The Farmer's Son

by John Connell

  The others are faring well. I bring them nuts every day and then walk to the back of the hill, where the purebred calf is located. He is growing fine and strong and his sight lifts my spirits. His foster mother and brother greet me, and I feed them too.

  Whichever ewe’s lamb went missing, she does not seem to have noticed, for they are all lying out on the hill, basking in the early spring sunlight.

  I shall have to watch them closer. I shall have to outsmart the fox.

  Cows on Canvas

  I watched a film in the sitting room this evening. It is our good room and we seldom use it, save at Christmas or Easter. Above the mantelpiece sits a painting of a rural scene of cattle drinking by a river stream. I do not know the painter, but pictures such as these hang in so many country houses. Constable is a favorite. Nowhere has he found a greater audience than with the farmers of England and Ireland, for in his works do we see ourselves. In our townland (the small land divisions of a parish) of Soran alone, there are more than four reproductions of The Hay Wain.

  Since the time the aurochs were first depicted in the cave paintings of France and Spain, it seems we have sought to capture the magnificence and strength of the cow in art. To look at this gallery of cows is to see the different meanings we have placed upon them through the centuries of understanding.

  Of the depictions in Egypt and India, I have mentioned the sanctity of the cow but not the aesthetic beauty of the works. The stone carvings and sculptures tell us something about the eye of the creators and the intent of their makers.

  In European art, the ox most frequently appears by the manger in nativity scenes, but it also features in other biblical depictions. Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf shows the cow on a plinth being celebrated by the Israelites, and in the painting by Rubens and Brueghel, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, a cow nudges into the right-hand side of the scene.

  From the Renaissance onwards, the ox and cow are depicted as working animals, symbols of the northern European Protestant ethic. Later, in the work of Van Gogh, it seems they are weighed down by some other burden, perhaps guilt or sheer exhaustion.

  In the twentieth century, it is perhaps Picasso who best captured the power of the animal. To him, the bull became a fixation. I have seen whole gallery wings full of his works from the early to mid-1940s, when he saw the bull as a symbol of power and recklessness—in it was death, the fiesta and the shadow of fascism. Indeed, the 1942 found-object piece Bull’s Head is made from a simple bicycle saddle and handlebars, and even with these man-made items and this man-made work of art, he celebrated the natural world, at a time when nature itself was being pushed out of the way.

  Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece of the Spanish Civil War, also features a bull. Every day for five years as a secondary-school student, I ate under a reproduction of it in our school canteen. I did not know it was a Picasso work then, only that it featured animals I knew; the horse, the bull, even its lamplight, felt familiar to me. It was to me like a chaotic scene from some stable or outhouse. A fight bigger than any thirteen-year-old could imagine.

  It seems now, on looking back, that cows have surrounded me in my creative life.

  In our hallway there is an old print of Millet’s The Gleaners. I never knew it was a famous work of art until we saw it on television years ago. Mam said she bought it because it reminded her of farm work in years gone by.

  I wonder now, will anyone ever paint our cows? As a youngster, I tried to capture the calves on paper, but my hand was not quick enough and their patience too short. The painting in the sitting room shall have to do. Those painted herds look peaceful in it.

  April

  ❦

  Round and Rounds

  My days are full of farming now, from morning until night. Da is still sick and moves from bed to living room, but he is not well enough to come out. I would not mind the days but for the nights, which have begun again.

  Our second set of lambs are coming, so there are midnight deliveries and three a.m. feeding times. Newborn lambs are like babies, for they must be minded and cared for, must be fed and watched. There has been another calf born too. The cow did it herself, and for that I have thanked her, for I had not the power in me that night. The calf is white with red patches and seems good and strong. When I went to help him suckle, he was not interested, and although I have been watching to see if he has sucked by himself, I have missed it. But he is alive and it has been two days now, and so I surmise that he was born with the right instincts.

  My morning rounds have grown longer. I begin at Clonfin and check that the remaining cows have enough to eat—they are getting through two bales a week. Then on to the sheep in the upper ground near Uncle Mick’s old house, and the second flock by my brother’s. The purebred calf and his family must also be fed, and when all the morning jobs are done it is nearly one in the afternoon and I must begin the lunch for the family.

  The bags have returned around my eyes, and yet I like the order and purpose. I was not always so disciplined a person, but I have found that it suits me and that in the order I can achieve much.

  I have tired of podcasts and so listen to audiobooks. This week it is Hemingway’s turn, and he has already transported me to the mountain peak of Kilimanjaro. In Vinny’s barking I have imagined I hear the braying of the hyenas. Today I am listening to The Old Man and the Sea. I have heard it before, but being so landlocked here, it gives me a vision of the ocean. I fancy that my task of running the farm during this time is somewhat like the old Cuban fisherman’s struggle with the great marlin: a long and arduous effort, neither of us knowing what will be thrown against us. It has been many months since I have been by the sea, and perhaps when all this is done and Da is back, I will go to the coast.

