Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Rosemary flushed. “Rhett, I didn’t mean …”

  “Dear Sister, of course you did. Women can never be kind to a woman who sells her favors. Favors are to be bestowed only after elaborate ceremony and payment in full.”

  “Rhett, please …”

  “Some years ago in New Orleans, Belle and I went into business together. I keep an office in Belle Watling’s sporting house; it amuses me when respectable businessmen sneak up her back stairs.”

  Meg was collecting mussel shells on the riverbank.

  “And who is Scarlett Hamilton to you? After you stirred her up yesterday, she marched into Eulalie’s drawing room and reduced Frederick Ward to stuttering. Poor Frederick couldn’t exit in a huff—he was in his own home! Rhett, what on earth did you say to that young woman?”

  Rhett’s face was rueful. “I seem to have a knack for annoying her.” He grinned. “But damned if I can resist.”

  “Scarlett would be very beautiful, I think, if she weren’t so unhappy.”

  “You see, Sister, little Miss Scarlett has no idea who she is. Her charming tricks attract men who are unworthy of her.” Rhett’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Hindoos believe we have had lives before this. Is it true?” He raised a mocking eyebrow. “Perhaps Scarlett and I were star-crossed lovers; perhaps we died in each other’s arms. …”

  “Why, Rhett,” Rosemary teased, “you, a romantic?”

  Rhett spoke so softly, Rosemary had to lean nearer to hear him. “I want that woman more than I’ve ever wanted a woman in my life.”

  Rosemary squeezed his hand. “There’s the brother I know!”

  On the riverbank, Meg was singing, “Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou …”

  Rosemary stared at the muddy water. “I do not think I can ever love John Haynes. Not like that.”

  Rhett let the power drain from her words before replying. “John’s a good man.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she said. “Do you think that makes a whit of difference?”

  “Perhaps—in time …”

  “Don’t worry, Brother, I won’t create a second scandal.” Rosemary’s voice faded to a whisper. “I see my life ahead as an unbroken stretch of days, each day exactly like the last, each as empty as the last.”

  Her smile was so pained, her brother couldn’t look at her.

  “I am my mother’s daughter and I will cut my cloth to reality. But by God, I will not pray. I will not pray!”

  Cleo’s squeak was an imprisoned scream. She scooped Meg up and ran toward the camp. “Oh, Captain Rhett,” she cried, “Captain Rhett. Get you gun.”

  “Pass Meg to me, Cleo,” Rosemary knelt and reached down. “I’ll take her.”

  As she lifted the frightened child to her mother, Cleo shook with impatience. “You gots to shoot him!”

  “Who must I shoot, Cleo?”

  “That fox. I see’d him!”

  “You saw a fox?”

  “In the broad daylight!” Impatiently, Cleo recited the country truism: “See a fox in daylight, fox he mad. Fox bite you, you go mad, too.” Cleo raised her arms and Rhett plucked her onto the porch.

  Below, a young vixen slid over a log on the riverbank.

  Rhett squinted into the sunlight. “She’s not mad, Cleo. Her fur is glossy and she moves normally. She’s no threat.” Rhett peered closely. “She’s lost her cubs, or maybe never had cubs. She wouldn’t be so sleek with cubs pulling her down.”

  “What she doin’ out in broad daylight scarin’ folks?”

  Cleo had her answer when a dog fox crossed the log and marked. The vixen pretended to find something and pounced, her tail flouncing marvelously. She rolled on a tussock of marsh grass, all languorousness and pleasure. Her tail was so bushy, she seemed more tail than fox.

  “Look at her! She’s flaunting herself!” Rosemary said.

  “Indeed she is,” Rhett said.

  The old dog fox’s muzzle was scarred and he favored a forefoot, as if he’d lost toes in a trap.

  Little Meg cried out, “She’s so pretty!”

  “She is, sweetheart,” her uncle said. “That fellow thinks she’s pretty, too.”

  “Is he her husband, Uncle Rhett?”

  “He wants to be,” her mother said. “See, Meg, he’s courting.”

  The child knelt below the rail to see better. “Does she like him, too?”

  “She’s pretending she doesn’t know he’s alive,” her uncle Rhett said.

  A skinny, half-immersed driftwood log next attracted the vixen. One end was ashore and the river plucked at the other. She trotted gaily down its length. The dog fox hesitated. The vixen turned at the end of the log and sat grinning at him.

