The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  “Any news?” she asks.

  “Nothing, only lies,” I say.

  “Then tell me the lies!”

  We laugh and sip our tea and talk of the terrible weather. She informs me that the west is still in a bad way. She also tells me that a neighbor has died. I do not know the family and tell her as much.

  “How would you know them—they’ve been living in California these last twenty years. But I thought you should know.”

  “Will they be a-burying at home?”

  “I’d say they will, but I won’t go. None of them came to Mick or John’s funerals.”

  I sense the anger in her voice. No matter their ages, both men were still her sons. She had thought she would be dead before them.

  “That’s fair enough,” I say, and we leave that subject.

  “How’s all going on the farm?” Granny asks.

  “Ah, grand. A few lambs this week and a new calf.”

  “You’re a great help to your father. He was up here the other day and said as much.”

  I nod, for he has never admitted that to me.

  “He’s a busy fool at his age to have so much work on,” she adds.

  “He has to do something,” I say.

  “I suppose so, but less would do.”

  “He’s not that sort of man.”

  “No, he never was.”

  Granny stands up and walks to the cupboard and takes out some biscuits.

  “Now, I know you’re on the healthy eating, but these are lovely with a bit of jam on them.”

  I cannot refuse her, and though I do not eat sweets anymore, I take the treat and enjoy it. We shall not always have this time together and I make sure to savor it. Granny has always been there for me.

  We talk then of neighbors and gossip. Granny has much news, and after an hour or more, when the talk has run out and our criticisms of everyone else’s failings are done, we part and agree to do it all again in a few days.

  The Black Dog

  Da has spotted something in the fields. It looms and roams by the fringes of the sheep that are still out. He has told me to keep an eye: it could be a wild dog come to kill; maybe there is more than one of them. I have not yet seen anything, but I have seen the damage wrought by their packs: whole flocks massacred, limbs torn asunder. They say it takes a rare man to emerge through a dog attack and still farm, for it takes the heart from one so.

  Tonight I shall be on the black watch. I will check the fields for signs of it, of them. The shotgun is sitting in the shed, for a week ago Da killed a fox in the upper ground, sure that it had taken one of the missing lambs. He killed him with a single shot, and cut his tail off. There is a den of foxes in the upper ground. If they have a taste for lamb, we are in trouble. I do not like to kill them, but I would have no choice in the face of the slaughter of the young that I have helped bring into the world. The shotgun in the shed is loaded. I must be equally ready when the time comes. I cannot hesitate.

  We make sure Vinny is secure in his house at nights now, for he is young and could be led astray by these wild dogs. If he started roaming with them, we would have to put him down, and I could not bear that.

  I waken at one a.m., to confuse them. For dogs can tell the time and have probably watched and know my usual routine by now. Rory, our neighbor, has told us of a collie he knew in Leitrim, where he is from, who was a killer, but he was clever and washed himself in the river after each kill. It took the farmer weeks to discover the true culprit, by which time ten lambs had gone missing.

  The yard is peaceful when I walk out, the cows are resting, the calves asleep. The lambs have huddled together and the ewes we brought back inside are quietly eating. There is no sign of danger, just the sense of it.

  I take my lamp and walk the close paddocks. I shine the bright torch and catch the eyes of the few old sheep that are still outside. They are eating in the darkness calmly, and baa to be so disturbed.

  “We will bring you in too,” I say.

  I am not sure if the dogs would enter a shed. Perhaps if they were wild enough, or hungry enough. If they were to go into the shed, the lambs would have no chance of escape. I would kill whatever animal did that and feel no remorse.

  I have only ever shot one thing in my life. It was ten years ago, when we had reseeded a field. Birds kept eating the grain and we feared they would destroy the growth, for they pecked so at the ground. Telling no one, I walked there with the shotgun thrown across my shoulder. I kept downwind of the pigeons, and when the time came I flanked them and took aim. I shot and took down a male. I did not take joy in it, but I tied its corpse upon the gate as a warning to the others. The birds did not come back and the seed grew.

