Thank you all for your wonderful reviews and comments. This is a slightly different chapter, and it's mature-ish in content for description of an unpleasant surgical procedure. Gina's plot is finally unveiled. Again, mostly unedited, as I've kept to writing a paragraph a day to avoid the long inter-chapter delays. I hope you enjoy (and as requested, there is some R&S at the end).
Rose speaks …..
The door closes once more, and I sit back to savor the silence. The blue hour sucks the light through the double windows, muting the bright red stains on the sheets into dull grey. The box containing the severed limb still sits in the corner. I have not asked the servants to take it out, and the sickly-sweet odor of rotting flesh already lurks underneath the faintly metallic scent of spilled blood. I must tell them to remove it, soon, or the stench will become overpowering, and attract flies. My patient has fallen into a restless sleep, only occasionally groaning in pain, or twitching fitfully. I twist my hands on my lap, and itch to fluff up a pillow, or straighten the blanket. In the end, I do nothing. I tell myself I do not wish to disturb what little peace she will get.
But the truth is, no straitening on my part will vanish the dip in the sheets, where her right leg should have been.
I ask myself, as I did many times that day, what prompted her to do it. I also ask myself, almost as uncomfortably, what she will say to me when – and if – she wakes up. After all, I took the decision to amputate upon myself. I make no excuses. And in the end, no one else could have made it, necessary though it was.
I pause for a moment to ponder the irony. Belle Watling and I have never been friends, or even friendly, and that very fact may yet save her life.
Thad came by earlier. I could not allow myself to feel for him except in the most abstract sense, not while I was sterilizing a saw to cut off his mother's leg. He understands that, I know, but I cannot help feeling a vague tinge of regret that I could not comfort him, that he could not comfort me. Because such is the nature of those choices.
James keeps up a slow drip of ether, perfectly spaced, and injected the morphine as instructed. She did not even twitch.
Daddy said very little once the decision had been made. Once I had made it, although I suspect it had been made for me when she first sank into the dust in front of Gina. Daddy could not bear to stay for the actual procedure, and I did not ask it of him. That is one way I am like my mother, aside from our shared faces. We can shut ourselves off, and do what is necessary, no matter how we feel inside. Mother kept her family fed at Tara after the War, and she kept herself upright even after my sister's death. It was Daddy who failed. It pains me to admit it, now that we have achieved something like a friendship, but abandoning my brother and sister as he did was not the work of a man. He did not love them, then, I believe, not truly, though he'd deny it now. They were Mother's children, and he was too engrossed with Bonnie to pay much attention to others. He changed after he returned, and became a father to them, but that was later.
Of course, he abandoned me, too, after I was born, and he saw how much I resembled my sister. I can remember a time when I was - three, four? - when I wondered if perhaps I was her ghost, and attempted to walk through walls to test my theory. Sharp bumps to my forehead taught me I was indeed corporal, even though his eyes did see right through me. I was a solid sort of ghost.
I start by cutting through the skin. Skin is surprisingly thick and resistant, and the blood vessels burst open as I pushed downwards onto the fascia. There is very little oozing, the tourniquet successfully stemming the flow. I peel it aside, revealing the first layers of filet-colored muscle. I feel my hand tightening on the scalpel as I lower it once more.
Mother helped the preparations for the surgery. She was white-faced, as if she were reliving awful memories, but she did not falter. Erratically, she would wipe the sweat off Belle's forehead with her white embroidered handkerchief. To this day, I do not understand this strange kinship. When I was little, I would watch them, as I watched everyone, waiting for the slip that would expose their dishonesty to me. After all, Mother had had false friendships before. Melanie Wilkins comes to mind. But I learned over the years that deception is not in Mother's nature, not when it comes to women, and even to men she does not lie easily. Mother was perfectly sincere: She had hated Belle once, or at least despised her, and now she did not. Understanding Belle was easier, Mother had saved Thad's life many years ago, and that counted for more than anything.
