Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  When little Wade hesitated, Rhett said, “Get in the wagon, son. Wouldn’t you like an adventure?”

  “No!” the boy said, and hiccuped. Rhett laughed as he scooped Wade aboard. Prissy scrambled into the back as Rhett lifted Scarlett onto the seat beside him.

  “Wade, honey,” Melanie murmured to her frightened nephew, “please slip that pillow behind me.”

  When she leaned forward so the boy could place the pillow, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry out. She mustn’t faint. She mustn’t!

  Little Wade’s hot breath was in her ear. “Aunty Melly, I’m scared.”

  “Sweet boy, there’s much to be scared about,” Melanie whispered. “But you are a brave young soldier, Wade, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose, Aunt Melly.”

  As they creaked off, Scarlett wailed, “I forgot to lock the front door!”

  Rhett’s roar of laughter cured Wade Hamilton’s hiccups.

  The rickety old horse and wagon headed toward Atlanta’s burning heart.

  Inside dark, seemingly abandoned houses, householders were hiding the family silver or burying Grandfather’s Mexican War pistol.

  Near the city center, the night was loud with creaks, cries, and hoofbeats—the tumult of a great army in retreat. Rhett turned into a side street. A tremendous explosion sucked the air from their lungs and Wade began hiccuping again. “That will be Hood’s ammunition cars.” Rhett reached behind him to give Wade’s knee a reassuring squeeze.

  Rhett had hoped they could slip around the fire, but this night every road led to hell. He lashed the old horse into a shambling run and curled his fingers around his revolver. His woman was pressed against his side and heaven help the fool who tried to stop them!

  On both sides of Marietta Street, warehouses were ablaze. Looters scurried off with their prizes. Drunks reeled around a shattered whiskey barrel.

  Suddenly, Rhett pulled the wagon over the boardwalk and stopped, concealed under an outdoor stairwell.

  “Hurry,” Scarlett said. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Soldiers.”

  They might have been a thousand-man regiment once, but they weren’t a hundred tonight. A lifetime ago, wives and sweethearts had sewn fine uniforms and embroidered their flag, and they’d had a name—they’d been the Grays or the Zouaves or the Troop or the Legion. They’d come from no place special, a town or a county where everybody knew everybody, and they’d enlisted with their brothers, cousins, and neighbors and elected the Master of the biggest plantation as their Colonel because they sure as hell wouldn’t take orders from just anybody.

  Their friends had died at their sides, and their cousins and their brothers and their Colonel—oh, he was long dead—and the Colonel who’d replaced him—what was his name?—dead, too. How many Colonels had there been anyway?

  They walked as if their springs were broken, as if they had walked so many miles, one mile was no different from the next, one battle no different from the last. They held their rifles like old friends. Their sweetheart-sewn uniforms were long gone. They wore homespun and scraps of Federal uniforms, and some had short jackets and some long ones, and a few walked bare-chested through the flickering glare.

  They scarcely lifted their feet, but their sliding strides would carry them onward until at last they fell. For some, that would come as a blessing.

  A boy soldier trailed behind. Perhaps he’d been a drummer boy when they’d had drums, but rifles were easier to come by than drums. The boy dragged his rifle in the dust.

  He stopped in his tracks, wobbled, and fell on his face. Wordlessly, two men fell out. One, whose black beard was the only substantial thing about him, gave his and the boy’s rifle to the second man, slung the boy across his shoulders and walked on.

  Rhett Butler removed his hat.

  After the last soldier turned the corner, Rhett lashed the horse forward.

  The burning city sucked air into its great lungs. Windows popped and blackened the street with burned glass.

  Scarlett cried, “Name of God, Rhett! Are you crazy? Hurry! Hurry!”

  Prissy screamed.

  Flames shot from eaves; oily smoke rolled from roof caps. Heat scorched their faces and they squinted against the glare. Rhett urged the horse into a shuffling trot, terror motivating the beast more than the lash. Fire to the left and right; only a narrow tunnel between. Wade shrieked again and again as heat waves crashed over them and bricks and timbers thudded into the street.

