Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  “Of course some people would say—”

  “I can see clearly, all right, that’s why—”

  “It’s nobody’s business but their own.”

  “That’s right, Ruby, God love you, that’s right.”

  They also knew that Ruby and Marie were responsible for fermenting the many rumors that circulated about them, the kindest, yet most robust, being that they had a small fortune in cheese money buried on the farm somewhere. Every now and then Fee would have to take a potshot at a local, spotted rummaging around the cheese factory in the dead of night with a shovel, usually with drink on board and a sniggering mate in tow. He knew for a fact that he’d never directly hit anybody but suspected that a ricocheted slug had cost Seamus O’Connor half an earlobe.

  Still, Ruby and Marie were worth their not insubstantial weight when it came to running the shop and processing the orders. Their mindless blathering never interfered with their weighing, labeling, phoning, faxing and (in recent years) e-mailing, and this left Corrie and Fee free to weave their magic in the cheese factory. They didn’t want to know about orders and invoices and delivery dates and schedules. They cared only for milk and curd and the sorcery of cheesemaking.

  Apart from Grace and another private specialty or two, they produced just two types of cheese at Coolarney: Gold and Blue. The Gold was a washed-rind cheese, which meant that once it had been shaped and salted, it was smeared every two to three days with a special Coolarney yeast culture, giving it a sticky glistening rind. This provided the perfect conditions inside to turn the curd into a strong, meaty, smooth, supersucculent cheese-lovers’ cheese, while the rind started out sticky pale yellow and moved on to gold, then orange, then deep tangerine.

  On alternate weeks, Corrie and Fee made Coolarney Blue. The secret to this cheese was in Avis’s legendary home-baked raisin bread. Once a year, in early September, she made two hundred of the fruity loaves, using her ancient family recipe. The loaves were then stored in the Blue curing room, where after three months they were covered in spores of blue mold. This mold was then sieved and added to the young curd to give Coolarney Blue the spicy, sharp taste and blue-green veins for which it was so well known (and which no one anywhere else on the globe could match, despite many attempts).

  Princess Grace was a variation on this cheese. Her taste was quite different though, because of the milk produced in April with the new spring grass and because, unlike a regular Blue, she was not pierced to encourage her blue veins, but was made with a looser curd and developed the veins on her own. As a general rule the less the cheesemakers had to do with Grace, the better.

  This week was a Gold week. Corrie and Fee stood ready to weave their magic, watching Old Fart Arse as he huffed and puffed his way up to the heat required to kill the allegedly life-threatening bugs in their milk. The sound of his clattering and banging usually riled Fee into a whole new face color. For generations, Coolarney cheese had been happily unpasteurized, but in recent years it had come to the attention of high-ranking health authorities that cheese contained bacteria and this evil, unnatural substance must be stomped out.

  Corrie and Fee, like other artisan cheesemakers around them, had been forced to undergo inspections by pimply young men with thick spectacles and excessive dandruff who had tut-tutted a lot and written very tidy notes on gleaming clipboards. The results were always the same. New European Union restrictions required the cheese to be pasteurized. Through farm after farm, the pimply young men wove their web of red tape, and Coolarney had not escaped their scrutiny. Corrie and Fee’s inspector was a particularly unattractive individual by the name of Roger Swoole, or R. Swoole, as Fee insisted on calling him.

  As a result of this interference, they had been forced to install, at great expense, Old Fart Arse, which was clattering and banging this very morning but strangely, Corrie thought, was having little effect on Fee’s complexion. If anything, Fee might be considered a little peaky, he thought, but then he was wearing an orange T-shirt and a purple vest and had a green and red scarf wrapped twice around his neck. No one could look a good color surrounded by quite such a palette, thought Corrie, noticing also that Fee had two different shoes on. Ah well, they matched his socks.

  When the two old friends finally heard the rattle of Avis’s tractor delivering the mother lode of milk to the vat outside the east door of the factory, they moved toward the noise in unison, the same smile playing across their different lips.

  The cheesemaking was about to begin.

