by Tom Phelan
“I did not!”
“Feck off, Phelan, and play with the other oul farmers. Oink, oink.”
The townspeople had antipathy toward farmers, believing they had money hidden in their mattresses. Their belief was probably reinforced by the sight of our pony-and-trap taking the family on a drive on Sunday, four of us facing the other three on the soft, cushioned seats, a blanket spread over our laps to keep us warm. High-spirited Red, speeding along in the shafts of the rubber-wheeled, brass-appointed trap, certainly projected an air of wealth. Those Sunday outings were happy times; they allowed Dad to escape from the farm for a few hours, peer over hedges to see what other farmers were up to, and to spend time with his family. I imagine Mam was instrumental in pushing for these trips to force Dad to relax. When we arrived home after a Sunday jaunt, Dad still had to milk five cows and we all went back to the business of operating a small farm as automatically as players on a football team taking their assigned places on the field.
Compared to many of my contemporaries, I came from a rich family. But the material things and the good times this richness allowed came at the cost of incessant work.
35
THE RAMBLER
In the dark ages of the 1940s and 1950s—rural electrification was not yet universal—many localities in Ireland had ramblers, people who visited certain houses in their neighborhood on a regular circuit. In most cases the ramblers were lonely single men in search of company, gossip, and the million-to-one chance of meeting a willing woman.
Certain ramblers were welcomed, others were tolerated, and some were actively disliked. Perhaps the unpopular ones were too free with gossip, forcing the hosts to continually edit what they said; maybe they brought in clumps of cow dung on their boots; perhaps they talked too much or said too little; perhaps they used their hand instead of a handkerchief or didn’t button up their trousers; maybe they spat into the fire or farted with impunity. These ramblers had been so isolated all their lives that they failed to notice the social cues that to anyone else would have been like a thunderclap exploding in the kitchen.
By trial and error, the ramblers had determined which houses were most receptive till eventually they felt comfortable enough to knock on a particular door at half-past seven on a Sunday night. So regular were the ramblers that their hosts anticipated the visits and worried if their guests did not appear, most likely sent a child the next morning to make inquiries at the house of the missing.
Many ramblers joined in playing cards with their hosts, each winner putting a penny into the paraffin box to pay for the night’s supply of lamplight. The rambler never left the house without being served tea and jammed and buttered bread, even if he had won every game of Twenty-Five and was weighed down by a pocketful of enormous copper pennies.
If any ramblers had ever tried to dip their toes into my parents’ hospitality, they would have found that Dad easily tired of conversing, and in less than an hour took off his boots and filled the hot water bottle. But in the case of Delia Delaney, Mam’s warm welcome outweighed Dad’s aggrieved hints. Mam had known Delia as a child in Derrycloney, and she had empathy for the woman. In her ferocious, hungry, lonely, despairing nonstop chatter, Delia repelled the very people she tried to befriend.
Delia, who was always old to me, was one of the farming community’s unfortunate single women, condemned by the Fates to live with her unmarried brother Seamus. Side by side they worked in the fields of their fifty-acre farm, milked their cows, forked out the dungy and watery bedding from the animal houses, castrated their calves, ate together, and shared all the details of daily living. Every morning, Delia carried her brother’s commode out to the dunghill and emptied it, rinsed it under the farmyard pump, and then made his bed. Farming men did no work inside the house, yet farm women often did as much work in the fields and farmyard as their men did.
Delia was a skinny woman with the sparse brown hair of a coconut that has spent too much time in the sea. She was bent at the shoulders and there was no bulge of bust. Her lips were thin and her teeth slightly bucked; her nose was as sharply humped as the Canal Bridge; her eyes were remarkable because her fair eyebrows were invisible. Her hands, battered and torn by years of wresting a living from the soil, were mindful of a turkey’s scaly claws; she’d never had an unbroken nail.
The moment Delia seated herself at the kitchen fire across from Mam, she began to talk, and unless Mam forcibly interrupted her, she did not cease until she looked at the clock at eleven and said, “Sure I’d better get going. Seamus will be asleep in front of the fire waiting for me to make his cup of tea.”