  The railroad tracks they bumped across were clear proof that this conflagration had once been a city where ordinary men went to work every morning and newspapers were published. Preachers preached, bankers banked, and grocers had produce to sell.

  When they finally emerged on a side street, it was immediately cooler. The fire was behind them. Little Wade’s wails diminished to muffled sobs and hiccups.

  Nobody else on the road. On the outskirts of the city, houses were farther apart and the road was bordered by elm trees. The fire wind rustled leaves. The city glowed at their back.

  Rhett drew rein.

  “Hurry, Rhett. Don’t stop.”

  “Let the poor brute catch his breath.”

  Their sweat dried in the cool air.

  Rhett Butler was immensely weary. He had done what he had promised her. She wouldn’t need him now. She’d never wanted him. Never. He asked if she knew where they were.

  “Oh yes. I know a wagon trace that winds off from the main Jonesboro road and wanders around for miles. Pa and I used to ride it. It comes out right near the MacIntosh place, and that’s only a mile from Tara.”

  He glanced at her face. She was yearning for Tara. Scarlett O’Hara was pure yearning. She and he were two of a kind, but she didn’t know it, and she never would.

  Some men could love without being loved. Rhett envied them.

  Her body was warm against his. He could feel her heartbeat.

  It was as if something inside him had snapped. All tension drained out of him. He was as tired as if they’d made love for hours.

  That drummer boy couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. He should be drifting down a river in the fog, watching for loggerhead turtles on otter slides.

  He told her to go on to Tara without him. She had her horse and wagon and she knew the way. He was going to join the army.

  “Oh, I could choke you for scaring me so! Let’s go on.”

  “I am not joking, my dear. Where is your patriotism, your love for Our Glorious Cause?”

  “Oh Rhett,” she said, “how can you do this to me? Why are you leaving me?”

  Too little, too late.

  Rhett Kershaw Butler put his arms around Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton and pressed his lips to hers. He felt her lips melt and awaken to his kiss.

  He would never get over her.

  He stepped down from the buggy into the darkness beside the road.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  After Franklin

  That fall, after unavailing appeals to less devastated regions of the Confederacy, the Charleston Free Market ran out of food and closed. Rosemary walked home through the rubble-strewn streets, entered her home through the front door she no longer bothered to lock, and sat across the room from John’s favorite chair. After a time, she retrieved the mantel’s sole ornament, a silver bud vase, and polished it.

  The very next morning, a furloughed convalescent delivered her husband’s letter: John was managing “pretty well for an old fellow” and had been promoted. Henceforth, all the world might address him as Captain Haynes—a promotion General Stahl made “only because there were no worthy men seeking it.”

  General Forrest took a liking to Rhett,” John wrote, “and wanted to commission him an officer. When your brother declined the honor, the ferocious Forrest was greatly amused. I see Rhett whenever our cavalry is in camp. He is in excellent spirits and has acquired a follower, one Archie Flytte, who attends upon Rhett faithfully as a dog. Flytte is a penitentiary bird pa
rdoned to join the army. Although the man is devoted to Rhett, his affection is not reciprocated.

  “After Atlanta fell, we marched north. General Hood believed if the Confederate army stood between General Sherman and his Knoxville supply base, it’d bring Sherman boiling out of Atlanta. Once again, Hood misjudged General Sherman, who burned what was left of Atlanta and marched off vigorously in the opposite direction.

  “As Sherman proceeds through Georgia, he is wrecking the east-west railroads as thoroughly as he previously wrecked our north-south lines. After those railroads are destroyed, dear heart, you and I will be marooned separately for God knows how long. Rosemary, will you come to me? In anticipation of your favorable decision, Rhett’s friend Rufus Bullock has telegraphed you a railroad pass.

  “I will understand perfectly if you don’t wish to hazard such an arduous, perhaps dangerous journey, but it would make me so glad to see you. We have so much to make up for, so much to talk about. Our Darling Meg lives in both our hearts. Dear Rosemary, I miss you more than I ever dreamed. My baseless jealousy kept us apart. All the fault is mine. I reproach you for nothing. Please come to me.

  “Your loving husband, John.”

