Fitzgerald’s closed at twelve thirty on Saturdays. When Pat came downstairs Des was scrubbing the chopping blocks and the sign was turned on the door. ‘Would you have a minute, Mrs Fitz?’
He came round the counter, looking awkward, and passed a very clean hand over his bristly head. He was a square-set man, light on his feet and quietly spoken, and the striped apron he wore over his white coat was tied low under an incipient paunch. ‘I was wondering if we’d have the usual window display, or if you wanted to skip it this year with Ger’s death so recent. I thought I might ask Frankie, but then it seemed best to come to you.’ He gazed at her doubtfully, obviously concerned that he might have said something wrong.
At first Pat couldn’t think what he meant. Then she remembered. ‘For St Patrick’s Day? Oh, yes, of course. No, we should have it, Des. We always do.’
The window display had been Ger’s idea, a way of combating the Carrick supermarkets’ St Patrick’s Day offers. It majored on nostalgia in the face of commercial hype. Instead of neon harps and foil shamrocks, Fitzgerald’s window sported a plaster wolfhound posed against a round tower, and customers buying their St Patrick’s Day lunch were given a free bunch of shamrock. Pat didn’t know where the slightly chipped plaster figures had come from, but they’d certainly been in the shop since Ger’s father’s day. The shamrock came from the farm. There were two or three places there where it grew profusely, and the idea of a giveaway that cost him nothing had greatly appealed to Ger. Each year he’d driven out with a knife and a plastic sack that had once contained sheep nuts, and returned with plenty for the customers and enough over to make a wreath around the wolfhound’s feet. So long as they didn’t lose by it, Lissbeg always liked to do down Carrick, and the free shamrock, as well as the saving in petrol, convinced many of the wisdom of buying local.
Pat hastened to reassure Des. ‘I should have remembered myself, and you did right to come to me. I’ll see about it.’
‘Right so, Mrs Fitz. I’ll put the dog on display at the start of the week. Wednesday’s the seventeenth, so if you could get me the shamrock soon I’ll be set for the rush.’
As he spoke, the door to the yard slammed and Cassie came in from the passage. Pat beamed at her. ‘Now! There you are, love! Are you busy this afternoon?’
‘Not a bit. Why?’
‘Well, I wondered if you’d drive me out to the farm.’ Pat turned to Des. ‘Ger would always check in advance to make sure of the shamrock. I know where to look and Cassie could take me today so we’d see what’s what.’
Cassie pushed her hand through her fringe. ‘No problem. Is this for St Patrick’s Day?’
Pat explained and Cassie’s eyes sparkled. ‘I didn’t know we grew shamrock on the farm.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be in the fields, love. You find it growing thick round a gate or up along a verge.’
‘You mean wild?’
Des chipped in. ‘Like your gran says, you just have to know where to look for it. Some years it fails in one place and springs up in another.’
‘Wow! So it’s like a treasure hunt.’
Pat laughed. ‘Sometimes it’s more like an endless trek down muddy boreens. We’ve never had a year without it, though. Not while I’ve been in this house.’
‘Okay. Let me find a pair of wellies and you can tell me where to go.’
* * *
It was what people called ‘a soft day’, half sunny, half misty. The bushes by the roadsides still wore a winter air, but the celandines gleaming against the stone walls had become flashes of gold in a carpet of yellow primroses. On lesser roads bounded by the banks of earth that Cassie had learned to call ditches, the primroses, fringed with pale green leaves, flourished behind a barbed network of dark, dormant briars. In damp corners between the stones, lamb’s tongue fern grew in emerald clumps. Cassie lowered her window to look out at them. Then, as she turned down a boreen indicated by Pat, she gasped. A profusion of starry flowers powdered the blackthorn hedges, their white petals shining like snow against the stark wood.
Pat smiled at Cassie’s reaction. ‘I’ve never known a spring when I haven’t gasped at the blackthorn flowers. I love the little catkins hanging from the hazel as well.’
‘It’s amazing how quickly everything’s coming to life.’
Pat began to chant in a childlike sing-song:
From Brigid’s Day on,
The birds build nests,
The sheep drop lambs,
And the day gets long.
‘I learned that from the nuns. Brigid’s Day is February the first, and they say it’s the first day of spring.’
‘It was snowing this year on February first!’
‘More often than not, that’s the way of it, love. But that’s what they say. When I was young we used make more of Brigid’s Day than St Patrick’s. Well, girls did, anyway. Maybe not lads so much.’
‘What did you do?’
‘You’d go round with a doll that was dressed up in lace and flowers.’
‘What was the significance?’
‘Ah, the custom was dying by that time, love, and I’m not sure what we were doing. There were all sorts of things they did in the past at the turn of the seasons. Dew gathered in Maytime was used for love potions, and there were herbs you could pick and put on your eyes to banish enchantment.’
‘No! Did you do that?’
‘Not at all, no one believed in that kind of stuff in my day. I think going round with the dolly was just about welcoming the spring.’
‘That’s cool.’
‘You’d walk the bounds of your land at certain times, too, and you’d light fires.’
‘What for?’
‘Protection, I think. From bad luck, you know, or a curse. An uncle of mine found an egg once, buried at a field boundary. He said someone had put it there to curse the land.’
‘Wow! He believed that?’
‘Land can bring out strange hatred in families.’
‘He thought a family member did it?’
‘I’m not sure, love. I was only a child, and they wouldn’t talk where I could hear them. I’d say there was bad blood between him and his brother, though.’
