Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

  The bellman at their London hotel unpacked their luggage while Rhett sat, hands between his knees. Taz wanted to call on the Campbells, but Rhett said he was too tired.

  Taz spent a pleasant afternoon renewing his acquaintance with the Campbell family, but when he returned to the hotel, Rhett was gone. The doorman said Rhett hadn’t taken a cab; he’d walked into Mayfair. “The gentleman seemed distracted like,” the doorman said. “Like the gentleman had something on his mind.”

  Rhett’s tailor hadn’t seen him and he hadn’t been to the gambling clubs. Of course they knew Mr. Butler. Was Mr. Butler back in London?

  Three days later, wearing the clothes he’d worn when he disappeared, Rhett came back to the hotel. He was filthy and unshaven. Perhaps he’d slept in his clothes. “It’s no use, Taz. I can’t forget. Drink, laudanum, women—I never thought I’d curse my memory.” He looked at his hands. “You may as well go back to New Orleans. I am grateful you interrupted your work to come, but…”

  Taz said, “I’ll draw your bath.”

  Rob Campbell provided the necessary letters of credit and would forward their mail. Taz bought tickets for the Dieppe steamer. Taz made sure Rhett had fresh shirts and tempted him to eat.

  In December, Paris was bitter cold and its famous light was unforgiving. Rhett couldn’t keep warm. Sometimes when they went outdoors, he wore two overcoats.

  Like a dutiful son with his frail parent, Taz escorted Rhett to the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Opéra Garnier. Taz chattered through the long silences. When Taz did ask a direct question, Taz’s companion replied courteously, but Rhett made few observations and no suggestions. He initiated nothing.

  One afternoon on the rue de la Paix, they strolled past excited young ballet dancers entering a maison de couture. Taz tipped his hat to the girls and observed, “There are other women, you know.”

  “How dare you say that to me!” Rhett’s eyes flared so hot, Taz took a step backward.

  Taz would wake in the middle of the night, to find Rhett sitting at the window. Winter moonlight bleached his face.

  Every week, dutifully, Rhett wrote the children. He asked Taz to read his letters before he mailed them. “Just the musings of an utterly ordinary tourist,” Rhett said. “I mustn’t frighten them.”

  In his letters, Paris sights Rhett had apparently passed without noticing were described in engaging detail. All their days were sunny. Rhett was amused by Paris’s famously truculent cabmen and waiters, who pretended they couldn’t understand Creole French.

  Taz’s letters to Belle were cheerful, too.

  Rosemary wrote, care of Rob Campbell, that she was staying at Tara “until I decide what to do with my life.”

  Belle wrote Taz, “Your Grandpa Watling’s come by twice. Might be one day I can get him to take a cup of coffee.”

  Buying Christmas presents was an agony. Though the temperature was below freezing, Rhett sweated through a Harris Tweed coat. After he bought the children’s gifts, he bolted from the cab into a milliner’s shop on the Place de la Concorde. He wasn’t inside five minutes.

  With a groan, Rhett collapsed in the seat. “There. That’s done. Taz, I don’t think I can do more. Would you see everything is shipped?”

  That night, Rhett vanished from the hotel. He was gone a full week, and a gendarme and his captain brought him back. “No, monsieur,” the captain told Taz, “Monsieur Butler has committed no outrages. But the gentleman takes his life in his hands. …” He paused. “In Montfaucon, where we found your friend, gendarmes travel in fours.”

  “Rhett?”

  He coughed. He couldn’t stop coughing, but he waved away Taz’s help.

  “Perhaps Monsieur is ill?” The captain of gendarmes wondered.

  “He is,” Taz said, and gave the man twenty francs.

  If Paris was cold, Glasgow was colder. Taz and Rhett spent their first night at the Great Western Hotel opposite Gallowgate railway station. There weren’t many people in the enormous dining room: a handful of commercial travelers reading as they ate alone, an elderly couple with their grandchild enjoying a celebratory evening out. The old couple consulted carefully before ordering a bottle of the cheapest champagne.

  Rhett picked at his food and drank nothing. In the morning, he was gone.

