The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  We got drunk that night on Jack Daniel’s. The bull’s pelt was salted and stretched and would be shipped to Len in a few weeks. Its head was boiled and bleached to remove the flesh. We ate sea turtle meat that the Yolngu elder had gifted us for supper. It was blood red and tasted like lamb.

  At three in the morning we were still drinking, and Len invited me to come and shoot a lion for free on his game farm in South Africa.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “You remind me of my son,” he said.

  “Is he a hunter too?” I asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  I do not remember the journey home to Sydney. I felt strange. I had not washed in several days. Upon leaving, the men had presented me with a hunting knife. On the plane back to the city, a well-dressed elderly woman sat beside me.

  “You look like you’ve just come out of the wilderness,” she said.

  Later, I caught a look at myself in the mirror of the plane’s bathroom. The bull’s blood was still in my hair. I was dressed in a blue shirt and brown khakis, as though in a weird homage to David Attenborough, though I felt very far from being him in that moment.

  Organics

  I have not been to see the cattle in Clonfin for a week or more, for the jeep is in the garage. Da has gone a few times in the car, which I’m not insured to drive, and he assures me they are OK. I miss the drive up there, for it gives me time to think and reflect.

  The listeria was a one-off case, thankfully, and the orf too—the sores that had afflicted the sheep and lambs have all but healed. It is hard to say if they are thriving, but they are getting bigger and the lambs are eating their pellets. It has been a hard year. We have been tempted to bring them inside once more, but there’s a risk that the orf might return, or another disease. Besides, the shed is full of new lambs now and there is not the space. They are better out. Some days I take them hay and they enjoy it.

  The grass is still scarce and no growth has occurred, but we must be patient. We are not alone in this dilemma: many men, many families, are caught in this predicament. The foxes are the only things thriving, and we have shot another.

  The calves are growing, but the weather has stunted them too. Perhaps Da is right that the bull has not bred well. He and Rory have located a new bull and have visited him twice. He is a young bull, Da says, and he has asked the owner to hold him.

  There are twenty or more calves now. I am busy bedding and watching them. We are constantly on the lookout for illness. I do not want to have a repeat of the ewe or of Red. I had a dream of him the other night.

  I was driving in the countryside through a barren landscape, treeless and rocky like the coast of County Clare, where the famous Cliffs of Moher reside. I was pulling a trailer behind me and when next I looked back, it had somehow opened and a cow and calf had fallen out. I was moving at speed and it took time to stop. I did not know how the animals had escaped. When I found them, the calf was drowning in a shallow pool of brackish water—there were small, pondlike plants growing in it. I raced to pull him out. His eyes were closed and he was unconscious, and so I performed resuscitation on him.

  He woke after a time and water fell from his mouth and nose. He was wet, wet as a newborn, and his eyes were black and bright. It was Red and I had managed to save him—in my dreams at least he is still alive. I have not told Da or Mam about this.

  Despite the weather, things are good on the farm. Everything is alive, and at times such as this I feel sure that I should be a farmer. Perhaps I spent so many years away from this place so that I could finally come back and see it for what it is: my calling. Da and Mam will not farm forever, so perhaps I will take over. I would make some changes, sure. I would become an organic farmer, for that is the future, or my version of the future at least. If I must provide food for an urban world, then let me provide the best.

  As I walk through the shed I dream of what I will do, which cows will take precedence, what breeds. Perhaps I shall have a small Dexter herd for my enjoyment: they are a miniature cow and cute, and would be nice in the front field. I should like a herd of Black Whiteheads, as they are good milkers and calve well. It will take work to become organic, but I am prepared for that.

  Later, I tell Father Seán of this dream and he thinks for a long time. What about your writing, he asks, the reason you are here?

  And what about my writing? I do not know. A cow does not calve in five minutes, and a book is not born overnight. For now, the animals need me and I need them.

  Saw

  It is time to trim the Limousin cow’s horn. She has but one. It has become a yearly ritual, for it grows quickly and, if left uncut, will grow into her eye. She is an old beast and growing thin at the hips, but she bears a great calf every year and we will not sell her.

  We walk her down to the crush and load her into place. I prepare a halter with the rope, first looping it around the back of her head, then under and over her nose. The tying of a halter is an important skill for a farmer to master, for it makes handling the cattle easier. Animals are not handled as much as they used to be years ago and have grown somewhat wilder. What they do in America, God only knows, for the cattle are never really housed and have become partly feral.

  I tighten the rope and loop it around the front metal post of the crush; when she is secure and in place, I nod to Da, who takes up the saw and begins to cut the tip of the horn. He is good with a saw, and with wood too, from his years in the building trade. I’ve never had his handling of such tools. In the summer, he designed and built a long hall for the playschool. The timbers were two-hundred-year-old pine from an old Orange lodge in Northern Ireland, which he cut, planed and sanded. The hall was beautiful when it was done.

  “I could never do this,” I told him.

  “Ah, sure, it’s not that hard,” he replied.