Perhaps it is that simple with Mother as well. We hate those we harm, and we can't help loving those we have done a good turn to.
Outside, the cattle moves over the grazing grounds, and I can feel the ground vibrating beneath their hoofs. That rumbling is deeply ingrained in my bones, from the first time I came here as a frightened young girl, where I would feel it in the night, rocking my bed like a lullaby. I still remember that first night, laying in the small chamber off Thad's bedroom. Mother had been pregnant with the twins, and they had been concerned for her life, and sent me to the Ranch lest I prove a distraction, or perhaps to spare me, or because my face reminded Daddy of that other violent loss. I'd gone stoically, and arrived white-faced and sullen, too proud and too frightened to cry. I hadn't cried that first night, either, but clutched Thad's hand like a drowing person as he sat next to the bed.
It was that night, I think, that I knew I loved him. Not just later, when my body recognized him as male. I had been a wraith in my father's house for weeks, perhaps years, and my mother's condition made even the servant's eyes glaze over when I'd come to them, silently begging for reassurance and attention.
"We busy takin' care of your Momma, Miss Rose", they'd say, not unkindly. "You know she's very ill, don't ya? Now be a good girl, and play."
They meant well, and I cannot fault them for their priorities. But Thad's hand anchored me as nothing else had. I was not a Ghost, or a nuisance, or an inconvenience to him. Here, I was a desperate little girl afraid for her mother's life, and I was worth sitting next to. And he spoke softly to me, in that voice that had always seemed older than he was. Over the weeks and months that followed, I became used to having a man's eyes on me, with compassion and concern, and my spine straightened and my head lifted. And I loved him, as unthinkingly and completely as I loved wind and the sea and my mother's heartbeat.
And it was Mother, as strange as it may be, that understood, as much as she tried to nudge me into a fashionable married when I was older. Understood that Thad was not a father – I had a father, albeit one I hated at that time, and his absence was overpowering and undeniable as his physical presence in my life. Thad offered love unfettered by guilt and memories, and I sopped it up greedily with every fiber of my parched soul. He also grieved, for what I did not know exactly, but his grief did not wear my face.
Only much later did it occur to me that our affection may have been sparked by a mutual wish for revenge against my father, but no matter how it started, it was real then.
The deep calf muscles have been severed, as have the tendons, leaving two long ends of skin and flesh on each side which will form a flap. This is a butcher's work, not a surgeon's, and not one well suited to a slight frame such as mine. I loop back the flesh, securing it for now with temporary stitches. When I done I blink, and underneath the lamp-light, there is the gleam of white bone.
The day had been pleasant. We had gone to Church like every Sunday, and lingered in front of the building longer than strictly necessary to give Perry an opportunity to speak to his flame, Stella.
It was much later, when we had gathered in front of the house to walk to a picnic at the lake, that a high pitched whistle informed us that sentinel lines had been breached.
The men had been alert – but looking back there was little to warn them that the low wagon driven by a lone woman would contain peril.
Thad was more guarded than most, but like all of us had foolishly relaxed when she had taken a small wrapped bundle out of the cart. I could see her clearly then, a tall, buxom, blonde woman, in a loose grey dress and a grey wrapper.
"I have come to bring you your son," Gina said to Thad.
"Not mine," he answered, simply, and the assurance in his voice was almost persuasive.
I stood beside him, silent as I am wont to be in moments of crisis. The other woman stretched out her bundle, letting it slide from her grasp, and he had instinctively caught it. It was in that moment, where his hands were trying to find safe hold on the child, that she drew a pistol from the wide sleeve of her dress. She pointed it at me.
Perhaps it was the silence that was most frightening, in that moment when everything hung in a balance. Suddenly, there was a screech from behind, and a soft, metallic click. Then, several things happened at once.
