Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Was that a false note in her voice? Perhaps her father wasn’t as well as she claimed. Gerald must be getting on in years.

  It didn’t matter. Scarlett had come to see him. She who’d spurned him when he was rich and free had come to see an impoverished prisoner the Yankees were threatening to hang.

  He told her she looked lovely. He asked her to turn around.

  As she spun, her lovely green dress wafted, exposing lace-trimmed pantalets. He clasped his hands behind his back to keep himself from devouring her then and there.

  Scarlett told him that Tara’s faithful negroes had hidden the plantation’s livestock in the woods, where Sherman’s bummers couldn’t find them, and Tara’d cleared twenty bales of cotton last year and things would be even better this year—but (she sighed) it was so terribly dull in the country. She’d become accustomed to city life.

  Rhett wondered how Scarlett could be bored, unless she’d gone through all the country boys.

  “Oh Rhett, I didn’t come all the way out here to hear you talk foolishness about me. I came because I’m terribly distressed about you. When will they let you out of this terrible place?”

  “And when they do?” he asked softly, leaning closer.

  Scarlett blushed like a maiden. As he leaned toward her, she raised her hand tenderly to his cheek. It was scratchy. Puzzled, he lowered her hand and turned it over. Scarlett’s palm was raw and cracked and her fingernails were broken. He stared, uncomprehending. She didn’t resist when he took her other hand and turned it over, too. Just as his hands had been when he labored in Broughton’s rice fields.

  Rhett licked his lips. As he had soared, he plummeted. His heart shriveled into something hard and mean. Dully, he asked, “So you have been doing very nicely at Tara, have you? Cleared so much money on the cotton, you can go visiting. Why did you lie to me?”

  Deep in her astonishing eyes he saw a flare—like a hunted vixen’s in the lamplight. “They can hang me higher than Haman for all you care.” Rhett let her hands drop. What a tawdry room this was. What had been generous as hope became a dirty little closet inhabited by Tunis Bonneau’s murderer and a female cheat.

  Money. She wanted money. Sure, she wanted money. She talked fast, her words tumbling over one another. Tara, her beloved Tara, was to be sold for unpaid taxes, and Scarlett didn’t have a cent. She’d fashioned her velvet dress from Tara’s window curtains. “You said you never wanted a woman as much as you wanted me. If you still want me, you can have me. Rhett, I’ll do anything you say, but for God’s sake, write me a draft for the money.”

  What a wonder she was! Scarlett O’Hara had priced his love. Three hundred dollars—he could enjoy his faithless darling for the price of a London suit or a pretty good horse. When you thought about it, three hundred was a bargain. Some Paris courtesans charged more than that. “I haven’t any money,” Rhett said wearily.

  She attacked him. She sprang to her feet with a cry that quenched the hum of soldiers’ voices in the next room. Rhett clamped a hand over her mouth and lifted her off her feet. She kicked, tried to bite. She tried to scream.

  It took all his strength to hold her. Rhett thought, She would do anything. She is just like me.

  Scarlett’s eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted.

  Yankee officers rushed in to revive the young lady. Captain Jaffery fetched a glass of brandy.

  When Scarlett O’Hara left that place, she was a defeated child, lost in her fake finery and a bonnet whose gay feathers—Rhett now knew—had been plucked from the tail of a barnyard rooster.

  That night, Rhett dreamed he murdered a little girl. Put his rimfire pistol against her forehead and pulled the trigger.

  Two weeks later, when Captain Jaffery brought news of Scarlett’s elopement, he was puzzled. “But didn’t your sister tell you she planned to marry?”

  For a moment, Rhett didn’t trust himself to speak.

  The captain clapped Rhett’s shoulder. “Perhaps Miss Scarlett thought her big brother might not approve of her new husband! Nothing to worry about: Frank Kennedy is thoroughly respectable.” Captain Jaffery scratched his ear. “I’m a little surprised a woman like your sister would fall for fussy old Frank—and wasn’t Frank engaged to marry another?” He smiled ruefully.

  “A woman’s heart”—Jaffery put his hand over his own—“who can understand it?”

  “If Kennedy’s got three hundred dollars, I can.”

  The forsythias were blossoming when Rufus Bullock brought Rhett’s pardon. It bore the signature of a Connecticut Senator who was not known as a forgiving man. Rufus asked, “Rhett, that letter you wrote him—in heaven’s name, what did you say?”

