Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  The humidity in the dairy made cutting the curd hard, hot work, but Kit found it satisfying to sweep silently through the squeaky mass, breaking it down to smaller and smaller pieces. “Small enough for you?” he asked, taking a moment to wipe his brow with his forearm.

  “Get on with you, you lazy article,” scolded Fee. “You’re not selling and marketing here, you know.”

  When the curd was broken down to crumb size, Fee pulled at a pluglike opening on Anneke’s side and the whey started to course out onto the floor, flowing down a channel to a grill in the ground.

  “Where does it go?” Abbey wanted to know.

  “Back out to the farm usually,” Corrie said. “It’s just water and a bit of protein but it helps maintain our equilibrium.”

  “Besides, we can’t find any other fecker that wants the stuff,” added Fee.

  He really can be quite grumpy, thought Abbey.

  “By the way, Abbey,” the old fox said, looking at her slyly, “did I mention how gorgeous you are looking this morning?”

  Not grumpy exactly, she corrected herself. Just forthright, really.

  When about a third of the whey was drained off, Fee looked at Corrie. This was an important moment for the future of Coolarney cheese and they both knew it. Everything rode on what was about to happen. Demeanor remaining casual while their hearts beat quickly in nervous anticipation, they entreated their apprentices to taste the curd. Kit scooped up a handful and held it to his nose.

  “Smell’s sweeter than I would have expected,” he said. Fee felt excitement rising in his chest.

  “God, it tastes delicious,” Abbey added, curd spilling from her lips on to the floor.

  “Incredible,” agreed Kit. “It’s fantastic.”

  Trying not to let them see his excitement, Fee dipped his arm into the vat. He lifted his hand slowly to his lips and closed his eyes to inhale its perfection. But before he even got it to his mouth, he knew something was wrong.

  It was still there. Unmistakable. The taint of failure.

  He shook his head ever so slightly as Corrie’s face collapsed with calamity. He dipped his own hand in and swallowed a mouthful of Kit and Abbey’s curd, willing it to sing and dance in his mouth, but it didn’t. It sat in the audience. Maybe it even clapped politely, but it still sat in the audience. Ignoring his own disappointment, he nodded encouragingly at the apprentices then left Fee to show them how to heat the curd again then drain it and pack it into molds until each last crumb was spoken for.

  When Fee found him sometime later he was sitting in the garden on the bench that had been home to Kit for so many hours the day before, looking old and gray.

  “If you really thought they could get it first time around you’re more of a simple old bollocks than I thought,” Fee said.

  Corrie just sighed. “And you didn’t?” he asked his friend. “That’s not what you were hoping for?” Fee simply shrugged his shoulders and sat down next to him.

  “Is it him, Joseph?” Corrie asked. “Are you wrong about him?”

  “Well, I don’t think so, but shall we give it, oh, I don’t know, at least another minute before we give up all hope and shoot ourselves in the head?”

  Corrie sighed again. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “We’ll just wait and see. What else is there for it?” They sat there in silence, watching a gentle breeze run like a ripple through the poppies in the garden.

  “Actually, I don’t think we should wait for too long,” Fee said eventually, sitting ramrod still on the bench. Corrie went to stand up but Fee pulled him back. “I don’t mean now,” he said, avoiding his friend’s eyes.

  Corrie sat back down. “Well, what do you mean?” he asked.

  Fee kicked at the pebbles on the garden path with his filthy tennis shoe. “I mean generally. I mean there might not be a lot of time.”

  Corrie felt a pain rip through his chest as he processed what this meant. For the first time in his life, Fee, who believed in nothing much but time, didn’t have any. Fee, who knew that it would heal all wounds. Who always waited, never rushed. Separated from time, Fee was not himself, Corrie thought. He was just a short, fat cranky cheesemaker with bad shoes. It wasn’t possible. He felt the pain in his heart spread and push a lump up into his throat and hot tears to the back of his eyes. He took a moment to compose himself.

  “Come on then,” he said, with a shaky smile and a confidence he felt a million miles away from, “let’s show them how it’s done.”

