacific track marched inexorably west as its bonds rose buoyantly into the skies. Natural Wonders!
After Scarlett ran through the money she'd got for her sawmills, she mortgaged the Peachtree Street mansion. In Melanie Wilkes's final days, Scarlett had borrowed against Tara. And now, Melanie was gone and Scarlett's Northern Pacific bonds were worth just as much as the trunks of Confederate currency in Tara's attic.
Scarlett would come home to Tara. Tara would provide for her.
"Dear Rosemary," she said mechanically, "so good of you to come.”
"Melanie Wilkes was ... I will miss her very much.”
"I needed her," Scarlett said, ignoring the total stranger at his sister's side. The stranger wet his lips as if he might have something to say, but of course he didn't. Neither of them had anything more to say.
The pallbearers slid the ornate casket, which Melanie Wilkes would never have chosen, from the fragile glass hearse Melanie would have thought pretentious.
As the pallbearers marched to the grave, Will Benteen eased forward on the heavy coffin's handles to bear the weight Ashley couldn't.
The rector wrapped his surplice around his neck. He began the graveside service. Wild geese honked by. A raven cawed in the brambles. Beatrice Tarleton coughed.
Scarlett closed her ears and kept her eyes focused on nothing.
Will's negroes took hold of the ropes and on Will's "Together, boys,”
they walked the casket over the grave and lowered it.
Ashley clasped his son and wept. Beau stared at his shoes.
A balloon of grief rose in Scarlett's throat. It hurt to swallow.
She trickled her bit of red clay onto Melanie Hamilton Wilkes's coffin lid and wiped her hands on her skirt.
She heard a horse crashing down the slope, and when she turned, Rhett Butler was gone from her life.
The grave at her feet might have held Scarlett's heart.
PART THREE
TARA
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Will Benteen
Then Miss Scarlett moved back to Tara and Uncle Henry Hamilton put her fancy Atlanta house up for sale, Will Benteen smelled trouble.
Miss Scarlett and Captain Butler were split; everybody knew that.
When Captain Butler galloped off after Mrs. Wilkes's burying, Will had been glad to see him go. As Will told Boo, his farm dog, "Sometimes critters got to lick their wounds.”
Tara's overseer was a mild-eyed Georgia Cracker with receding sunbleached hair, wrists and neck red as fresh-cut beets. He was mostly head and chest, his real leg almost as spindly as the wooden leg he'd earned at Gettysburg. His fingers were as big around as his daughter Susie's wrists.
Once, in the hard years after the War, when Scarlett was sending every profit from her Atlanta sawmills to Tara, she'd complained, "Will, before the War Tara provided for the O'Haras, not the other way around.”
Will had removed his shapeless hat and scratched his forehead. "Well, Miss Scarlett, I spect you might lease Tara to some Yankee.”
That was the last time she complained.
Nowadays, Tara had to support everybody again. There were the negroes — Dilcey, Prissy, Pork, Big Sam, and Mammy — as well as Miss Scarlett, her children, and the Benteens.
Not long after the city folks came, seven-year-old Ella had a fit. At the supper table, she gave this unearthly cry and fell out of her chair. Although she was unconscious, her eyes were rolling, her legs were kicking, and Will Benteen couldn't hold her still. Directly she came out of it, white-faced and a little shaky, but she'd scared the daylights out of Will.
Beau Wilkes was at Tara, too. Mr. Wilkes wasn't in any shape to care for his son. And after the funeral, Miss Scarlett had asked Miss Rosemary and her boy to stay.
Will had a notion why Miss Scarlett had invited Captain Butler's sister and son. It was one of those things Miss Scarlett did without thinking.
Miss Scarlett took advantage before anyone else saw there was advantage to be had. It was her nature.
When Suellen figured it out, she told her husband, "It's a dirty trick, Will Benteen, using Rhett's sister as bait.”
Will had shushed her with a kiss. Will could shush Suellen when nobody else could.
Suellen O'Hara hadn't been Will Benteen's first choice. Will had courted Carreen, the youngest O'Hara daughter, but Carreen made up her mind to join a Charleston convent.
By then, Tara had become Will's home, but despite the relaxed attitudes after the War, he couldn't share a house with the unmarried Suellen.
And proud Suellen had no other suitors and nowhere else to go.
Despite its unsentimental start, Suellen and Will's marriage had been happy. Their six-year-old, Susie, was willful, but her parents loved her all the more for it. As Suellen liked to say (remembering how Scarlett had stolen her beau Frank Kennedy), "Nobody will ever pull the wool over Susie's eyes!" Robert Lee, the Benteen boy, was so shy and sweet, sometimes his father couldn't bear to look at him.
Will had come to Tara a wounded veteran. As Tara had healed him, Will'd healed Tara. With Miss Scarlett's money, Will had rebuilt Tara's cotton press, bought Cyrus McCormick's newfangled mowing machine, and replaced the dozens of small tools: the four- and six-tooth crosscut saws, the saddle clamps, the augers and awls Sherman's soldiers had stolen or ruined. Will's gangs had uprooted cedars and blackberry brambles, replaced split-rail fences, reroofed the icehouse and meat house, cleaned and pruned the orchard, doubled the kitchen garden, built a twelve-stall horse barn, fenced a hog lot, and erected a whitewashed board and batten cotton shed on the foundations of the old one.
To make room for Scarlett, the Benteens evacuated Gerald and Ellen's front bedroom. "There can only be one Mistress at Tara," Will had told his angry wife, "I reckon she'll be Miss Scarlett.”
But Scarlett hadn't wanted her parents' bedroom with Gerald's balcony and the canopied bed where O'Haras had been begot, born, and died. Instead, Scarlett took her old room at the head of the stairs, beside the nursery.
After the War, Tara's field workers had left for the city they'd heard so much about. After several hungry years, most returned to Clayton County, living in the run-down Jonesboro neighborhood everybody called "Darktown.”