May 17 update - I was waiting on a tad of inspiration and it came this afternoon. The chapter just needed a bit more oomph - give me a few days to work it out. I'm going to the beach Saturday so I very much want it done by then. Trying my best peeps, but it's not balancing the checkbook or cleaning out the fridge, know what I mean? Gotta get in the zone. Thanks for your patience and see you soon, misscyn
May 12, 2021 - While you are awaiting Chapter 27 please google 'A Disgustingly Accurate Gone with the Wind Vine Compilation' and laugh your butt off. It's teenagers on Vine and it's stupid as all get out but I can't stop giggling at a good bit of it, because, well, it is disgustingly accurate! See you in a few days!
iMay 11 update: I have had a guest request for a time of arrival for Chapter 27 and it is - a week or less. I was thinking this Thursday but it may very well take longer. It's framed up and nearly filled in, waiting for the muse to bring some finishing touches, the ornaments, as I like to call them. The devil's in the details, my friends. Inspiration often comes after a good night's sleep, and every once in a while after I've had some tequila. I'll see what I can do. Peace, misscyn
I want to thank you all for your kindnesses and encouraging words. This last month has been uber rough. Please know you helped me get through it.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Inspiration this time around, and it's a biggie that stands alone:
"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love."
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, How to Love
It's still Sunday in the story, folks.
Chapter 26
She is dying, this young woman he dreams of, has always dreamt of, crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. She tumbled, rolled over and over, hit her head, broke her ribs. He can feel it, where she hit her head and ribs. They are hurting him, an ache, dull and foreign but there, fuzzy now, yet ever-present. He made her fall with noises from his mouth, with the cacophony of cruelty he'd chosen just for her, so afterward he wanted to take her pain and he did, how did that happen?
God or fate must have given him this, he wished it had been him instead, she had his baby, his baby in her belly, but his baby is gone, Bonnie was his baby, she is gone too, she fell and broke like the woman-wife, the wild girl he'd managed to trap yet not tame, yet it broke his Bonnie all the way, and it broke him nearly all the way as well. He has no babies, no children, no wife, he killed her too. He wants to die.
There's something, a wall of fog. Not fog, she always dreamt of the fog, the only thing she appeared to fear for so long. Something thicker than fog, gray and porous like the cloth soles of his shoddy army boots, bouncing back when he presses on it with his mind. He wants to find the holes in the fog, it shouldn't be hard, so much like the boots, but the holes are evading him. Just as well. He's been avoiding holes forever, the holes in his reasons, his disguises, his logic, his life.
There's a scent from somewhere, a smell from childhood, a place once called home, of tea olive blossoms and saltwater, but it hadn't been his home in forever. He is there now, he thinks, there and it's then. Bad, always been bad, his father said it and his mother, he thought she didn't believe it but she must have, she let him leave, someone could have helped him, given him money, even clothes, he didn't have enough to live, didn't have a way, nowhere to go—where is he now that it smells like then?
The scents, the scents confuse him and he is already confused. His family doesn't want him, no one does, he has no one, can't go back to the house he grew up in, his people there don't want him, why?
Boys he knew, young men and old, friends of his for years, grew up with, and their parents, look through him like he isn't there, won't answer his calls, cross to the other side of the street. He has disappeared from their sight over a broken wheel and a sunset. This world is a Roman carnival, and it makes no sense.
His weak lady of a mother was proud of him, so was his father, not proud anymore. Lost, a lost boy, tossed on the street like offal. Hated. They all hated him then, and they hate him now, whenever that is.
A passing moment of anger brings a flash of temporary clarity and he remembers, remembers his brash young self, so confident in his own worth and abilities, thinking that by God they can't take his mind or his education or his size or his looks and he'll show them, the lot of them, he'll never be hungry or poor again, he'll travel the world and wear the finest clothes and drink the best whiskey and have all the money and pleasure that money can buy. He'll do whatever it takes, lying or cheating or stealing or killing. He's already killed once. If success is the best revenge then his revenge will be the greatest of successes. He will have it all, he'd decided while starving and dirty, damaged and sad. And alone, so very alone.
