Rhett Butler's People

  Kennedy’s buggy rolled past thickets of tender glowing redbuds. Spice bushes perfumed the air. Dogofthewoods shimmered like ghosts in the woods beside the road.

  This display, north Georgia at its most beautiful, plucked at Rhett’s heart. He’d wintered in Manhattan, where war talk dominated every dining room and gentleman’s club. Rhett had heard Abraham Lincoln speak at Cooper Union and thought the gangling, long-faced westerner would make a formidable enemy. A hundred thousand Yankees were forming into regiments. He’d traveled to New Haven, where a gun maker told the affable Mr. Butler he couldn’t find the machinery he needed. “I have more contracts than I can fill,” the man complained. “Butler, can you help me buy barrel lathes?”

  One Sunday afternoon, Rhett toured the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where a hundred warships were being fitted. Hammering and forging and coppering hulls and painters on scaffolds and hundreds of women sewing in the sail lofts. On a Sunday.

  As the South prepared to fight Goliath with gallantry.

  Damn the fools!

  Rhett Butler loved the Southland’s gentle courtesies and hospitality, the fiery tempers just beneath languid drawls. But if a fact was disagreeable, Southerners disbelieved that fact. For how could fact outfight gallantry?

  Frank Kennedy misinterpreted Rhett’s silence as a stranger’s unease crashing a party whose host he’d never met. Frank provided reassurances. Their host, John Wilkes, was “a Georgia gentleman of the old school” and Wilkes’s son, Ashley, although younger, of course, was of the old school, too. Ashley’s bride-to-be was “a little slip of a thing,” but Melanie Hamilton was, Frank assured Rhett, “a Spark.”

  Getting no response from his guest, Frank went on to name the young bloods who’d be there: the Tarletons, the Calverts, the Munroes, and the Fontaines. “When Tony Fontaine shot Brent Tarleton in the leg—both of them were drunk as lords!—they made a joke of it! A joke!” He shook his head: deploring men he half wished to be.

  Rhett Butler wasn’t too sentimental to profit from Southern blunders. The South grew two-thirds of the world’s cotton and Rhett knew Lincoln’s navy would blockade the Southern ports. After the ports were closed, cotton prices would skyrocket. Rhett’s cotton would be safe in the Bahamas before Federal blockaders came on station.

  The money was nothing: ashes in his mouth. Rhett felt like a grown-up watching children playing games. They yelled, they gestured, they pretended to be Indians or Redcoats or Yankee soldiers. They strutted and played at war. It made Rhett Butler want to weep. He was helpless to prevent it. Utterly helpless.

  His guest’s silence made Frank Kennedy uncomfortable. He babbled, “John Wilkes is no rustic, Mr. Butler. No indeed. The Wilkeses’ library has so many books; why, I expect John has hundreds of books! John Wilkes has read everything a gentleman should read, and his son, Ashley, takes after John. As they say, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree.’ You’ll meet Gerald O’Hara, too. Fine fellow! Gerald’s from Savannah. Not originally, of course, originally, Gerald’s from Ireland. Not that I have anything against the Irish. I’m keeping company with his daughter Suellen, so I couldn’t have anything against the Irish, ha, ha.”

  When he looked for Rhett’s reply, Rhett’s eyes were remote. “At any rate,” Frank filled the silence, “Gerald bought Tara Plantation and that’s how Gerald came to Clayton County.” Frank gave his horse a stern look. “Suellen is a peach.” Frank slapped his knee. “A Georgia peach.”

  They continued in silence.

  Rhett was picturing Charleston, where men who’d been Rhett’s schoolmates were manning guns hammering Fort Sumter while their elders made speeches each more belligerent than the last.

  Might Rhett persuade Rosemary and John to leave? “Just until this shakes out, John. California has opportunities for a man like you. Or London, John. Wouldn’t your Meg love to visit London? And Rosemary …”

  Andrew Ravanel and Rosemary had created a scandal at that patriotic ball. John and Rosemary weren’t speaking.

  “My Suellen can be ‘sharpish,’” Frank Kennedy was saying. “But she soon repents. You’re a man of the world, Butler. You know what I mean.”

  Rhett held his sharpish tongue.

