Rhett Butler's people (43 page)

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"Sheriff ..."

The man wouldn't be sidetracked. "Course, there's Bill McCracken. When the provosts come to conscript Bill, Bill run into the woods. Bill can't read nor write, but might be that won't matter. And he's never spent a day sober, but might be that won't matter, neither. Some sheriff. Where'd you know Archie Flytte?"

"Forrest's division."

"Uh-huh. Archie and his bunch been terrorizin' our coloreds. Freed-men's Bureau come out twict account of Archie Flytte. Course no white man would testify and no coloreds dared to." He scratched his head. "Last boy they killed, first thing they did was cut off that boy's member. You tell me, mister, why they'd do such a thing. Then they laid him on a heap of chestnut rails and burned him to death. Boy was already dead when they hung him." The sheriff jabbed a thumb toward the cells. "Nigger probably told you he didn't do nothin'."

"Would it make any difference?"

"Prolly not."

"What are you going to do?"

"I telegraphed Atlanta. Maybe they'll send some Bluebellies, maybe not. It gets dark about six; that's when I go home for dinner. I b'lieve I'll stay home afterward."

"The woman who complained? Where can I find her?"

"Little Lisa? Oh, she's a shame. She's a cryin' shame."

Bert's Saloon was across the tracks in Darktown. Bert, a fat man with greasy black hair, said Rhett would find Lisa out back. "Second door from the left." He opened his mouth in a soundless laugh. "No accountin' for tastes."

The whores' cribs were in a long, low clapboard building. Crude doors cut in the walls didn't disguise its origin as a chicken house. When Rhett knocked, a muffled voice told him to go away.

"Miss?"

"Goddamn it, go away."

The smell was worse inside. Where walls met the ceiling, latticework

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provided light and air. A spindly washstand held a milk-glass pitcher. Mended, neatly folded cotton stockings were stacked in a wooden crate turned on its side. Long-dead flowers protruded from a liniment bottle. An empty bottle lay beside the bed. The lump under the bedcovers moaned and a woman's hand emerged to wave him away. "Get out," she said without believing any man would ever do what she wanted.

Rhett poured brandy from his flask into its cup and folded the woman's fingers around the cup. Her head emerged from the covers. She brought the cup to her mouth, chattered it against her teeth, and swallowed. She waited to see if it would stay down. The moment passed and she tapped the cup, and Rhett refilled it and she swallowed again. She sat up and cuffed hair out of her eyes. She was naked. "Thanks, mister. You're a pal."

She fingered her cheeks and jaw to see if she'd suffered injuries she couldn't remember. Her eyes slipped in and out of focus. "My God," she said, "I know you."

"Lisa?"

"Captain Butler? I sure as hell never thought to see you no more." When she smiled, she was young again. "You got any more brandy?"

Rhett emptied his flask and she drained it like medicine. "You want to turn around while I get my clothes on?" She giggled. "Listen to me, little Miss Touch-Me-Not." Frowning, she added, "It's because I knew you before, don't you see."

Rhett went to the open door and lit a cigar. The cigar smelled good.

Behind him Lisa said, "How's that boy of yours? What's his name? Tuck?"

"Tazewell is safe. He's in school now."

"He was a good boy. I liked him. You can turn around now. You got another flask? My stomach's rilin' me."

Rhett shook his head.

She put her hands on her hips. "Look at me, Captain! Ain't I the god-damnedest mess?"

Her dress was a plain yellow cotton shift. She was barefoot. Rhett said, "Come with me. I'll buy you supper."

The girl snickered. "Me in the Railroad Hotel dining room? Wouldn't

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that be something? Naw, Captain. Bert has an understanding with Sheriff Talbot. Bert's girls don't cross the tracks and Sheriff don't come down here."

"Weren't you on the depot platform?"

"I can pick up fellows on the platform." Her brow furrowed. "That why you come? The nigger?"

"He claims you accused him falsely, that he did nothing disrespectful."

"Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Captain, Bert'd be glad to sell you a bottle and you and me could get better acquainted. Your son and me were gettin' right friendly. Might be you'd enjoy havin' a girl your boy wanted? I ain't but eighteen."

Rhett couldn't hide his wince.

"Little rough for you, Captain? Ain't you a man of the world? Whores can't be no big surprise to Captain Rhett Butler."

"Why did you lie?"

She balled her fists. "What makes you think I lied?"

"I've known Tunis Bonneau all my life."

"Well, I reckon you're gonna have to find yourself a new nigger."

Rhett opened his wallet and took out greenbacks. "Sometimes we Southerners talk about the North as if none of it was worth a damn. There are small towns on the Maine seacoast where a Confederate widow with a little cash might make a new life for herself. Or maybe she'd go west -- young women are scarce out west. A pretty woman could pick and choose."

"Why don't you go buy that bottle," Lisa said flatly.

"Don't you want more than this?" Rhett gestured at her crib.

Her features closed up tight. "You bastard. You want me to tell folks I lied? Tell everybody in town Lisa has got herself lower than a low-down, dirty nigger?"

As a gray-faced Rhett Butler came up the courthouse walk, Sheriff Talbot was leaving. Men looked at the clouds or anywhere but at the sheriff, who didn't say a word as he brushed past. "Where you been, Captain Butler?" Archie asked. "With a whore." Archie's smile shrank. "I don't hold with whores."

