AN - Gone with the Wind and all its characters are Margaret Mitchell's creation and property. This little story borrows them.
Requiem - December 8, 1941
The old man snapped off the radio and walked with slow deliberateness toward the front door. The president had declared war at 12:30 that afternoon and this evening the airwaves were full of the news. This would be the fourth war of his lifetime. He was born in a time of war, and he reckoned that he became a soldier in order to master his childhood fear of it, as much as to emulate his father and grandfather. The War Between the States claimed his father, the father he never knew, and destroyed a way of life that had shaped his people and defined their world. The second was his war, the Spanish-American War. In his prime he served as the commanding officer of four companies, Second Battalion, 18th Infantry out of Fort Sam Houston, Texas, part of the VIII Corps in the Battle of Manila and later putting down the Philippine Insurrection. Then there was the Great War, the war to end all wars. "God help us," he thought bitterly, "would there ever be such a thing as a war to end all wars?" Even the offer of a brevet brigadier general's star and a position on General Pershing's command staff couldn't induce him to join the fighting in Europe. Over the years he had grown weary of the business of soldiering and was looking forward to a peaceful retirement, so he stayed in Georgia. At Fort McPherson he trained young men who would fight on faraway fields of battle with strange names: Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel, Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Sedan. A few years after the armistice was signed, he retired.
Now the country was engulfed in a new war. A cold wave of fear gripped him as he thought of his grandsons. His son was already in uniform following the tradition of the Hamilton family, the son, and great-grandson of career officers. Three of his daughters' boys had enlisted this morning. Their youthful zeal reminded Wade Hamilton of his father, Charles, dead in camp before ever seeing battle, his head filled with dreams of glory, his heart filled with love for a beautiful woman who carried his child, never living to see his dreams turn to ashes or meet his son.
They buried that beautiful woman, Scarlett O'Hara Butler, this afternoon, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the day the president declared war. She always loved to make a splash, to be noticed and admired, envied even, so the news stole a little of her thunder. Regardless, many important Atlantans were there and she received a complimentary write up in the newspapers. All of her contemporaries were gone. By living well and long she had the last laugh on the Old Guard as present day Atlanta lauded her as a grande dame of polite society.
She lived to be ninety-six years old, sharp as a tack until her early nineties. When her mind started to drift and she didn't know what year it was; worse yet, started talking to those family members who had gone before her, the old man and his half-brothers decided she couldn't live on her own. Wade and his wife took her in. He couldn't remember now who had protested more loudly about this arrangement, his wife or his mother. As Scarlett's mind clouded during the long twilight of her decline, she lived in another world and the clashes that had characterized the relationship of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law faded, then ceased.
It saddened Wade and his younger half-brothers, James and Gabe Butler, to see their mother, a woman who had no patience, sitting on the porch, dressed to receive guests, waiting with preternatural patience. When they asked her who she was waiting for she replied, with a proud lift of her chin, "my husband." Then she would explain in a tone of voice that seemed to suggest her sons were blithering idiots for even asking, "he left me here but told me he would come back."
Wade's younger brothers didn't realize that comment cut two ways. They were born after the time of turmoil and unhappiness in their parent's marriage which led to a three year separation. Wade always wondered what his mother meant by it. Did she imagine it was 1873, and she was waiting for her husband to return home, or was she aware it was 1937, and waiting to be reunited with him after her death? Either way, it ceased to matter now, they were together in Oakland Cemetery.
Wade moved quietly, yet the rusting hinges on the screen door betrayed him as they screeched in protest when he pushed it open. His wife called out to him wanting to know where he was going.
"Nowhere, just want a smoke," he replied.
Then the door banged shut against the old frame, the sound echoing in the stillness of the night. The night air was cool, stirred by a gentle breeze. Someone in the house flipped on the porch light as the old man settled on the swing, and reached into the pocket of his worn jacket for a pipe and pouch of tobacco. He was tamping the moist, fragrant leaves in the bowl of the pipe when he heard the screen door open again. A small, dark-haired figure glided onto the porch and under the pool of yellow light he saw his youngest grandchild, eight-year-old Laura Maddox, the youngest child of his youngest child.
"What are you doing out here Little Lulu?" Her winsome smile, round face, and curly, dark hair reminded him of the cartoon character, Little Lulu, hence the nickname. "You'll catch cold."
She giggled at her grandfather as she sat down on the swing and nuzzled his sleeve. "No, I won't. What're you doing, Grampa?"
