Rhett Butler's people (46 page)

"Why, yes, I suppose she is." Scarlett. Sunshine and hope and everything he had ever wanted. Grimness and sorrow receded into the past.

The two men clattered down the firehouse stairs, past the sentries into the cold. Exuberance rushed in where Rhett's resistance to Scarlett had once lodged, and he couldn't stop smiling. He called out, "Good morning, sir. Isn't this a grand morning?" to a mud-spattered teamster whose overloaded wagon was mired to its hubs. The teamster gave him a look.

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Rhett tipped his hat to a pair of Atlanta ladies who were not too busy snubbing the hated Yankee soldiers to snub the notorious Captain Butler.

Up the familiar steps, into Federal headquarters, a right turn, then into a roomful of anonymous Yankee soldiers and Scarlett.

When he saw her, Rhett Kershaw Butler forgot who he was and every hurtful lesson he'd learned. They'd been such a long time apart; it seemed a lifetime.

Scarlett wore a moss green velvet gown and a gaily feathered bonnet.

She was in the room with him. She'd come to him. Her smile. Herself. He fought back tears. "Scarlett!" He kissed her cheek. "My darling little sister."

A Yankee captain protested: "Most irregular. He should be in the fire-house. You know the orders."

"Oh for God's sake, Henry," Captain Jaffery replied, "The lady would freeze in that barn."

That the brother and sister might have privacy, Tom Jaffery evicted two clerks from an orderly room that had once been a butler's pantry. Lit by a single window, lighter-colored plaster showed where the plate racks had hung. Sheaves of military orders dangled from nails driven into the wainscoting.

When Rhett bent to kiss Scarlet, she turned her face away.

"Can't I really kiss you now?"

"On the forehead, like a good brother."

"Thank you, no. I prefer to wait and hope for better things."

Rhett Butler felt like a young man again. As if everything were possible, as if the world were brand-new.

Scarlett told him Tara had escaped the War unscathed. She said her son, Wade, and Melly's little Beau were fine, that Tara had an able farm manager in Will Benteen.

"And Mr. Ashley Wilkes?"

Carelessly, Scarlett said that Mrs. Wilkes was glad to have Ashley home again. Will Benteen was courting her sister Carreen. Suellen was still chasing that old maid Frank Kennedy.

Rhett chuckled, "Old Frank may be a bore, but he's got money."

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Scarlett made a face.

She paused and then spoke so softly, Rhett had to lean forward to hear. "Mother passed away. Of the fever. She was ... dead when I came home to Tara." Her eyes brimmed.

"I am so sorry, my dear. Your father, Gerald?"

Scarlett looked away. "Gerald keeps himself busy."

Was that a false note in her voice? Perhaps her father wasn't as well as she claimed. Gerald must be getting on in years.

It didn't matter. Scarlett had come to see him. She who'd spurned him when he was rich and free had come to see an impoverished prisoner the Yankees were threatening to hang.

He told her she looked lovely. He asked her to turn around.

As she spun, her lovely green dress wafted, exposing lace-trimmed pantalets. He clasped his hands behind his back to keep himself from devouring her then and there.

Scarlett told him that Tara's faithful negroes had hidden the plantation's livestock in the woods, where Sherman's bummers couldn't find them, and Tara'd cleared twenty bales of cotton last year and things would be even better this year -- but (she sighed) it was so terribly dull in the country. She'd become accustomed to city life.

Rhett wondered how Scarlett could be bored, unless she'd gone through all the country boys.

"Oh Rhett, I didn't come all the way out here to hear you talk foolishness about me. I came because I'm terribly distressed about you. When will they let you out of this terrible place?"

"And when they do?" he asked softly, leaning closer.

Scarlett blushed like a maiden. As he leaned toward her, she raised her hand tenderly to his cheek. It was scratchy. Puzzled, he lowered her hand and turned it over. Scarlett's palm was raw and cracked and her fingernails were broken. He stared, uncomprehending. She didn't resist when he took her other hand and turned it over, too. Just as his hands had been when he labored in Broughton's rice fields.

Rhett licked his lips. As he had soared, he plummeted. His heart shriveled into something hard and mean. Dully, he asked, "So you have been

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doing very nicely at Tara, have you? Cleared so much money on the cotton, you can go visiting. Why did you lie to me?"

Deep in her astonishing eyes he saw a flare -- like a hunted vixen's in the lamplight. "They can hang me higher than Haman for all you care." Rhett let her hands drop. What a tawdry room this was. What had been generous as hope became a dirty little closet inhabited by Tunis Bonneau's murderer and a female cheat.

Money. She wanted money. Sure, she wanted money. She talked fast, her words tumbling over one another. Tara, her beloved Tara, was to be sold for unpaid taxes, and Scarlett didn't have a cent. She'd fashioned her velvet dress from Tara's window curtains. "You said you never wanted a woman as much as you wanted me. If you still want me, you can have me. Rhett, I'll do anything you say, but for God's sake, write me a draft for the money."

What a wonder she was! Scarlett O'Hara had priced his love. Three hundred dollars -- he could enjoy his faithless darling for the price of a London suit or a pretty good horse. When you thought about it, three hundred was a bargain. Some Paris courtesans charged more than that. "I haven't any money," Rhett said wearily.

She attacked him. She sprang to her feet with a cry that quenched the hum of soldiers' voices in the next room. Rhett clamped a hand over her mouth and lifted her off her feet. She kicked, tried to bite. She tried to scream.

It took all his strength to hold her. Rhett thought, She would do anything. She is just like me.

Scarlett's eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted.

