Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Rhett poured brandy from his flask into its cup and folded the woman’s fingers around the cup. Her head emerged from the covers. She brought the cup to her mouth, chattered it against her teeth, and swallowed. She waited to see if it would stay down. The moment passed and she tapped the cup, and Rhett refilled it and she swallowed again. She sat up and cuffed hair out of her eyes. She was naked. “Thanks, mister. You’re a pal.”

  She fingered her cheeks and jaw to see if she’d suffered injuries she couldn’t remember. Her eyes slipped in and out of focus. “My God,” she said, “I know you.”

  “Lisa?”

  “Captain Butler? I sure as hell never thought to see you no more.” When she smiled, she was young again. “You got any more brandy?”

  Rhett emptied his flask and she drained it like medicine. “You want to turn around while I get my clothes on?” She giggled. “Listen to me, little Miss Touch-Me-Not.” Frowning, she added, “It’s because I knew you before, don’t you see.”

  Rhett went to the open door and lit a cigar. The cigar smelled good.

  Behind him Lisa said, “How’s that boy of yours? What’s his name? Tuck?”

  “Tazewell is safe. He’s in school now.”

  “He was a good boy. I liked him. You can turn around now. You got another flask? My stomach’s rilin’ me.”

  Rhett shook his head.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Look at me, Captain! Ain’t I the goddamnedest mess?”

  Her dress was a plain yellow cotton shift. She was barefoot. Rhett said, “Come with me. I’ll buy you supper.”

  The girl snickered. “Me in the Railroad Hotel dining room? Wouldn’t that be something? Naw, Captain. Bert has an understanding with Sheriff Talbot. Bert’s girls don’t cross the tracks and Sheriff don’t come down here.”

  “Weren’t you on the depot platform?”

  “I can pick up fellows on the platform.” Her brow furrowed. “That why you come? The nigger?”

  “He claims you accused him falsely, that he did nothing disrespectful.”

  “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Captain, Bert’d be glad to sell you a bottle and you and me could get better acquainted. Your son and me were gettin’ right friendly. Might be you’d enjoy havin’ a girl your boy wanted? I ain’t but eighteen.”

  Rhett couldn’t hide his wince.

  “Little rough for you, Captain? Ain’t you a man of the world? Whores can’t be no big surprise to Captain Rhett Butler.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  She balled her fists. “What makes you think I lied?”

  “I’ve known Tunis Bonneau all my life.”

  “Well, I reckon you’re gonna have to find yourself a new nigger.”

  Rhett opened his wallet and took out greenbacks. “Sometimes we Southerners talk about the North as if none of it was worth a damn. There are small towns on the Maine seacoast where a Confederate widow with a little cash might make a new life for herself. Or maybe she’d go west—young women are scarce out west. A pretty woman could pick and choose.”

  “Why don’t you go buy that bottle?” Lisa said flatly.

  “Don’t you want more than this?” Rhett gestured at her crib.

  Her features closed up tight. “You bastard. You want me to tell folks I lied? Tell everybody in town Lisa has got herself lower than a low-down, dirty nigger?”

  As a gray-faced Rhett Butler came up the courthouse walk, Sheriff Talbot was leaving. Men looked at the clouds or anywhere but at the sheriff, who didn’t say a word as he brushed past.

  “Where you been, Captain Butler?” Archie asked.

  “With a whore.”

  Archie’s smile shrank. “I don’t hold with whores.”

  As the sun dropped behind the courthouse roof, bottles appeared.

  Archie said, “I b’lieve Sheriff Talbot was hoping the Bluebellies would get here before dark.”

  Rhett asked, “Why wait for dark?”

  “Some things ain’t fittin’ for women and children to see.”

  “You always were fastidious.”

  “And you always liked to use two-bit words. I guess you figured they’d make me mad. Captain, you can’t make me mad. No way in hell you can make me mad.

  You saved my life, and maybe my life ain’t worth much, but you’re the only one ever saved it.”

  “What if I told you that boy didn’t do anything?”

  Archie was genuinely puzzled. “He’s a nigger, ain’t he?”

  As Rhett went inside, one fellow flung a rope over a stout limb and others tore down the rail fence around a free colored’s house. The free colored had left for the North and the poor whites who’d rented his house didn’t object.

