Scarlett (72 page)

And she didn’t even know I was coming. Scarlett was favorably impressed, in spite of Molly’s undeniable beauty. She had the most velvety clear skin Scarlett had ever seen, and her bright blue eyes were free of shadows or pouches. Hardly any crows’ feet, either, and not a line worth mentioning except from her nose to her mouth, and even girls can have those, Scarlett summed up in her rapid appraisal. Colum must have been mistaken, Molly couldn’t possibly be in her fifties. “I’m so happy to meet you, Molly, and just too grateful for words that you’re going to put me up in your lovely house,” Scarlett gushed. Not that the house was all that much. Clean as fresh paint, granted, but the parlor wasn’t any bigger than the smallest bedroom in her Peachtree Street house.

“My grief, Colum! How could you have gone off and left me there all by myself?” she complained the next day. “That awful Robert is the most boring man in the world, talking about his cows—for pity’s sake!—and how much milk every one of them gives. I felt like I was going to start mooing before we finished eating. Dinner, as they told me about fifty-eight times, not supper. What on earth difference does it make?”

“In Ireland the English have dinner in the evening, the Irish have supper.”

“But they’re not English.”

“They have aspirations. Robert had a glass of whiskey once in the Big House with the Earl’s agent when he was paying the rents.”

“Colum! You’re joking.”

“I’m laughing, Scarlett darling, but I’m not joking. Don’t worry yourself about it; what matters is, was your bed comfortable?”

“I suppose so. I could have slept on corncobs I was so tired. It feels good to be walking, I must say. That was a long ride yesterday. Is it far to Grandmother’s place?”

“A quarter mile, no more, by this boreen.”

“ ‘Boreen.’ What pretty words you’ve got for things. We’d say ‘track’ for a skinny little path like this. It wouldn’t have these hedgerows either. I think I’ll try them at Tara instead of some of the fences. How long does it take to get them this thick?”

“It depends on what kind of planting you use for the foundation. What kind of shrubs grow in Clayton County? Or do you have a tree you can prune low?”

Colum was surprisingly well informed about growing things, for a priest, Scarlett thought as he explained and demonstrated the art of creating a hedgerow. But he had a lot to learn about measurements. The narrow twisting path was much longer than a quarter mile.

They emerged suddenly into a clearing. Ahead of them was a thatched cottage, its white walls and small blue-framed windows fresh and bright. A thick stream of smoke painted a pale line across the sunny blue sky from the low chimney in the roof, and a calico cat was sleeping on the blue sill of one of the open windows. “It’s adorable, Colum! How do people keep their cottages so white? Is it all the rain?” It had showered three times during the night, Scarlett knew, and that was only in the hours before she went to sleep. The muddiness of the boreen made her think there might have been more.

“The wet helps a bit,” Colum said with a smile. He was pleased with her for not complaining about what the walk was doing to her hems and her boots. “But really it’s that you’re visiting at a good time. We do our buildings twice a year without fail, for Christmas and for Easter, inside and out, whitewash and paint. Will we go see if Grandmother’s not dozing?”

“I’m nervous,” Scarlett confessed. She didn’t say why. In fact she was afraid of what a person looked like who was almost a hundred years old. Suppose it turned her stomach to look at her own grandmother? What would she do?

“We’ll not stay long,” said Colum, as if he read her mind, “Kathleen’s expecting us for a cup of tea.” Scarlett followed him around the cottage to the front. The top half of the blue door was open, but she couldn’t see anything inside except shadows. And there was a strange smell, earthy and sort of sour. It made her nose wrinkle. Was that what very old age smelled like?

“Are you sniffing the peat fire, then, Scarlett darling? You’re smelling the true warm heart of Ireland. Molly’s coal fire is naught but more Englishness. It’s the turf burning that means home. Maureen told me she dreams of it some nights and wakes with a heart full of longing. I mean to take her a few bricks when we go back to Savannah.”

Scarlett inhaled curiously. It was a funny smell, like smoke, but not really. She followed Colum through the low doorway into the cottage, blinking to adjust her eyes to the dark interior.

