Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig

The Barnes & Noble Review

On a crisp November night in New York City, Donald McCaig -- ad copywriter turned sheep farmer turned author -- stood reading in his ten-gallon hat from Rhett Butler's People, his sequel, prequel, and companion to Gone with the Wind. He'd reached the scene in which Rhett, having declared the slim chances of a Southern victory, retires to Twelve Oaks' library and accidentally overhears Scarlett's ill-fated declarations of love to Ashley Wilkes. Rhett's cynical assessment: "Irish immigrant's daughter and the aristocrat. She's good enough to toy with but not to marry." He then watches Scarlett give Ashley the resounding slap that stings his cheeks and sears his soul just about the time guns fire on Fort Sumter. The scene, here shown in reverse angle from Rhett's perspective, shows that Rhett has already been taken by Scarlett. " 'My God.' Rhett moistened dry lips. 'She's just like me!' "

The work McCaig read to an audience of Upper East Side book lovers is the product of 4 years of his own life and 12 years of work between the publisher St. Martin's and the Margaret Mitchell Estate on an authorized sequel to Mitchell's 1936 work of spitfire, nostalgia, and a South swept away by Sherman's army. It's the literary equivalent of a modern wing added to an old plantation: the commission from the estate demanded that McCaig enter and renovate something sensitive, time-bound, and ultimately political. His zoning board was made up of somewhat persnickety preservationists: the Mitchell Estate preemptively balked at interracial or same-sex relationships in the text, and at use of the n-word. A shocking update akin to Alice Randall's 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone, which parodies the novel from the point of view of slaves, was out of the question. This sequel had to emerge within conscripted notions of propriety, and play nice in its historic neighborhood.

The issue, then, is what McCaig proposes to add and what to remodel. And those aren't small questions when you consider the book's target audience: the official launch of the book took place not in Manhattan but at the Center for Southern Literature, located (where else?) in the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta. The event was a lavish one, including a tour of Mitchell's own version of Tara. The scale of this celebration points up the status of Gone with the Wind as something of a national heirloom that must be treated with appropriate reverence. And yet that additional wing has been seen by many as necessary. According to spokespeople for the Margaret Mitchell Estate: "The public itself wanted another sequel." McCaig himself brings a perhaps less burdened perspective to the task. He admits that he'd never read the novel before the publisher approached him, but was moved by the book once he did, and intrigued by the enigma of Rhett, a character he noted was "almost more an attitude than a man."

But what kind of attitude? And whose? What, we might ask, does the public want from Rhett? It might seem at first gander that we're simply hungry to revisit Rhett and Scarlett, the star-crossed lovers who embrace as Atlanta burns but never seem able to love each other at the same time. The book does resolve that cliffhanger, but it treats other anxieties as well -- and not as Alexandra Ripley's book Scarlett did, by transporting the action to Ireland. McCaig instead transposes the issues at play to a change within the character of Rhett himself. The man still has a swagger, it's just a question of what the swaggering means. The earlier alpha-male Rhett was a renegade mostly because he seemed dangerously willing to transgress sexual mores: we hear that he wasn't received in Charleston. He fled often to Belle Watling's house of ill repute. His past perhaps involves an illegitimate child. And he was a blockade runner, which showed that his primary allegiance in the divided world was to himself. In this way, he's perfect for Scarlett. Together they're a captivating -- if difficult -- analogue for the capitalist self-interest that, it seems, will get the fallen South back on its feet after the visionary "Cause" is defeated.

McCaig's updated Rhett goes on being self-interested, but he's not much of a sexual rogue. He visits brothels in his salad days (he is Rhett Butler!), but he's actually quite respectable. Damn it, he's loved Scarlett from the moment he set eyes on her -- and once assured of her love, he settles happily into a life that might be downright suburban. If he were living today, he might even buy them both an SUV. As for Scarlett, once she makes up her mind to love Rhett, she ends up beaming while she pours cream in his coffee. So what's a rebel to do? Herein lies the transposition: in this story, it's Rhett's position on race that securely positions him as a renegade. The real way that we know that this Rhett doesn't give a damn is that he is willing to be friends with black people, to work beside them and to be in business as equals with them. He's even -- as the book shows -- willing to kill his black friends in acts of friendship designed to keep other white people from lynching them. Some reviewers have called this moving. I have to admit it made me squirm.