  Reluctantly, the dog fox stepped onto the driftwood and tiptoed toward her.

  His added weight was too much for the log’s hold on the bank and it launched, turning in the swift current. The purely disgusted expression on the dog fox’s face made Meg laugh.

  Peals of childish laughter pursued the star-crossed lovers down the river to the sea.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Bastard

  Tazewell Watling pressed his forefinger under his nose so he wouldn’t sneeze. Swirling yellow-brown smoke drooped over the earth, draining livelier colors from the sunset. The light penetrating this pall was the color of dirty linen and the sun was a pale silver disk on the horizon. Burning coke, sulfur, white-hot iron, ammonia, and less identifiable stinks cluttered the air.

  Through Alabama and western Georgia, the train had traveled a single track. Now that track divided and divided again and the train overtook a freight on the left, then a string of flatcars. A self-important yard engine huffed at them, squealing, veering, passing so close, Taz might have reached out his window and touched it.

  “First time to Atlanta, boy?” The Confederate corporal beside Taz hawked on the floor.

  “I am from New Orleans,” Taz said with a boy’s flimsy hauteur.

  “Over there, that’s the rolling mill where they make plate for our ironclads. I got a brother works there. Lucky bastard’s exempted from the army. Over there’s J. W. Dance revolvers and them brick smokestacks—no, those un’s over there—that’s the naval gun factory. Four railroads roll into this town, son—four altogether different railroads!” He jabbed an elbow into the boy’s side. “What you think about that!”

  How could Taz find his mother in this smoky cauldron?

  Factories fronted the tracks; houses faced away from it. A few dwellings were brick, but most were dingy clapboard. Cows, pigs, and chickens grazed in half-acre pastures. The houses huddled closer together as the train rolled into the city. Broad streets seemed to snap open and shut. Taz saw three- and four-story brick and stone businesses and warehouses, and countless carriages and wagons.

  Was that woman on the corner Belle Watling? That face in the landau, was she his mother?

  Tazewell Watling’s oldest memory was night in the cavernous dormitory of New Orleans’ Asylum for Orphan Boys: children coughing and whimpering for their mothers. Taz lay on a rush pallet with other children pressed against him, and the dampness on his thigh was where one of the younger boys had wet himself.

  Taz was hungry and afraid but would not cry. Boys who cried disappeared into the infirmary, where they died, and were buried in the asylum’s verdant, lovingly tended cemetery. Most of the orphans were Irish and the nuns were French Sisters of Charity who took their vows of poverty so seriously, they starved themselves. Embracing hunger as a virtue, the Good Sisters were imperfectly sympathetic to hungry children.

  Yet, when the Mardi Gras Krewes paraded down Royal Street, these same self-abasing sisters waved gaily from their balcony to catch the strings of bright, worthless beads drunken mummers tossed to them.

  The Sisters of Charity said Taz’s mother was a fallen woman condemned to the fires of hell. A good Catholic boy like Taz would never see his mother in heaven.

  Taz believed them—and he did not believe them. In his child’s heart, nig
ht fears gave way to mornings when miracles might happen.

  Four years ago, Rhett Butler had been such a miracle. Scrubbed until his skin glowed, the boy had been summoned to the Mother Superior’s office to meet a big smiling stranger. A cup of the Mother Superior’s weak tea stood untouched at the man’s elbow. In a place that reeked of carbolic and lye soap, the stranger smelled of good cigars, bourbon, and pomade. “I am your guardian, Tazewell Watling,” Rhett Butler told him. “A guardian’s not as good as a father, perhaps, but I’ll have to do.”

  The next day, in his new suit, Tazewell Watling was delivered to the Jesuit School of the Catholic Society for Religious and Literary Education, attached to the enormous Jesuit church. There, Taz was enrolled, shown his bed (which he was forbidden to lie upon in the daytime) and the peg where he was to hang his coat.

  His mother, whose visits to the asylum had been sporadic, now visited regularly. Belle wore prettier dresses and seemed happier. Tazewell believed Mr. Butler was his mother’s miracle, too.

  When Taz started at the Jesuit School, his reading was poor, his spelling impossible, and he had no mathematics. The Jesuits would remedy these deficiencies.

