Rhett Butler's People

  “We’ll fix harness until this lets up,” Will said. “We’re ahead of ourselves anyways.”

  Rain turned the Jonesboro road into gumbo, and since they couldn’t get to church that Sunday, Rosemary read psalms in the parlor, Big Sam and Dilcey adding vigorous Baptist amens. The children recited the prayers they offered every night at their bedsides, and Scarlett shut her eyes when Ella begged God to bring Daddy Rhett home.

  Lord, how she missed him. Not his wit, nor his power, nor his physicality—she missed Him!

  Sometimes in her lonely bed, Scarlett startled awake, listening for her husband’s breathing. She’d reach across the quilt to pat where Rhett should be.

  Her skin was too sensitive, her hearing painfully acute. She flinched at sudden noises and heard visitors in the lane long before anyone else. She would stand for long minutes staring out the window at nothing at all. “Dear God,” she prayed, “please give me one more chance ….”

  Uncle Henry Hamilton arrived after the dinner dishes had been washed and put away. The bad road had turned the hour’s ride from Jonesboro into four. Uncle Henry was wet and cold and his rented horse was knackered. He couldn’t possibly return to the depot for the last train.

  “Sit by the fire and we’ll find you something to eat,

  Uncle Henry,” Scarlett said. “Prissy, please make up the front bedroom.”

  Mammy had an apple pie in the pie safe, corn bread and brown beans in the warming oven. Pork carried Uncle Henry’s saddlebags upstairs. Happy to do work he’d been trained to do, Pork laid out Uncle Henry’s shaving things on the nightstand and fetched a pitcher of water.

  Will came in blowing on his hands. The cold was stiffening the road, and if Uncle Henry left early tomorrow morning, he’d make a quick journey.

  Mollified by a full belly and warm fire, Uncle Henry folded his napkin in precise folds. “Scarlett, if we could have a moment—privately?”

  Suellen had been hoping for some Atlanta gossip and abandoned the dining room with ill grace.

  Scarlett’s heart sank. Oh my God, something’s happened to Rhett! Henry has some awful news about Rhett! But he was saying something about a fire. “A what?” she asked. “What fire?”

  Uncle Henry gave her a strange look. “Your Atlanta home, dear Scarlett,” he explained a second time. “I’m terribly sorry. They couldn’t save it. Captain Mulvaney arrived ten minutes after the alarm, but his men couldn’t even get the furniture out.”

  “My house … burned?” Scarlett’s mind raced ahead.

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Uncle Henry said. “I fear, I very much fear it will be a long time before Atlanta sees so grand a home again.”

  “Gone?”

  “Mulvaney’s men saved the carriage house.” Uncle Henry leaned forward confidentially. “Dear Scarlett, I don’t wish to alarm you, but Captain Mulvaney believes …” Uncle Henry cleared his throat.

  “Believes what?”

  “There’ll be nothing in the papers, my dear. I saw to that!”

  “Uncle Henry! What are you trying to say?”

  “Scarlett, the fire was set.”

  Bored housebound children were playing noisily on the front stairs.

  Scarlett thought, Some child’s going to fall and there’ll be wailing. Scarlett let her annoyance smother the elation she felt. “The carved staircase, the Oriental rugs, the bureaus, Rhett’s books—everything gone?” Despite her intentions, the corners of Scarlett’s mouth twitched upward in a smile.

  Uncle Henry frowned. “I’m sorry, Scarlett, I cannot share your amusement.”

  “Forgive me, Uncle Henry. But I owe so much money, and Tara sucks up every penny, and that house was fully insured.”

  Uncle Henry put on his glasses, removed papers from his jacket pocket, and unfolded them as one who already knew what they contained. “You were insured with the Southern Benefit Insurance Company? Edgar Puryear’s firm? Were you insured with anyone else?”

  “No. Southern Benefit covered everything.”

  Uncle Henry sighed, refolded, and pocketed her policies. “Then, my dear, I’m afraid there is no insurance. Edgar and the Southern Benefit Insurance Company are bankrupt. In this depression, your house wasn’t Atlanta’s first arson.”

  Scarlett frowned. She said, “Someone is trying to destroy me.”

  “What are you saying? Who …”

  “I don’t know who.” Scarlett shook her head, clearing cobwebs. “Never mind. Henry, there’s nothing you can do. Sell the lot. A double lot on Peachtree should be worth something!”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Uncle Henry said.

