Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Mrs. Tarleton slipped around to the paddock, where Will kept his new foals. Normally, she would have asked Will to join her so she could remark—for the umpteenth time—how her stallion’s qualities were appearing in his foals. Not today.

  As if at a funeral, women brought bread and casseroles; Mrs. Tarleton gave Suellen two hams. “So you’ll have something for Christmas.”

  Suellen said they’d keep them indoors in the pantry, where they’d be safe.

  Safe. How could they be safe?

  Eventually, the neighbors went home. The house negroes were frightened, and by 5:30 winter dark, excepting Mammy, who slept behind the kitchen, the negroes were in their cabins behind latched doors.

  Boo was excited and too aware of his responsibilities, and that night he barked whenever a fox or polecat slipped through the farmstead. Will Benteen would wake up, pull overalls over his nightshirt, and shove his bare feet into cold leather brogans. He clumped down the back stairs and slipped outside with his shotgun.

  When he came back to bed, Suellen grumbled sleepily and pulled away from his cold embrace.

  In the late afternoon, Christmas Eve, a Railway Express wagon delivered a large wooden crate emblazoned with shipping labels. Will and Big Sam helped the driver unload the heavy crate and gave him a mug of Christmas cheer, which he downed with one eye cocked at the lowering clouds.

  Will agreed yes, it did feel like snow.

  Big Sam said, “Won’t nobody be on the roads tonight.”

  “I won’t be, that’s certain.” The driver left for Jonesboro at a brisk clip.

  After supper, everyone gathered in the parlor to decorate the Christmas tree Big Sam had erected that afternoon. With whispered speculations and many side glances at the mysterious crate, the children hung the tree with apples, walnuts, and paper cutouts. Will stood on a kitchen chair to place Rosemary’s newly sewn pink-and-white silk angel at the top. The grown-ups hung the candleholders higher than little hands could reach.

  Boot scraping on the porch signaled Ashley Wilkes’s arrival. His hat and coat were dusted with snowflakes. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was pruning crab apples and lost track of time. Happy Christmas, Beau!” He hugged his son. “Happy Christmas, everyone!”

  As Rosemary poured Ashley Christmas punch, Will took a nail puller to the wooden crate. When the nails screeched, the children put their hands over their ears.

  Rhett had sent Ella an exquisite French porcelain doll, Beau and Louis Valentine got ice skates and, to his delight and the younger boys’ envy, Wade received a single-shot .22 rolling-block rifle with a note in the trigger guard. “Wade, I’m trusting Will to show you how to shoot this. If you are sensible and become a good shot, when I come home we’ll go hunting together.”

  There was a gold locket for Rosemary, and for Scarlett a green velvet hat that matched her eyes. Although there was no note for her, Scarlett’s heart leapt for joy. Even when Ella knocked over her punch glass, Scarlett didn’t stop smiling.

  More snow fell and Louis Valentine and Beau went onto the front porch to slide noisily from one end to the other. Ashley had brought small gifts for the children, and Will gave his Suellen a red wool nightcap. It was nearly midnight before Rosemary ushered protesting children upstairs to bed. Yawning, Will and his night-capped wife retired.

  Ashley sat by the fire. “What a wonderful evening.” After a long silence, he said, “Scarlett, do you ever miss the old times, the warmth, the gaiety?”

  Scarlett teased, “Like the Twelve Oaks barbecue when I confessed my love for you and you turned me down flat?”

  Ashley took a poker, knelt, and stirred the fire. “I was promised to Melanie. …”

  “Oh Ashley, fiddle-dee-dee,” Scarlett said, not unkindly.

  When Ashley raised his eyes to hers, they had a new light—a light Scarlett understood all too well. She sat bolt upright. “Goodness,” Scarlett said. “I hadn’t realized the time!”

  Dear God, what was Ashley taking out of his pocket? Was it a ring box? Scarlett sprang from her chair. “Oh Ashley, I’m simply exhausted. All this excitement! Please see yourself out!”

  “But Scarlett!”

  Scarlett ran up the stairs and locked her door behind her.

  Dear Lord, if Rhett got wind of this, if he thought she and Ashley … He’d never come home!

