Scarlett sat beside the two girls, staring at them stupidly. The whisky taken on a stomach long empty was playing tricks on her. Sometimes her sisters seemed far away and tiny and their incoherent voices came to her like the buzz of insects. And again, they loomed large, rushing at her with lightning speed. She was tired, tired to the bone. She could lie down and sleep for days.
If she could only lie down and sleep and wake to feel Ellen gentry shaking her arm and saying: “It is late, Scarlett. You must not be so lazy.” But she could not ever do that again. If there were only Ellen, someone older than she, wiser and unweary, to whom she could go! Someone in whose lap she could lay her head, someone on whose shoulders she could rest her burdens!
The door opened softly and Dilcey entered, Melanie’s baby held to her breast, the gourd of whisky in her hand. In the smoky, uncertain light, she seemed thinner than when Scarlett last saw her and the Indian blood was more evident in her face. The high cheek bones were more prominent, the hawk-bridged nose was sharper and her copper skin gleamed with a brighter hue. Her faded calico dress was open to the waist and her large bronze breast exposed. Held close against her, Melanie’s baby pressed his pale rosebud mouth greedily to the dark nipple, sucking, gripping tiny fists against the soft flesh like a kitten in the warm fur of its mother’s belly.
Scarlett rose unsteadily and put a hand on Dilcey’s arm.
“It was good of you to stay, Dilcey.”
“How could I go off wid them trashy niggers, Miss Scarlett, after yo’ pa been so good to buy me and my little Prissy and yo’ ma been so kine?”
“Sit down, Dilcey. The baby can eat all right, then? And how is Miss Melanie?”
“Nuthin’ wrong wid this chile ‘cept he hongry, and what it take to feed a hongry chile I got. No’m, Miss Melanie is all right. She ain’ gwine die, Miss Scarlett. Doan you fret yo’seff. I seen too many, white and black, lak her. She mighty tired and nervous like and scared fo’ this baby. But I hesh her and give her some of whut was lef in that go’de and she sleepin’.”
So the corn whisky had been used by the whole family! Scarlett thought hysterically that perhaps she had better give a drink to little Wade and see if it would stop his hiccoughs— And Melanie would not die. And when Ashley came home—if he did come home ... No, she would think of that later too. So much to think of—later! So many things to unravel—to decide. If only she could put off the hour of reckoning forever! She started suddenly as a creaking noise and a rhythmic “Ker-bunk—ker-bunk—” broke the stillness of the air outside.
“That’s Mammy gettin’ the water to sponge off the young Misses. They takes a heap of bathin’,” explained Dilcey, propping the gourd on the table between medicine bottles and a glass.
Scarlett laughed suddenly. Her nerves must be shredded if the noise of the well windlass, bound up in her earliest memories, could frighten her. Dilcey looked at her steadily as she laughed, her face immobile in its dignity, but Scarlett felt that Dilcey understood. She sank back in her chair. If she could only be rid of her tight stays, the collar that choked her and the slippers still full of sand and gravel that blistered her feet.
The windlass creaked slowly as the rope wound up, each creak bringing the bucket nearer the top. Soon Mammy would be with her—Ellen’s Mammy, her Mammy. She sat silent, intent on nothing, while the baby, already glutted with milk, whimpered because he had lost the friendly nipple. Dilcey, silent too, guided the child’s mouth back, quieting him in her arms as Scarlett listened to the slow scuffing of Mammy’s feet across the back yard. How still the night air was! The slightest sounds roared in her ears.
The upstairs hall seemed to shake as Mammy’s ponderous weight came toward the door. Then Mammy was in the room, Mammy with shoulders dragged down by two heavy wooden buckets, her kind black face sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey’s face.
Her eyes lighted up at the sight of Scarlett, her white teeth gleamed as she set down the buckets, and Scarlett ran to her, laying her head on the broad, sagging breasts which had held so many heads, black and white. Here was something of stability, thought Scarlett, something of the old life that was unchanging. But Mammy’s first words dispelled this illusion.
“Mammy’s chile is home! Oh, Miss Scarlett, now dat Miss Ellen’s in de grabe, whut is we gwine ter do? Oh, Miss Scarlett, effen Ah wuz jes’ daid longside Miss Ellen! Ah kain make out widout Miss Ellen. Ain’ nuthin’ lef now but mizry an’ trouble. Jes’ weery loads, honey, jes’ weery loads.”
As Scarlett lay with her head hugged close to Mammy’s breast, two words caught her attention, “weery loads.” Those were the words which had hummed in her brain that afternoon so monotonously they had sickened her. Now, she remembered the rest of the song, remembered with a sinking heart:
“Just a few more days for to tote the weary load!
No matter, ‘twill never be light!
Just a few more days till we totter in the road—”
“No matter, ‘twill never be light”—she took the words to her tired mind. Would her load never be light? Was coming home to Tara to mean, not blessed surcease, but only more loads to carry? She slipped from Mammy’s arms and, reaching up, patted the wrinkled black face.
“Honey, yo’ han’s!” Mammy took the small hands with their blisters and blood clots in hers and looked at them with horrified disapproval. “Miss Scarlett, Ah done tole you an’ tole you dat you kin allus tell a lady by her han’s an’—yo’ face sunbuhnt too!”
Poor Mammy, still the martinet about such unimportant things even though war and death had just passed over her head! In another moment she would be saying that young Misses with blistered hands and freckles most generally didn’t never catch husbands and Scarlett forestalled the remark.
“Mammy, I want you to tell me about Mother. I couldn’t bear to hear Pa talk about her.”