excerpt
Finn MacLir kept his eyes on his daughter for a while. His eyes were perturbed, tired and bloodshot, and his forehead was wrinkled. He should have been wearing glasses but he always refused to see an optician, and Caitlin and Mother Ross had both given up hope of ever convincing him to buy spectacles. Finn looked as though he was going to say something but changed his mind. He now spent most of his time with his daughter and his wife, though he was by nature uncomfortable in the company of women. He rarely held anything like a conversation with them, especially when they were both together. So it was now, by the fire in the sitting room.
Finn leaned forward in the chintz-covered armchair and threw two more clods of turf on the fire. He and Caitlin and Mother Ross did not usually sit in here. They preferred the informality of the kitchen where they grouped themselves around the open grate of the shiny, black-leaded cooking range. But a cold December wind was blowing from the northeast, starving the numb flanks of the mountains. The kitchen at the back of the house felt chill, so Finn had lit a large fire in the sitting room hearth and retired to his armchair in the corner facing the window. Like many Drumard farmers on a winter night, he set about making sheep’s langles out of grass rope. Black-faced, horned sheep, grazed on a mountain like his own, grew wild at times, liked to wander and had to be tethered. Then Caitlin with her knitting, followed by Mother Ross with her delicate crochet had joined him in the lamplight by the fire.
Caitlin watched her father surreptitiously as well as her bowed head would allow. Finn was failing badly. He was losing weight, and the flesh hung loosely on his cheeks with an unhealthy colour. Every now and then Caitlin saw how he held his breath and stiffened; how his eyes took on the hard, distracted look of a man in pain; how he tried to hide his obvious discomfort if he caught her looking at him.
“It’s his age, Caitlin,” was all that Dr Starkey had said. “Your father’s an old man. Even the Finn MacLirs of this world grow old.”
Libros Libertad 