But the fog's back and it's then again, and he's a small boy, back through the spongy boot soles. They call him exceptional, brilliant, gifted in so many ways, although the tendency toward satire appears nearly alarmingly early. Mind broadens, imagination blossoms and soars. Takes part in the arts as they are taught, takes to the stage. A natural, they say.
His father says the most natural and pure forms of culture are linguistic and based on history so he learns to recite in Latin, quote scripture, mythology, literature, and events, an excellent student, yet still mother cries too often as father rages about his imperfections. Somehow he knows it's not enough, could never be, as long as he is himself and naughty to the bone and looks just like the seafaring man, the pirate, Neptune, the king of the water.
He tries to be a good boy though, learns all his lessons and his manners. The ladies pat him on the head and compliment his mother, who smiles, who loves him, he thinks, and his father, who nods, not smiling.
But he is really a bad boy and deep down, he knows it. He gets bored, plays pranks, tricks, gets into mischief. Sometimes smart-mouthed, increasingly sarcastic. Father frowns at him, punishes him. Mother looks sad.
Grows up. There are gentlemen and ladies in this world he is a part of, for the most part, that is. Learns to ride and shoot and play cards. A friend's uncle takes him to the bawdy house for the first time, and it is begun. Women dress brightly, scantily, bosoms and legs showing. Warm, snug, soft, wet. Tingles, thrills, pleasure. Secrets. Secret places, secret touches. Good. It's so good. The act is power and potential and being alive. Feels good but it's bad. Everything is good and bad at once.
Time passes as time does and what was once revered becomes not so much, and he feels his father's slight regard receding like a tide, infinitesimal at first and then gaining momentum. His appetites and propensities propel him from a boy to a man and he feels his father seeing him not as his son but merely the seed of his grandfather, once removed.
Then a good girl, but a silly one, out after nightfall on a cursed ride. A gunshot, another boy's life gone along with the one he's always known as well. No home anymore, no big house on the Battery to sleep in and smell the tea olive trees and the sea from the windows, to go to, no family to live with, to be a part of, not even the servants who felt more like family than the rest.
Trains. Stealing rides. Hustling, tricking, playing, from New Orleans to out west. Enough for food and clothes and a bed and a woman. Some women to pay, some women to seduce. Paying is easier, but he doesn't always have money and seduction is free but they want what he does not have as well. He does both, excels, he is told. One woman, a kind but bad one, with bright red hair who touched him, took pity on him, helped him along, became his friend. More money, life is easier. Another kind one much later, a good woman with brown hair, too kind, saw good in him, the Curate's egg.
Makes fortunes, embarks upon adventures. Yet he relishes his palate and desires and revenge, his certain hungers. He and the bad women are at the bottom, belonging together in a way. Contrary to what he would one day tell someone important, some women's bodies may well be cheap but all women's bodies are not the same and he learns quickly that the more worthy the woman, the greater the enjoyment, as the mind is nearly always somewhat involved, if not the heart—unless one is so desperate for a release the act is perfunctory, or unless one is completely drunk, that is. As is more often the case than he'd care to admit.
Power and potential and being alive win out. No more weak women. Only smart, brave ones. Ladies be damned.
Confusion as Neptune pokes him with his trident, more spongy fog, and he struggles with his train of thought before it clears somewhat. There is another woman. The woman. A girl really, a fairy, an impossibly glass-green-eyed witch whose name means red but not like the red-haired woman who touched him and relieved his pain for a minute, an hour, a night, a decade. A light, almost a foreign, magical light within this one. Bright, like a jewel, small but large, beautiful in a strange and so compelling way, calling to him, across the state, the country, the ocean, the world.
She is an elemental creature, a fire fairy with a razor-sharp mind and sharper tongue and a heart-stopping face and an impossible waist and a joyous laugh he can hear from beyond this watery grave. She fights for what is hers and those who are hers, a tiny figure from mythology, a diminutive Amazon, battling the world and taking no prisoners. Deeply intelligent overall but decidedly dim when it comes to people's emotions, herself. Selfish, greedy. She is bad, but good too, at least a little. Just like him.
