Rhett Butler's people (49 page)

Dr. Meade was probing a wound in Ashley Wilkes's shoulder. White-lipped with pain, Melanie Wilkes's husband lay on the daybed while, kneeling beside him, Rhett dropped one bloody cloth into a bucket and patted the wound with a clean one.

Hugh Elsing hissed, "We wanted to teach the niggers to keep their black hands off our womenfolk."

Dr. Meade scrabbled through his bag for forceps. "Wilkes," the doctor said, "this will hurt like blazes. Do you want leather to bite? You mustn't cry out."

With a terse nod, Ashley refused.

The big elm tree's branches whisked the clapboard like a broom. Rhett looked up. "Sorry, Belle. I didn't know where else to bring them. The Yankees were on our heels."

"And you?" Belle asked. "Was you with 'em, Rhett?"

"Me? A Klansman?" He snorted. "I was playing stud tonight with two captains too drunk to keep their mouths shut. Seems they were keeping an eye on these gentlemen. Our brave Klansmen meant to ride through Shantytown shooting any negro too slow to get out of their way. The Yankees set a trap.

"I rode to warn them, but they were in the trap already." Rhett shrugged. "So I sprang it before the Yankees could. Mr. Colt's revolvers make a lovely racket. The Yankees thought I was a brigade!"

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Ashley bucked under Dr. Meade's probe and Rhett used his whole strength to hold him down.

Hugh Elsing persisted, "The Fourteenth Amendment gives the vote to negroes and takes it from every man who saw Confederate service. We are beneath the conqueror's boot...."

Rhett flared. "If it wasn't for your womenfolk, I'd let you all hang. What in pluperfect hell did you think you were doing?"

Belle's front door slammed and officers careened into the yard below the window, serenading. "Just before the battle, Mother ..."

The room got so deathly still, the

plunk

of the bullet into the bucket made everyone jump. Rhett stifled Ashley's moan. Below, a Yankee stepped around the corner to pee and hummed as his water splashed the ground.

Belle touched Rhett's arm. "Mr. Wilkes ... will he -- "

"He'll live. Christ, what a mess! There are two dead men in the basement of the old Sullivan house. I stuffed their robes up the chimney. They called themselves 'The Wednesday-Night Democrats.' Clever, yes? Under that guise, they met to decide which uppity negro needed their attentions." His face was grim. "The fools could hang for this night's work."

Grandpa Merriwether's face was so red, Belle feared he'd burst a blood vessel. "Get us horses, Butler! We can pay. We'll run tonight. We'll run to Texas."

Belle couldn't forget how kind Mrs. Wilkes had been. She asked, "Couldn't you just say they were here?"

Rhett snorted. "Atlanta's fanciest gentlemen in a sporting house?"

"My girls ... my Cyprians will swear they were here all night. They come upstairs -- every Wednesday night, you said? -- just a few girls. The Wednesday-Night Democrats are extremely discreet."

Rhett mulled her idea before breaking into the biggest grin Belle had ever seen on his face. He chuckled. "My, my, Miss Belle. What

will

people say?"

Dr. Meade peeked outside and drew the curtain.

Rhett gestured to the frightened, thoroughly subdued Wednesday-Night Democrats. "Atlanta's most respectable citizens, dear me. Dear, dear me. Belle, you're as clever as you are good." He cleared his throat. "Boys, I sure as hell hope you're good at charades."

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After Dr. Meade bandaged Ashley's shoulder, Rhett fashioned a sling and draped the man in his cloak. Rhett patted raw whiskey on Ashley's pale cheeks.

Calm as General Lee issuing battle orders, Rhett spelled out everyone's roles in the performance. "Wilkes," Rhett said, "if we can't convince them, you're hung. The Yankees will be waiting at your house, so we must be very drunk, falling-down drunk. Elsing, can you play the drunken fool? I know you can play the sober one."

When Rhett splashed Ashley's shirt with whiskey, the reek overpowered the blood smell.

"Dr. Meade? Mr. Merriwether? You'll have starring roles!"

"What about me?" Henry Hamilton demanded.

Rhett thought for a minute before shaking his head. "Sorry, Henry, all our speaking parts are cast. You'll have to be stage manager."

Rhett and Hugh Elsing supported Ashley down the back stairs and out where MacBeth saddled their horses. The cold air revived Ashley and he mounted without assistance. In the saddle, he swayed for a perilous instant before he straightened to say, "Do or die trying."

After they rode away, Belle pressed a double eagle into her bouncer's hand. "MacBeth, you don't know nothin'."

MacBeth's eyes were old with understanding. "No, ma'am, I never knew that Miz Kennedy was skeered this afternoon and I never heard no Klansmen was gonna shoot up Shantytown and I never heard no Yankees was goin' to bushwhack 'em. Never heard nothin' about Captain Butler savin' the Kluxers. No, ma'am. I'ze just a dumb nigger. I don't know nothin'."

"You said ... Mrs. Kennedy?"

"Miz Kennedy what owns the sawmills."

"Was she ... hurt?"

"Naw, Miss Belle. Two thiefs grabbed at her, but that Tara nigger, Big Sam, he kilt one 'n' chased the other'n off. Skeered Miz Kennedy plumb to death."

"Just 'skeered'?"

"In Shantytown, one skeered white lady is a world of trouble."

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Listening for Federal patrols, the three riders slipped through Atlanta's dark streets and alleyways. As they neared Ashley Wilkes's home, the night air seemed to thicken. Wind swirled dust at their horse's hooves.

