Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Her dream had been short-lived.

  One day before Scarlett got home—one irrecoverable day—Scarlett’s mother, Ellen, had died of fever. Ellen died with a man’s name on her lips: Philippe—a French name.

  Now there was nobody left on earth who could teach Scarlett how to live. “Philippe”? She didn’t know any Philippe and she had more important things to worry about.

  Sometimes, Scarlett believed Gerald O’Hara should have died with his wife. Scarlett’s father was a shell of the shrewd, impetuous, sturdy man he’d been. Though Gerald still sat at the head of the table and ate his meager portion without complaint, her father’s mind was broken.

  Now he rose. “I think I’ll rest now, my dear. This afternoon, your mother and I are riding to Twelve Oaks.”

  “That will be nice,” Scarlett said, though John Wilkes was long dead and Twelve Oaks burned to the ground.

  Scarlett kept up the pretense because pretense was better than Gerald O’Hara’s lucid moments, when he remembered everything he had lost and crumpled in paroxysms of weeping.

  Little Wade drummed his heels against his chair rungs, whining he was still hungry. “Wade, you’ll just have to wait. When Mammy bakes corn bread, you can have the bowl.”

  Scarlett tied her bonnet before going outdoors, where Pork waited, wearing the cast-off Sunday coat Gerald had given him years ago. Tight-lipped with determination, Pork began, “Miss Scarlett!”

  Pork’s too-familiar complaint rolled over her: “Miss Scarlett, when my old master tried to buy me back from Master Gerald, he offered eight hundred dollars, which was right smart of money in them days. Yes, Miss, it were! Master Gerald wouldn’t take no money for me account of I’ze Master Gerald’s personal valet. I ain’t one to brag on myself, but some folks say I is the best valet in Clayton County. And I ain’t gonna hill no potatoes!”

  “Pork,” Scarlett restrained her temper, “if a strong man like you won’t help, how can we women do the work?”

  Out of the corner of her eye Scarlett spotted her sister leading their only horse to the mounting block. “Suellen! Suellen! Wait!”

  Suellen was wearing her good dress and had a plump white peony in her thin, lifeless hair. “Suellen, where are you going?”

  “Why, I’m going to Jonesboro, Sister dear. It’s Tuesday.”

  Frank Kennedy had been Suellen’s “intended” for years. Although his Jonesboro store had been destroyed, every Tuesday Frank brought dry goods and groceries from Atlanta to swap for eggs, butter, honey, and whatever small family treasures the Federals had overlooked.

  “Suellen, I’m sorry, but we need the horse today. Dilcey knows where the Yankees threw away a barrel of weevily flour. Think how good biscuits would taste!”

  Suellen threw her peony in the dirt as she stalked indoors.

  Scarlett held her tongue.

  The Yankees had burned $200,000 of Gerald O’Hara’s stored cotton. A few months later, they returned to burn the tiny crop Scarlett had gleaned: perhaps $2,000. A month before the Confederate surrender, Scarlett had replanted. If this year’s scant crop survived weevils and bindweed, come fall it might fetch $200: A fortune.

  Before the War, Scarlett believed only imprudent people ate their seed corn. Now she understood the bitter truth that people ate their seed corn and their seed potatoes and made bread of their wheat seed when they were hungry enough. Scarlett was thankful Tara’s people couldn’t eat cotton seed!

  Scarlett grieved each time they had to butcher one of their sow’s thirty-pound shoats—a shoat who in time would have become a three-hundred-pound hog!

  Pretty Scarlett was stark-featured with fatigue; gay Scarlett was always cross. Proud Scarlett would do anything—literally anything—for Tara and its people. Gerald O’Hara’s daughter did work she’d never dreamed of. Scarlett had hoed until blisters came and weeded until pigweed tore her blisters open. She’d worked until her back and shoulders ached. Scarlett had lost so much weight, she fit into dresses she’d last worn when she was thirteen. The woman who’d come home to Tara to be a child again had become its mistress, distributing food, disarming squabbles, tending the sick, encouraging the weary.

  She tied the horse and turned to Pork. “Pork, if you can’t hill potatoes, perhaps you’d grease the windlass.”

  As if explaining to a child, Pork said, “Miss Scarlett, I’ze Master Gerald’s valet. …”

  Scarlett felt heat at the roots of her hair. She smiled sweetly and said, “I wonder if some other Clayton County family might need a valet.”

