Rhett Butler's People

  “Ma’am.” One man removed the stovepipe hat he’d worn during his meal. “Henry Harris. Glad to make your acquaintance. Your brother, ma’am. I can’t say too much about your brother! Hard to pull the wool over Captain Butler’s eyes!” The speculator set a finger beside his nose and winked. “Him and that nigger Bonneau—they’re deep ones! Ma’am, I got to be frank. Frankness is my weak point. I got to have ten cases of Frenchie champagne, and Cap’n Butler always brings in the best. Ma’am, if you see your brother afore I do, tell him Harris will meet any offer and better it by ten percent. Tell him that.”

  “Mama, is he talking about Uncle Rhett?”

  “I’m afraid he is, dear.”

  “Uncle Rhett is my friend!” the child declared.

  “Yes, dear, he is,” her mother said. “Sir, you must excuse us.”

  In their second-floor suite, Rosemary pulled the drapes closed. The Federal guns were not firing tonight and peace blessed the city. Cleo took Meg into the smaller bedroom to undress her, while Rosemary wondered what she was doing here. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she love a good man?

  At her bedside, Meg prayed for her Uncle Rhett and Joshua and Cleo and her grandfather and grandmother Butler and all the soldiers in the War. She prayed the shelling wouldn’t start again, because it scared Tecumseh.

  Meg prayed, “Please, dear God, let Mama and Papa and me be happy again. Amen.”

  Sometime later, a porter’s knock was attended by a note slid under the door.

  In John Haynes’s hand it said, “On any terms, Rosemary. I need you.”

  Might it be? Might John’s love alone be enough to sustain them? Surely not! Surely no woman’s heart could be transformed by a husband’s devotion! Rosemary clamped her eyes so tight, she saw shooting stars. “Oh, please, God …” she prayed.

  Briskly, she said, “Cleo, I must go home.”

  “Yes, Miss. I’ll have Tecumseh brought ’round.”

  “No. I can’t wait. Keep Meg, Cleo ….” Rosemary took her servant’s brown face between her pale hands, “I may not return tonight.”

  “Yes, Miss.” The servant looked her mistress in the eye. “I hopes you doesn’t.”

  On Meeting Street, a startled gentleman gave up his cab. “Forty-six Church Street! Please!” Rosemary urged the driver, “Please hurry!”

  When her husband answered the door, Rosemary searched his face, as if his familiar lines and furrows might tell a new and different story.

  When John said, “Dearest…” Rosemary touched her finger to his lips, led him up the stairs into her bedroom, and that was the last word they spoke to each other.

  Meg cried so piteously after her mother left that Cleo took her into her pallet at the foot of Rosemary’s empty bed. “S’ all right, honey-child. You Mama with you Daddy. They come get us tomorrow.”

  “Cleo, I’m afraid.” “Nothin’ be ‘fraid of. Time we go to sleep.”

  Little Meg was restless, and each time Cleo almost drifted off, the child would murmur or rutch around. Finally, the child put an arm around Cleo’s neck and her sweet breath tickled Cleo’s cheek and they slept.

  A terrific flash and bang brought Cleo bolt upright. “S’ all right, honey,” she said reflexively.

  The room’s windows glowed as if white-hot and Cleo shielded her eyes. Meg wailed. “Hush, now. T’ ain’t nothin’, nothin’ t’ all.” Cleo disentangled from the bedclothes and, with Meg clinging to her, padded barefoot to the window.

  A stream of fire like molten lava cascaded down the building across the street. Cleo put a hand to her mouth.

  Footsteps thudded past her door. “Fire! Fire!”

  Men ran down the hallway. “The damn Yanks are shelling the city!”

  Meg cried, “Cleo, I don’t like it here.”

  “Don’t neither,” Cleo said. “We goin’ home now. I gonna need your help, honey. Turn loose my neck and get on your own two feet and we get you dressed.”

  Thunderous footfalls outside their door, like cattle stampeding. Cleo dropped Meg’s dress over the child’s upstretched arms and groped for her shoes—one beside the bed, another under the bureau. A fresh explosion was not so near.

  “Please …” Meg whispered.

  Cleo draped a blanket over her shift and set the child on her hip. “Put your arms ’round me and hang on, baby!”

  Cleo hurried down the stairs. In the hotel lobby, half-dressed men were in a panic. Some ran into the dining room, others into the lobby. When a near miss shook the building, speculators dove onto a floor awash in cigar butts and overturned spittoons.

  Meg wailed, “Mama.”