  Rhett smacked dust from the hat he hadn’t worn in months and set it at a rakish angle. “Rufus, the Senator made a fortune during the War manufacturing the cotton linings of Federal officers’ coats. Did you ever wonder where the Senator found that contraband cotton?” Rhett Butler grinned broadly. “Rufus, let us leave this place. It is spring.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A Southern Belle

  The summer was droughty. The corn crop was poor, the cotton hardly worth ginning. White preachers couldn’t explain to their flocks why God had abandoned the Confederate republic. Some preachers contemplated suicide; others quit the pulpit. Negro preachers and parishioners penned eloquent petitions to the United States Congress seeking their promised rights. Some prominent ex-Confederates—General Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Virginia’s General William Mahone among them—said negroes must have voting rights, arguing that the South must be rebuilt by blacks and whites together. But Georgia’s General John B. Gordon and Tennessee’s General Nathan Bedford Forrest used their wartime prestige to restore the prewar order.

  Yankee idealists bought tickets South to promote negro education and citizenship. Republican congressmen who’d lost friends and kin to Confederate bullets sought revenge. Opportunists wanted to roll the Southern corpse over to see if there was anything underneath worth stealing.

  The U.S. Army turned over railcars and locomotives to the same railroad companies they’d recently wrecked. Although Southern railroads had to pay their workers with sides of bacon and bags of flour, track was furiously relaid, bridges and tunnels were rebuilt, and if passengers sometimes had to transfer to wagons for a stretch, the trains were running.

  With the profits of Frank Kennedy’s store, Scarlett O’Hara Kennedy bought a sawmill. Financed by torrents of Yankee money, Atlanta was rebuilding at a breakneck pace. Brick, Portland cement, and lime fetched premium prices, and wagonloads of north Georgia pine rolled down Marietta Road to the Kennedys’ sawmill. Proper Atlantans sniffed that Mrs. Kennedy “wore the pants in that family.” But Scarlett was too busy to care. She bought a second sawmill and persuaded Ashley Wilkes to run it.

  When Scarlett and Frank Kennedy’s daughter, Ella, was born, Scarlett’s daughter strongly resembled her homely husband.

  When Gerald O’Hara died, Scarlett’s money and her farm manager, Will Benteen, were already rebuilding Tara.

  One morning, as Belle Watling dug deeper than usual in her bureau drawer, she was struck by a possibility that made her gasp.

  Belle’s laundry woman had run off with Dr. Jewett’s Scientific Remedy Medicine Show, which Belle didn’t learn until MacBeth returned her laundry unlaundered. At the bottom of her bureau Belle found a garment wrapped in parchment paper. She pulled back a corner to reveal the rich gray fabric of the dress Rhett had given her long ago. Belle sat down, breathless with calculation: Scarlett O’Hara was Scarlett Kennedy now. They had a daughter. The Kennedy marriage should last until Scarlett was an old woman.

  The rest of that day, Belle went about the house humming and singing nonsense songs until Minette complained that she, Minette, had been a habitué of New Orleans’s Opera St. Louis and Belle’s “omp-pah-pahs” and “oh doodah days” were hopelessly unmusical.

  “Oh Minette,” Belle replied happily. “Can’t expect a soiled dove
to sing like a dove, now can you?”

  To the dismay of several older customers who had favored a comfortable (less demanding) paramour, Belle quit receiving gentlemen callers. On a diet of greens, bread, and water, her waistline shrank.

  One afternoon, MacBeth drove her to the Wilkeses’ home.

  “Go ’round back,” Belle said nervously. “Through the alleyway.”

  Outside the gate of the Wilkeses’ kitchen garden, Belle hesitated. Who was she to ask anything of anybody?

  Why, she thought, I am Ruth Belle Watling; that’s me. Her courage plucked up, she brushed past Melanie’s fall greens and baskets of just-dug potatoes.

  When she knocked at the back door, a curtain pulled back and a solemn little boy peered at her. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. In response to Belle’s reassuring smile, the child let the curtain fall and ran to the front of the house. “Mama, Mama!”

  “What is it, Beau honey? Is something wrong?”

  Belle heard a woman’s footsteps. “Is someone here, Beau? How good you are to tell me.”