  “No, no, no,” Kit was saying to Abbey as they leaned against the benches packed with filled cheese molds, the factory heavy with the smell of settling curd, “she was training to be a nun but she got sent to teach the von Trapps instead.”

  “Well, who sent her?” Abbey asked.

  “The mother superior or whatever they’re called,” Kit answered. “I don’t know, but Maria wasn’t making a very good nun because she kept running up into the Alps with her guitar and singing.”

  “You’re clearly not up with what makes a good nun.”

  “Well, I know that handwriting is important,” Kit said, but Abbey ignored him as Corrie and Fee appeared again. Kit wasn’t sure if he imagined it or not but she seemed to stiffen ever so slightly at the sight of her grandfather. He supposed they hardly knew each other, but still . . .

  Fee looked around with pleasure at the sight of all his cheese molds filled with curd, dripping happily onto the benches and the floor below. “A fine mess you’ve made while my back was turned,” he beamed. “Tomorrow we’ll soak these cheeses in that salty solution in the big stainless tub at the back there. In the meantime we’ll need to turn the molds every hour to make sure the cheeses take on an even shape and also to squeeze out the last bits of whey.

  “The face on you!” Fee said suddenly to Kit. “What’s your problem?”

  “Why do you have to salt it?” Kit asked. Years of nutrition advice at the gym he had frequented before Jacey used up all his time had steered him away from salt to the point where he no longer had a taste for it.

  Fee huffed in an exasperated fashion. “Saints preserve us,” he said. “What do you think is going on inside this contraption?” Fee rapped on the nearest mold, sending droplets of whey spinning into the air. “We’ve got something wet and warm to which we have added bacteria. It’s alive,” he whispered dramatically. “What we have in here is the result of our own specific equilibrium. Do you know about equilibrium, Kit?”

  Kit nodded. He knew about equilibrium all right. Equilibrium, or lack of it, was why he was here.

  “You take the amount of acreage out there,” Fee said, nodding in the general direction of the farm, “the mood of the shorthorns, the nature of the grass, the amount of milk they give us, the time of year and whatever’s in the air, you mix them together and what have you got?”

  “Bibbity-bobbity-boo!” cried Abbey. “I did see that one!”

  Corrie laughed but Fee rapped his knuckles sharply once more against the cheese molds, sending an angry message rattling down the bench. “If you’re not going to take this seriously . . .” he warned.

  “Okay, okay,” said Kit. “I’m listening.”

  You great girlie swot, thought Abbey.

  “Just feel the heat, the humidity, the smell, the plain Coolarniness of this place,” Fee said, lifting his round red nose up to the air and waggling it. “The things that are going on in here . . .”

  He closed his eyes and sniffed, Kit and Abbey with him.

  “What’s going on in these cheeses is dynamite,” he said, snapping his head forward and opening his eyes to look at his apprentices. “If it keeps going on the way it is now we could be blown to kingdom come.”

  Kit felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  “What we do with the salt is cancel that bacterial life inside the cheese so we can gain control. The salt locks the flavor, freezes the equilibrium,” he said, “so we can regroup for a moment.”

  Frozen equilibrium, Kit thought.
Regrouping.

  “We’re using alchemy: turning liquid to solids courtesy of acidification, with the catalyst of rennet to trap the protein,” he continued. “That much is chemistry. Anybody can do that. Monkeys, three-year-olds, investment brokers . . .”

  He beckoned for Kit and Abbey to follow him to the back of the factory, where he headed down the stairs to the Gold room. He stopped reverentially and bowed his head (overkill, thought Corrie) at the door then slipped inside, entreating the others to follow. The smell was tantalizing. Nutty, sort of, Abbey thought, and grassy, but with a hint of tamarillo perhaps, or kiwi fruit. And there was a sourness to it, too: a Junior’s shoes at the door on an especially hot day sort of a smell.

