Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Mammy gathered the children like a mother hen gathers chicks.

  “Gentlemen, if you’ll take our horses to the barn, and could you four please … carry this gentleman—Mr. Wilkes—into the parlor.”

  “His ankle’s smashed, Miss Scarlett,” the farrier observed. “Reckon it hurts like the devil.”

  “I reckon,” she snapped.

  They carried Will to the springhouse and laid him out on the cool stones beside the milk cans. “No, gentlemen, no. We’ll not be needing more help, thank you. You’ve done too much already.”

  Unwilling to see their adventure ended, they milled about for another twenty minutes before they departed.

  Scarlett and Rosemary made up a bed for Ashley on the parlor floor. Rosemary said, “Prissy! Find an old sheet and tear it into strips, about”—Rosemary held her hands four inches apart—“so wide. Dilcey, fetch warm water and soap.”

  When she and Rosemary were alone, Scarlett said, “What did they think they were doing?”

  Rosemary said, “Some of Ashley’s ribs are cracked and his throat is swelled nearly closed. I believe his ankle is broken.”

  After Mammy got Suellen to take a dose of laudanum and put the widow to bed, she and Prissy washed Will’s body and dressed him in his Sunday suit.

  Young Dr. Bryan was establishing his practice, and he made a point of noting that, although a native Georgian, he’d studied medicine in Richmond. He set Ashley’s ankle and made a wintergreen poultice for his throat. Diffident while doctoring, he was assertive with his reckoning.

  “Ten dollars? My goodness, Doctor. Where did you serve in the War?”

  “Mrs. Butler,” the doctor replied, “I was thirteen when the War ended.”

  At twilight in Tara’s little graveyard, Pork dug Will Benteen’s grave.

  Scarlett said, “It isn’t deep enough. Pork, you’re the only man left. Dig deeper.”

  When Scarlett returned to the house, Suellen Benteen was waiting for her. Scarlett’s sister’s face was raw from crying. “When my Will told me you were coming home to Tara, I told Will we should go away. ‘Tara will be Scarlett’s,’ I said. ‘It won’t be our home anymore.’ I begged my Will to leave. I told him, ‘My sister Scarlett has never been anything but trouble.’ You stole Frank Kennedy from me and you got Frank killed. Now you got my Will killed, too.” She burst into anguished sobs. “What am I going to do without Will? Dear God, what will I do?”

  Scarlett went upstairs, where, still dressed in rumpled finery, she fell on her bed and slept dreamlessly until her eyes snapped open in the stark light of morning and everything came flooding back.

  In later years, Scarlett remembered only fragments of the next days: the coffin maker rattling up the drive with his toe pincher bouncing in the wagon; the children whispering past Suellen’s closed bedroom door. Neighbor women brought food nobody wanted to eat and neighbor men did Will’s chores.

  Rosemary tended Ashley behind the parlor’s closed door while mourners trooped through the dining room, where Will Benteen was laid out.

  An expressionless Suellen O’Hara Benteen received those who would have consoled her. At her side, Scarlett understood vital bonds had been severed; henceforth, she and Suellen would be sisters in name only.

  It was hot. The roses heaped on Will’s coffin in such profusion didn’t entirely disguise the smell.

  Will Benteen had been a lapsed Baptist, but since Jonesboro’s only Baptist church was the African Baptist, he was buried by the Methodist preacher, who afterward invited Scarlett to next Sunday’s service.

  “I’m a Catholic,” Scarlett replied.

  “That’s all right,” the preacher said cheerfully. “We welcome every sinner!”

  After the burying, Suellen Benteen and her children left for Charleston, where’d they’d bide with Aunt Eulalie. As their wagon rattled down the lane, Scarlett went to the horse barn to feed the horses. With the leather feed bucket Will and Sam had used for so many years, she poured feed into the long trough.

  Sleek dark heads bent and chewed as if nothing at all had happened. Scarlett whispered, “How can Tara live without Will?” One horse lifted its head, as if trying to understand. He twitched his tail and went back to eating. Silent, hot tears streamed down Scarlett’s face until she could see nothing—nothing at all.

