The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  “You’ll be OK,” I say, the first words I have spoken in two hours.

  Finally, I check the Limousin. She is pacing her house, rooting up her straw. She will calve tonight.

  It is pitch-black now and the lights of the sheds guide my way back to the house. I begin and end the days in darkness. The lack of sun has made itself known and the moods of the parish are low. We all think of the sunshine to come, and wait.

  “It’s bedtime, Vinny.”

  He barks and runs towards his cage. I check his water, give him food for the night and close the door. We have bedded an old diesel tank for him. It is warm and dry and he cannot wander in the night. He is safe and so are the lambs.

  I am tired. It has been another long day.

  Gods

  With the domestication of the auroch, two subspecies appeared: in India, the zebu, and in Europe, the taurine. All modern cows belong to either of these subspecies, and both have a long association with divinity.

  The Indian zebu is thought to have emerged during the Bronze Age, and was characterized by a distinctive hump and large dewlap, or flap of skin, below its neck. In the pantheon of Hindu gods, the animal was represented as Nandi, the sacred bull and vahana of Shiva. The vahana is the carrier of a god, much like Saint Francis’s donkey.

  Shiva chose Nandi as his vahana because the people of India at that time were mostly farmers, and cows were the main form of transport. Shiva was not a warring god, and chose to spend his time in meditation and in thought, so it made sense that he would be carried by a slow but reliable animal. Nandi had strength and calmness, and virility too.

  There are temples and statues to Nandi throughout the Indian subcontinent, and in some parts of India people still worship at his shrines. It is said that if you whisper your wish in his ear, it shall be granted. In Sanskrit, Nandi means “happy,” and in old Tamil it means “bull,” so we could say that he is the happy bull. Happy indeed, for the cow is a protected and sacred animal in India.

  Even older than the zebu, the taurine emerged in the Near East some ten thousand years ago. This was a period during which settled farming and agricultural techniques spread from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia to the first great civilization of Egypt. The cow was part of this transition, working the fields, giving milk, meat and even warmth on cold nights, so it is no wonder that the animal was held in high regard. And just as Nandi acquired godlike status in India, so in the era before the pharaohs the ancient Egyptians worshiped Apis the bull.

  Judging by the later hieroglyphics and statues, Apis was from the taurine species of cow, for he is without the distinctive hump and dewlap of the zebu. He stands proud, muscular and strong as a modern European bull.

  The most important of all sacred animals in Egypt, Apis was associated with strength and fertility in relation to agriculture. He was also the servant and manifestation of the original creator god, Ptah, who thought the world into existence and gave life to all things through his words. We cannot be sure, for not all the records exist, but it seems that the bull might also have been the representative of a king who became a deity after death. Perhaps it was Apis that the Jews worshiped as the Golden Calf when Moses went to the mount. For he too was the sacred cow, the golden calf, the bringer of fertility. Indeed, the Canaanites, another Semitic people, worshiped their creator god, El, in the form of a bull called Toru El.

  And it is in death that Apis, the sacred bull, would be given his greatest honor, for the ancient Egyptians celebrated the afterlife in all its glory, pomp and sadness.

  The Apis papyrus records much of the ritual of the mummification and burial of the bull. The instructions were so precise that one might suppose that those carrying out the ceremony feared that any deviation might prevent Apis from returning to the heavens and so prevent his rebirth, thereby upsetting the very balance of life itself.

  Egyptian relief with a bull and an ankh, the symbol of life, from Luxor Temple in Thebes

  The process took seventy days, and the priests involved could not bathe during that time. They were expected to wail and mourn throughout their work and to adhere to a strict diet and fasting, which included not eating milk and meat. I imagine now that I can see the ritual once more. I can smell burning sage in the air and hear the mournful chants rising at the loss of Apis as he is laid out, godlike, upon the mighty stone table. He will be washed and cleaned and then mummified. His head and mouth will be embalmed first, and then the body, once the organs have been removed. His cows will cry out for him, as I have seen our cows do at the loss of a calf or the taking away of a herd member, as he departs on his final journey.

  The mummified bull was transported to Saqqara, the city of the dead near Memphis, in Lower Egypt. It was here, some five thousand years ago, that the oldest-known complete building complex in history was built. These mastabas, or “houses for eternity,” were flat-roofed structures made out of mud bricks with sloping sides, and were the precursor to the pyramids. Inside, the bull would be placed in a colossal seventy-ton black sarcophagus. It was from here that the bull would make his journey to the heavens.

  The story of Apis does not end there, however, for upon his passing, the search for his reincarnated self began anew through the herds of the country. This must have been akin to the search for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for the records are very clear that certain markings and traits must be present on the chosen beast. When found, the bull would be raised by hand, given a harem of cows and would live a peaceful existence, tended by priests and minders.

  In 1850, the Serapeum of Saqqara was rediscovered near the Pyramid of Djoser by the French scholar Auguste Mariette. All of the tombs in the temple had been robbed bar one, which is now in the Agricultural Museum of Cairo, but there was a large collection of some twenty-five Apis bulls, suggesting that the practice continued through successive dynasties. Such was Apis’s importance that Alexander the Great himself made a sacrifice to him during his recapture of Egypt from the Persians.