  It didn’t rain the morning Uncle Henry left for Atlanta and didn’t rain thereafter. The soil warmed to Will’s satisfaction. Tara’s horses were fit and eager to work.

  The third Saturday in March, Will Benteen rode into Darktown to let Tara’s field workers know there’d be work Monday. “Usual rate for full-task hands. Twenty plowmen, twenty sowers. Start at daybreak in our river fields.”

  Before daylight on Monday, Will and Sam loaded seed, shovel plows, and spare traces into the wagon. It was still dark when they led the workhorses down the winding path they knew by heart. It was chilly in the bottoms, Sam dozing while Will smoked his pipe.

  The sky lightened, but fog clung to the lowlands. Songbirds woke and started chirruping. Will tapped dottle out of his pipe, got down from the wagon, stretched, and yawned. He’d eaten a big breakfast to prepare for this day’s work.

  At ten o’clock, when Will Benteen galloped into Darktown, he found only women and children. The wives told Will his field hands were sick in bed or working in Atlanta or off visiting kin. One wife looked him straight in the eye. “You know how it is, Mr. Will,” she said.

  “No, Sadie, I don’t know,” Will said. “I’m ready to plant cotton and I’ve got no workers. I know I pay good wages and I believe I’ve treated you fair. No, I don’t know how it is.”

  Gently but firmly, she closed the door in Will’s face.

  The negroes wouldn’t come to Tara and Tara’s neighbors had their own cotton to plant. Ashley came, but Mose refused. “I’ze a Twelve Oaks nigger. I don’t work nowheres but Twelve Oaks.”

  Ashley Wilkes had never steered a shovel plow, so Will walked alongside until Ashley got the hang of it. Dilcey had sown cotton, and though she claimed she’d never done “such a thing,” so had Prissy. Although Pork complained, he hung the canvas seed bag around his neck and walked behind, sprinkling seed in the shallow trench the plowmen opened in the cotton ridges. Scarlett, Rosemary, and Suellen rode behind the sowers, their workhorses pulling drag boards to cover the seed.

  It didn’t rain.

  Will quit sleeping in the hayloft. At day’s end, Will was too weary to hear Boo’s bark.

  Mammy rose at four A.M. to light the stoves and cook breakfast. After they ate, they gathered at the horse barn. Pork muttered, “Praise the Lord old Master Gerald ain’t alive to see what we has come to.” Suellen reminded Will they’d never had trouble getting workers until “certain parties” returned to Tara. As their wagon rolled to the field, Rosemary sat bolt upright with her eyes closed, trying to snatch a few more minutes of sleep.

  At noon, young Wade brought their dinner and stayed to fetch water for workers and horses. Mammy milked, gathered eggs, slopped the hogs, and tended the younger children. At dusk, when Tara’s weary workers trudged back to the house, Mammy had supper waiting.

  When Rosemary read her brother’s letters, the children could hardly keep their eyes open. Rhett joked he’d almost been buried in the hold of a Scottish herring schooner under a ton of wriggling fish.

  Louis Valentine made a face.

  Ella asked, “Mama, when is Daddy coming home?”

  The last Sunday in April dawned a warm, sweet morning. Honeysuckle and spicebush scented the air. Little Ella accompanied Mammy to the milk house. The child liked it when Mammy squirted milk into the mouths of the barn cats, who waited beside the m
ilking stool in a comical expectant row.

  “What’s that, Mammy? Beside the gate?”

  Mammy snatched Ella’s hand. “Honey, you come away with me now. Don’t get no nearer to that.”

  Ella fell to the ground, convulsing.

  Long tongue covered with flies, white teeth bared in a defiant snarl, Boo’s bloody head was perched on the gatepost.

  At dusk, Will found Sam beside the river, where suckers were spawning. Although a shadowy flotilla of the big bony creatures darkened the pools, Sam’s fishing pole lay beside him on the bank. Will’s knees cracked as he sat. “Gettin’ old,” Will said.

  An osprey hit the water and rose with a wriggling fish in his talons.

  “Sorry about Boo,” Sam said. “I thought high of that dog.”

  “Uh-huh.” Will fumbled when he lit his pipe.

  After a while, Sam said, “I’m deacon there at the First African.”

  “Big job,” Will said.

  “You think lyin’ is when you don’t say what you know or just when you outright tell a lie?”

  Will was saved from answering when his pipe went out. After a time, Big Sam added, “Niggers skeered. That’s why they ain’t comin’.”

