The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  We are in the depths of winter. It’s been the wettest January on record and storms have battered and blown our sheds and fields and rivers. In the west of the country people are flooded, and I’ve watched them cry on the news. I met an agriculture salesman in the feed store who had come from Galway, and he told me they had rowed boats over fields, over the height of gates. I cannot imagine our fields being so drowned.

  Our fields have names, but I do not think this strange, for all our neighbors have names for their fields too. They have been passed on from generation to generation. When Da and Mam bought Ruske’s ten years ago, after old Robin died, the first thing they did was to find out their names. There was the Crab Apple field, the Potato field and the Meadow. They were English names, for Ruske’s land had once been owned by the Hamiltons, who had been settlers in the time of the plantations of Queen Elizabeth I. We no longer know what the Gaelic names for the fields were; they are gone. Once on the radio I heard a well-known sports commentator from Kerry speak of the childhood fields of his home; their names were in Irish and sounded beautiful.

  The fields here are old and have known my people, the Connells, for a long time, first as tenants to an English lord, then as owners. We have walked and worked their knolls and nooks. There have been other families, other bloodlines, in this place in the townland of Soran, but many have moved away or died out. Farming is a walk with survival, with death over our shoulder, sickness to our left, the spirit to our right and the joy of new life in front. It is a cross of creation, like the sign of God we were taught in school.

  There are three sheds in the yard, each built at a different time as the farm grew. Once our old accountant tried to get my parents to invest in apartments in a tourist town, but they refused. The land is what we know, they said. It sustains us, enriches us, the land is our living and we know no other way. Birchview is the name of this place. It is my home.

  Mornings

  Mother is the first to rise. I do not know anyone who works quite as hard as her. She is our gatekeeper, for between the hours of three and six a.m. no one is awake, unless there is a birth, and so her morning watch at six is the first of the new day and will tell us what to expect.

  The farm is not her job; she has a Montessori school and day-care center at the back of the house, but she loves the farm all the same.

  I must admit that there have been mornings when I have cursed her waking of me, but then I am reminded that the cows or sheep have no one else to help them in their hours of need or distress. Mother is their voice.

  I rise at the same time each morning, have a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge and make my way to the farmyard.

  It is still dark as I walk across the yard. The frost has not come, but it is cold and I blow upon my hands to warm them. I do not wear gloves, for we farmers do not wear gloves—I think it might be seen as weakness.

  My first job of the day is to let the dog out.

  His name is Vinny, he’s a pup, and I’ve been training him these last few weeks. I’ve never trained a dog before, so cannot gauge either my work or his discipline, and yet he does as he is told now, which is just as well for Vinny, because he was nearly a goner.

  I blame myself, for I started it. The sheep had been lambing for a few weeks when Vinny arrived on the farm. He was bright and young and great company for us as we checked on the animals in the night. It must have been the third or fourth lambing when I threw him the afterbirth, which is the placenta of the mother. He set to it and chewed as if it were the finest tartare. I wondered briefly if it was the right thing to do, but he did not bother the lambs or sheep so it seemed that it was OK, and so the practice began. I would deliver a lamb and throw Vinny the afterbirth and, being the good dog he was, he would eat it promptly.

  It was six in the morning when Mam woke me.

  “Vinny’s eating one of the new lambs,” she cried.

  I did not see the attack but I saw the lamb afterwards, his ears chewed red and bloody, his legs clawed. He was shaken but he was alive. Mother had wrestled the two apart and hushed the dog away.

  I treated the lamb’s cuts with iodine and put him back with his mother.

  We worked out as best we could what had happened. The lamb had been born in the night and had escaped its pen, still covered in birth fluids. Vinny had thought it another placenta—lunch, a mobile lunch—but I do not think he minded that, and he would have chewed the lamb up happily, not out of violence towards the creature but in getting his treat of meat.

  “He’s got no sense,” Mam said.

  “Do you think he meant it?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I scolded Vinny then, for the sight of the lamb’s ears angered me so.

  When my father came out to the yard, he too scolded the dog and then, carrying him by the scruff of his neck, placed him in his doghouse. He stayed there for a time whilst we decided what to do with him.

  My father is not a dog person, so it was odd that he was the one who had bought Vinny and even given him his name. After a few days of thinking, he took the dog in the jeep to give him a new home with a neighbor by the hill farm of Clonfin, some twenty minutes away. I did not say anything then. I now think that cowardice comes in different forms; sometimes it is as simple as silence.

  In the end, we decided against getting rid of Vinny. Mam and I called Da and asked that he bring the dog home. It came down to faith, we reasoned—faith that the dog could be trained to unlearn bad habits. There is nothing more dangerous to a farmer than a bad dog, for they can kill sheep, drive cattle to madness and break your heart.