  This ground has known guns for centuries. To my left, on Oran Hills, which is the land of our neighbors the Lees, British redcoats marched the rebels of 1798 to their deaths in the nearby village. They hanged the men from the trees and buried them in quicklime. Da told me that when Pat Reilly bought the ground forty years ago and cut down those same trees, the shackles were still upon the branches; they had become part of nature itself.

  Relaxing, untensing, I return to the yard. Vinny is barking wildly and I tell him it is just me, but he will not stop. Then I hear it—the barking of another, a bigger, wilder bark. Da was right.

  I find him in the lower shed with the weanlings. He has cornered a bullock and is growling. He did not hear me enter. Turning, he sees me and tries to run, but I am quick and close the shed door and he has no escape. Faced with me, the animal could turn vicious, and I realize then that the gun is not in my hand but in the upper shed, and I could well be attacked. I grip the lamp, which is heavy, and prepare to smash his head should he come to attack. It is nature now, pure and raw, and my heart is pumping. The dog bares his teeth and I step forward. I shout and he starts. He does not attack me. Instead, he whimpers, cowering, with his tail between his legs. He tries to hide from me and jumps into the weanlings’ feeder, and I see for the first time something that is not in Vinny: fear.

  I lower the lamp and walk closer. I do not let my guard down, for this all could be an act, a ploy. The dog might make a fool of me and then attack, but he does not. He whimpers and cries and, on moving closer, I see that he has but one eye, and I wonder what has happened to him. He is no hunter but a broken thing, a stray, who has wandered the night for how long I do not know. He has come in search of food and perhaps has been eating Vinny’s feed these last nights.

  I take a rope and gently place it over his head and tie him to the gate. I do not know yet what to do with him. The gun is in the shed and I am tempted to kill him. I cannot deny that, for it is easier. Da and I have searched to see the cause of these lamb deaths and now the night has delivered a strange one-eyed dog. I deliberate and pace. I have no one to talk to, for the others are asleep. I must make this decision myself.

  The Dream

  I have had the most peculiar dream. I do not know if it is due to tiredness or lack of sleep, but my dreams have been vivid of late. I have tried to interpret them as best as I can, and I have looked through dream dictionaries to find their meanings, but for this one there can be no hidden symbolism, for it was so clear.

  It began in space, with Da and me as astronauts. I saw the rays of the sun shining through our shuttle. It reflected upon our suits and masks in its giant yellow glow. I saw the world or worlds down below. I felt the coldness, the vacuum of the outside void and the mechanical whir of our computers and guidance systems. We were traveling somewhere.

  After a time, or no time, our lander was touching down. Da was my captain and I his first mate. We worked together and steered the grey craft towards the surface of a world we did not know. It could have been the moon, for it was a lifeless place. We walked upon its surface, smiled and knew our task was completed. And then I do not know what happened, but something went wrong. Our oxygen was running low, and I knew then that we were in trouble. We raced back to the shuttle.

  He sacrificed himself, giv
ing me his oxygen tank so that I might live. I protested, but he would not listen. He took off his helmet, and he looked a younger man, perhaps the age that I am now, his hair black, his face unlined. He smiled and produced from nowhere a glass of champagne. He raised it to his open lips, smiled to me and, through my protests and laments, he hit the eject button and I shot back to the waiting ship high, high above. I cried and shouted, but he was dead, gone in a moment of joyful agony. He was gone and I was alone.

  I woke in fear and sadness. I did not think of our fighting then, only of our bond of blood and all the sacrifices he has made in his life for me. I have not told him of the dream, however, for he would think it strange. He thinks me strange enough already.

  Lough Gowna

  There are places here where the soul of wildness has not been not killed. I suppose it is because the land was poor or the water strong, but nature thrives in these places, and in the morning you can wake and think of the dream time, the time when all of this land was forest.

  I feel this in the bogs, I feel this in the bottom marsh ground, and I feel this in Lough Gowna. I have come to love this lake, and she has only begun to reveal her secrets to me. By its waters, the swans and seagulls and egrets fish and work. It has islands of oak and ash, including Inch Island, which is a sacred place. Uncle Davy and his son Jack have camped out here and shot and skinned rabbits and caught fish from its shore. A Mulligan man, our neighbor, owns the island and ferries his sheep herd across on a small barge. I do not know if he winters them out here; it would be hard work to bring them hay.