"Sing, my thespians, sing! Make a joyful noise unto the Yankees!" Rhett leaned back and bellowed Sherman's hated marching song:

"How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound,

How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,

How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,

While we were marching through

Georgia."

"Elsing! Damn it! Sing!"

Shouting and weeping Sherman's anthem, three drunks rollicked up to the house where Captain Tom Jaffery and his men were waiting to arrest Klansmen with blood on their hands.

At the Chateau Rouge, Belle directed Act Two. Dr. Meade tried to refuse his role. "I'm to brawl in a ... a sporting house? I've never

been

in a sporting house!"

"More's the pity. You're in one now. Might be you'd druther hang?"

When Meade patted too little whiskey on himself, Henry Hamilton doused him so thoroughly, Grandpa Merriwether pocketed his pipe. The thoroughly respectable Henry yanked their shirts out of their trousers, popped Grandpa Merriwether's top vest button, and tugged Dr. Meade's collar askew.

Hands on hips, Belle surveyed them. "Gents, you sure look the part. I 'spect you got hidden talents."

Shortly afterward, two of Atlanta's first citizens, apparently drunk as lords, tumbled into Belle's parlor, punching each other ineffectually. Belle yelled for MacBeth to fetch the provosts. Since some officers in the parlor were supposed to be searching for Klansman, this occasioned a general exodus as, getting into the spirit of things, Meade and Merriwether punched and slapped each other, shouting invective rarely heard in the Chapeau Rouge.

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The provosts found two gentlemen rolling in Belle's flower bed. Their muffled threats and curses were indistinguishable from muffled laughter.

Protesting that hers was an orderly house, Belle wrung her hands as the provosts separated the combatants and arrested them. From the corner of her mouth, Belle told MacBeth, "You don't know nothin'."

"I'ze an ignorant nigger," MacBeth assured her.

Two hours after the provosts left, Archie Flytte brought a buggy around the back of the Chapeau Rouge with the bodies he'd collected from the Sullivan house.

"Rhett fooled the Yankees?" Belle asked anxiously.

Archie spat.

Belle was weak-kneed with relief. "Mrs. Wilkes's husband ... he's safe?"

"I reckon."

Belle eyed him curiously. "You don't like Captain Butler, do you?"

"Used to be beholden to Butler. I work for Mrs. Wilkes now."

MacBeth and Archie laid out two dead men in the vacant lot behind the Chapeau Rouge. Archie placed a recently fired pistol beside each man's cold right hand and doused their uncaring faces with whiskey. He asked MacBeth, "Nigger, you scared of the Klan?"

"Oh yes, sir," MacBeth replied. "I mighty scared."

"Don't got to be scared of these two." Archie nudged a corpse with his foot. "They's 'gentlemen.'"

He tucked the empty bottle into a dead man's armpit.

The

Atlanta Journal

reported that two Atlanta gentlemen had gotten drunk, quarreled, and shot each other. The city was shocked and fascinated.

Belle and her Cyprians were summoned to Federal headquarters, where they swore on the holy Bible that the suspected Klansmen, Ashley Wilkes, Hugh Elsing, Henry Hamilton, Dr. Meade, and Grandfather Merriwether, had been in the Chapeau Rouge on the night in question, carousing with the notorious Captain Butler, as was their Wednesday-night custom. The group called themselves the Wednesday-Night Democrats to deceive their

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wives. "They raise hell at my joint, and they're cheapskates to boot," Belle wailed.

The Yankee officers couldn't keep grins off their faces. The Atlantans who'd snubbed them and their wives had been dramatically and publicly brought low.

Afterward, when the Yankee officers' wives smiled condescendingly to the wives of the Wednesday-Night Democrats, those proud Southern women would gladly have seen Rhett Butler hung.

Rhett Butler had rewritten the story. He'd transformed Frank Kennedy from a Klansman killed during a Shantytown raid to a quarrelsome drunk who died in a stupid fight in a vacant lot behind a brothel. For Frank's funeral, Rhett Butler dressed in a dark blue London suit and carried a rakish malacca cane.

"Do you got to go?" Belle asked listlessly.

"Not go? Not go, my dear? Aren't I the scoundrel who foiled the wicked Yankees while making Atlanta's best citizens look like hypocrites? Of course I'm going. I intend to crow."

"Miss Scarlett will be there?"

"Where else would you expect Frank's grieving widow to be?"

Rhett had a red rose in his lapel. Belle wondered where he'd gotten it. Her roses were still in bud.

"Rhett, you're not going to ... Not... again?"

He kissed her forehead. As a brother might.

The funeral was at three that afternoon and Rhett didn't come back to Chapeau Rouge afterward. That evening, Belle sat at her dressing table, staring at the silly, vulgar woman looking back at her. A lady? What the hell had she been thinking?

Minette stuck her head in. "Miss Belle,

chère

. It is payday...."

"Yeah," Belle said. She unfastened her blue faille dress and let it fall to the floor. She plucked the cameo ear bobs from her ears and dropped them in a little velvet bag. She pinched color into her cheeks, and with her carmine lip rouge, she slashed a whore's mouth over her own.

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Chapter

Chapter Thirty-four

Some Damn Mistake

Rhett was in England when MacBeth asked Belle if he could store some old furniture in Rhett's office. Belle frowned. "No, you can't. Captain Butler will want his office when he comes back."

MacBeth said, "No'm. Captain Butler ain't comin' back here. He be with Miz Kennedy when he come back."

"You're a damn fool. He gave up on her years ago."

MacBeth said, "Uh-huh."

Belle got a strange note from Taz.