"I asked you first." He lit the pipe and then put his arm around Laura, swinging in silence, listening to the sounds of the night.
"Tell me the story." She looked up into his face, creased with age, and from exposure to sun and wind, and he smiled at her lovingly.
"What story might that be?" He knew what story, but he teased her anyway.
"Great-gran's story," she replied.
The story. When his mother was younger, in her sixties and seventies, she began to tell the young ones her story, much embellished, leaving out the sadness and pain, of how she fell in love with a dashing sea captain. The sea captain was the handsomest man in Atlanta and she was the most beautiful woman. She would tell her grandchildren and then her great-grandchildren about the barbecue, where she first met him, on the day Georgia went to war and everyone's life changed forever; the night the sea captain found her hiding in the corner at the bazaar and led her on to the dance floor; how he rescued her from the burning city of Atlanta, protected her from harm during Reconstruction, married her and made her the happiest woman alive, and how they traveled the world together. Her story. It made his mother happy to tell it and thrilled the children to hear it. It was their favorite fairy tale.
The circumstances of his and Ella's lives might have borne a glancing similarity to Scarlett's story, but his mother was nothing if not self-centered, and the insecurities of her children were of little consequence as long as she was happy. If it made his mother happy to tell her version of events, he couldn't stop her, wouldn't even dream of trying. Wade remembered the truth of it, the truth of those years as seen through the eyes of a child, buffeted by change, scarred by loss, and afraid of so many things, especially, incomprehensibly, his mother. He knew his mother loved him after a fashion. For true maternal affection he turned to his Aunt Melanie. After Aunt Melanie's death and Uncle Rhett's departure, his mother became a little more attentive, and even at times solicitous for his happiness, though those times were short-lived. During those years, as Wade matured, he came to realize how much personal loss his mother had endured, and how she shouldered her burdens with an outward show of strength. Telltale signs, such as her habit of drinking on the sly, indicated to him that inwardly she writhed with the pain, and suffered from loneliness. He gained a new regard for her, something akin to grudging respect.
Later, after Uncle Rhett and Mother reconciled, started a new family, and sent Wade and Ella away to school, Scarlett and Ella became estranged due to the separation and perceived indifference. At that point in his life Wade was immune to his mother's cavalier disregard for the feelings of others. He tried to persuade Ella to adopt the same attitude of indifference to save herself from feeling the pain of rejection. Seeing Ella's emotional distress made Wade angry with his mother. For a time after he married, he totally broke contact with her. Then Uncle Rhett passed away and Scarlett began to lean on Wade, and sought his help raising her young sons. Suddenly their roles were reversed: Scarlett needed Wade, but he had no time for her or his brothers.
After coming back from the war in the Philippines, his perspective changed again. "War does that to a man," he mused. It was then that he also realized just how badly war had affected his mother. Wade came to see that just as he had made mistakes raising his own family, his mother had made hers, and they were able to forge a new relationship based on mutual respect and shared family loyalty.
"Little Lulu, you know that story by heart," he said patting her knee. "Why don't you tell it to me?" He was in a pensive mood and didn't want to talk, that was why he left the house for the quiet comfort of the cold porch swing. His wife, daughters and daughter-in-law were in the kitchen putting away the food left over from the reception after the funeral, catching up on all the family gossip. It was no place for a man. In the front room, the men were talking excitedly about the war. Wade knew war. He didn't want to think about that tonight, there'd be time tomorrow to think about this new war and its attendant horrors.
"I like it better when you tell me. Please, Grampa," she implored.
He puffed on the pipe. "Don't feel much like talking Lu." He eyed her for a reaction. "Maybe you'd best get on back in the house." He gestured toward the door with the stem of his pipe. "Anyway, must be about your bedtime."
Laura ducked her head against her grandfather's sleeve upon hearing this mild rebuke. At the moment she didn't want to be in the house any more than he did. The war talk frightened her. Left with no better choice, she sucked in her breath and began telling him her great-grandmother's story.
The opening scene was the Twelve Oaks barbeque, and the way Scarlett told it, she was the star, like some celluloid goddess out of Hollywood. Laura faithfully repeated it. Wade remembered his Aunt Melanie's version, and liked it better, because she told him that that was the day his mother fell in love with his father. The devil was always in the details, and this particular detail did not figure in Scarlett's version of the story--ever. It might have occurred to her that the grandchildren of Charles Hamilton and later, of his son Wade, might have wanted to hear that.