  I clean and bed the cattle houses. I have lost count of how many times I have done this, for there is no point in keeping records. Shit is eternal: it always keeps coming and it would break a man to recount how much he has had to shift or move. It is better to face each day in the moment.

  The cattle we brought home from Clonfin are getting close to calving, and more new life will be on the way.

  The bales are dwindling every day. There is just enough left, but I may need to buy in feed. I have discussed this with Mam and she has agreed. We are not alone in this shortage—other farms are suffering from the wet winter too.

  It is dark by five and I have spent all my daylight hours on the farm. I call Tim, my friend, for a chat and retire for a few hours.

  Loser

  It has been over a week now that I have been alone on the farm and the last few days have been stressful. Another lamb went missing, and I suspect a calf has pneumonia. The weather has also turned wet once again and I am constantly tired. Da says he is still sick from the sting and I have not questioned this, for I know that if we stay apart, there will be no fighting.

  He has come into the habit of asking me to do certain things from his sick station, and I have carried out his requests. Today was to be no different. He felt it was time for the third group of lambs to be let out with their mothers. I agreed and said that I would do it. It started simply, but it ended in chaos.

  Before releasing the lambs, I injected them for fluke and worm and checked their weights. They were all of them strong and fit. I opened the gates and doors and walked them and their mothers up the lane by the river to the upper ground with the rest of the sheep. I was careful and slow in how I released them, for I had learned my lesson on this and I did not want any estrangement to take place. Some tracked back and forth, but I managed to hush and coax the new group towards the others, and after ten or fifteen minutes they had mingled with the big herd and together they numbered some 130 or more.

  It had been raining for a while and I was already soaked through when I got back to the shed. It was then that Da came out and asked why I had released the sheep.

  “You told me to,” I said.

  “I meant let them out to the small paddock here
by the house. Them lambs are too small.”

  “You never told me that,” I said.

  “Any bollox would know not to let them out to the upper ground. They’re not fit for it yet,” he growled.

  “I did what you asked me to do,” I said calmly.

  At that point, one of the newly released ewes returned to the shed. What she came for, I do not know, but her lambs were with her. She baaed and Da spat and then he shouted that they would all have to be brought back down and put in a separate field.

  And so we began. The rain grew heavier and more intense, and bit by bit we brought the newly released group to the small paddock. We did not speak, for I knew he was in a rage and to speak now would only add to his anger.

  I was in the lower ground by myself when the phone call came.

  “Get up here now, you bollox. There’s a sheep lying out up here. How did you miss her, huh? She’s nearly dead.”

  “What? Where are you? I’ll come up with the tractor.”

  “I’m up here, in the upper ground.” And then he hung up abruptly, as he does when he is in a temper.

  I did not know where exactly he was and so I phoned him, but he would not answer me. Now my anger also grew. I started the tractor and put the box on the front loader so as to carry this sick sheep. I had walked the fields that morning and noticed no illness, but perhaps I missed her. Sheep are not so hardy as cows, and sickness can take them suddenly. I hoped then it was not turning sickness, for I didn’t want to lose another ewe that way.

  He met me on the lane and shouted at me to get out of the tractor. Although my anger was strong, it had not taken hold. I let him into the driver’s seat and walked down to open the gate for him.

  I heard him mutter, “What sort of an idiot could miss her?”

  Suddenly I could take it no longer and months of suppressed rage inside me spewed forth. I was not bowing down this time but standing up for myself. I stood in front of the tractor and told him to talk with me, but he would not face me. Again I stood in front of the tractor and told him to talk with me, and again he would not. He began to drive the machine forward, but I stood in its way, refusing to move. I was determined that we would talk this day, rather than shout at one another. We would solve these fights once and for all. He made to drive over me then, but still I stood my ground and started to shout to him.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you? I’ve been running this place day and night for nearly two weeks and then you come out and start picking holes in everything. Talk to me, will ya?”

  “Running it? It’s a mess. Sheep in the wrong fields, a sick animal.”

  “We were getting on fine the two of us. What the hell has gotten into you?”

  “We’re not getting on fine, and it’s a mess,” he said again.

  “That’s not true. I’m here to help you, you’re getting older, it’s too much for one man.”

  “No one asked you to help me.”

  “Mam did.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now, I don’t need you.”

  The rain was beating down upon the tractor and it was soaking my back and legs. I felt a stab in my heart at these words, at all the work I’d done and the lives and illness we had faced together. I stepped up inside the tractor then and forced the engine off.

  “I’ve been working here for the last four months and you tell me you don’t need me. I’ve other things to be at. I could be working on my writing.”

  “Your writing! You’ve wrote four books now and none of them have succeeded. You’ve no job, no money, your life is a mess, and you’re a failure. You’re thirty and you’ve nothing to show for it. This is all a repeat of last year, and what did we come out with from that? Nothing! Your mother worries about you still, and she doesn’t worry about the others. You’re going to turn around one day and be sixty and have nothing. You will have wasted your life on those books and this farm. I don’t want you blaming me that you couldn’t achieve your goals because your time was took up at farming. I don’t need you.”