He must be guarded with this one, so sly, calculating. She has but a bare inkling of the depth of her appeal, yet she plays that effect to the hilt and revels in its every nuance. So very entertaining to tease and enrage, to watch her eyes flash and her face fill with fury but—careful. Careful. She will swallow him alive if he lets her. Can't ever tip his hand.
He killed the fairy before she could swallow him, didn't mean to, but he did. He killed the scarlet fairy with the flowing black hair and pale skin. Light went out of her eyes. He put the light out, again and again. Loved her, afraid, hurt her to ease his suffering. His words became weapons, Herculean in their strength, and he wielded them mightily against her. Once he wielded more than words, but he can't think about that.
Fear and love. Fear and love and pain. Children, sweet children, hers, and his. He tried so hard but his children died. Good man. Bad man.
He bats irritably at another wave of murkiness as he fails to maintain his focus again. The bad woman is Belle and she is safe, knows her place. Belle is a scarlet woman. Scarlett is a belle. The fairy loves a ghost. And Belle loves a bad man. She may be a harlot who can't read, but she knows him and loves him in spite of it.
Belle doesn't push, yet the feelings aren't the same. Scarlett isn't safe, she is wildfire in a box, a cage. Her people put his Scarlett in a cage and she can see through the bars, gets out sometimes, always goes back in and she can't see that she does it. Grips the bars so tightly, won't let go, but looking out, looking out at it all always.
She hates him, the crumpled woman at the bottom of the stairs, even when he has taken her pain, because he caused her so much more. She loved another, and now hates him. She is dead, the war killed her yet she is everything. Her child, his child, looks like her, is part of her, a part that loves him. If she is a fairy then the child is a sprite, a fire sprite who thinks he rules the world. He will stay with that sprite, that part of her that loves him, love that part, give her everything.
Kills her, too.
'All dead,' he mumbles in his mind. 'They're all dead.' He's dead inside, died with them. Belle loves a dead man. Scarlett says she loves him now, but Scarlett loves a ghost. She always has.
All is not lost because there are more sprites, not his, but hers, and he loves those parts of her as well. A boy, her boy, scholarly, brown-haired like the kind woman he knew before, golden-brown eyes like hers as well, but with her spirit. And a girl, a green-eyed girl, this one is timid, not like his baby girl, but sweet, yet he senses a spark here and there. Her children. His too by association, and more. His Bonnie's people. But there's her. She has the sprites and she is cold. His Bonnie's people are with her and she is so cold for a wildfire. How can a wildfire be so cold?
She didn't play fair and neither did he so he took his toys in a manner of speaking and went home. Except, no home, he doesn't have a home. Rooms in hotels, a room at the belle's house, no, a room in the scarlet woman's house. Not Scarlett. Her home, the crimson catacomb, the glistering purple crypt, is not his, not anymore, he gave it away. The ocean was his home, but the ocean tried to kill him. That's why Neptune keeps pricking him with his fork.
He tires and comes to an island of a sort, bereft of images, and stays there for a while, not thinking, not floating, but in the water still. Drifting untethered until seaweed tangles and tightens around his torso. He's bumping up against the island just as his boat bumped up against Fort Sumter. There's a rhythm to it he finds somewhat hypnotic.
The crumpled woman's broken ribs start to hurt him again and there's swimming. Swimming now, to the top, the top of the fog. No more pricks in his arm. He has to tell the sea god this. He wants to go to sea. But the sea got him here, wherever this is.
"I need my people," he tells the ocean that wavers in front of his blurry mind's eye. "My Bonnie's people. I need my family."
"We're right here," a female's voice, but not the one he wants to hear.
"Not you," he rolled his head away from the sound. "The sprites and the unholy nymph who bore them."
No answer. Woozily Rhett feels himself clawing toward the edge of consciousness. Was he drunk? This didn't feel like whiskey and his throat is too dry, getting dryer every second and he wants to cough but he somehow knows that is a bad idea. Had he been asleep? Voices drifted in again from a few feet away. He opens one eye to make out the shape of a corky male figure wearing spectacles by his bed.
