Scarlett (71 page)

His dark-suited form stepped hurriedly from the dark smoke that was billowing across the road. “Move on,” he shouted to Scarlett. “Back to the carriage.”

Before she could break the trance of horror that held her fixed in place, Colum was beside her, his hand clasping her arm. “Come along, Scarlett darling, don’t tarry,” he said with controlled urgency. “We must be going home now.”

The carriage lurched off with all the speed the horses could manage on the winding road. Scarlett was tossed from side to side between the closed window and Kathleen, but she barely noticed. She was still shaking from the strange and terrible experience. It was only when the carriage slowed to a quietly creaking movement that her heart stopped pounding and she could catch her breath.

“What was going on back there?” she asked. Her voice sounded odd to her.

“The poor woman was being evicted,” said Kathleen sharply, “and Colum was comforting her. You shouldn’t have interfered like that, Scarlett. You might have caused trouble for us all.”

“Softly, now, Kathleen, you mustn’t be scolding so,” Colum said. “There was no way for Scarlett to know, being from America.”

Scarlett wanted to protest that she knew worse, much worse, but she stopped herself. She wanted more urgently to understand. “Why was she being evicted?” she asked instead.

“They didn’t have the rent money,” Colum explained. “And the worst of it is, her husband tried to stop the process when the militia came the first time. He hit a soldier, and they took him off to jail, leaving her with the little ones and afraid for him besides.”

“That’s sad. She looked so pitiful. What will she do, Colum?”

“She’s a sister in a cottage along the road, not too far. I sent her there.”

Scarlett relaxed somewhat. It was pitiful. The poor woman was so distraught. Still, she’d be all right. Her sister must be in the Goldilocks cottage, and that wasn’t far. And, after all, people really did have an obligation to pay their rent. She’d find a new saloonkeeper in nothing flat if her tenant tried to hold out on her. As for the husband hitting the soldier, that was just unforgivable. He must have known he’d go to jail for it. He should have given some mind to his wife before he did such a stupid thing.

“But why did they destroy the house?”

“To keep the tenants from going back to live in it.”

Scarlett said the first thing that came into her head. “How silly! The owner could have rented it to somebody else.”

Colum looked tired. “He doesn’t want to rent it at all. There’s a little piece of land goes with it, and he’s doing the thing they call ‘organizing’ his property. He’ll put it all in grazing and send the fattened cattle to market. That’s why he raised all the rents past paying. He’s no longer interested in farming the land. The husband knew it was coming; they all know once it starts. They’ve got months of waiting before they’ve got nothing left to sell to raise the rent money. It’s those months that build up the anger in a man and make him try to win with his fists… For the women, it’s despair that tears at them, seeing their man’s defeat. That poor creature with her babe on her breast was trying to put her little body and bones between the ram and her man’s cottage. It was all he had to make him feel like a man.”

Scarlett couldn’t think of anything to say. She’d had no idea things like that could happen. It was so mean. The Yankees were worse, but that had been war. Not destruction so that a bunch of cows could have more grass. The poor woman. Why, that could have been Maureen holding Jacky when he was a baby. “Are you sure she’ll go to her sister’s?”

“She agreed to it, and she’s not the kind to lie to a priest.”

“She’ll be all right, then, won’t she?”

Colum smiled. “Don’t worry, Scarlett darling. She’ll be all right.”

“Until the sister’s farm is organized.” Kathleen’s voice was hoarse. Rain spattered, then poured down the windows. Water sheeted the inside of the carriage near Kathleen’s head, gushing through a rip torn by the hedgerow. “Will you give me your big handkerchief, then, Colum, to stuff this peephole with?” Kathleen said with a laugh. “And will you say a priestly prayer for the sun to return?”

How could she be so cheerful after all that and with that huge leak on top of everything else? And, for goodness sake, Colum was actually laughing with her.

The carriage was going faster, much faster. The driver must be crazy. Nobody could possibly see through a downpour like this, and the road was so narrow, too, and full of curves. They’d tear ten thousand leaks open.