So, while the book purports to be here resolving the unfinished question of whatever happened to Scarlett and Rhett, it can't avoid engaging with the stage on which their encounter takes place: the memory of the Civil War, and America's racial legacy. It sets out to scratch one itch and ends up having to apply balm to a wound, and to re-forge the mold its characters are poured in. But the result is a book that rewrites a great deal without actually discussing much; McCaig's renovation of Rhett's world is ultimately incomplete. It's convenient that Rhett is friends with the black man he eventually has to kill, but there are still quite a few Porks and Prissies in McCaig's telling, equally convenient -- dumb for comic mileage, or literally dying to save their white mistresses. While slavery was a horror for those who fled in the wind of Sherman's passage, the house slaves of Tara linger. Slavery was awful, goes the subtext, but our heroes were so likable that their people hung around just to make cornbread. There's no miscegenation onstage, but Scarlett and Rhett toss up their heels at an octoroon ball. Times being what they were, there are limits to Rhett's activism: he can promise a black preacher to help raise funds for black schools, and even invite him to a party -- providing the preacher doesn't stay too long.

We live in a literary moment plush with retellings -- recently including March, Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer Prize–winning revisitation of the characters of Little Women, or Finn, Jon Clinch's dark and lyric look at the politics of love and race that swirl through the universe of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, the question of how to make sense of our troubled 19th-century American inheritance is fertile ground for authors of the early 21st. It will be interesting to see how a book like Gone with the Wind (albeit an early-20th-century work that looks back with longing at the antebellum period) keeps being reimagined -- unless McCaig's book is really an answer to whatever longings provoke a book like this into being in the first place. I suspect that our longing to make sense of history -- especially difficult histories -- runs deeper than this, and that part of the reason that we need such books is that we are a country that is ambivalent about memory and constantly wishes to remake its own myths.

As for McCaig: he's offered an engaging read, albeit with wooden bits here and there. And, for all its flaws, the original still can dole out its great intoxications. Scarlett, with her combination of corsets and entrepreneurial moxie, is the steel magnolia who looms above them all -- broken, unbreakable, and transcendent. As for our hero: lest we rest too much on the laurels of our newly renegade Rhett, I'd like to think that the way he's been rewritten is only the best remaking McCaig could provide the Rhett he was given. I'd certainly hope it's not the best that can be imagined for our gallant -- or renegade -- heroes now. --Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of The Misremembered World, a collection of poems. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

From Barnes & Noble

It was the rabid enthusiasm of Margaret Mitchell's fans that forever terminated the possibility of another Gone with the Wind book. The Atlanta author was so unnerved by the persistence of the novel's devotees that she reportedly vowed to never write another word. In any case, her death in 1949, 13 years after the book's publication, forever closed the question of a sequel. Or so it seemed until 1991, when the Margaret Mitchell Estate sanctioned a sequel, Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett. Now, after a protracted search, the estate has fully authorized this stylish retelling of the Gone with the Wind saga through the eyes of Scarlett's beloved Rhett Butler. Find yourself a cozy nook and a cup of hot cocoa, and get ready to curl up for a warm winter read.

From the Publisher

Fully authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, Rhett Butler's People is the astonishing and long-awaited novel that parallels the Great American Novel, Gone with the Wind. Twelve years in the making, the publication of Rhett Butler's People marks a major and historic cultural event.

Through the storytelling mastery of award-winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfold. Through Rhett's eyes we meet the people who shaped his larger than life personality as it sprang from Margaret Mitchell's unforgettable pages: Langston Butler, Rhett's unyielding father; Rosemary, his steadfast sister; Tunis Bonneau, Rhett's best friend and onetime slave; Belle Watling, the woman for whom Rhett cared for long before he met Scarlett O'Hara at Twelve Oaks Plantation, on the fateful eve of the Civil War.

Of course, there is Scarlett. Katie Scarlett O'Hara, the headstrong, passionate woman whose life is inextricably entwined with Rhett's: more like him than she cares to admit; more in love with him than she'll ever know…

Brought to vivid and authentic life by the hand of a master, Rhett Butler's People fulfills the dreams of those whose imaginations have been indelibly marked by Gone with the Wind.

Donald McCaig is the award-winning author of Jacob's Ladder, designated "the best civil war novel ever written" by The Virginia Quarterly. People magazine raved, "Think Gone with the Wind, think Cold Mountain." It won the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction and the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction.