"You're not Neptune," he managed to rasp. "Where's my wicked fairy?"
The figure chuckled and turned to speak to another. "He's awake," the same female voice, relieved, and a further rustle of skirts, a vague wafting of bergamot and rose water. Ah. The feeble one.
"Look in Scythia for the red dirt, near the Black Sea," he murmured to no one in particular. "That's where she came from, that's where she calls home." The two figures appeared to ignore him as they conversed in low voices.
"… may have been running on adrenaline and didn't realize…"
A shuffle and then the words became clearer.
"... apparently hurt much worse than he let on." Rhett caught the end of the man's comment. "I should have known when he wasn't quoting the Hippocratic Oath to me in Ionic Greek."
He looked down and vaguely recognized the coverlet as that of his bed in his mother's Charleston house.
Rhett tried to sit up and then, gasping, laid back down. How did Scarlett stand this, he thought blearily, then panicked. She's dead? No, no that was in the dream. Relief. He'd dreamt that, it isn't real.
"You passed out in the bathtub, darling," his mother said as she smoothed his hair away from his forehead bandage, her clear blue eyes worried. "Two men couldn't stop you from trying to stand and slipping. Too much strain so you fell and then you hit the side of the tub hard and injured yourself again."
A vague memory of his mother's manservant and another man helping him into the tub passed through his mind, but that was the end of the recollection.
Dr. Hawthorne stood beside her and regarded him, a rueful expression on his face this time.
"I think that last dose of morphine is wearing off so I'm going to ask you some questions," he said, his manner decidedly more somber than earlier in the day, "and see if you can answer them without bravado. It will only hurt you more in the future if you aren't completely honest about how much pain you are in now."
"I recall telling you my injuries were killing me," Rhett managed to get out through teeth clenched in fury and discomfort.
"And then you told me I smelled like a wharf dog that rolled in dead fish and you'd be back after I got cleaned up."
Despite his considerable agony, Rhett derived not a small amount of satisfaction from his mother's flinch as he repeated the doctor's words, before realizing he was in effect tattling like an eight-year-old boy.
"Yes well, when I arrived I found absolute mayhem."
When Dr. Hawthorne returned to the Butler residence later in the afternoon Sunday he indeed found the household in pandemonium as Rhett apparently passed out and fell in the tub despite the efforts of his mother's and her neighbor's manservant to help him out.
"You were roaring like an injured bull elephant and wouldn't take the painkillers. That is, before you lost consciousness. Terrible patient."
"I gave you a couple of doses of morphine by syringe so we could get your ribs wrapped. They've worn off now, obviously." He handed him a cup with two pills in it.
So that was why his arm ached in addition to every other part of his body. The wrappings had slowly been making themselves known as well for the last few minutes, hot and tight.
"Take the laudanum." The doctor's voice brooked no argument. Rhett, however, didn't give a damn.
"Take it." A tad firmer this time.
"Please, Rhett," his mother's voice, barely above a whisper. It tugged at the bitter remains of his heart.
"You both know I don't like painkillers. I want a shot of whiskey or five," he managed to wheeze stridently, if such a thing can be done. He needed something to drink, damn it, were they trying to dehydrate him?
What had Scarlett taken? Had she felt this way?
He tried to remember, although he had blocked a good bit of that time period out. Carrying her, unconscious, seeing the bruises and swelling bloom across her face. Cutting the stays and corset off, hearing her screams ricochet in his head for days, weeks. The pinched look on Mammy's face, Dr. Meade's expression, and Melly, dear, dear Melly, talking him down from the ledge, listening to him wail and weep. Holding his head in her lap. Letting him confess his evil, sickening sins.
Then putting her on that train to Tara so he could talk to Melly, getting rid of those mills. He'd tricked Scarlett into selling to Ashley as both a way to get her away from him, and to protect Melly. To make sure she kept her husband safe from Scarlett's maneuverings. She had been so kind. She'd helped him through, through when he knew Scarlett was dying.
Before the train he could hardly stand to look at her, truth be told. Pale, so pale, ghost-like. Moving stiffly, slowly, white-lipped. Sitting and standing ram-rod straight, determined not to appear weak despite her pain and suffering. Her pride. Damn her pride.
