Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Since he’d received no reinforcements from Braxton Bragg, General Whiting, Fort Fisher’s commander, had stripped other river forts of men, and as Rhett tied up, a gunboat was disgorging soldiers onto the wharf. These artillerymen were like no Confederates Rhett had seen in years: well fed, their uniforms entire and recently laundered. Until today, these men had had a good war. Perched in gun batteries above the river, they’d lobbed an occasional shell at Federal blockaders venturing too close, but they’d never been under fire themselves. Grateful runner captains had kept them supplied with victuals and whiskey.

  Formed into ragged ranks, these comfortable soldiers peered unhappily at the maelstrom ahead.

  Rhett turned to a corpulent captain whose uniform had fit less snugly four years ago. “Nice day,” Rhett observed.

  The ocean was a mirror except where short rounds fell and spouted. White streamers marked projectiles’ arcs into the battered fort. Each Federal vessel was visible, as if under slight magnification. The breeze their firing created was strong enough to whip the smoke from their gun muzzles. The ironclads Pawtuxet, Brooklyn, Mahopac, Canonicus, Huron, Saugus, Kansas, Pontoosuc, Yantic, Mohican, Monadnock, New Ironsides, Pequot, Seneca, Tacony, Unadilla, and Maumee stood a thousand yards offshore, fronting wooden warships Minnesota, Colorado, Tuscarora, Mackinaw, Powhatan, Wabash, Susquehanna, Ticonderoga, Juniata, Vanderbilt, and Shenendoah. A dozen smaller warships were farther out, attended by eighteen gunboats and twenty-two troop transports.

  Fort Fisher was contiguous sand dunes in an upside down L. The long leg of the L faced the Federal fleet, and the short leg crossed the peninsula, facing the Federal landing party. Fisher’s sand dunes were fifty feet wide and thirty feet high, linked by gun platforms in the saddles between.

  Before the Federal bombardment, Fort Fisher had had barracks, corrals, and a parade ground. These had been pounded so thoroughly, not a scrap remained.

  The corpulent captain raised his hand and ordered his men to the double-quick. Rhett took a deep breath, lowered his head, and ran like a hare. He pounded along the road until it disappeared in shell holes. Rhett’s legs ached from running through soft sand and he stumbled and fell. Exploding sand erupted around him and concussions slapped his eardrums. The sand deluge filled his shirt, pants, and boots and thickened every strand of his sweaty hair.

  Fort Fisher’s flag was a torn rag on a spliced flagpole. Some risers on the Headquarters Battery staircase were shattered; others, two and three in a row, were missing. Rhett clambered up rails, risers—whatever he could grab hold of. The battery’s guns had been dismounted and one gunbarrel flung partway down the sea face. Across the saddle between the dunes, sandbags were piled waist-high. Behind them, an officer had his glass trained on the Federal fleet. At his feet, his orderly kept his back against the sandbags.

  “General Whiting?”

  The General snapped his glass closed. “If you are a journalist, sir, inform your readers we will hold this fort.”

  “I have come from General Bragg.”

  The General’s face flamed with eagerness. “Is Bragg sending reinforcements?”

  “I am not privy to General Bragg’s plans, sir.” Rhett wiped his envelope clean of sand before giving it to the General.

  Braxton Bragg’s orders transferred Private Tazewell Watling from the 18th North Carolina Junior Reserves to Colonel Rufus Bullock’s Department of Railroads. Rhett Butler, of that department, would escort Private Watling.

  General Whiting said, “I ask Bragg for reinforcements and he takes the men I have.”

  “Watling’s just a boy, sir. He’s fifteen.”

  “The Federals outnumber us four to one.”

  The winter night was closing down and each minute was darker than the last. When the Federal fleet abruptly stopped firing, silence rang like a carillon. Whiting’s orderly stood up, stretched, and took out his pipe.

  “Don’t light that pipe, Sergeant,” Whiting said. “They may not be finished with us.”

  One by one, the anchored fleet’s portholes illuminated. Bugles, some discordant, some sweet, sounded the dinner call.

  “I don’t suppose you’d take Private Watling’s place, sir? You’re no boy of fifteen.” The General waited, head cocked for Rhett’s reply. “I thought not.” General Whiting endorsed Bragg’s orders with a pencil stub.

  “Are you sure Bragg said nothing of a counterattack? Did you see signs he might come to our relief?”

