Rhett Butler's people (3 page)

"They'll never believe this in Amity," Tom Jaffery whispered.

The sun strained upward until a white space opened between its rim and the riverbank. In a clear voice, John Haynes called, "Gentlemen! Turn! Fire!"

Rhett Butler's hair lifted to a wind gust off the river. Butler pivoted, presenting a fencer's profile as his pistol rose.

Shad Watling fired first, an explosion of white smoke at the muzzle when the hammer struck home.

Nine years earlier.

At his father's impatient gesture, Langston Butler's elder son prepared for his caning. He removed his shirt and folded it over a straight-backed chair.

The boy turned and set his palms flat on his father's desk. The fine leather surface gave infinitesimally under his weight. He fixed his eyes on his father's cut-glass inkwell. There can be a world of pain in a cut-glass inkwell. The first searing blow caught him by surprise. The inkwell was half-full of blue-black ink. Rhett wondered if this time his father might not be able to stop. When the boy's sight blurred, the inkwell seemed to float in a mist of tears.

This time, too, his father did stop.

Hands curled in frustration, Langston Butler hurled his cane to the floor and shouted, "By God, boy, if you weren't my son, you'd feel the bullwhip."

At twelve years of age, Rhett was already tall. His skin was darker than his father's and his thick jet black hair hinted at Indian blood.

Although the boy's back was a mosaic of livid stripes, he hadn't begged.

"May I dress, sir?"

"Your brother, Julian, is dutiful. Why must my elder son defy me?"

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"I cannot say, sir."

Langston's office was as spare as Broughton's family quarters were opulent. The broad desk, a straight-backed chair, inkwell, blotter, and pens were its entire furnishings. No engravings or paintings hung from the picture rail. Ten-foot-tall undraped windows offered an unimpeded panorama of the plantation's endless rice fields.

The boy took his white chambray shirt from the chair and with a just perceptible wince draped it over his shoulders.

"You refuse to accompany me when the legislature is in session. When prominent men meet at Broughton, you vanish. Wade Hampton himself asked why he never sees my elder son."

The boy was mute.

"You will not drive our negroes. You refuse to learn to drive negroes!"

The boy said nothing.

"Indeed, it is safe to say you reject every proper duty of a Carolina gentleman's son. Sir, you are a renegade." With his handkerchief, Langston wiped sweat from his pale forehead. "Do you think I relish these punishments?"

"I cannot say, sir."

"Your brother, Julian, is dutiful. Julian obeys me. Why won't you obey?"

"I cannot say, sir."

"You cannot say! You will not! Nor will you accompany your family to Charleston. Instead, you swear you'll run away."

"Yes, sir, I will."

The angry father stared into the boy's eyes for a long time. "Then, by God, let the fevers have you!"

Next morning, the Butler family departed for their Charleston town house without their elder son. That night, Dollie, the colored midwife, rubbed salve into the welts on the boy's arm. "Master Langston, he a hard man," she said.

"I hate Charleston," Rhett said.

On the river plantations, the rice seed was clayed and planted in April and trunk gates were opened for the sprout flow. The rice would be flooded three more times before harvest in September. Maintenance and

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operation of the great and lesser trunk gates were so vital to the crop that Will, Broughton Plantation's trunk master, ranked in the slave hierarchy second only to Hercules.

Although Will obeyed Master Langston and Isaiah Watling, he obeyed no other man, including Shad Watling, the overseer's twenty-year-old son.

Will had a cabin to himself. He owned a table, two chairs, a rope bed, and three cracked Spanish bowls that Louis Valentine Butler had taken from the

Mercato.

A decent year after Will's first wife died, Will jumped the broomstick with Mistletoe, a comely girl of fifteen.

Fearing the deadly fevers, Low Country planters shunned their plantations during the hot months. When Langston came out from the city to inspect his crop, he arrived after daybreak and departed before dark.

Barefoot and shirtless, his son hunted, fished, and explored the tidal marshes along the Ashley River. Young Rhett Butler was educated by alligators, egrets, osprey, rice birds, loggerheads, and wild hogs. The boy knew where the negro conjure man found his herbs and where the catfish nested. Sometimes Rhett stayed away from Broughton for days on end, and if his father visited during one of Rhett's absences, the elder Butler never asked after his son.

Overseer Watling supervised the floodings and hoeings of the tender rice plants. Watling determined when dike-burrowing muskrats must be poisoned and the rice birds shot.

Although they were more resistant to fever than their white masters, rice negroes worked knee-deep in a subtropical swamp, and inevitably some sickened. In Broughton's dispensary, Overseer Watling's wife, Sarah, and young Belle dosed victims with chinchona bark and slippery elm tea. The white woman and her child helped Dollie deliver babies and salved the backs of the men and women their husband and father had whipped.

Some negroes said Master Langston was less likely to pick up the bull-whip than Boss Watling. "Master Langston ain't gonna get no work out of a man laid up in the dispensary."

Others preferred Isaiah Watling. "Boss Watling, he hard all right. But he don't lay no whip on you less'n he got to."

Young Master Rhett pestered his father's servants with practical

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questions: Why were the trunk gates made of cypress? Why wasn't the rice hoed after the harvest flow? Why was the seed rice winnowed by hand? The negroes ate the fish and game Rhett brought and the white boy spent Sundays, the negroes' day of rest, in the quarters. Rhett accompanied Will on trunk inspections, and often at noontime the two shared a meal on the riverbank.

