Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  She ground to a halt midsentence, at the side of the meetinghouse, her mouth still hanging open, and turned to Shirl. Slowly, her big brown eyes widened as she began to shake uncontrollably. “Oh, my God, Shirl,” she said, her face crumpling like a screwed-up paper bag, as her hands flew to her mouth in horror. “Nan!”

  Abbey collapsed against the side of the building and let herself sink to the ground, her back against the outside wall. Nan’s tears over Fafi, her daughter? Maybe she hadn’t been asking if Abbey was going to take the Water Man away. Maybe she had been asking if Abbey would take him away. Maybe Martin had been cooking up a family with seventeen-year-old Fafi as well.

  “I don’t think they’re the only ones, Shirl,” she said, all calm abandoned and replaced by mounting hysteria. “I think there are more. Or he wants there to be more. Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God.”

  At that moment it just seemed too much to bear. Shirl was kneeling at her side trying to comfort her, but Abbey was being ravaged by reality, her body racked with shudders as she gasped for air. What about Imi? Her best friend? Had Martin been bonking her too? And even if he hadn’t, she must have known. Her best friend must have known all this time what was going on. Abbey pulled her knees as close as she could and let her hot tears explode onto Imi’s hand-me-down cargo pants. All this time she had thought that the villagers were her friends and she was protecting Martin from their scorn, when really they were laughing at her. Poor dreamy Abbey with her baggy clothes and burned hands and irritating irrigating husband. How could she have been so stupid?

  She gave in to the hysteria that was clawing at her and howled at the awful truth of such mass betrayal. Her ridiculous life had all been a lie, and what’s more, she didn’t have any other life to go to. The loneliness that she had kept at bay for years enveloped her. Scrunched up against the side of the meetinghouse, the landscape of her existence a charred, empty desert, she wished she were dead. It would be easier and nobody would care anyway.

  Sobbing into her knees, Shirl holding her as best she could, she imagined herself floating down the river on her back, stone-cold dead and pale as a ghost with blood streaming from her wrists, leaving ribbons of pink trailing behind her, winding their way around the many cheeses bobbing up and down in the current.

  Abbey’s wailing slowed a fraction. Cheeses?

  She dismissed the river idea and instead pictured her lifeless body hanging rag-doll style from the branch of a giant oak tree, its leaves rustling in a cold evil breeze as overripe cheeses thumped to the ground.

  Cheeses? Abbey hiccupped. This was not the time for daydreaming. This was the end of her life.

  “Everything will be all right,” Shirl was saying in a voice so soft Abbey wondered what she usually used it for. “Everything will be all right.”

  Abbey let her breathing fall into the pattern of Shirl’s massage.

  “Everything will be all right,” Shirl whispered again, and this time Abbey turned her tear-stained face to look at her friend.

  “How?” she said, her voice hollow and hopeless. “How can everything be all right?”

  Before Shirl could answer, Abbey heard the crunch of an encroaching footstep, then Junior’s voice.

  “Is everything okay?” he said. “Is Abbey okay?”

  Abbey looked over Shirl’s head at his worried little-boy face and felt the pain of a thousand spears in her heart. How was everything going to be all right, exactly?

  “Do us a favor, would you, love?” Shirl said, suddenly efficient. “Run over to Abbey’s house and grab the old bugger with the beard for me, will you? Tell him Shirl says it’s a code red and I’ll meet him at Old Herc.”

  Junior turned immediately to go but Shirl reached for his hand and pulled him back. “Hang on a minute, love,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Junior.”

  “How fast can you run, Junior?”

  “Faster than a speeding bullet,” Junior answered proudly. “Faster than anyone else at my school, anyway—apart from Lula Fasado and she’s slowed down heaps since she got periods.”

  Shirl blinked at this last piece of information and then turned to Abbey. “Where’s your passport, darl?” she asked.

  “My passport?” Abbey repeated stupidly.

  “Come on, Abbey,” Shirl urged. “Where is your passport?”