“Do you not feel the eagerness coming over Jim Daly’s grand horses, Scarlett darling? They think they’re on a race course. But I know a racing stretch like this could only be found in County Meath. We’re nearing home for sure. I’d better tell you about the little people before you meet a leprechaun and don’t know who you’re talking to.”

Suddenly there was sunlight slanting low through the rain-wet windows, turning drops of water into shards of rainbow. There’s something unnatural about rain one minute and sun the next and then rain again, Scarlett thought. She looked away from the rainbows, toward Colum.

“You saw the mockery of them in Savannah’s parade,” Colum began, “and I tell you it’s a good thing for all who saw it that there are no leprechauns in America, because their wrath would have been terrible and would have called in all their fairy kinfolk for taking the revenge. In Ireland, however, where they’re given proper respect, they bother no one if no one bothers them. They find a pleasant spot and settle themselves there to ply their trade of cobbler. Not as a group, mind you, for the leprechaun is a solitary, but one in one place, another in another, and so on until—if you listen to enough tales—you could come to count on finding one by every stream and stone in the country. You know he’s there by the tap-tap-tap of his hammer tacking on the sole and heel of the shoe. Then, if you creep as quiet as a caterpillar, you may catch him unaware. Some say you must hold him in your grip by an arm or an ankle, but for the most part there’s general agreement that fixing your gaze on him is sufficient for the capture.

“He’ll beg you to let him go, but you must refuse. He’ll promise you your heart’s desire, but he’s notorious for lying, and you must not believe him. He’ll threaten some great woe, but he cannot harm you, so you disdain his blustering. And in the end he’ll be forced to buy his freedom with the treasure he has concealed in a safe hidden spot nearby.

“Such a treasure it is, too. A crock of gold, not looking like much, perhaps, to the uneducated eye, but the crock is made with great and deceptive leprechaun cunning, and there’s no bottom to it, so you may take out and take out gold to the end of your days, and there’ll always be more.

“All this he’ll give, just to be set free; he likes not company so much. Solitary is his nature, at any cost. But fearful cunning is his nature, too, so much so that he outwits almost all who capture him by distracting the attention. And if your grip eases, or your eye looks away, he’s gone in an instant, and you’re none the richer save for a story to tell of your adventure.”

“It doesn’t sound hard to me for a person to hold on or keep staring if it means getting the treasure,” Scarlett said. “That story doesn’t make sense.”

Colum laughed. “Practical and businesslike Scarlett darling, you’re just the sort the little people delight in tricking. They can count on doing what they like because you’d never credit them as the cause. If you were strolling through a lane and heard a tapping, you’d never bother to stop and look.”

“I would so, if I believed that kind of nonsense.”

“There you are, then. You don’t believe and you wouldn’t stop.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, Colum! I see what you’re doing. You’re putting the fault on me for not catching something that’s not there in the first place.” She was beginning to get angry. Word games and mind games were too slippery, and they served no purpose.

She didn’t notice that Colum had turned her attention away from the eviction.

“Have you told Scarlett about Molly, yet, Colum?” Kathleen asked. “She has a right to a warning, I would say.”

Scarlett forgot all about leprechauns. She understood gossip, and relished it. “Who’s Molly?”

“She’s the first of the Adamstown O’Haras you’ll meet,” said Colum, “and a sister to Kathleen and me.”

“Half sister,” Kathleen corrected, “and that’s a half too much, by my thinking.”

“Tell,” Scarlett encouraged.

The telling took so long that the trip was almost over when it was done, but Scarlett wasn’t conscious of the time or the miles going by. She was hearing about her own family.

Colum and Kathleen were also half brother and sister, she learned. Their father, Patrick—who was one of Gerald O’Hara’s older brothers—had married three times. The children by his first wife included Jamie, who’d gone to Savannah, and Molly, who was, said Colum, a great beauty.

When she was young, maybe, according to Kathleen.

After his first wife died, Patrick married his second wife, Colum’s mother; and, after her death, he married Kathleen’s mother, who was also the mother of Stephen.

The silent one, Scarlett commented silently.