Thad, who did not have use of his hands, kicked at Gina's legs instead, swiping them from underneath her, as if he was once more thirteen, and confronted by a group of older boys from the dormitory. Had it gone as planned, her bullet would probably have gone harmlessly into the ground. But at that precise moment, Belle Watling stepped forward, shoving her body between myself and my would-be assassin. As Gina fell forward, the pistol went off, the bullet plowing at point-blank range into Belle's thigh. Belle screamed. My father pounced from behind, and unceremoniously wrestled Gina to the ground.
I glance at the saw, and raise my eyes first to James, to Okla, who hands me the instrument in the unobtrusive, silent way I have come to associate with him. I gather my strength …. If cutting the muscle has been hard, this would be harder. I push the small saw forward, and then back. I feel the strain in my back and my shoulders, but I press on. Forward, and back.
The sound that fills the silent chamber is not unlike that of sawing a tree limb. I begin to see the groove that I am making. I push myself to work faster. The tourniquet can only stay on for so long, before the ischemia starts to damage the healthy tissue.
Only then do I move, because my brain has identified a patient in need of help. I think back to that moment now, many days later, when I knelt beside her and even while kneeling tore a long strip out of my petticoat to make a crude tourniquet for her leg. The blood flow drizzled, and stopped, and when I removed it hours later it did not restart.
There is a knock, jolting me back into the present, and a moment later, Thad enters. His face wears the stubble of a beard, and at any other time I might have compared him to a pirate from one of the penny novels Ella is so fond of. "How is she?"
"Unchanged," I say, not as his affianced wife, but as her doctor. I try not to show that I am tired, and despondent. Thad stares back at me. I'm certain he sees the dark shadows under my eyes. I see his hand move as if to reach out to me, and then fall uselessly at his side. I do not want his pity.
"The baby is not mine," he says at last. "Whatever else I may be, I was always ….careful. I had no intention of fathering a child out of wedlock."
A child like me, I hear plainly. "It matters not," I say almost coolly.
He looks as if he begs to disagree, but any protestations died on his lips.
"Okla is here, and wants to see us," he says at last. "In the drawing room. James will sit with mother."
I agree, albeit reluctantly. I owe much to the young Healer. If anyone else had asked for me, I would have refused. I pick up my wrapper from the chair. Even in the afternoon heat, I feel the cold.
They are all there, except for the little boys. Mother and Daddy. Uncle Charles Butler. Okla, holding Gina's infant with a strange, practiced ease. Dressed in a dark shirt and trousers, he looks even younger than he most likely is. Chase and Ella stand next to him, and I see that my sister's eyes never let go of the baby. Charlotte, looking uncomfortable and ill at ease. And now, Thad and I.
Okla makes a sound, like a call to attention, and the low murmuring stops, and all eyes turn to him. He adroitly removes the swaddling, and turns the nacked baby over in his arms. We all stare, unsure what he is requesting us to see. Our gaze follows his index fingers, pointing out marks on the downy soft skin of the infant. In the afternoon light, darkly pigmented spots on his back and buttocks were suddenly visible.
"He is hurt!" Ella cries, agitated, and makes as if to stretch out her hand. I step more closely. The dark marks have the look of bruises, but I have never seen bruises shaped quite so oddly.
"No," Okla said. "This is what I had come to see. They are not bruises. They are - the marks of our people."
Heads turn to him, uncomprehending. "Many of our newborns have these marks," he explains in his soft, authorative voice. I forget he is little more than a child. I think we all do. "They fade, after few years. But the White Man's children do not bear them."
For a moment, there is silence, as the implications sink in.
Charles blinks first. "I be damned" he mutters.
"It rather ….inspired," Daddy says, musingly. "If she wanted to choose a father with similar coloring to …"
"Yes," Thad says, and although this development absolves him, there is something akin to rage in his eyes.
"We take care of our own," Okla says, turning our attention back to him. "With his mother unlikely to regain freedom, we will claim the baby, if your people do not." I cast him another glance, admiring how deftly he has turned a matter of betrayal, attempted murder and heartbreak back to the essentials. Of providing for kin.
"He will stay with me," my sister says, firmly. For the first time in a long while, her voice carries, and her eyes gleam with light.