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As the sun dropped behind the courthouse roof, bottles appeared.

Archie said, "I b'lieve Sheriff Talbot was hoping the Bluebellies would get here before dark."

Rhett asked, "Why wait for dark?"

"Some things ain't fittin' for women and children to see."

"You always were fastidious."

"And you always liked to use two-bit words. I guess you figured they'd make me mad. Captain, you can't make me mad. No way in hell you can make me mad. You saved my life, and maybe my life ain't worth much, but you're the only one ever saved it."

"What if I told you that boy didn't do anything?"

Archie was genuinely puzzled. "He's a nigger, ain't he?"

As Rhett went inside, one fellow flung a rope over a stout limb and others tore down the rail fence around a free colored's house. The free colored had left for the North and the poor whites who'd rented his house didn't object.

The sheriff had locked his file cabinets and desk. His wastebasket was set neatly on the desktop for the negro sweeper. Rhett suspected it'd sit there for a good while.

In the dim cell, Tunis was on his knees, praying.

"Lisa won't change her story."

"Don't reckon it'd make much difference if she did."

"She wouldn't take money."

"Might be you could get some of it to Ruthie and my boy?"

"I'll take care of Ruthie and the boy."

"You don't owe me. Wasn't Captain Butler tied down the steam-escape valves. Captain Bonneau done that." A faint smile flickered over Tunis's face. "That night, I knew the Federals would be waiting for us to come out. Over the Cape Fear bar, we was doing twenty-two knots. My boat was the fastest ever was."

"You'd still have the

Widow,

hadn't been for me."

"You never did like nobody to do nothing for you, do you, Rhett? Always got to be Captain Butler's hands on the wheel. Well, Rhett, my boat's sunk and I'm gonna die. Ain't nothing you can do to change that."

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"You always were a hardheaded son of a bitch."

"The negro who ain't hardheaded'll be a nigger all his life. I ain't scared of dyin'. But I fear what they're gonna do to me before I die. When you see Ruthie, tell her I love her. Nathaniel Turner Bonneau -- darned if that boy's name don't have a ring to it."

Rhett said, "It surely does."

Outside the jail, men's voices rose like surf building before a storm.

Tunis smiled. "Ain't it funny what a man thinks about? I'm scared, so dam -- darned -- scared. And all I can think about is happy times. I'm remembering first time I laid eyes on Ruthie. It was a Baptist picnic and I bought Ruthie's cake. It was an apple cake. I remember how I felt when little Nat was born and how it was that last time we run the Charleston blockade. I never said, Rhett, how you was: Captain Rhett Butler standin' on his wheel housing and all the Federal shots and shells on this earth couldn't make him step down."

"Some things stick in the mind," Rhett said quietly. "Did you know Will, the trunk master?"

"Daddy Thomas spoke high of Will."

"Will was a better father to me than my own father. I couldn't save him, either."

The two men were silent until Tunis swallowed and said, "There's one thing you can do for me, Rhett. I don't want them to do to me what they're goin' to. I need you ... I need for you to shoot me." Tunis rubbed his lips, as if cleansing the words he'd spoken. His smile was sudden, nervous, luminous and his words tumbled over one another, as if he might not have time to finish. "Remember when we was kids and took my daddy's skiff all the way down to Beaufort? Darned if Daddy didn't tan my hide! Worth it, though -- just the two of us and a following wind. I never saw a sky so blue. Rhett, it's worth living a man's whole life if just once, just one time, he gets to see a sky that blue."

The men who became beasts that night at the Clayton County courthouse had been soldiers who killed and had friends killed at their sides. Death was no stranger. Tonight was the nigger's turn; tomorrow

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might be theirs. Though some in that mob were crazy or simple or drunk, others were respectable men acting from what they saw as duty.

If before the War these respectable men hadn't "slipped down to the quarters" to enjoy a black girl, they knew men who had. Unmanned by defeat and afraid of the future, these men could not imagine that black men would not do to white women what white men had done to their women.

Archie Flytte told them, "You and you and you, go get the nigger. Any more, we'll be getting in each other's way. Somebody splash lamp oil on the bonfire."

When they heard the shot -- more like a popgun than a pistol -- Archie understood right away. "Now wait a damn minute," he said. "Just wait one goddamned minute."

Archie ran through the jail to the cell where Tunis Bonneau lay dead on the stone floor.

When Rhett Butler popped a match to light his cigar, the flame shook.

"Damn you, Butler." Archie kicked the cell door. "Goddamn you, Rhett Butler. Why the hell did you do that for?"

Rhett Butler said, "The nigger was disrespectful to a white woman."

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Chapter

Chapter Twenty-

e

igh

t

In Federal Custody

The mob swarmed down the corridor into the cell: a fug of unwashed bodies, whiskey fumes, and rage. A balding middle-aged man kicked Tunis's head again and again. "Damn you, nigger! Damn you!"

An indignant graybeard pronounced, "Dead ain't no zample to nobody! Dead nigger ain't no zample."

They eyed Rhett Butler from the corners of their eyes like wolves circling a campflre. Rhett kept his hand on the revolver in his coat pocket.

Archie Flytte's hard voice slashed through their mutterings. "Captain Butler, he didn't mean nothin' by it! Captain Butler's a gentleman. You know ary gentleman with a lick of sense?"

"He should take the nigger's place," a disappointed boy spluttered.