  After Ashley’s fever broke, he was too weak to go home. He spoke quietly when spoken to, volunteered nothing, and never asked about Will. Rosemary sat with him in the dim, quiet parlor and fed him broth and weak tea. For reasons Rosemary never fathomed, she told Ashley things. In her quiet, calm voice, meticulously identifying the year, month, and circumstances, Rosemary Butler Haynes Ravanel told Ashley Wilkes about walking out the back door of the little house in Franklin, Tennessee, knowing the body lying in the frozen garden was her husband John. “I only loved him after it was too late,” Rosemary said. She spoke about her darling Meg; how Meg had loved horses and been betrayed by a horse. “Tecumseh was afraid. How can you blame a horse for being afraid?” Rosemary told Ashley about finding Andrew’s bloody boots. They were English boots and Andrew had once been proud of them. She told the silent Ashley things she had never told anyone—not Melanie, not even her brother Rhett. She told him how lonely she’d been growing up at Broughton. She told him how much she’d missed her brother Rhett. She told Ashley about her pony, Jack.

  Sheriff Talbot’s office was a cool underground den.

  Scarlett demanded, “Why haven’t you arrested them?”

  “Who should I arrest, Mrs. Butler?”

  Scarlett wanted to shake the blandness off the sheriff’s face. She pushed words past her teeth. “The Watlings! Isaiah and Josie Watling murdered Will Benteen!”

  The sheriff rolled his chair against the wall and leaned back to examine the fly-specked ceiling. He grunted, bent, and spat into the spittoon.

  “Well?” Scarlett demanded. “When are you going to arrest them?”

  “I reckon, Mrs. Butler, I reckon there’s two ways of lookin’ at this. You got your ’pinion and some folks got ’nother ’pinion.”

  Scarlett blinked. “Whatever are you talking about?” “Some folks say Mr. Wilkes started that fight.” “They’d shot my horses, burned my Atlanta home, and frightened off my field workers. Sheriff, they intended to murder my husband!”

  “Did they? I always figured Mr. Butler could take care of hisself. Didn’t I hear your husband was in Europe somewheres? I don’t know that the Watlings ever been to Europe—leastways they never said they had.” Sheriff Talbot went in his drawer for a leather sap. He got up, plucked his hat from the hat rack, and rolled it in his hands. “Mrs. Butler, some folks b’lieve—and I ain’t sayin’ I disagree—that Ashley Wilkes started that fight and Will Benteen murdered Archie Flytte once Flytte was getting the better of Wilkes.”

  “Ashley was defending Tara. Those Watlings—” “B’lieve you mentioned that, Mrs. Butler. B’lieve you mentioned that several times. But you never showed me no proof.” He set his hat on the back of his head so it framed his face like a picture frame. “Mrs. Butler, I don’t mean to hurt your feelin’s, but I am inclined to b’lieve that Mr. Wilkes attacked Archie Flytte unprovoked and when Archie resisted, Will Benteen shot Archie. Josie Watling killed Benteen trying to save Archie’s life. Least that’s how I see it. You might see things different.” He slipped the sap into his trouser pocket. “Now, ma’am, I got to get to Darktown. Another cuttin’. Ain’t it peculiar? Niggers cut each other, where a white man’d use a gun. You reckon that’s because they’re more primitive?”

  “The Watlings—”

  “Won’t bother you no more, Mrs. Butler. The Watlings done left Clayton County. Josie and old Isaiah lit out after the fight and nobody’s seen ’em since. Weren’t no Flyttes willin’ to bury Archie, so the County buried him.” He shrugged. “Far as this sheriff’s office is concerned, everything’s square. Archie’s dead, Will Benteen’s dead, and the Watlings are gone. Josie Watling was always kiddin’ about
Jesse James. Said he rode with the James brothers during the War.” Sheriff Talbot opened the door to show Scarlett out. “You reckon next time we hear about the Watlings, they’ll be robbin’ trains?” The sheriff locked the door behind them and peered at the cloudless sky. “Darned if it ain’t dry.” He added, “Watlings was a good family. Hard workers. I swear Isaiah Watling near worked himself half to death tryin’ to make a go of that hardscrabble farm. Sorrowful, ain’t it—how things turn out?”

  When she got back to Tara, Scarlett rode into the river fields. Will’s furrows between the cotton ridges had been smooth red clay. Now they were greened with weeds. Oat sedge tangled the ridges where her cotton plants, each set eight inches from its neighbor, turned hopefully toward the beckoning sun.

  Before daybreak next morning, Scarlett was in the horse barn. The work harness was so heavy, she dragged it over the horse’s rump, and the hames were an awkward nightmare. She guessed which straps to buckle and re-buckled what seemed too loose or tight.

