Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  Jamie’s apron was spattered with what looked like tomato pulp.

  “I didn’t come to the trial. I thought you wouldn’t want me there. Judge Boyd?”

  “Pronounces sentence tomorrow. My lawyer thinks I’ll get off light if I grovel, but”—Andrew grinned—“if the Pit Bull is out of sorts or Mrs. Pit Bull quarrels with the judge over the breakfast table, he might give me ten years. You know how I thrived in the penitentiary.”

  “Andrew!”

  He shook his head. “Jamie, don’t worry. It won’t come to that.”

  “Andrew, won’t you come inside? Juliet would love to see you.”

  “I bear my dear sister no animosity. I forgive everyone. I forgive the Yankees, the niggers, even that nigger-loving President Grant. But … some other time. Jamie, you and I have somewhere to go.”

  “Andrew, I’m preparing—”

  “No buts, Jamie. We’re attending a matinee at the Hibernian Hall—the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, direct from Phila-damn-delphia. The headliner is?” Andrew applauded. “Why, none other than my nigger, Cassius!”

  “Andrew, my guests …”

  “For old times’ sake, Jamie.”

  Jamie had moisture in his eyes. “On the day before your sentencing, Andrew? Are you mad?”

  Andrew Ravanel grinned. “Why yes, Jamie. You know I am.”

  The wooden-legged veteran selling tickets snapped to attention. “Colonel Ravanel, glad you come, sir. These boys put on a great show. You won’t be disappointed.”

  “Where’d you lose the leg?”

  The man smacked his wooden leg like a soldier slapping a rifle stock. “Sharpsburg, Colonel. Let me get the manager. You and Mr ….”

  “My scout, Jamie Fisher.”

  When Andrew made to pay, the man wouldn’t take his money. The manager arrived, apologizing that the audience wasn’t so high-toned as Andrew was used to, and escorted Andrew and Jamie to the best seats in the house. The men they displaced were inclined to dispute until told for whom their seats were required. They doffed their caps and one man saluted, saying, “God bless you, sir” and “You taught those Yankees a thing or two” and “Ten more like you and, by God, we’d have won the war,” at which sentiment, the house broke out in rebel yells.

  The manager cordoned off their chairs with a rope. Men seated beyond the rope offered them flasks, cigars, and plugs of tobacco. Andrew’s eyes fixed on the curtain, where painted nymphs and cherubs frolicked.

  The audience was rough. The women were bawds and whores. A handful of Federal soldiers sat in the last rows.

  That Patriotic Ball, so long ago, when he’d first tried to seduce Rosemary Butler—Lord, she’d been gangly and fresh as a newborn filly—that ball had been in this room. Andrew wondered if that Confederate eagle was still painted on the floor, entombed beneath layers of dirt and spit and trampled cigar butts.

  Rosemary bore no resemblance to that leggy girl who had enchanted him. Andrew said, “Don’t fidget, Jamie. Everybody loves us here.”

  There was rustling behind the painted curtain before a banjo clanged, frailing the notes. Andrew elbowed Jamie. That’d be Cassius.

  The curtain opened on a stage and a semicircle of empty chairs. As the offstage banjo plunked “Old Dan Tucker,” white men in blackface pranced in to stop before each chair, eyes front, still as statues. Tambo and Mr. Bones had the end chairs, and the armchair center stage was the Interlocutor’s.

  Jangling his tambourine, Tambo took his seat. The Interlocutor marched in, bowed and froze halfway through his bow. In blackface like the white players, Cassius ambled across the stage, grinning and mugging, until he reached Mr. Bones’s chair, where he, too, froze.

  The Interlocutor revived from his frozen bow and strolled past his company, miming astonishment, as if he’d never seen any of the performers before. He prodded them as a child might if loosed in a wax museum.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Gentlemen, be seated.

  [Tambo’s tambourine and Cassius’s banjo made a cross fire.]

  BONES: Music makes me feel so happy!

  TAMBO: Well, you ain’t goin’ to be happy no more. You’re going to be a 7th Cavalry soldier and I’m goin’ to train you. I’m a first-class soldier trainer, I is. I’m a lion trainer, I is.

  BONES: YOU is a lion trainer?

  TAMBO: That’s what I said. I’ze a hard-boiled lion trainer, I is.