  They forded the Flint River and trotted briskly up a rise. The flat-roofed, many-chimneyed plantation house was smaller than Broughton but grand enough for all that. Broad Corinthian columns supported a roof that shaded broad verandas on three sides of the house.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” Frank Kennedy insisted. “Twelve Oaks’ hospitality—why, it’s legendary!”

  There was a bustle at the turnaround, where riders dismounted and carriages disgorged their occupants. Negro grooms removed horses and rigs while guests exchanged enthusiastic greetings with neighbors they hadn’t seen since last week.

  The tang of barbecued pork flavored the hickory smoke.

  On the veranda, maidens in their prettiest outfits flirted with beaux in tight gray trousers and ruffled linen shirts. Older folks solemnly considered symptoms and remedies while children darted like barn swallows across the lawn.

  Was this the last glorious, graceful Southern afternoon? Or was it the Southland’s funeral?

  Frank and Rhett were greeted by a white-haired patrician with a young woman at his side. “John Wilkes, John’s daughter, Miss Honey Wilkes: Mr. Rhett Butler. Mr. Butler and I had business today and I thought we’d flee our cares for a while. John, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “My home is open to any gentleman,” John Wilkes said simply. “Welcome, sir, to Twelve Oaks.”

  “You are too kind.”

  “Your accent, sir?”

  “The Low Country, sir, born and reared.”

  Wilkes frowned. “Butler … Rhett Butler … Wasn’t there … Don’t I recall…?”

  The flicker in the older man’s eyes told Rhett that Wilkes had indeed ‘recalled’ … but Wilkes’s smile never faltered. “No matter, I suppose. Tom! Bring the salver. Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Butler have had a dusty journey.”

  Honey Wilkes was waving eagerly. “Oh look, Daddy. It’s the O’Haras. Frank Kennedy! Shame on you! Aren’t you going to help Suellen down?”

  Frank hastened to his duty. With a polite nod to his host, Rhett withdrew to a quiet corner of the veranda. He wished he hadn’t come.

  Twelve Oaks buzzed like a honeybee swarm on its mating flight. There’d be marriages made today and doubtless a scandal or two. Swirling through the floral and Parisian perfumes, amid the gaiety, flirting, and jests, was romance, as fresh as if no man or maid had experienced romance before.

  Rhett’s eyes fell on a very young woman in a green dancing frock and his heart surged. “Dear God,” he whispered.

  She wasn’t a great beauty: her chin was pointed and her jaw had too much strength. She was fashionably pale—ladies never exposed their skin to the brutal sun—and unusually animated. As Rhett watched, she touched a young buck’s arm both intimately and carelessly.

  When the girl felt Rhett’s gaze, she looked up. For one scorching second, her puzzled green eyes met his black eyes before she tossed her head dismissively and resumed her flirtation.

  Forgotten the looming War. Forgotten the devastation he expected. Hope welled up in Rhett Butler like a healing spring. “My God.” Rhett moistened dry lips. “She’s just like me!”

  His heart slowed. He looked away, smiling at himself. It had been a long time since he’d made a fool of himself over a woman.

  Rhett followed his nose around the plantation house to the barbecue where, scattered under shade trees, picnic tables were draped with Belgian linen and laid with English silver and French china. He took a seat at a half-empty table and a servant delivered Rhett’s plate and glass of wine. When his thoughts circled back to that girl, he shook his head and drank a second glass of wine.

  Although the pork had a deep, smoky flavor and the potato salad was a perfect admixture of tart and sweet, two drunk young bucks at the foot of the table were glowering at the stranger, and befor
e long they’d make a remark that couldn’t be overlooked. Rhett refused dessert and decamped to the shade of a venerable black walnut tree to light a cigar. When John Wilkes joined him, Rhett complimented his host. “Hospitality like yours, sir, stops at the Mason-Dixon line. Hospitality cannot survive Yankee winters.”

  “You are too kind. Mr. Kennedy tells me you’ve been up north recently.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Will they fight?”

  “They will. Abraham Lincoln won’t show a white flag.”

  “But surely, our brave young men …”

  “Mr. Wilkes, I am a stranger and you welcomed me to your home. I believe that defines the Good Samaritan. I am grateful, sir.”

  “Too grateful to tell your host what you think of Confederate prospects?”

  “Mr. Kennedy says you have a fine library. Perhaps, later, you can show it to me.”