  Taz visited Glasgow’s hospitals and the central jail, where he was directed to the Gartnavel Lunatic Asylum. After Scarlett’s telegram came, Taz placed an ad in the Glasgow Herald:

  ANYONE KNOWING THE WHEREABOUTS OF MR. RHETT BUTLER—A MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN GENTLEMAN, TALL, WELL-DRESSED, APPARENTLY MENTALITY DISTURBED—CAN CLAIM A SUBSTANTIAL REWARD PROM MR. TAZEWELL WATLING AT THE GREAT WESTERN HOTEL.

  Four days later, a nervous cabman drove Taz to an alehouse in the slums of Glasgow’s East End. “It’s a wee bit risk, man,” he’d advised. “It’d be a wise man who took precautions.”

  Coal smoke was so thick it was dusk at 4:30.

  Tenements loomed over a narrow street lit on one corner by a gaslight’s dirty circle of light. Taz said, “I’ll pay after I see Mr. Butler.”

  The cabman snarled, “I’ll have my dosh now. I’ll not set foot in yon place.”

  “If you want your money, you’ll wait.”

  The cabbie stood in his box to peer up and down the street. A cat squalled in an alleyway.

  “I’ll double your money if you wait.”

  The cabman subsided. “I canna say I will and I canna say I willnay. For God’s sake, man, be quick.”

  The moment he passed through the unmarked front door, Taz’s eyes watered. The low room was blue with smoke and reeked of unwashed bodies. Old stinks had varnished the tin ceiling brown. Thick stools lined the bar; there were benches at the tables. The furniture was too heavy to use as weapons.

  In the back of the dim room, wearing a mink-lined cape, gold nugget shirt studs, and thick gold watch chain, Rhett Butler was at a table with five of the worst ruffians Taz had ever seen.

  “Hello, Taz. Come here and I’ll introduce you. Remember my grandfather, Louis Valentine? Broughton Plantation was purchased by worthies just like these.”

  “God, don’t he go on?” one worthy chuckled.

  Rhett’s clothes were rumpled and he hadn’t shaved, but he was cold sober and the glass before him was untouched.

  “I’ve a cab, Rhett.”

  “The night is young, Tazewell Watling, and I’m discussing love with Scottish philosophers. Mr. Smith, at my left, claims regular thrashings warm the marital bed. Mr. Jones—this sturdy, sandy-haired fellow—holds similar opinions.”

  “Can’t have ’em puttin’ on airs,” Jones affirmed.

  “Certainly not,” Rhett agreed.

  “Rhett, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Taz handed the telegram to Rhett.

  Kill or cure: Those were the words Tazewell Watling thought while his friend read Scarlett’s brief message.

  Staring at the missive, sweat beaded Rhett’s forehead.

  Then with his old litheness, he rose to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, regrettably, all good things must come to an end.”

  Smith objected: “Here, now; where’re you going?”

  Jones got up and tugged his cap over his eyes. “We was goin’ to have us a rare old time.”

  “Somehow”—Rhett chuckled—“I suspected that was your intent.”

  Jones dropped his hand and came up with a thick wooden truncheon. Something sharp gleamed in Smith’s hand. The bartender dropped his rag, hurried out the back, and let the door clunk shut behind him.

  “You’ll stay wi’ us, sir. Just for a wee while.”

  Tazewell drew his revolver from his jacket pocket and pointed it casually at the ceiling. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but our cabman won’t wait.”

  “Good Lord,” Rhett mocked him, “we might have to walk back to our hotel? Good night, friends. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

  Jones’s truncheon dangled in his hand. He grinned. “Aye, sir. Come back anytime, sir. We’
ll be lookin’ for yer.”

  Outside, their cabman was signaling urgently, but Rhett patted his pockets and frowned. “I left my gloves.”

  “For God sakes, Rhett, are you mad?”

  Rhett puzzled for a moment before smiling his once-familiar smile. “Loving is a chancy thing, Taz. You risk your immortal soul.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Drought

  Clayton County was dry. Bindweed was strangling the tender cotton plants. With Big Sam gone and Ashley back at Twelve Oaks, Will Benteen started cultivating before light, trusting his horse to stay in the furrows. Instead of resting at noon, Will hitched a fresh horse and kept working, eating cheese and bread as he walked behind the plow.

  But Will’s plow couldn’t weed the ridges and couldn’t thin the cotton plants to eight inches apart. Hoeing wants human hands. Only Mammy, who was too old, and three-year-old Robert Benteen, who was too young, were spared stoop labor.

  For the hundredth time that morning, Scarlett shook weeds off her hoe. “Wade Hampton Hamilton! Hoe the weeds, not the cotton.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Though he’d severed the plant’s roots, Wade heeled it carefully back into place.