  Although Wade had his new rifle, his mother had kept Rhett’s note to the boy, and as she undressed, Mrs. Rhett Butler read it again. Her husband had written, “when I come home.” Those were Rhett’s exact words. As she let her hair down, Scarlett was a happy woman.

  Brilliant stars illuminated snow as glossy as unskimmed cream. Ashley’s horse trudged homeward.

  Deep in the woods, a frozen tree cracked like a rifle shot. Ashley snuggled into his buffalo coat.

  He whispered to his Melanie, “Dear Heart, I told you it wouldn’t work. You think I need someone to look after me, but Scarlett isn’t the type to look after grown men. The look on her face when she realized I was going to propose … Oh Melly!” His laugh rang out. His horse’s hooves crunched through frozen snow. “Our first Christmas apart, dear Melly. Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. Weren’t we the luckiest couple on earth?”

  The driver’s log house fronted Twelve Oaks’ neglected garden. Ashley had scrubbed the heart-pine floor with sand, whitewashed the logs, and hung Uncle Hamilton’s Mexican War sword over the fireplace.

  He knelt to light a blaze. He would sit up until the fire got going. He had so much to tell Melanie.

  Boo didn’t bark that night and Will Benteen slept spoon-fashion behind his wife. The tassel of Suellen’s new nightcap tickled his nose.

  It warmed in January and the snow retreated to the shade. The Flint River ran brown and so loud, they could hear it from the house. When it froze again, the snowmelt became a bright, hazardous glaze, which kept those without outdoor chores indoors next the fire. Every morning, Big Sam split the firewood young Wade carried in.

  Will Benteen visited every farmhouse and poor-white shanty for twenty miles around. Who had a grievance against Tara? Had anybody boasted about vandalizing a meat house? Somebody at the Jonesboro market told Tony Fontaine the Klan was involved, but Will thought that unlikely. “The Klan’s finished, Tony. Anyways, the KKK never pestered Democrats.”

  The hayloft of the horse barn was the highest vantage point in the steading, and when the ice melted and riders were traveling the road again, Will toted quilts and an old straw tick up the ladder to the loft.

  Suellen told Will he was wasting his time, that whoever had wrecked their meat house had “had their fun.”

  “Honeypie,” Will said, “when Boo barks at night, I plumb hate to keep wakin’ you.”

  Suellen said if anything happened to Will, she’d never forgive him.

  That evening, Big Sam stared up at the loft door and called, “I’m sorrowed ‘bout this, Mr. Will. But this ain’t no business for colored folks.”

  “See you in the mornin’, Sam.”

  Uncertain about the change in routine, Boo lay in front of the horse barn for an hour before he got to his feet, stretched, and resumed his nocturnal patrol.

  The moon illumined frozen earth. It was a windless night. Wrapped in quilts, Will slept deeply all night long.

  The next night was as uneventful as the first.

  His third night in the loft, Will startled awake to scuffling sounds. Somebody was climbing the ladder. Will’s hand crept from the warm quilts to his shotgun’s icy steel barrels. His finger found the triggers.

  When Will felt a tremor in the loft floor, he cocked the hammers: clack, clack.

  “It’s me, Will,” Wade Hamilton whispered.

  Will let the hammers down. “Son,” he said as the boy’s head cleared the hatch, “you skeered the bejesus out of me.”

  “I came to help.” Wade slid his new rifle into the loft. “It isn’t right, you bein’ out here by yourself.”

  A grin crossed Will’s big face. “Is that gun loaded?�
�

  “No, sir. I thought maybe you could show me.”

  “In the morning, Wade. I thank you for comin’, but I reckon I’ll handle this business my own self.”

  Will was still grinning when he dropped off to sleep.

  In the morning, when Will came into the house for breakfast, Suellen pouted, “Oh, here’s my husband now. I was wondering if I still had one.”

  Though she tried to pull away, Will kissed her. “Mornin’, Sweet Pea. I got to tell you that sleepin’ with a shotgun is a darn sight colder than sleepin’ with you.” He swatted her behind.

  “Please, leave off, Will. The children …”

  “Yes’m.”

  Will and Big Sam got ready for planting. They checked and trimmed the workhorses’ hooves, polished and oiled the plow soles, and inventoried hames and work harnesses.

  “Mr. Will,” Big Sam complained, “we got to buy some new harness. These lines dried out and cracked.”

  “Put together harness from what’s sound.”