  “It’s in my old handbag inside my trunk,” Abbey said, “but why—”

  Shirl was leaning toward Junior now, her voice grown louder with urgency. “Tell the old bugger about the code red,” she said. “Then get Abbey’s bag from the trunk in their hut and run like a gun, like a son of a gun, like a—shit, what was it?”

  “Speeding bullet,” said Abbey emptily.

  “Then run like a speeding bullet to the plane at the landing strip. Junior, are you listening to me? You have to get there before the old bugger, before Martin does. You have to give me the bag before anyone else arrives. Can you do that? Abbey needs you to do that.”

  Junior looked at Abbey and, nodding silently, turned on his heels and ran.

  Shirl pulled Abbey to her feet. “Just do what I say, Ab. We can work it all out later on.”

  She put her arm around Abbey’s shoulders and shuffled her out to the main track around the village. A mist in Abbey’s brain was making it hard for her to understand what was going on. She was still confused by thoughts of cheese and she didn’t understand about the passport. Everything was too hard, so she surrendered to Shirl’s navigation and let herself be hurried along, her eyes remaining just out of focus on the ground in front. Through her haze she thought she heard voices growing louder and louder, maybe Pepa and Oba, maybe even Imi, but Shirl clutched her close and hurried her forward.

  The noise, however, got louder and closer, until Shirl exclaimed, “Jesus H. Christ!” Before she knew it, Abbey was being thrust into the passenger seat of Tomi’s Mazda and Shirl was flooring it in the direction of the airstrip. It wasn’t far to go but the car certainly made it faster than the villagers; word had spread quickly that Martin’s little secret was out and the gossips were on the warpath. At the Hercules, Shirl squealed to a halt and abandoned the car, pulling open the crew door at the front of the plane and bundling Abbey inside the aircraft before heading to the cockpit and flicking on some interior lights and a bank of switches on the control panel.

  “Come on, Bullet Boy,” Shirl whispered as she pulled down a seat in the cargo hold for Abbey to sit on. She reached through the cargo net beside her to pull out a thick woolen blanket and wrapped it tightly around Abbey’s shoulders.

  “I’m a bit out of my league, love,” she said in her normal gravelly voice, looking nervously out the door. “But I think you should come home with me.”

  Abbey rocked back and forward, her eyes focused on an invisible point in front of her.

  “You can always come back here if you want to, darl,” Shirl continued, still craning her neck toward the darkness, looking for Junior. “But I think you need to get away for a bit to see what’s what.” She turned to her friend, aching at the sight of her. “Leastways it’s what I would be doing.”

  With that the thunder of Blundstone boots alerted them to Jim’s pending arrival.

  “Bugger,” said Shirl. “Where’s the kid?”

  Looking red-faced and puffed but not particularly surprised or angry, Jim sprinted toward them, a flurry of villagers in his wake, and dived in the door. “What kid?”

  “She’s my wife,” Abbey heard Martin roar close by. “She’s my wife. Let her out. Give her back.”

  As Shirl pulled Jim across the floor and lurched over to pull the door closed, a red leather missile came flying through the air and landed on the back of Jim’s neck.

  “You beauty, Speeding Bullet,” Shirl roared out the door before pulling it closed with an almighty thud and locking it.

  “What the bloody hell is going on here?” Jim asked, breathing heavily and rubbing his neck where an angry welt had already formed. He had taken in t
he semicatatonic Abbey, rocking back and forward in the empty cargo hold, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her husband was banging on the cargo door outside, demanding in a rage that Jim open it and let Abbey out.

  “Your friend out there is starting a new breed of little Martins behind his wife’s back is what the bloody hell is going on here,” said Shirl, pushing her husband toward the cockpit. “Now get this thing in the air.”

  “Steady on, darl. How do you know about this? Who told you?”

  “I saw them with my own eyes,” said Shirl. “Now get this thing in the air or I’ll thrash you, you great galah. Come on!”

  Jim slipped into the pilot’s seat just as Martin appeared in front of the plane on the airstrip, his face bulging with rage and a string of expletives pouring from his angry, spitting lips.