No matter what she talked about there was an edge of anger, of begrudgery, on the words she was so eager to get out. There were no full stops, commas, semicolons, or paragraphs. She spoke about the weather, farming, recent deaths, people from her childhood, the local scoundrels, and the people who were too high and mighty.
“And, Nan, will there ever be an end to the church building fund? Isn’t Father McCluskey a terrible cranky old man? We’ve heard nothing but the building fund for the last twenty years. A body would feel like never giving another penny to that man. And he with two motors, one from France, Seamus says. That man does nothing but fish, and the rest of us looking for a wisp of soft grass under a hedge to wipe ourselves.”
If she ever confided in Mam about her living conditions or her disappointments in life, Mam never said. Nor did Mam say Delia was ever critical of Seamus. But one time Mam told us Delia had cried while talking about her other brother, William, a member of an order of teaching brothers who worked in India, who had been home on a six-month break.
“Nothing was good enough for him, Nan. Everything was better in India. And after whitewashing and thatching and blue-stoning the windowsills and buying a geranium. And Nan, we fattened six big bullocks last winter and bought him a Morris Minor to drive around in. And when he had the attack of appendicitis he made us bring him to the Mater Hospital in Dublin because he said the one in Marbra is dirtier than the ones in India.”
She and Seamus had gone in the Morris Minor with a bag of fruit to visit William in the Mater, and when they arrived in the ward, Delia had fainted, collapsed on the floor. “Not a leg under me, Nan! And the nurse said it was because I was wearing my head scarf on a hot day that stopped the heat from getting out of my body. Did you ever hear the likes? And me wearing a cap on the hottest day of the year and I never fainted before. It was the stairs, Nan; the stairs. They wouldn’t let us use the lift. I thought we’d never stop climbing.”
When Delia had been revived by the nurses and all the fuss was over, William in the bed told her she smelled like the farmyard and didn’t know how to dress. “ ‘Wearing that blessed wool coat summer and winter, and that head scarf . . . no wonder you fainted,’ he said.”
Then he told Delia never to visit him in hospital again.
Delia cried at our fire. I imagine Mam wept, too, when she heard of William’s cruel and snobbish humiliation of his sister.
At the end of the evening visit, Mam gave Delia a mug of tea and slices of the Sunday currant cake. Then she helped her into her woolen coat and escorted her out onto the lane. Delia took hold of her bike’s handlebars as if they were the horns of a bull calf she was about to wrestle to the ground. A gust of wind howled around the two women as Delia switched on her flash lamp and turned her bike in the direction of home.
“Sure, Seamus says I’m as tough as an old galvanized bucket, Nan. I’ll be home in no time because once I get on the Commons Road the wind will be in my back.”
And then, like a lone, lost crow blown across a stormy sky, Delia was gone.
36
LUCKLESS LAR
Lar Dixon was a lonely, shy, and quiet man in his twenties who lived fifty yards beyond our house. Orphaned as a small boy, he spent his early years being handed off to different relatives. His education had been sorely neglected, and reading and writing were beyond him. When he came of age, he took over the small farm h
is father had bequeathed him.
Lar seldom got up before noon unless his cow bawled to have her painful udder relieved. But it wasn’t the cow’s discomfort that motivated Lar; it was her broadcasting to the neighbors that he was still in bed.
Mam was fond of Lar and had a lot of maternal compassion for him. Whenever it could be done without hurting his pride, she gave him his dinner. She often sent a child out with a plate for him after Dad had gone back to the fields. If Lar had spent a day selling an animal at the Mountmellick fair, Mam saved him bacon, potatoes, and cabbage and kept an eye on the lane to intercept him on his way home.
When Dad hired Lar for a day’s work on our farm, Mam sent one of us children out at half-past seven to knock on his bedroom window. She hoped to save a tardy Lar from Dad’s sarcastic tongue.