  Like Pontius Pilate, my father absolved himself of all responsibility for the dog that day. He put Vinny into my care, and there he has stayed. I have not fed him an afterbirth since; I do not wish to tempt the dog and I do not wish to beat him. Vinny is a reformed character now, remembering his brief punishment all too well. There is a learning in everything on a farm, something that I am growing to know as I age.

  Vinny keeps to my heels as I walk over to the cowsheds. The cows roar at the sight of me, demanding their silage, which is a fermented grass that was harvested in the summer. I was not here for the harvest. Some mornings it smells sweet and reminds us of summer and meadows. This morning it has no smell. My father and I mostly feed the cows together, but some mornings I do it alone. Today he is having a sleep-in. This suits me fine, I think, so he cannot nitpick my way of doing things, and, after his decades of early mornings, I like to give him the odd morning off.

  The cows eat a bale of silage each morning and another in the evening. In the past, we had to cut open the bales and use our long-handled pitchforks—or grapeforks, as we call them—to manually distribute the feed amongst the cows, but this winter my brother gifted my father an automatic feeder, which rolls and chews up a round bale and spits it out in a neat row, neater than I could ever do by hand. It saves waste and time. The cows low until they are fed and then set to eating and chewing. It takes two hours each morning to feed all the stock, and only when every animal has food in front of it does the bellowing stop.

  In the lower shed the weanlings are being fattened. They will go for slaughter in a few weeks, so we keep food in front of them at all times. There is a young red bull that I have admired. He is strong and muscular and will bring a good price. He nearly killed me one day while I was cleaning the shed, but I have forgiven him that, and I suppose he has forgiven me for the scolding I gave him in return. I know it was only curiosity that drove him to try and headbutt me. Cattle have their own personalities. Like dogs—or people, for that matter—some cows are nice, some are bad, some are sly and some are just lazy. Their temperaments vary and their moods change. I have seen the kindest cow bully one of its fellows and the angriest bull play with young calves. There is no racism in cows, and the different breeds and colors all get along together.

  After everything is fed, I check the hens for eggs and give them feed and water. They are laying well at the moment and I
praise them, as I do all the animals when they are good. Some mornings the eggs are still warm; I imagine the poached or boiled egg I will eat later and smile, for it will be a nice treat. But before that: mucking out.

  The cows that have recently calved are in the single pens, and they must be cleaned and bedded. Cows don’t have the sense to void in a corner or to bury or cover over their waste, and the houses grow filthy. I don’t like to see them stand in shite, so their pens are cleaned out every second day.

  I put the mechanical bucket on the front loader of the tractor, gather my grapefork and shovels and make my way to the cow pens. Sometimes when I am cleaning the houses I listen to the radio or to podcasts, and sometimes I lose myself in the task. It is odd to say, but in cleaning out the cow dung I have often thought of Zen monks and their sand gardens, raking and reraking, cleaning, purifying, being immersed in their actions and thereby entering a meditative state. I think you can find meditation in the shoveling of shit, too. When the tractor bucket is full I drive up to the dunkel, which is a vast pile of manure and used straw, and empty my load. The dunkel will be spread on the fields in spring as fertilizer. Everything on a farm has a purpose and a future use, every action is part of a cycle: the dung of winter will bring the grass of summer.

  When all the pens are mucked out I bed them with fresh straw. The cows seem happier. They rub their heads in the clean, dry bedding, giving themselves a sort of dust bath, like the buffalo do in those BBC nature documentaries. I smile and am glad of my work. Like any animal, the cow does not want to live in filth.

  After an hour or more my cleaning is done and the jobs are nearly over for the morning. Now I can eat my eggs. Today they will be poached.

  Ancestors

  To speak of cattle is to speak of man, for cows have been our companions for more than ten thousand years. The origin of the domestic cow has been traced by geneticists back to a single herd of wild oxen in what is now Iran. That breed of ox, the auroch or urus, is extinct, but it must have been something majestic to behold. It is these beasts who grace the cavemen’s paintings in Lascaux and in the even earlier Chauvet Cave in France.

  Standing at over seven feet tall, much larger than ancient humans and modern cattle, these giants must have seemed otherworldly to our forebears. Perhaps they were praised as gods, feared as devils. Strong and brave, they were like no other animal.

  The earliest auroch remains have been dated to two million years ago in India, but the auroch was itself descended from the Bos acutifrons, the sire of all bovines. With the cooling of the climate in the Pliocene period, grassland increased, which led to the evolution of large herbivores by the time of the Ice Age. These were the days of the megafauna of the mammal kingdom, when woolly rhinoceroses, giant mammoths, saber-toothed cats and cave bears ruled. The animals in J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are products of her imagination, but all along nature has provided creatures just as strange. The auroch was the success story of the Bos family, and it spread from India, migrating west and east.

