Scarlett (48 page)

She felt Rhett’s touch on her left foot. Good! I’m not really paralyzed. Scarlett took a deep breath for the first time since the storm hit. How strange her feet felt. She’d had no idea how heavy and constricting boots were. Oh! The hand at her waist was strange-feeling. She could sense the sawing motion of the knife. Then suddenly a tremendous weight slid down her legs and her shoulders bobbed up out of the water. She cried out in surprise. The sound of her cry reverberated in the hollow space beneath the wooden hull. It was so loud that she almost lost her handhold from the shock of it.

Then Rhett burst through the water. He was very close to her. “How do you feel?” he asked. It sounded as if he was shouting.

“Shhh,” said Scarlett. “Not so loud.”

“How do you feel?” he asked quietly.

“Frozen nearly to death, if you really want to know.”

“The water’s cold, but not that cold. If we were in the North Atlantic—”

“Rhett Butler, if you tell me one of your blockade-running adventure stories, I’ll—I’ll drown you!”

His laughter filled the air around them and it seemed somehow to make it warmer. But Scarlett was still furious. “How you can laugh at a time like this is beyond me. It’s not funny to be dangling in freezing water in the middle of a terrible storm.”

“When things are at their worst, Scarlett, the only thing to do is find something to laugh about. It keeps you sane… and it stops your teeth chattering from fear.”

She was too exasperated to speak. The worst of it was that he was right. The chattering had stopped when she stopped thinking that she was going to die.

“Now I’m going to cut the laces on your corset, Scarlett. You can’t breathe easily in that cage. Just hold still so I don’t cut your skin.” There was an embarrassing intimacy in the movement of his hands under the sweater, tearing open her basque and her shirtwaist. It had been years since he had last put his hands on her body.

“Now, breathe deep,” said Rhett when he pulled the cut corset and camisole away. “Women today never learn how to breathe. Fill your lungs all the way. I’m rigging a support for us with some line I cut. You’ll be able to turn loose that cleat when I’m done and massage your hands and arms. Keep breathing. It’ll warm up your blood.”

Scarlett tried to do what Rhett said, but her arms felt terribly heavy when she lifted them. It was much easier just to let her body rest in the harness-like rope support under her arms and rise and fall, limp, with the rise and fall of the waves. She was feeling very sleepy… Why did Rhett have to keep talking so much? Why did he insist on fussing at her about rubbing her arms?

“Scarlett!” The sound was very loud. “Scarlett! You cannot go to sleep. You’ve got to keep moving. Kick your feet. Kick me if you want to, but move your legs.” Rhett began to rub her shoulders vigorously, then her upper arms; his touch was rough.

“Stop it. That hurts.” Her words were weak, like the mewing of a kitten. Scarlett closed her eyes, and the darkness became darker. She didn’t feel so cold any more, only very tired, and sleepy.

With no warning Rhett slapped her face so hard that her head jerked backwards and hit the wooden hull with a crash that echoed in the enclosed space. Scarlett came full awake, shocked and angry.

“How dare you! I’ll pay you back for that when we get out of here, Rhett Butler, just see if I don’t!”

“That’s better,” said Rhett. He continued to rub her arms roughly, though Scarlett was trying to push his hands away. “Keep talking, I’ll do the massage. Give me your hands so I can rub them.”

“I certainly will not! I’ll keep my hands to myself and I’ll thank you to do the same. You’re rubbing my flesh right off my bones.”

“Better my rubbing than crabs eating it,” said Rhett harshly. “Listen to me. If you let yourself give in to the cold, Scarlett, you’ll die. I know you want to sleep but that’s the sleep of death. And, by God, if I have to beat you black and blue, I will not allow you to die. You stay awake, and breathe, and keep moving. Talk; keep talking; I don’t give a damn what you say, just let me hear your cantankerous fishwife tones so I’ll know you’re alive.”

Scarlett was aware of the paralyzing cold again as Rhett rubbed life back into her flesh. “Are we going to get out of this?” she asked without emotion. She tried to move her legs.

“Of course we are.”

“How?”

“The current is carrying us ashore; it’s an incoming tide. It’ll take us back where we came from.”