Once, while helping Dad to reverse a cartful of mangels into the boiler house, Lar caught his hand between the axle and the wall. Mam took care of the wound. For several weeks, Lar’s hand, along with the bandage, was soaked in warm water, and a new dressing was applied. Every time he left, Mam lamented the thinness of his body and its slowness in repairing itself. In wintertime, his triple-socked feet were always cold even though he stuffed his wellingtons with newspaper he got from Mam.
Lar sometimes worked in our tillage fields with our horses. Because of this familiarity with the animals, Dad didn’t hesitate to be a good neighbor whenever Lar needed to borrow a horse. He always asked Dad a few days in advance if Lame Mare would be available.
On the morning the horse was needed, Dad went out to the Back of Fitzes rattling a handful of oats in the bottom of a bucket. Then he tackled Lame Mare and tied her to the hinge of the boiler house door. But Lar never came for the horse before one o’clock.
Dad complained loudly about Lar’s behavior. “That fellow! You’d think he’d be here by now, and he knowing the mare is waiting for him since morning.”
Still, every time Lar asked, Dad got the horse ready first thing, Lar never arrived until afternoon, and Dad groaned.
“The sun’ll be setting soon,” he would say.
Lar would only smile.
When I was about nine, Lar finally saved enough money to buy his own horse. One day Lar turned him loose to graze in a field where a plough had been carelessly left. That night, perhaps frightened by something in its own imagination, the horse galloped into one of the plough’s wooden handles. It sank deep into the right side of his chest. When Lar heard the wounded animal’s screams, he managed to walk him home, where he died in Lar’s tiny stable, originally built to house a donkey.
When my brother Eddie and I went to see the dead animal, he had collapsed against two corner walls, his terrified eyes wide open, his long yellow teeth bared in raging pain. We watched as Dad used chains and Lame Mare to drag the corpse out to the nearest field for burial. It took a long time for the child I was then to bury the frightening image of the horse’s face.
“Poor old Lar,” Mam often said. “He’s not had one good day in his life.”
Lar died in his forties. Whenever I’m in Ireland, I stand by his grave, remembering the time he had a swollen jaw from a bad tooth as well as a pronounced limp from broken toes. I was a young teenager then. For a laugh at his expense, I quipped that Lar had hoof-and-mouth disease.
The things we regret.
37
THE MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING
For all the years I knew him, in fair or foul weather, our distant neighbor Durt Donovan dressed in a beltless gabardine coat that had witnessed the birth of many a calf; it had been worn while he examined a variety of animal orifices; it had been present at the castration of calves and at the daily milking of cows. His paddy cap, with its peak broken in the middle, was used as a glove while he handled boiling pots and kettles, as a basket to carry eggs or transport newborn kittens, and as a rag to wipe animal dung off his face.
Only the lower part of Durt’s wellington boots had ever been cleaned—accidentally, when he walked through ankle-high dewy grass. The cloth of his trousers, their legs stuffed into the top of the wellingtons, had been stiffened by years of milk spillages, splashes of bovine urine, and dirt in a thousand manifestations. In a million years, the same trousers would be a paleontologist’s lode, with their compressed layers as evidentiary as the Burgess Shale.
Above Durt’s lantern jaw, his forehead was furrowed, and the furrows were like miniature potato drills, with farmyard manure already teased out along them, ready for the reception of seeds. His sagging neck was mindful of the loose flesh swinging at the throat of an old plodding bull.
Looking out on the world through omniscient eyes and speaking with the assuredness of the infallible pope, Durt would address those who had the misfortune to encounter him. Whenever Dad saw him coming in the distance, he climbed through the nearest hedge and hid.
One spring, I was spike-harrowing in Conroy’s Field with Lame Mare and Whiteface. My brother Eddie was cutting back the previous year’s briars, which had snaked their way out of the hedges and into the clay. Durt Donovan, who had his nephew Packie and Packie’s pregnant wife, Monica, living with him, suddenly appeared at the whitethorn hedge beside the lane. There was no escape for Eddie and me.
Durt summoned us over. Without preamble, he addressed us across the low hedge. “Dey took yer wan”—meaning Monica—“to the hospital last night to have her babby. Hospital, me arse! In my day a woman took a batter of flour and water when she went to bed and the next morning she put the babby from her like a snot.”