  The sheriff had locked his file cabinets and desk. His wastebasket was set neatly on the desktop for the negro sweeper. Rhett suspected it’d sit there for a good while.

  In the dim cell, Tunis was on his knees, praying.

  “Lisa won’t change her story.”

  “Don’t reckon it’d make much difference if she did.”

  “She wouldn’t take money.”

  “Might be you could get some of it to Ruthie and my boy?”

  “I’ll take care of Ruthie and the boy.”

  “You don’t owe me. Wasn’t Captain Butler tied down the steam-escape valves. Captain Bonneau done that.” A faint smile flickered over Tunis’s face. “That night, I knew the Federals would be waiting for us to come out. Over the Cape Fear bar, we was doing twenty-two knots. My boat was the fastest ever was.”

  “You’d still have the Widow, hadn’t been for me.”

  “You never did like nobody to do nothing for you, do you, Rhett? Always got to be Captain Butler’s hands on the wheel. Well, Rhett, my boat’s sunk and I’m gonna die. Ain’t nothing you can do to change that.”

  “You always were a hardheaded son of a bitch.”

  “The negro who ain’t hardheaded’ll be a nigger all his life. I ain’t scared of dyin’. But I fear what they’re gonna do to me before I die. When you see Ruthie, tell her I love her. Nathaniel Turner Bonneau—darned if that boy’s name don’t have a ring to it.”

  Rhett said, “It surely does.”

  Outside the jail, men’s voices rose like surf building before a storm.

  Tunis smiled. “Ain’t it funny what a man thinks about? I’m scared, so dam—darned—scared. And all I can think about is happy times. I’m remembering first time I laid eyes on Ruthie. It was a Baptist picnic and I bought Ruthie’s cake. It was an apple cake. I remember how I felt when little Nat was born and how it was that last time we run the Charleston blockade. I never said, Rhett, how you was: Captain Rhett Butler standin’ on his wheel housing and all the Federal shots and shells on this earth couldn’t make him step down.”

  “Some things stick in the mind,” Rhett said quietly. “Did you know Will, the trunk master?”

  “Daddy Thomas spoke high of Will.”

  “Will was a better father to me than my own father. I couldn’t save him, either.”

  The two men were silent until Tunis swallowed and said, “There’s one thing you can do for me, Rhett. I don’t want them to do to me what they’re goin’ to. I need you … I need for you to shoot me.” Tunis rubbed his lips, as if cleansing the words he’d spoken. His smile was sudden, nervous, luminous and his words tumbled over one another, as if he might not have time to finish. “Remember when we was kids and took my daddy’s skiff all the way down to Beaufort? Darned if Daddy didn’t tan my hide! Worth it, though—just the two of us and a following wind. I never saw a sky so blue. Rhett, it’s worth living a man’s whole life if just once, just one time, he gets to see a sky that blue.”

  The men who became beasts that night at the Clayton County courthouse had been soldiers who killed and had friends killed at their sides. Death was no stranger. Tonight was the nigger’s turn; tomorrow might be theirs. Though some in that mob were crazy or simple or drunk, others were respectable men acting from what they saw as dut
y.

  If before the War these respectable men hadn’t “slipped down to the quarters” to enjoy a black girl, they knew men who had. Unmanned by defeat and afraid of the future, these men could not imagine that black men would not do to white women what white men had done to their women.

  Archie Flytte told them, “You and you and you, go get the nigger. Any more, we’ll be getting in each other’s way. Somebody splash lamp oil on the bonfire.”

  When they heard the shot—more like a popgun than a pistol—Archie understood right away. “Now wait a damn minute,” he said. “Just wait one goddamned minute.”

  Archie ran through the jail to the cell where Tunis Bonneau lay dead on the stone floor.

  When Rhett Butler popped a match to light his cigar, the flame shook.

  “Damn you, Butler.” Archie kicked the cell door. “Goddamn you, Rhett Butler. Why the hell did you do that for?”

  Rhett Butler said, “The nigger was disrespectful to a white woman.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  In Federal Custody

  The mob swarmed down the corridor into the cell: a fug of unwashed bodies, whiskey fumes, and rage. A balding middle-aged man kicked Tunis’s head again and again. “Damn you, nigger! Damn you!”

