"Will's a good nigger," Watling said.
"Your boy will do the punishing.”
“Shadrach?" Watling's eyes were anthracite. "Have you been satisfied with my work?”
"It has been satisfactory.”
Watling bowed his head and muttered, "I got to tell you, Master Langston. Will had just cause. My Shadrach ... Shadrach ain't no account.”
"But he's white," Master Langston replied.
The sky was unseasonably clear that August morning; the air was dead and heavy.
Broughton Plantation's rice mill was brick; its winnowing house was whitewashed clapboard. The dairy, negro houses, and infirmary were tabby — cement of crushed oyster shells and lime. Tall and windowless, with its thick iron-banded door, Broughton's meat house was as forbidding as a medieval keep. Every Sunday morning, standing before this vault of plentitude, Overseer Watling distributed the week's rations to the servants shuffling past. "Thank you, Boss Watling.”
“We sure does thank you, Boss.”
Isaiah Watling was the giver of all good things, as well as the source of all punishment.
Broughton's whipping post was a blunt black cypress stub five feet six inches high and eighteen inches in diameter. An iron ring was placed where a man's wrists might be fastened.
Will had asked the young Master to intercede, and Rhett confronted the overseer. "Watling, I am giving you an order!”
Isaiah Watling studied the boy as if he were something curious washed in on the tide. "Young Butler, when you defied Master Butler to stay, I asked him who was Master when he was off in town. Master Butler said I was to follow his orders, that you weren't to give no orders. Now, young Butler, the niggers is here to see justice done and to learn respect. Will's insolence bought him two hundred.”
"It'll kill Will. Damn it, Watling, it's murder.”
Isaiah Watling cocked his head as if listening for something faint and far away. "The nigger's your father's property. Very few of us, young Butler, get to be our own men.”
His son Shad's bullwhip coiled lazily before he popped a trumpet-vine blossom off the well house. The negroes stood silently, men to the fore, women and children behind. Tiny children clung to their mothers' shifts.
When Isaiah Watling led Will out of the meat house, the trunk master blinked in the brightness. When the overseer tied Will's wrists, Will didn't resist.
Rhett Butler had not yet come into his adult courage and could not watch his friend be killed. When Watling bared Will's back, Mistletoe fainted and Rhett bolted for the river, deaf to the whip crack and Will's grunts, which became screams.
Rhett jumped into his skiff, loosed the mooring line, and let the river take him away. A rainsquall descended and he got soaked through. His boat went where the current willed. Rain drummed in the boy's ears and he blinked rain from his eyelids.
Rhett Butler swore that when he was a man, he would never be helpless again.
Rain fell on the boy. Rain fell harder. Rhett couldn't see the bow of his boat. Water lapped at its thwarts.
His sail exploded into tatters. He lost an oar. When a drifting cypress trunk threatened to roll the skiff, he broke his other oar fending it off. He inspected the stub as if, had he the wit, he might yet row with it. He bailed until his arms ached. When he shouted to ease the pressure in his ears, the wind snatched his shout away.
The river broached the trunks and flooded rice fields, and sometimes Rhett's skiff was in the channel and sometimes scudding above what had been acres of Carolina's finest golden rice.
Suddenly, as if he'd been washed into a different universe, the wind and rain stopped. In the calm, Rhett's skiff drifted gently through brightness at the tip of a whirling funnel that rose up, up into a heaven, which was so dark blue, Rhett imagined he saw stars. He had heard about the hurricano's eye. He never thought he'd see one.
The current bumped the waterlogged skiff against a jumbled shoreline of uprooted, broken trees. Rhett tied his skiff to a branch before clambering inland toward the sound of hammering.
As a young man, Thomas Bonneau had been freed by the master who had fathered him. Thomas Bonneau's white father deeded his son five acres of land on a low rise beside the river, where Thomas built a modest tabby house, whose thick, homely walls had resisted previous hurricanoes. Bonneau and a boy about Rhett's age were on the roof, nailing shingles.
"Look, Papa, yon's a white boy," the boy, Tunis, said.
The two slid to the ground and Thomas greeted the half-drowned Rhett. "Come with us now, Young Master. These walls has sustained us thus far. God grant they sustain us a mite longer.”
Inside his one-room house, Thomas Bonneau's wife, Pearl, and two younger children were piling trunks, fish traps, a chopping block, and chicken coops onto a rickety mound to clamber onto the ceiling joists.
"It ain't hurricano's rain nor wind kills you," Bonneau explained as he took his joist. "Ol' hurricano raises up a mighty tide what drowns you.”
Tunis passed the youngest children to his father, who set them next to him under his strong arm. When they all were astride a joist, Bonneau spoke in a singsong: "And God said to Noah, 'The peoples is corrupt and so I will raise a mighty flood. But you and your family gonna swim above the flood... ' " Whatever more he said was snatched away by the wind.
When it came, the storm surge crashed against the little tabby house and forced the door. Water foamed beneath Rhett's dangling feet and the joist he straddled vibrated between his thighs. Thomas Bonneau leaned his head back and shut his eyes and the cords of his neck were taut with praising God.
That was the worst of it.
As all storms must, this storm ended, the waters receded, and as ever after such storms, the sun illuminated a brilliant new world.
Thomas Bonneau said, "If I ain't mistook, that's a macaw in yon tree.”
A bedraggled blue-and-yellow bird clung weakly to a leafless branch. "Lord knows where he been blowed from.”
They dragged the muddy trunks and broken fish traps outside and Pearl Bonneau stretched a line to dry their clothes. Pearl wore her wet petticoat while her dress dried; the others went naked.
Tunis and Rhett collected storm-beached fish while Thomas Bonneau started a fire with the dry inner bark of a cedar tree.
When they were seated around the fire, turning fish on sticks, Thomas Bonneau offered thanks to God for sparing his family and the Young Master.
"I'm not the Young Master," the white boy said. "I'm Rhett.”
Ten days later, when Rhett returned to Broughton, Will had been buried in the slave cemetery and Mistletoe had been sold South. Broughton Plantation was miles of drowned, stinking rice plants.
Langston Butler was personally supervising a gang repairing breaks in the main trunk while Watling's gang restored the interior trunks. Men trundled wheelbarrels of fill; women and children emptied pails and buckets in the breaches.
Rhett's father's boots were filthy and he hadn't shaved in days. His soft hands were cracked and his fingernails were broken. Langston Butler greeted his son, "We accounted you dead. Your mother is grieving.”
"My mother has a tender heart, sir.”
"Where have you been?”
"The free colored Thomas Bonneau saved me from the hurricane I have been helping his family restore their homestead.”
"Your duty was with your people.”
Rhett said nothing.
His father ran his forearm across his sweaty forehead. "The crop is lost," he said distantly. "A year's work destroyed. Wade Hampton asked me to run for Governor, but now, of course ..." Langston Butler looked into his son's unforgiving eyes. "Sir, have you learned anything from the trunk master's fate?”
"Yes, sir.”
"Humility? Obedience? A proper deference to authority?”