  At the Asylum for Orphan Boys, only a few boys knew their fathers, and none of these elusive creatures ever visited. Tazewell Watling loved and needed his mother; he hadn’t even imagined a father.

  But at the Jesuit school, Tazewell Watling learned fathers were necessities. As an older boy, Jules Nore, patiently explained, “We boys are educated to become gentlemen. You, Watling, cannot be a gentleman.” Jules Nore frowned and corrected his overgenerous appraisal: “You can’t be anything without a father. Bastards like you, Tazewell Watling, are meant to serve gentlemen, open our carriage doors, clean the mud from our boots….”

  For this appraisal, Taz bloodied Jules’s nose. When Jules’s friends piled on, Taz gave a good account of himself.

  A bastard can’t ever be anything!

  As they rolled into the Atlanta railyard, another train drew alongside. Like theirs, it overflowed with Confederate soldiers, some standing between cars, others on the tops of the cars. Cheers volleyed from one train to the other. In Taz’s car, one soldier struck up a banjo and another tootled a mouth organ, though they weren’t playing the same tune.

  Side by side, the trains raced toward the huge open-ended brick Car Shed, which they penetrated with bells clanging and brakes shrieking. The sun vanished and cinders, unable to escape through the Car Shed’s roof, clattered like buckshot onto the tops of the cars.

  “This is it, boy.” The corporal hefted his haversack. “The bustlingest town in the Confederacy. You can find anything you want in Atlanta.” He winked. “Might find some things you’d be better off without.”

  Across the filthy brick platform, a hospital train was disgorging soldiers wounded at the Fredericksburg fight. Men supported one another or hobbled along on crutches. Negro litter bearers carried the severely wounded.

  Behind the cluster of ambulances at the end of the platform, Peachtree Street was stalled carriages, angry teamsters and riders taking to the sidewalks as pedestrians cursed them.

  Taz intercepted a well-dressed civilian. “Sir, can you direct me to Belle Watling’s establishment?”

  The gentleman eyed Taz up and down. “I will not. You look to be a decent young lad who cannot possibly have business at”—he twisted his mouth around the name—“Chapeau Rouge.”

  “You’re acquainted with Chapeau Rouge, sir?” Taz asked pertly.

  “Insolent whelp!”

  Atlanta was colder than New Orleans and Taz could see his breath.

  The soldier Taz accosted was more helpful. “Boy, just walk on down Decatur Street. When it gets right lively, you’s ’bout where you want to be.”

  Brick sidewalks gave way to boardwalks, which gave way to dirt paths beside rutted streets. The gaslights quit with the business district. The overcast sky was a glowing ceiling through which neither stars nor moon penetrated.

  After twenty minutes or so, Tazewell Watling came to a cluster of saloons and cribs, tinkling pianos, hoots, and braying laughter. “Please, sir. Which is Chapeau Rouge?”

  The soldier was too drunk for words. His finger slewed up and down the street before settling on a two-story frame house with drawn curtains and a demure red lantern in its parlor window. This house had known better days and loomed over its shabby neighbors like a disapproving aunt. Behind a picket fence, the front yard was neat; its rosebushes were pruned for winter. The negro on the porch was smoking a cigar. His dark suit looked scratchy. A pale scar divided the man’s face from chin to forehead. “Boy,” he growled, “you got no business here. Git!”

  Taz set his bag down and massaged his cramped hand. He said, “Abraham Lincoln emancipated the negroes. Why don’t you git?”

  Belle Watling’s bully, MacBeth, said, “I’m a ’Lanta nigger. Them ’mancipators don’t scare me none.”

  Tuesday after the battle of Fredericksburg, Chapeau Rouge was quiet. Last Saturday, the telegraph had brought news of the great Confederate victory, so Sunday morning, Belle Watling’s top Cyprian, Minette, had sought out the soldiers’ widows who filled in when Belle expected an overflow crowd. The Chapeau Rouge was usually closed on the Sabbath, but the Federal losses at Fredericksburg had been so huge, their mighty army so thoroughly humbled, that Belle ran out of champagne by six Sunday evening, dispatched MacBeth twice to replenish the brandy, and a score of exuberant patriots were still waiting on her doorstep at eleven that night.

  Monday, Belle’s Cyprians had moped around the establishment, sore, weary, and hungover, but by Tuesday evening the house had recovered its equilibrium and Minette had almost been glad to welcome the provost officer they’d nicknamed “Captain Busy.”