  Jim looked uncertainly at Shirl. “Jeez, darl, this doesn’t seem right. Are you sure it’s what Abbey wants?”

  Shirl looked back at the wretched sight of Abbey shaking underneath her blanket in the cabin.

  “Do you want to go back to Martin, Abbey,” she called, “or do you want us to run the useless bastard over on our way out of here?”

  Abbey rocked back and forward, back and forward, her teeth chattering despite the warm air and the woolen blanket.

  “What’s she saying?” asked Jim, flicking switches above his head to engage the propeller blades. “She’s saying something. What’s her answer?”

  “Get this thing cranked up, will you?” Shirl commanded, as she picked her way back through the hold and leaned down to hear what Abbey was mumbling.

  “She says Martin’s not his real name,” she called back to Jim, straightening up. “She says his real name is Bruce.”

  Jim’s anxious frown eased instantly and he exploded with laughter as the Hercules’ engines sputtered into life.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Shirl wanted to know.

  “Jeez, they must have really taken the piss out of him when he first arrived here,” he chortled, checking his flight plan and slipping on his earphones. “Round here a brus,” he shouted as the noise of the plane got louder, “is what you might let rip after a pot full of beans, if you get my drift.”

  “What?” squawked Shirl. “What’s that about beans?”

  “A fart,” roared Jim. “The silly bugger’s named after a fart.”

  Shirl was astonished. “And you’re going to run him over because of that?”

  “Nah,” Jim shouted. “I’m going to run him over because he’s a boring bastard who’s been cheating on his wife.”

  With that the Hercules shuddered into motion and lurched forward.

  Martin, wanting his wife back but not willing to end up splattered on the Hercules’ nose, moved out of the way at the last possible moment, throwing his hat to the ground and kicking the dust in fury. A weeping gaggle of villagers clutched each other behind him but Abbey was oblivious to their cries. As the plane rose higher and higher, she pulled the blanket closer around her shoulders and, despite her emptiness, her loneliness, her despair, felt the smallest weight lift off them.

  She never wanted to see Ate’ate nor her cheating, hateful husband again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “There’s a bit of thinking time between adding the rennet and cutting the curd. Different cheesemakers use this in different ways. Personally I favor planning elevenses.”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  In the parlor of her little pink B&B in the West Cork town of Schillies, Maureen McCarthy was attempting to drive Kit back to drink. He’d arrived in the village after a hellish trip from New York, expecting to be able to fall into bed and escape reality courtesy of a handful of Halcion. This, however, was clearly not on Maureen McCarthy’s agenda.

  “From New York, are you?” Maureen had asked, snatching away his bags and pushing him into an armchair in her stuffy drawing room the moment he arrived. “It looks like a wonderful place, sure it does, despite the twin towers—what a tragedy, all those lives, God rest their souls—and didn’t Pauline O’Brien just down the lane have an uncle who moved there a few years back?” she said, disappearing to make a cup of tea but eerily leaving her voice in the room with Kit. “Run over by a yellow taxicab and killed stone-dead the poor man was,” the voice said, enthusiastically. “Then his poor broken body trampled by a horse and cart full of tourists. Do you take milk?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Kit answered, although she was already back in the room with a mug full of milky tea.

  “In the street with all the theaters. Do you know it?”

  “Broadway?” Kit offered.

  “The very one. Fancy that.” Maureen beamed. “Pauline went there herself a year or so ago but it was hard to tell the exact spot where it happened, so she went to Starbucks instead then took in the afternoon showing of Cabaret. Well, she was in the area, God bless her.”

  A small, wiry woman, with curls set in rows of military precision, she perched like a bird on an uncomfortable little stool by the fireplace and took in every detail of her guest with bright, beady little eyes that didn’t miss a trick.

  “He’s not the only one from around here to end his days under the wheels of a fast-moving motor vehicle actually,” she said, as if Kit had just announced he were doing a thesis on the subject and did she have any other data that might be useful?