  That girl—the green-eyed girl in the dancing frock—had seated herself among her beaux, and her rosewood ottoman might have been a throne. She was a princess; no, a young queen among favored cavaliers. The girl was responding too eagerly to compliments and jests, almost as if she were an ingenue overplaying her first big part.

  “Fiddle-dee-dee!” she derided an admirer’s inept sally.

  Despite Suellen O’Hara’s obvious dismay, Frank Kennedy was fetching this girl dainties—although any of Wilkes’s servants could have performed that humble chore. Rhett half expected the man to kneel.

  Wilkes followed Rhett’s eyes. “Scarlett O’Hara. Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Scarlett,” Rhett savored the name. “Yes, she is.”

  “I’m afraid our Scarlett’s a heartbreaker.”

  “She’s never met a man who understood her.”

  Wilkes misread Rhett’s intensity and frowned, “Aren’t beaux and balls what a young lady should concern herself with? Would you rather Scarlett trouble her pretty head with war and armies and politics?”

  “I hope to God she’ll never need to,” Rhett replied. “There are worse things than beauty and innocence.”

  “My son, Ashley, has enlisted.” Wilkes indicated a slender young man seated cross-legged beside the girl who must be his fiancée. Ashley Wilkes was his father’s son: tall, gray-eyed, and blond with an aristocrat’s confident grace. His fiancée laughed prettily at some private jest.

  Wilkes unburdened himself with this stranger precisely because Rhett was a stranger. “Some of my acquaintances—influential, far-seeing men—are exiling their sons to Europe.”

  “Mr. Wilkes, there are no good decisions left to us, only painful ones.”

  Wilkes sighed heavily. “I suppose you’re right.” He became the host again with “Excuse me. I believe the Tarleton twins have lingered too long at the brandy cask.”

  Scarlett flirted, demurely accepted each compliment, flattered outrageously and, from time to time, beneath lowered eyelids Miss O’Hara cast glances at … young Wilkes? Oh yes, she did. And Rhett caught her doing it.

  Whispering confidences to an admirer, Scarlett looked past the man’s shoulder to Wilkes. When she caught Rhett’s eye again, Rhett laughed. Because he understood. Oh yes, he did. The heartbreaker was using the besotted males to make Ashley Wilkes jealous. For Wilkes’s sake, she’d bewitched every available male—as well as some, like Frank Kennedy, who weren’t as available as they might have wished.

  Apparently the heartbreaker was heartsick for another woman’s prize. Poor, lovely, unhappy child!

  At Rhett’s laughter, Scarlett O’Hara flushed to her roots before refuging among her admirers.

  It was inevitable. Some fool would mention the unmentionable, what every person here was trying to ignore. The fatal words “Fort Sumter” were uttered and the romantic languor of a spring afternoon vanished like a dream.

  “We’ll whip the Yanks in a month,” one gallant promised.

  “Three weeks,” another supposed.

  “Hell—excuse me, ladies—they haven’t the guts to fight.”

  “Any Southerner can whip four Yankees.”

  “If they want a fight, by God, we’ll give them one.”

  One aged dodderer shouted incoherently and brandished his cane. Faces were red with drink, passion, or both.

  Pressed for an opinion, young Wilkes said that he’d fight if he had to, of course he would, but war would be terrible.

  That incomparable girl adored her hero with her eyes.

  “And you, sir,” Wilkes turned to Rhett. “My father says you have spent time among our former countrymen.”

  Which is how Rhett Butler came to say everything he had promised himself he must not say; knowing even as he spoke that his words were futile and he was speaking to men deaf to them.

  “I answer only to my conscience. I will not fight a war that will destroy what I hold dear.”

  “You ain’t gonna fight for your country?” one boy brayed disbelief. Other young men formed a circle around the stranger. The queen’s cavaliers rose to their feet, alert for apostasy.

  In for a penny, in for a pound …

  Like a schoolmaster instructing dull students, Rhett described Yankeedom and its tremendous mills and humming factories. He evaluated its wealth—the California gold and Nevada silver—which the Confederacy did not possess. He explained in detail why England and France would never recognize the Confederacy.

  “This isn’t General Washington’s war, gentlemen. France won’t bail us out this time.”

  The young bucks pressed nearer. None smiled. The air was still like it gets before a thunderstorm.

