We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It by Tom Phelan

Author:Tom Phelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

23

TYRANNY OF THE IRISH WEATHER

The weather exercised a tyranny over Dad’s farming life, creating alternating periods of crisis and calm, and sometimes days of frantic intensity. The daily condition of the soil was ever present in my mind from the moment I could worry; if I was not working the soil firsthand, I was immersed in it by way of Dad’s moods, which reflected the wetness or dryness, the workability or unworkability of our fields. But even during the occasional weeks of continuous sunshine, Dad’s mood never soared, never became playful. No matter how warm the sun, no matter how dry the soil, in his mind there were always heavy-bellied rain clouds lurking behind Slieve Bloom, waiting to rise up and turn the earth into a quagmire.

For Dad, sunshine was not a gift; it was paid for many times over by months of slogging in boot-sucking clay. Staying one step ahead of the bills demanded constant and sometimes superhuman effort in whatever weather God sent. The hard work ruled out everything that was not necessary to the immediate task at hand. For Dad, the incessant labor dispelled all illusions, all dreams of an easier life. The only time his imagination took flight was when he wished aloud for specific misfortunes to befall his perceived enemies, chief of whom was Prime Minister Eamon de Valera. “That bastard!”

There was no escape from the soil, from a land prone to holding water. The soil became sloppy after even a passing shower, so its cultivation required immediate and Herculean efforts once the sun and wind had done their part.

Whenever Dad heard his children fantasizing aloud—“Wouldn’t it be great to live in Arizona, where the sun shines all day?”—he collapsed their card houses with a cold breath of reality. Only work considerations counted; the spiritual and intellectual did not. Keeping one step ahead of the always offensive enemy ruled out idealism. All that mattered was creating tactics to get some fieldwork done on days when all four seasons seemed to repeat themselves in quick succession. This required a mind-set so ironbound that it was dangerous even to talk within Dad’s hearing when he was working. What made his life all the more hellish was the Church’s admonishment to accept the will of God, when he knew that the God who sent down all this misery from heaven was a mean and rotten bastard.

He was often gaunt with fatigue, and when he was under the pressure of weather-created anxiety, he sometimes slipped over the edge into extreme impatience. And sometimes he slipped over the precipice into a blind rage. He ruptured several relationships when he flared over a minor detail, like being charged a halfpenny too much for a gallon of paraffin oil. Whenever his anger began to leak out onto his children, it was Mam, by touch or look or word, who calmed him down. But Mam was not there to save me when the searing lava of his anger erupted onto me when I was seven.

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