by Tom Phelan
I learned at an early age how to tackle the horses, even though at first I needed an adult to buckle the belts holding the collar and the hames in place around their necks. But I could lift, balance, and let the straddles fall onto their backs, then reach under their bellies and cinch the straps in their buckles. I loved tackling the horses. Being able to do so made me feel that I was appreciated by Dad, that I was an accepted part of the effort to wrest a living from the land, that I was “getting big.”
In early spring a concrete roller was used in the grazing fields to level out the cattle hoof-holes from the previous autumn. I was ten when I was left alone in a field for the first time to work one of the mares at this job. At twelve, I was entrusted with two horses to spike-harrow and spring-grub the newly ploughed fields. Walking behind the horses through the freshly tilled clay I felt a palpable connection with the soil. The soft stirring of the soil beneath the teeth of the tilling implements was mesmerizing to eyes and ears. And there were the trailing, worm-seeking birds; the chirping finches; the cawing crows; and the shrill cries of the bullying seagulls. I remember the sinking of my feet into the fecund clay, the smell of the horses, and spring rising up out of the awakening earth filled me with a mysterious contentment.
I never rode any of Dad’s mares. Neither did he. The only people I saw riding were properly rigged-out “rich” people on saddled horses, or tinkers galloping bareback and using raveling binder twine as reins. Perhaps Dad, not being properly equipped or else too proud to be associated with the tinker culture, chose not to be an equestrian. He did not encourage his children to ride either. The only time my siblings and I were on horseback was when Mam took a photo in the farmyard with her Brownie box camera. In the photograph, Dad is holding the horse, his anxiety for the precarious perch of his five children obvious on his face.
Because the horses were so valuable, the most regularly consulted tome in our house was an anatomy book with diagrams of equine bits and pieces. Dad took great care of his horses and regularly scraped out the hooves of his three mares. During the winter the horses were housed in the stable. Every morning, while Dad cleaned the stable and scattered soft barley straw, the children walked the horses around the farmyard for ten minutes and then brought them to the water tank.
In wintertime their bellies and sides were shorn to keep them clean when they lay down. Shearing was a job for a wet day or when it was dark, because Dad would not waste daylight or good weather doing it. The stable was a dark place, and without the yard lamp it was impossible to use the long-handled shears. The yard lamp, fueled with paraffin, had a flame inside a glass globe that provided slightly more light than a candle.
One night while Dad sheared I held the yard lamp close to the action. Why was I the one chosen to hold the lamp while my brothers and sisters were inside in the warm kitchen? I complained silently.
“Can’t you shine where I’m clipping?” Dad said. How was it that no matter how I held the lamp, I was not lighting up the correct place?
Along through the red horsehair Dad’s shears clip-clipped, leaving behind an oxford-grey, two-inch swath. But when impatient Dad pushed the shears too hard, creating a wave of hairy flesh that ran before the teeth until they eventually caught the flesh and pinched it, the mare then raised a hind leg and whacked her hoof on the floor. Dad slapped the horse’s side with the shears. It was unlikely the shears hurt much, but even so, the slapping made the horse react by squashing Dad and me up against the wooden dividing wall. And so it went, until man and horse were very annoyed at each other.
“I’ll put the touch on you!” Dad shouted as he smacked the mare in the ribs with the flat of his hand. The “touch,” a rope noose on the end of a short stick, was used to render a mare immobile with the threat of severe pain. The upper lip was pulled through the noose, which was tightened by the twisting of the stick.
Silence on my part was the wisest course to take. Dad was a true believer in the catechism teaching that “animals were made for man’s use and benefit.” He never allowed an animal to win.
28
THE FORGE
Dad told us children, “If a big person ever asks you questions about the farm or about the cattle or the pigs or our family, just say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s not telling lies. It’s a way of telling him to mind his own business.”
The place where we muttered the most “I don’t know” answers was at Peetie Flanagan’s forge. Peetie Flanagan was a big man with a hairy chest, unkempt hair, and giant hands that could have squeezed water out of a stone.
