Rhett Butler's people (35 page)

"But Eulalie, I

am

a man of no consequence."

Many years ago, when Eulalie's husband died, she thought she had lost everything. She'd never dreamed she had so much more to lose. Willy was dead and her daughters had run off with Sherman's soldiers. Eulalie and Frederick got so hungry, they'd killed Eulalie's little dog, Empress -- and then been unable to eat her.

From the rear platform (Rosemary didn't consider getting off the train), Rosemary begged the militia captain to let the Wards board. "Ma'am," he said, "ain't no place for 'em. Less'n you hop off and make room."

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As the overloaded train pulled out of the depot, Rosemary looked anywhere but at the refugees on the platform.

Where the tracks had been torn up by Sherman's cavalry and hastily re-laid, the ramshackle train crept no faster than its passengers, who got off and walked alongside. That night, male passengers held lanterns for the trainmen bracing long bars under the sagging rails to level them as the cars tottered over.

Twelve hours and ninety miles later, the train reached Albany, Georgia. Rosemary paid five dollars for three corn pones and, with other weary, unwashed refugees, slept on the depot floor until daybreak.

The Selma and Meridian train was a miracle. Untouched by the war, its cars weren't shot up, and its locomotive's bulbous smokestack didn't have a single bullet hole -- not one! Although the paint was faded, every car was dark green, with black trim.

The train click-clacked over level rails at a breathtaking thirty miles an hour. The tubercular veteran beside Rosemary had traveled extensively in New England before the war and announced, "By golly, ma'am, we might as well be in Massachusetts!"

This paragon train ended at Demopolis, where the passengers were ferried across the Tombigbee River. From there, they hiked four miles to a log platform, where a wheezing locomotive and familiar mismatched, bullet-pocked cars awaited them. In Meridian, Mississippi, Rosemary took a hotel room and slept like the dead. The Mobile and Ohio train she boarded next morning delivered her to Corinth, Mississippi, at dusk. That night, she slept in the depot. At two o'clock the following afternoon, the Memphis and Charleston train brought supplies, conscripts, and Rosemary Haynes into Decatur, Alabama, the end of the line.

The train disgorged barrels of gunpowder and brined beef, boxes of minie balls, and conscripts onto the platform. The youngest conscript was three days past seventeen, the eldest forty-nine. Most of the conscripts hadn't anything to say, but one fellow in a beaver-collared frock coat confided to Rosemary Haynes that he was too valuable to the war effort to be expended in battle, and a bucktoothed boy chewed his thumbnail and said

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he'd desert first chance he got. When they stepped down in Decatur, provost's men formed the conscripts into ranks and told them that aspiring deserters should be able to outrun a bullet.

After five hard days' travel, Rosemary was grateful for the unvibrating, untrembling platform beneath her feet. She relinquished her carpetbag to old Joshua. "Have you been waiting long?"

"I reckon."

She almost didn't recognize the horse tied to the hitching rail. The knacker man would make no profit on him.

"What have you done to Tecumseh?" Rosemary cried. "Oh my poor boy!"

"He old, Miss Rosemary," Joshua replied. "He born in them olden times."

"He was sound until he went into the army. You were a good boy, weren't you, Tecumseh?"

The gelding lifted his head and nickered a welcome, and Rosemary thought that was the saddest thing of all. "Joshua, Tecumseh wants an apple."

"Miss Rosemary, whatever oats or apples or corn we gets, we eats. When horse dead, I reckon we eat him, too."

Since the railroad bridges north of Decatur had been burned, Hood's supplies and conscripts were off-loaded and freighted by ox, mule wagon, or shank's mare to Columbia, Tennessee. Sometimes, Rosemary rode Tecumseh. From pity, she usually walked. Army supply wagons spilled off the narrow road, cutting ruts through adjacent fields. There were no fences: their rails had fed soldiers' campfires, and if any livestock survived, they were hidden deep in the woods. That night, Rosemary slept beneath a supply wagon.

In the morning, rain plucked the last leaves off the trees and overflowed the ruts. Tecumseh couldn't carry a rider anymore. A little after dark, they entered Pulaski, Tennessee, where Rosemary bought some oats, which the gelding picked at. Joshua slept in a stall with the horse.

Rosemary's hotel room was unheated, but by doubling her threadbare blanket, she was warm enough. She dreamed of John and Rhett on a June day when the sun was so bright and Rhett had brought picnic baskets with

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more food than they could eat and Tecumseh grazed in timothy so tall, it tickled his belly.

Although there were trains running out of Pulaski, the pale-faced young provost wouldn't let Rosemary board. "Ma'am, I couldn't let you on this train were your pass signed by President Jefferson Davis himself."

"I have traveled from South Carolina to see my husband in the army."

"So far as that?" The young provost quoted, " 'Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusts in her.... Her children arise up, and call her blessed.' "

"The Federals killed my daughter. Meg would have been six next March."

"Ma'am, I'm sorry to carry on. I was a seminarian before the war."

"Do you still believe in God?"

The young man looked away. "I guess I've gotten used to it."

Rosemary, Joshua, and the stumbling Tecumseh passed haphazard piles of discarded Federal equipment: artillery horses shot in their traces, overturned wagons. Files of Federal prisoners were marched south. The prisoners wore Confederate rags, their guards sported warm blue Federal uniforms.

