The other long-barreled pistol hung loose in Rhett's hand; his smile was so big, it traveled down his naked arm to the muzzle, as if the pistol, too, were smiling.
In the river morning, a thick, angry man stood back-to-back with a half-naked, smiling man.
Each would step off twenty-five paces. When the sun cleared the horizon, John Haynes would give the command to turn and fire.
The duelists stepped off twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five paces... The sun clung to the horizon.
"They'll never believe this in Amity," Tom Jaffery whispered.
The sun strained upward until a white space opened between its rim and the riverbank. In a clear voice, John Haynes called, "Gentlemen! Turn! Fire!”
Rhett Butler's hair lifted to a wind gust off the river. Butler pivoted, presenting a fencer's profile as his pistol rose.
Shad Watling fired first, an explosion of white smoke at the muzzle when the hammer struck home.
Nine years earlier.
At his father's impatient gesture, Langston Butler's elder son prepared for his caning. He removed his shirt and folded it over a straight-backed chair.
The boy turned and set his palms flat on his father's desk. The fine leather surface gave infinitesimally under his weight. He fixed his eyes on his father's cut-glass inkwell. There can be a world of pain in a cut-glass inkwell. The first searing blow caught him by surprise. The inkwell was half-full of blue-black ink. Rhett wondered if this time his father might not be able to stop. When the boy's sight blurred, the inkwell seemed to float in a mist of tears.
This time, too, his father did stop.
Hands curled in frustration, Langston Butler hurled his cane to the floor and shouted, "By God, boy, if you weren't my son, you'd feel the bullwhip.”
At twelve years of age, Rhett was already tall. His skin was darker than his father's and his thick jet black hair hinted at Indian blood.
Although the boy's back was a mosaic of livid stripes, he hadn't begged.
"May I dress, sir?”
"Your brother, Julian, is dutiful. Why must my elder son defy me?”
"I cannot say, sir.”
Langston's office was as spare as Broughton's family quarters were opulent.
The broad desk, a straight-backed chair, inkwell, blotter, and pens were its entire furnishings. No engravings or paintings hung from the picture rail. Ten-foot-tall undraped windows offered an unimpeded panorama of the plantation's endless rice fields.
The boy took his white chambray shirt from the chair and with a just perceptible wince draped it over his shoulders.
"You refuse to accompany me when the legislature is in session. When prominent men meet at Broughton, you vanish. Wade Hampton himself asked why he never sees my elder son.”
The boy was mute.
"You will not drive our negroes. You refuse to learn to drive negroes!”
The boy said nothing.
"Indeed, it is safe to say you reject every proper duty of a Carolina gentleman's son. Sir, you are a renegade." With his handkerchief, Langston wiped sweat from his pale forehead. "Do you think I relish these punishments?”
"I cannot say, sir.”
"Your brother, Julian, is dutiful. Julian obeys me. Why won't you obey?”
"I cannot say, sir.”
"You cannot say! You will not! Nor will you accompany your family to Charleston. Instead, you swear you'll run away.”
"Yes, sir, I will.”
The angry father stared into the boy's eyes for a long time. "Then, by God, let the fevers have you!”
Next morning, the Butler family departed for their Charleston town house without their elder son. That night, Dollie, the colored midwife, rubbed salve into the welts on the boy's arm. "Master Langston, he a hard man," she said.
"I hate Charleston," Rhett said.
On the river plantations, the rice seed was clayed and planted in April and trunk gates were opened for the sprout flow. The rice would be flooded three more times before harvest in September. Maintenance and operation of the great and lesser trunk gates were so vital to the crop that Will, Broughton Plantation's trunk master, ranked in the slave hierarchy second only to Hercules.
Although Will obeyed Master Langston and Isaiah Watling, he obeyed no other man, including Shad Watling, the overseer's twenty-year-old son.
Will had a cabin to himself. He owned a table, two chairs, a rope bed, and three cracked Spanish bowls that Louis Valentine Butler had taken from the Mercato. A decent year after Will's first wife died, Will jumped the broomstick with Mistletoe, a comely girl of fifteen.
Fearing the deadly fevers, Low Country planters shunned their plantations during the hot months. When Langston came out from the city to inspect his crop, he arrived after daybreak and departed before dark.
Barefoot and shirtless, his son hunted, fished, and explored the tidal marshes along the Ashley River. Young Rhett Butler was educated by alligators, egrets, osprey, rice birds, loggerheads, and wild hogs. The boy knew where the negro conjure man found his herbs and where the catfish nested.
Sometimes Rhett stayed away from Broughton for days on end, and if his father visited during one of Rhett's absences, the elder Butler never asked after his son.
Overseer Watling supervised the floodings and hoeings of the tender rice plants. Watling determined when dike-burrowing muskrats must be poisoned and the rice birds shot.
Although they were more resistant to fever than their white masters, rice negroes worked knee-deep in a subtropical swamp, and inevitably some sickened. In Broughton's dispensary, Overseer Watling's wife, Sarah, and young Belle dosed victims with chinchona bark and slippery elm tea. The white woman and her child helped Dollie deliver babies and salved the backs of the men and women their husband and father had whipped.
Some negroes said Master Langston was less likely to pick up the bullwhip than Boss Watling. "Master Langston ain't gonna get no work out of a man laid up in the dispensary.”
Others preferred Isaiah Watling. "Boss Watling, he hard all right. But he don't lay no whip on you less'n he got to.”
Young Master Rhett pestered his father's servants with practical questions: Why were the trunk gates made of cypress? Why wasn't the rice hoed after the harvest flow? Why was the seed rice winnowed by hand? The negroes ate the fish and game Rhett brought and the white boy spent Sundays, the negroes' day of rest, in the quarters. Rhett accompanied Will on trunk inspections, and often at noontime the two shared a meal on the riverbank.
When he felt the urge, Shadrach Watling visited the quarters after dark.
Usually, Watling sent the girl's family away: "Might be you could take a meander down by the woods." Sometimes Shad gave the husband or father a demijohn of popskull to while away the hour.
But Mistletoe, the trunk master's new wife, didn't want to fool with the overseer's son, and when Shad Watling wouldn't leave his cabin, Will tossed him into the street, a circumstance that delighted the other negroes.
When Langston Butler heard what Will had done, he explained to Overseer Watling that negroes must not laugh at the Overseer's son, lest they laugh at the Overseer next and ultimately at the Master himself.
Three hundred negroes lived on Broughton with a handful of whites, some of them women. What prevented those negroes from rising up and murdering those whites? Langston Butler told Isaiah Watling that revolt could not be suppressed after negroes have begun muttering and sharpening their hoes, their rice knives. Rebellion is quelled by crushing the first defiant glance, the insolent whisper, the first disrespectful snicker.