Besides shoeing horses, ponies, jennets, and donkeys, Peetie also made iron gates and drill harrows. His forge, a galvanized shack attached to the end wall of Laffey’s bike shop, was a most untidy place, with bits and pieces of farm implements piled on the floor against the left-hand wall. Two of the shack’s corners were so dark that monsters with metal teeth and eyes might have been crouching in them. Directly inside the open door was a space large enough to accommodate a horse. To the right side of this area stood the anvil, bolted to a block of wood studded willy-nilly with old horseshoe nails hammered in during idle moments. Beyond the anvil were the fire and the bellows. The doorway, the only source of light, also served as chimney for the smoke of the anthracite. Everything in the forge was black, everything coated with the fine residue of burned coal.
I loved being in the forge with its flying sparks, ringing hammers, wheezing bellows, and the foreign smell of anthracite. Being in the blacksmith’s was to be among grown men who said “fuckin’ dis” and “fuckin’ dat.”
When I was eleven our mare Timahoe needed new shoes, and Dad waited for a wet day to bring her to the forge. Eddie and I went along in the pony’s cart, Eddie sitting backward holding the reins of the mare trotting behind.
Outside Peetie Flanagan’s, droopy-hatted farmers were already standing in the rainy street, each with a naked horse, waiting their turn to go into the forge. Dad paid Peetie in advance and left us with instructions about leading the mare home through the town when the job was done. Before he climbed back into the pony’s cart he whispered, “Them oul lads will be asking you all kinds of questions. You know what to say.” We took our place at the end of the queue.
No sooner was Dad out of sight than a red-faced man who hadn’t shaved in a week asked, “How many horses does your father have?”
My brother said, “I don’t know.”
“Be Janey! You don’t know a little thing like that?”
When an animal relieved itself inside the forge, Peetie swept the effluvium out the door and across the footpath and built a dam with it in the gutter. In the puddle of rainwater and urine that formed behind the dung he cooled red-hot, newly forged shoes. Peetie himself carried them out with tongs and dropped them in, where they hissed and steamed and spluttered and threw drops onto the legs of his trousers.
The farmer ahead of us looked as if he had spent days standing out in the rain. The rim of his hat had collapsed and it looked like an upside-down flowerpot.
“Are you the one that’s going to be the priest?” he asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, everyone says you are.”
A newly shod horse was led prancing out of the forge with his hooves shining. The owner shortened his grip on the reins and the horse whinnied loudly at the waiting mares. Peetie stood in his doorway in his leather apron and called, “I’d swear one of that lad’s balls was left in when you cut him, Mick. There’s too much spunk in him altogether.”
Out of the spills of rain a waterlogged farmer led his waterlogged horse into the forge. A man behind us tied his animal to a telephone pole and went inside out of the rain.
“One of us should go in, too,” Eddie said. “It’s no use the two of us getting wet. We’ll take turns.”
“We’ll toss,” I said. “I have a penny.”
Eddie won. He went into the forge and I stayed outside holding Timahoe’s reins.
“Hey, chappie! Does yer fadder s
till raise them little pigs?” a man called from the forge door.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh fuck off, you little sleeveen. You know fuckin’ well.”
It was the first time anyone told me to fuck off, and I felt as if I had been severely scolded.
A farmer behind me shouted, “Hey, young lad! You look like a rale Hayes, but you couldn’t be one because none of them men ever got married. Is your mother a Hayes?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your own mother’s name? Are you an eejit or what?”
I felt like a fool. I began to wonder whether Dad’s order to stay closemouthed was a wise one.
Finally it was time to lead Timahoe into the forge. Peetie and his apprentice, Pierce, pushed her into the best position for the light to brighten their work space. Before Peetie grabbed Timahoe’s fetlock, I asked him if I could pull the bellows.
“Yes, but only when I tell you, and don’t touch the fire or the iron in it.”
The bellows was a monstrous contraption, operated by pulling a chain hanging from a pole attached to the top side of the blower. The real joy of blowing the burning anthracite was seeing the iron turning red and then white. The exotic smell of the burning coal and the heat from the fire on a chilly, wet day were wondrous, the beating of the rain on the galvanized roof adding another layer of comfort.