  The schoolchildren loved it too. He was proud that week, happy in using his old skills.

  The saw is nimble and quick, and Da is careful not to get dust or bone flakes into the cow’s eye. The horn is made of bone, but the part close to the head has veins in it.

  The tip of the cow’s horn is gone now and I loosen her from the halter.

  “That’ll keep you for another while, girl,” Da says.

  I lead her back to the shed. Her udder waddles as she walks. Her time is nearly up and she will calve soon.

  Neighbors

  Farming is a hard life and our fellow farmers understand the journey. We can share with them our losses and triumphs in a way we would not with others. We are a community here, and a good farmer is lost without his neighbors, for, though we perhaps would not always admit it, we need one another. No man, no farm, is an island. At times, our neighbors will be stuck just as we are: a broken-down tractor, a man short on a cattle move, in need of an extra trailer or just a friendly ear and advice.

  I know other men’s fields and ground as well as our own, for I have helped and worked them when they have been in need.

  In the summer, I helped stacked the square bales at the Murphys’, for their sons are emigrants and they had not the help. It cost me but an hour out of my day and they were glad to see me come round the corner. I remember too when Uncle Mick died and the neighbors came to make the silage. I do not know who instigated this, but men came with tractors from all over, the meadows were rowed and baled, and the feed wrapped and stacked. I have never forgotten this act, nor the men who did it.

  The importance of neighbors came to us a few weeks ago in all its glory, for the McVays, whose land mearn, or abuts, ours in Kilnacarrow, had a horse stuck in a bog hole in the moorland that meets both our properties.

  Try as Jim McVay might, he could not release the mare on his own, and his tractor had not the power to pull the animal from the embrace of the swampy earth.

  It took our tractor and four men to free the animal. She cried and neighed as we worked to free her. The fight had gone from her body and she had not the strength left to help us in any way. Our slings and ropes m
issed and failed several times, and at the last, when all our hopes were faded, Da and I tied the sling one last time and we all pulled her free.

  We were all of us united in the joy of our actions for that short moment. She would have died there that day if it were not for Jim and us, his neighbors, and for that we are all glad.

  Canada

  It snowed the other night when I was out looking at the animals: I saw it fall from the eternal blackness of the dark. Strange that it was snowing, but this winter is not yet over. It fell in patches, melting as it hit the wet ground. I stood for a time and watched it mysteriously drift. It brought Canada back to me.

  The winters were long there, the snow high and heavy. By the lake house where we sometimes stayed, the water would freeze over and we could drive snowmobiles across the lake. I remember too the sight of a bear in French River, and a golden eagle by the waterside. Nature was vast and epic there. I dream of it all sometimes still.

  My old love, my former fiancé, and I have not talked in a year or more, and I don’t know what could be said now. Things feel so different from how they did this time last year. I was back on the farm last winter too, but I found no joy in it then. I did not count myself a farmer that year, just a laborer looking no more than a day ahead, a wanderer trying to find his way home. That winter was the darkest I had ever known, though the weather was not of nature.

  I look into the night and put out my tongue and taste the snow. It is cold and fresh. A cow bellows low and clear from the shed and rouses me from my thoughts. It is three or four in the morning; even the bats are asleep, and I must do the same. I don’t remember the time difference with Toronto anymore.

  Property

  The Celtic Tiger boom brought with it money and dreams. Some saw us farmers as backward then, for working our land was far less profitable than selling it. We could have sold sites for development. We had fields with road frontage and they would have made us money, but the money would be gone now and the fields would be full of new houses.

  There are still plenty of ghost estates in our county, half-finished suburbs which stand as memorials to another time, evoking some strange future that never was. The recession did not just leave these empty buildings upon our landscape; it forced thousands to emigrate and drove some, in the face of financial ruin, to suicide.

  Mam has told me that Da sometimes thinks about the bank repayments for Ruske’s and has suggested that we sell Clonfin to pay the debt sooner. Now that the recession is ending, there is an appetite for building once more, and selling the hill farm would clear the bill, but the land that has been with us for so long would be gone. We did not want this to happen during the boom, and we do not want it to happen now.

  I have not spoken with Da about this Clonfin idea. He knows that one day I hope to build a house there. At times I have imagined my sons and I working the fields, as he and I work them now. My vision of the future has changed many times, but I still think perhaps it will come to pass.

  Charters

  “Charters has his lambs out,” I say.

  “How do you know?” Da asks.

  “Saw them when I was out on me bike.”

  “How do they look?”

  “They’re good,” I admit.

  “The hoor never has bad ones,” Da says.

  The Charters family have lived in the area for over two hundred years. They have been here as long as we have, but we are of different tribes. I only came to know old Charters in the last few years, for I set about to write a story about the assassination of his uncle Willie during the War of Independence.

  The war with the British will never be forgotten in Ireland. Running from 1919 to 1921, it was both the defining of our new nation and the end of the old one. An Ireland died in that time: British Ireland. This was the Ireland in which the Charters family lived as members of the Protestant and Anglo-Irish community.