  Corrie and Fee set about their separate routines: for Corrie it was cleaning and preparing the surfaces and molds, for Fee it was overseeing the delivery of the milk. Outside, Avis was sitting behind the wheel of the tractor twinkling at the little man.

  “You were right, Joseph,” she said, putting the tractor in neutral and climbing down to ground level. “Little Lucy’s going to work out just fine. I’ve hardly seen anyone take to it so quick. Mind you, isn’t it always the way when Jesus, Mary and All The Saints take such a shiner. Hardly a word at all this morning and the face on her! And don’t tell Joseph, but Jamie spoke. Can you believe it? He asked what Lucy’s name was. What a day!”

  Jamie was Avis’s cowherd and almost pathologically shy, thanks to a speech impediment that made his sibilants sound like the grinding of old tractor gears. She’d discovered him hiding in the hayshed when he was twelve, shaking like a leaf after a belting in the Schillies school playground, and he’d helped her with the Marias ever since, albeit most days without saying a single word. That he had come up with an entire question thrilled her to bits.

  She and Fee each grabbed a side of one full milk urn and heaved its contents into the tank using a handmade copper funnel, continuing until they were all emptied and the tank nearly full. Within an hour the day’s milk had been pumped through Old Fart Arse; had reached, according to the gauge, the required 72 degrees Celsius for the required fifteen seconds; and was pouring into the cheese vat, its sweet comforting smell slowly warming the whole factory. The room was coming to life.

  Fee and Corrie worked silently and separately, weaving in and around the vat and surrounding counters like so many threads of wool following an intricate pattern. When the vat was full and the temperature a steady 35 degrees, Fee added his starter, the first part of the secret to ripening the milk and kick-starting the cheese’s flavor.

  Like most cheesemakers they used a commercial brand of freeze-dried starter, which came in sachet form. They had spent much of the ’50s arguing over whether to make the switch to this commercial product, Fee initially being keen to stick with making his own even though it was labor intensive and slightly unreliable. By the ’60s, though, he had come around. The rennet, the coagulating agent, they similarly bought in, having not enough calves’ stomachs on hand for the making of it. Despite the fact that this had weighed on Fee’s conscience heavily for decades, he had to admit that the cheese had never suffered. Quite the opposite, in fact. And the cheese was the thing. The cheese was always the thing.

  Once the rennet was added, the magic of the cheesemaking began in earnest. Before their very eyes, the milk disappeared and the cheese began to emerge. In more than sixty years on the factory floor, there had not been one single day when this point in the cheesemaking had not given each man a tingle of excitement up his spine. As the minutes ticked by, the thick creamy milk dissipated into a watery whey, leaving a shiny, solid, beautiful mass floating in its wake. This was the curd. And the curd was their gold. Every blade of grass they grew for every Maria to chew for every vegetarian to milk for Avis to unload led to this moment.

  The curd. The first taste of what was to come. An inkling of the cheese it would one day be. The promise of perfection.

  The secret potential of every cheese was locked up in the warm, soft curd and it smelled glorious. When the time was right, Corrie and Fee picked up their blades and, starting at opposite sides of the vat, began to cut the curd. The blades, like enormous, long-toothed combs, had ancient wood
en handles shaped like baseball bats, each worn away in different places to fit its own cheesemaker’s hands, attached to a row of sharp steel blades.

  Corrie and Fee wove their blades through the soft curd like synchronized ice skaters, cutting patterns in the shiny surfaces that to begin with looked like melted checkerboards. They stirred and sliced and twisted and turned, until the curd was finally broken into tiny even pieces. At this point they abandoned their blades, and Fee started to drain off some of the whey.

  As the grate in the factory floor spat and hissed with the barrage of watery waste, the sweet smell of grass and passion filled the air. Corrie and Fee looked at each other with identical satisfaction. In every batch, this was the moment they waited for, the moment that kept them in love with Coolarney cheese.

  It was tasting time.