“Hey, Phelan,” one of the waiting farmers said to my brother, “did your father sow sugar beet this year?”
“I don’t know.”
“He did,” the blacksmith said as he dropped Timahoe’s hoof. Peetie leaned against the mare’s side. “He sowed three acres like myself, and I have the best beet I ever had. And I want you, young fella”—he pointed his pincers at me—“to tell your father I was drill-harrowing my beet on Monday, and my beet is so big the harrow got stuck between two of them and the horse was brought to a dead stop. What do you think of that, men?”
“Bejazus, Peetie.”
“You must have put great dung in the drills.”
When Peetie bent down to lift up Timahoe’s hoof, the men winked at each other.
“Hey, Phelan, I heard your father’s pony ran away in Marbra last Sunday and crashed into the back of a motorcar. Is that right?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” the man sneered. “It’d be easier to get a fart out of a dead ass than get an answer out of you.”
The men chuckled. One of them said, “I asked yer man on the bellows the name of his mother and he said he didn’t know.”
Peetie threw one of Timahoe’s old shoes onto the pile in the dark corner. On his way to the mare’s rear hooves he said, “She’s a Hayes from up the road, sister of Paulie’s and Billy’s and Jack’s.”
“I knew he was a Hayes the minute I looked at him.” Turning to me, he said, “I hope you don’t grow into an old bollicks like your grandfather.”
“He’s going to be a priest,” someone said.
“No better job . . . a motorcar and the best of grub and not having to work for it.”
“Free house, too, and golf all day.”
“Aye, and an oul one of a housekeeper to look after you.”
“No temptation there, lads! Priests’ housekeepers always look like the back of a bus.”
Pierce, the apprentice, was wearing a sleeveless shirt and his biceps were big, bulging, and blue-veined. He wore a leather apron, too, to protect against the sparks flying from the hammer-whacked, white-hot iron. He swung the big sledge and flattened the iron while Peetie used a lighter hammer to shape it into a shoe on the points and edges of the anvil. Like the sound of a ticking clock the two hammers rang out an even staccato until an “Up!” from Peetie interrupted the flow. The blacksmith held the long-handled punch while Pierce whacked it to make the nail holes.
“Hey, Phelan . . . you holding the horse’s head,” a man said. “Was your father in Port fair with cows last Friday?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Do you know anything at all? Do you know even what feckin’ day it is?”
Peetie Flanagan was walking back to the anvil after dropping a horseshoe in the horse-water outside the door. “Ah, leave them lads alone,” he said. “For all we know, JohnJoe told them not to be talking about things that do be going on at home.”
“Is that right, chappie? Did your father tell you that?”
“Leave the chap alone,” Peetie said. “Sure, we all have things we don’t tell anyone. Like I never give away the price I get for an animal at the fair, and you’d never ask me and I’d never ask you either. Them lads are not old enough to know what should and shouldn’t be talked about, so they don’t talk about anything.”
Peetie bent over, with his back toward the horse’s head. He grabbed the fetlock, lifted the leg, and put it between his knees. Our Timahoe was a quiet mare, but even so, my brother kept a tight grip on her bit.
If any horse moved or tried to regain control of its leg while being shod, Peetie shouted at the farmer for not holding the horse steady. “Do you want me to get fuckin’ kilt or what?”
It was also the farmer’s fault if his horse nipped Peetie. “If this fucker was mine, he wouldn’t bite a second time because he’d have no fuckin’ teeth to bite with!”
Sometimes, while a horse’s leg was still locked between his knees, Peetie gave the animal a punishing elbow in the stomach and snarled, “Hold up there, ya hure!”
“Do you have a name on your horse, chappie?” a farmer asked Eddie.
“Yes. Timahoe and she’s a mare.”
“Glory be to God on high, the lad knows something.”
When the blacksmith and his helper finished making a shoe, Peetie inserted the point of his punch into one of the nail holes to make a handle, and he pushed the red-hot iron against the mare’s hoof. Then he threw the shoe in the urine pool and took the new piece of glowing iron out of the anthracite and shaped it on the anvil. When the iron for Timahoe’s third shoe was pushed into the glowing anthracite, Eddie took my place at the bellows.