  BONES: You’re a lion son of a gun.

  TAMBO: Was your pappy a soldier?

  BONES: Yessir, he was at the battle of Bull Run. He was one of the Yankees what run.

  [Rebel yells.]

  [More jokes followed by banjo and tambourine duets and sentimental ballads. For forty minutes, the audience sang along with familiar tunes and shouted old jokes’ punch lines.]

  BONES: I got a poem I can recite.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Well, go ahead and recite it.

  BONES:

  Mary had a little lamb,

  Her father killed it dead,

  And now it goes to school with her

  Between two hunks of bread.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Mr. Bones, it’s a good thing you can play that banjo better than you can write poetry.

  At this invitation, Cassius played for twenty minutes without interruption. He moved his audience from patriotic fervor to sentimental tears. His dance tunes pulled them into the aisles.

  After his final note, Cassius froze again, chairs scraped, and men coughed. The Interlocutor said, “Corporal Cassius: Pride of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, finest banjo picker North or South. Boys, Cassius is a Confederate veteran.”

  When the rebel yell rose again, the Yankee soldiers slipped out of the hall.

  Chuckling, Andrew said to Jamie, “A nigger pretending to be a white man pretending to be a nigger. Now, that’s unusual.”

  For their finale, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels promenaded, singing rousing tunes, until the manager jumped onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention! We are honored to have a hero among us this afternoon: Colonel Andrew Ravanel, the Tennessee Will of the Wisp, the Carolina Cougar, the Thunderbolt of the White Knights of the … of the …” He shook his head. “Can’t say that name. It’d get me in deep!”

  Laughter and cheers. Despite Jamie’s protests, Jamie and Andrew were propelled onto the stage and the troupe resumed promenading while Cassius strummed “Dixie.” Performers and audience sang until the manager drew the curtains.

  When the curtains opened for bows, Andrew and Jamie stood at attention stage front. The troupe took four curtain calls before the Interlocutor called it quits and clapped Andrew on the back as if he were a fellow trouper. Some minstrel men left the stage, others shared a flask. Cassius rested his banjo on a chair and sat on the floor beside it, sticking out his legs. “Colonel, Captain. Been a long time.”

  Andrew chuckled. “The last time I saw you, boy, you were climbin’ an Ohio riverbank like the hounds of hell were after you.”

  “Oh my, I was scared. Them Yankees was killin’ everybody in sight!” He shook his head. “Them olden times, mercy! I lives in Philadelphia now. Got me a wife and two baby girls.”

  “Philadelphia? Don’t you miss the Low Country?”

  Cassius smiled faintly. “Rabbit Foot Minstrels, we been everywhere—Boston, Buffalo, all over the country.” He cocked his head. “How you farin’, Mister Jamie? You find yourself a wife?”

  Jamie made a wry face. “Haven’t found a woman who’ll put up with me.”

  Andrew’s eyes gleamed. “You’re a headliner now, aren’t you, boy? Bet you got plenty of money. All the money you need. You remember when I tried to buy you and Langston Butler’s overseer shamed me?”

  “I remember bein’ sold, Colonel Andrew. Ain’t the kind of thing a man forgets.”

  Jamie said, “Andrew, I’ve got to get back to the Inn. Maybe you’ll join us for supper?”

  “You gonna invite this boy here for supper, too? Not much difference twixt him and your damn Yankees. He’s got money. He ca
n pay.”

  “I believe”—Cassius started to rise—“I’ll get this nigger makeup off me.”

  When Andrew shoved him, Cassius and the chair went over backward. Cassius’s banjo skidded across the floor with a metallic ring. Cassius caught himself on his hands.

  “I’m just a banjo picker!” he said to nobody in particular. Andrew lifted his boot and stamped it on Cassius’s right hand like a man smashing a spider. He would have stamped again if Jamie hadn’t grabbed him with surprisingly strong arms and dragged him off as the manager entreated, “Colonel Ravanel, consider what you are doing, sir.”

  Moaning, Cassius tucked his hand to his chest.

  “Nothing’s changed. You got that, boy!” Andrew was shouting as Jamie wrestled him outside. “Nothing has changed!”

  Outside Hibernian Hall, Andrew rubbed his mouth.