"Rhett Butler's People covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in Gone with the Wind. Readers will…get inside Rhett's head as he meets and courts Scarlett O'Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time." --The New York Times

"McCaig is a bred-in-the-bones storyteller." -Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Geraldine Brooks

The New York Times - Stephen L. Carter

McCaig's prose captures something of the charm and smoothness of the original. He understands that the power of Mitchell's narrative arose because she set the romance against momentous events. He sensibly places the postwar struggle over white supremacy at the heart of his story. But mostly his goal is to rehabilitate Rhett. The Klan question, the woman he dishonored, the rumors of a bastard in New Orleans, the money supposedly pilfered from the Confederate treasury—all of this McCaig explains away while keeping the story moving at a nice clip, faster even than the original.

Publishers Weekly

Was it strictly necessary to our understanding of Gone With the Wind's dashing hero to flesh out his backstory, replay famous GWTWscenes from his perspective, and crank the plot past the original's astringent denouement? Perhaps not, but it's still a fun ride. In this authorized reimagining, Rhett, disowned son of a cruel South Carolina planter, is still a jaunty worldly-wise charmer, roguish but kind; Scarlett is still feisty, manipulative and neurotic; and the air of besieged decorum is slightly racier. (Rhett: "My dear, you have jam at the corner of your mouth." Scarlett: "Lick it off.") But it says much about the author's sure feel for Margaret Mitchell's magnetic protagonists that they still beguile us. McCaig (Jacob's Ladder) broadens the canvas, giving Rhett new dueling and blockade-running adventures, and adding intriguing characters like Confederate cavalier-turned-Klansman Andrew Ravanel, a rancid version of Ashley Wilkes who romances Rhett's sister, Rosemary. He paints a richer, darker panorama of a Civil War-era South, where poor whites seethe with resentment, and slavery and racism are brutal facts of life that an instinctive gentleman like Rhett can work around but not openly challenge. McCaig thus imparts a Faulknerian tone to the saga that sharpens Mitchell's critique of Southern nostalgia without losing the epic sweep and romantic pathos. The result is an engrossing update of GWTWthat fans of the original will definitely give a damn about. (Nov.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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Read an Excerpt