Watching the blacksmith hammering the square-headed and sharp-pointed nails through the shoe holes and into the hoof, and then twisting the protruding ends off the nails between the claws of his hammer, was like seeing a circus clown perform a succession of tricks he has done ten thousand times. Silently, like a nurse anticipating a surgeon, Pierce was always one step ahead of the blacksmith’s needs. He passed a heavy rasp to Peetie, who filed the nail edges and the hoof smooth; he handed Peetie a brush for painting the hoof with old engine oil out of a dented tin can.
When he finished the job, Peetie slapped Timahoe on the rump for being such a good client. Then he said, “Now, lads, there are seven nails in a horseshoe. Would it be cheaper for your father to pay me half a crown for each shoe with its seven nails, or one penny for the first nail, two pennies for the second, four for the third, and so on up to the twenty-eighth nail?
“The first way,” Eddie and I replied in unison.
“Be gob, men,” the blacksmith said, turning to the other customers, “these lads are not as thick as you’d think.”
Peetie said, “Don’t forget to tell your father about my drill harrow getting stuck between two beets.”
When we told Dad this, he said, “Either Peetie is an eejit or his horse is worse than a bad ass.”
29
WHITEFACE AND THE STALLION
Every afternoon at three o’clock, with my schoolbag strapped on my back and my kneesocks at my ankles, I was gushed out through the narrow schoolyard gate in a stream of escaping boys. One day when I was about twelve, I unexpectedly saw Dad at the Long Barn, sitting on the wooden seat of the pony’s cart and waving to get my attention. Wearing his good grey hat with its black band, he had washed his wellingtons at the pump trough before leaving home. The hat and the sparkling boots stood in sharp contrast to his soiled workaday clothes.
Except for her winkers, the ma
re, Whiteface, was standing naked and somnolent behind the cart, her head hanging and her reins in Dad’s right hand. With one foot on the box of the wheel and my hands gripping the wingboard, I vaulted into the bundle of straw behind Dad’s seat; he greeting me by running his hand through my hair. Then he passed the mare’s reins to me with the instruction, “Don’t wrap them around your hands, Tom.” This was to protect me against being dragged out of the cart if the mare suddenly stopped or shied. I shook the reins to get Whiteface’s attention.
“Hold her, now,” Dad said, and he dropped the pony’s reins along her back and hupped her forward. Within a few seconds, he turned back to me and said, “We’re going to trot, Tom. Hold her tight.” And we set out on the clip-clopping six-mile journey to Marbra—a corruption of the regal Maryborough—where the mare had a date with a stallion in the yard behind Ramsbottom’s shop.
Once we left Mountmellick behind, Dad unwrapped the butter-and-jam sandwich Mam had made for me. He took a bite for himself before handing it to me. Next he pulled the newspaper twist out of a lemonade bottle, took a long swig of sweetened tea, and then gave it to me. “If there’s any left, I’ll drink it.”
Dad was addicted to tea. When he got up in the morning, he looked around for teacups containing dregs from the previous night, poured them into one vessel, and drank it cold. Then he lit the turf fire to boil the kettle. Whenever he spent the day working around the farmyard, he came into the kitchen for tea so often that Mam said, “It’s a good job he doesn’t drink porter!”
From Mountmellick to Marbra the paved road ran across a deep bog that stretched, heather-covered, to the horizon. For miles we saw neither animal nor human. Along the lonely road we trotted to the music of grinding iron-shod wheels, the jangle of the pony’s tacklings, the jingle of the draughts, the light rhythm of the pony’s hooves and the heavier one of the mare’s hooves smacking the tarmac.
Facing backward in the cart, I could see the bog and the heather and the few bushes along the road moving past us until they came to a stop and took their place on the landscape. When the Fairy Tree sailed past, I blessed myself against evil spirits and remembered it was near here that Uncle Jack saved a woman on a dark night by filling the dry tank of her carbide lamp with his personal water.