  Will relit his pipe, made a face, and tapped the soggy dottle onto a rock. “Figured it was something like that. Who scared ’em?”

  “Look at that scamp! I bet that fish three feet if he a inch.”

  “He’s big all right.”

  The two men recalled the biggest suckers caught in the Flint River and agreed that Tarletons’ Jim’s forty-pounder, as weighed on Beatrice Tarleton’s hog scales, was the “biggest hereabouts.”

  Sam said, “I knowed it all along, Mr. Will. You think it’s a sin, my not tellin’?”

  Will ran a twig through his pipe stem. “I reckon, you bein’ a deacon and all.”

  “I knowed it was,” Sam said unhappily. “Darned if I didn’t.”

  Quietly, Will asked, “The same boys that spoiled our meat, killed our mares, and”—Will coughed—“Boo?”

  Sam sighed. “I reckon. Little Willy what works at the Jonesboro market heard them jokin’.”

  “Who was joking?”

  “That horse breaker fella. Willy heard him say, ‘I like my hog meat without the horse shit.’ Horse breaker’s uncle—name of Isaiah, same as the prophet—no, sir, Isaiah didn’t care for sech rough talk. Course, little Willy pretended he hadn’t heard. They’s three of ’em: the horse breaker ’n’ Isaiah ’n’ that Archie Flytte from up Mundy Hollow.”

  Will Benteen asked Sam what was the best bait for suckers or if it was true they’d bite on most anything. Then Will recalled how Mrs. Tarleton had admired Sam’s favorite workhorse, Dolly, when Dolly was a foal.

  In his own good time, Sam said, “The horse breaker and Archie Flytte was Kluxers. They got all ’round Clayton County after the War.” Sam shivered. “I reckon Archie’d kill a colored man soon as look at him. ’Twas Archie kilt that negro Senator down by Macon. Strung him up like man weren’t no account at all!”

  Will rode to the Tarletons’.

  Mrs. Tarleton snorted. “Horse breaker! Josie Watling claims to be a horse breaker! Says he’s been out west where the tough horses are. Arrogant pip-squeak. You know Jim Boatwright, owns the cotton warehouses? Jim hasn’t got the sense God gave a goose. Jim had a Thoroughbred filly that was a little wild, a spirited filly, just the kind of horse anybody’d want to have. When the filly bucked Josie Watling off, Watling took a barrel stave to her. Damn fool took out her eye.”

  Just past ten o’clock the following morning, Big Sam tied Scarlett’s buggy to a hitching post outside the courthouse. Scarlett wore a high-waisted, severe dress and the hat Rhett had sent her for Christmas. Big Sam hurried to help her down.

  “Sam, wait here for me.”

  “I be at the hardware, Miss Scarlett. Mr. Will need’n’ plow points.”

  The sheriff’s office was in the courthouse basement, and the air cooled as Scarlett went down the steps. Inside, the wall behind the sheriff’s desk bore a Clayton County map, yellowed wanted posters, and the obligatory lithograph of Robert E. Lee on Traveller. Sheriff Oliver Talbot stood to greet her, and when Scarlett introduced herself, Talbot said he was so pleased, so pleased. He knew Mrs. Butler’s husband.

  “You served with Rhett?”

  “No, ma’am.” He pivoted to show her his withered arm. “Born that way, ma’am. Ugly, ain’t it?” Sheriff Talbot chuckled, “My wife says, ‘Praise God, Olly. Your poor arm kept you from bein’ kilt in the War.’”

  Scarlett said, “My plantation has been vandalized and the negroes are too frightened to work for me.”

  “I knew your father, too. Gerald O’Hara was a grand gentleman. Mrs. Butler, who do you suspect?”

  Scarlett described ruined hams rolling down the slope into the boneyard and a foal trying to nurse its dead mother.

  “Twenty-eight hams, you say. Two mares. A dog?” Sheriff Talbot frowned. “Tell me what niggers done it and I’ll show them the error of their ways.”

  “This wasn’t negro work, Sheriff. Only white men could be so malicious—the same white men who set fire to my Atlanta home. The finest home in Atlanta, burned to the ground.”

  Sheriff Talbot’s smile shrank. “Mrs. Butler, I can’t do nothin’ ’bout ’Lanta. J. P. Robertson, he’s ’Lanta sheriff. Vandalizing isn’t white man’s work.”

  She named Isaiah and Josie Watling and Archie Flytte. “Flytte hates me. He was a convict, you know. Archie murdered his wife.”