  Pork shook his head sadly. “Miss Scarlett, why you so hard?”

  Why? Why? If Scarlett hesitated, if she lost heart, if she once—as she sometimes wished to—broke down and wept, everything would be lost.

  Pork ambled off on a vague search for some kind of grease for the windlass.

  Gerald O’Hara’s thousand-acre plantation had shrunk to a hundred-foot kitchen garden and one five-acre cotton patch. Scarlett squinted so she wouldn’t see the brambles and blackberry bushes encroaching.

  Scarlett did servant’s work and she ate servant’s food: chickweed, dry land cress, dandelion greens, and wild mustard. Scarlett stooped in the shade of a live oak where the poke hadn’t bolted yet. They’d have poke greens for supper.

  A stranger was riding up their lane on a donkey so small, the rider’s boot tips brushed the ground. His ill-fitting green civilian coat was new, his beard was short, and his whitish blond hair a stubble. He had more flesh on him than the paroled soldiers who came to Tara. At the foot of the final rise, his donkey stopped, stretched its neck, pointed its muzzle to the skies, and brayed. The rider waited, slack-reined, until the donkey exhausted its complaints.

  Judging by his new coat, the man was a Carpetbagger; though not a prosperous one.

  Though the rider might have made quicker progress leading his donkey, he rode the disgruntled beast to Scarlett’s feet. “Nice morning,” he observed.

  “If you’re a Carpetbagger, sir, you are not welcome.”

  This jerked a startled laugh from him. “Carpetbagger, ma’am? Madam, I have sinned grievously, but that particular sin has eluded me. Might I water my steed?”

  Scarlett pointed to the well.

  The ungreased windlass squealed when the man turned the crank. “Then you must be a Scalawag,” Scarlett decided. “Nobody else wears new clothes.”

  He poured water into a bucket for his donkey. “Your windlass needs lard,” he said.

  He peeled off his new coat and hung it on the windlass handle. With a quick jerk, he ripped a sleeve off. Broken threads fringed an empty armhole. He stuffed the sleeve into his pocket before redonning his coat. “A ‘Scalawag,’ ma’am? One of those Southerners who were secret Union sympathizers—keeping their opinions to themselves until the Yankees were victorious? No, ma’am, I’m a convict released from the Ohio Penitentiary, issued these clothes and ten dollars, with which I bought this noble steed, Chapultapec.” He patted the animal’s haunch.

  “That’s a mighty fancy name for a donkey.”

  His face was transfigured by his grin. “I am an incurable romantic. You don’t recognize me?”

  Scarlett frowned. “No … I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Perhaps if I wore a cavalry officer’s hat with an egret plume? If I had a banjo player accompanying me? Surely, Miss Scarlett, you didn’t have many callers who brought their own orchestra.”

  Scarlett blinked. “Colonel Ravanel?”

  He bowed deeply. “I had hoped you’d find me unforgettable.”

  “You were that.” Something tugged at Scarlett’s memory. “Didn’t I hear you’d lost your wife?”

  “My Charlotte is with the angels.”

  Scarlett’s mind raced. When she’d met Charlotte Ravanel at Aunt Eulalie’s, she’d thought her a worthy, uninteresting gentlewoman: a woman other women confide in. But Charlotte had been a Fisher: heir to one of the South’s great fortunes. Doubtless, Charlotte Fisher’s attic had its trunks
of worthless Confederate currency, as Tara’s did. But so much money couldn’t all be gone. Scarlett smiled sadly, “Colonel, my condolences for your loss.”

  Didn’t Charlotte have a brother? “And Jamie Fisher?” Scarlett asked.

  “Jamie and I shared a cell. ‘Eat your oatmeal, Andrew! Do take some fresh air! Andrew, you must not be bitter.’” Andrew Ravanel said, “Jamie couldn’t understand how bitterness solaces a man.”

  For her own part, Scarlett thought bitterness was like nostalgia: It got in the way of what needed doing. Feeding Tara’s hungry people, restoring its house and outbuildings, hiring workers, buying livestock, and planting a thousand acres in cotton would leave no time for bitterness.

  “Colonel Ravanel, you’ll take supper with us?”

  “Thank you, no. I couldn’t.”

  “My goodness, surely you’re hungry?”

  “I cannot pay.”

  “Gracious!” Scarlett said. “If you must pay, sir, your supper will cost you one Confederate dollar!”