  “So, science can get everybody some of the way,” Fee said, “but the rest is up to us and this is where it happens.” He looked proudly around the room at the neatly packed racks of cheese. “We bring Coolarney Gold down here and wipe it every two days with a yeasty smear that gives a bit of a turbocharge to the flavor and makes it this pale-yellow hue.” He pointed at the racks closest to them. “It’s not for wimps, Coolarney Gold. It’s a cheese-lovers’ cheese. Anyway, as the cheese develops and we keep washing it, it changes color, till it’s golden or even orange,” he said, pointing at the racks at the back of the room.

  “No offense,” said Kit bravely, “but it smells like old men’s socks.”

  “None taken,” Fee said delightedly, “it’s supposed to. That’s our older boys at the back there. Nothing like it anywhere else in the world. We’ve always had something different. Something you can’t get anywhere else. Something unique,” he said.

  The four of them stood and soaked up the Coolarniness.

  “So what we do,” continued Fee, “is we bring our perfectly calculated cheese made at the right temperature with right ingredients at the right time—the stuff you made up there today—down into this room and we let something happen. That’s always been the way, whether we made our own starter, our own rennet or not.

  “We do what we can upstairs according to a fairly rigid set of calculations, then we stand back and let the farm, the air, the rain, the moon, the room we’re feckin’ standing in, make its mark and that becomes Coolarney Gold.”

  In the dim light of the curing room he smiled on the racks. “Can you believe it?” he said. “The magic of cheese.”

  Kit felt a shiver run down his spine. He was thirty-two years old and until recently a well-respected New York investment broker. He wore Prada shoes, Calvin Klein boxers and paid $100 every three weeks to get his hair cut. He had Louis Vuitton luggage, for chrissakes. But he’d screwed up his equilibrium, and as a result here he was standing in a dingy cellar in the arse end of Ireland regrouping. It’s a strange old world, he thought to himself with a shudder.

  Abbey too felt trembly and scared, but for a different reason. She wasn’t sure if it was tiredness or stress or hope or fear but the intensity of the curing room was making her heart beat in time to the words her mother had hurled at her as she left the London flat.

  “Just ask that old bastard what happened to your grandmother,” she heard Rose sob. “Just ask him what’s buried in his precious factory.”

  Corrie turned to say something to her, but at the sound of his feet moving in the underground room, panic gripped her. With a strangled cry, Abbey dodged the old man, wrenched open the door and stumbled up the stairs and through the factory. Outside, palms sweating and chest heaving, she leaned against the wall, threw back her head and gulped the fresh, clean country air.

  “What am I doing here?” she begged the sky.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “If you think cheese is just food, you’re an eejit, because it is so much more than that. It’s poetry. It’s passion. It’s pathos. It’s no coincidence that milk and human blood are almost the same temperature. Had you thought about that, now?”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  Jesus, as it turned out, was a bad mother. When Lucy ran to check up on the kittens while Abbey and Kit were having their first cheesemaking lesson, it became clear that Jesus had succumbed to the lure of the night and abandoned her newborns. Two little corpses lay under the tree next to the old blanket Lucy and Jamie had put there the night before, and of the other four there was no sign. Jesus herself had been seen licking the cream off the dairy floor earlier on and had spent much of the morning yowling outside the kitchen door for food and attention. Apart from a slight bagginess about the undercarriage, she showed no recent signs of motherhood and didn’t have the decency to exhibit so much as a glimmer of guilt over the whole affair.

  Lucy was inconsolable. Nothing Avis nor the girls said could calm her down, and when Kit retreated to the garden after lunch for a bit of reflective peace and quiet, he found her hiccupping and grief-stricken on his bench.

  After Abbey’s abrupt departure from the curing room earlier on, Corrie had gone in search of his granddaughter while Fee and Kit stayed behind to smear the cheeses, an arduous yet comforting task that had worked up quite an appetite for the vegetarian pies Avis had made for lunch. Kit had gorged himself on Coolarney Blue and was feeling the need for a snooze in the sun, but Lucy’s need for a shoulder to cry on was obviously greater—so he resigned himself to that duty.

  “How could she leave them like that?” she wailed. “They were only tiny babies.”

  Kit was at a loss to explain. “Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be,” he said. “Perhaps it just wasn’t their time.”