When he felt the urge, Shadrach Watling visited the quarters after dark. Usually, Watling sent the girl's family away: "Might be you could take a meander down by the woods." Sometimes Shad gave the husband or father a demijohn of popskull to while away the hour.

But Mistletoe, the trunk master's new wife, didn't want to fool with the overseer's son, and when Shad Watling wouldn't leave his cabin, Will tossed him into the street, a circumstance that delighted the other negroes.

When Langston Butler heard what Will had done, he explained to Overseer Watling that negroes must not laugh at the Overseer's son, lest they laugh at the Overseer next and ultimately at the Master himself.

Three hundred negroes lived on Broughton with a handful of whites, some of them women. What prevented those negroes from rising up and murdering those whites? Langston Butler told Isaiah Watling that revolt could not be suppressed after negroes have begun muttering and sharpening their hoes, their rice knives. Rebellion is quelled by crushing the first defiant glance, the insolent whisper, the first disrespectful snicker.

"Will's a good nigger," Watling said.

"Your boy will do the punishing."

"Shadrach?" Watling's eyes were anthracite. "Have you been satisfied with my work?"

"It has been satisfactory."

Watling bowed his head and muttered, "I got to tell you, Master Langston. Will had just cause. My Shadrach ... Shadrach ain't no account."

"But he's white," Master Langston replied.

The sky was unseasonably clear that August morning; the air was dead and heavy. Broughton Plantation's rice mill was brick; its winnowing house was

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whitewashed clapboard. The dairy, negro houses, and infirmary were tabby -- cement of crushed oyster shells and lime. Tall and windowless, with its thick iron-banded door, Broughton's meat house was as forbidding as a medieval keep. Every Sunday morning, standing before this vault of plentitude, Overseer Watling distributed the week's rations to the servants shuffling past. "Thank you, Boss Watling." "We sure does thank you, Boss."

Isaiah Watling was the giver of all good things, as well as the source of all punishment.

Broughton's whipping post was a blunt black cypress stub five feet six inches high and eighteen inches in diameter. An iron ring was placed where a man's wrists might be fastened.

Will had asked the young Master to intercede, and Rhett confronted the overseer. "Watling, I am giving you an order!"

Isaiah Watling studied the boy as if he were something curious washed in on the tide. "Young Butler, when you defied Master Butler to stay, I asked him who was Master when he was off in town. Master Butler said I was to follow his orders, that you weren't to give no orders. Now, young Butler, the niggers is here to see justice done and to learn respect. Will's insolence bought him two hundred."

"It'll kill Will. Damn it, Watling, it's murder."

Isaiah Watling cocked his head as if listening for something faint and far away. "The nigger's your father's property. Very few of us, young Butler, get to be our own men."

His son Shad's bullwhip coiled lazily before he popped a trumpet-vine blossom off the well house. The negroes stood silently, men to the fore, women and children behind. Tiny children clung to their mothers' shifts.

When Isaiah Watling led Will out of the meat house, the trunk master blinked in the brightness. When the overseer tied Will's wrists, Will didn't resist.

Rhett Butler had not yet come into his adult courage and could not watch his friend be killed. When Watling bared Will's back, Mistletoe fainted and Rhett bolted for the river, deaf to the whip crack and Will's grunts, which became screams.

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Rhett jumped into his skiff, loosed the mooring line, and let the river take him away. A rainsquall descended and he got soaked through. His boat went where the current willed. Rain drummed in the boy's ears and he blinked rain from his eyelids.

Rhett Butler swore that when he was a man, he would never be helpless again.

Rain fell on the boy. Rain fell harder. Rhett couldn't see the bow of his boat. Water lapped at its thwarts.

His sail exploded into tatters. He lost an oar. When a drifting cypress trunk threatened to roll the skiff, he broke his other oar fending it off. He inspected the stub as if, had he the wit, he might yet row with it. He bailed until his arms ached. When he shouted to ease the pressure in his ears, the wind snatched his shout away.

The river broached the trunks and flooded rice fields, and sometimes Rhett's skiff was in the channel and sometimes scudding above what had been acres of Carolina's finest golden rice.

Suddenly, as if he'd been washed into a different universe, the wind and rain stopped. In the calm, Rhett's skiff drifted gently through brightness at the tip of a whirling funnel that rose up, up into a heaven, which was so dark blue, Rhett imagined he saw stars. He had heard about the hurricano's eye. He never thought he'd see one.

The current bumped the waterlogged skiff against a jumbled shoreline of uprooted, broken trees. Rhett tied his skiff to a branch before clambering inland toward the sound of hammering.

As a young man, Thomas Bonneau had been freed by the master who had fathered him. Thomas Bonneau's white father deeded his son five acres of land on a low rise beside the river, where Thomas built a modest tabby house, whose thick, homely walls had resisted previous hurricanoes. Bonneau and a boy about Rhett's age were on the roof, nailing shingles.

"Look, Papa, yon's a white boy," the boy, Tunis, said.

The two slid to the ground and Thomas greeted the half-drowned

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Rhett. "Come with us now, Young Master. These walls has sustained us thus far. God grant they sustain us a mite longer."

Inside his one-room house, Thomas Bonneau's wife, Pearl, and two younger children were piling trunks, fish traps, a chopping block, and chicken coops onto a rickety mound to clamber onto the ceiling joists.

"It ain't hurricano's rain nor wind kills you," Bonneau explained as he took his joist. "Ol' hurricano raises up a mighty tide what drowns you."