"Your pride is going to be the death of us both," his mother proclaimed, startling him out of his inner musings.
"I'm sorry, mother." The pain nearly blinded him now. Reluctantly he agreed to a single dose after more coaxing, after which Dr. Hawthorne continued to examine him and appeared to be in no hurry to leave this time. Unfortunately.
"You told me I had to stop drinking and then you drugged me." Rhett gritted his teeth again, this time in frustration. "I refuse to become an opium slave. And these wrappings feel like a particularly sweaty and ill-fitting suit of armor."
"It's only a few doses, Mr. Butler. And at this point it's less damaging to you than alcohol." Dr. Hawthorne finally moved away from the bed. "Your concussion is worse than we thought. The wrappings have to stay. If you fall anymore the danger of a rib piercing a lung will become a reality."
His mother patted him on the hand.
"If a woman can wear a corset, surely a big strong man like you can stand a few wrappings," she smiled encouragingly.
Rhett cursed inside his head. Had Scarlett worn a corset after? Not for a while, but she did after a month or so, surely when she returned from Tara, he was fairly certain. He'd avoided her. Given up. She hadn't called for him, after all. Didn't ask to see him and that's all he needed to know. That was the end of it, their marriage, their life. That's when he turned away from loving her.
Something about that particular decision didn't seem right, now that he thought about it. He decided not to dwell on it. It didn't matter anyway, not since the flash of a blue velvet riding habit hurtling through the air ended any chance he'd ever had for rightness.
"You're stuck here with me for a while,'' his mother smiled again, her eyes kind. "The cook is bringing up some broth and toast so you'll get something in your stomach."
With a sinking feeling, Rhett realized she was right. He gazed out the large window at the dusky Charleston Harbor as he waited for the pills to kick in, waited for broth and toast like an infirm old man, trying not to retch from his empty belly because that would surely hurt like a bastard; and haunted both by his past and his drug-induced dreams with no whiskey or cigars to dull either.
No time transpired at all before he found himself wondering, much as he had wondered from the afternoon of that fated barbecue until far past his only wedding day, just how a certain embattled and jewel-toned fire fairy might be occupying herself at that very moment.
Damn it.
OOOOooooOOOOoooo
Fun Facts:
Amazons May Have Actually Existed
Although for centuries they were believed to be based in myth, recent discoveries suggest strongly that the Amazons were real. In late 2019 archaeologists unearthed the remains of four female warriors buried with a cache of arrowheads, spears and horseback-riding equipment in a tomb in western Russia — right where Ancient Greek stories placed the Amazons, in Scythia, near the Black Sea. - from Smithsonian Magazine.
Curate's egg
A "curate's egg" is something described as partly bad and partly good. In its original usage, it referred to something that is obviously and entirely bad, (Punch magazine, 1895), but is described out of politeness as nonetheless having good features that redeem it - Wikipedia
Victorians loved them some fairies.
In the years prior to the reign of Queen Victoria, fairy tales were dismissed and marginalized in English culture. Sense and sensibility ruled the school. But with Victoria's coronation in 1837, fantasy crept back into British nurseries in what is now coined as the "golden age for the literary fairy tale." - Carina Bissett, Victorian writer
The 1860's Opiate Crisis
America's first opioid epidemic took shape on the battlefields of the Civil War, where physicians prescribed opium gum, laudanum or morphine to treat the pain of gunshot wounds and other injuries, as well as diarrhea and cough.
Then as now, the opium poppy wrecked lives as much as it eased suffering. In the days before addiction became a household word, addicts were known as "opium slaves" — too unmanly to bear pain, or to kick the habit by force of will. Some lost their military pensions or spent decades languishing in mental institutions, largely forgotten by a history too ashamed to mention their plight. - Jennifer McCall, Binghamton University News
A/N My flighty muse came and left me with enough material to get back on a more regular schedule. I thank you again for your patience and very much appreciate the sharing of your thoughts and feelings. I like to think we're on this quirky journey together. Peace, misscyn