  An indignant graybeard pronounced, “Dead ain’t no zample to nobody! Dead nigger ain’t no zample.”

  They eyed Rhett Butler from the corners of their eyes like wolves circling a campfire. Rhett kept his hand on the revolver in his coat pocket.

  Archie Flytte’s hard voice slashed through their mutterings. “Captain Butler, he didn’t mean nothin’ by it! Captain Butler’s a gentleman. You know ary gentleman with a lick of sense?”

  “He should take the nigger’s place,” a disappointed boy spluttered.

  “What’s that you say, boy? You sayin’ we should string up one of General Forrest’s troopers? Hang a man fought b’side Archie Flytte? Well, you son of a bitch.” Archie grabbed the boy’s shirtfront and flung him into the crowd.

  The graybeard said, “We got to make a zample!”

  Another old man said disgustedly, “Aw, the hell with this. I’m late for dinner.”

  “Leave Butler be. There’s niggers to burn.” A cackle at his own wit. “You hear that? ‘There’s niggers to burn’!”

  As they passed Tunis’s corpse down the corridor, men punched and clutched at Tunis’s groin and spat. One mad-eyed man dabbed blood from the bullet hole in Tunis’s forehead and stuck his finger in his mouth.

  After the mob followed the corpse outside, Rhett and Archie were alone in the sheriff’s office.

  Archie brought a lint-covered plug of tobacco from his pocket, bit off a chaw, and settled it under his lip. “All those months we was ridin’ together, I done like you said. I fetched firewood and watered the horses and ’twas me foraged our grub. Was there a rocky place to lie down and a smooth place, you spread your slicker on the smooth. I pretended I never know’d you was lookin’ down on me. I guess you figured I was dirt-stupid. Captain Butler, you saved my life. Account of that, I was beholden to you. Well, Captain Butler, I ain’t beholden no more. You and me are quits.”

  After Archie left, Rhett slumped against the rough stone wall and released his revolver. His hand ached from gripping it. He looked at his trembling hand, opened and closed his fingers. It was a hand, only a hand—whatever it had done.

  He heard the whump when lamp oil ignited their bonfire. The basement windows glowed red. They darkened when they tossed Tunis onto the blaze.

  Rhett snuffed the lantern and sat in the dark behind the sheriff’s desk while the mob screeched and hollered and an off-key voice wailed, “I’ll live and die in Dixie! I’ll live and die in Dixie!”

  When the stink of burning meat seeped into the basement, Rhett lit another cigar and puffed until the tip glowed. He coughed and gagged and his stomach heaved. He puffed until the cigar scorched his fingers.

  Sometime later, they dragged Tunis out of the fire to hang him. They started shooting. They yelled and shot for a time.

  About four that morning, the moon set and men went home to their warm beds, their beloved wives and children.

  It was getting light when Rhett came out. Three men sat by the bonfire, passing a bottle. What had been Captain Tunis Bonneau—Ruthie’s husband, Nat’s father, Rhett’s friend—dangled from the limb of a chestnut tree. It looked more like last year’s Yule log than a man.

  Something glittered at Rhett’s boot tip. He bent for the metal frames of Tunis’s lensless glasses.

  One of the drunks tottered to his feet, wobbled toward the fire, saved himself by throwing his arms in the air, got turned properly, and zigged and zagged down the street.

  Cooing and clucking, pigeons fluttered onto the courthouse lawn. Two ravens settled in the chestnut tree. One opened its wings and cawed. The other dropped onto the burned thing and pecked at it.

  Sheriff Talbot arrived. “Mornin’, Butler.” The sheriff’s glance never wandered to the torso. “I b’lieve you killed my prisoner.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I ain’t sayin’ if I’d been the nigger I wouldn’t have wanted you to do what you done, but that don’t change the facts.”

  “Facts don’t change.”

  “No sir, they don’t. You killed the nigger what was in my custody and I got to arrest you and hold you until the Bluebellies get here. I’ll have your pistol, sir. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve got a job to do.”