Scarlett nodded in the darkness. She remembered all the fuss about leaving before the tide turned. Nothing in Rhett’s voice revealed his knowledge that the power of gale-force winds would make all normal tidal activity meaningless. The storm might be carrying them through the mouth of the harbor into the vast reaches of the Atlantic Ocean.

“How long before we get there?” Scarlett’s tone was querulous. Her legs felt like huge tree trunks. And Rhett was rubbing her shoulders raw.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “You’ll need all your courage, Scarlett.”

He sounds as solemn as a sermon! Rhett, who always makes fun of everything. Oh, my God! Scarlett willed her lifeless legs to move and forced terror away with iron determination. “I don’t need courage half as much as something to eat,” she said. “Why the devil didn’t you grab that dirty old bag of yours when we turned over?”

“It’s stowed under the bow. By God, Scarlett, your gluttony may be the saving of us. I’d forgotten all about it. Pray it’s still there.”

The rum spread life-restoring tentacles of warmth through her thighs, her legs, her feet, and Scarlett began to push them back and forth. The pain of returning circulation was intense, but she welcomed it. It meant she was alive, all of her. Why, rum just might be better than brandy, she thought after a second drink. It sure did warm a person up.

Too bad that Rhett insisted on rationing it, but she knew he was right. It would be too awful to run out of the warmth in the bottle before they were safe on land. In the meantime she was even able to join in Rhett’s tribute to their prize. “ ‘
Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!
’ ” she sang with him when he finished each verse of the sea chanty.

And afterwards Scarlett thought of “
Little brown jug, how I love thee.
”

Their voices echoed so loudly inside the hull that it was possible to pretend that they weren’t growing weaker as the cold gripped their bodies. Rhett put his arms around Scarlett and held her close to his body to share its warmth. And they sang all the favorites they could remember, while the sips of rum came closer together with less and less effect.

“How about ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’?” Rhett suggested.

“We sang that twice already. Sing that song Pa loved so much, Rhett. I remember the two of you staggering down the street together in Atlanta bellowing like stuck pigs.”

“Sure and we sounded like a choir of angels,” Rhett said, mimicking Gerald O’Hara’s brogue. “ ‘
When first I saw sweet Peggy, ’twas on a market day
…’ ” He sang the first verse of “Peg in a Low Back’d Car,” then admitted he didn’t know the rest. “You must know every word of it, Scarlett. Sing it for me.”

She tried, but couldn’t find the strength. “I’ve forgotten,” she said, to cover her weakness. She was so tired. If only she could rest her head against Rhett’s warmth and sleep. His arms felt so wonderful holding her. Her head dropped. It was too heavy to hold up any longer.

Rhett shook her. “Scarlett, do you hear me? Scarlett! I feel a change in the current, I swear it, we’re very near shore. You can’t give up now. Come on, my darling, let me see some more of that gumption of yours. Hold up your head, my pet, it’s almost over.”

“… so cold…”

“Damn you for a quitter, Scarlett O’Hara! I should have let Sherman get you in Atlanta. You weren’t worth saving.”

The words registered slowly in her fading consciousness, and produced only a feeble stirring of anger. But it was enough. Her eyes opened and her head lifted to meet the dimly sensed challenge.

“Take a deep breath,” Rhett commanded. “We’re going in.” He put his big hand over her nose and mouth and dove under the water with her feebly struggling body held close. They surfaced outside the hull, near a line of tall, cresting combers. “Almost there, my love,” Rhett gasped. He bent one arm around Scarlett’s neck and held her heavy head in his hand while he swam expertly through a breaking wave and used its power to carry them into the shallows.

A thin rain was falling, blown almost horizontal by the gusting wind. Rhett cradled Scarlett’s limp form to his chest and huddled over it, kneeling in the white frothing edge of the water. A comber rose far behind him and raced toward the beach. It began to curl over on itself, then the foam-streaked gray water crashed, surged toward land, and the rolling, roiling forces in it struck Rhett’s back and roared across his sheltering body.