Cassie drove in silence between the flowering thorns. Then she remembered her conversation with Fury. ‘Did you know Fury O’Shea before he went off to England? He left after his dad died. His elder brother got everything so Fury just took off.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’ Pat looked at her mildly. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Nothing. Well, nothing much. It’s just . . . people here seem to have gone away a lot. And there always seem to be quarrels about land.’
‘Plenty of land was hard got, Cassie, and if a farm couldn’t feed a whole family, people had to emigrate.’
‘Fury didn’t want to go. Well, I don’t think so. He just couldn’t bear to see what would happen to the forest. In the end it got sold off. Was his brother an alcoholic?’
‘You’d find plenty who’d say he was. Plenty of others who’d say he was just a man who couldn’t cope with what life threw at him.’
‘But how come he didn’t get help?’
Pat pointed to an upcoming junction. ‘Here we are. If you take this turn, we can pull in and look around.’
Cassie turned, bumped along obediently for several hundred yards, and pulled in where she was told, by a slender hazel growing out of the ditch. This was nothing more than a rutted cart-track running between small fields. Pat, who had also worn wellington boots, climbed out of the passenger seat and made her way to Cassie’s side through a patch of young nettles. Their first furry grey-green leaves were springing through a tangle of last year’s dead couch grass. ‘There used to be plenty of shamrock down here. We’ll be better walking – the car would only get filthy.’ She set off carefully, picking her way between the muddy ruts.
Cassie crossed to a nearby gate and climbed up a few bars to get the lay of the land. The fields sloped upwards and, in the distance, she could see what she thought was the gable end of the old farmhouse. Catching up with Pat, she asked if she’d been right. ‘Is that the house Ger was born in?’
‘He was born and raised in it, love, and never left till we got married. I remember it in his mam’s day. She kept a lovely home. His granddad bought the butcher’s shop, and the flat above it, way back in the thirties. Well, the upstairs was just storage then, no one lived there. But Ger and I were given the use of it and, later on, Ger got the shop and his brother got the farm. And then, after poor Miyah died, Ger kept the farm going. Even these days, people like to know where their meat comes from. Ger used to say he could name the field that raised every joint in the shop.’
‘What happened to Miyah?’
‘He was never strong. He had a heart attack. Maybe he had the same weakness Ger had, I don’t know. We didn’t have all the scans and things back then.’
‘You didn’t have modern stress and stuff, though, either, did you?’
‘No, but I suppose we had stresses and strains of our own.’
Cassie gestured up the hill. ‘But look at all that amazing gorgeousness! And listen to the birds!’ She turned a slow full circle, the heels of her boots churning up the mud. ‘How could you find a more stunning place to live?’
‘I don’t suppose you could.’
‘Do you still notice it?’
‘Gracious, child, I haven’t lost the use of my senses yet.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I thought that maybe because it was all so familiar you, kind of, wouldn’t see what’s here anymore.’
‘No, I’ve always loved the countryside. I didn’t know you did.’
Cassie wrinkled her nose. ‘I didn’t either. Not before I came to Finfarran. Now I don’t understand how Dad and Uncle Jim could leave.’ As she spoke she realised that, only the previous week when she’d first met Brad, she’d been pining to set off round the world again. Yet now, gazing through drifting mist at these rolling fields, she couldn’t imagine a better place to be.
With a squeak of triumph, Pat pointed to the foot of a gatepost. Squatting down, Cassie peered at the mass of green trefoil. Its branching stems carried clusters of leaves hardly bigger than a fingernail, and each was divided into three further leaflets. She looked up at Pat. ‘Not like the lucky shamrock you see on a greeting card.’
‘No, love, I think some people confuse shamrock with four-leaf clover. It’s an easy mistake to make. Anyway, this is the stuff we call shamrock here. You’d wear a bunch of it on your lapel.’
‘Or in your hat?’
Pat laughed. ‘Not many do these days. Mind you, Ger’s father did. Your great-granddad.’
Cassie stood up with a leaf in her hand. ‘Do you think he picked it here?’
‘I’ve no notion, love. He’d have got it on the farm, though, I do know that.’
They were admiring the leaf when a shout came from the direction of the car. Looking up, Cassie saw Frankie coming towards them. Irritated by the interruption, and concerned not to show it, she waved with more enthusiasm than she felt. Then, as Frankie approached within hearing range, she called out cheerfully, ‘We haven’t been walking the bounds!’ Frankie’s face darkened. Thinking that she’d said something wrong, Cassie hastened to explain. ‘I mean we’re not burying eggs or trying to curse you.’
By now he had joined them, and was looking sharply at Pat. Cassie wondered if speaking of curses was thought to be unlucky. Or maybe it was a male/female thing, like the St Brigid’s celebrations. Something women didn’t discuss with men? Whatever it was, he didn’t seem happy.
Pat smiled. ‘Don’t mind her, son. I was telling her all about old superstitions. We came out to look for the shamrock and there’s great growth this year.’
Cassie saw Frankie’s shoulders relax. He glanced at the shamrock without much interest, and the smile that never quite reached his eyes spread across his face. ‘Fran said someone saw your car passing. She has tea made in the house if you’d like to drop up.’
Pat’s eyes lit up. ‘Well, that’s nice, now. Isn’t it, Cassie? I could do with a cup of tea.’
Cassie sighed inwardly. Whatever else she’d inherited from the Irish side of her family, it didn’t include this endless obsession with tea. Still, if that was what Pat wanted, she couldn’t be churlish. She smiled at Frankie, aware as she did so of a dull, wary mulishness in his eyes. He turned on his heel and, as they followed him, Cassie wondered if he mightn’t be very bright. Had he taken on the farm because Dad and Uncle Jim weren’t interested, or did he end up working for Ger because he wasn’t fit for much else?