  They sat on the courthouse steps until a vedette of Federal cavalry trotted up Jonesboro’s main street. Their captain swung down, shook out stiff legs, and rubbed his buttocks. He glanced at the charred thing that had been a man. His men loosened saddle girths and turned their horses onto the lawn to graze. Ignoring the sleeping drunks, a trooper kicked the fire into flame. The captain wore the aggravated expression of a veteran who’d drawn unpleasant duty. He nodded to the sheriff.

  “This here’s Rhett Butler,” Sheriff Talbot said. “Was him killed the nigger.”

  “Butler? … Butler? … Sir, we’ve been looking for you. You’ll come with us to army headquarters.”

  “That nigger was in my custody and Butler shot him dead. This is his pistol what done it.”

  The captain stuck the gun in his belt. “Sheriff, cut that thing down and get it buried.”

  “I don’t know if I can, Captain. The boys hung it up and they’ll cut it down. They won’t want anyone foolin’ with it.”

  “Sergeant!”

  When the sergeant approached, the ravens flew, cawing angrily. The sergeant cut the rope with his saber. The thud of Tunis Bonneau hitting the ground settled in Rhett’s soul forever.

  That afternoon, Rhett Butler rode with the Federal patrol along the Macon and Western Railroad into Atlanta. Burned and exploded railcars had been dragged aside and shiny new rails snaked along the old roadbed.

  Central Atlanta was a moonscape of broken walls, toppled chimneys, brick piles, and broken melted machines whose original purposes were unguessable. The Georgia Railroad Bank had been reduced to a broken wall. The Car Shed’s great roof was crumpled like a blanket over its ruins. An open-air locomotive round table had been hastily constructed within the roofless circular walls of what had been a roundhouse.

  Federal soldiers were everywhere; their tent city overflowed the public square.

  While blue-clad soldiers drilled and ex-slaves explored their freedom, Atlantans were rebuilding. Here, men laid reclaimed bricks atop a fire-scorched wall; there, a rickety scaffold held workers setting a keystone in place.

  Before Rhett and his escort reached Federal headquarters, the news was out: “Captain Butler’s back and he’s been arrested.” “Rhett Butler’s with a Federal patrol.”

  The patrol crossed the devastated rail yard into a neighborhood that had escaped the fire.

  Rhett had been inside Judge Lyon’s house—now army headquarters—before the War. The house’s Corinthian columns needed paint and the balustrade was gap-t
oothed where balusters had been ripped out for kindling.

  Rhett was escorted past a brace of saluting sentries into what had been the judge’s office. Three officers warmed themselves at the fire and a pan-faced first sergeant was writing in the daybook.

  He set down his pen. “Who do we have here, Captain?”

  “Picked him up in Jonesboro. Rhett Butler. He killed a negro.”

  An officer came over. “Rhett Butler, Rhett Butler. I’ll be. … I’ll wager you don’t remember me.”

  Rhett blinked and shook his head.

  “Tom Jaffery. Remember? The field of honor? Charleston? Lord, I was green.”

  “You’re a captain now,” Rhett observed.

  “Never was good at anything but soldiering.” Jaffery paused. “We’ve been looking for you. Orders straight from the top. ‘Bring in Rhett Kershaw Butler.’”

  Rhett said. “You’ve brought me in.”

  The sergeant inscribed Rhett’s name in the daybook and barked, “Hopkins, telegraph the War Department, we’ve got Butler.” He accepted Rhett’s wallet and watch, which he absently pocketed.

  Tom Jaffery escorted Rhett down the street. “Butler, what have you got yourself into now?”

  Firehouse Number Two overlooked the fire scene it had been powerless to prevent. It was still very much a firehouse. Sentries didn’t conceal the original purpose of the wide arched doors through which fire engines had come at the gallop while alarm bells were ringing from the squat cupola on the roof.

  The engine floor held petty malefactors.

  Along the second-floor hallway, a sentry stood before each door. A leather fire helmet hung beside the window of Rhett’s small room. An iron bed and deal table completed the furnishings. It was bitter cold.

  Jaffery hesitated before saying, “I’m sorry to see you in this fix. Is there anything I can do? Anyone you want told?”

  “I’d like writing materials.” Rhett paused. “Jaffery, that foggy morning beside the Ashley—what did you think of us?”