6. Rhett

Several years ago, I was walking home from the bank. It was one of those clear, crisp, bright spring days that are far too pleasant to be spent cooped up in one's carriage. But on that day, I had what I believed at that time to be an apparition of death. It was as if time stopped for a second or two - there was quick sunlight, then a shower of falling leaves from a nearby tree. And one in particular landed at my feet. A reminder of, what? My own mortality? The fragility of life? There was no need to remind a middle-aged man with a young wife of his own mortality, still isn't, to this day.

I wanted to run home and make passionate love to Scarlett, to prove my continued virility to myself and to her, to celebrate the life I'd found and the love I'd won.

But I went to Belle's.

And I had to hear from her that my wife had been discovered in an embrace with Ashley Wilkes.

I felt like poor, doomed Charles Hamilton. Only he had the benefit of naivety. I did not. I didn't think about the incident with the leaf again until I was leaving the port of Charleston, taking Bonnie with me on a trip to first, the city of my birth, and second, to New York and London. We made it to New York before she got homesick. But as we left port and I was staring out at the water looking at the city which had turned me out on my ear, I was filled with an innate sense of dread. Had it been a seizure? A fit like my father used to get? A stroke of some kind? Would it happen again? What would Bonnie do without me?

A year after that, I dreamed about death again, although this time, I was the one being left behind by it. I was standing in the middle of an icy ravine, translucent, like shards of broken glass as they are hit by the sunlight. It was a breathtaking vision. And I saw my precious child, dressed all in white atop her fat little pony, waving goodbye to me. I woke and wept like a baby, then, reassured that she was sleeping soundly in her little bed next to mine, I went back to sleep.

Clearly, I had been dreading death all my life. I've always had difficulty accepting anything final. You realize, when you're my age, that time is irrecoverable. That is difficult for those of us who are young at heart, even in an aging body. But I was, and would say still am, unable to accept the fact that Bonnie was dead. It failed to register how something like that could happen to her, my precious, vivacious four-year-old with her whole life in front of her. It would have been far easier if it had been me to begin with.

One morning after it happened, I picked up the newspaper and felt a tightness in my chest that could not be written off as a broken heart, or melancholy, or whatever it is that Meade called it - I was dying. I was going to be with Bonnie.

The next day, I visited Mrs. Wilkes, expecting sympathy. She believed that she was dying. She told me so, repeatedly. She had become pregnant against the advice of all, including her long-suffering husband (whose part in the matter I was gracious enough not to mention), and she was prepared to die for her foolishness. I'm going to lose the baby, she said, I don't know what possessed me to tell you, Captain Butler, but I am convinced that it is my end, and I beg you, I beg you not to bother Scarlett until you absolutely must - she's so brave, so brave - you must not worry her, until we are sure it is so. And so I promised her that I'd do just that, and I was caught in that awful limbo between what was kind to Mrs. Wilkes and what was reasonable. She had been dealing as well through most of the year with a series of enervating medical issues. I could see that her tiny hands and feet were swollen and she was short of breath. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were dull. The steadily increasing frequency in which she sought me out should have given me a clue. She was closing shop and needed my word that Scarlett would be cared for. And I, wallowing in my own grief over losing Bonnie, offered little tenderness back to Melanie as she gripped my hand and told me how much Scarlett loved me.

But during those two months she was with child, clearly buoyed with the pleasures of lovemaking long denied her for medical reasons, her mood seemed to lift to insurmountable heights. She was close to three months in; she'd have another baby and show them all!

We did not speak in any meaningful way during the months between Bonnie's death and her final days.

But she told Scarlett to be kind to me. Her dying words.

The day she died or the day before, I saw Ashley walking Beau to school. You lucky bastard, I thought. Your wife loves you beyond compare, your child is healthy, happy. Why do you need my wife's love too? I want Scarlett to love me. Though I grant that my love for the woman has bordered on obsession over the years, I love her as much as any man has ever loved any woman. And she loves Ashley. Always Ashley. If I followed Mrs. Wilkes into the ground, there would be Ashley.

Always Ashley.

I tried to dismiss thought from my mind.

And yet he lingers there, even as I profess loudly that I don't give a damn what she does. He lingers like the Reaper carrying his scythe.

October 31, 1873. I'm leaving port again. Or I will be, this time tomorrow. I'm going to Paris, to reconnect with the city I fell in love with as a teenager on the last leg of my Grand Tour. I've not seen it since 1862. I bought her back a bonnet that time. It matched her eyes exactly.

I was sitting at the bar at the National. I had seen Scarlett earlier and made a barbed jest about her looking pale. I'd been to the house twice, and the first time Ashley of all people had answered the door. I'd expected it. Somewhat.

Why had I expected that she would miss me? Perhaps vanity. Perhaps some long-dead desire to know that she cared something. Ha. Better chance of finding snow in the middle of the Sahara.

But Ashley Wilkes did sit down next to me at the bar of the National.

"Drink," I offer.

"No, thank you."

"Take it," I insist, shoving a glass of scotch in his direction.

He drank it down in one swig.

"I must speak to you, Rhett."

"Speak," I say.

"I apologize that I was in your house today."

"I don't want to hear it-"

"I insist that you hear it, Rhett. I have never once spoken directly to you on the subject of Scarlett, so I might as well take this opportunity to do so."

I shrug. "Be my guest."

"Scarlett is desperately in love with you."

I dismissed him with a flippant hand motion.

"Scarlett is wasting away. Your absence is killing her, Rhett, killing her."

I don't care, I want to say. I don't give a damn. Don't give a damn.

"Why can't you accept her love," he said. It did not come off as a question. It was accusatory. So that's how it would be. He wanted me to take her off his hands, expunge his guilty conscience.

"You were right to hate me," he said then. "All those years. You hated me, because of her."

I hate you now. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

"I'm sorry, Rhett. I'm sorry for my part in it."

God damn you, Ashley Wilkes.

And that's all I remember. My ship was sailing. Leaving port for good. I remember them standing above me, watching someone lift me up and convey me to some other loud place where a woman in a long black veil washed my face.

Again, they are standing over me, alternating every hour on the hour. I try to make out their faces, but I cannot. I simply cannot.

But she holds my hand. I know its hers and hers alone.

She whispers. "I love you, Rhett. Even if you no longer love me, no matter what happens, Rhett, darling, I love you."

I always did, I think to myself, I never stopped.