  We were silent awhile and simply eyeballed one another.

  “Then there’s nothing more to say,” I said quietly.

  “Nothing.”

  I should have cried then, had life not made me a stronger man. It crossed my mind to shake his hand to say goodbye, for it all seemed so final, but I did not. Too much had been said to forgive or see a way to forgiveness.

  I walked back to the house in the pouring rain. I had lost my cap and my hair trailed into my face and my glasses fogged over with the beating, pouring rain. I looked back as he drove on into the mist, shaking his head.

  The Past

  W. G. Sebald called it “the dog days,” Winston Churchill called it “the black dog,” and long before either of them, it was known as the black bile. It was only after the fact that I came to name it. I call it simply the Past, and it has shaped my life. I was not in love with life then. I did not run or swim or cycle. I did not see the joy in each calf’s birth nor kiss fuzzy lambs’ heads.

  I spent six months in a cold bedroom, unable and afraid to leave, grappling with the very concept of life. Things had been good before this, but of course they always are.

  After leaving Australia, I had made a life in Canada with my then fiancée. We lived in a penthouse apartment and I did not want for money or material things, for she was an heiress and I was starting to make a name for myself as a writer and film director. Before the fall, life was so different.

  When the Past arrived, precisely, I cannot say. It came upon me like a weighted cloak of water, pouring over body and soul until I felt that I was drowning.

  As a teenager, I had been fascinated with the works of Albrecht Dürer, in particular the print of Melencolia I.

  Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer

  It was odd that this engraving, created in 1514, should have held the attention of a sixteen-year-old farmer’s son. I don’t know why I loved it so, for I didn’t even know what the title meant then, but I drew and copied it many times and attempted to create my own screen print of it in my high school art class. Raised on films about different forms of creative genius, I knew that all great men suffer for their craft, and I associated this figure, and deep and troubled thought, with achieving something worthwhile.

  It was said that before he created the image, Dürer confessed, “What is beautiful I do not know.”

  The image of that engraving returned to me two years ago and haunted my dreams, and I understood then what Dürer meant.

  Our relationship was ended, the wedding was canceled, and the life we had planned came crashing down, and I found myself once again back in rural Ireland.

  A great unease and sadness had come upon me and I could no longer see the beauty in anything. I pushed everything away from me in a sort of madness as I rebuked life and love and battled with the elements of darkness.

  I stayed in my bedroom, emerging only occasionally to help on the farm when the lambing was very busy or a calf needed to be delivered. The farm then seemed as a prison to me, and one I longed to escape. I neither spoke nor listened to anyone. I still remember the abhorrence of that rural Christmas, alone, afraid, and thinking only of death and of wanting to leave this world. I was a man possessed with a deep and sickly sadness.

  I have a friend, Charlie, who is a faith healer, and it was he and modern medicine that saved me. Through a combination of the old and new worlds and ways of healing, the six months of darkness ended and I emerged reborn. I came to know that not until we are lost can we truly find ourselves, and, in so doing, we can then measure that thing men call life and living, and appreciate its ordinary bounty.

  I wrote of my experience in articles and in the farmers’ paper, and ended up on national radio talking of the Past, of my fall, of my journey through depression and mania, and of mortality itself. Why did I choose to speak out? Perhaps because I felt I now could. I supposed it was a postcard, a letter, from the other side, a message to those still suffering—to hold on, to
say that life does get better.

  Days after the broadcast, a man sent a letter to the radio station saying he had been on his way to take his life when he had heard me speak. He had been driving in his car, with a rope and medicine for an overdose in the back seat, ready to kill himself, and I had popped onto the airwaves. My words had stopped him from that ultimate act. And he had written in simply to thank me for saving his life.

  I cried then, for surely, I reasoned, all of it had been for a reason. Had I not walked that path through grief, depression and the struggles of mental health, his life would have ended that day. Such is the interconnectedness of this world.

  It was shortly after that I met an old love from Australia again, after several years apart. It was a wholly unexpected thing. But then, as the old book says, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

  Vivian and I had been each other’s first loves and I had never thought we should meet again. Our love is one of long distance, for she is still in Australia and I am here. We talk and hope that soon we will be reunited. She jokes that she will be a farmer too. I left Australia to become a writer, and she has supported me in this, and for that I am eternally grateful, for she has never doubted my intent or wish.

  ❀

  And so I have returned to this farm, to the place where I was so tortured and sick, to write, but it is no longer a prison.

  On learning the secrets of perspective from the Italian masters, Dürer published them in a book, for all of his northern contemporaries to read and understand. So it was with me. I have talked and written and revealed the secrets of perspective, the perspective of melancholia. It has helped people. It has helped me.

  I return now to that question of Dürer’s. What is beautiful? It is, I think, life itself and living. In this farm, I have found my Walden, my sustenance. I walk its fields and know I am alive.