Okla nods, as if he had somehow anticipated her answer.
"Well," Mother says, with the air of one for whom things are moving rather too quickly. Within a short space, she has almost lost a daughter, seen a friend crippled, and now, gained a new grandson. However, Mother is nothing if not adaptable, and after all this time, she is still capable of surprising. She takes Ella's hand into her small one. "What will you name him?'
I see Daddy smile at her, and for a moment, the room lights up in ways I couldn't have fathomed.
Ella hesitates for a moment. She shares a look with Chase, who gives her a small, encouraging nod.
I pause for a moment. There is is …..that last bit of bone still holding the leg in place. I do not make eye contact with anyone before I lower the saw once more for the final effort. Okla catches the limb as it falls, hiding it from my sight, and hands me the bone file so I can keep my mind occupied, busy with smoothing away the rough edges of the cut before closing the flap over the bone, occupied so I don't have to think about what I just did.
The pale blue eyes fly open. She changes from sleep to wakefulness like those do that do not know what they will be waking up to. Thad does it. As does Daddy. Not Mother, who has retained some of her child-like innocence, but she is the exeption.
Belle sees me at her bedside, and I can feel her confusion, the questions she dares not ask. I know her mangled nerve endings are howling in agony through the haze of the morphine, but like an injured animal she does not acknowledge she has taken a mortal hit.
She tries to sit up, and I lift my hand to stop her. She flinches at my movement, as if expecting a punch.
Then, she exhales, and leans back. Her eyelids flutter shut.
"My leg," she says, finally, evenly, and her courage strikes me like a blow. Mother's courage. And I finally do understand.
Her eyes open again, searching, and I know she can see nothing in my face.
"The bullet tore the artery apart." I pause, and the remaining blood drains from her pale, pale face. But she nods encouragingly; I believe to make it easier for me to continue. "Infection set in. I amputated three days ago to avoid death by blood poisoning." I felt it best to establish my culpability right away. Perhaps it will give her something to fight against.
Instead she smiles, a rueful smile, as if she does indeed appreciate the irony. "Must thank yer, then, for savin' ma life. Mustn' I."
"No indeed," I say formally, with a calm I don't feel. "It is I who must thank you for your efforts to save mine."
"Much good that it did. Thad kicked 'er down, and I jes got in the way. Shoulda just stayed outta it, shouldn' I?"
Again, her ruthless practicality surprises me, but I can find nothing to say. It does not appear that she expected a reply.
Her hand moves forward slowly into the empty expanse of the sheet, searching, grasping at the space where her limb had been. Now her eyes start to glitter, and she turns her head away, too proud before me to weep, and I respect that as well. I rise to make an excuse, but I am spared the effort, for the door opens silently, and Uncle Charles steps in. Her face breaks as she beholds him, and she cries all the tears that she wouldn't cry for me.
"Oh Charles," she cries, "what good am I now ter anyone?"
A few hasty steps take me to the door. I turn briefly, and see him holding her firmly against his chest, stroking the wild hair, mumbling words of comfort.
I close the door behind me, and walk into the corridor. I know, and always have known, my duty. A few turns later, I stand before a heavy oak door, and knock.
Thad opens, in his customary black trousers and a white shirt open at the neck. The lack of sleep shows in his eyes, and in his rumpled hair, framing his face in untidy ringlets. He runs an unsteady hand through it when he sees me. It feels as if I haven't seen him for days. He steps aside, but the eyes are wary and watchful. I try not to feel hurt.
I turn in the middle of the room, and only then do I speak. "She's awake." I give him a moment to collect himself, and then I continue. "I believe she will recover, as long as there is no new infection."
He nods, and I can see the relief. "Thank you." And then, he finds words for the awful distance that has sprung up between us. "I've ….missed you."
I bite my lips, and raise my hands as if to push back the words, a helpless gesture, and I despise myself. There is stinging in my eyes, and any minute I will cry like an infant.