  His chest heaving for air, Jamie Fisher kept a short distance away. The short distance was a great distance. “Good-bye, Andrew. I wish you well. I have always wished you well.”

  Bottle trees lined the lane to Congress Haynes’s old fishing camp. At first, there’d only been a few bottles and Andrew had knocked them down. But whenever he visited the camp, there were more bottles, until the niggers had blue, green, red, and clear glass bottles tied to the branches of every tree and bush strong enough to bear them. Colored light spots chased down the lane when the sun struck the glass and the faintest breeze was enough to set them jingling. One night, he and Archie Flytte had waited up, hoping to catch a nigger hanging a bottle, but Archie got jumpy after the moon set and the wind started. When Andrew asked if he was afraid, Archie was scornful. The bottles were supposed to scare off the spirits of the dead, and Archie wasn’t dead by a long sight. But Archie left for Georgia before midnight and Andrew got drunk, and in the morning the cypress beside the porch, not ten feet from where he’d passed out, glistened with bottles that hadn’t been there the night before.

  The camp’s broken front door had yawned open since Custer’s cavalrymen booted it in.

  Excepting rat droppings and leaves blown across the floor, the cabin was as he’d left it.

  He’d been treated well in that overcrowded prison camp. Hard evidence against Klansmen was hard to find and many witnesses were afraid to testify. The Yankees turned Klansmen loose because they couldn’t get enough evidence or didn’t have enough room or simply lost patience. Josie Watling hadn’t been caught and Archie Flytte hadn’t come back after the night of the bottle trees.

  When Andrew was in the prison camp, Rosemary had brought clean clothes.

  She said, “I’m sorry. I’m sure this is hard for you.”

  “Not at all,” Andrew had replied. “I’m used to being imprisoned.”

  He’d lied. The camp was a vise whose jaws screwed tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out of him.

  When Lawyer Ellsworth announced he was released on bond, Andrew stepped out of the camp gate, newborn, like a boy in the exciting world with no school today. But when Andrew returned to 46 Church Street, his wife wouldn’t let him in.

  At dusk, the wind off the river set the bottle trees to jingling. It was a fine sound. Say what you would about niggers, they made music. Andrew felt fine. Late on a gentle spring afternoon, the river rolling past as it had before he came and would after he was gone, and all the lawyers and judges gone, too, Rosemary, Jamie—all of them gone.

  Poor dear Charlotte had loved him. She had known who he was and loved him anyway. Sometimes he heard Charlotte’s sweet voice in the bottle trees.

  Andrew dressed in his Confederate Colonel’s uniform and sat outside in the dusk. He’d forgotten how stiff the military collar was.

  Small boats sailed up and down the river. Swallows swooped after insects. A heron landed in the shallows and stalked fish, lifting one leg at a time. That’d be the last thing a fish would see, that motionless leg in the water, looking just like a weed or stick.

  Andrew’s revolver was as familiar to him as Charlotte had been. The long browned barrel was white at the muzzle from much firing; that chip on the grip was where he’d cracked some nigger’s skull.

  As the moon rose, a pregnant vixen came out of the bushes to fish for crayfish. Andrew considered shooting her but decided not to.

  To the merciful shall mercy be given.

  At first light, Andrew Ravanel, late Colonel, C.S.A., went inside to write a letter to his firstborn son and shot himself.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Legacies

  The Chapeau Rouge had just closed when a heavy knock brought MacBeth to the door. He cracked it open and then slammed it shut. “Miss Belle … They’s some mens, Miss Belle, wants talk to you.”

  “At this time of night? Who …”

  “Miss Belle …” MacBeth was rigid with fear. “They ain’t wearin’ no hoods, but they’s Kluxers.”

  Belle ran to her bedroom for her revolver, and when she returned, MacBeth had vanished.

  Belle stood indecisively, listening to feet shuffle on the porch. She took a deep breath, cocked her revolver, and jerked the door open. “Jesus Christ,” she gasped.

  Isaiah Watling slapped his daughter’s cheek so hard, she almost pulled the trigger. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

  “Poppa! After twenty years you hit me. …”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Daughter? Why didn’t you say something?”

  A younger man was with Isaiah and a third at the curb held their horses. Belle was trembling so violently, she used both hands to uncock her revolver.

  “I trusted him, Daughter. I believed the man who dishonored you was a Christian gentleman.”

