by John Connell
Bloat
Today I am glad of my phone. In the shed this morning a lamb that has always been somewhat poorly is lying out. He is foaming from his mouth and panting. His gut is swollen and large and I do not know what is wrong. This is a new illness to me. I am alone out here and the lamb is in pain. Da will not know what to do, for we have only had sheep these past three years and it is to me he looks for insight on these beasts.
The lamb’s mother paws the ground in an effort to make him stand, but he will not rise. I set him upright, but after a few steps he collapses. I do not know what to do. When I squeeze his gut, there seems to be air, a huge quantity of it, stuck inside him. It is some form of bloat, that much I piece together. To be a farmer is to be a student forever, for each day brings something new.
I Google the symptoms and find the cause and cure. I sigh gently, for it seems the illness is treatable here without the need of a vet. This lamb has had a hard road already, for his mother had only one tit and he has been fostered to a surrogate. She and he had taken well together and formed a strong bond, but now it seems fate has dealt him another bad card.
I walk inside to get some vegetable oil and baking soda to quell the bacteria in his gut, as the internet has told me.
“Got a lamb with bloat,” I say.
Mam and Da are sitting in the kitchen. They’ve been having a serious chat and the news lifts them out of themselves.
“Swollen as big as a balloon,” I say.
“Which one?” Mam asks.
“The fostered lad in the top pen.”
“He was always a bit ropy,” Da says.
“Leave it with me.”
I must stomach-tube the mixture into him. The article said that natural yogurt will also work. I grab some from the fridge and return outside with my home remedy.
He is panting heavier now, and I worry is it too late and that he may die. The article said that’s a possibility. I do not know how long he has been this way. Perhaps I missed him in my rounds. Perhaps Da did too.
When running our night and day shifts, we leave notes by the front door for one another. Looking back through those scraps of paper recalls each of the late nights and long evenings, the sicknesses and the successes. Of this lamb, there is nothing. A blank record.
I insert the slender plastic stomach tube down the lamb’s throat and carefully attach the syringe full of fluid. If I get this wrong, I will send the fluid to his lungs and kill him. He squirms and cries and I hold him tight. I push and inject the fluid.
The article told me that after a few minutes I should insert the tube down his throat once more to allow the gas in his stomach to escape. I must massage his belly and gently force the air from him. I let the lamb recover and take a moment to settle myself. I do not think he will die, but I must be careful. They say farming has changed, that it has become industrial and mechanized, but still, if the farmer has not the nature to care for his beasts when they fall sick, they will die. I have known the hardest of men to be soft and gentle with their animals in a way they never are with their own families.
Settled now, I insert the tube again and rub and massage his distended belly. I hear the rift of gas and smile, for the operation is working. He is still swollen, but perhaps less so. I massage and rub and shake him for ten minutes or more. His wool is still short and bobbly, he is not muscular like the other lambs, but he is by no means a cripple. He has grown with his foster mother. She cries out for him now.
“In a minute. I’m not taking him away forever,” I tell her, but she does not listen and still cries out.
I think I am finished, for I can hear no more air. Perhaps the mixture and massaging have worked. I check through the article again, reading to the end. I must isolate him from his mother, for her milk will only feed the bacteria growing in his stomach, and that needs to be killed. He must fast and then I will reintroduce healthy bacteria through the natural yogurt.
It will be twenty-four hours before I know if I have succeeded. The article tells me that in extreme cases a needle should be inserted through the abdomen into the stomach for an emergency release of the gas. I am not confident enough to do this yet, and it would cost fifty euro to take him to the vet, more than the lamb is worth. I must take my chances. I must gamble and wait. If he has not improved in a few hours, I will intervene and perform the emergency operation.
I place him in our hot box, which is a small wooden chest below the work kitchen. It has a red heat lamp to keep him warm and safe. I close the latch. I have done all I can in this hour of need and there are other jobs to do.
So far this year I have had good luck with the lambs. I have lost only two, and those have died of causes that man could not prevent. There was the lamb taken from me by his mother’s carelessness, for she lay on top of him and smothered him in the night. Then there was the lamb who was born a triplet and a cripple. Da said it was from the way he had lain in the womb, for his neck was forever bent to one side and he could not stand upright. I dubbed him Richard III, after that crippled king, and together we waged against death, and for several days we prevailed. Through careful massage, his neck began to unstiffen and with aid he could stand. I had hopes that he might strengthen and become instead a Hotspur, but hope is a chancy thing with animals; it flew like swallows’ wings and left the morning I found him dead upon the floor of the hot box. He and I had lived together for five days. It is dangerous to name animals, for in a name we build a bond.
Those two have been all my losses, and I cannot complain; I have heard of far more death in a season and I have seen far more in other years. If I can mend the bloated lamb, I will be happy.
I have lost no calves, and for that I am the most thankful. Mam jokes that we have Saint Francis working on overtime at the moment. Let not the saints get tired, nor the older gods. We will pray to whatever keeps luck alive.