Laura spoke of the war years in Atlanta, the hospital bazaar where Scarlett, the young widow, danced the night away with her dashing blockade runner beau and scandalized Atlanta; Scarlett acting as midwife at Beau's birth, and the harrowing trip to Tara on the night Atlanta burned. Wade remembered the sheer terror of that night, and of many nights to follow. He didn't like this part of the story. Laura continued, telling of Scarlett shooting the Yankee marauder and Aunt Melanie following her down the stairs with grandfather Hamilton's sword, and then brave Scarlett and Melanie standing up to the raiding party that tried to burn down the house.
After the war was over, foreclosure loomed. When her family was threatened with eviction, Scarlett, her sisters and Aunt Melanie made a dress out of Grandmother Robillard's portieres so Scarlett could go to Atlanta and borrow some money. Laura loved this part of the story. Aunt Sue saved the dress made of the velvet drapes, and stored it in the attic at Tara where Laura's aunts and her mother found it one summer when they were children. The girls loved to wrap themselves in the dusty fabric and act out Scarlett's story. Laura's mother showed it to her several years ago.
So Scarlett went to Atlanta. Here the story became a little sketchy and thin on facts, as it usually did when Scarlett's actions were of questionable integrity. Mr. Kennedy, Ella's father, offered to marry her and help her pay the debt. However, Mr. Kennedy was engaged to Aunt Sue at the time, a detail that the devil Aunt Sue never let anyone forget. Once again Uncle Rhett stepped in, lending Scarlett money to start her lumber business, driving her around to keep her from harm. After Mr. Kennedy's untimely death, Uncle Rhett married her.
Scarlett's version of the story glossed over the first five years of the Butler marriage, with the exception of Bonnie's birth and tragic death. At this point, Wade stopped listening to Laura and began his own journey back in time. He remembered it all well: the lavish entertaining, the bitter fights, Bonnie's birth, more fights, the coldness, Uncle Rhett going away with Bonnie, Scarlett's miscarriage, more coldness, Bonnie's death, the melancholy, the drinking, Aunt Melanie's death, the separation, deeper melancholy, more drinking.
His mother told him that before Uncle Rhett left he said he would come back often enough to keep gossip down. Though she had no idea just how often that would be, she always assured her children he would return.
"When?" They asked.
"Soon," she answered.
They could tell she really didn't have any idea when, and after awhile stopped asking. Days slipped into weeks, weeks piled up into months, and finally months turned into years. Rumor, innuendo and gossip followed Scarlett around Atlanta like a noxious odor. Uncle Rhett had failed her again; still, she held her head high and persevered.
The sunny summer morning in 1876 when Uncle Rhett came back was indelibly imprinted in Wade's memory. On this particular day Scarlett was firmly telling Wade and Ella what she expected of them. They were to help out while she was taking inventory at Kennedy's Store. In order for her children to be able to manage the business on their own someday, they needed know everything about it, starting with sweeping the floors. The maid was clearing their breakfast dishes, when Uncle Rhett walked into the dining room. His presence filled the space and made it feel as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. Scarlett stopped speaking mid-sentence, her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened in shock. Striding up to her chair, Uncle Rhett took her hands and pulled her up to stand. Though he smiled Wade noticed his eyes were sad, and he looked careworn. He enveloped Scarlett in his embrace.
"I've come home. This is where I belong—with you."
Wade never forgot those words. They came back to him vividly every time he returned to Atlanta from some far-flung duty station and made his way to his own home where his wife and children eagerly awaited him.
Scarlett laughed and cried at the same time, choking out the question she had been waiting to ask for years, "What took you so long?"
First Uncle Rhett gave her a hungry kiss. Then he started to answer, "I needed time..."
"But...," Scarlett interrupted.
Nodding toward Wade and Ella who were sitting at the table, staring at them, slack-jawed, Uncle Rhett placed two fingers across her lips to silence her and said, "Please, not now."
After hugging his step-children, he poured himself some coffee, sat down at his place at the table, and life went on as though he had never been away. Wade never did hear the explanation for Uncle Rhett's absence and Scarlett never volunteered the information.
Late in December 1878 James was born and in the summer of 1880 Gabriel followed. Shortly after that Wade went off to the Virginia Military Institute to get an education and become a soldier, following in the footsteps of the grandfather he only knew through the stories of his Aunt Melanie, Uncle Henry, and the old servant Uncle Peter. Ella was sent, protesting, to a convent school in Savannah, the same one Grandmother Robillard had attended.
