Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  At the grave site, the strong helped children and the infirm. A white-faced Beau Wilkes clung to his father’s hand. Wade Hamilton stepped around his father Charles’s grave.

  Little Ella clutched a bouquet of wilted chrysanthemums.

  Scarlett’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears.

  Half Clayton County was here. The Wilkeses had been a grand family and country folk are proud of their grand families.

  Faces Scarlett knew were worn with age and privation. Here was Tony Fontaine, back from Texas. And Alex Fontaine had married Sally Munroe, his brother Joe’s widow. Beatrice Tarleton was whispering to Will Benteen—probably about horses. Beatrice Tarleton loved her horses more than her daughters. Randa and Camilla Tarleton had red clay on their Sunday shoes. They’d have to scrub them before they taught school tomorrow. Betsy Tarleton hovered beside her mother to avoid her fat, ill-natured husband. Beatrice paid Betsy no mind.

  Suellen O’Hara Benteen glared at Scarlett. Will had told his wife Scarlett would be staying at Tara after the funeral.

  As her marriage disintegrated month by month, week by week—sometimes Scarlett believed, hour by hour—Scarlett had found refuge investing money. She’d always been shrewd. Hadn’t she built the two most profitable sawmills in Atlanta? Rhett had insisted the railroads were overextended, that more track had been built than there were passengers, or freight.

  She’d show him! She’d bought Northern Pacific bonds.

  After Bonnie died, Rhett had vanished into another world—a world she could not enter. Nothing she said seemed to touch him. Her sincerest promises were as ineffective as her tantrums. Rhett had looked at his wife with tired, sad eyes and abandoned her to sit beside Melanie Wilkes’s deathbed.

  When Scarlett’s regrets and self-recriminations were too much for her, she’d gone downtown to her broker. Jay Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad had been the sole happiness in Scarlett’s life. With no effort and no suffering on her part, Northern Pacific track marched inexorably west as its bonds rose buoyantly into the skies. Natural Wonders!

  After Scarlett ran through the money she’d got for her sawmills, she mortgaged the Peachtree Street mansion. In Melanie Wilkes’s final days, Scarlett had borrowed against Tara.

  And now, Melanie was gone and Scarlett’s Northern Pacific bonds were worth just as much as the trunks of Confederate currency in Tara’s attic.

  Scarlett would come home to Tara. Tara would provide for her.

  “Dear Rosemary,” she said mechanically, “so good of you to come.”

  “Melanie Wilkes was … I will miss her very much.”

  “I needed her,” Scarlett said, ignoring the total stranger at his sister’s side. The stranger wet his lips as if he might have something to say, but of course he didn’t. Neither of them had anything more to say.

  The pallbearers slid the ornate casket, which Melanie Wilkes would never have chosen, from the fragile glass hearse Melanie would have thought pretentious.

  As the pallbearers marched to the grave, Will Benteen eased forward on the heavy coffin’s handles to bear the weight Ashley couldn’t.

  The rector wrapped his surplice around his neck. He began the graveside service. Wild geese honked by. A raven cawed in the brambles. Beatrice Tarleton coughed.

  Scarlett closed her ears and kept her eyes focused on nothing.

  Will’s negroes took hold of the ropes and on Will’s “Together, boys,” they walked the casket over the grave and lowered it.

  Ashley clasped his son and wept. Beau stared at his shoes.

  A balloon of grief rose in Scarlett’s throat. It hurt to swallow.

  She trickled her bit of red clay onto Melanie Hamilton Wilkes’s coffin lid and wiped her hands on her skirt.

  She heard a horse crashing down the slope, and when she turned, Rhett Butler was gone from her life.

  The grave at her feet might have held Scarlett’s heart.

  PART THREE

  Tara

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Will Benteen

  When Miss Scarlett moved back to Tara and Uncle Henry Hamilton put her fancy Atlanta house up for sale, Will Benteen smelled trouble.

  Miss Scarlett and Captain Butler were split; everybody knew that.

  When Captain Butler galloped off after Mrs. Wilkes’s burying, Will had been glad to see him go. As Will told Boo, his farm dog, “Sometimes critters got to lick their wounds.”

  Tara’s overseer was a mild-eyed Georgia Cracker with receding sun-bleached hair, wrists and neck red as fresh-cut beets. He was mostly head and chest, his real leg almost as spindly as the wooden leg he’d earned at Gettysburg. His fingers were as big around as his daughter Susie’s wrists.