  Rhett spoke carefully: “Yesterday, General, there were wagons at Bragg’s headquarters. I believe General Bragg was evacuating.”

  General Whiting smacked his fist into his palm. “He cannot abandon us. Not even that goddamned Bragg. … I will write him myself. Bragg must understand!” The General scrambled down the broken staircase.

  When the orderly lit his pipe, the match flare was blinding. “Might as well get kilt tonight as tomorrow,” he opined.

  Like ants from an anthill, Fort Fisher’s defenders emerged from bombproofs deep under the dunes. The full moon brightened the fort. While quartermasters rolled barrels and relayed boxes of hardtack, hungry soldiers formed ragged lines.

  The wiry corporal finished his side meat and licked his fingers clean before he’d touch Rhett’s document. The corporal ran his forefinger over each word and refolded the paper into the envelope. “Watling know ’bout this?”

  “No.”

  “Watling’s a good boy. Most of these Junior Reserves are plumb petrified. Some of ’em won’t come out of the bombproofs even when the Federals ain’t shootin’.” The corporal was missing a front tooth. “Watling was our powder boy long as we still had us a gun to shoot. Us gunners think high of that boy, mister.”

  “You don’t mind my taking him out?” The corporal grinned a gap-toothed grin. “Take me, too?”

  Chewing on a biscuit, Taz Watling sat on the trunnion of a dismounted Columbiad. His uniform hung loose on his skinny frame. “Be damned,” Taz said. “I thought you were in the army.”

  “Rode with Forrest for a spell.”

  “They say Forrest’s had twenty horses killed under him.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Out on the ocean, an ironclad fired. The streak of the burning fuse arced across dark water, dropped into the fort, and exploded.

  “They’ll hit us tomorrow,” Taz said matter-of-factly.

  “They only outnumber you four to one.”

  “Don’t joke. You’re always joking.”

  “You mean this isn’t funny? Eighteen hundred brave men waiting to die while Braxton Bragg is skedaddling? Got to hand it to ol’ Brax.”

  “I was proud when you joined the army,” Taz said. “What are you doing here? Why are you in civilian clothes?”

  “My uniform hatched lice.” Rhett perched on an empty powder keg and lit a cigar. “The Army of Tennessee’s finished, so I got reassigned. I thought I’d look you up.”

  The interior of the fort was moonlit sand except for sparks from cigars and pipes. Out on the ocean, the Federal fleet was a floating metropolis ablaze with light. On the peninsula, Federal campfires flamed from shore to shore.

  “I understand you’re a hero. I had hoped your expensive education would prevent that.”

  Taz shrugged. “The Creoles say, ‘Capon vive longtemps.’ Probably my Butler blood. Wasn’t Great-Grandfather a pirate?”

  “‘The coward lives a long time,’” Rhett translated. “Creoles are feisty bastards. I don’t know if Louis Valentine Butler would have called himself a ‘pirate.’ Louis would have preferred ‘Gentleman of Fortune.’”

  The boy sighed. “Anyway, I’m glad to see you.”

  Rhett wiped sand from his silver flask and unscrewed two nesting cups. Rhett filled his before filling one for the boy.

  A fiery streak passed overhead and its concussion pressed Rhett’s jacket against his back.

  The boy took a mouthful, gagged and coughed.

  “Don’t waste it, son. That brandy’s older than
you are.”

  Taz took another swallow. “I haven’t heard anything from my mother. We get no mail.”

  “Belle was fine when I passed through Atlanta. She’s safe there. The Federals won’t come back.”

  Taz drank his brandy in brave gulps and passed his cup for a refill. “Might as well get drunk once in my life.”

  “Might as well.” Rhett brimmed the cup.

  They drank for a time.

  Taz said, “Being a powder boy isn’t easy as you’d think. I run to the bombproof magazine—that tunnel is six hundred steps, by my count—for a twenty-five-pound powder bag, which I tote back to the gun. Federal shells flyin’ around like … like”—he gestured—“like damn sand fleas. If you get buried in sand, you better claw out, or you’ll suffocate. I’ll take another drink, thank you. I’m thirstier’n I thought.

  “I’d rather be a powder boy, anyway, than hid in the bombproofs, breathing twice-breathed air and stinkin’ buckets to do your business in. Damn! If this is how brandy tastes, it’s a wonder anyone drinks it!”