  Talbot nodded. “Poor Hattie Flytte was kin to me, Mrs. Butler. I knowed Archie before he was sent up and I know him now. Ol’ Archie’s a rough customer. But wreckin’ your meat house? That ain’t like Archie. These other fellows? Isaiah Watling is a pious, hardworkin’ man. When he still had his farm in Mundy Hollow—oh, must have been 1840 or ’41 …”

  “Sheriff, please spare me your affecting reminiscences. My family is of some consequence in this county.”

  Sheriff Talbot’s smile vanished as if it had never been. “Mrs. Butler, every white citizen is of consequence in Clayton County. I know those boys you’re namin’. And they ain’t no angels. But they wouldn’t do somethin’ like what you’re sayin’ they done. You got you some impudent niggers out your way and I certainly mean to look into it.”

  When Scarlett came into the bright sunshine, a leathery oldster was leaning against her buggy. He tapped his hat brim. “Mornin’, Miz Butler. I’m Isaiah Watling and I knew your husband when he was Young Master at Broughton Plantation. I hear Butler’s in Europe.” He tut-tutted. “It’s a caution how some people get around. When you write your husband, you’ll tell him Isaiah Watling was asking after him.”

  “Mr. Watling, what are you doing? Why are you tormenting us?”

  He cackled. “There’s torments and torments, Miz Butler, but the worst is the torments of hell.” He pointed a bony forefinger at her. “Archie says you are Jezebel, but you don’t look like I imagine Jezebel to be.”

  “If I catch you sneaking around my property, I’ll have you horsewhipped.”

  “Whipped, Miz Butler?” He considered. “Miz Butler, as much whipping as I’ve seen and done in my long, long life, I can’t say it ever did a lick of good.” Isaiah Watling’s eyes crinkled with amusement, “I b’lieve I made a joke. A lick of good,’ my, my.”

  When Scarlett looked around the empty square, she felt a chill. “Where’s Sam? He was supposed to wait for me.”

  “Was that big nigger yours, Miz Butler? I believe he has done run off.”

  “Sam’s a good negro. He wouldn’t leave me.” “Well then, I’m right sorry he’s run off, ma’am. But might be that boy won’t quit runnin’ until he’s far away.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  A Telegram

  The Georgia Railroad telegrapher reckoned he could send a telegram care of Rob Campbell in London, England—they had the transatlantic cable—yes ma’am. But it might take some time, account
of he’d never sent a telegram to London, England, before. He checked his book and whistled. “Ma’am, it’s gonna be a dollar a word.”

  Scarlett’s pencil pressed deep into the message pad where she wrote. “Rosemary needs you.” She handed the pad to the clerk but snatched it back to add, “I need you. Darling come home.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Glasgow

  Tazewell Watling wanted to tear the damn thing up, but he returned it to its envelope and gave the boy sixpence.

  Who touched his cap anxiously. “Sir, you will deliver this to Mr. Butler?”

  “When I find him.”

  Six months before, when Rhett Butler had walked into Nicolet and Watling’s office, Tazewell had scarcely recognized him. Once-elegant clothes hung on his gaunt frame. He had the face of an old man.

  Rhett rolled his hat in his hands. “I’m going abroad, Taz.” His weary smile was sadder than no smile would have been. “The grand tour. Museums. Historic places. Fine art.” He paused. “I wondered if you might join me.”

  It was on Taz’s tongue to say October was the firm’s busiest month. Ships were backed up at Nicolet’s wharf and so much cotton was coming in, they’d rented a second warehouse. Taz looked into his guardian’s blasted eyes and said, “Of course I’ll come.”

  They caught the mail steamer that same day.

  Belle had written Taz about Rhett. “Honey, I never seen him so bad. First Bonnie Blue and then Miss Melly. It’d be hard enough if Rhett and Miss Scarlett could console one another, but they can’t. I’m fearing Rhett ain’t got much to live for.”

  Rhett didn’t speak about this, and they were in England’s Bristol Channel before Rhett mentioned Melanie Wilkes. Seabirds whirled and dipped over white chalk cliffs. “Miss Melly couldn’t be deceived,” Rhett said. “Melanie Wilkes never doubted her heart.”

  Tazewell Watling looked away so he couldn’t see the tears streaming down his guardian’s face.

  Taz didn’t ask about Rhett’s wife. That Scarlett’s name never crossed Rhett’s lips told Taz everything he needed to know.