After the meeting in the library Fury O’Shea drove home in the dusk with The Divil beside him on the passenger seat. From time out of mind Fury’s family had owned the ancient forest in the center of the peninsula where the house he had grown up in now stood derelict. The house where he lived now was the first that he had built when he came home twenty years ago, having spent twenty years before that on the building sites in London, unable to bring himself to come home.
Fury had always known that his elder brother Paudie was a waster. He had known, too, for as long as he could remember, that Paudie would inherit the land and the house, and that that would be a disaster. Their father, a taciturn man with a deep love of the forest, was equally aware of what would happen when his eldest son came into his inheritance. If his wife had still been alive she might have talked sense into him, but she had died when Fury was six. Some of the old man’s friends did try to reason with him, but he was adamant. Paudie was the heir and the house and the trees were his birthright. There was money set by for Fury’s sister and a few acres of land as a site for Fury if he wanted them, but everything else was for Paudie, though they all knew that he’d drink it away within months of the old man dying.
And so it had happened. At sixteen Fury had left school and gone to work for his father. By then Paudie was already in the pub six days out of seven and lying in his bed when he wasn’t on a barstool. When their father died a year later Fury decided to emigrate. His sister had gone to America and Fury had no intention of staying to watch Paudie neglect the land that the family had always cherished. It took him three months to raise the price of a ticket to London and a bit of money to keep him afloat till he settled. He wasn’t a builder by trade but he knew lumber, and, like any Finfarran man of his generation, he had grown up knowing how to raise a stone wall and to turn his hand to anything. The better part of the money for his fare to England came from the walls he built for Maggie Casey. Finding Maggie had been a real stroke of luck. The O’Sheas were a well-respected family, and people had sympathy for the orphaned seventeen-year-old Fury, but the early 1970s were a hard time on the peninsula when the weak were often cheated by the strong. Maggie Casey had paid his wages into his hand without docking money for invented misdemeanors, unlike some of the builders he’d worked for in the months before leaving Finfarran.
In London he settled to the life of an itinerant laborer, knowing that he’d never go home until Paudie died. He had his share of walking the streets and sitting in public libraries to keep warm, but each job he got taught him more about his trade, which meant he was more in demand. News from home reached him through the emigrant grapevine; lads from Finfarran would turn up in pubs in Hammersmith or Cricklewood with stories of how his brother was selling off parcels of woodland for no more than beer money. Then came the day when Fury was sitting in the Empire Café in Kilburn reading the Finfarran Inquirer and saw that the whole forest was up for auction. Knowing what Paudie was capable of, he had rung the auctioneer in Ballyfin and confirmed that his own site was excluded from the deal; though, judging by the auctioneer’s voice at the end of the line, it was just as well that he’d had the sense to call. Then, a few weeks later, on the third stage of scaffolding round a factory out in Croydon, a young fellow from Knockmore had told him that the forest was gone, sold to a man from Dublin who had later gone off to Australia.
By the time Fury returned to Finfarran, Paudie was dead, having drunk every penny he’d made at the auction, and the huge tract of woodland once managed by the O’Sheas had become a wilderness. The land their father had left to Fury was no more than a few acres of trees and a plot near the crossroads where Gunther and Susan now ran The Old Forge Guesthouse. Susan and Gunther were nice, hardworking people who were no bother at all if Fury wanted to borrow a couple of goats, as he’d done for Hanna Casey. It was a grand guesthouse. But Fury could remember the days of the working forge, when men’s voices could hardly be heard over the clash of iron, and the smith’s furnace had burned red and gold, making sparks in the cavernous darkness. And he could remember days spent among the trees, learning the pathways between them, the shapes of their limbs and their leaves, and the nature of the wood they yielded; hard or soft; straight or knotted; fit to make floorboards or joists, fine furniture or delicate inlay. When he first came home, in the spring of 1993, he had thought that he couldn’t live on the plot that was left to him, looking out at the untended forest and missing the world of his childhood. But in the end, since his site was all he had, he built himself a house.
In the next year or so he had watched the smith die and the forge fall into decay while a stream of emigrants from the peninsula still moved eastward, making for the boats and the airports. After that he had seen the bubble that was the Celtic Tiger swell and burst, leaving families that had overextended themselves struggling with debt and the legacy of unreal expectations. In those years of boom and bust, builders were asking silly money for badly done work and people were fool enough to pay for it. In Ballyfin, men that Fury had known without a seat to their trousers bought sites when they were cheap and sold them on for a fortune. Some speculators who had arrived back from England were stupid enough to hang on too long watching the prices rise, and had burned their fingers. Others, like old Ger Fitz, who had stayed at home and seen the way the wind was blowing, played a cuter game and came out laughing. Fury himself had bought little and saved enough, and remained beholden to no one.
Now he turned his van off the road and onto his own land, crunching down the gravel driveway and pulling up by his house. He had set it at right angles to the road with the trees on three sides of it. At the rear was a series of sheds, against one of which he’d built a kennel for The Divil. From the outside, the house had nothing to recommend it but its authoritative proportions. Inside it was sparsely furnished and suited Fury well.