  Willie Charters was but a boy when the IRA killed him, dumping his body into Lake Gurteen. Old Charters cried when he told me the story. There was nearly eighty years’ distance from the event in the telling and still the emotion was real. Willie had been innocent, he said; he had been no informer. And old Charters began to explain how his uncle had got caught up in the conflict.

  Following a land dispute between two members of the Charters family (brothers William and Robert had argued over how a parcel of land was to be divided between them), they turned to the newly formed IRA courts for justice and a decision in the matter.

  The IRA courts were the only functioning law of the land during the war years. They met in a local hall and made their proclamation. The judge, a Mr. Victory, decided that the fields would need to be divided properly, and so he set about to walk the land with other members of the party and the Charters family to conduct a fair survey.

  But at the arrival of the IRA men, young Willie, the son of William, left his family and informed the British forces of the enemies located at their house. Victory and his aide, Barney Kilbride, were arrested by the British as enemy combatants.

  The IRA commander of the area, Seán Mac Eoin, treated Willie’s actions as the most serious act of treachery. It was he who ordered Willie’s capture and execution.

  Willie Charters was younger than I am now when the IRA men blindfolded him and put the pistol to his head. Da says he was given a choice, to be shot or drowned. He chose the lake, but they shot him anyway for good measure. The killing changed and shocked the Anglo-Irish community in the area. There is a statue to our war leader Mac Eoin in the village now. We do not talk of Willie.

  I have finished my short story on Willie but have not given it to old Charters yet. I must make sure to do so, for he is getting on now and it would, I think, gladden his heart to know that Willie too has not been forgotten.

  I tried to give him something in fiction that reality did not: dignity in his end.

  Clonfin

  Mam has come home from Clonfin and she’s furious. The cows are roaring and thin, and there is no grass. Her anger is directed at me.

  “I’ve not been up there for a week or more,” I say. “Da said they were fine.”

  “They’re a shame to me,” she says. “What will the neighbors say? They need a bale, they need nuts.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it.”

  Da has gone to the mart and it is just as well, for the row would have escalated.

  “I’ve no one to take care of this farm. I should just sell it,” she continues, shouting now. “Your brother, you, your father, none of you is a farmer. I’d be better without it. You can’t even take care of the animals we have. I’m going to sell the whole thing up. I’m fed up of this.”

  “I’ll go up there now,” I say.

  Her words have hurt my pride, for I have been working day and night on this place. But I am also angry with Da, for why did Da say the cows were fine? Why did he not tell me the cows needed grass? I have done nothing wrong, but I must be in the middle of all of this once more. I spit and shout and Vinny jumps on my leg to be patted, but I shout at him to sit down. He puts his tail between his legs and runs away.

  “Fuck it, fuck it.”

  I will need to take a round feeder with me, a type of metal holder for feeding animals outside. Its metal exterior prevents the animals from tramping their silage into the ground.

  First I load its large, split metal halves onto the rear of the tractor, for I will assemble the feeder when I get to Clonfin. Then I put the blade on the front loader and take a large wrapped silage bale, and now I am ready.

  I think of Ma again and sigh. These are not her true feelings, I tell myself. She is upset and this will pass, even if it takes several days. Perhaps it is this weather, but the fights have grown more frequent lately; the unease in the house has come back. The work is wearing on all of us—the nights, the calves, the sheep, Red’s death. We are at each other’s throats. They tell me this is the way of farming, but I do not like it. When I am in control, I tell myself, I shall
do things differently. I shall not fight with my sons. And in the same breath, I curse the whole thing and think I’d be better to return to the city and not bother with any of this shite.

  It is raining as I move along the country roads to Clonfin. The tractor is slow and the drive takes forty minutes. I have time to cool down, to cool off, as does Mam. Why can things not be easy, I ask myself.

  The cows are waiting for me at the gate when I appear. They low and bellow, but they are fine; they look wet and rained upon but have not starved or perished. I know now that the strain is showing on Mam too. That the weather has affected her too.

  I drive up the long slow hill and unchain the feeder and assemble it. The ground is wet and the muck comes up to the top of my wellies. I trudge and labor and a light mist falls from the sky, but soon everything is where it should be and I can load the bale. I unfurl the plastic and pour the silage into the feeder. The cattle stand around it and they gorge themselves happily.

  I listen to an interview with the American writer Jay McInerney while I work. As he speaks, I see the skyscrapers of New York, the world of East Egg and the Jazz Age of Fitzgerald. The interviewer asks McInerney about his youthful success, and he laughs, and I am thoroughly relaxed now and have forgotten my woes.

  I do not say anything to Da when I come home. There has been no crisis and I will ensure the cows get a bale every few days to keep everyone happy. While there is silage still, I shall feed them. Soon the spring will come and we will move them off this scrubby ground at Clonfin. The meadow grounds of Ruske’s and Esker will be lush and green and we will all be able to breathe easier. Today has shown me one thing: that all of us need a break.