  Cleo said, “Honey, I gettin’ you to your Mama.”

  They sped through the hotel kitchen.

  The hotel’s stable boys had run off and terrified horses reared, whinnied, and kicked in their stalls. Tecumseh’s eyes were white and rolling. Cleo threw a bridle on him, set the bit, and led the quivering animal into the alley. She boosted Meg onto his neck and scrambled up behind. “Grab Tecumseh’s mane, child.”

  “Cleo, I’m scared!”

  “Darlin’, don’t you be scared! I needs you not be scared!”

  Above the burnt district, a slice of moon scudded between clouds. The shells of burned buildings were almost homes or almost churches: eerie mockeries of human hopes. The ruins thrust shadow fingers across the street, snatching at the woman and child.

  A shell burst directly overhead and bright fire streamered to earth. Meg screamed and Tecumseh clamped the bit between his teeth and bolted. “Tecumseh, whoa! You whoa now!” Cleo hauled at the reins with all her strength. The wailing child lost her grip on the mane and slid down the horse’s neck. “Tecumseh!” Cleo shrieked.

  As Cleo loosed the reins to snatch at the child, Tecumseh swerved and servant and child thudded onto the cobblestones.

  With her breath knocked out of her, Cleo frantically patted Meg’s small body. Cleo struggled to one knee. She’d bitten her tongue through and swallowed hot thick blood. “You a’right, honey? Is you hurt?”

  Meg whimpered, “Cleo, can’t we please go home?”

  “We go home soon as they stop shootin’. Directly, we go home.”

  Cleo sought the familiar among the ruined spires and walls. “Look, child. There’s the ol’ churchyard. There’s that Round Church. Look, that’s its churchyard. We hidin’ in the churchyard until we go home.”

  John and Rosemary found them among the shattered tombstones. Meg’s body lay half underneath Cleo, who, with her last breath, had tried to shield the child from the bombardment.

  “Oh my God,” Rosemary Haynes sobbed. “I should never have left her.”

  John Haynes took his only child in his arms.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Love Tokens

  The sleek gray blockade runner eased through the shallows north of Rattlesnake Shoal. In this second dark night of the moon, starlight reflecting off the ocean provided enough light for sharp eyes to see twenty yards. Behind its surf fringe, the Carolina beach was paler than the ocean.

  A barefoot leadsman ran to the Merry Widow’s wheel and flicked his fingers twice: “two fathoms.” Tunis Bonneau touched the lead to his tongue and murmured, “This oyster beds. We comin’ up on Drunken Dick.”

  Rhett squeezed Tunis’s shoulder for reply.

  The Widow’s oversized engines burbled through underwater exhausts. Her hinged stacks lay flat, offering no silhouette against the pale beach. A hundred feet away, the runner might have been mist above the swell.

  Bringing a runner through the Charleston blockade was more dangerous after the Federals took Battery Wagner. With Federal guns commanding the deepwater ship channel, no runner dared sail west of Fort Sumter. The eastern passage, Maffitt’s Channel, was narrow and crooked. Before the War, buoys had marked Rattlesnake and Drunken Dick shoals, but the blockaders had removed them. At low tide, stretches of Maffitt’s Channel were four feet, four inches deep. Loaded, the Widow drew four feet.

&nb
sp; Just beyond Drunken Dick, the runner must veer to starboard and run for Charleston harbor’s remaining entrance.

  To keep Federal ironclads out of the harbor, Confederate defenders had floated a log boom studded with contact torpedoes across the channel from Sumter to Fort Moultrie on the eastern shore. The hundred-yard gap in that boom, directly under Moultrie’s guns, was the passage into the harbor.

  The Federals knew runners must come in during the dark moon. They knew the channel the runners must take. They knew the tiny entrance they must pass through. Sharp-eyed young Federal lookouts rubbed their eyes, straining to penetrate the night. They listened past the wheeze of their own breathing, the thudding of their hearts.

  After Battery Wagner fell, most blockade runners had quit Charleston for Wilmington, North Carolina, where runners had two coastlines to sneak along and two inlets to slip through—both protected by Fort Fisher, a colossal sand fort astride the narrow peninsula between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic.

  Approaching Charleston, Tunis Bonneau kept his 180-foot side-wheeler inshore in that shifting watery hollow where ocean swell became surf. Though Federal warships kept well offshore, picket boats patrolled the shallows. Twenty-foot dories couldn’t sink or board the Merry Widow, but their flares could direct the warships’ guns onto the unarmed, unarmored runner.