At two a.m., I waken and do my rounds. I check the lamb in the hot box and find him standing upright. He is brighter now and cries out to me for food. His stomach is still swollen, but he seems not to be in pain, and I am thankful for the internet: today it has served a use and helped me greatly. I want to tell Da of my success, but he is asleep. He will see in the morning. The lamb roars to me and I agree that, yes, you can feed. I feed him some natural yogurt and then make a small bottle of milk replacer and feed him, childlike, in my arms.
“You’re a good lad,” I say, and rub his head.
I close the box and walk back into the farmhouse, happier now. The day has ended well. We shall see what the morning brings. I boil the kettle and have a mug of tea and a scone before returning to sleep.
The Stock Exchange
He has died in the night. I rise at nine thirty a.m. Mam had forgot to look into the hot box on her morning rounds, so it is I who find him. The foam had come back; it was around his mouth and still wet. His body was stiff and cold.
I know now that I should have performed the emergency needle operation. I had been too much of a coward to do it and now he is dead. It is my fault.
The death has brought back a memory of previous cowardice. I was eight or nine and cycling into the local village, by the bridge over the Camlin River, when I saw a small animal cowering by the roadside. I stopped and discovered an otter. What he was attempting to do, I do not know—perhaps cross to the other side. The animal looked scared and young and something in me said it needed help. I was afraid to pick it up, in case it would bite me. In my fear I pushed it off the road with my foot, nudging it out of the way of traffic. Eventually, unsure of what to do and scared to handle it, I cycled home to get a cardboard box to load the animal and take it to safety.
I did not cry when I returned and saw its lifeless form on the roadside. My young mind understood that a car had killed it, crushing its head. My cowardice had cost a life that day. I have never forgotten that beautiful creature.
Da is not sympathetic when I tell him about the lamb and says it was “never fuckin’ right in the first place.” I tell h
im of the needle and the ifs and buts, but it is pointless now.
I take a needle and perform the operation on his lifeless body so I will know how to do this for the next time. I pierce the flesh in his abdomen where I imagine his stomach is. I feel the metal push through the layers and then the gas escapes and his body deflates. It was this easy. I am a fool.
I place his stiff body in the empty fertilizer bag and will take him to the knackery yard later, which is where the dead must go. I am annoyed and disappointed. I am reminded of a neighbor’s saying: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock. The phrase helps, but does not bring back the lamb.
Cash Cows
The lower shed is all but empty. Most of the weanling calves have been taken to market by Da and my brother. They had reached the fourteenth month of their lives, had put on the required weight, and Da decided it was time to sell them. There has been a row and we are not talking. Our tongues, which were venomous a few days ago, have been stilled with anger.
I watched the procession leave the yard all morning, the trailer full of the roaring of the bullocks, the wails of the heifers; they would not be coming home again. Derek, our neighbor, helped with the last load of weanlings, for the day was well into itself and Da feared he would not get good sale numbers. The numbers are a gamble: if you arrive too early, you will not have enough buyers at the sale; too late, and good prices have already been and gone.
There are just four weanlings left, too young to sell; we will fatten them on spring grass soon. Walking through the shed, I miss the presence of the others, their noise and smell and rumble. But they are the payment to the bank for the land. They are money embodied, nothing more. That is what Da says.
On this we do not agree. I cannot see them just as products. They are animals, not mere steak-holders. They may carry flesh, but they carry personality too, memories and feelings. But to go down this route is not businesslike. And farming above all is a business, I am told.
The reality of beef farming is that the cows live so that they can be killed. They are here so that they may die. If we did not eat meat, they would not exist, or not in such great numbers. All of the cows on our farm will be killed at some time or other; they shall get old, or reach their weight, and all shall know the butcher’s knife. But even knowing this, and even for the businessman-farmer, I do not believe it is solely about the money, nor that he sees the animals only as future beef. If it were, I do not think he would get up so instinctively in the middle of the night to deliver a new calf or tend to a sick lamb. There must be nature in the man for the beast, nurturing in the human for the nonhuman.
In the cities, man has divorced himself from nature. Perhaps it was not meant that way at first, but the separation has occurred almost wholly, and the most that urban dwellers see is a park, a manicured replica of nature—alive, yes, but carefully cultivated and controlled. There are animals in the city, but apart from the birds and the vermin, they do not roam free. The city dwellers pay us to maintain that link to nature, and we, the growers, harvest what they cannot. Sadly, the majority of us now upon this blue planet have lost our relationship to nature.
It was Toronto that brought this home to me most sharply. For nearly two years I lived in its concrete embrace. The trips I took with my then partner to the countryside—to “cottage country,” as Canadians call it—were like an oasis. To be reunited with nature and trees and calm and birds was a sustenance that I needed. It was here I saw bald eagles and bears, salmon and trout in the river, moose and deer in the woods.