When the wave had passed over and spent itself, he rose unsteadily to his feet and stumbled forward onto the beach, clasping Scarlett to him. His bare feet and legs were cut in a hundred places by the fragments of shell that the breaker had thrown against him, but he was uncaring. He ran clumsily through the deep clinging sand to an opening in the line of immense sand dunes and climbed a short way into a bowl-like area sheltered from the winds. There he gently placed Scarlett’s body on the soft sand.

His voice broke as he called Scarlett’s name over and over again while he tried to bring life into her chilled whiteness by rubbing every part of her with his two hands. Her snarled, glistening black hair was spilled around her head and shoulders and her black eyebrows and lashes were shocking streaks across her colorless wet face. Rhett slapped her cheeks softly and urgently with the backs of his fingers.

When her eyes opened their color looked as strong as emeralds. Rhett shouted in primitive triumph.

Scarlett’s fingers half closed around the shifting solidity of the rain-hardened sand. “Land,” she said. And she began to cry in gasping sobs.

Rhett put one arm under her shoulders and lifted her into the protection of his bent crouching body. With his free hand he touched her hair, her cheeks, mouth, chin. “My darling, my life. I thought I’d lost you. I thought I’d killed you. I thought—Oh, Scarlett, you’re alive. Don’t cry, my dearest, it’s all over. You’re safe. It’s all right. Everything—” He kissed her forehead, her throat, her cheeks. Scarlett’s pale skin warmed with color, and she turned her head to meet his kisses with her own.

And there was no cold, no rain, no weakness—only the burning of Rhett’s lips on her lips, on her body, the heat of his hands. And the power she felt under her fingers when she gripped his shoulders. And the pounding of her heart in her throat against his lips, the strong beat of his heart beneath her palms when she tangled her fingers in the thick curling hair on his chest.

Yes! I did remember it, it wasn’t a dream. Yes, this is the dark swirling that draws me in and closes out the world and makes me alive, so alive, and free and spinning up to the heart of the sun. “Yes!” she shouted again and again, meeting Rhett’s passion with her own, her demands the same as his. Until in the swirling, spiraling rapture there were no longer words or thoughts, only a union beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world.

H
e loves me! What a fool I was to doubt what I knew. Scarlett’s swollen lips curved in a lazy surfeited smile, and she slowly opened her eyes.

Rhett was sitting beside her. His arms were wrapped across his knees, his face hidden in the hollow they made.

Scarlett stretched luxuriantly. For the first time she felt the rasping sand against her skin, noticed her surroundings. Why, it’s pouring down rain. We’ll catch our death. We’ll have to find some shelter before we make love again. Her dimples flickered, and she stifled a giggle. Maybe not, we sure didn’t pay any attention to the weather just now.

She reached out her hand and traced Rhett’s spine with her fingernails.

He jerked away as if she’d burned him, turning in a rush to face her, then springing to his feet. She couldn’t read his expression.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “Try to get some more rest if you can. I’m going to look for some place to dry out and build a fire. There are shacks on all these islands.”

“I’ll go with you.” Scarlett struggled to get up. Rhett’s sweater was across her legs, and she was still wearing hers. She felt burdened by their water-laden weight.

“No. You stay here.” He was walking away, up the steep dunes. Scarlett gaped foolishly, not believing her eyes.

“Rhett! You can’t leave me. I won’t let you.”

But he kept climbing. She could see only his broad back with his wet shirt clinging to it.

At the top of the dune he halted. His head turned slowly from side to side. Then his hunched shoulders squared. He turned and slid recklessly down the steep slope.

“There’s a cottage. I know where we are. Get up.” Rhett held his hand out to help Scarlett rise. She clasped it eagerly.

The cottages that some Charlestonians had built on the nearby islands were designed to capture the cooler sea breezes in the hot humid days of the long Southern summer. They were retreats from the city and the city’s formality, little more than unornamented shacks with deep shaded porches and weathered clapboard siding perched on creosoted timbers to raise them above the blistering summer sands. In the cold driving rain the shelter Rhett had found looked derelict and inadequate to stand against the buffeting wind. But he knew these island houses had stood for generations, and had kitchen fireplaces where meals were prepared. Exactly the shelter needed for shipwreck survivors.