  Breathing in the warm sweet air, Corrie leaned over the vat and dipped his arm into the curd, savoring its soft silky squelch before bringing a handful to his lips. On the other side of the vat, Fee too was savoring his first mouthful, his head back and his eyes pointed at the factory ceiling in full concentration.

  No sooner had the first microbe of the closest curd hit Corrie’s lips, though, than he knew something was wrong. His heart beating in his chest, he looked across at Fee, who had turned to stare at him, open-mouthed, his own half-swallowed curd sitting sad and unwanted on his tongue.

  Corrie threw the remaining curd in his palm at the drain and dipped his hand again into the vat, his fingers trembling. He brought a fresh handful to his nose, crumbling it softly to release the aroma. To his horror, sure enough, there it was: the faint scent of failure, not right in his face but nevertheless wafting over him like a long-forgotten scandal being whispered about in a distant corner. He pressed the curd to his lips again, regardless, and was stung for a third time by its betrayal. It wasn’t bitter, or sour, or rancid. It wasn’t even unpleasant. It was something he didn’t even need to put his finger on. It just wasn’t right. That was all. Just plain not right. Nobody else but Fee would even notice the difference most likely. But nobody else made Corrie and Fee’s cheese. Perfection was their goal and they reached it each and every day. But not today.

  Fee was still staring at Corrie, open-mouthed and stunned.

  “Could it be the starter?” Corrie asked, already knowing the answer. “Did something contaminate the starter? Or the new girl,” he said, almost excitedly. “Could it be the new girl?”

  Fee slowly spat the errant curd into his hand and sat down on an upturned bucket.

  “Is it the rennet? Or the milk itself, Fee? Perhaps the Marias are poorly. Foot and mouth!” Corrie said, almost wishing the deadly disease would prove present. Anything rather than the truth. Fee just looked sadly at the curd in his hand, then at his old friend. His blue eyes had lost their glimmer, his round face had collapsed into a new miserable shape. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “It’s fecked,” he said.

  With those words Corrie felt the temperature in the room drop 10 degrees. If Fee was never wrong about even the stupidest most inconsequential things, he thought, it was unlikely he would be wrong about this. Of course, it shouldn’t be coming as such a surprise, they were both seventy-three after all, but in such rude good health, apart from Fee’s back.

  Corrie staggered backward and leaned against the draining bench, cheese molds clattering to the floor as his hands reached behind to steady him. Fee’s back! He felt a hole open up in his chest and swallow his hope. Fee. In the many, many years that the Corrigans and Feehans had been making cheese together the curd had soured on just a handful of occasions, and not a week following each such incident, they’d been dressed in black and praising the dead.

  The souring of Coolarney curd signaled a changing of the cheesemaking guard from one generation to the next, and Corrie knew in his heart of hearts that this was no exception. Fee’s back. His refusal to seek medical treatment. His peaky condition. God help him. God help them both. Corrie stared at the little round man on the bucket and wondered how much time he had left.

  “Don’t give me the feckin’ eye,” said Fee, surprisingly robustly for someone in such poor health. “Wasn’t it allus going to happen?”

  Corrie stayed where he was, stunned at the turn a day could take. One minute, as good as any other day, the next, the worst a man could have.

  “I wonder would Abbey come home,” Fee said, looking craftily at Corrie. “I wonder would Abbey make the cheese?”

  Fee never wondered things, thought Corrie. He was too busy already knowing them. “I could try writing and asking,” he said, the calm tone belying the hammering in his chest. “But with Rose, you know . . .” He trailed off. “Are you sure, Fee?”

  Fee looked at him with his beady blue eyes and said nothing.

  “Well, I don’t think we should rely on Abbey,” Corrie said eventually. “It’s been twenty-four years since we even laid eyes on her, and she’s a million miles away and lactose intolerant for all we know. We’re going to have to go outside.”

  They had talked about this before, of course. About the possibility of bringing non-Corrigans and non-Feehans on board for cheesemaking purposes in the event of a disaster such as this. It had never been done before and there was no telling whether it would work or not. But Fee had never married and neither had his only brother, a retired plastics engineer living in Florida; and Corrie’s only daughter, Rose, had not spoken to him since she had run off with her daughter all those years ago. The closest she’d come to the family cheese in recent years was ignoring it in Harrods food hall.