  There is an old ruin of a monastery upon Inch Island, and, as Da says, if it were in Kerry, they would be ferrying tourists, not sheep, to see it. The monastery is over a thousand years old, so old the Vikings attacked it, but we’ve no tourists here, and so it sits idle and unmolested.

  The island is full of rabbits, for there are no predators here and they breed easily. Davy told me that a while back a pair of foxes worked out that the rabbits were on the island and were swimming out to kill them. In the end, one of the foxes was caught by a hunter and shot from the shore.

  Until recently, the lake people were buried here. This was their sacred ground, their reilig. Their headstones are broken and worn and hard to read, and wildflowers and nettles grow between them. The headstones face the rising sun.

  I swam out to the island a few months ago. I wanted to see if I could do it, I suppose. I wasn’t trying to be Byron crossing the Hellespont; I just did it to feel alive. The water was black but warm, and I was not scared until I came to the lake’s depths, and then I knew how the crossing foxes felt. Perhaps in some long-forgotten past the monks did this crossing too.

  Mam’s mother’s people, the McGaherns, were lake people. She told me that in her childhood the winters were colder and their lake would freeze, and they would move the cattle across the ice to a small island. It is not so cold now with climate change, so I have never seen this happen, but as a child I used to imagine it was as epic a crossing as in the old West in America, and the cows as beautiful and calm as in a Constable painting.

  Cattle Raids

  The auroch never lived in Ireland, for not all species made it to this island. It was the taurine that came here, with the Celts. In the long ago, before the founding of nations, we were a nomadic people, the Maasai of the north, for we traversed these lands through the seasons, herding our cattle. It was the cow and not money that was the basis on which all wealth was measured. It was also the cow that gave us our founding myth: the Táin bó Cuailnge, or The Cattle Raid of Cooley. All my life, I have lived upon the Táin. It is our Beowulf, the epic of our world, where history and myth converge and where the cow takes center stage. It was a queen who started this legend, and it was a bull that caused it.

  The story begins in a bedchamber, where the queen of Connacht, Medb, lies with her husband, Ailill. Together they compare their wealth, for in Celtic society the partner with the most would be in control. The value of their possessions is equal but for the fact that Ailill has a white bull, Finnbhennach (a forebear of the real-life White Park cattle breed).

  Determined not to cede power to her husband, Medb sends messengers to the Ulster cattle lord Dáire mac Fiachna. Dáire owns Donn Cuailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, the only rival in the land to the white bull.

  Being a good man, Dáire agrees to a request by Medb and a deal is struck: she may borrow the bull for a year, until such time as he breeds for her an heir.

  But, as has happened so often in Ireland, drink is the downfall of men, for Medb’s loose-tongued messengers boast that, had Dáire not agreed, they would have taken the animal by force. Ireland being Ireland, this news is heard quickly and fully by Dáire, and the deal is broken. There will be no bull.

  From her seat in what is modern-day Roscommon, the queen summons an army to raid Ulster and steal the brown bull. The táin bó Cuailnge, the cattle raid of Cooley, begins.

  When I think of the story of Medb, I think of my mother, for she has built her own small empire through these lands and fields. It was she who suggested to Da that we have a farm in the first place. It was she who invested her profits into fields rather than flats or houses. She has bought cows and bulls and knows their worth. In a man’s world, she has proved herself; in a man’s world, she has staked her claim. I think of our neighbor and great friend Mary Ann Tynan, who runs two farms. She has succeeded where men have failed; she too has built her kingdom.

  There have been times at marts when I have looked at the faces of farmers there and seen the traces of our mythic past. The surroundings have changed, but the people have stayed the same. Our relationship with the beasts has stayed the same too: they are still the foundation of our rural world, our link with nature, and our livelihood.