“And is that you at last, Colum O’Hara? Why, I want to know, have you brought Molly to see me when Bridie promised me the gift of my own Gerald’s girl?” Her voice was thin and cantankerous, but not cracked or weak. Relief and a kind of wonder filled Scarlett’s being. This was Pa’s mother that he told about so many times.

She pushed past Colum and went to kneel beside the old woman, who was sitting in a wooden armchair next to the chimney. “I am Gerald’s girl, Grandmother. He named me after you, Katie Scarlett.”

The original Katie Scarlett was small and brown, her skin darkened by nearly a century of open air and sun and rain. Her face was round, like an apple, and withered, like an apple kept too long. But the faded blue eyes were unclouded and penetrating. A thick wool shawl of bright blue lay across her shoulders, across her breast, the fringed ends in her lap. Her thin white hair was covered by a knitted red cap. “Let me look at you, girl,” she said. Her leathery fingers lifted Scarlett’s chin.

“By all the saints, he told the truth! You’ve got eyes green as a cat’s.” She crossed herself rapidly. “Where did they come from, I’d like to know. I thought Gerald must be drink-taken when he wrote me such a tale. Tell me, Young Katie Scarlett, was your dear mother a witch?”

Scarlett laughed. “She was more like a saint, Grandmother.”

“Is that so? And married to my Gerald? The wonder of it all. Or maybe it’s that being married to him made a saint of her with all the tribulation of it. Tell me, did he stay quarrelsome to the end of his days, God rest his soul?”

“I’m afraid so, Grandmother.” The fingers pushed her away.

“ ‘Afraid,’ is it? It’s grateful I am. I prayed America wouldn’t ruin him. Colum, you’ll light a candle of thanksgiving for me in the church.”

“That I will.”

The old eyes scrutinized Scarlett again. “You meant no ill, Katie Scarlett. I’ll forgive you.” She smiled suddenly, eyes first. The small pursed lips spread into a smile of heartbreaking tenderness. There was not a tooth in the rose-petal-pink gums. “I’ll order another candle for the blessing granted me of seeing you with me own eyes before I go to my grave.”

Scarlett’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you, Grandmother.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Old Katie Scarlett. “Take her away, Colum, I’m ready for my rest now.” She closed her eyes and her chin dropped onto her warm, shawled chest.

Colum touched Scarlett’s shoulder. “We’ll go.”

Kathleen ran out through the open red door of the cottage nearby, sending the hens in the yards scattering and complaining. “Welcome to the house, Scarlett,” she cried joyfully. “Tea’s in the pot stewing, and there’s a fresh loaf of barm brack for your pleasure.”

Scarlett was amazed again at the change in Kathleen. She looked so happy. And so strong. She was wearing what Scarlett still thought of as a costume, an ankle-high brown skirt over blue and yellow petticoats. Her skirt was pulled up on one side and tucked into the top of the homespun apron that was tied around her waist, showing the bright petticoats. Scarlett owned no gown as becoming. But why, she wondered, was Kathleen bare-legged and barefooted when striped stockings would have finished off the outfit?

She had thought about asking Kathleen to come over to Molly’s to stay. Even if Kathleen made no bones about her dislike for her half sister, she should be able to put up with her for ten days, and Scarlett really needed her. Molly had a parlor maid, who acted as lady’s maid as well, but the girl was hopeless at arranging hair. But this Kathleen, happy at home and sure of herself, was not someone who’d jump to do her bidding, Scarlett could tell. There was no point in even hinting at the move, she’d just have to make do with a clumsy chignon, or wear a snood. She swallowed a sigh and went into the house.

It was so small. Bigger than Grandmother’s cottage, but still too small for a family. Where did they all sleep? The outside door led directly to the kitchen, a room twice the size of the kitchen in the small cottage but only half the size of Scarlett’s bedroom in Atlanta. The most noticeable thing in the room was the big stone fireplace in the center of the right-hand wall. Perilously steep stairs rose up to an opening high in the wall to the left of the chimney; a door to its right led to another room.

“Take a chair by the fire,” Kathleen urged. There was a low turf fire directly on the stone floor inside the chimney. The same worked stone extended outward, flooring the kitchen. It gleamed pale from scrubbing, and the smell of soap mingled with the sharp aroma of the burning peat.