  Big Sam cocked his head. “Mr. Will, is Tara broke?”

  Will didn’t answer.

  On the second of February, a full moon sailed across a cloudless sky and Will slept restlessly in the too-bright night. He woke to Boo’s furious barking, followed by shots that came so fast, Will didn’t know how many had been fired. He backed so quickly down the ladder, he missed a rung and almost fell. In stocking feet, he jogged toward the barking.

  That low dark shape speeding toward him was Boo. The dog’s ears were flattened against his head.

  “S’ all right, Boo,” Will said thickly.

  At the paddock gate in the bright moonlight, Will saw it all. “Christ Jesus,” he said. “Christ Jesus.”

  One foal was blindly racing the fence in a panic. The other stood trembling over her dead dam. The two mares seemed smaller than they’d been when they were alive. The second foal lowered her long neck to bump at her dead mother’s flanks. Like all frightened babies, she wanted to nurse.

  Tara’s neighbors came. Men stood in groups in the paddock, speaking in low tones. The women stayed in the kitchen and said how frightened they were. They asked who would do such a wicked thing. Mammy insisted, “This ain’t colored folks’ work.” Tony Fontaine hunted for tracks, but the ground was too hard.

  Mrs. Tarleton took the foals to rear on goat’s milk. She said there was a special place in hell for anybody who’d shoot a horse.

  When they could stomach it, Sam and Will wrapped chains around the mares’ hind legs and dragged them to the boneyard.

  The weather warmed, the ground thawed, and though Will still slept in the hayloft, like other Clayton County planters he spent his days plowing and ridging the cotton fields.

  Before daylight, Big Sam put hames and harnesses on the big, stolid workhorses. Sam might say, “Right nippy this mornin’,” or “Look here, Dolly’s got a gall.”

  Will might say, “Feels like weather coming in.”

  The two men rarely said much more. Big Sam always fitted the hames. Will always lit the tack room lantern and snuffed it when they went out.

  As soon as it was light enough to keep to their furrows, they lowered their plowshares and plowed until noon, when they rested the horses and ate the dinner Suellen brought them. Will never tired of hearing about Tara before the War, and Sam obliged by describing Tara’s barbecues and the time Gerald O’Hara organized a horse race down the Jonesboro road. “All the young bloods was bettin’ and drinkin’ and it’s a wonder none of ’em fell off and got kilt.

  “Miss Ellen, she was a good Christian woman. ’Deed she was. But sometimes her bein’ so good made everybody else feel bad. Master Gerald, oh he had a temper.” Sam shook his head. “Master Gerald jest like a summer rain—get you wet ’n’ gone. Wet ’n’ gone.”

  While Will smoked his pipe, Sam’d talked about Darktown doings. Sam didn’t approve of Reverend Maxwell, the First African Baptist’s new young preacher. “That boy don’t know his place,” Sam said. “He born up north. He never been bought nor sold.”

  After dinner, they’d hitch up and plow until dusk, when they returned to the barn, rubbed down and fed their horses. Will never went into the paddock where his mares had been killed.

  One Sunday after church, Rosemary and Beau Wilkes rode to Twelve Oaks. It was a crisp February day and every branch tip glowed pink with new life.

  Ashley’s grandfather, Virginian Robert Wilkes, had built his plantation in a wilderness. His negroes felled the timber and burned or uprooted stubborn stumps from what became Twelve Oaks’ cotton fields. As his plantation prospered, Robert Wilkes added outbuildings, servants’ quarters, and, ultimately, his Georgian manor house. The gardens at Twelve Oaks were a project of Robert’s old age and his lifelong urge to civilize wilderness.

  Huge magnolias had marked the garden corners. Dogwood, redbud, sparkleberry, and crab apple were the backdrop for flowering perennials. Spirea bushes shaded garden paths and the formal rose garden—fragrant with Bourbon roses—had been framed with boxwood. An arched Chinese footbridge had crossed a tiny stream banked with camellias, and an iron trellis, covered with abelia, opened on a tiny park where a fountain splashed.

  That was before Sherman came.

  The carriage turnaround was black where Ashley had burned brush. More brush, piled higher than Rosemary’s horse, awaited the match. She and Beau dismounted and Beau ran down a stubbly path toward the sound of singing.