  The unfamiliar taste didn’t deter him from drinking too much too fast. Taz rambled on about Fort Fisher, how proud he was to have the gunners’ respect, until his speech began to slur. When the cup dropped from his nerveless hand, the boy murmured, “Why won’t you be my father?” and slid down onto the sand.

  With the wiry corporal on one end of the litter and Rhett on the other, they carried the boy to the dock.

  “What’s your name, Corporal?”

  “Why’d you be wanting to know?”

  “Might meet up after the war.”

  “Small chance of that.” The corporal added, “If you keep this young’un alive, he’ll make a man one day.”

  Fifteen minutes before Tunis’s deadline, Rhett’s dinghy bumped against the Merry Widow and her crewmen plucked the unconscious boy aboard.

  When Rhett returned to the fort, the corporal said, “Didn’t expect to see you again. Federals’ll be hittin’ us tomorrow.”

  “Did you ever love a woman?”

  Startled: “My wife, Ella, died three years past.” “You lost everything.” “I reckon.”

  After a time, Rhett said, “Anyway, it’s a fine moon.” The corporal nodded. “You got the boy away?” “Tazewell Watling’s going to England.” “I’ll be! I’ve heard tell England is a green sort of place. I heard folks is happy there.”

  “In any event, they’re not shooting each other.”

  “My,” the corporal said, “wouldn’t that be pleasant?”

  The next morning when Taz Watling woke, his headache woke, too. He was lying on a hard deck, surrounded by cotton bales, whose woody, oily smell passed through his nose straight to his stomach, and he crawled backward out of his cotton cave to a ship’s rail (where in hell was he?) to vomit. His head thumped with each spasm and he opened his eyes wide to relieve the pressure on his skull. He got up. He brushed sand off his knees. He was in a boat on a flat sea. They weren’t going fast. A stream of water shot from the bow into the sea. The sun was not quite high noon. Goddamn Rhett Butler. Taz’s headache settled into a throb. His stomach was empty, thank God. What boat was this? Men climbed from the hold to rig a windlass. After it was rigged, a cotton bale emerged into sunlight. They swung it out and dropped it over the side.

  Taz asked a sailor where they were.

  “Day and a half day from Nassau if she floats. Lend a hand. Heave on that rope when I say ‘Heave.’”

  When Taz pulled the thick hemp rope, his head expanded like one of the pig bladders children inflate and pop at Christmastime. The sailors wore clean singletons, clean duck trousers. Taz was dirty and he smelled bad.

  When her belowdecks cargo had been jettisoned, the Widow’s crew breathed easier and the helmsman lit his pipe.

  Tazewell Watling felt light as a feather. As he mined the bitterness of Rhett Butler’s betrayal, Taz discovered he hadn’t wanted to die after all. This expanse of milky green sea was so flat, at the horizons he could see the earth curve. Sandy, dangerous, noisy, doomed Fort Fisher seemed very far away. His head stopped hurting and he was hungry.

  He went belowdecks to the galley, where he found a half-carved roast of beef and some bread.

  Four men labored at the hand pump in the cavernous hold. Water ran in through bulkhead seams. In the engine room, one of the two engines was cold. Exhausted men sprawled on pallets inches above the water-slick deck.

  Nobody questioned Taz; nobody seemed to care who he was.

  About three o’clock, the crew started jettisoning deck cargo. Cotton bales splashed over the side and bobbed in the Widow’s wake.

  A weary negro captain issued the orders.

  Taz cleared his throat politely and said, “I am Tazewell Watling. I am not aboard of my own will.”

  “I know who you is.” Another cotton bale splashed into the sea and scraped along the hull. “This was to be the Widow’s last run. Me and Ruthie and Nat was goin’ to Canada. My father’s in Kingston. He says there’s no such thing as a nigger in Canada.”

  The Federal gunboats that tried to stop the Merry Widow’s flight hadn’t hurt her; she’d hurt herself. Her overpowered engines had torqued plates apart, popped rows of rivets, and sprung the vessel’s knees. Although Mr. MacLeod had caulked and plugged every hole he could, he couldn’t reach all of them, and water was within six inches of the fireboxes when they started heaving cargo over the side.

  “Are we sinking, sir?”

  Another bale hit the water and thumped and bumped along the hull. “Rhett’s made arrangements for you, boy. We get to Nassau, I’ll put you on a ship. They expectin’ you in England.”