  The woman who opened the back door was thin—too thin—and her dark eyes were enormous. “Why … Miss Watling. What a pleasant surprise!”

  “Mrs. Wilkes, I didn’t want to shame you, so I come ’round back.”

  “How could you shame me, dear? Please, come in.”

  Belle eased into the kitchen. When Melanie suggested they proceed to the parlor, Belle demurred. “Thank you, ma’am, but the kitchen’s fine.”

  Staring at the stranger, Beau wrapped around his mother’s legs.

  Melanie pulled out a stool. “Won’t you sit? Will you take a cup of tea?”

  Belle’s mouth was dry from nervousness. “I wouldn’t mind a glass of water.”

  Melanie worked the pitcher pump until cool water splashed. Like all Atlanta well water, it tasted of iron.

  “Mrs. Wilkes, I thank you for seein’ me and I won’t pester you much. You ain’t so snooty as them other ladies and I thought I might ask you …”

  Melanie’s gentle smile invited Belle’s confidence.

  There were fresh daisies in a vase beside the sink and bright windows overlooked a lovingly tended garden.

  “Right nice garden,” Belle said. “Right nice greens.”

  “Thank you. You shall take some with you.”

  “Oh, no Mrs. Wilkes. I didn’t mean I wanted none.” Belle dropped her eyes. “I was just sayin’ they was nice.”

  “Well,” Melanie said, “I always have a cup of tea this time of day. Won’t you join me?” She stooped to shake the stove grate and add wood to the firebox.

  It was a newfangled stove with a water tank perched beside the hood. When Belle admired it, Melanie said ready hot water was convenient. Belle asked if Mr. Wilkes liked managing a sawmill, and after a slight hesitation, Melanie told her, “Mr. Wilkes was reared as a gentleman.”

  Belle asked if Miss Pittypat Hamilton still owned the house behind the garden and Melanie said yes, that she and her brother, Charles, had been raised by Miss Pittypat and when the Wilkeses returned to Atlanta after the war, they’d been fortunate to rent the house that backed up on Melanie’s childhood home. So many memories.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy livin’ with Miss Pittypat now?”

  “Why yes, they are. We’re doubly blessed. My son and I spent the last year of the War on Mrs. Kennedy’s family plantation, Tara.” Melanie added, “Of course Scarlett wasn’t Mrs. Kennedy at that time. Scarlett is my brother Charles’s widow.”

  Belle yearned to ask if the Kennedys’ marriage was happy, but she couldn’t think how to phrase that question. She set her teacup down so quickly, it clicked against the saucer. “Mrs. Wilkes, a gentleman has took my heart.”

  “Why, Belle, what good news! My own marriage has been so fortunate, I pity women who’ve never wed.”

  “Things ain’t gone so far as that. The thing is, Mrs. Wilkes”—Belle’s face glowed with earnestness—“my gentleman’s a Gentleman and I ain’t no Lady.”

  Melanie thought before replying. “I’m not sure, Miss Watling, how important that distinction is. Doesn’t God love all His children?”

  “Maybe He does, but all His children surely don’t love all His other children. Generally, Gentlemen, they love Ladies, and the Other Sort loves the Other Sort.”

  Belle wished she could be as serene as Mrs. Wilkes. She wished she didn’t feel sweat starting. What if a drop ran down her arm, where Mrs. Wilkes could see it? She gulped tea and pressed on. “I came to ask you, Mrs. Wilkes. How can I turn myself into a lady?”

  The tiny flicker at the back of Melanie’s eyes almost killed Belle’s hopes then and there, but Melanie’s smile was kind. She said, “I’ve never thought about it. To be a lady, doesn’t one act and seem like a lady?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Wilkes. That’s why I come.”

  “But your … occupation …”

  “I don’t see no more callers. I just own the place.”

  “I see.”

  “I mean, how can I seem like a lady? I dunno know how to act and I dunno how to dress. Mrs. Wilkes, I dunno know how to think like a lady thinks!” When Belle opened her hands helplessly, a cold drop of sweat trickled down her rib cage. “Mrs. Wilkes, where can I get clothes like yours?”

  “Dear me, Miss Watling. Being a lady is more than—”

  “I got money.”

  “I’m afraid money—”

  “But right clothes and money are a start, aren’t they?”