  Pork was snipping roses in the dooryard. Every morning, fragrant bouquets appeared in the parlor, the dining room, and Gerald’s bedroom. “Pork, didn’t I tell you to grease the windlass?”

  “Yes, Miss Scarlett. I pick these flowers first.”

  “The flowers are pretty, but every bucket is heavier because the windlass needs grease. When you’re finished with that, start hilling the potatoes.”

  Pork’s lips were a rebellious pout.

  “I hear the Yankees have banned the bullwhip,” Andrew Ravanel observed mildly. “But your plantation is so far off the main roads …”

  Pork drew himself to his full height. “I ain’t never been whipped! Master Gerald don’t ‘low no whippin’ at Tara.”

  The Colonel pulled the torn sleeve from his pocket and popped it against his pant leg.

  Pork’s mouth fell open and his roses dropped from his hand. In a dead voice, he said, “Yes, Miss Scarlett. I go grease the windlass.”

  As she and the Colonel entered the front hall, Scarlett apologized. “I’m afraid Sherman’s soldiers visited us.”

  “My recent quarters, Miss Scarlett, were nothing to boast about.”

  Scarlett showed the colonel into the dining room. “Excuse me, Colonel. I’ll see about your supper.”

  She found Mammy kneeling on a stool, washing kitchen windows. “Mammy, we’ll want that corn bread, and there’re poke greens under the live oak behind the well.”

  “Miss Scarlett, this corn bread’s for supper.”

  “Mammy, the gentleman is our guest.”

  “I seen that fellow through these windows.” Mammy snorted. “What gentleman only got one sleeve to his coat?”

  “He ruined his coat so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a Scalawag.”

  “He did what?” Mammy shook her head. “Lord have mercy!” She climbed down and went for the greens.

  Scarlett raced up the servants’ stairway to her bedroom. Her cracked mirror revealed a too-brown, unladylike face, but her hair was clean. She undid her bun and rearranged her hair to frame her face. She dabbed a drop of precious cologne behind each ear.

  In nightshirt and riding boots, Gerald emerged from his bedroom. “Have you seen Ellen?” he inquired anxiously. “We should be at Twelve Oaks by four. John will want to have a drink before we dine.”

  “I’ll remind her, Father. Please excuse me. I’m attending to a guest.”

  “Shouldn’t I greet him?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, Father. You don’t want to tire yourself before your ride to Twelve Oaks.”

  Gerald O’Hara waggled his finger, “Don’t forget to remind your mother,” and closed his door behind him.

  When Scarlett returned to the dining room, Mammy was laying out food previously intended for everyone’s supper.

  Colonel Ravanel indicated his plate. “You are generous.”

  “Goodness, Colonel. It’s just a snack. Before the War, Tara’s hospitality was legendary.”

  So she wouldn’t stare at his overfull plate, Scarlett asked if the Colonel had passed through Atlanta.

  “From Whitehall and Broad, I could not see a building standing.” The Colonel’s fork conveyed a stack of glistening greens to his mouth and he munched with a ruminant’s mindless satisfaction. “The city center is destroyed.”

  “The train station? The Car Shed?”

  “The Yankees dragged straw inside and fired it. Whatever survived the fire was treated to explosives and battering rams.” Ravanel’s smile was hard. “Only a Yankee General could make his reputation by burning an undefended city.”

  Atlanta destroyed? Scarlett couldn’t bear to think of it. Atlanta had energy and ingenuity by the bucketful. If Atlanta was destroyed, what hope was there for the South?

  The Colonel guessed Scarlett’s thoughts. “They won’t let us up. The Carpetbaggers and Scalawags are backed by Union bayonets. They mean whites to be ruled by niggers.”

  Scarlett tried not to watch his fork scoop, wrap, and lift. It entered his mouth; his mouth closed. “If brave men like you are so discouraged, what can the rest of us do?”

  “Men like me?” An ugly laugh. “Romantic fools tilting at windmills.” He pushed his empty platter aside and wiped his mouth on that torn sleeve. “I don’t suppose you’d have brandy. …”

  “Only white liquor, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes?”

  “We use it medicinally.”

  “I’m not as particular as I was.”

  Scarlett went to the kitchen for the corn whiskey she kept hidden from Gerald. Mammy inquired, “Is the gentleman feeling poorly?”