Chapter One Affairs of Honor One hour before sunrise, twelve years before the war, a closed carriage hurried through the Carolina Low Country. The Ashley River road was pitch-black except for the coach’s sidelights, and fog swirled through the open windows, moistening the passengers’ cheeks and the backs of their hands. "Rhett Butler, damn your cross-grained soul." John Haynes sagged in his seat. "As you like, John." Butler popped the overhead hatch to ask, "Are we near? I wouldn’t wish to keep the gentlemen waiting." "We comin’ down the main trunk now, Master Rhett." Although Hercules was Rhett’s father’s racehorse trainer and Broughton’s highest-ranking servant, he’d insisted on driving the young men. Rhett had warned, "When he learns you’ve helped, Langston will be angry." Hercules had stiffened. "Master Rhett, I knowed you when you was just a child. Was me, Hercules, put you up on your first horse. You and Mr. Haynes tie your horses behind. I’ll be drivin’ the rig tonight." John Haynes’s plump cheeks belied his uncommonly determined chin. His mouth was set in an unhappy line. Rhett said, "I love these marshes. Hell, I never wanted to be a rice planter. Langston would go on about rice varieties or negro management and I’d not hear a word for dreaming about the river." Eyes sparkling, he leaned toward his friend, "I’d drift through the fog, steering with an oar. One morning, I surprised a loggerhead sliding down an otter slide—sliding for the pure joy of it. John, have you ever seen a loggerhead turtle smile? "I don’t know how many times I tried to slip past a sleeping anhingawithout waking her. But that snaky head would pop from beneath her wing, sharp-eyed, not groggy in the least, and quick as that"—Rhett snapped his fingers—"she’d dive. Marsh hens weren’t near as wary. Many’s a time I’d drift ’round a bend and hundreds of ’em would explode into flight. Can you imagine flying through fog like this?" "You have too much imagination," Rhett’s friend said. "And I’ve often wondered, John, why you are so cautious. For what great purpose are you reserving yourself?" When John Haynes rubbed his spectacles with a damp handkerchief, he smeared them. "On some other day, I’d be flattered by your concern." "Oh hell, John, I’m sorry. Fast nerves. Is our powder dry?" Haynes touched the glossy mahogany box cradled in his lap. "I stoppered it myself." "Hear the whippoorwill?" The rapid pounding of the horses’ hooves, the squeak of harness leather, Hercules crying, "Pick ’em up, you rascals, pick ’em up," the three-note song of the whip-poorwill. Whippoorwill—hadn’t John heard something about Shad Watling and a whippoorwill? "I’ve had a good life," Rhett Butler said. Since John Haynes believed his friend’s life had been a desperate shambles, he bit his tongue. "Some good times, some good friends, my beloved little sister, Rosemary…" "What of Rosemary, Rhett? Without you, what will become of her?" "You must not ask me that!" Rhett turned to the blank black window. "For God’s sake. If you were in my place, what would you do?" The words in sturdy John Haynes’s mind were, I would not be in your place, but he couldn’t utter them, although they were as true as words have ever been. Rhett’s thick black hair was swept back off his forehead; his frock coat was lined with red silk jacquard, and the hat on the seat beside him was beaver fur. John’s friend was as vital as any man John had ever known, as alive as wild creatures can be. Shot dead, Rhett Butler would be as emptied out as a swamp-lion pelt hung up on the fence of the Charleston market. Rhett said, "I am disgraced already. Whatever happens, I can’t be worse disgraced." His sudden grin flashed. "Won’t this give the biddies something to gossip about?" "You’ve managed that a time or two." "I have. By God, I’ve given respectable folk a satisfying tut-tut. Who has served Charleston’s finger pointers better than I? Why, John, I have become the Bogeyman." He intoned solemnly, " ‘Child, if you persist in your wicked ways, you’ll end up just like Rhett Butler!’ " "I wish you’d stop joking," John said quietly. "John, John, John…" "May I speak candidly?" Rhett raised a dark eyebrow. "I can’t prevent you." "You needn’t go through with this. Have Hercules turn ’round—we’ll enjoy a morning ride into town and a good breakfast. Shad Watling is no gentleman and you needn’t fight him. Watling couldn’t find one Charleston gentleman to second him. He pressed some hapless Yankee tourist into service." "Belle Watling’s brother has a right to satisfaction." "Rhett, for God’s sake, Shad’s your father’s over-seer’s son. His employee!" John Haynes waved dismissively. "Offer some monetary compensation…." He paused, dismayed. "Surely you’re not doing this… this thing … for the girl?" "Belle Watling is a better woman than many who condemn her. Forgive me, John, but you mustn’t impugn my motives. Honor must be satisfied: Shad Watling told lies about me and I have called him out." John had so much to say, he could hardly talk. "Rhett, if it hadn’t been for West Point…" "My expulsion, you mean? That’s merely my latest, most flamboyant disgrace." Rhett clamped his friend’s arm. "Must I enumerate my disgraces? More disgraces and failures than…" He shook his head wearily. "I am sick of disgraces. John, should I have asked another to second me?" "Damn it!" John Haynes cried. "Damn it to hell!" John Haynes and Rhett Butler had become acquainted at Cathecarte Puryear’s Charleston school. By the time Rhett left for West Point, John Haynes was established in his father’s shipping business. After Rhett’s expulsion and return, Haynes saw his old friend occasionally on the streets of town. Sometimes Rhett was sober, more often not. It troubled John to see a man with Rhett’s natural grace reeking and slovenly. John Haynes was one of those young Southerners from good families who take up the traces of civic virtue as if born to them. John was a St. Michaels vestryman and the St. Cecilia Society’s youngest ball manager. Though John envied Rhett’s spirit, he never accompanied Rhett and his friends—"Colonel Ravanel’s Sports"—on their nightly routs through Charleston’s brothels, gambling hells, and saloons. Consequently, John had been astonished when Butler came to the wharfside offices of Haynes & Son seeking John’s assistance in an affair of honor. "But Rhett, your friends? Andrew Ravanel? Henry Kershaw? Edgar Puryear?" "Ah, but John, you’ll be sober." Few men or women could resist Rhett Butler’s what-the-hell grin, and John Haynes didn’t. Perhaps John was dull. He never heard about amusing scandals until Charleston society was tiring of them. When John repeated a clever man’s witticism, he invariably misspoke. If Charleston’s mothers thought John Haynes a "good catch," maidens giggled about him behind their fans. But John Haynes had twice seconded affairs of honor. When duty came knocking, it found John Haynes at home. Broughton Plantation’s