  This only made Lucy cry harder. Her bony shoulders shook with grief, and when she lifted her little girl’s face to Kit, it was blotchy and mottled and streaked with mascara. She looked about five years old, Kit thought, and his heart went out to her. All traces of the flirtatious minx from last night had been replaced by this tearful girl-child; he scooted closer on the bench and put his arm around her, squeezing her tight.

  Lucy sobbed into his T-shirt, and Kit felt her tears wet and warm on his skin. He thought of Flynn and wondered how his own kid brother was doing. He’d sent him a check and a letter explaining that he was going away for a while, but hadn’t quite had the balls to ring and tell him why. Flynn knew about Jacey of course, but not about Kit’s problems since then. He sighed and held Lucy a bit tighter. It was hard to admit to himself that his life had spun out of control. How could he admit it to anyone else, especially Flynn, one of the few people left in the world who still thought the sun shone out his butt?

  Lucy’s sobbing subsided mildly but she kept her head on Kit’s chest. He’d never seen dreadlocks up close, he realized.

  “I just don’t understand it,” she said wetly. “Jesus is normally such a sweet little thing. Mary and All The Saints are the mean ones.”

  “Perhaps she just wasn’t cut out for motherhood,” Kit said, inspecting the tangle on her head and wondering how clean the matted locks actually were.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lucy cried, anguished, pushing her face harder into Kit’s T-shirt. “That’s what’s so scary.” She wailed even louder and the penny, for Kit, finally dropped. It was sad about the kittens, sure, but her tears were out of proportion. The hysterics, when he thought about it, were unlikely to be truly about Jesus’s maternal instincts.

  “Lucy,” he said, “is there anything else that’s bothering you?” She seemed so innocent, he thought, looking at her round, blue eyes. So helpless and young.

  She blinked away her tears and nodded her head.

  “Is it about the baby?”

  She sniffed. “Maybe,” she said quietly.

  Kit started to say something. Thought better of it. Then said it anyway. “Maybe,” he said, “you’re worried that you’re not cut out for motherhood.”

  Lucy bit her quivering bottom lip.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She took a deep breath and sat up straight so she could look at him more easily. “You’re the only one who understands me,” she said.

&nbs
p; “I hardly know you,” Kit answered with a brotherly smile. “I’m sure the others would understand you if you let them.”

  “I’m nothing like them,” Lucy said. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant until I got here. I could’ve been one of those girls that ends up on Ricki Lake having a baby in the toilets at a nightclub and not telling anyone.”

  “That happens?” Kit asked.

  “All the time.” Lucy sniffed again, her bravado making a brief return as she danced around the delicate subject of her condition. “And then their mothers go ballistic and their friends all turn against them and it’s a total nightmare.”

  There was no correct response to that, Kit decided. “So how did you end up here, anyway?”

  “I just went to the bus station and got a ticket for as far away as I could afford.”

  “Why?” asked Kit. “What were you getting away from?”

  “A great stinking bollocks by the name of Eamon Casey is what,” Lucy said with venom. “My so-called boyfriend back in Dublin.”

  “So-called?”

  “Well, he was just my plain old boyfriend until, you know—” Lucy faltered.

  “Until what?”

  “Oh God, I can hardly bear to talk about it,” Lucy said, screwing her face up again. They’d been going out for almost a year, she told Kit. Eamon played bass guitar in a Dublin grunge band called Oktober and she was in her first year of a music degree at Trinity College. They’d met at a mutual friend’s party in a rambling student house in Dun Laighoaire and had declared themselves “exclusive” straightaway, or so Lucy had thought.

  “Then a couple of months ago we were supposed to meet up one night and I got a message on the answering machine at home saying the band was having an extra practice and he wouldn’t be able to make it. They had this huge big gig the next night down at Slane Castle, being the support act for the support act for the band before The Red Hot Chili Peppers, so it made sense. Except”—her lip trembled—“except that he was calling me from his cell phone and he must have hit the wrong button or not switched it off or something because the message on the answering machine didn’t finish when he thought it did, when he said good-bye.”