  The cow, the wild creature, had not only been domesticated, but had also entered the spiritual world of man.

  Equus

  We have always kept horses on the farm, not for riding or status but rather, I think, because of the traditional Irish connection to that creature. We are people of the land, and the horse has been our way of life far longer than the tractor. In Mam and Da’s childhood, every farm had a horse or donkey to perform the work, pull the trap and break the soil.

  The nearby village of Ballinalee has a Connemara pony show each June, and it was here, perhaps, that Da got the idea of owning a breeding mare. Ashling was our first horse, and each year for many years she bred us foal after foal. We always got a good price for them, and she earned a place of respect on the farm. Ashling was just a few days apart in age from my sister Linda, and, as I remember it now, we often celebrated both birthdays together.

  The Connemara is a native Irish breed from the west of Ireland. They say the breed has Viking blood, and that when the Spanish ran aground off the west coast, their Andalusians broke loose and mixed with the native horses. Whatever the blood, they are the horse of this country. They are small but graceful and make for great show ponies. Ashling’s sister had competed at the Dublin Horse Show, one of the world’s great show-jumping events, and I heard she was later sold to a man in France. I never knew her name.

  During the years of the Celtic Tiger, which was our economic boom from 1997 to 2007, there was a great demand for horses amongst the rural people, and we expanded our herd to ten, but then, with the collapse of the economy, no one wanted horses anymore and we sold many of them cheap. It pained my father the day we took them to the mart, for they were all of them great ponies.

  I had named one of them Grey of Macha, after the famous stallion Liath Macha, the chariot horse of the central hero of Irish mythology, Cúchulainn. It was said that he had emerged from a lake as a gift given by the gods to the warrior. The Cúchulainn story takes place in these lands, and I imagined that perhaps
that horse once galloped across these very fields. Grey of Macha was sold as a stallion, wild and untamed, but he would make a good breeder for the right man. The others went to the Continent and their fate was not so blessed, for they were bound for an abattoir.

  Before Ashling stopped breeding, she gave birth to her last and greatest foal, Hazel. Hazel was praised by all the callers to the house, and many men came from far and wanted to buy her, but Da always refused. She would replace her mother, he said. It was with great pride that my parents accepted the blue ribbon for best foal that year at the Connemara pony show, and then they retired from the shows and bred no more.

  Ashling died peacefully of old age in the front field years later, but we still have Hazel, as well as our donkey, Asal (pronounced Aw-sal), which is Irish for “ass.” They are kept outside on the boggy ground and pickings are scarce in winter, so I feed them a square bale of hay each day. A few weeks back, on the one day I had not fed them, the donkey’s foal died of some unknown illness. I have thought many times of the ifs of that situation: if I had gone out that day, perhaps I could have saved him; if I had gone out early the next morning, perhaps he might still have been alive; if, if, if . . . But we cannot bring back the dead.

  And so Asal and Hazel wait for me each morning to come with their hay. It has the smell of summer and the feel of sunshine. I know they too can taste it. They run to greet me and I hear their neighs and brays of excitement. I open the bale and let them eat; some days I rub their flanks and speak with them. They are social creatures and need to be spoken to, lest wildness set in again.

  This hay is three years old, for there has not been a good summer since to make new bales. The hay is from my uncle Mick’s ground. He too is dead. We have rented part of his farm from my aunt, and I think it would make him happy to see his fields used again. It is strange, for as Mick grew sick with the lung cancer, so too the weeds began to choke the land. It was as if a sickness had come upon everything.

  They are the fields of Da’s childhood, for he worked them with his own father as I work them now with Da. To have these fields in his possession, if only rented, is an important thing for him. We have made them healthy again, and when the weather is dry, green grass grows. Da has never spoken of that fulfillment of the land or the fields being green once more, but I know, I feel it; Mam has felt it too. The hay, like the straw, like the cows, has memories of other times.

  Uncle Mick was gifted with his hands. Everyone says he should have been a mechanic or an engineer, for he was happiest in engine grease and oil. I think back to the summer of my childhood when we came down Soran Hill on a three-wheeled tractor (the front left wheel had got a flat and we had no spare) with a full load of square bales on the trailer. I sat atop it all with Mick’s son, my cousin Michael, and we had never been so high in our lives. As the three-wheeled tractor drove down Soran Hill and took the turn for home and the hay shed, I remember us both holding on for dear life. Michael is grown now, with a child of his own. Mick’s tractors are sold, his land divided and changed. We talk of him still, as though in the same breath he might just appear in the yard once more, with his peaky hat and the butt of a cigarette in his mouth, but as time moves on, the talk becomes less.

  The death of Mick fell hard on my father, for they were more than brothers—they were friends. I think now as I rub the horses, watching them eat the last of the feed, that that loss has hardened his heart in some way. He does not go to mass much anymore, and perhaps he is angry with God at the loss of Mick and his other brother, John, who died suddenly three years ago.

  Uncle John planted the birch trees around the farm, the trees that have given their name to this place. In them I see him and his quiet labors. His heart attack broke us all in new ways, and it still seems all too fresh to talk of.