main trunk was a broad earthen dike separating its rice fields from the Ashley River. The carriage lurched when it quit the trunk to turn inland. John Haynes had never felt so helpless. This thing— this ugly, deadly thing—would go forward whatever he might do. Honor must be satisfied. It wasn’t Hercules driving the team; it was Honor’s bony hands on the lines. It wasn’t .40-caliber Happoldt pistols in the mahogany box; it was Honor—ready to spit reproaches. A tune sang in John’s head: "I could not love thee Cecilia, loved I not honor more"—what a stupid, stupid song! Shad Watling was the best shot in the Low Country. They turned into a brushy lane so infrequently traveled that Spanish moss whisked the carriage roof. Sometimes, Hercules lifted low-hanging branches so the rig could pass beneath. With a start, John Haynes recalled the story of Shad Watling and a whippoorwill. "Ah," Rhett mused. "Can you smell it? Marsh perfume: cattails, myrtle, sea aster, marsh gas, mud. When I was a boy, I’d get in my skiff and disappear for days, living like a red indian." Rhett’s smile faded with his reverie. "Let me beg one last favor. You know Tunis Bonneau?" "The free colored seaman?" "If you see him, ask him if he remembers the day we sailed to Beaufort. Ask him to pray for my soul." "A free colored?" "We were boys on the river together." Indeterminate gray light was filtering into the carriage. Rhett looked out. "Ah, we have arrived." John consulted his pocket hunter. "Sunrise in twenty minutes." The field of honor was a three-acre pasture edged with gloomy cypresses and moss-bedecked live oaks. The pasture vanished in the fog, inside which a voice was crying hoarsely, "Sooey! Soo cow! Soo cow!" Rhett stepped down from the carriage, chafing his hands. "So. This is my destination. When I was a boy dreaming of glories awaiting me, I never dreamed of this." Cattle bawled inside the fog. "We wouldn’t want to shoot a cow." Rhett stretched. "My father would be furious if we shot one of his cows." "Rhett…" Rhett Butler laid a hand on John Haynes’s shoulder. "I need you this morning, John, and I trust you to arrange matters properly. Please spare me your sound, kindly meant advice." John swallowed his advice, wishing he hadn’t remembered about Shad Watling and the whippoorwill: After Langston Butler built Broughton’s grand manor house, his overseer, Isaiah Watling, moved his family into the original Butler home, which was convenient to the rice fields and negro quarters. Huge live oaks, which had been saplings when the Butlers first arrived in the Low Country, shaded the small, plain farmhouse. Nesting in a live oak, that whippoorwill welcomed them from twilight until dawn. Apparently, Belle, the Watling girl, thought the bird was seeking a mate. Her mother, Sarah, said the bird was grieving. The question of whether the bird was flirting or weeping was mooted at daybreak, not long after they moved in, when a shot blasted through the house. When his mother rushed into his bedroom, Shad Watling’s smoking pistol lay on the windowsill. "Fool bird won’t rise me up no more," Shad Watling grunted. In poor light at sixty paces, Shad Watling had shot the tiny whippoorwill’s head off its body. John Haynes asked Rhett, "You’ve heard about that whippoorwill?" "Just a yarn, John." Rhett scratched a match on his boot sole. "Shad Watling has killed before, Rhett." The match sputtered and flared as Rhett lit his cigar. "But only negroes and men of his class." "Do you believe your gentle birth will turn a bullet?" "Why, yes," Rhett said solemnly. "Hell yes! Gentle birth’s got to be good for something!" "Comes somebody," Hercules spoke from his elevated seat. Breathing hard, a young man emerged from the fog. His frock coat was folded over his arm and his trouser knees were wet where he’d stumbled. "Darn cows," he confided. He shifted his jacket and offered his hand to John Haynes, then thought better of it and made an awkward bow instead. "Tom Jaffery. Amity, Massachusetts. At your service, gentlemen." "Well, Tom." Rhett smiled. "It seems your Charleston visit will be a memorable one." Jaffery was two or three years younger than Rhett and John. "They’ll never believe this in Amity." "Lurid tales, Tom. Lurid tales are the South’s principal export. When you describe us to your friends, remark the devilishly handsome, gallant Rhett Butler." Rhett’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. "If I were telling the tale, I wouldn’t mention the cows." "Has your principal arrived?" John asked the young Yankee. Tom Jaffery gestured at the fog bank. "Watling and that Dr. Ward, too. They don’t care for each other." John Haynes took the younger man’s arm, walking him out of Rhett’s earshot. "Mr. Jaffery, have you seconded these affairs before?" "No, sir. We don’t hardly do this kind of thing in Amity. I mean, my grandfather might have done it, but nowadays we don’t. I’m a novice, so to speak. My aunt Patience passed to her Heavenly Reward and she bequeathed me a sum, so I set out to see the country. Tom, I says to myself, if not now, for goodness’ sake, when? So there I was, admiring your Charleston harbor, which is, if I might say so, every bit the equal of our famous Boston harbor. Anyway, there I was when Mr. Watling approached me and asked was I a gentleman, and I said I certainly hoped so. When Mr. Watling asked if I would second him, I thought, Tom, you’ve come to see the country, and see the country you shall. I’ll never get a chance like this in Amity." John Haynes didn’t tell the younger man that Shad Watling’s choosing a Yankee stranger to second him was a calculated insult. "Are you familiar with your duties?" " We seconds make sure everything happens regular." John Haynes eyed the young Yankee thoughtfully. "Seeking reconciliation between the principals is our primary duty," he said with the regret of the man who has failed that duty. "Oh, my principal isn’t contemplatin’ reconciliation. My principal says he anticipates shootin’ Mr. Butler in the heart. He and Mr. Butler are old acquaintances." "It will be light soon. We generally let sunrise be our signal." "Sunrise suits you, suits us." "When the sun comes over the horizon, the gentlemen choose their pistols. As the challenged party, your man chooses first. Shall we load now?" John Haynes braced the mahogany box on the carriage fender, unlatched it, and removed a pistol. The sleek knurled butt felt alive in his hand, as if he’d clutched a water moccasin. "As you see, the pistols are identical. While you observe, I’ll charge one pistol. You will charge the second." John poured powder, set a round lead ball into an oiled cloth patch, and rammed it home. He placed a cap under the hammer and eased the hammer to half cock. Excerpted from Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig Copyright © 2007 by Stephens Mitchell Trusts. Published in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