  Medb’s raiding party moved through the midlands, through our home of Longford, through the very fields of Birchview, and from there to Louth and the lair of the bull Donn Cuailnge.

  The men of Ulster could not defend themselves from Medb’s forces, for they had been cursed by a goddess in vengeance for the king’s cruelty towards her while she was heavily pregnant, and were stricken down with the pains of childbirth at their greatest hour of need. Despite Medb’s advantages, her raid was a failure, for a spirit called the Morrígan appeared to the bull in the form of a crow, telling it to flee and evade capture. In his rampage, the brown bull of Cuailnge killed many Connacht men.

  The Ulstermen lay prone and bare, and there was but one man who could defend them: Cúchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who gained his title as a child when he killed a guard dog in self-defense and then offered to serve in its place until a replacement could be reared. Now, still only seventeen years old, Cúchulainn found himself standing alone against the force. He invoked the ancient right to single combat and faced Medb’s army one by one, day after day.

  During this time, Cúchulainn also successfully faced the Morrígan, who appeared to him in various forms, some alluring, some violent, including as a stampeding cow. It is, however, his fight with his best friend and foster brother, Ferdiad, that is remembered by every Irish schoolchild. Ferdiad was the champion of Connacht, the bravest and best of men of that province, and through Medb’s guile and cunning he was forced to fight his beloved brother. For three days and nights the pair faced one another with swords, spears, lances and shields. In the end, Cúchulainn slayed his friend, though it was with great sadness.

  It is said that as the final mortal blow to his brother was delivered, he shouted, “Thou to die, I to remain. Ever sad our long farewell.”

  In their tragic battle, I see a part of our own history reflected, from the Civil War up unto the modern day and the bloodshed of Northern Ireland, with its war and bombs and terrible violence on both sides.

  After several months of man-to-man fighting, Cúchulainn pitted against Medb’s warriors, the men of Ulster finally began to rise from their pain and slumber. The army mustered, and with that the final battle began. Medb’s forces los
t the day, but they did manage to take with them the brown bull.

  Finnbhennach the White and Donn Cuailnge the Brown met at last and began an epic battle themselves. In a long and brutal fight, Donn Cuailnge killed his foe, but in the doing was mortally wounded himself. He then wandered around Ireland before finally returning home and succumbing to his wounds. And so ends the great Ulster Cycle.

  The story is a part of my life, a part of every cattleman’s life in this country. Revisiting it now, I see it not just as some epic tale of war and bloodshed, but as a morality lesson on the covetous nature of man and the worthlessness of possessions. In it we also see that animals have their own intentions, for Donn Cuailnge, despite whatever the Morrígan did, did not wish to be dominated, and fought against his imprisonment.

  Interestingly, the Táin was written down for the first time in the twelfth century, in The Book of the Dun Cow, the Lebhair na hUirde, so named because the manuscript was said to have been made from a dun (greyish brown) cowhide. In it are contained the legends of pagan Ireland as well as Christian works of faith and history pieces. The Book of the Dun Cow is the earliest extant Gaelic manuscript, and without it we should not have so beautiful a telling of the Táin. It shows what great respect the Christian monks held for the old stories. Even as men of a new god, they did not cast them aside as mere idolatrous tales.

  How much of this myth is based on real events, we can only guess. How true were the deeds of Perseus or Heracles? And yet there is always some fact in fiction.

  It is strange to talk and think of cattle raids in the twenty-first century, but in recent weeks I have heard news of several cattle raids in the area. It is the worst crime that we farmers can imagine. Since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger some half dozen years ago, lawlessness has increased in rural Ireland. People no longer feel safe in their homes, for gangs of thieves roam the once-quiet countryside. I do not know a farmer without a gun now, for the police are fewer and we are all but alone. In the last three years, over ten thousand cattle have been stolen. The raiders are most active along the border with Northern Ireland, where the warriors raged in the long ago. In our hardship, we have resorted to the old ways. The stolen cattle are butchered hastily and their meat sold; few are ever recovered alive. Their bones are often found dumped on lonely back roads. The Táin is not dead; it has but changed its form.