  Scarlett closed her eyes, seeking patience. Dilcey called, “You doin’ all right, Miss Scarlett?”

  Scarlett snapped, “If you’d spend less time gabbing and more time hoeing, we’d get through this field.”

  Wade muttered under his breath, “How can we do that?”

  Which was, Scarlett thought but didn’t say, a good question.

  Spindly cotton plants languished behind the little band of cultivators. Ahead, there were so many weeds, it was hard to spot the cotton.

  Yesterday, Will had told Scarlett they must abandon the upper tract. “We won’t get there before the cotton is strangled, Miss Scarlett. No sense me tillin’ it. I can do more, hoein’ alongside you all.”

  Louis Valentine Ravanel and Beau Wilkes shared a row. Like the grown-ups, Wade had a row to himself. Will Benteen worked two.

  Clouds drifting lazily across the sky chased shadows across their tiny patch of the world.

  Although they no longer went into Jonesboro for church, they quit work at noon on Sunday, and weary, silent children climbed into the wagon. In the heat haze, traces jingled. Will murmured, “Get up now, Molly,” and the horse’s big hooves clopped the dry ground.

  At the horse barn, the children scrambled down, while Pork, Dilcey, and Prissy headed toward the quarters.

  “Suellen, please get the children washed. I’ll help Will with the horses.”

  “Don’t reckon I need help, Miss Scarlett,” Will said.

  “I reckon you do,” Scarlett said.

  Rosemary was briefly puzzled by the black carriage in front of the house. Surely she knew it? “Why, Belle Watling. What a surprise.”

  In her modest brown check dress, Belle might have been any country woman come to call. “I’m sorry to be a bother, Miss Rosemary, but I just had to come.”

  “I’m always glad to see a friend of Rhett’s, Belle. Is it dry in Atlanta? I swear we’re burning up. Please, won’t you come in the house?”

  Belle hesitated at the threshold.

  “Please, come in.” Rosemary led Belle into the cool parlor. Dried sweat coated Rosemary’s skin and made her sticky. “Won’t you sit? Can I fetch some refreshment? We’ve fresh buttermilk. …”

  “Oh, no. I don’t need nothin’. I just come to … tell you, you and Miss Scarlett…” Belle laid her gloves across an arm of the love seat, then picked them up and fiddled with them. Belle took a breath. “Miss Rosemary, you and me, we’ve been friendly, but I believe Miss Scarlett hates me. What I got to say is important, and I’d ’predate your fetchin’ her.”

  Rosemary stepped into the hall to call upstairs. “Wade! Please fetch your mother. Tell her it’s important.”

  Belle amended: “Say it’s life or death.”

  The boy clattered down the back stairs. Rosemary asked Mammy to bring water to the parlor.

  When Rosemary came back into the room, Belle was examining the portrait over the mantelpiece. Startled from her reverie, Belle said, “I guess she was a real lady.”

  “I believe Mrs. Butler’s grandmother was married three times.”

  “I’m sorry to show up without no invitation.” Belle bent to the roses Pork still picked every day. Belle said, “I got to water my roses with well water. Roses don’t care for well water.”

  When Mammy brought the pitcher and glasses, her mouth was set in a tight line. Rosemary forestalled her vocal disapproval. “Thank you, Mammy. The children can take dinner in the kitchen.”

  Mammy mumbled, “Poor Miss Ellen be rollin’ in her grave ….”

  A dirty, sweat-streaked Scarlett untied her sunbonnet as she came into the parlor. “‘Life or death,’ Rosemary? Ah, Miss Watling …”

  “Missus Butler, I wouldn’t have troubled you, but…”

  “You certainly needn’t trouble us anymore.” Pointedly, Scarlett stood aside so Belle could leave.

  “Scarlett…” Rosemary protested.

  Scarlett’s smile was steely. “Dear Rosemary, Louis Valentine is filthy as a chimney sweep. Shouldn’t you see to his bath?”

  “Scarlett, I don’t imagine Belle drove out from Atlanta unless it was important.”

  Scarlett brushed dirty hair off her forehead, went to the hunt board, uncorked the decanter, and poured a brandy. She tossed it back and made a face. “Miss Watling, excuse my manners. You are … unexpected.”