  I carry my bale of hay from the shed, and in some respect I carry the total memories of family and men who are no longer here. I walk out to the horse and cross the gate, throwing the bale on the ground.

  Hazel neighs and I pet her before heading back to the farmyard. As long as we are here, there will be horses on this land.

  February

  ❦

  The Way of the Cross

  It is the first day of February, and I am out in the fields cutting rush, a type of reed which is common to this land. The paddocks around the house are reclaimed bog, and there is a fine crop of this weed. I cut and gather and bundle, and soon I have enough to complete the job. It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, and I am collecting the blades to weave a cross of rush, as it is said Brigid herself did when she explained the way of Christ to a local Celtic chieftain on his deathbed. I do this because we have always done this. I do this in a way beyond religion. I do this in a way of culture.

  Mam has asked the children of the playschool to bring in their own rushes and she will show them how to weave the cross so they can each of them take one home.

  As a youngster growing up, I often wished that we were French or Spanish, for their culture seemed so vibrant, so alive to me in its tongue and rituals. Our own seemed so watered down, so globalized, that I had wished myself someone else. And yet, in these last few years and after these last few months of farming, I now see that our lives are rich with tradition.

  Brigid is celebrated on February 1, but it was once a Celtic feast day called Imbolc, which marked the beginning of spring. Back then, another Brigid was celebrated that day: the Gaelic dawn goddess, the daughter of Dagda, the good god. It was said that on Imbolc Eve, Brigid would visit virtuous households and bless the inhabitants. The practices that I and my family still carry out are ageless; we continue to live out our Celtic past. In my cutting and gathering, I am worshiping both the old and the new. As so often in this place, everything is done in an evocation of something else, something older.

  We were once a tribal people. My mother’s family originally came from the race of Bréifne in Cavan, home of the O’Reillys, and my father’s from the Mumu in Kerry, home of the O’Connells.

  The language of our ancestors is long changed, but it and our culture still flow in our veins, and you have but to look into our faces to see it. Tribalism is not dead. We have an attachment to this land that goes beyond money; it is a connection of a spiritual quality. It is our baile agus beatha, the place where we come home, that which sustains us.

  In my years as an emigrant, I have met only the Aborigines of Australia and the native peoples of Canada who have fully understood this connection to place.

  When I was twenty-one and finishing my journalism studies in Australia, I made a documentary about the Aborigines for my thesis. For a number of months I lived in the Northern Territory and shared my life with these people of the desert. I found in them a reflection of what I knew from home. Their struggles for land rights and native title did not need to be explained to me, for I understood that it was their beatha, their spiritual link. To borrow another Irish word, it was their draiocht, that magical connection which is unseen, and without which they miss a part of themselves, and are powerless.

  I remember the day I visited the town of Katherine, where an Aboriginal health worker told me of an old man who remembered his first encounter with the white man. The whites had come with cattle and guns in what is called the Frontier Wars. The old man had been a boy then, and everyone in his tribe had been shot. He alone had survived. The health worker looked at me then with tears in his eyes.

  “We lost so much,” he said.

  I nodded. The sun shone down on us and I did not speak for a time.

  “Who was the old man?” I asked then.

  “He was my father.”

  Freedom is a wonderful thing and we are lucky to have it. But we are both peoples of colonialism: the Aborigines can never regain all that was taken from them, and neither shall we. Perhaps this is why our culture endures so strongly, why the rituals of the past take on new meaning and significance in this modern world. I work the rush as the Aborigines do their timber for making throwing spears, or
as the Northern Territory tribes do for their didgeridoos.

  I take the reed in my hands, then bend and fold and tie its four ends with string. I will put it above our icon of the Virgin and Child which hangs over the fireplace. There it shall dry out in the days to come, aging and changing as the year goes on. I replace the cross each year—it is a topping-up of faith.

  Now that I am home, I go to mass each Sunday. Our parish is Killoe, and there is a healthy congregation. I go on my own and listen more deeply to the scripture than I used to as a child. I find great beauty in its words and stories, and it has made me think. Its imagery is often that of the farm and farmer. The scripture is rich with men of my trade, men who have risked everything to look for a single missing lamb and felt happier at its finding than in the keeping of the other ninety-nine in their flock. I too have known that joy at the salvation of something you thought was lost—as shepherd, as cattle drover, as a man come through darkness.

  Religion has become a laughable word in modern life. To believe is often to be scorned, and yet what is so wrong in belief? I do not agree with everything the Catholic Church says, and there are things I ignore. I too have doubted my faith, even turned my heart from God, and yet I have found faith once more. I found the beauty and wonder of nature on this farm, and in it the joy and despair of life. For this, I have no other word but Yahweh.

  Father Seán is our parish priest. He is also my anam cara, my soul friend. We meet most weeks and talk of literature until the late hours. He is the best-read man in the parish and the one to whom I show all my writing. I have not written anything in four months, for I have been so busy on the farm, but we talk of what the next book shall be, if it shall be. He believes in me, in my work, in my decision to be back in Ireland and write for a year. Above all, he has faith that my writing will see the light of day.