  Rosemary rushed from room to room, pulling clothing from drawers and chifforobes. She had packed three portmanteaus and a steamer trunk before plumping down on the trunk, covering her face, and giggling. What a ninny!

  She stuffed what she absolutely had to have into a carpetbag. Her only ornament was a filigree rose-gold brooch. Why she had ever disliked it, she could not recall.

  Rosemary picked up her railroad pass at the depot, where she boarded the train to Savannah.

  Next morning in Savannah, Rosemary changed to the Georgia Central, which by noon the following day was huffing cautiously into Macon.

  Sherman’s cavalry was nearing the city and Macon’s depot was clogged with refugees.

  Before he burned Atlanta, General William T. Sherman had proposed, “War is cruel and you cannot refine it,” a proposition he’d further tested on the undefended farms and towns along his line of march.

  Even before Rosemary’s train reached the platform, refugees were swarming aboard, hoping to assure a place for themselves when the train departed. When told the locomotive needed fuel, men, children, clergymen—even respectable matrons—passed balks hand over hand up to the wood car.

  Militia guarded the Southwestern train Rosemary wanted to board. Their captain had lost an arm at Chancellorsville, and said he didn’t know Rufus Bullock from “Gee Crackey.” He hadn’t known the Confederacy had a “Railroad Bureau.” He touched Rosemary too familiarly. Since the captain chose who rode the train, he said, he picked the prettiest.

  Rosemary thanked him and brushed his hand aside as if she hadn’t noticed it. She had seated herself in the car when a familiar voice hailed her from the platform. “Rosemary Haynes! Dear Rosemary! Please, please speak to these men!”

  The Wards had evacuated Charleston to refuge at a cousin’s plantation near Macon. A scant year later, Sherman’s bummers torched that plantation and the Wards fled again. Eulalie Ward and her brother-in-law, Frederick, hadn’t changed clothes in days. Eulalie’s shoes were broken-soled; Frederick, who had always worn a hat out of doors, was bareheaded and his pate was painfully sunburned.

  “Rosemary, they let you on the train! Please help us get on, too. We must flee Macon. We have nothing left. Nothing!”

  Before the war, Frederick Ward had been a rich man with a rich man’s comfortable opinions. Now his sister-in-law led him by the hand. “Stand straight, Frederick. You mustn’t be mistaken for a man of no consequence.”

  “But Eulalie, I am a man of no consequence.”

  Many years ago, when Eulalie’s husband died, she thought she had lost everything. She’d never dreamed she had so much more to lose. Willy was dead and her daughters had run off with Sherman’s soldiers. Eulalie and Frederick got so hungry, they’d killed Eulalie’s little dog, Empress—and then been unable to eat her.

  From the rear platform (Rosemary didn’t consider getting off the train), Rosemary begged the militia captain to let the Wards board. “Ma’am,” he said, “ain’t no place for ’em. Less’n you hop off and make room.”

  As the overloaded train pulled out of the depot, Rosemary looked anywhere but at the refugees on the platform.

  Where the tracks had been torn up by Sherman’s cavalry and hastily relaid, the ramshackle train crept no faster than its passengers, who got off and walked alongside. That night, male passengers held lanterns for the trainmen bracing long bars under the sagging rails to level them as the cars tottered over.

  Twelve hours and ninety miles later, the train reached Albany, Georgia. Rosemary paid five dollars for three corn pones and, with other weary, unwashed refugees, slept on the depot floor until daybreak.

  The Selma and Meridian train was a miracle. Untouched by the war, its cars weren’t shot up, and its locomotive’s bulbous smokestack didn’t have a single bullet hole—not one! Although the paint was faded, every car was dark green, with black trim.

  The train click-clacked over level rails at a breathtaking thirty miles an hour. The tubercular veteran beside Rosemary had traveled extensively in New England before the war and announced, “By golly, ma’am, we might as well be in Massachusetts!”

  This paragon train ended at Demopolis, where the passengers were ferried across the Tombigbee River. From there, they hiked four miles to a log platform, where a wheezing locomotive and familiar mismatched, bullet-pocked cars awaited them. In Meridian, Mississippi, Rosemary took a hotel room and slept like the dead. The Mobile and Ohio train she boarded next morning delivered her to Corinth, Mississippi, at dusk.