He is at my side, swiftly, and catches the balled fists, drawing me into him. "Rose," he says, and I want to cry more, grateful that I can finally break down. Arms pick me up, and I experience a falling sensation, only dimly realizing Thad has pulled me back onto the bed. I let him cradle me as if I were once more five years old, only this time, it is different, and he weeps as well, as the maelstrom of guilt and fear and pain crashes through us, and it is perhaps fitting that we weep for his mother, now, in this room, where I have wept for mine. Much later, something shifts and he finds my lips, and I taste salt and tears (mine? his?) as we trade unbridaled, open mouthed kisses that turn into stroking, tangling tongues. And the world holds its breath, like a spinning top trembling on its tip, poised to fall this way, or that.
Had I been a different sort of a girl – a girl who had not been a Ghost – this night might have ended otherwise. And if Thad had not grown up as he did, child of two worlds, craving the ideals and boundaries of the society that had cast him out. As it was, I learned many things that night, but the Ultimate truths, I did not learn. Before we could lose ourselves entirely, Thad has caught my hands, encircled my wrists, and pulls me down to his side, encasing me in his arms. I am suspended like a traveler at the gates of a new city, pausing for the doors to open before stepping through.
"Soon," he says softly, "but not yet." I am grateful for the reprieve. For behind the walls, there was as the rumbling of a Great River, poised to sweep us away with its tide.
"Oh, dear," Scarlett said, pacing back and forth in the room that had been allotted to them. "What will we do now?"
Her husband was already dressed for sleep, and leaned back on the small mountain range of pillows the servants had made at the head of the four-post bed. Instead of answering, he merely cast her an enigmatic look.
"Rhett Butler!" she exclaimed, nettled to irritation by his silence, and grateful for the chance to vent at someone. "I come to you, telling you that I have seen …..God's nightgown! I am not sure where my head is anymore. I never expected anything like this!"
Her husband wisely did not inform her that he had had some prior knowledge of improprieties on the part of their youngest daughter. He looked down at his hands, which he had spread out before him, and then back to her. He gave what was intended as a reassuring smile. "I am sure nothing happened."
Scarlett's expression turned even more irate. "How can you be so calm about it? We are talking about our daughter! To be sure, they were both fully dressed, but – in his bed! Sleeping! In his arms! Just think of the scandal, if this comes out!"
"Who is to tell them, if you do not? You yourself would not have walked into his room, had Belle not asked to see him, and no one else has any business there. I am sure Rose will be wise enough to leave before the servants wake."
Scarlett eyed him suspiciously, clearly scandalized by such a loose conception of morals. It was all the more incomprehensible as it was unprecedented. He had never translated the liberties he had taken with his own reputation to any of his daughtes. "You don't mean you….that you condone…."
"Of course not," he said, and now she saw that his half-smirk was uncomfortable, not amused. "However, these are extenuating circumstances. Rose has been under a great deal of stress, as has Thad. We know they mean to marry, and we both know Thad will not dishonor her, or us, by bedding her before her wedding night. Causing a scandal now, here, at this time, seems…..unnecessary, and will do much more harm than good."
As always, her practical side reacted to having the truth spoken so baldly. "You are right," she conceded, with a sigh, setting herself down on the edge of the bed. She shook herself again, like a puppy after a bath, and tried to think of an explicative worthy of the occasion. "God's Nightgown!" was all that came to mind, and after having uttered it, she lapsed into a brief but fulminating silence. "But don't you think, Rhett, that I won't have a firm talk with the young lady about all of this!"
He smiled with amusement at the determination on her face. "My dear - I was counting on it."
"Mongolian blue spots" are a kind of hyperpigmentation, like a birth mark, and often fade over time. Okla is wrong in thinking they are exclusive to Native Americans (they can be found f.e. in Asians, Malay archipelago islanders, Micronesians, Polynesians, East Africans, and Turks) - but right that Caucasian children rarely have them (as compared to about 80-90% of Native American babies).