“Her head was turned by his uniform, that was the all of it.”

“Poor girl. I hope he’s waiting for her when she gets home.”

“Thanks be to God, his regiment’s gone back to England. He’ll bother her no more.”

Colum’s face was hard as granite. Scarlett held her tongue.

“What about that list?” she asked after she gave up expecting Colum to speak. “We’d better get back to our shopping. You know, Colum, Jamie has everything you want at his store. Why don’t we just go there?”

“I couldn’t put him in a fix. He’d feel bound to make me a price that would hurt him.”

“Honestly, Colum, you don’t have the brains of a flea about business! Even if Jamie sells to you at cost, it will make him look better to his suppliers, and he’ll get a bigger discount next order.” She laughed at Colum’s bewilderment. “I have a store myself, I know what I’m saying. Let me explain . . .”

She talked a blue streak while they walked to Jamie’s. Colum was fascinated and obviously impressed, asking question after question.

“Colum!” Jamie boomed when they entered the store. “We were just wishing for you. Uncle James, Colum’s here.” The old man came out from the storeroom with his arms full of bunting fabric.

“You’re the answer to a prayer, man,” he said. “Which is the color that we want?” He spilled the fabric onto a counter. It was all green, but four closely related shades.

“That one’s the prettiest,” Scarlett said.

Jamie and her uncle asked Colum to make a choice.

Scarlett was miffed. She’d already told them which was the best. What would a man know, even Colum?

“Where will you have it?” he asked.

“Over the window outside and in,” Jamie replied.

“Then we’ll look at it there, for the light on it,” said Colum. He looked as serious as if he was picking out the color to print money, Scarlett thought crossly. What was all the fuss about?

Jamie noticed her pout. “It’s to decorate for Saint Paddy’s Day, Scarlett darling. Colum’s the one to say what’s closest to the true green of a shamrock. It’s been too long since we’ve seen them, Uncle James and me.”

The O’Haras had been talking about Saint Patrick’s Day ever since the first time she met them. “When is it?” Scarlett asked, more polite than interested.

The three men gaped at her.

“You don’t know?” Old James said incredulously.

“I wouldn’t ask if I knew, would I?”

“It’s tomorrow,” Jamie said, “tomorrow. And, Scarlett darling, you’re going to have the finest time of your life!”


Savannah’s Irish—like the Irish everywhere—had always celebrated on March 17. It was the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland, and feast day was the secular meaning, as well as the canonical. Although it came during Lent, there was no fasting on Saint Patrick’s Day. There was, instead, food and drink and music and dancing. Catholic schools were closed, and Catholic businesses, except for saloons, which expected and achieved one of their biggest days of the year.

There had been Irish in Savannah from its earliest days—the Jasper Greens first fought in the American Revolution—and Saint Patrick’s Day had always been a major holiday for them. But during the bleak depressed decade since the defeat of the South, the entire city had begun to join in. March 17 was Savannah’s Spring Festival, and for one day everyone was Irish.

There were gaily decorated booths in every square selling food and lemonade, wine, coffee, and beer. Jugglers and men with trick dogs gathered crowds on street corners. Fiddlers played from the steps of City Hall and proud, peeling houses throughout the city. Green ribbons fluttered from flowering tree branches, shamrocks made of paper or of silk were for sale from boxes carried by enterprising men, women, and children from square to square. Broughton Street was bedecked with green bunting in shop windows, and ropes of fresh green vines strung between lampposts to canopy the parade route.

“Parade?!” Scarlett exclaimed when she was told. She touched the green silk ribbon rosettes Kathleen had pinned in her hair. “Are we finished? Do I look all right? Is it time to go?”

It was time. First early Mass, and then a celebration all day and into the night. “Jamie tells me there’ll be fireworks starring the sky over the park until you’re fair giddy from the splendor of it all,” Kathleen said. Her face and eyes were shining with excitement.

Scarlett’s green eyes were suddenly calculating. “I’ll bet you don’t have parades and fireworks in your village, Kathleen. You’ll be sorry if you don’t stay in Savannah.”

The girl smiled radiantly. “I’ll remember it forever and tell the tale by all the hearths of all the houses. Once home, it will be a grand thing to have seen America. Once home.”

Scarlett gave up. There was no budging the silly girl.