There were ten O’Hara cousins for her to meet in Adamstown, some with children and even grandchildren of their own. Patrick, God rest his soul, was dead these fifteen years, come November 11.

In addition there was her uncle Daniel, who was still living, and his children and grandchildren. Of them, Matt and Gerald were in Savannah, but six had stayed in Ireland.

“I’ll never get them all straight,” Scarlett said with apprehension. She still got some of the O’Hara children in Savannah confused.

“Colum’s starting you out easy,” Kathleen said. “Molly’s house has no O’Haras in it at all, save her, and she’d just as soon deny her own name.”

Colum, with Kathleen’s acid commentary, explained about Molly. She was married to a man named Robert Donahue, a “warm” man in material terms, with a prosperous big farm of a hundred and some acres. He was what the Irish called a “strong farmer.” Molly had first worked in the Donahue kitchen as a cook. When Donahue’s wife died, Molly became, after a suitable time of mourning, his second wife, and stepmother to his four children. There were five children of this second marriage—the eldest of them very big and healthy for all that he was nearly three months early—but they were all grown now and gone to homes of their own.

Molly was not devoted to her O’Hara kinfolk, Colum said neutrally, and Kathleen snorted, but that was perhaps because her husband was their landlord. Robert Donahue rented acreage in addition to his own farm; he sublet a smaller farm to the O’Haras.

Colum began to enumerate and name Robert’s children and grandchildren, but by this time Scarlett had already started dismissing the overwhelming onslaught of names and ages as “the begats.” She paid no close attention until he spoke about her own grandmother.

“Old Katie Scarlett still lives in the cottage her husband built for her when they married in 1789. Nothing will persuade her to move. My father, and Kathleen’s, married first in 1815 and took his bride to live in the crowded cottage. When the children started coming, he built nearby a grand big place with room to grow in, and with a warm bed by the fire especially for his mother in her old age. But the Old One will have none of it. So Sean, he lives in the cottage with our grandmother, and the girls—like Kathleen here—do for them.”

“When there’s no escaping it,” Kathleen added. “Grandmother needs no doing for really, except a pass with the broom and the dust cloth, but Sean goes out of his way to find mud to track in on a clean floor. And the mending that man creates! He can go through a new shirt before the buttons are hardly sewed on. Sean’s the brother to Molly and only a half to us. He’s a poor model of a man, nearly as nothing as Timothy, though he’s a full twenty years older and more.”

Scarlett’s brain was reeling. She didn’t dare ask who Timothy was, for fear of having another dozen names thrown at her.

In any case, there wasn’t time. Colum opened the window and shouted up to the driver. “Haul up, Jim, if you please, and I’ll get out and join you on the box. We’ll be turning into a lane just ahead; I’ll need to show you the way.”

Kathleen caught his sleeve. “Oh, Colum darling, say I can get down with you and make my own way home. I can’t wait longer. Scarlett won’t mind riding along to Molly’s, will you, Scarlett?” She smiled at Scarlett with such shining hope that Scarlett would have agreed even if she hadn’t wanted a few minutes by herself.

She wasn’t about to go to the house of the O’Hara family beauty—no matter how faded—without spitting on a handkerchief and wiping the dust off her face and her boots. Then some toilet water from the silver vial in her purse and some powder and maybe just a very, very small touch of rouge.

T
he lane to Molly’s house ran through the center of a small apple orchard; twilight tinted the airy blossoms mauve against the dark blue low sky. Strict ribbon beds of primroses edged the angularity of the square house. Everything was very tidy.

Inside, as well. The rigid horsehair suite of furniture in the parlor wore antimacassars, each table was covered with a starched white lace-edged cloth, the coal fire was ashless in the brightly polished brass grate.

Molly herself was impeccable in dress and in manner. Her burgundy gown was trimmed with dozens of silver buttons, all gleaming; her dark hair was shining and neatly coiled beneath a delicate white cap of drawn work with lace lappets. She offered her right cheek and then her left for Colum’s kiss and expressed “a thousand welcomes” to another O’Hara when Scarlett was presented.