Now free from the restrictions imposed by the school schedules of their older children, Rhett and Scarlett traveled with their boys to all the capitals of Europe and the far corners of the British Empire: Cairo, Bombay, Mombasa, Hong Kong. They maintained a pied-à-terre in Paris and bought a townhouse in London. Scarlett's favorite destination was the Côte d'Azur. One summer they rented a villa in the mountains of Monaco overlooking the Mediterranean. Rhett shared his love of the sea with his family, taking them sailing. He showed his little boys how to tie knots like a good sailor. Scarlett enjoyed the nightlife of Monte Carlo, and spent pleasant days on the beach watching her boys play, all three of them. Those years were the happiest time of their marriage she later told Wade.
Back in Atlanta, Wade was busy and Ella felt abandoned. Wade had a network of cousins: Hamiltons, Wilkeses, Burrs, Whitmans and Winfields. Ella had her mother, step-father and half-brothers, and none of them were with her. After graduating from the convent school, she married and moved to Florida, turning her back on the family which she felt had turned away from her. Wade began his military career assigned to a post in Arizona. He left for the West shortly after marrying a distant cousin, Ruth Winfield. After the graduations and weddings, Rhett, Scarlett, James and Gabe returned to London and alternated between living there and in Atlanta for the next six years. That's where Scarlett's story ended even though she had over fifty years left ahead of her.
Rhett died suddenly in London in 1890, his heart the doctor said. Scarlett's life shattered. She brought him home to Atlanta and laid him to rest next to Bonnie. Wade, stationed in South Dakota, came home with Ruth, as did the reluctant Ella. The years of loving and being loved by Rhett had softened Scarlett's hard edge. In her sorrow, she reached out to her older children, and they attempted to heal the breach. Regardless, old hurts lingered. Ella died during the influenza epidemic after the Great War, still largely estranged from her mother. Wade remembered his silly, sweet sister with fondness.
Scarlett stayed in Atlanta to raise Rhett's young sons. It was a daunting task for these two boys were born pranksters and daredevils. People said they favored their father in looks, as well as their unerring instinct for trouble. James was the quieter of the two, the brains, and a born instigator. Gabe was boisterous, James' willing acolyte, always ready to carry out whatever scheme his brother devised. Scarlett had a difficult time keeping them in line, something Rhett had done with ease for all that he refused to curb Bonnie's behavior. In the end, Rhett really did know boys, and he kept a tight rein on his sons while lavishing them with love and affection. In his absence and their mother's grief-stricken inattention, James and Gabe ran wild for a time, much to the chagrin of the citizens of Atlanta.
This afternoon, when the family gathered in Wade's house after the interment, the Butler brothers regaled those present with tales of their misadventures.
"Poor Mama," Gabe laughed, "we really gave her fits!" James heartily concurred.
Their most daring prank occurred in 1892. The Reverend Phinneas Earle, pastor of the Methodist church around the corner, had provoked the Butler brothers to retaliation when he caught them with a black boy named Chance, the church janitor's son, taking turns puffing away on a rancid cigar while hiding behind a pew in the back of his church. Initially thinking the church had caught fire, Reverend Earle reacted quickly, throwing a bucket of water on the source of the smoke. When the wet miscreants stood up, coughing, he realized what was really going on and he proceeded to chase the trio out of the building promising hellfire and eternal damnation on their heathen souls.
A pompous man given to pride, the minister was especially proud of his fine carriage. James and Gabe thought they'd bring him down a notch and came up with this gambit. In the dead of night on a Saturday, James and Gabe and their accomplice, Chance, stealthily removed the minister's prized phaeton from his barn. Chance knew where his father kept the keys to the barn and the church, enabling them to gain entry. Gabe and Chance took a long coil of rope and a block and tackle up to the belfry. After threading the rope through the pulleys and securing them from a hook in the eaves, they dropped the rope down to James who lashed the phaeton securely. He sprinted up the steep stairs to the belfry and then the three boys hoisted the carriage up the front of the church until it dangled precariously from the steeple, high above the church entrance. On Sunday morning parishioners arriving for services were shocked to see the minister's fine carriage suspended in mid-air, while a highly distraught Reverend Earle called down the wrath of the Old Testament God of retribution on the perpetrators of this fiendish act.