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A Deathwatch
As Melanie Wilkes was dying, Rhett Butler waited in the parlor of his mansion on Peachtree Street, listening to the clock.

It was October. A dark, drizzly afternoon.

His glass of cognac had been distilled from grapes Napoléon's armies might have passed. It tasted like ashes.

The Governor of Georgia, Senators, and United States Congressmen had been entertained in this room. The workman who'd fitted its chair rails had got more pleasure from this house than Rhett ever had.

The big house was quiet as a tomb. After Bonnie died, he'd shunned Ella and Wade. He was afraid he'd look at the living children and think, it might have been you instead of Bonnie. If only it had been you. . . . Mammy and Prissy took the children out of the house to play. When it rained, Ella and Wade played in the carriage house.

He'd quit going to his desk at the Farmer's and Merchants' Bank. Yesterday -- or was it the day before? -- the bank's president had come, deeply worried. Although the Farmer's and Merchants' hadn't invested in the Northern Pacific, when Jay Cooke declared bankruptcy, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. All over the country, depositors raced to their banks to withdraw their savings. Banks had failed in New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston, and Nashville. The Farmer's and Merchants' didn't have enough cash to meet the demand.

"Rhett," the president begged, "could you help?"

Rhett Butler pledged his fortune so Farmer's and Merchants' depositors could withdraw their savings in cash -- every cent. Since they could, they didn't.

Rhett didn't care.

The clock chimed the hour: six funereal strokes.

A gust in the still room ruffled the hair on the nape of his neck and Rhett knew Miss Melly was dead.

Melanie Wilkes was one of the few creatures Rhett had ever known who would not be deceived.

As the brown autumnal light leaked out of the room, Rhett lit the gaslights.

Had he loved Scarlett, or had he loved what she might become? Had he deceived himself -- loving the image more than the flesh and blood woman?

Rhett didn't care.

If she had betrayed him again and again with Ashley Wilkes, Rhett didn't care. Ashley was free now. If she still wanted the man, she could have him.

That evening, when Rhett's wife came home from Melanie Wilkes's deathbed, she told her husband she loved him. Scarlett had never said that before, and Rhett may have believed her. But he didn't care. Rhett Butler looked into the pale green eyes that had mesmerized him for so many years and did not give a damn.