  The Fisher heir contentedly sipped corn liquor and smiled on Scarlett. “It has been so long since I’ve been in any lady’s company, let alone a handsome lady like yourself.”

  Demurely, Scarlett lowered her eyes.

  “Two long years … I had nearly forgotten …”

  Scarlett couldn’t remember when she’d had enough to eat.

  “I regret our encounter … that night in Atlanta. My unsought advice, dear Mrs. Hamilton: Never be an honoree. While fools are honoring you, you cannot escape them. When I came to your home, I was tired of fools, tired of myself, and I’d had too much to drink. Scarlett—I may call you Scarlett? You were the one bright moment that day, and for thanks, I insulted you. Please accept my apology.” Ravanel chuckled reminiscently. “‘And take your orchestra with you!’”

  Scarlett issued the invitation she’d issued to so many ragged, hungry strangers, but this time, she blushed. None of those strangers had been a Fisher heir. “Sir, you are welcome to stay at Tara tonight. Melanie Wilkes will be delighted to have your news. We’ve not heard from her husband.”

  “He’ll be alive,” the Colonel said carelessly. “Men like Wilkes live forever.”

  Scarlett hid her wince. “If you’ve finished, I’d like to show you Tara.”

  Tara had been Gerald O’Hara’s dream.

  Tara’s whitewashed brick walls and broad roof would shelter the children, kinfolks, and guests enjoying Gerald’s hospitality. “No foofaraw,” Gerald had told his wife, Ellen. “Just a big comfortable farmhouse. I cannot abide drawing rooms and withdrawing rooms and private family rooms—for what is my house if not for my family?” When Ellen wanted a ballroom, Gerald snorted. “Won’t we be dancing in our parlor, Mrs. O’Hara, anytime we have a mind to?”

  Tara had no basement, because if Gerald O’Hara feared anything, it was snakes, and Gerald was certain basements harbored snakes.

  Gerald wanted porches front and back—“where we can sit of a summer evening.” Off the front bedroom would be Gerald’s balcony, where Tara’s proprietor could stand in the morning brightness, overlooking a lane bordered by chestnut saplings and red clay fields verdant with flowering cotton.

  The leaded lights and semicircular fanlight framing the front door were Gerald’s concession to his wife’s notions.

  If Gerald’s house had been battered by the War, his planta
tion had been destroyed. “Our pecan trees bore the fattest nuts in Clayton County. The children’s swing was here. The Yankees burned the pecans. They burned the swing, too,” Scarlett said.

  “This is where the cotton press stood. My father always bought the most up-to-date machinery. ‘Why should men do work dumb machines can do?’—that’s what my father said.

  “This was our dairy. See! That’s the spring box beside that collapsed wall.

  “As you see, they didn’t burn the negro cabins.”

  The Colonel kicked a charred board. “You’ll need them when the niggers come to their senses. Thousands and thousands are sleeping in the streets of Atlanta. If the Yanks didn’t feed them, they’d starve.”

  What did Scarlett care about negro refugees? “With a thousand dollars, Tara could get back on its feet. Just a thousand. There’s nothing wrong with the land; they can burn our buildings and kill our livestock, but, by God, they can’t kill our land!”

  “Aren’t you the pretty Amazon.” When Andrew Ravanel took Scarlett’s hand, his convict’s hand felt unpleasantly soft. “I dislike traveling alone,” he said. “Can I convince you to accompany me to Charleston?”

  Though Scarlett had expected an invitation, she’d not expected such a bold one. “An unmarried man and woman traveling together? Sir, what will people think?”

  Ravanel’s contemptuous laughter shocked her. “My dear Scarlett, they’re dead. Everyone whose opinion mattered is dead. Only cowards, traitors, and… convicts survived the war. Jeb Stuart—the lilies of the field bowed in homage when General Stuart rode by. Pious General Polk has taken his sermons to heaven, where he and Stonewall Jackson can preach to each other. Cleburne, Turner Ashby, brave little Pegram—my friend Henry Kershaw—that brave, dumb bastard—even Rhett Butler is dead.”

  Scarlett felt as if she’d been shot through the heart. She whispered, “Who?”

  Colonel Ravanel picked up a crockery shard and flipped it into the ruined springhouse. “Rhett was in Fort Fisher when the Federals assaulted. It was a butcher’s shambles.” His voice lost its bitter edge. “Rhett and I were friends once. He was the best friend I ever had.”