10. Ashley

If I kept a diary or other memoir, an entry might have read something like this: Getting sideswiped by looking back.

In July, I returned with Beau to Twelve Oaks and moved into the overseer's house, the only building still intact. I saw immediately that being in the County brought with it the potential of triggering all that I had sought to put behind me.

I could control it, I thought, by avoiding any venue that I might associate with either Scarlett or Melly. This would require, of course, ingenuity.

I had lived in the County from 1836 until 1861. When I returned in 1865, we spent a significant amount of time there, this time at Tara, until Scarlett married Frank and convinced - well, coerced - me to become a partner in her lumber business. The same year that the house in which I had taken residence was built, I was born in the big house. I went to school here, experienced my first kiss under the rosebushes before Melanie had ever grown up enough for me to court and when Scarlett was still making mudpies with the Tarleton twins instead of tempting them. But for reasons that remain unclear to me, being home at Twelve Oakes rarely triggered the onslaught of memories that being in Atlanta did, although in theory, every acre of land was permeated with associations I tried desperately to avoid: the war, the end of life as I knew it.

After Rhett's illness had run its course, he needed to heal physically and Scarlett needed to heal emotionally. I, for my part, needed to extricate myself from the situation in order for them to do either. So Beau and I would stay in the overseer's house, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks at a time. We set up a small garden, we talked.

What if, Beau was always asking. What if Mother was alive? What if Grandpa was still alive? Uncle Charlie? Ella's Pa?

He could ask what if about anything.

What if everything changed?

It had, had it not? The war had changed us. All of us.

And yet, Twelve Oaks in all its ruin seemed the safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, where no one would know about or refer to the events of the last year. The ignominy of the scandal with Scarlett, Melly's ill-advised pregnancy, the miscarriage, her death. This was the place in which I could still be the man I had been before any of it had happened.

I plotted my garden. I remained guarded, even around my neighbors.

Never once the entire summer did I set foot on Tara. When forced to ride by the turn, I looked neither left nor right. I could avoid looking at the red soil, remembering the agony of splitting rails, of watching Scarlett throw herself at me, of dreaming about her at night while sweet Melly lay next to me, chaste as a nun.

I invited Honey and her husband from Lovejoy to dinner every night they had business in Jonesboro, which was frequent. I went to the Tarletons' to pay court to Beatrice and the three unmarried girls. There were horses and roses just as there had been all those years before. All that was missing were four boisterous male voices.

In their place were four marble headstones.

Ah, what if?

I could have been in a bank in New York.

Yet, I was home, toiling in the garden. Just like my father had done after my mother died.

One afternoon, I was riding several miles east of my property, previously untested territory, as it straddles the border of Tara. I caught sight, unprepared, of a tree clearing in which Scarlett and I rode through only days before I was to announce my engagement to Melanie. I wanted to tell her then. I would have, too, if it hadn't been so dark. Perhaps, then, things would have been different for us all.

What if?

Melly the day of the barbeque. The cherry-colored organdie sash. The scarf I wrapped theatrically around her small shoulders, my subtle, vague way of expressing my feelings for her. I should have shouted them.

My furlough. She was wearing her nightgown low about her slender shoulders. Her attempt at seduction. She should have known better. I was smitten the moment she opened her mouth. She could have been a troll.

What if?

Beau and I walked around the property together, as my own father had done with me at his age. I listened as he chattered, then put my arm around them as we sat on the hill and watched the sun set. I nudged him as he began to fall asleep.

I need to fall in love again.

What if? What if?

In point of fact the house which would have once been my symbol of status no longer existed. It had been burned to the ground by the Yankee army and there was no hope of rebuilding it in my current financial state. In fact, nothing of it remained standing but one chimney.

Scarlett and Rhett arrived in the middle of August.

The day, when it came, seemed to unfold like a dream. Rhett was thin. So thin. He looked old. Scarlett, too. She was aging. At twenty-nine, she looked thirty-five, if not more.

What if?

What if I had been the one to marry her? Would she have looked any younger? Would she have been any happier than she was now, clinging onto Rhett's arm as though he would fall over dead at any moment?

No, I tell myself to this day. You would have driven her into madness.

Back in the clearing, alone with Scarlett for the first time, I took the loaf of bread and tore it into pieces so we could share like we did as children. After a few bites she shook her head. She had not kept any solid food down for days now and could not eat more. She said that there had been several days she could not eat at all.

"Do you think we've made it, Ashley?" she asked then.

"Of course," I reassured her.

I remember telling her something similar some weeks before.

I realized that I had answered my own what if. There had been no error. I had known from the beginning.

I left the conversation where it was.

There was no need to fall in love again.