Peering out of the window, Cassie could see that the sky was slate grey. But the temperature was nowhere near freezing, and last night the forecast had shown what had seemed to her no more than a sprinkling of snow.
Irish people were weird about the weather. This morning Conor, who’d stayed overnight, had left number eight early, to move stock that was grazing on the hills to fields closer to the farmhouse. And when Bríd and Aideen had gone out later, they were bundled up as if they expected a blizzard.
After breakfast Cassie shrugged on her coat, hitched her knapsack over her shoulder, and set out for Ballyfin. It was no fun just shooting down the motorway, so she planned to take the back roads and see if she could skirt the edge of the forest and find her way to the high mountain pass at the southern side of Knockinver.
Soon she was driving down a one-track road towards trees that disappeared and reappeared as she navigated dog-leg bends. Up ahead, the sky steadily darkened to a pewter colour. Then, out of nowhere, a gust of wind hurled a shower of hail against her windshield. Switching on the wipers, she leaned forward. Beyond the windshield, the road seemed almost in darkness, so she hit the fog lights. Flying hailstones were hitting the road like bullets, and leaping back into the air. Fiddling with the controls, Cassie tried to work out if she’d do better relying on the headlamps without the fog lights, or whether she might see more with no lights at all.
As she inched on down the road, the weight of the hailstones seemed to be too much for the wipers, so she pushed their speed up to max. Briefly, it made a difference. Until the arm passing in front of her suddenly stopped at upright, then floated randomly left and right, doing no good at all.
Up ahead was a T-junction. Turning onto it, she realised there was a passing place about ten yards away, where she could pull in by the forest edge. But now, to see anything at all, she had to lean over and peer through the passenger side of the windshield, where the single wiper was still working. So, even travelling the short distance to the passing place was horrible, with her right foot stretching for the accelerator, and the frightening awareness that her instinctive responses belonged in a left-hand drive car.
As soon as she pulled in, and the wipers were off, the windshield caked up altogether. Opening the door, she stepped out into the bitterly cold wind in order to squint at the sky. The heavy clouds were still as dark as pewter and the hailstones blown sideways against her face felt like tiny shards of glass. She was about to get back into the car to call a garage when a battered red van appeared, coming towards her. It pulled up as it drew alongside, and Fury O’Shea leaned over to shout out of the window.
‘Are you having trouble?’
‘One of my wiper blades broke.’
Fury climbed down from the cab and strolled over to her car. ‘You’re Ger and Pat Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, aren’t you?’
‘That’s me. Cassie. The car’s Pat’s but I guess she didn’t fit winter wipers.’
Fury was scraping at the coat of hailstones on the windshield. ‘You never know what to expect of the weather round these parts, girl – we don’t do seasonal.’
He was wearing the same oversized waxed jacket she’d seen him in previously, and the ends of his corduroy trousers were stuffed into wellington boots. Rubbing his hands together to warm them, he jerked his head towards the van. ‘I’d say I might have a fix for that wiper in the shed. The house is just down the road. I’ll give you a cup of tea till the hail clears, and then we can drive back and set you right.’
He ordered his little Jack Russell terrier into the back of the van, and Cassie climbed into the passenger seat. The heater in the cab was going full blast and there was a smell of linseed oil, sawdust, and extra-strong mints.
As they rattled away, Cassie tried to thank him.
‘Well, I couldn’t go leaving you at the side of the road, could I? You wouldn’t have frozen to death, mind, but, even with that grand tinfoil coat, you would have got nippy.’
‘I was on my way to Ballyfin. Pat said I could take the old road over the mountain pass if I skirted the forest.’
‘Well, if you were navigating by eye, you weren’t making a bad fist of it.’ He swung the wheel and the van crunched down the gravel drive of a house that backed onto the forest. It was set at an angle to the road, so that trees were on three sides of it, and Cassie could see a dog kennel and a group of sheds at the rear.
The big room that Fury led her into had a kitchen at one end, a table and chairs in the middle, and an easy chair angled to face a TV that stood on a large fridge-freezer.
‘This is really kind. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’
Fury grunted and went to fill the electric kettle. The Divil, who had pattered in behind them, jumped on one of the chairs and settled his chin on the table.
‘Is this where you grew up?’
Fury shook his head. ‘Not in this house, no. I built it. The place I grew up in has fallen to bits now. It was down the road.’ He assembled mugs, milk, and sugar on a corner of the table, most of which was taken up by something covered with a cotton dust sheet. There were curls of wood shavings scattered on the floor beneath The Divil’s chair.
‘Are you a wood-carver?’
Fury cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Aren’t you the inquisitive one?’
‘Well, I just wondered.’
‘I was raised a forester, if you must know.’
‘That’s what your dad did?’
‘And his father before him. Back for generations. The forest got sold off, though.’
As he went to put water in the teapot, Cassie sat down by The Divil. When Fury handed her a steaming mug she wrapped her cold hands around it gratefully. ‘Who sold off the forest?’