Yankee officers rushed in to revive the young lady. Captain Jaffery fetched a glass of brandy.

When Scarlett O'Hara left that place, she was a defeated child, lost in her fake finery and a bonnet whose gay feathers -- Rhett now knew -- had been plucked from the tail of a barnyard rooster.

That night, Rhett dreamed he murdered a little girl. Put his rimfire pistol against her forehead and pulled the trigger.

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Two weeks later, when Captain Jaffery brought news of Scarlett's elopement, he was puzzled. "But didn't your sister tell you she planned to marry?"

For a moment, Rhett didn't trust himself to speak.

The captain clapped Rhett's shoulder. "Perhaps Miss Scarlett thought her big brother might not approve of her new husband! Nothing to worry about: Frank Kennedy is thoroughly respectable." Captain Jaffery scratched his ear. "I'm a little surprised a woman like your sister would fall for fussy old Frank -- and wasn't Frank engaged to marry another?" He smiled ruefully. "A woman's heart" -- Jaffery put his hand over his own -- "who can understand it?"

"If Kennedy's got three hundred dollars, I can."

The forsythias were blossoming when Rufus Bullock brought Rhett's pardon. It bore the signature of a Connecticut Senator who was not known as a forgiving man. Rufus asked, "Rhett, that letter you wrote him -- in heaven's name, what did you say?"

Rhett smacked dust from the hat he hadn't worn in months and set it at a rakish angle. "Rufus, the Senator made a fortune during the War manufacturing the cotton linings of Federal officers' coats. Did you ever wonder where the Senator found that contraband cotton?" Rhett Butler grinned broadly. "Rufus, let us leave this place. It is spring."

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Chapter

Chapter Thirty-one

A Southern Belle

The summer was droughty. The corn crop was poor, the cotton hardly worth ginning. White preachers couldn't explain to their flocks why God had abandoned the Confederate republic. Some preachers contemplated suicide; others quit the pulpit. Negro preachers and parishioners penned eloquent petitions to the United States Congress seeking their promised rights. Some prominent ex-Confederates -- General Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Virginia's General William Mahone among them -- said negroes must have voting rights, arguing that the South must be rebuilt by blacks and whites together. But Georgia's General John B. Gordon and Tennessee's General Nathan Bedford Forrest used their wartime prestige to restore the prewar order.

Yankee idealists bought tickets South to promote negro education and citizenship. Republican congressmen who'd lost friends and kin to Confederate bullets sought revenge. Opportunists wanted to roll the Southern corpse over to see if there was anything underneath worth stealing.

The U.S. Army turned over railcars and locomotives to the same railroad companies they'd recently wrecked. Although Southern railroads had to pay their workers with sides of bacon and bags of flour, track was furiously relaid, bridges and tunnels were rebuilt, and if passengers sometimes had to transfer to wagons for a stretch, the trains were running.

With the profits of Frank Kennedy's store, Scarlett O'Hara Kennedy bought a sawmill. Financed by torrents of Yankee money, Atlanta was rebuilding at a breakneck pace. Brick, Portland cement, and lime fetched premium

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prices, and wagonloads of north Georgia pine rolled down Marietta Road to the Kennedys' sawmill. Proper Atlantans sniffed that Mrs. Kennedy "wore the pants in

that

family." But Scarlett was too busy to care. She bought a second sawmill and persuaded Ashley Wilkes to run it.

When Scarlett and Frank Kennedy's daughter, Ella, was born, Scarlett's daughter strongly resembled her homely husband.

When Gerald O'Hara died, Scarlett's money and her farm manager, Will Benteen, were already rebuilding Tara.

One morning, as Belle Watling dug deeper than usual in her bureau drawer, she was struck by a possibility that made her gasp.

Belle's laundry woman had run off with Dr. Jewett's Scientific Remedy Medicine Show, which Belle didn't learn until MacBeth returned her laundry unlaundered. At the bottom of her bureau Belle found a garment wrapped in parchment paper. She pulled back a corner to reveal the rich gray fabric of the dress Rhett had given her long ago. Belle sat down, breathless with calculation:

Scarlett O'Hara was Scarlett Kennedy now. They had a daughter. The Kennedy marriage should last until Scarlett was an old woman.

The rest of that day, Belle went about the house humming and singing nonsense songs until Minette complained that she, Minette, had been a habitué of New Orleans's Opera St. Louis and Belle's "omp-pah-pahs" and "oh doodah days" were hopelessly unmusical.

"Oh Minette," Belle replied happily. "Can't expect a soiled dove to sing like a dove, now can you?"

To the dismay of several older customers who had favored a comfortable (less demanding) paramour, Belle quit receiving gentlemen callers. On a diet of greens, bread, and water, her waistline shrank.

One afternoon, MacBeth drove her to the Wilkeses' home.

"Go 'round back," Belle said nervously. "Through the alleyway."

Outside the gate of the Wilkeses' kitchen garden, Belle hesitated. Who was she to ask anything of anybody?

Why, she thought, I am Ruth Belle Watling; that's me. Her courage plucked up, she brushed past Melanie's fall greens and baskets of just-dug potatoes.

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When she knocked at the back door, a curtain pulled back and a solemn little boy peered at her. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. In response to Belle's reassuring smile, the child let the curtain fall and ran to the front of the house. "Mama, Mama!"

"What is it, Beau honey? Is something wrong?"

Belle heard a woman's footsteps. "Is someone here, Beau? How good you are to tell me."

The woman who opened the back door was thin -- too thin -- and her dark eyes were enormous. "Why... Miss Watling. What a pleasant surprise!

"Mrs. Wilkes, I didn't want to shame you, so I come 'round back."