  “This ain’t easy for me,” Belle began. She sipped from her glass. “You’ve got better water than in town.”

  “Belle,” Rosemary said, “what…”

  Belle rolled the cool glass on her forehead. “Miss Rosemary, I wouldn’t be alive today hadn’t been for Rhett Butler. Likely my boy, Tazewell, would be dead, too.”

  “Miss Watling,” Scarlett interrupted. “I’ve been in the field since daybreak. I am filthy and irritable.”

  Belle Watling rested her head on the back of the love seat and shut her eyes. In a dull voice, she said, “Poppa blames Rhett for all his sorrows. Poppa says Rhett lured my brother, Shadrach Watling, into a duel and shot him dead, account of Shad killed that trunk master, Will.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Scarlett demanded.

  “Poppa’s been comin’ by,” Belle kept her eyes shut. “Every Sunday, ten o’clock sharp, Poppa comes by.”

  Isaiah Watling would come up Belle’s walk without noticing how nice she’d kept the lawn, nor her roses, nor the cheery petunias in her window boxes. Belle always had a coffeepot and sweet rolls on the porch in case he’d take something, but he never did. “Mornin’, Poppa.”

  He always came by himself. He left Archie and Josie back in Mundy Hollow.

  He’d sit on the glider, feet flat on the floor so the glider wouldn’t glide. He kept his hat on. “Daughter.” He said the word as if he wasn’t sure she was.

  Isaiah never asked about his grandson, but he didn’t seem to mind when Belle read Tazewell’s letters; his descriptions of the Severn Bore, Notre Dame, and Longchamps Racecourse, where Taz and Rhett met Mr. Degas, a painter. “I think a painting should look like what is painted, don’t you?” (Belle agreed with his commonsensical view.)

  “Think of that, Poppa,” she said. “They got racetracks in France just like we got here.”

  As Belle folded each precious letter, her father always asked, “Does the boy say when they’re comin’ home?”

  “No, Poppa.”

  “Butler can’t hide behind Miss Elizabeth no more.”

  They sat on that porch like any father and daughter on the porch of any house on a perfectly ordinary Sunday morning. Belle picked at a sweet roll.

  Sometimes, Isaiah didn’t say one word. Other times, he recalled the Watling farm in Mundy Hollow, naming every horse and even that old hound dog her brother, Shad, had loved. “Everybody said your mother’s elderberry jam was the best they e
ver ate,” Isaiah said. “I never cared for elderberry myself.”

  He, Josie, and Archie were living just down the road. “The home place is nothin’ now,” Isaiah said. “House ’n’ barn’s fallen in—like we was never there.”

  Isaiah had tried to beat the wickedness out of his son.

  “Shad was hard-hearted,” Belle said.

  “That don’t mean Rhett Butler should have shot him.”

  “I’m your daughter, Poppa.” “I been ponderin’ on that.” The glider squeaked. “You ever consider repentin’?”

  “Miss Watling,” Scarlett interrupted. “Your father and his gang have terrorized us and frightened our field hands away. I don’t know what grievance he imagines he has with me.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t! Archie Flytte hates you, but Poppa don’t think nothin’ about you.”

  “Miss Watling,” Scarlett said, “you said you had a ‘life or death’ matter …”

  Belle set her water glass down. She picked up her gloves and folded them. Softly, she said, “I never thought this’d be so damned hard.”

  “Belle …” Rosemary prompted gently.

  “Miss Rosemary, you know how Poppa felt about your mother. He thought she was a saint on earth. You know Poppa—once he gets an idea in his head, there’s no shakin’ it. Miss Scarlett, Poppa ain’t worried ’bout you, but he’s wanted to kill Rhett for the longest time, and now Miss Elizabeth is passed away and Poppa’s joined up with that Flytte fella and Cousin Josie … it’s bad.”

  “But…” Scarlett said.

  “So long’s Rhett’s across the sea, they can’t do nothin’, so they been botherin’ you so you’ll beg him back.” Belle was anguished. “Whatever you do, Miss Scarlett, please don’t ask Rhett to come home.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Three Widows

  Although the Jonesboro telegraph office was closed Sundays, Scarlett interrupted the telegrapher’s supper and cajoled him until he agreed to accompany her to the railway station, where the telegrapher topped his instrument’s batteries, rolled up his sleeves, tested his signal strength, and sent Scarlett’s frantic warning rattling across the Atlantic.