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.

50

The lant 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.

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. “Its 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.”