The janitor, suspecting he knew which fiends had perpetrated the act, knocked politely on the door of the Butler mansion, and informed the Widow Butler that her sons better be mending their ways before they hurt somebody, or, he suggested archly, got in trouble with the law. Scarlett raised a delicate eyebrow questioningly, so the janitor suggested she take a walk a few blocks over to the Methodist church. When Scarlett got there, she saw the excited crowd pointing skyward at the phaeton, and heard the impassioned exhortations of the aggrieved Reverend Earle. Recoiling in horror, she hurried home to box her sons' ears, and declared them confined to their rooms for the next week in order to ponder their misdeed.
After a few days stuck inside, Gabe became bored and decided to use the easiest clandestine escape route available to him—the window. Thinking he could jump down from his third-story window onto the roof of the veranda and then slide down a downspout to the ground, he misjudged the pitch of the roof and once he hit the shingles, he started to slide, and tumbled off the roof into the boxwood hedge surrounding the veranda, breaking his fall. James, watching from his window, hollered down to Gabe, and called him a nincompoop for the clumsy execution of his escape. This attracted the attention of a servant who alerted their mother. Then there was hell to pay. Scarlett hauled them off to Tara and told Uncle Will to put them to work picking cotton, a suitable punishment for such active boys.
Wade heard about Reverend Earle's phaeton from at least three different people, as well as from his agitated mother. When Wade pointed out to Scarlett that Uncle Rhett would've roared with laughter over this prank, she just about turned purple with angry frustration and launched into a tirade about the incorrigible behavior of her two younger sons.
"Yes, indeed," Wade thought, "they gave Mother fits!"
In her mature years, after her boys left home, Scarlett began telling her story to her grandchildren, later her great-grandchildren. When she told the story to the girls she emphasized the romance, the dancing, and the glamour of her travels. She would produce bangle bracelets, fine veils and scarves in vivid hues of saffron, crimson, peacock blue and purple interwoven with gold and silver threads, picture postcards and bric-a-brac acquired as souvenirs on these trips abroad. The boys heard a version of the story that emphasized valor during the war years and the adventure of traveling with Rhett. She loved to bring out Charles' pistol and brandish Colonel Hamilton's sword. When she was in her eighties, strength failing her, Wade removed the weapons from her grasp so that she wouldn't inadvertently harm herself or any of her great-grandchildren. All the children loved to hear her story, regardless of which props were used. It occurred to Wade that Scarlett had created her own myth, one that would live on long after she was gone.
Laura had stopped talking, but Wade hadn't noticed, as his mind drifted through the years, remembering. She gently tugged his sleeve, "Grampa, you're not listening to me. I thought you wanted to hear me tell the story."
"I'm sorry, Lu. I was thinking about your great-gran." What he mourned, more than just his mother's passing, was the end of an era. She had been his last fragile link to the past, to his father.
"You miss her, don't you Grampa?"
"It was her time to go. She's happier now. She's with great-grampa Rhett." His answer sounded too matter-of-fact to Laura.
"But, you do miss her, don't you?" Laura spoke with the sweet certitude of a child, and looked at him expectantly, eyes round with curiosity.
Something in the tone of Laura's voice gave Wade pause for thought. He tilted his head and looked into her trusting face. On this day of upheaval and uncertainty, in the face of the juggernaut of war, she sought her grandfather's assurance that, despite it all, love still held them together. He understood. Aunt Melanie had always given him that assurance and her death left him bereft.
"Of course I do. She was so young when I was born that, in a way, we grew up together." Pausing for a moment, he took her hand. "Lu, I want you to remember that story, write it down if you have to. Remember every detail your great-gran ever told you. Someday you'll have children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren of your own, and when you do, you tell them the story. Every time you tell the story it'll be your way of keeping your great-gran alive just the way she wanted to be remembered—young and beautiful, in love with the handsomest man in Atlanta. That's why she told it to you. Will you do that for her?" He paused again, lowering his voice to a near whisper, and asked "Will you do that for me?"
"I love the story. I won't forget, ever!"
Wade smiled with quiet satisfaction. "Thank you, Little Lulu." He gave her an affectionate squeeze of the shoulders.
"I love you, Grampa." Laura hugged her grandfather back.
The old man kissed the top of her head. "I love you, too, Lu." They sat in silence for a few minutes more. Then he said, "Must be about your bedtime, time to get on back into the house."
With a soft groan he rose stiffly from the swing and tapped the bowl of his pipe on the porch rail, knocking the cold ashes into the flower bed below. Laura slid off the swing, waiting for him to finish. After slipping the pipe into his pocket, he took her hand and they walked back into the house, the screen door banging behind them, to rejoin the waiting circle of family.
Thank you for reading my first foray into fan fiction. Please review and be kind!