Having spoken ex cathedra, he adjusted his cap, uttered not another word, and processed up the lane, picking his teeth with a thorn from a gooseberry bush.
Once, when I was fourteen, I met Durt Donovan on our lane as I was riding my bike home after serving mass. The smell off him was fierce.
“I hear yer an altar bye now, chappie.”
“Yes,” I said, and continued pedaling until I emerged from his cloud of stink.
“I hear you’re goin’ off to college in September.”
“I am,” I said. I braked, put my foot to the ground, then twisted on the bike seat to look back at him.
“Schooling won’t change who y’are, chappie. Look at me . . . I never got beyant fourth class, and I can talk with the best of them, teachers and bank managers, and I know more than the whole lot of them together.” He paused for a moment. “And what will you be doing when yer finished in college?”
“I’m going to be a priest.”
“A priest! Well for you! Nothing to do all day only play golf with the big nobs; eating the best, drinking, too; warm and clean all the time with a woman to buy the food and cook for you, and you not having to marry her. Grand life. But still and all, a lot of them fellas turn into contrary old shites, all thorns and no flowers. Mark my words, chappie: if you become a priest, you’ll be sorry in the long run.”
He walked away.
I felt resentful toward Durt for squeezing my balloon while everyone else was keeping it inflated. But as I grew older I remembered the pebble of doubt he had placed in my boot.
38
WASTED ON THE BOG AIR
Uncle Jack eventually left our house and went to live with his sister Meg and her family. He would spend the rest of his life working a hand tool for the Laois County Council. When he died four decades later, he bequeathed thirty-seven pounds and fifty pence to me and each of my siblings; his thoughtfulness, his affection, and his love were the most precious part of the gift.
Shortly after Jack’s departure, one of Mam’s other brothers, Paulie, moved in with us. Perhaps his sister Peg, still living at Mam’s home place with my grandfather and Paulie, was fed up with two snarling, demanding, self-absorbed alcoholics and asked Mam if she and Dad would take in Paulie for a while.
I imagine there were conditions attached to his lodging with us. Dad and Mam were Pioneers and had never tasted alcohol, and Dad especially had an unforgiving attitude toward men who squandered their income and their lives on
drink, particularly married men with children.
If he’d had any educational opportunities, Paulie might have soared in academia. His extraordinary memory alone would surely have boosted his skyward climb in several fields. But the times and the circumstances were not favorable, and so his intellect, like that of so many of his contemporaries in Ireland, was wasted on the bog air. At age eighteen he had his first glass of porter, at Mam and Dad’s wedding reception. It was the start of a lifelong addiction. For the rest of his days, except for a few valiant Lenten efforts to remain sober, he drank whenever he had a few shillings.
Paulie once had a relationship with a woman—chaste, I imagine, in keeping with both the mores of the time and the lack of contraceptives. But his girlfriend eventually gave him a choice: “It’s me or the drink, Paulie.” He could not promise he would stop drinking.
Before he came to stay with us, “drunk Paulie” stories were grist for the town’s gossip mills, all of them funny except to the people directly affected by his behavior. Mam winced at every tale she heard. “What a wasted life!” she’d say.
For the first couple of months he lived with us, Paulie seemed to have his liquor intake under control. But then one night in the dense dark of the unlit countryside, he waddled along our lane on his bike after drinking himself stupid in the Hill Bar.
Half a mile from our house he rode off the lane into Rourke’s Drain, fell eight feet into fourteen inches of mucky water, and landed on his hands and knees. He stumbled around for a while in the Stygian blackness, fell over his bike several times, and finally, when he failed to establish his whereabouts, sat down with his back to one side of the drain. He slept till sunrise, then dragged his lower body out of the sucking muck. It was the shape of a large and familiar whitethorn bush above him that helped him get his bearings. Recovering his bike, he pulled it along the drain until he reached a right-angle turn and saw the underside of Rourke’s Bridge. He found the place where we children climbed down to make echoes on our way home from school.