  Cave paintings at Lascaux, France

  Aurochs reached Europe some 270,000 years ago, and so we could say that Europe belonged to them before it belonged to us. This continent was their great pasture; its ancient forests provided them with shelter and witnessed their cycles of birth, life and death.

  The auroch looked very different from our modern cows, perhaps more like a cousin to the American bison—with slender legs, an athletic torso and muscular shoulders and neck. Its horns were angled forward and could grow up to a foot long.

  As I child, I remember reading about the auroch in our worn and broken encyclopedia and feeling a great sadness at its absence from my life. I told my parents of these magical beasts and they listened with great attentiveness. I think perhaps that night I walked out to the yard and looked somewhat miserably at our own cows and wished them just a little bigger.

  I did not know it then, but I was not the first to be fascinated by the creatures. In antiquity, aurochs were held in awe, and even mighty Caesar praised their power and ferocity in Book 6 of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars:

  These [uruses] are a little below the elephant in size and of the appearance, colour and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.

  Maybe it was Caesar, or some of his generals, but the Romans brought some of the animals from Gaul back to their games, where men fought them to the death. It is not recorded who won.

  Their great horns were prized as drinking cups by the nobility, which surely hastened the aurochs’ decline. Indeed, it is worth noting that the drinking horn at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is believed to be that of an auroch, given to the college in 1352.

  The hunting of aurochs began in earnest then, and over the centuries their numbers slowly dwindled, until hunting them became an exclusive right of the nobility, and poaching them was punishable by death.

  Auroch by Sigmund von Herberstein

  This is the last known image we have of the auroch, produced in 1556 by Sigmund von Herberstein, a diplomat from Carniola, which is now in Slovenia. The beast, like the diplomat’s own country, would soon cease to exist.

  The last of the great aurochs died a natural death in Jaktorów Forest in Poland in 1627. The king himself had refused to hunt her, and I imagine that he must have been sad at the news of her death, just as I was centuries later. There is a plaque to her there now. The last of her kind.

  Calves

  Every week I put down bedding for the calves in the area we’ve put aside for them in the big shed. This space, the creep, takes three square bales of straw, and is enclosed by gates, with a passage out to the slatted shed where the calves can go and see their mothers and suckle.

  The creep is theirs alone. It is a safe place. In the late nights when I walk out to check the sheep, I see the calves huddled together, fast asleep—they lie like great dogs or fawns, curled and warm.

  The bedding of the calves gives me great satisfaction, for I know that they are clean and that I can keep infection away. They seem to enjoy it too, for they puck and jump and leap, sometimes butting one another in mock fights, instinctively practicing for the freedom of the great meadows of summer.

  The straw bales have sat in the shed for two winters. They are not heavy, but as I carry them across my back, one by one, I remember the sunshine that made them and the man who baled them. Richard Monaghan was his name. A tillage farmer and agricultural contractor, he has been gone two years now. Sometimes I think of my memories of him when I carry those bales, of the harvest trips to his farm, the September days that he and we had enjoyed. Changed now forever.

  When the cancer came, it was quick. Of his illness I do not know so much, but he traveled to Dublin to the big hospitals, took his treatment, battled and did what the doctors told him. In the end, looking for relief or hope or thanks, he made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the Virgin appeared. Granny told me that he rode a bicycle in Lourdes, like a young man, and then the day after he came home, he died. It is said that the dying often get better just before the end, so that they can say goodbye. Perhaps those few days were his blessing.

  The bales he made are nearly gone now and his fields are worked by other men. Next season we will have to buy our straw elsewhere.

  “Them calves need a good foot of straw—drown them in bedding,” Mam says as we meet at midday for coffee. She is taking a break from t
he school, and I a rest from the farm.

  “I’ve just done it,” I say.

  “I read it in the Farmer’s Journal,” she says.

  I have seen the article too and we both agree that the Journal often has good advice. I know that it pleases Mam the same as me to have the cows clean.

  “We don’t want a repeat of that joint-ill,” I say.

  “That was a terrible year.”

  Many winters ago, when the big shed was still new and I was still in school, calf after calf succumbed to that malignant illness. We bedded and cleaned and disinfected, but the sickness seemed to have gained a foothold.

  The bacteria enter at the navel and get into the bloodstream, where the disease spreads and attacks the joints of the animal. In the worst cases it can leave a beast a cripple. They do not need to be put down, but they will never thrive and gain weight as they should. To see them walk with the illness makes you ashamed that you hadn’t acted sooner, but these outbreaks do happen and one must be ready for them.

  “I’ve got one or two of them with a slight scour,” I confess. Scour is a type of infection which leads calves to pass dung excessively, leaving them dehydrated, and will, if untreated, kill them eventually.