  Once, in the hard years after the War, when Scarlett was sending every profit from her Atlanta sawmills to Tara, she’d complained, “Will, before the War, Tara provided for the O’Haras, not the other way around.”

  Will had removed his shapeless hat and scratched his forehead. “Well, Miss Scarlett, I spect you might lease Tara to some Yankee.”

  That was the last time she complained.

  Nowadays, Tara had to support everybody again. There were the negroes—Dilcey, Prissy, Pork, Big Sam, and Mammy—as well as Miss Scarlett, her children, and the Benteens.

  Not long after the city folks came, seven-year-old Ella had a fit. At the supper table, she gave this unearthly cry and fell out of her chair. Although she was unconscious, her eyes were rolling, her legs were kicking, and Will Benteen couldn’t hold her still. Directly she came out of it, white-faced and a little shaky, but she’d scared the daylights out of Will.

  Beau Wilkes was at Tara, too. Mr. Wilkes wasn’t in any shape to care for his son. And after the funeral, Miss Scarlett had asked Miss Rosemary and her boy to stay.

  Will had a notion why Miss Scarlett had invited Captain Butler’s sister and son. It was one of those things Miss Scarlett did without thinking. Miss Scarlett took advantage before anyone else saw there was advantage to be had. It was her nature.

  When Suellen figured it out, she told her husband, “It’s a dirty trick, Will Benteen, using Rhett’s sister as bait.”

  Will had shushed her with a kiss. Will could shush Suellen when nobody else could.

  Suellen O’Hara hadn’t been Will Benteen’s first choice. Will had courted Carreen, the youngest O’Hara daughter, but Carreen made up her mind to join a Charleston convent.

  By then, Tara had become Will’s home, but despite the relaxed attitudes after the War, he couldn’t share a house with the unmarried Suellen. And proud Suellen had no other suitors and nowhere else to go.

  Despite its unsentimental start, Suellen and Will’s marriage had been happy. Their six-year-old, Susie, was willful, but her parents loved her all the more for it. As Suellen liked to say (remembering how Scarlett had stolen her beau Frank Kennedy), “Nobody will ever pull the wool over Susie’s eyes!” Robert Lee, the Benteen boy, was so shy and sweet, sometimes his father couldn’t bear to look at him.

  Will had come to Tara a wounded veteran. As Tara had healed him, Will’d healed Tara. With Miss Scarlett’s money, Will had rebuilt Tara’s cotton press, bought Cyrus McCormick’s newfangled mowing machine, and replaced the dozens of small tools: the four-and six-tooth crosscut saws, the saddle clamps, the augers and awls Sherman’s soldiers had stolen or ruined. Will’s gangs had uprooted cedars and blackberry brambles, replaced split-rail fences, reroofed the icehouse and meat house, cleaned and pruned the orchard, doubled the kitchen garden, built a twelve-stall horse barn, fenced a hog lot, and erected a whitewashed board and batten cotton shed on the foundations of the old one.

  To make room for Scarlett, the Benteens evacuated Gerald and Ellen’s front bedroom. “There can only be one Mistress at Tara,” Will had told his angry wife. “I reckon she’ll be Miss Scarlett.”

  But Scarlett hadn’t wanted her parents’ bedroom with Gerald’s balcony and the canopied bed where O’Haras had been begot, born, and died. Instead, Scarlett t
ook her old room at the head of the stairs, beside the nursery.

  After the War, Tara’s field workers had left for the city they’d heard so much about. After several hungry years, most returned to Clayton County, living in the run-down Jonesboro neighborhood everybody called “Darktown.”

  Scarlett asked Will Benteen, “Why don’t they live on Tara like Big Sam and the house negroes?”

  “Miss Scarlett, they’d rather live in the worst broken-down shanty than back in Tara’s ‘Slave Quarters.’ B’sides, what would we do with ’em in the wintertime?”

  “Tara always found work for its people.”

  “Miss Scarlett,” Will explained. “They ain’t Tara’s ‘people’ no more. I need field hands from March to September and I pay a fair wage. Full-task hands get fifty cents a day.”

  “The rest of the year, what do they live on?”

  “They’re free labor now, Miss Scarlett,” Will had sighed. “Wasn’t us set ’em free.”

  Miss Scarlett had rushed the cash from this year’s cotton crop into the Atlanta bank—had taken it into town personally. When Will had told her they’d want new work harnesses for the spring planting, she’d replied, “Will, we’ll have to make do with the old ones.”