  The porch creaked when the younger man shifted his weight. He cleared his throat. “’Lo, Cousin Belle.”

  At her father’s impatient gesture, the young man withdrew into the shadows.

  “We were young, Poppa,” Belle said. “Was you ever young?”

  “No,” Isaiah said, “I had no time to be young.”

  His eyebrows were untrimmed. He had clumps of hair in his nostrils and ears. Belle smelled the bitter metallic stink of an outraged soul.

  “You have your mother’s eyes.” Isaiah pursed his lips. “I’d forgotten that.” His curt head shake buried that memory. “I trusted Colonel Ravanel. I trusted him.”

  “Andrew loved me, Poppa. I cried when I heard … what he done to himself.”

  Isaiah rubbed his hand across his face. “Colonel Ravanel left things for the boy—his pistol, watch, a note ….”

  “My Tazewell is a gentleman, Poppa,” Belle insisted. “He’s got schooling and he’s in the cotton business in New Orleans. He even bought himself a house!” Belle rubbed her cheek.

  He said, “I should never have come to the Low Country. Your mother hated to leave Mundy Hollow, but I said we had to start over somewheres else. So we come to Broughton. I was Master Butler’s man, body and soul, for thirty-two years. Thirty-two years, body and soul.”

  “This parcel … it’s from Tazewell’s father?”

  “Only ones besides us at the Colonel’s burying were Yankees lookin’ for Klansmen.”

  “Uncle Isaiah never held with the Klan.” Belle’s cousin grinned at her. “Uncle Isaiah’s … ‘fussy.’ Him ’n’ me, we found the Colonel. We was going to spirit him away to Texas, but the Colonel got his own self away first. I reckon he would have done right good in Texas.”

  “This is Josie, Abraham’s son.”

  Josie touched his hat. “Pleased to meet you, cuz. Nice place you got. That’s Archie Flytte with the horses.”

  Belle’s hands trembled. “Father, did you love Mama?”

  “Your mother was devout.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Daughter, I love the Lord.”

  Belle had believed her father was a simple man; she’d never before guessed how much his simplicity cost him.

  “Colonel Ravanel lied to me,” Isaiah said. “And your brother, Shadrach, died for Colonel Ra
vanel’s lie. Shadrach never had no days to repent of his sins.”

  An unkind thought flashed through Belle’s mind: Shadrach died because he’d challenged a better shot.

  Josie said, “Dead is dead.”

  “Rhett Butler lied.”

  “He never did. Rhett never said nothin’. He just let ’em believe whatever they wanted to believe.”

  “Butler murdered your brother and disgraced his parents. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land the Lord thy God has given you.”

  “Even now, after all this hurtfulness …” Belle’s hands opened and closed helplessly. “You can’t forgive?”

  Belle’s father handed her the parcel. “By my lights, I did my best.”

  The parcel was heavier than it looked. “I reckon we all do the best we can,” Belle said. “Won’t you come in? I’ve a picture of your grandson.”

  For one moment, she thought Isaiah was going to take off his hat and step inside. They’d go to the kitchen—they wouldn’t need to be in the business part of the house. She’d make coffee for her father. She remembered he took sugar in his coffee—heaping tablespoons of sugar.

  Isaiah Watling touched the package. “Give these to your son.” He turned away.

  “Uncle likes to say our day will come,” Josie observed, “but it ain’t come yet.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Ashley’s Birthday Party

  Melanie was preparing a surprise birthday party—Ashley’s first since the barbecue at Twelve Oaks, eleven years ago, when he and she had announced their betrothal.

  The Wilkeses’ home was nearly ready. The mantelpiece had been scrubbed with Sapolio, the gilt mirror frame had been dusted, every grate and stove was freshly blacked, and the winter carpets had been taken up and brushed. Pork and Peter had sprinkled tobacco on them before carrying them to the attic.

  As chairwoman of the Confederate Widows and Orphans Society, Melanie knew all Georgia’s Confederate greats: General John Gordon, five times wounded at Sharpsburg; Robert Augustus Toombs, Confederate Senator and Secretary of State; even Alexander Stephens had accepted Melanie’s invitation. Vice President Stephens’s two-volume justification of secession, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, had pride of place in many Southern households (where it was more honored than read). Ashley’s spinster sister,