  “Well, I suppose they might be ….”

  So later that week, without telling a soul, Melanie Wilkes escorted Belle Watling to Atlanta’s best dressmaker. Miss Smithers was an octoroon who had been free colored before the War, and no white woman had higher standards of propriety.

  Nowadays, most of Miss Smithers’s business came from Carpetbaggers’ or Yankee officers’ wives. Her establishment was a shotgun house on Mitchell Street. In her front room, one dressmaker’s dummy wore a delicate high-necked blouse, while another was naked brown muslin stretched over a wire frame. Bolts of cloth—piqués, lawns, worsteds, failles, velvets, and brocades—draped Miss Smithers’s counters, and pattern books were stacked higher than the diminutive dressmaker’s head.

  She touched the pattern books. “What style do you fancy, Miss Watling? Paris, London, New York, Boston?”

  “You make Mrs. Kennedy’s clothes?”

  “Why yes, I do.”

  “I want to be somewheres between her and”—Belle pointed at her companion—“Mrs. Wilkes here.”

  Unwrapped, the parcel Belle held so tenderly contained the gray dress Rhett had given her. “Oh dear, I’m afraid I cannot alter this garment.” Miss Smithers held the dress up. “The neckline and bodice … I’m afraid not. And we don’t wear hoops these days.”

  “Can’t you find the same fabric? My dearest friend give me this.”

  Miss Smithers thought to explain that no two fabrics were exactly alike, that this weave was French, that … the seamstress relented at the hope in Belle’s eyes. “I will see what I can do,” she said.

  After they had arranged for dresses, blouses, and jackets, Melanie took Belle to the German shoemaker, where Belle was fitted for three pairs, one in patent leather.

  Before they parted, Melanie said, “I’m afraid, Belle, that being a lady is more than proper clothes. It is an attitude. From your… experience, you may know more of business and politics than ladies are supposed to know. Gentlemen are pleased to think ladies are ornamental, and it is an ill-advised ornament who contradicts her gentleman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll want to read books—novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.” Melanie paused. “Your diction, Belle …”

  “The way I talk, you mean?”

  “Imitate the heroines of novels. Ladies tal
k as they do.”

  Although Mr. Belmont’s jewelry store had burned and his safe hadn’t proved as fireproof as its maker had promised, Belmont had set up again not far from his prewar location. Belle wanted ear bobs to match the cameo she showed him. “They got to match this brooch. It is my prized possession.”

  Fine jewelers are as discreet as undertakers and priests. Belmont admired the cameo extravagantly, as if he’d never seen it before, and sold Belle the most expensive cameo ear bobs he had.

  Belle’s new gowns were prints in muted shades. Her blouses were lawn and silk, with lace at the neckline. When Belle stood before Miss Smithers’s pier glass, she didn’t recognize the lady looking back at her.

  “Mercy me,” Belle gasped.

  “Yes, Miss Watling.” The dressmaker smiled, satisfied. “Yes indeed!”

  Emboldened, Belle promenaded into the Kimball House, Atlanta’s newest hotel. Glittering crystal chandeliers hung over a lobby whose black-and-white checkerboard floor was scattered with Oriental rugs. A porter waited, poised, beside Atlanta’s first steam “elevator.” Although Belle saw a few gentlemen she’d known in a business way, none recognized her. Over tea—“So refreshing, don’t you think?” Belle told the waiter—Belle studied real ladies covertly, how they held their teacups, where they set their spoons, and how they folded their napkins.

  Tuesdays and Thursdays, Belle took tea at the Kimball House, and one fine Sunday she attended church—not St. Philip’s Episcopal, where the Wilkeses worshiped, but the Second Presbyterian, which Belle figured wouldn’t be so hoity-toity.

  After the service, Belle introduced herself to the preacher as Mrs. Butler—the Savannah Butlers—visiting Atlanta kin.

  “I hope you’ll worship with us again, Mrs. Butler,” the clergyman said.

  Tazewell Watling wrote his mother about his friends at his English school, their sports, and his successes on the rugby team. Not long after he arrived at Shrewsbury School, he’d concluded a letter with “When Captain Butler visited London after the Confederate surrender, he telegraphed the Headmaster his intent to visit me. I asked the Head to tell Captain Butler that I would not see him.”