My soul, Scarlett thought, my family’s really very poor. Why on earth did Kathleen cry her eyes out to come back to this? She forced a smile and sat down in the Windsor chair Kathleen had pushed forward to the hearth.

In the hours that followed Scarlett saw for herself why Kathleen had found the space and relative luxury of life in Savannah an inadequate replacement for life in the small whitewashed thatched cottage in County Meath. The O’Haras in Savannah had created a sort of island of happiness, populated by themselves, reproducing the life they’d known in Ireland. Here was the original.

A steady succession of heads and voices appeared in the open top half of the door, calling out, “God bless all here,” followed by the invitation to “come in and sit by the fire,” and then by the entrance of the owners of the voices. Women, girls, children, boys, men, babies came and went in overlapping ones, twos, threes. The musical Irish voices greeted Scarlett and welcomed her, greeted Kathleen and welcomed her home again, all with a warmth so heartfelt that Scarlett could all but hold it in her hand. It was as different from the formal world of paying and receiving calls as day differs from night. People told her they were related, and how. Men and women told her stories about her father—reminiscences from older ones, events told them by their parents or grandparents repeated by younger ones. She could see Gerald O’Hara’s face in so many of the faces around the hearth, hear his voice in their voices. It’s like Pa was here himself, she thought; I can see how he must have been when he was young, when he was here.

There was the gossip of the village and town to catch Kathleen up on, told and retold as people came and went so that before long Scarlett felt that she knew the blacksmith and the priest and the man who kept the bar and the woman whose hen was laying a double-yolk egg almost every day. When Father Danaher’s bald head appeared in the doorway, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, and when he came in she looked automatically, with everyone else, to see if his cassock had been mended yet where the rough corner on the gate to the churchyard had torn it.

It’s like the County used to be, she thought; everybody knows everybody, and knows everybody’s business. But smaller, closer, more comfortable somehow. What she was hearing and sensing, without recognizing it, was that the tiny world she was seeing was kinder than any she had ever known. She knew only that she was enjoying being in it very much.

This is the best vacation a person could possibly have. I’ll have so much to tell Rhett. Maybe we’ll come back together sometime; he’s always thought nothing of going off to Paris or London at the drop of a hat. Of course we couldn’t live like this, it’s too… too… peasanty. But it’s so quaint and charming and fun. Tomorrow I’m going to wear my Galway clothes when I come over to see everybody, and no corset at all. Shall I put on the yellow petticoat with the blue skirt, or would the red…?

In the distance a bell tolled, and the young girl in the red skirt who was showing her baby’s first teeth to Kathleen jumped up from her seat on a low three-legged stool. “The Angelus! Who’d have believed I could let my Kevin come home and no dinner on the fire?”

“Take some of the stew, then, Mary Helen, we’ve got too much. Didn’t Thomas greet me when I came home with four fat rabbits he’d snared?” In less than a minute, Mary Helen was on her way with her baby on her hip and a napkin-covered bowl in her arm.

“You’ll help me pull out the table, Colum? The men will be coming to dinner. I don’t know where Bridie’s got to.”

One by one, close on the heels of the one before, the men of the cottage came in from their work in the fields. Scarlett met her father’s brother Daniel, a tall, vigorous, spare angular man of eighty, and his sons. There were four of them, aged twenty to forty-four, plus, she remembered, Matt and Gerald in Savannah. The house must have been like this when Pa was young, him and his big brothers. Colum looked so astonishingly short, even seated at table, in the midst of the big O’Hara men.

The missing Bridie ran through the door just as Kathleen was ladling stew into blue and white bowls. Bridie was wet. Her shirt clung to her arms, and her hair dripped down her back. Scarlett looked through the door, but the sun was shining.

“Did you tumble into a well, then, Bridie?” asked the youngest brother, the one named Timothy. He was glad to deflect attention away from himself. His brothers had been teasing him about his weakness for an unnamed girl they referred to only as “Golden Hair.”

“I was washing myself in the river,” Bridie said. Then she began to eat, ignoring the uproar caused by her statement. Even Colum, who rarely criticized, raised his voice and banged the table.