Dipping his beaky nose into his own mug, he gave her a sharp look. ‘What do you do for a living yourself?’
‘I’m a hairdresser.’
‘Oh, right. I thought you might be an investigative journalist.’
He didn’t seem particularly cross, though. Cassie ran her hand through her fringe and shook it back into place. ‘I guess Irish people don’t like straight questions.’
‘You’ve noticed that, have you?’
‘Well, yeah. Since I’ve been here.’
‘Bet you grew up thinking you were Irish yourself, though.’
Cassie laughed. ‘Well, half Irish. My mom’s from Québec.’
‘Will you be wanting biscuits?’
‘Because my mom’s from Québec?’
‘Because I’ve never known a woman who didn’t want a biscuit with her tea.’
‘Oh. Okay. Well, I won’t say no.’
‘I wouldn’t doubt you.’ He produced a tin of fig rolls from a cupboard and looked severely at The Divil. ‘Yer man there is the same, of course, and now he’ll want his saucer as well.’
With The Divil sitting beside her lapping tea and crumbled fig roll from a saucer, Cassie tried another angle. ‘How come you wanted to be a builder, not a forester?’
‘I didn’t say that’s what I wanted.’
Feeling repressed, she returned to her tea. Fury said nothing for a minute. Then he laughed. ‘Well, if you want the story it’s no secret, and I suppose you may as well have it from the horse’s mouth. I went away, like your dad and your uncle Jim. To England, in my case, to work on the sites. My older brother fell in for the house and the land here at home. And by the time he died of drink he’d let the house go to ruin and sold off most of the forest.’
This was rather more information than Cassie had bargained for. Glancing up, she found Fury looking amused.
‘There you have it. A straight answer to a straight question. Will we change the subject?’ He reached forward and lifted the dust sheet from the table. On sheets of newspaper, among more shavings, was a range of chisels, several pieces of wood, and a group of carved figures.
Cassie gasped in delight. ‘You are a wood-carver!’
‘Well, I know my trees, I can tell you that.’
She picked up one of the figures. It was a donkey. You could see every hair in his coarse, bristly mane. Grouped together on the table were three half-carved sheep. They were made of paler wood than the donkey. Beside them was a man leaning on a stick. He was wearing a rough jacket and trousers and his feet were bare.
Cassie picked up another figure, similarly dressed, but with a sheepskin tied round his shoulders over his jacket. He had a close-fitting cap on his head and held a little lamb in his arms.
The men were about four or maybe six inches high. On the table, propped against a little pile of sawdust, was the half-carved figure of a baby wrapped in a blanket. You could see that the fabric was thick and tightly wrapped, and that the baby was deeply asleep.
Putting the shepherd back on the table, Cassie lifted another carving. ‘You’re making a Nativity scene.’
‘You’d call it a crib round here.’
‘And this is the ox.’ She turned the piece in her hands, admiring the curved horns. You could see how the marks of different tools had defined the folds of its dewlaps and the curly hair on its poll. ‘Are you going to paint them?’
‘Name of God, girl, are you thick or what are you?’ Fury slammed his mug on the table and, troubled by disturbed sawdust, The Divil sneezed. ‘Why do you think a carver chooses different kinds of wood?’
Cassie hadn’t thought about it at all. ‘Because they’re easy to work? Or they’re what you’ve got?’
Fury sopped up his spilled tea with a corner of the cotton dustsheet. ‘Well, that too. But because they give you different colours. You don’t want to clog up your work with layers of paint. Different trees give different colours. Sapwood or heartwood makes a difference too. If you know your trees you’ll make your choice.’
‘Do you get it all from the forest?’
Fury shook his head. ‘The little fellow is cherry sapwood. So are the lambs. I know a fella that has an orchard. But there’s pine and ash there from the forest. And the ox is red oak.’
‘How do you know what animals looked like back then? Wouldn’t they have been different? I mean, like, different breeds?’
‘I wouldn’t know, girl. Chances are you’re right.’ Fury pointed to a little piece so dark it was nearly black. It was a border collie, with a thick ruff of shaggy hair and a pointed face. ‘You probably wouldn’t get herd dogs like yer man there over in Bethlehem either. But he’s what you’d see round here.’
Yesterday Conor had told Cassie that Hanna was turning a new page of the psalter each week in the run-up to Christmas and, since she’d never seen the exhibition, she’d gone in to take a look. She hadn’t waited to check out the meaning of the text, but she’d been fascinated by a little illustration in the margin of the left-hand page. It was of a flock of sheep strung out across a green field, with the sun setting behind distant mountains, and it looked exactly like a photograph she’d taken last week.
Now, looking at Fury’s carvings, she realised it had never occurred to her that visual artists expressed images in what amounted to a language, and that the artist could choose to make it foreign or native, or to weave one into the other, to create a conscious effect.
When she said so, Fury nodded at her. ‘Ay, well, if you’ve noticed that you’ve noticed more than most people. And I’ll tell you something else, girl. Most people stand still the whole of their lives and see things from one point of view.’