  The Chapeau Rouge was the most expensive sporting house in Atlanta. Its callers were high-ranking Confederate officers, speculators, and profiteers. It had been unexceptional in New Orleans’s Vieux Carré but was considered highfalutin in earthier Atlanta.

  In its parlor, hand-tinted lithographs of Parisian street scenes hung on flocked red-and-green-striped wallpaper. The ormolu mantel clock was flanked by tall marble Venuses in coy poses. Belle’s spittoons were stored in cupboards unless requested. Her “Frenchy” furniture encouraged tough men to sit straight with their hands in their laps. To these men, Belle’s Cyprians were as exotic as egrets. At the slightest provocation, the girls would burst into giggles or swift incomprehensible Creole.

  Rhett Butler owned a share in the Chapeau Rouge and kept an office upstairs. Would-be troublemakers departed quietly when MacBeth told them, “Sir, I reckon you best be goin’ home now. Wouldn’t want to fetch Captain Butler.”

  Minette was a courtesan, and a shrewd one. To provide for her old age, Minette bought house lots in New Orleans’ Garden District and she tithed to the Good Fathers for the future of her soul. When Madame Belle invited Minette to work at the Chapeau Rouge, Minette nearly turned her down because Madame Belle was decidedly not a courtesan.

  Although Madame Belle was older than Minette, she was a child as only American women can be children—infuriating children! A courtesan understands the nature of the transaction; the American is likely to confuse it with love—a confusion from which, Minette believed, only her sound Creole advice had kept Belle Watling.

  Tonight, Minette smiled her courtesan’s smile and told Captain Busy how dapper he looked.

  “Ah, Minny. Have you changed your hair? It seems much redder than it was. Did I hear Rhett is back in town?”

  What questions this man asked! He’d sit in the parlor on a slow rainy afternoon and ask question after question. Minette once heard Eloise describing her first lover—a neighbor boy—while Captain Busy chuckled as she recounted the poor boy’s fumblings. Captain Busy advised Hélène on constipation, suggesting remedies when everyone knew Hélène’s laudanum was the culprit! Once Captain Busy had asked Minette how she avoided pregnancy!

  Captain Busy was extremely
curious about Captain Butler: where he was, what he was doing, what he thought about this or that. How was Minette to know what Rhett Butler thought—and what business was it of Captain Busy’s?

  When Minette complained about the meddlesome provost, Rhett was amused. “Edgar is still trying to solve the mystery of life, Minette. Let him stew.”

  Edgar Puryear was a slender fellow, whom men remembered, after he had left the room, as shorter than he was. He had a bony long face, big ears, and a wide, expressive mouth; his fine eyelashes protected eyes as bright as a curious sparrow’s.

  Something about Captain Busy made ordinary Confederate soldiers want to knock him down, and when the liquor flowed on payday nights, his sergeant, Jack Johnson, accompanied him.

  Tonight, the provost asked Minette for brandy. “Just a tot, dear Minny,” putting his fingers two inches apart.

  Power fascinated Edgar Allan Puryear. Rhett’s father, Langston Butler, was powerful because he was rich and ruthless—rich because he was ruthless. Charlotte Fisher Ravanel was powerful because she was rich, and Andrew Ravanel was powerful because war rewards courage.

  Edgar Puryear didn’t understand Rhett Butler’s power.

  When young Rhett first arrived at Cathecarte Puryear’s school, Edgar had gone upstairs to assess his father’s new pupil. Rhett looked at Edgar, looked through him, and disregarded him in a single instant. Wait a minute, young Edgar wanted to protest. I am not merely what you see. I am more than that! But thereafter, Edgar only earned Rhett’s half-amused smile. When Edgar flattered Rhett, Rhett mocked his flattery. When Edgar bought an expensive foulard for Rhett, Rhett never wore it. One evening, Edgar spotted it around the neck of Miss Polly’s negro doorman. The only time Edgar summoned up courage to explain himself, Rhett interrupted before he’d finished three sentences—“Not now, Edgar”—and left the room.

  Rhett Butler was never cruel to Edgar—not as Henry Kershaw and Andrew Ravanel could be cruel—but Rhett’s indifference was worse than cruelty. Was that Rhett’s secret? Might Rhett’s indifference be his power?