  When she came into the house, Tara’s people were in the kitchen, the children poking sleepily at their breakfast. Scarlett took fried side meat off the counter and ate without sitting down. She said, “Now Will is gone, we’ll have to do without him. Lord knows, there’s enough work to go around. Mammy, you’ll tend Ashley. Ella, honey, stay here and help Mammy. I don’t want you taking one of your fits. Everyone else into the fields. Yes, Pork, I know what you’re going to say: ‘But Miss Scarlett, I’ze been a valet all my life!’” Scarlett’s mimicry was so accurate, even Pork cracked a smile.

  It was cool at first. Rosemary and the youngest children worked a row. Dilcey, Wade, Pork, and Prissy each had a row. Scarlett took Will’s job: plowing up one long row, down another, steering a plow whose tall wooden handles were whitened from strong men’s sweat. The horse knew its job and marched forward phlegmatically, but the plow handles jerked and bucked and whenever the plow hit a rock, the handles kicked against Scarlett’s small hands until her palms ached.

  Sun was the enemy.

  Leather traces lay across Scarlett’s shoulders as if she were in harness with the horse. She stumbled and turned her ankles on the rough ground. Sweat stung her eyes and half-blinded her. The dust the horse raised mixed with her sweat and caked her face.

  At noon, they stopped under the shade trees beside the river. When Scarlett knelt and splashed cool water on her cheeks and neck, it ran over her breasts. Rosemary knelt beside her. “Y’all Georgia planters surely do live a life of ease.”

  In the long afternoon, Dilcey began a chant Scarlett had heard all her life.

  “It’s a long John,” Dilcey sang.

  Prissy answered, “It’s a long John.”

  “He’s long gone.”

  “He’s long gone.”

  “Mister John John.”

  “Mister John John.”

  “Old big-eyed John. Oh, John John …”

  Stumbling behind the horse, fighting the plow handles, Scarlett breathed in time with that ancient African measure.

  They placed Ashley on folded blankets, with his plastered ankle propped on the tailboard of Twelve Oaks’ wagon.

  Ashley’s fine gray eyes looked into Rosemary’s. “Thank you for … talking to me.”

  “That day at the market,” Rosemary said, “you did the best you could.”

  Ashley Wilkes closed up. “I got Will killed.”

  It clouded over the afternoon they finished hoeing. Big-bellied rain clouds rolled over the horizon. Tara’s dusty, sweaty field hands were on the porch drinking cool water when two riders appeared at the bottom of the lane.

  Scarlett leapt to her feet as if she’d been stung, ran into the house, and pounded up the stairs like a schoolgirl.

  In her bedroom, she kicked off her brogans, dropped her sweat-stained dress in a heap, dipped a washcloth into the water pitcher, and attended to her arms, face, and breasts. She snatched a fine green silk gown from the chifforobe, snapped and tied it. She hadn’t time for corset or shoes.

  Downstairs again, Scarlett emerged barefoot as a grinning Pork took her husband’s reins.

  There were new deep lines at the corners of his mouth and under his eyes. Scarlett yearned to hurl herself into his arms, but she wasn’t that easy. “Pork, it isn’t the Second Coming. It’s only Mr. Butler come home.”

  Rhett’s hungry eyes devoured her. “I thought you might need a Savior.”

  “You look like you’ve been through hell.”

  “There were one or two bad days.” His smile was so warm, so knowing.

  He swung down, scooped Ella up and set her on his hip. Scarlett took an involuntary step toward him but dug in her heels. How dare he be so confident, so sure of her. Scarlett tossed her head. “And how was Paris?”

  Rhett’s warm smile became his too-familiar infuriating grin and he laughed. The children—it had been so long since she’d heard the children laugh—the children laughed with him.

  A raindrop. Another. Raindrops puffed the dry lane.

  “This gent is Tazewell Watling. You might remember him.”

  “My escort at the Quadroon Ball,” Scarlett said, even though her heart was rebelling: No. No! What’s wrong with me? I should be in Rhett’s arms!

  Rain splashed her cheeks.

  Tazewell Watling turned beet red. “I was a fool, Mrs. Butler. I pray you’ll forgive me.”

  Fool, no fool—what did Scarlett care?

  “You’ve been in the sun,” Rhett noted.

  Anxiously, Scarlett touched her tanned cheeks. “My complexion …”

  “Dear brother …” Rosemary kissed her brother on both cheeks. “You are here and everything will be all right. I know it will.” Rosemary turned to Rhett’s companion. “Mr. Watling, I am Rosemary, Rhett’s sister. I’m so glad … so very, very glad. Come with me and I’ll show you where to unsaddle your horses.”

