The Farmer's Son by John Connell

Author:John Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Aftermath

It takes a few days to overcome the loss.

“Better outside the house than in,” Mam says as we break for dinner.

She is right—it could have been Da, or herself, or indeed me, in some accident. I do fear the day when there will be a call to say they are gone, and what then? What of all the said and unsaid things? It has happened twice already, with Uncle John and Uncle Mick. We thought it had happened when my brother got his arm caught in a machine at the factory and we feared for the worst, or that he might lose the arm, that he might never regain its use. But the surgeons were quick and saved him. He has metal rods keeping the arm together, but he is alive and able-bodied. Mam says it was the best thing that happened to him, for it made him slow down at work and settle down with his girlfriend and get married. He has built his house nearby and they have a child together. We are not so close as we had been in childhood, and yet when his accident came I knew I had but one brother in this whole world.

I am aware now more than ever of mortality, for there is nothing like darkness to show one the light. It has come too in growing older and seeing death on the farm. We must be thankful that we have been spared.

The cow cried all night for Red, but come the morning she had stopped. Da disposed of his body. I offered to help, but he wanted to do it himself. I read of Saint Luke recently: he has often been depicted as an ox with wings, and I think that perhaps Red is something like that now, in bovine heaven. I do not know where the spirit of life goes from a departed beast. I must ask Father Seán.

Da and I said nothing of the vet. Perhaps Gormley had missed something. Or perhaps medicine can only do so much, and that is what he would tell us now if he were here.

Before the Department of Agriculture imposed stricter laws that required the removal of carcasses, we used to bury the smaller calves who did not make it in the fields. I remember their graves, if that is what they could or should be called. By the corner of the Garden field there are two, another in the yard where we keep the bales and one in Mick’s old potato ground. I was a teenager when we last buried a calf on the farm, and the grave was big enough to hold me. I would carry the body out in the wheelbarrow and turn the sod with my spade. The ground in these parts can be wet, and though they are animals, I did not like to bury them in a watery grave. I always chose a dry patch of ground. The graves would be a few feet deep, not

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