  Love trouble and money trouble: Will didn’t know which was worse.

  Captain Butler was in Europe with Mr. Watling.

  Evenings in the parlor, Miss Rosemary read her brother’s letters aloud. Mr. Rhett described Paris racetracks and cathedrals and artists, and joked about the cardinals’ hats hanging high in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “The French believe that when the hats fall down, the cardinal enters heaven. Some of those hats have been hanging for centuries!”

  Will marveled with the children. He felt sorry for Miss Scarlett. She seemed so neglected.

  Miss Rosemary was modest and helpful, and Tara accepted her and Louis Valentine without a ripple.

  Miss Rosemary became the schoolmarm and the nursery was her schoolroom.

  Suellen managed the house negroes, except Mammy, who managed herself.

  Sundays, Big Sam drove the buggy into Jonesboro, where Rosemary and the children worshiped with the Methodists. The negroes walked across the tracks to Reverend Maxwell’s First African Baptist.

  Money or no money, they wouldn’t go hungry. The summer’s produce had been put up and stored in Tara’s root cellar, where glistening rows of Mr. Mason’s patented canning jars were filled with peaches, berries, tomatoes, and beans.

  A three-year-old ox had been butchered and packed in brine. Fifteen hogs had been slaughtered, butchered, salted down, and hung in the meat house to take the cure. Will Benteen’s hams were locally famous, and every Christmas, he hand-delivered a ham to favored neighbors as “a little something from Tara.”

  Although Will was a crop farmer, his first love was animals. Like Mrs. Tarleton, Will Benteen was mad about horses. He liked Tara’s cattle and mules and he befriended his hogs: Tusker, Runt, Big Girl. He admired their pure piggishness. When Big Girl got sick, Will sat up half the night dosing her with turpentine.

  The hog killing on the first chilly day in November was bittersweet. Yes, Will’d filled Tara’s meat house, but tomorrow morning he’d not go to the hog lot. Big Girl wouldn’t be there to grunt her greeting and snuffle his pant legs.

  Saturday mornings, Ashley came out from Atlanta. He’d thank Scarlett for keeping Beau and often brought her a small gift: an embroidered lawn handkerchief or a tin of English toffees.

  Ashley said nobody was building. His saws were idle and his lumber turned blue in the stacks. The Kimball House had closed its doors. “It’s this depression,” Ashley said, as if it didn’t really concern him.

  “Goodness, Ashley.” Scarlett frowned. “Don’t you care?”

  “I care that Monday morning, I will be deciding which worker I will let go and how he’ll feed his family.”

  Ashley took coffee with Scarlett, Beau, and Rosemary and he’d quiz his son about Beau’s progress with McGuffey Readers, but Ashley never drank a second cup before he left for Twelve Oaks, where he’d climb to the hilltop graveyard and talk to Melanie.

  Gentle Melanie didn’t share Ashley’s regrets. She assured her grieving husband they would be reunited one day. As they talked, Ashley cleaned the graveyard, tossing dead limbs and brush over the wall. On his third visit, he brought a poleax to open up the vista. Melanie had always loved the view from here.

  He spent the night in Twelve Oaks’ negro driver’s house. As at Tara, Sherman’s men had spared the negro quarters. This was the one night in the week when Ashley Wilkes’s sleep was dreamless and untroubled.

  Before Ashley left for Atlanta, he’d dally at Tara and reminisce about times gone by. Sometimes, Scarlett was bemused by Ashley’s sonorous, gentle voice. When she was irritable, she’d remind him he had a train to catch.

  One Saturday morning when Ashley arrived, his cheeks were ruddy and his eyes sparkled. Scarlett had been doing accounts at the table. Rosemary set aside her mending. “I’ve sold the sawmills,” Ashley announced. “A Yankee from Rhode Island. Goodness! The man has no end of money.”

  Scarlett’s mouth tightened. “Atlanta’s most modern sawmills. Ashley, how much did he pay?”

  His happiness deserted his eyes. “I won’t need much,” he said. “I’m coming home to Twelve Oaks. I’ll live in the driver’s house.”

  Rosemary took his hand. “I’m delighted you’ll be our neighbor. But what will you do with yourself out there?”

  “I won’t be alone!” Ashley’s words tumbled out.