Broughton Street was lined with people, all of them sporting green. Scarlett laughed aloud when she saw one family. With all those scrubbed-up children wearing green bows or scarves or feathers in their hats, they were just like the O’Haras. Except that they were all black. “Didn’t I tell you everyone is Irish today?” Jamie said with a grin.

Maureen elbowed her. “Even the loo-las are wearing the green,” she said, jerking her head toward a pair nearby. Scarlett craned her neck to see. Good grief! It was her grandfather’s stuffy lawyer and a boy who must be his son. Both of them were wearing green cravats. She looked curiously up and down the street at the smiling people, searching for other familiar faces. There was Mary Telfair with a group of ladies, all of them with green ribbons on their hats. And Jerome! Where had he found a green coat, for pity’s sake? Surely her grandfather wasn’t here; please, God, don’t let him be. He’d manage to make the sun stop shining. No, Jerome was with a black woman wearing a green sash. Fancy that, old prune-face Jerome with a girlfriend! At least twenty years younger, too.

A street vendor was handing out lemonade and coconut candy cakes to each O’Hara in turn, starting with the eager children. When he got to her, Scarlett accepted with a smile and bit into the candy. She was eating on the street! No lady would do that, even if she were dying of starvation. Take that, Grandfather! she thought, delighted by her own wickedness. The coconut was fresh, moist, sweet. Scarlett enjoyed it very much, even though it lost its thrilling defiance when she saw that Miss Telfair was nibbling on something that she was holding between her kid-gloved thumb and forefinger.


“I still say the cowboy in the green hat was the best,” Mary Kate insisted. “He did all those fancy things with the rope, and he was so handsome.”

“You just say that because he smiled at us,” Helen said scornfully. Ten years old was too young to be sympathetic with the romantic dreams of fifteen. “The best was the float with the leprechauns dancing on it.”

“Those weren’t leprechauns, silly. There aren’t any leprechauns in America.”

“They were dancing around a big bag of gold. Nobody would have a bag of gold except leprechauns.”

“You’re such a child, Helen. They were boys in costumes is all. Couldn’t you see that the ears were false? One of them had fallen off.”

Maureen intervened before the argument could get out of hand. “It was a grand parade, every bit of it. Come along, girls, and hold on to Jacky’s hand.”


Strangers the day before, strangers again the day after, on Saint Patrick’s Day people joined hands and danced, joined voices and sang. They shared the sun and the air and the music and the streets.

“It’s wonderful,” Scarlett said when she tasted a chicken drumstick from one of the food stalls. And, “It’s wonderful,” she said when she saw the green chalk shamrocks on the brick paths of Chatham Square. “It’s wonderful,” about the mighty granite eagle with a green ribbon around its neck on the Pulaski Monument.

“What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful day,” she cried, and she spun around and around before she sank exhausted onto a newly vacated bench next to Colum. “Look, Colum, I’ve got a hole in the bottom of my boot. Where I come from everybody says you can tell the best parties because they’re the ones where you dance your slippers right through. And these aren’t even slippers, they’re boots. This must be the best party ever!”

“It’s a grand day, to be sure, and there’s the evening still to come, with the Roman candles and all. You’ll be worn through just like your boot, Scarlett darling, if you don’t take a little rest. It’s near four o’clock. Let’s go to the house now for a bit.”

“I don’t want to. I want to dance some more and eat some more pork barbecue and have one of those green ices and taste that awful green beer Matt and Jamie were drinking.”

“And so you shall tonight. You observe, do you not, that Matt and Jamie gave up an hour ago or more?”

“Sissies!” Scarlett proclaimed. “But you’re not. You’re the best of the O’Haras, Colum. Jamie said so, and he was right.”

Colum smiled at her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. “Saving only yourself,” he said. “Scarlett, I’m going to take off your boot now, hold it up, the one with the hole in it.” He unlaced the neat black kid lady’s boot, removed it and upended it to empty the sand and crushed shell fragments. Then he picked up a discarded ice cream cornet and folded the thick paper to fit inside the boot. “This should get you home. I’m supposing you’ve got more boots there.”

“Of course I do. Oh, that does feel much better. Thank you, Colum. You always know what to do.”

“What I know right now is we’ll go home and have a cup of tea and a rest.”