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 olf, 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 silvertrimmed 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.”

“Spin them like you do?”

“Well, sure. No sense having a six-shooter if you’re not going to put it through all its tricks.” Tony ruffled Wade’s hair with a man-to-man rough hand. “I’ll let you learn to ride Western, too, Wade Hampton. I reckon you’ll be the only boy in these parts that’ll know what a real saddle ought to be. But we can’t start today. My brother’s going to be giving me lessons in farming. See how it is—everybody’s got to learn new things all the time.”

Tony planted quick kisses on Suellen’s and Scarlett’s cheeks—the little girls got theirs on the top of their head—and then he said goodbye. “Alex is waiting for me down by the creek. Why don’t you go find Sally? I think she’s hanging up the wash out behind the house.”

Sally acted glad to see them, but Suellen refused her invitation to stop in for a cup of coffee. “I’ve got to get home and do just what you’re doing, Sally, we can’t stay. We just didn’t want to leave without saying hello.” And she hurried Scarlett back to the wagon.

“I don’t see why you were so rude to Sally, Suellen. Your wash could have waited while we had a cup of coffee and talked about the party.”

“Scarlett, you don’t know anything about keeping a farm going. If Sally got behind on her wash, she’d be behind on everything else all day. We can’t get a bunch of servants way out here in the country the way you can in Atlanta. We’ve got to do plenty of the work ourselves.”

Scarlett bridled at the tone of her sister’s voice. “I might just as well go back to Atlanta on this afternoon’s train,” she said crossly.

“It would make things a lot easier for all of us if you did,” Suellen retorted. “You just make more work, and I need that bedroom for Susie and Ella.”

Scarlett opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it. She’d rather be in Atlanta anyhow. If Tony hadn’t come home, she’d be there by now. People would be glad to see her, too. She had plenty of friends in Atlanta who had time for coffee or a game of whist or a party. She forced a smile for her children, turning her back on Suellen.

“Wade Hampton, Ella, Mother’s got to go to Atlanta after dinner today. I want you to promise you’ll be good and not give your Aunt Suellen any trouble, now.”

Scarlett waited for the protests and the tears. But the children were too busy talking about Tony’s flashing six-shooters to pay any attention to her. As soon as they reached Tara, Scarlett told Pansy to get her valise packed. That was when Ella began to cry. “Prissy’s gone, and I don’t know anybody here to braid my hair,” she sobbed.

Scarlett resisted the impulse to slap her little girl. She couldn’t stay at Tara now that she’d made up her mind to leave, she’d go crazy with nothing to do and no one to talk to. But she couldn’t go without Pansy; it was unheard of for a lady to travel alone. What was she going to do? Ella wanted Pansy to stay with her. It might take days and days for Ella to get used to Lutie, little Susie’s mammy. And if Ella carried on day and night, Suellen might change her mind about keeping the children at Tara.

“All right, then,” Scarlett said sharply. “Stop that awful noise, Ella. I’ll leave Pansy here for the rest of the week. She can teach Lutie about fixing your hair.” I’ll just have to hook up with some woman at the Jonesboro depot. There’s bound to be somebody respectable going to Atlanta that I can share a seat with.