  “I’m hiring Old Mose—you’ll remember Mose—and Aunt Betsy to help me. It’ll be good to have them back on the place. The formal gardens. Scarlett remembers them, don’t you, Scarlett? Wilson, the Jonesboro liveryman—every summer, Yankee tourists hire Wilson to drive past our ‘picturesque ruins.’ I’m going to restore the gardens. We’ll clear the brambles and wild grapes and get that old fountain flowing again. Do you remember the fountain, Scarlett? How beautiful it was? The gardens will be Melanie’s memorial. Twelve Oaks—as it was, as it is supposed to be. Melanie loved it so.”

  “Mr. Wilkes,” Rosemary smiled, “you have a gentle heart.”

  Scarlett frowned. “You’ll charge the Yankee tourists to tour your gardens?”

  “Why, I hadn’t thought about charging. I suppose … I suppose I could.”

  Abruptly, it turned colder. The Flint River froze solid and Tara’s stoves glowed red. Rosemary moved the schoolroom downstairs into the parlor. Fog hung above the horse troughs, where warmer spring-water flowed.

  Four days before Christmas, Tara’s people were at the breakfast table when Mammy marched in from the meat house so angry, she could hardly speak. “They’s ruint! They’s sp’iled! Been some deviltry here!” Mammy propped her bulk against the dry sink and took deep breaths. “Ain’t no colored folks done this, neither.”

  Scarlett was on her feet. “What is it, Mammy?”

  Mammy pointed with a quivering arm.

  When the children made to follow, Scarlett snapped, “Ella, Wade, Beau—all of you, stay in the house. Rosemary, Suellen, tend them, please!”

  The meat house door had been crowbarred off its top hinge and hung slantwise across the opening. Will Benteen dragged the door aside and cautiously stepped into the building. “Lord have mercy!” he groaned.

  Scarlett cried, “Oh Will!”

  Every one of their cured, wrapped hams had been cut down. They lay on the dirt floor like so many slain babies. The casks of brined beef had been overturned and manure strewn over everything.

  Mammy was behind them in the doorway. “Weren’t no coloreds!”

  “Mammy,” Scarlett snapped, “I can see that!”

  Tail between his legs, Boo poked his head inside the forbidden sanctuary and sniffed.

  Meat and manure sloshed beneath their feet. The stink was overpowering.

  “Can’t we just wash them?”

  Will picked up a ham, dropped it
, and wiped his hands on his pant legs.

  “No, ma’am. See how somebody cut ’em open? That meat’s tainted, Miss Scarlett. Pure poison.”

  Will stepped out of the meat house, walked around the corner, and threw up.

  The wide-eyed Mammy trembled. “Them bummers, they come back,” she whispered. “I knew they comin’ back one day.”

  “The War is over, Mammy,” Scarlett snapped. “Sherman’s bummers can’t hurt us anymore!”

  Although Boo had barked during the night, Will hadn’t left his bed to see what the dog was bothering about. Now, growling importantly, Boo led Will and Scarlett to the spot outside the garden fence where horses had been tethered. Will knelt to inspect the tracks. “I reckon there was three of ’em.” Will shook his head. “What crazy bastards would—Scuse my language, Miss Scarlett.”

  “Goddamn the bastards!” she said.

  Will followed the tracks to the Jonesboro road, where they disappeared.

  None of the negroes would set foot in the violated meat house—not even Big Sam, who’d been Tara’s driver under Will Benteen and Gerald O’Hara before. “I never thought you’d turn coward, Sam,” Scarlett hissed, “Not Big Sam.”

  Her harsh words washed over Sam’s bowed head. “Some things it don’t do for coloreds to fool with,” he said.

  So Will, Scarlett, and Rosemary loaded the defiled meat into a wagon and drove it to the boneyard—that upland gully where Tara’s dead animals were left to rot.

  As the hams rolled and bounced down the slope, Will whispered, “Good-bye, Big Girl. I’m truly sorry what they done to you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Warming Soil

  Their money might have become worthless overnight and their elected government might have fallen, but their cool, dark, solid meat houses reminded country people that true prosperity came from the work of one’s hands, and God’s providence.

  Neighbors came to view the sacrilege. “What kind of minds would think to do this?” Men muttered threats and prowled the farmstead as if the violators might still lurk nearby. Will guided parties to where they’d tied their horses and men knelt to trace the tracks with their fingertips. Tony Fontaine and his brother Alex argued over the size of one horse’s shoes.