  They emerged into a clearing where a dry fountain was overseen by a rearing, life-size bronze horse. Ashley was stabbing a sword into the earth beside the fountain. Unaware of his audience, he sang, “De Master run, ha, ha.” Ashley stabbed a new spot. “And de darkies stay, ho, ho.” Ashley dropped to hands and knees and wiggled the sword. “Must be the Kingdom comin’ and de day of Jubilo!”

  “Daddy,” Beau cried, “that’s Grandpa’s sword!”

  Ashley looked up and grinned, “Hullo, Beau. I didn’t hear you. Mrs. Ravanel, welcome to Twelve Oaks.” Wiping red clay onto his trousers, he rose and gestured at the sword. “I’m probing for its valve box. I never thought to become a plumber.”

  When Rosemary eyed the rearing horse, Ashley said, “I bought it in Italy years and years ago. They said it was Etruscan.” He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  Beau freed the sword and wiped it with dead grass.

  “Beau, the saber is an excellent tool for splitting kindling or finding buried water valves.”

  “‘Ye shall beat your swords into plowshares’?” Rosemary suggested.

  “Something like that. Here, Beau, try it on these blackberries. Keep the handle free at the base of your palm. Good.” The father adjusted the son’s stance.

  Beau slashed a blackberry cane at the height of a man’s heart.

  “Excellent, Beau. My saber teacher would have approved. Mrs. Ravanel, how good of you to bring my son. Won’t you come to the house? Beau, I’ll carry the sword.”

  Smoke wisped a second, smaller cabin. “Mose is a better Christian than I. Won’t find Mose workin’ on the Lord’s Day, no sir.” Lithe as a boy, Ashley sprang onto his porch. “Won’t you come in, Mrs. Ravanel? I can offer tea.”

  “If you’ll call me Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary it is.”

  Ashley’s cabin was a one-room log hut with a stone fireplace. Its windows sparkled, and the bed was neatly made. Horticultural books lined the table. Cattails stood in a jar on the dry sink.

  Ashley said, “Typha domingensis. Our red-winged blackbirds nest among them.”

  Beau stirred the fire, took the wood basket, and went for firewood.

  “He’s a good boy,” Rosemary said.

  “Thankfully, Beau favors his mother.” Ashley hung a kettle on the pot hook and swiveled it over the fire. “This’ll only take a minute.” With no special inflection, he said, “I found some letters in Melanie’s desk. I didn’t know my wife had a faithful correspondent. I’ll return them if you wish.”

  “I think … at th
e time … Melanie’s letters saved my sanity. My husband Andrew … It was … it was all so tawdry.” Rosemary clasped her arms around herself. “Those awful memories. No, I shan’t want my letters; please burn them.”

  Ashley stared into the fire. “I loved her so much. Melly … is with me always.” He grinned suddenly.

  “She approves of all this, you know—selling the sawmills, becoming a gardener.”

  “Why, of course she does!”

  Beau set the wood basket on the hearth. “Father, could I call on Uncle Mose and Aunt Betsy?”

  “I’m sure they’d love a visit.” When Beau was gone, Ashley explained, “Aunt Betsy is a prodigious baker of oatmeal cookies.”

  When the kettle was hissing, Ashley filled a stained Blue Willow teapot. “I found this half-buried beneath a garden bench. I suppose some Yankee looter set it down and forgot where. It was my mother’s.”

  As she measured tea, Ashley said offhandedly, “Did Scarlett tell you I tried to propose to her?”

  “Why, no, Ashley. She didn’t.”

  Ashley’s laugh was self-mockery, relief, and joy. “I’d half-persuaded myself Melanie would have wanted us married. I thank a watchful Providence and Scarlett’s inherent good sense; she scorned my proposal.” Ashley retrieved two mismatched cups.

  “Ashley,” Rosemary said softly, “why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I am done with deception. I shan’t conceal my true feelings ever again.”

  By the first week in March, Will Benteen and Big Sam had finished plowing t/he river fields and moved on to the uplands. Like most countrymen, they rarely remarked the beauty about them, but each savored the expansive vista, with Tara stretching at their feet.

  At noon every day, Will visited the river fields to crumble soil in his hands and test its temperature.

  When the rains came, they quit and put up the horses. The wet clay soil was too heavy to plow.