  “There was Patsy Mulligan who came from up the lane bowled over by a bus on her way to Mass over in Cork,” Maureen said, shaking her head. “Of course, she’d been into the sherry and hadn’t she got Sunday morning confused with Friday rush hour but she was bowled over, nonetheless. ’Twas a terrible tragedy for the family. What with her being ninety-nine and all their hopes pinned on a big hooley for her hundredth.”

  She stopped and looked mournful for a moment before adding rather brightly, “I ended up with her toilet-seat cover as it happens. It’s purple. It looks like carpet.”

  Kit had no response to that.

  “There’s been a murder here too, you know,” Maureen continued. “Out by the coast, last year. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it in New York. Germans with boatloads of money. Boatloads. They built a huge house with four bathrooms and the husband wore thick socks with his sandals, but his wife was young and pretty as a picture. Pretty as a picture! She came to stay in the house on her own one weekend, but by the time her husband turned up she had been attacked and stabbed twenty-four times in the chest. Twenty-four times, God bless her. Or was it twenty-five?”

  Kit felt sick. The tea had gone cold and there was something oily floating on the top of it. Actually, he didn’t really like tea. He liked vodka. And a lot of it, right now, would have made him feel a whole lot better.

  “So,” Maureen said brightly, “what brings you here? Touring? Sailing? The Ikebana Festival in the village hall this weekend?”

  “Much as I like raw fish,” Kit joked, “I’m actually going to stay at a farm. They make cheese there. It’s called Coolarney, and it’s run by a couple of old guys and this woman, Avis something, I can’t quite remember. I have the details upstairs. I don’t suppose you would happen to know where that is?”

  Maureen’s eyes darkened. “Don’t we all know where that is,” she said. “A fine old time you’ll be in for up there, no doubt. A fine old time indeed. Applying for the cheesemaker’s job there, are you? I wouldn’t have picked it. Not at all. With your fancy luggage and your fruity cologne. Still, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen, a fancy fella like yourself turning up to make cheese at Coolarney House, that’s for sure.”

  “You think my aftershave is fruity?” Kit asked, trying not to feel hurt and wondering what was behind Maureen’s change of mood.

  “Oh, well, you know,” she said airily, picking a bit of imaginary fluff off her skirt. “Some people like it that way.” Her momentary silence made it clear she was not one of those people. “There was a lad from across the lane who wore a very similar cologne,” she started.<
br />
  “Don’t tell me,” interrupted Kit, with his most charming smile, “he ended his life under the wheels of a fast-moving motor vehicle.”

  Maureen looked surprised. “Well, he didn’t end it but he certainly slowed it down a bit,” she said. “And anyway, it wasn’t my fault and it certainly wasn’t fast moving. What sort of an eejit would go to sleep on the ground behind a Honda Civic? Nobody would have seen him. That’s what was agreed.”

  Kit made a mental note to avoid, under any circumstances, falling asleep behind Maureen McCarthy’s Honda Civic. But he was intrigued by her insinuations about Coolarney House.

  “So what goes on up at this cheese farm, then?” he asked. “You make it sound kind of weird.”

  “Well, I really couldn’t say,” Maureen said, with pinched lips. “I’m not one to gossip but over the years the shenanigans up the road there would curl your hair.”

  “Shenanigans?” Kit asked, trying not to smile.

  “Let’s just say there’s more people gone into Coolarney House than have come out again—unless it’s babies you’re talking about, in which case it is entirely the other way around.”

  “Babies?” Kit wanted to know. “What shenanigans happen with babies?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, no doubt,” Maureen snipped. “Being as you are headed there yourself. Two old men with a houseful of expectant mothers, it’s not right. And Mr. High-and-Mighty Corrigan’s own daughter the first to turn her back on them. If you don’t count his wife, that is, God Rest Her Soul, wherever it might be with only those two old devils and your man upstairs 100 percent certain.”

  Kit was confused. “So his wife what? Died?” he asked. He’d put money on there being an automobile involved.

  “Just try asking him yourself,” Maureen said, surprising him by remaining stingy with details. “And while you’re there, see if you can find out where the bockety old borries have buried their treasure as well.”