It was not all bad in the city, of course: there were theaters and discos, gyms and cafés, restaurants and young people. But whilst living my condo life, part of me missed these cows and this way of being. It was a sort of uaigneas, or loneliness, that I could not fully articulate. It is now that I think that life was meant to be shared with animals, not just other people.
And so these beasts, these cows, are not mere products to me; they are my fellows. It was we who brought them from the wilderness to join our family and walk by our side, and I am glad to walk with them still.
Da comes back from the mart. The prices we got for the weanling calves were not so good as last year, and for that he is a bit annoyed. It was not the quality of the cattle, for they were good beasts. He hands the sale docket to Mam and she inspects the prices, calling out the numbers, to which Da responds which calf it was.
“And for the good red lad?”
“Seven hundred,” Da responds.
“I thought you’d get more for him.”
I can see the hurt on Da’s face, though he tries not to let it show.
“Prices are back.”
“Is everyone selling now?” I ask. These are the first words we have spoken in a few days.
“Ah, the whole country decided to come out at the same time.”
“They’re good prices, considering,” I say.
“Ah, they’re all right,” he replies.
The factories have a monopoly on cattle prices, for there are only a handful of slaughter companies. Larry Goodman is the biggest, with plants in Ireland and the UK. They call him a beef baron. The factories are not the friends of farmers. They know that at this time each year the weanlings are nearly ready for market, feed is running low and bills must be paid. And so, some say, the factories control prices and keep them low, and farmers do not get a fair amount. It is not fair, but it is business.
I have only been to the slaughterhouses a few times. Each time I have found them cold and clinical, for death is their business. Da always says that there is an instant when the beast is no more and the carcass has replaced it. In photography, it is called the decisive moment: the second before the footstep hits that puddle, or Capa’s dying Spaniard hits the ground as a corpse. It is the same in the slaughterhouses: life becomes flesh. Of where the spirit goes, I do not know.
“Did you eat there?” I ask.
“No,” Da says.
“I’ll put on something.”
I fry a rasher and mushrooms and serve them to him in a sandwich with a mug of tea. I leave the tea bag in, for it is the way he likes it best. It is a small act of reparation. We forgive each other silently for the row and nothing more is said. It has been a long day for Da and he is tired. Mam smiles as I serve him his meal. This will be their twenty-fourth season of selling the weanlings. The ritual has not changed.
Westerns
Like most men of his generation, my father is a great lover of westerns. He has seen them all. Here in the midlands, we play country-and-western music. Men have built careers on it. This Irish country and western, as it is called, has its own sound. It is not so harsh or so blues-driven, and it has a soul of its own. It is hard to imagine the barren landscapes of the rugged American plains in this green place, but we picture ourselves as stars in our own westerns. The cows become steers, the horses steeds, and the farmers ranchers.
In these lawless days, we are perhaps closer to the Wild West. We too have frontiers. There are cowboys here, and rogues and villains. We know a local man who shot two thieves who broke into his property. He is not ashamed of it, for they were armed too. The police are mostly absent, so men have taken things into their own hands, and each family is now an outpost. These times have made the country people harder.
Our family has not been spared either: we have been robbed, and a house we owned burned down, and the police were of no use. There are roaming gangs on the country roads, and neighbors keep watch and text one another of suspicious activity. Uncle Davy’s brother-in-law had his four-wheel quad stolen from in front of his house two weeks ago. It had cost him ten grand and was not yet insured. The thieves tried to blackmail him and offered to sell it back to him for four grand. He is going to lay a trap for them. I am not sure if it will work.
Uncle Davy knows the king of the Travelers, who are our native Gypsies, for they deal with him for their burials. We are somewhat safe from Gypsies: they will not go against Davy, and by extension us, for that coul
d cause a taboo on their families. They will not break their rules of death, for they are very devout. But the king has no say on the roaming gangs. He is powerless and can only police his own people.
Perhaps it is this climate of chaos, but I have been thinking of writing a western and have bought some old classic films. Da and I have watched them together, and we discuss them out in the yard between chores.
“That Charles Bronson is some man,” I say.
“A classic.”
“Had you seen that one before, Da?”
“Years ago. I had it forgot.”
“The bit with the harmonica was amazing.”
We are happy in our talk.
Every man has hidden depths and everyone at some point can surprise you completely. It happened with Da some years ago. I had been learning guitar for some time and had just got into Bob Dylan. Following in the footsteps of so many teenagers, I bought a harmonica and began to practice, badly. One Saturday, Da and I were sitting inside after our chores had been done. It was then that he asked me for the mouth organ. He put it to his lips and blew and no sound came, and I made to show him how to use it.
He nodded his head and then ran the blades across his lips once more and played such music as the house had never heard before: blues first, old and timeless. I stood smiling, lost for words. He played country and western then, and again his notes were sonorous and clear. In the melody, I could see the Great Plains, the bars, the brawls, the buffalo and the blood. I looked around me, willing there to be another present to see this, but there was no one but me, an audience of one. He played for five or ten minutes more, then put the instrument down gently.