  That night, she slept in the depot. At two o’clock the following afternoon, the Memphis and Charleston train brought supplies, conscripts, and Rosemary Haynes into Decatur, Alabama, the end of the line.

  The train disgorged barrels of gunpowder and brined beef, boxes of minié balls, and conscripts onto the platform. The youngest conscript was three days past seventeen, the eldest forty-nine. Most of the conscripts hadn’t anything to say, but one fellow in a beaver-collared frock coat confided to Rosemary Haynes that he was too valuable to the war effort to be expended in battle, and a bucktoothed boy chewed his thumbnail and said he’d desert first chance he got. When they stepped down in Decatur, provost’s men formed the conscripts into ranks and told them that aspiring deserters should be able to outrun a bullet.

  After five hard days’ travel, Rosemary was grateful for the unvibrating, untrembling platform beneath her feet. She relinquished her carpetbag to old Joshua. “Have you been waiting long?”

  “I reckon.”

  She almost didn’t recognize the horse tied to the hitching rail. The knacker man would make no profit on him.

  “What have you done to Tecumseh?” Rosemary cried. “Oh my poor boy!”

  “He old, Miss Rosemary,” Joshua replied. “He born in them olden times.”

  “He was sound until he went into the army. You were a good boy, weren’t you, Tecumseh?”

  The gelding lifted his head and nickered a welcome, and Rosemary thought that was the saddest thing of all. “Joshua, Tecumseh wants an apple.”

  “Miss Rosemary, whatever oats or apples or corn we gets, we eats. When horse dead, I reckon we eat him, too.”

  Since the railroad bridges north of Decatur had been burned, Hood’s supplies and conscripts were offloaded and freighted by ox, mule wagon, or shank’s mare to Columbia, Tennessee. Sometimes, Rosemary rode Tecumseh. From pity, she usually walked. Army supply wagons spilled off the narrow road, cutting ruts through adjacent fields. There were no fences: their rails had fed soldiers’ campfires, and if any livestock survived, they were hidden deep in the woods. That night, Rosemary slept beneath a supply wagon.

  In the morning, rain plucked the last leaves off the trees and overflowed the ruts. Tecumseh couldn’t carry a rider anymore. A little after dark, they entered Pulaski,
Tennessee, where Rosemary bought some oats, which the gelding picked at. Joshua slept in a stall with the horse.

  Rosemary’s hotel room was unheated, but by doubling her threadbare blanket, she was warm enough. She dreamed of John and Rhett on a June day when the sun was so bright and Rhett had brought picnic baskets with more food than they could eat and Tecumseh grazed in timothy so tall, it tickled his belly.

  Although there were trains running out of Pulaski, the pale-faced young provost wouldn’t let Rosemary board. “Ma’am, I couldn’t let you on this train were your pass signed by President Jefferson Davis himself.”

  “I have traveled from South Carolina to see my husband in the army.”

  “So far as that?” The young provost quoted, “‘Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusts in her. … Her children arise up, and call her blessed.’”

  “The Federals killed my daughter. Meg would have been six next March.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry to carry on. I was a seminarian before the war.”

  “Do you still believe in God?”

  The young man looked away. “I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

  Rosemary, Joshua, and the stumbling Tecumseh passed haphazard piles of discarded Federal equipment: artillery horses shot in their traces, overturned wagons. Files of Federal prisoners were marched south. The prisoners wore Confederate rags, their guards sported warm blue Federal uniforms.

  In Columbia, Tennessee, Rosemary bought corn pones and brown beans for herself and Joshua.

  That evening, as they walked toward Franklin, Tennessee, Rosemary heard distant thunder as if a thousand wagons were rumbling across a wooden bridge.

  “They’s fightin’,” Joshua said.

  “They can’t be fighting. The Federals are running away. Why would they be fighting?”

  “They’s fightin’.”

  As light faded from the sky, the rumble grew louder and Rosemary could distinguish individual explosions. Muleteers pulled off the road to let fleeing Confederates by.