In Columbia, Tennessee, Rosemary bought corn pones and brown beans for herself and Joshua.

That evening, as they walked toward Franklin, Tennessee, Rosemary heard distant thunder as if a thousand wagons were rumbling across a wooden bridge.

"They's fightin'," Joshua said.

"They can't be fighting. The Federals are running away. Why would they be fighting?"

"They's fightin' ."

As light faded from the sky, the rumble grew louder and Rosemary could distinguish individual explosions. Muleteers pulled off the road to let fleeing Confederates by.

Rosemary and Joshua bucked a tide of ambulances, blank-faced deserters, and walking wounded. Provost officers cursed and flailed at the men

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with the flats of their swords. The deserters ducked or left the road and kept moving south.

The frosty Milky Way stretched across the heavens to the horizon, where it drowned in the ruddy penumbra of guns.

"I am Captain John Haynes's wife. He's with General Stahl's command. Sir, do you know my husband?"

"Sorry, ma'am."

The firing stopped.

"Rhett Butler, my brother, he's with General Forrest. Do you know Rhett Butler?"

"Ma'am, I served with General Bates."

Joshua stopped on the roadside and took off his hat. "Miss Rosemary, this here horse ain't goin' no farther."

Tecumseh stood with legs splayed, head down.

"Me and horse come a far piece with you and Mister John," Joshua said. "But we ain't comin' no more."

Rosemary walked into the starry night alone.

Dim yellow lanterns bobbed where two great armies had fought. Here and there on the gentle rolling landscape, a campfire flared. The air tasted like burned pepper and Rosemary smelled blood: rich and sour and salty.

The faces of the men tending the wounded were black from powder and some were as bloody as the men they were ministering to. "My husband is with General Stahl's brigade," Rosemary appealed.

The boy's eyes shone like a minstrel's in blackface. "Ma'am, I believe General Stahl's been kilt. They was in the center of the line, twixt the house and the cotton gin."

"Where are his men now?"

"Ma'am," the boy said cautiously, "I believe most of General Stahl's men are layin' twixt the house and the cotton gin."

Dawn washed out the lanterns and dimmed the campfires. Wounded men begged for water. The earth bristled with frost.

Rosemary tried to staunch a wounded officer's bleeding, tying his belt

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above the mangled hole in his thigh. Frost glistened white on the blood he'd spilled. He convulsed and gasped and was astonished by death.

The sun rose. Civilians came from Franklin to help and marvel.

What was John Haynes wearing? Was he still stout? Had he grown a beard? Rosemary would have recognized her husband instantly by his walk or the angle at which he carried his head, but in the jumble of dead men, she couldn't distinguish one from another.

There were more dead on the gentle rise before the abandoned Federal breastworks.

A wounded boy lifted himself onto one elbow.

"I've no water," Rosemary said. "I'm so sorry."

Some of the dead wore grim expressions, some were determined, others were savoring a joke. Three weeping solders knelt beside a dead comrade.

To another boy, she said, "There'll be someone to help you soon. I'm sorry. I've no water. I'm sorry."

Rosemary intercepted litter bearers. "I seek my husband. May I lift the cloth from his face?"

The Federal breastworks were fronted by a spiked abatis where dead men were impaled, frozen in final attitudes. An elderly woman asked if Rosemary had seen her grandson, Dan Alan Rush. "We call him Dan Alan, account of his daddy was Dan, too."

"Mother, I'm sorry. I haven't seen your grandson. I am seeking my husband, Captain John Haynes."

"My grandson was a bright spark." The woman smiled. "They said he lies hereabouts."

Two riders came along the face of the breastworks.

Rosemary waved frantically. "Oh dear God! Rhett! Rhett!" she shouted.

The horsemen galloped and her brother jumped down and took her in his arms. "Rosemary! Oh Rosemary, I wish you had not seen this."

"Oh Rhett! Thank God! Dear Brother, you are alive!" Rhett's uniform was torn and filthy, but he wasn't wounded. Merciful heaven!

"I haven't found John. Rhett, do you know where he is?" Rosemary pushed hair off her eyes. "John may be hurt...."

"Yes, he may be hurt."

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"Likely he's kilt." Rhett's companion spat tobacco juice.

"Shut up, Archie," Rhett said.

The leather-faced man beside her brother had the tip of his wooden leg in a makeshift scabbard. He had a poor man's teeth and the lips of a hard one.

Rhett said, "Rosemary, this was the worst thing I've ever seen."

"Then you ain't never been to the penitentiary," his companion said.

"Archie" -- Rhett pointed -- "go through the Federal position and collect any repeating rifles you find."

As Archie left, Rhett said, "The Chinese believe if you save a man's life, you are obligated to that man forever." He took his sister's icy hands and rubbed them. "Dear Rosemary, do you have nerve for this?"

At her nod, Rhett boosted her onto his horse.

The ditch before the Federal breastworks brimmed with dead men, packed so tightly that some were upright, unable to fall. Soldiers and civilians were dismantling the tableau to get at wounded men underneath.

Rosemary asked, "Does John have a beard now?"

"He is clean-shaven."

Rosemary had never thought she'd see an exposed human brain or an adolescent boy with a neat scorch mark around the bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Dizzy, she clasped the horse's neck and pressed her face into its coarse mane. "I despair, Rhett. Dear Brother, John and I were so far apart."

"Rosemary, John often spoke of you. He never stopped loving you."