  Scarlett said, “Dilcey, tell Mammy the prodigal has returned. Take the children and give them a bath. They’re filthy.”

  Louis Valentine was catching raindrops on his outstretched tongue. Wade was grinning like an idiot. When Rhett set Ella down, she clung to his legs until he said, “Go get cleaned up, sweetheart. Your mother and I want to talk.”

  Rain washed Scarlett’s forehead and hair.

  Rhett said, “Scarlett, honey, show me your hands.”

  Scarlett tucked them in her armpits.

  “By God, Mrs. Butler. It’s good to see you.”

  The earth was warm and wet under Scarlett’s feet. Soaked through, her gown clung to her body like a nightdress. Scarlett was so happy, she thought she might faint. So she lifted her chin defiantly. “Is it now, Mr. Butler? Weren’t you in such a tearing hurry to leave me?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  The Glorious Fourth

  The next morning, Scarlett stepped onto Tara’s veranda and shaded her eyes against the sunrise. Was that a horse in the river fields? Rhett was hunkered over a cotton ridge, examining plants. After some time, he remounted and proceeded up the rise to the steading, touching the broad brim of his planter’s hat as he rode by. “Good morning, Mrs. Butler,” he said. “I believe we can expect another fine day.”

  “I expect we can, Mr. Butler.” Scarlett’s smile was lazy and sly.

  Later, with Wade Hampton’s enthusiastic help, Rhett visited Tara’s hog pens, the meat house, the cotton press, and the weedy upland fields. He checked every harness in the tack room. Wade showed Rhett the post by the milking barn where Ella had found Boo’s head and they visited Will Benteen’s grave.

  After supper, Rhett perched on the top rail of the corral while Rosemary and Taz brought Tara’s horses out of the barn one by one.

  That evening, Rhett invited Wade Hamilton to join the grown-ups at dinner, which the beaming Pork served in the dining room. Wade was tongue-tied with good behavior. Tazewell Watling proved to be a funny, self-deprecating raconteur. His deadpan descriptions of how sophisticated Parisians reacted to “l’ Américain’s�
� Creole French had everyone laughing.

  Over coffee and Mammy’s pecan pie, Scarlett asked Taz what cotton would fetch in the fall.

  “Sea Island middling: thirty cents. Piedmont: thirteen to eighteen.”

  “As little as that?” Rhett rose. “Scarlett, honey, perhaps you’ll show me Tara’s books.”

  The light glowed in Scarlett’s office until very late.

  Scarlett woke from a dreamless sleep when Rhett’s footsteps hesitated at her bedroom door. His name swam toward the surface of her sleepy mind and she would have called him, but he passed on.

  Next morning at breakfast, Rhett asked what everybody wanted from Atlanta.

  “I’ll accompany you,” Tazewell said. “I’ve gifts for my mother.”

  Scarlett took a breath. “Mr. Watling, please convey my best regards to your mother. Without Belle’s warning, my husband might have ridden into a fatal ambush.”

  Rhett chuckled. “My, my, Mrs. Butler. How very … predictable my life would have been without you.”

  When Wade wanted to go, too, Rhett said, “Be ready at the horse barn in ten minutes. We won’t wait.”

  Wade clattered up the stairs.

  Rhett turned to Scarlett. “Rosemary says the Watlings have fled the county.”

  “So Sheriff Talbot says. Rhett, Talbot said he knew you?”

  When Bonnie Blue died and when Melanie died, Rhett had hugged his sorrow to himself, as if sorrow were all he had left. Now he said softly, “One day, I’ll tell you about Tunis Bonneau.”

  Scarlett and Rosemary waved them off and Scarlett turned to her friend. “My God, has Rhett been here only two days?”

  Rosemary said, “My brother can be rather… daunting.”

  “He’s changed, Rosemary. He’s the same Rhett he was, but he’s different, too. I … I feel like a maiden again.” She paused and in a soft voice added, “I pray life will be good to me!”

  “Of course it will, dear.”

  “Do you really believe so? Oh, please say you do!”

  Only Louis Valentine, who had mastered six of McGuffey’s seven readers, was disappointed when Rosemary canceled school that day. Beau asked to accompany Rosemary to Twelve Oaks, but she said no, he could go after his father was feeling better.