provided.
Pork had dug the grave the night before, close by Ellen's grave, and he stood, spade in
hand, behind the moist red clay he was soon to shovel back in place. Scarlett stood behind him in the patchy shade of a gnarled low-limbed cedar, the hot sun of the June morning dappling her, and tried to keep her eyes away from the red trench in front of her. Jim Tarleton, little Hugh Munroe, Alex Fontaine and old man McRae's youngest grandson came slowly and awkwardly
down the path from the house bearing Gerald's coffin on two lengths of split oak. Behind them, at a respectful distance, followed a large straggling crowd of neighbors and friends, shabbily dressed, silent. As they came down the sunny path through the garden, Pork bowed his head upon the top of the spade handle and cried; and Scarlett saw with incurious surprise that the kinks on his head, so jettily black when she went to Atlanta a few months before, were now grizzled.
She thanked God tiredly that she had cried all her tears the night before, so now she could stand erect and dry eyed. The sound of Suellen's tears, put back of her shoulder, irritated her unbearably and she had to clench her fists to keep from turning and slapping the swollen face.
Sue had been the cause of her father's death, whether she intended it or not, and she should have the decency to control herself in front of the hostile neighbors. Not a single person had spoken to her that morning or given her one look of sympathy. They had kissed Scarlett quietly, shaken her hand, murmured kind words to Carreen and even to Pork but had looked through Suellen as if she were not there.
To them she had done worse than murder her father. She had tried to betray him into
disloyalty to the South. And to that grim and close-knit community it was as if she had tried to betray the honor of them all. She had broken the solid front the County presented to the world.
By her attempt to get money from the Yankee government she had aligned herself with
Carpetbaggers and Scalawags, more hated enemies than the Yankee soldiers had ever been. She, a member of an old and staunchly Confederate family, a planter's family, had gone over to the enemy and by so doing had brought shame on every family in the County.
The mourners were seething with indignation and downcast with sorrow, especially three
of them--old man McRae, who had been Gerald's crony since he came to the up-country from
Savannah so many years before, Grandma Fontaine who loved him because he was Ellen's
husband, and Mrs. Tarleton who had been closer to him than to any of her neighbors because, as she often said, he was the only man in the County who knew a stallion from a gelding.
The sight of the stormy faces of these three in the dim parlor where Gerald lay before the funeral had caused Ashley and Will some uneasiness and they had retired to Ellen's office for a consultation.
"Some of them are goin' to say somethin' about Suellen," said Will abruptly, biting his straw in half. They think they got just cause to say somethin'. Maybe they have. It ain't for me to
say. But, Ashley, whether they're right or not, we'll have to resent it, bein' the men of the family, and then there'll be trouble. Can't nobody do nothin' with old man McRae because he's deaf as a post and can't hear folks tryin' to shut him up. And you know there ain't nobody in God's world ever stopped Grandma Fontaine from speakin' her mind. And as for Mrs. Tarleton--did you see her roll them russet eyes of hers every time she looked at Sue? She's got her ears laid back and can't hardly wait. If they say somethin', we got to take it up and we got enough trouble at Tara now without bein' at outs with our neighbors."
Ashley sighed worriedly. He knew the tempers of his neighbors better than Will did and
he remembered that fully half of the quarrels and some of the shootings of the days before the war had risen from the County custom of saying a few words over the coffins of departed
neighbors. Generally the words were eulogistic in the extreme but occasionally they were not.
Sometimes, words meant in the utmost respect were misconstrued by overstrung relatives of the dead and scarcely were the last shovels of earth mounded above the coffin before trouble began.
In the absence of a priest Ashley was to conduct the services with the aid of Carreen's
Book of Devotions, the assistance of the Methodist and Baptist preachers of Jonesboro and Fayetteville having been tactfully refused. Carreen, more devoutly Catholic than her sisters, had been very upset that Scarlett had neglected to bring a priest from Atlanta with her and had only been a little eased by the reminder that when the priest came down to marry Will and Suellen, he could read the services over Gerald. It was she who objected to the neighboring Protestant preachers and gave the matter into Ashley's hands, marking passages in her book for him to read.