Entering the living room with The Divil at his heels, he went to a table by the bookshelves and removed a sheet of newspaper from the de Lancy lectern he was working on for Charles Aukin. There was a collection of tools spread out on the table and Fury had already removed the split batten of wood and selected a replacement. The two leaf-shaped pieces of brass were laid aside, wrapped in a cotton rag, and the new screws on which they would pivot were ready and waiting in the upturned lid of an old coffee jar. He had made the screws himself and drilled new holes in the shelf at the front of the lectern to receive them; because of Charles’s ham-fisted DIY job the leaf-shaped pieces of brass designed to hold open the leaves of a book would have to be set farther apart than before. But they would still do their work, and Fury was confident that with subtle changes to the flow of the carving on the original batten, he could achieve a balanced effect on the new one.
It had been clear to him when he removed the split wood that it was an alteration to the original. At some stage, perhaps three hundred years ago, someone else had replaced or added the batten with its design of carved ash leaves and berries. Perhaps the medieval manuscript books that had first stood on the lectern had been held open by weighted leather bookmarks and the pivoting leaf-shaped pieces of brass had been added later as a high-tech innovation. The lectern was made of ash wood, but Fury could tell that the tree that produced the split batten had hardly been a sapling when the wood used for the rest of the piece had been cut. Centuries of sunlight and beeswax had darkened both the new wood and the old, and now the strip that Fury was carving would almost appear to be gilded in comparison to the shelf he would fix it to. But it, too, would darken with time, telling its own story to those who had eyes to see.
Pulling a bench up to the table, he picked up the new batten of ash with its half-carved ribbon of berries and leaves. He had countersunk the screw holes among the carved foliage so that as the wood darkened the screws would appear like golden berries. He would be long dead before the effect would show. But sure that didn’t bother him. In fact it was half the pleasure of creating it. Selecting a chisel from those on the table, he reached for his glasses and set to work.
Fury was a man who liked to know what was happening. He had had no particular reason for attending young Conor McCarthy’s event in Lissbeg Library, for example, but, seeing that something was going on, he had simply wandered in. It was the same impulse that took him to the back of the church on Sundays, and into the corridors of the council building in Carrick if he happened to be passing. Forty years ago, he remembered, Maggie Casey had accused him of having a spying eye. She had handed him a cup of tea by the fire after a day’s work and seen him looking fixedly at the dresser that stood in the alcove by her fireplace. At the time, the dresser had had open shelves above, a broader one at waist height to act as a work surface, and an open space below, originally intended as a coop for hens. Maggie hated hens in the house and spent her life hunting them out of the kitchen, so Fury had offered to put shelves and solid doors at the bottom of it and glazed doors above, to keep dust off the glasses and ware. He built them of ash wood and the piece he was carving now was left over from that job—stored with other offcuts in a tin box in a shed, it had kept its golden color for over forty years.
The year he came home to Finfarran, Fury had taken a crowbar to the locks on the outbuildings behind his old home and removed the tools, lumber, and other oddments accumulated by his father and grandfather before him; in theory they belonged to the man to whom Paudie had sold the buildings, but he had had no compunction about taking them. He knew that his neighbors on the peninsula said that he was a law unto himself, and he supposed that was true. He believed in acting in accordance with the laws of common sense, and, above all, he hated waste.
As a cluster of ash berries formed in the ash wood under his chisel he remembered a moment in the council building in Carrick a while back, when Joe Furlong, the owner of the largest hotel in Ballyfin, had emerged from an office in the planning department and dodged into an elevator, clearly hoping he hadn’t been spotted. Knowing that Joe had been dabbling in property development for years, and having heard rumors about the council’s impending plan, common sense had suggested to Fury what was going on. Then a few days later he noticed Joe Furlong and Ger Fitzgerald with their heads together in a Ballyfin pub. Tonight at Conor’s event in the library the usual accusations about councillors taking bribes in brown envelopes had been thrown about by a lad in a leather jacket. But Fury thought it unlikely that anything so crude had occurred. The councillors didn’t need bribing; the proposed plan incorporated a new, high-tech complex that would add hugely to the kudos and comfort of their jobs, and, to be fair, there must be those among them who believed it would also improve the service that the council provided to the community. Still, in order for the plan to get support and approval in government circles in Dublin it needed quiet words in the right places, which the rich businessmen in Carrick would be able to provide.
Fury turned the carving in his hand, blowing away the curls of chiselled wood. He knew that years ago, Ger Fitzgerald had picked up a site on the outskirts of Ballyfin large enough to take a massive hotel. It was just above the site of the proposed marina, which would allow cruise ships to schedule stopovers in Ballyfin. If Ger and Joe were to get together on a scheme for a new hotel they could make a killing if the marina got built. Fury reckoned it was as simple as that. Nothing that was actually dodgy. No one breaking the law. Just a tidy stitch-up that, once again, put money into very large pockets while keeping it out of small ones.