“She was layin’ with my brother. He got away. I ain’t sorry none that I kilt her. Loose women ought to be kilt. The law ain’t got no right to put a man in jail for that but I was sont.”
“But—how did you get out? Did you escape? Were you pardoned?”
“You might call it a pardon.” His thick gray brows writhed together as though the effort of stringing words together was difficult.
“ ‘Long in ‘sixty-four when Sherman come through, I was at Milledgeville jail, like I had been for forty years. And the warden he called all us prisoners together and he says the Yankees are a-comin’ a-burnin’ and a-killin’. Now if that’s one thing I hates worse than a nigger or a woman, it’s a Yankee.”
“Why? Had you— Did you ever know any Yankees?”
“No’m. But I’d beam tell of them. I’d beam tell they couldn’t never mind their own bizness. I hates folks who can’t mind their own bizness. What was they doin’ in Georgia, freein’ our niggers and burnin’ our houses and killin’ our stock? Well, the warden he said the army needed more soldiers bad, and any of us who’d jine up would be free at the end of the war—if we come out alive. But us lifers—us murderers, the warden he said the army didn’t want us. We was to be sont somewheres else to another jail. But I said to the warden I ain’t like most lifers. I’m just in for killin’ my wife and she needed killin’. And I wants to fight the Yankees. And the warden he saw my side of it and he slipped me out with the other prisoners.”
He paused and grunted.
“Huh. That was right funny. They put me in jail for killin’ and they let me out with a gun in my hand and a free pardon to do more killin’. It shore was good to be a free man with a rifle in my hand again. Us men from Milledgeville did good fightin’ and killin’—and a lot of us was kilt. I never knowed one who deserted. And when the surrender come, we was free. I lost this here leg and this here eye. But I ain’t sorry.”
“Oh,” said Scarlett, weakly.
She tried to remember what she had heard about the releasing of the Milledgeville convicts in that last desperate effort to stem the tide of Sherman’s army. Frank had mentioned it that Christmas of 1864. What had he said? But her memories of that time were too chaotic. Again she felt the wild terror of those days, heard the siege guns, saw the line of wagons dripping blood into the red roads, saw the Home Guard marching off, the little cadets and the children like Phil Meade and the old men like Uncle Henry and Grandpa Merriwether. And the convicts had marched out too, to die in the twilight of the Confederacy, to freeze in the snow and sleet of that last campaign in Tennessee.
For a brief moment she thought what a fool this old man was, to fight for a state which had taken forty years from his life. Georgia had taken his youth and his middle years for a crime that was no crime to him, yet he had freely given a leg and an eye to Georgia. The bitter words Rhett had spoken in the early days of the war came back to her, and she remembered him saying he would never fight for a society that had made him an outcast. But when the emergency had arisen he had gone off to fight for that same society, even as Archie had done. It seemed to her that all Southern men, high or low, were sentimental fools and cared less for their hides than for words which had no meaning.
She looked at Archie’s gnarled old hands, his two pistols and his knife, and fear pricked her again. Were there other ex-convicts at large, like Archie, murderers, desperadoes, thieves, pardoned for their crimes, in the name of the Confederacy? Why, any stranger on the street might be a murderer! If Frank ever learned the truth about Archie, there would be the devil to pay. Or if Aunt Pitty—but the shock would kill Pitty. And as for Melanie—Scarlett almost wished she could tell Melanie the truth about Archie. It would serve her right for picking up trash and foisting it off on her friends and relatives.
“I’m—I’m glad you told me, Archie. I—I won’t tell anyone. It would be a great shock to Mrs. Wilkes and the other ladies if they knew.”
“Huh. Miz Wilkes knows. I told her the night she fuss let me sleep in her cellar. You don’t think I’d let a nice lady like her take me into her house not knowin’?”
“Saints preserve us!” cried Scarlet, aghastMelanie knew this man was a murderer and a woman murderer at that and she hadn’t ejected him from her house. She had trusted her son with him and her aunt and sister-in-law and all her friends. And she, the most timid of females, had not been frightened to be alone with him in her house.
“Miz Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman. She lowed that I was all right She ‘lowed that a liar allus kept on lyin’ and a thief kept on stealin’ but folks don’t do more’n one murder in a lifetime. And she reckoned as how anybody who’d fought for the Confederacy had wiped out anything bad they’d done. Though I don’t hold that I done nothin’ bad, killin’ my wife. ... Yes, Miz Wilkes is right sensible, for a woman. ... And I’m tellin’ you, the day you leases convicts is the day I quits you.”
Scarlett made no reply but she thought,
“The sooner you quit me the better it will suit me. A murderer!”
How could Melly have been so—so— Well, there was no word for Melanie’s action in taking in this old ruffian and not telling her friends he Was a jailbird. So service in the army wiped out past sins! Melanie had that mixed up with baptism! But then Melly was utterly silly about the Confederacy, its veterans, and anything pertaining to them. Scarlett silently damned the Yankees and added another mark on her score against them. They were responsible for a situation that forced a woman to keep a murderer at her side to protect her.