  Five knots. Tunis Bonneau stood on tiptoes, squinting. Breakers boomed and surf whumped onto the beach, hissing as it ebbed.

  The Widow’s bow lookout raised his left arm, meaning, “picket boat on the port bow.” Tunis bent to the speaking tube and asked the engine room for more steam.

  The coxswain of the Federal picket boat saw something—a shape that might or might not be a ship, might or might not be a runner. He fumbled a signal flare from its tin chest and shouted, “Ahoy! What is the countersign?”

  Engines quivering its deck planking, the Widow was making nine knots. “The Union Forever!” Rhett Butler sang out.

  Tonight’s countersign was “Gettysburg,” but last night’s had been “Preserve the Union.” The coxswain had flare and match in hand but hesitated. Might this be a Federal vessel whose captain was on the wrong page of the signal book? There’d been no runners in weeks, and the overzealous coxswain who called fire onto a Federal gunboat faced certain court-martial. “Countersign!” the coxswain demanded again.

  “Dishonest Abe!” Rhett shouted.

  The coxswain had lit the flare when the Widow sliced into the dory, dragging eight Federal sailors into her slashing paddle wheels.

  “Brave fellows,” Tunis Bonneau said.

  “But indecisive,” Rhett replied.

  “Slow ahead,” Tunis murmured into the speaking tube.

  Tunis steered by dimly seen land shapes and familiar currents tugging at the wheel. He trusted the memories in his hands.

  The Merry Widow proceeded without further difficulty until she’d weathered Drunken Dick. Fort Sumter was off her port bow when the first Federal flare streaked into the sky.

  Tunis called for full steam, the deck crew hove her hinged stacks upright, and the Widow lunged forward like a racehorse at the starter’s gun.

  Picket boats and warships sent up red, green, and blue signals. “Who are you? Are you ours?”

  Rhett fired the Widow’s own red and green flares: nonsense signals.

  Tunis Bonneau panted, as if faster breathing could make the Widow’s side wheels turn faster. The deck shuddered beneath his feet.

  The first Federal shells fell short by twenty feet. Spume drenched the Widow’s deck crew.

  “Their marksmanship has improved,” Rhett said. He climbed a paddle wheel housing and put his glass to his eye, as if the bellowing Federal guns were harmless fireworks on a pleasant summer evening.

  The bow lookout strained to spot that narrow gap in the torpedo boom.

  Since the Federal guns couldn’t track a racing runner, they had zeroed on the boom opening, and the Widow wallowed and bucked through near misses, as thoroughly drenched as if beneath Niagara Falls.

  In full daylight, the lethal boom lay low in the water; by the dark of the moon, it was invisible. Tunis steered for the thickest concentration of waterspouts, praying the Federal guns were well pointed. The Widow shuddered: hit. Hit again, she shook like a wet dog. Tunis almost lost his grip when the wheel kicked in his hands. Another near miss slapped him into its spokes.

  They were through. The boom’s pale cypress logs and greening, barnacled iron torpedoes passed six inches to port.

  Fragments from a final burst rattled onto the deck.

  After the Federal guns quit, Tunis bent sideways to shake water out of his ears.

  Rhett stepped down from the housing, folded his telescope, and lit a cigar. His match’s flare was so bright, it hurt Tunis’s eyes. In a hoarse voice, Tunis ordered Mr. MacLeod, the Widow’s engineer, to check for damage.

  “We come through again,” Tunis told Rhett.

  “That was the easy part,” Rhett said. “Lord, I dread our arrival. Poor, poor Rosemary.”

  News of Meg’s death had reached Rhett in Nassau.

  “I hate this war,” Tunis said.

  “Some say it will set your people free.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what some people say.”

  The city was dark. Charleston’s church steeples—mariners’ beacons for generations—had been painted black so Federal gunners couldn’t aim by them.

  Marked by the streak of its fuse, a shell arced from Federal guns into the city. A brief flash was followed seconds later by a dull rumble.

  Tunis felt river currents in his wheel. The land breeze stank of brick dust and fires. “Slow ahead.”

  Rhett tried a joke. “Now I’ve sold you the Widow, Tunis, you must be more careful with her.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  Charleston’s waterfront was wrecked. The Widow thrummed upriver past burned wharves, clipper ships moldering at their moorings, and steamers, decks awash, settled on the river bottom.

  Engineer MacLeod reported shell damage was minor but that the Widow’s oversized steam engines had torqued their steel mounts and twisted the ship’s starboard knees.