  “I have seen what you all have not: Tens of thousands of immigrants who’ll fight for the Yankees, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—everything we lack. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. The Yankees’ll lick us sure.”

  With a monogrammed linen handkerchief, Rhett brushed a speck of dust from his sleeve.

  Insects buzzed. Somewhere, a servant dropped a plate and was instantly shushed.

  Beneath his imperturbable manner, Rhett Butler was laughing at himself. Despite his intent to remain silent, he’d offended everybody. That girl had loosed his tongue and he’d acted like a too-bright schoolboy. Rhett turned to John Wilkes. “Your library, sir. I’d be obliged if I could see it now.”

  Wilkes entreated his guests. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll excuse us. Earlier, I begged Mr. Butler for his candid opinion of Confederate prospects and he has accommodated me.” Wilkes smiled tersely. “Too candidly, perhaps. If anyone has objections, raise them with me. …” Their host raised an admonitory finger. “Privately.” Turning to Rhett, Wilkes said, “Our library? Sir, I don’t believe Clayton County has a finer.”

  It was a handsome high-ceilinged room, thirty feet on a side, whose walls were covered with books, even above the windows and door.

  Wilkes gestured perfunctorily. “These are biography and history. These are novels on the shelves beside that chair: Dickens, Thackeray, Scott. Most of my guests will be resting soon, repairing for this evening’s dancing. Our fiddler is famous here in the countryside. Perhaps you’ll stay.”

  “My regrets, sir. My train departs at ten.”

  “Ah.” Wilkes touched the side of his nose and looked at Rhett for a long moment. If he may have wished to say more, he contented himself with, “If there are virtues worse than beauty and innocence, sir, overmuch candor is among them. Now, sir, I must return to my guests. I’ve feathers to unruffle.”

  The library walls were thick and high ceilings kept the room cool and Rhett Butler was suddenly very tired. He stretched out on the long high-backed couch and closed his eyes.

  Women. All those women. Rhett remembered how Didi always took one forkful from his plate and went through his wallet when she thought he was asleep. He smiled. He hadn’t thought of that in years. Scarlett O’Hara…

  Rhett dozed. One restless dream became another, then another. And then, through the fog of sleep, he heard voices.


  “What is it? A secret to tell me?”

  She took courage, “Yes—a secret—I love you.”

  He said, “Isn’t it enough that you’ve collected every other man’s heart here today? Do you want to make it unanimous? Well, you’ve always had my heart, you know. You cut your teeth on it.”

  Puzzled, Rhett swam upward through the layers of sleep. When his eyes snapped open, his cheek was pressed against a leather bolster and his mouth was dust dry. The voices he’d been dreaming continued remorselessly.

  “Ashley—Ashley—tell me—you must—oh, don’t tease me now! Have I your heart? Oh, my dear, I lo—”

  Ashley? Now who the hell was Ashley? Exactly where was he, anyway? Rhett’s mind cast for a mooring. Fort Sumter. Frank Kennedy’s cotton. A backwoods plantation with pretensions. The library. Scarlett? Scarlett who? Rhett frowned. His cheek was stuck to the leather bolster.

  Somebody—Ashley?—said, “You must not say these things, Scarlett!”

  That Scarlett. Rhett came suddenly and entirely awake.

  An earnest voice droned on earnestly, “You mustn’t. You don’t mean them. You’ll hate yourself for saying them, and you’ll hate me for hearing them.”

  Rhett thought, So much for your adoring glances, Miss Scarlett. He’d slept on his right side and his pocket watch was pressing into his hip and his feet were numb. He should have removed his riding boots. A better man than I, Rhett thought, would leap up, apologize, and assure the lovers he’d heard nothing as he hurried from the room. Fortunately, I am not a better man.

  She said, “I couldn’t ever hate you. I tell you I love you and I know you must care about me because … Ashley, do you care—you do, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I care.”

  Tepid response, young man, Rhett thought, grimacing as he unstuck his cheek from the leather.

  “Scarlett, can’t we go away and forget that we have ever said these things?” Young Wilkes dithered for a few minutes more before he reached the crux of the matter, “Love isn’t enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are ….”

  Rhett thought: Aha, Irish immigrant’s daughter and the aristocrat. She’s good enough to toy with but not good enough to marry.