  Abbey would have been their only hope, but she had long since been dragged into her mother’s complicated war and exile. Anyway, she was living on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean according to Ruby O’Toole, whose next-door neighbor’s daughter, Pauline, kept in touch with Rose.

  “Outsiders it is, then,” said Fee, standing up. “Feck it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “So, the starter gives it a shove and gets it going, then the rennet comes along and kicks the separation process up the arse.”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  As soon as Shirl pointed it out, Abbey saw it for herself, clear as day. Bing and his little sisters Georgie and Martha were dead ringers for Martin. He could almost be their father. She started to smile at this cheeky nudge of coincidence, but before her lips had reached even half-stretch she felt her bone-bone chicken “thunk” to the pit of her stomach. One little Martin lookalike would be a coincidence, she realized, as the color in her face drained southward, but three? She forced her mouth a little further toward a smile and half-snorted at the realization that was tugging at her brain as she looked at the three blond, blue-eyed children.

  He could almost be their father?

  Her lips abandoned their smile like a released rubber band and regrouped into a wonky O of disbelief as Abbey took a step closer to the children, still staring at them as if for the first time.

  He could actually be their father.

  Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Abbey shook her head. Martin and Geen? It wasn’t possible. Gorgeous Geen with her long brown legs and crazy hair? Fertile Geen with her greedy ovaries and her new second family? She looked at Geen and in that single moment knew the truth.

  Geen was staring at her, her face twisted with guilt and fear, but as she met Abbey’s horrified gaze there was a flicker of something else, too. As Abbey felt the cold, wet cloak of dread seep into her every pore she realized her eyes were truly open for the first time in years. Geen’s late run on childbearing had begun almost as soon as Abbey had returned from Brisbane with her terrible news, the news that had hurt Martin so deeply he had withdrawn his affection from her. She’d always imagined that affection had stayed inside him, that it was her fault he was mean and unhappy. But now . . .

  “How could I have been so stupid?” she whispered, as Geen, suddenly panic-stricken, hurriedly rounded up her stupefied children and her
ded them toward their beds.

  Shirl had begun to regain her composure but was still frozen with shock and scrutinizing Abbey for signs of hysteria, trying to think what would be the best next move. She’d assumed Martin was a bully and an arsehole, that much had been blatantly obvious, but this? How could he do this to someone as sweet and innocent and idiotically devoted as Abbey? Shirl wanted to wring the bastard’s neck.

  “Right,” said Abbey, snapping out of her daze and shrugging off the cloak of dread. “Let’s go.” She turned on her heel and walked out, Geen crying now and following her.

  “So sorry, Abbey. So sorry. Pleeeeease!” she sobbed, but Abbey, her back straight and her head held high, kept going.

  Outside the same night sky and carpet of stars twinkled above Abbey’s world, yet she knew that in those few moments inside her friend’s house, her life down on earth had changed and would never be the same again. She walked calmly down the track, wondering how she should feel, where she should go. She’d always imagined that in situations like this people knew exactly what to do next, but she didn’t have a clue. Geen, of all people. They’d been friends. Or had they? With a shiver, she realized she knew what that look on Geen’s face was. That little hint of something not quite horrified enough at being discovered. It was a look she’d seen a thousand times before, just not on Geen. But of course, she’d seen it countless times on the sun-beaten features of her handsome, faithless husband. After every petty insult, after every needless humiliation, after every pointless row, there was a moment where Martin mentally tallied up the score and congratulated himself on winning. The result was a look. The look was triumph.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” Abbey repeated, half to herself and half to Shirl. Shirl, still stuck for words, stumbled along beside her friend, wondering when the tears, the anger, the emotion, would come.

  “I can’t have children,” Abbey said calmly, “so he stops wanting to sleep with me, then Geen gives birth to three blond babies one after the other and we all, stupidly, I suppose, say what a miracle it is. It’s all so obvi—”