  Most of Charleston’s speculators had left for Wilmington, but, alerted by the Federal welcome, men at the Haynes & Son wharf were eager to do business.

  Tunis reversed his engines as the Widow eased into her mooring and crewmen fended her off the bumpers.

  Flickering lanterns illuminated the wharf. Someone cried, “Rhett, I got to have me some silk and perfumes.”

  “Buttons and epaulets,” another voice called.

  “I’ll take twenty of champagne!”

  The Widow was snubbed fore and aft, and with loud whooshes, the boilers vented steam. In the silence, Rhett could hear the river lapping at her hull. “Can’t help you tonight, gentlemen. I’ve got no luxury goods. I’ve got thirty cases of cotton-carding combs, fourteen cases of Wentworth rifles, army shoes, uniform cloth, and minié balls. Perhaps you’ll join me in a cheer for the Bonny Blue Flag That Bears a Single Star?”

  “Christ!” someone said. “You pick a hell of a time to get patriotic.”

  A heavy hammer was banging in the engine room: Mr. MacLeod repairing engine mounts.

  Disappointed speculators abandoned the wharf to a blue sulky and a black buggy.

  “I reckon that’s Ruthie and Rosemary,” Tunis said.

  “Tunis, why do we give our hearts to be broken?”

  “Reckon we’d be better off if we didn’t?”

  Rhett’s sister waited beside the sulky. She seemed smaller than Rhett remembered her.

  “Dear Rosemary.” He enfolded her in his arms.

  For a moment, she resisted; then she gave a racking sob and convulsed. “Why, Rhett? Why do they murder our children? Have they no children of their own?”

  In punctuation, a shell exploded in the city. Rhett held her until she stopped quaking and some tension leaked out of her. “Thank you,” she said very softly. He released her a
nd she wiped her eyes and tried to smile. She blew her nose.

  In a calm, flat voice, she said, “Meg was so tiny. Almost as if she were an infant again. When John picked her up, one of her shoes fell off. You know, we never did find her other shoe. My baby’s face was filthy, so I took my handkerchief to wipe her face, but John jerked her away. Rhett … Margaret Haynes was my own baby, but I had to beg before my husband let me clean her dear forehead. Her lip was cut—here—but it was not bleeding. She was cold as clay. With these fingers, Rhett, I closed my baby’s eyes.”

  Rhett held her again. Absent the tension that had animated her, Rosemary was a rag doll. Rhett asked, “John? …”

  “He walks the streets every night, utterly indifferent to the bombardment. Why, Rhett”—she offered a ghastly smile—”our free colored firemen see more of my husband than I do. Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “I will go to him. …”

  Rosemary clutched Rhett’s arm. “You cannot! He will not see you! John begs that as his friend you will not go to him.”

  “If an old friend can’t—”

  “Rhett, please believe me. John Haynes will not admit you to our house.”

  At the other buggy, Ruthie Bonneau was whispering fiercely, “Go on, now, Tunis Bonneau. You go on!”

  Tunis crumpled his hat in his hands, “Miss Rosemary, me and Ruthie, we’re right sorry ’bout your trouble. We always thought high of you Hayneses.”

  Rosemary looked past him. Absently, she stroked her horse’s muzzle. “I wonder if Tecumseh remembers Meg,” she said softly. “I look into his large mild eyes and …” She put her hand over her face to muffle a sob.

  “Every night, me ’n’ Ruthie, we prays for you, Miss Rosemary,” Tunis said desperately. He helped his pregnant wife into their buggy and drove off.

  Rosemary searched her brother’s face. “Rhett, I have been so blind, so terribly blind! I wanted what I ought not and lost all the precious hours I might have had with my child and my husband. …” She paused and took a breath. “Brother, you must not make my mistake. Promise me … promise you’ll do something for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “You love Scarlett O’Hara.” She stopped Rhett’s lips with a soft fingertip. “Rhett, please, for a change, don’t say something cynical or amusing. You love the woman and we both know you do. Brother Rhett, you cannot be superior to love. Go to Scarlett now. Be as straightforward with her as you’ve always been with me.” Turning to her sulky, Rosemary retrieved a parcel wrapped in butcher’s paper and unfolded one corner to reveal bright yellow silk. It was the scarf Rhett had given her so many years ago. “This was Meg’s favorite thing. She’d wrap it around herself and pretend she was a bird or a butterfly. It’d float behind her when she ran, like … angel… wings.”