  “Sir, I am a Confederate soldier.”

  “You a what?’ The negro captain’s mouth worked furiously. “Mercy,” he said. He turned to his crew. “That’s enough overboard, Mr. MacLeod! Let’s see if we can keep a couple to sell.” More to himself than to the boy, he added, “One thousand dollars for one bale of cotton. One thousand dollars.”

  It was a bright day. Taz had been a powder boy in the greatest Confederate fort ever known. He’d done dangerous duty and through no fault of his own his life had been spared. He’d been prepared to die, but he hadn’t, and the sun had never shone so bright as it shone on him today. Tazewell Watling was a young man on his way to a new life. The hair on his arms tingled.

  Her engine strained as the Merry Widow wallowed across the glassy green sea. She had been sleek and beautiful and fast, but she was beautiful no more. If she got to Nassau, the ship breakers would take her.

  Captain Tunis Bonneau turned his bloodshot eyes on his passenger. “Boy,” he said, “there ain’t no Confederates no more.”

  PART TWO

  Reconstruction

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A Georgia Plantation After the War

  Charleston surrendered, Columbia burned, Petersburg fell, Richmond burned; the Confederate armies surrendered. It was finished. After four bitter years, the war was over. From the Potomac to the Rio Brazos, grass softened the abandoned earthworks, skeletons of men and horses vanished beneath new growth, and by June’s end, when the grass slumped in the heat, only burned plantation houses, shattered cities, and broken hearts testified to what had happened to the South. That spring, the songbirds’ bright cluttering fell on ears still tensed for the thunder of guns. Gaunt survivors of once-feared armies laid down their weapons and started their weary walk home.

  With her moistened fingertip, Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton captured the last crumb of corn bread on her plate. “Mammy, we must give smaller portions to the vagrants.

  ” Plates clattering angrily as the old servant carried them to the kitchen, Mammy grumbled, “Tara ain’t never turned folks away hungry, and these boys ain’t no vagrants; they’s soldier boys!”

  Though Tara was off the beaten track, those soldier boys arrived daily. “Jest passing through, ma’am. I’m a-goin’ home. Got young’uns I ain’t seed since ’63. Hope they remember their old
pappy.” Last night, an Alabama boy had slept on Tara’s parlor floor and breakfasted on corn bread before leaving. Tara’s remaining cornmeal—seven precious pounds—was locked up in Gerald O’Hara’s liquor cabinet.

  Tara’s dining room wallpaper had been jerked away in strips by Sherman’s bummers searching for valuables. Some of the mismatched chairs around the dining room table were wired together. “I’ze no cabinetmaker, Miss Scarlett,” Pork had explained. “I’ze Master Gerald’s valet.”

  Melanie rose from her chair. “I’m a little tired. If you don’t mind terribly, I’ll lie down until we hill the potatoes. Scarlett, dear, you will wake me?”

  At Scarlett’s terse nod, Melanie produced her sweetest smile. “If you won’t call me, dear, I won’t be able to rest. You can’t do it all by yourself.”

  “Why, of course I’ll wake you,” Scarlett lied, kissing her sister-in-law’s cheek.

  The Yankees wouldn’t steal anything more. Tara had nothing left to steal. Of its hundred beef and milk cows, two hundred hogs, forty horses and mules, fifty sheep, and countless chickens and turkeys; one horse, one milk cow, one cranky elusive sow, and two elderly hens survived. What the Yankees hadn’t killed, they’d stolen.

  Tara’s field workers—even dependable negroes like Big Sam—had run off. Only the house servants—Pork, Mammy, Dilcey, and Prissy—were still at Tara, and sometimes Scarlett wished they’d run too. Four more mouths to feed.

  In her dawn-to-dark fight to keep Tara alive, even Ashley Wilkes had faded from Scarlett’s mind. She didn’t know whether Ashley had died in the Federal prison camp, as so many had, or would be coming home one day. Most nights, Scarlett managed a brief prayer for Ashley before her exhausted mind succumbed to sleep. Some nights she forgot.

  A year ago when Rhett Butler abandoned her outside burning Atlanta, Scarlett had been running to her childhood Tara, where her Mammy would warm some milk and her mother, Ellen, would lay cool cloths on her brow. War’s terrors would be banished as Scarlett fell into her mother’s loving arms.