by Tom Phelan
On the morning after the plucking, all the feathers were gone from the kitchen. Mam spent the day preparing the turkeys that would go to the Post Office. She did not cut off the feet, wings, or head, nor did she draw them. “They travel better with their guts in,” she said. Mam folded the wings, the neck, and the feet against the body and tied them with white twine. She weighed the bird on the spring scales hanging on the wall, said a number to herself, and wrote it on a label. Next, she wrapped the bird in butter paper and tied it in place with twine; she did the same with a sheet of brown paper; then, with needle and thread, she sewed the whole thing into a piece of an Odlum’s flour sack. The turkey looked like a lumpy football in a tight sock with its end sewed up. “That’s the way the Post Office says to do it,” Mam said. Then she wrote an address and the weight of the contents on the label.
When Mam had all the turkeys ready, Dad caught the black pony, yoked her to the trap, and carried out the parcels. Turkey season was over for Mam, except for preparing a bird for our Christmas dinner. On Christmas morning, she spread live turf coals on the hearth, placed the lidded cast-iron baker holding the turkey on them, and then surrounded the baker with more glowing coals.
Our beautiful brown Christmas turkey marked the high point of our culinary year.
6
LOVE WRIT SHYLY
Dad, with his all-devouring work ethic, was a large presence in my young life. Mam was the sheltering harbor from the storms that sometimes raged in Dad’s head and spewed out in loud and angry words.
But Mam never became the object of Dad’s anger. He loved and respected her. Although I never heard either of my parents express words of affection to each other, Dad showed his love for Mam in many small and silent ways. Later in life, I came to understand that his attentiveness to her was love writ shyly.
Dad was always taking care of Mam. Before going to the fields, he renewed the freshwater bucket in the kitchen and filled the turf box. He washed the potatoes for the midday meal; he picked cabbage from the garden and cleaned it; he cut pieces off the preserved side of bacon. He did all the farmyard chores, including churning the milk, and when we children grew big, he delegated those jobs to us. On Saturday nights, he was half the team that washed and scrubbed the bodies of the children and inspected their hair for living creatures.
Besides rearing turkeys for the Christmas market, Mam did farm work only in an emergency. Even though she had milked the family cow when she was a child in Derrycloney, Dad did not allow her to do this; in his mind, a milking woman was married to a lazy and thoughtless man.
Every morning, Mam prepared breakfast for the family, as well as for whoever had come to work for Dad. When the men were toiling in the fields, she brought tea to them at eleven and four, along with slices of her homemade currant cake. If the farm work was being rushed to keep ahead of looming rain, Mam carried entire dinners of bacon, cabbage, spuds, tea, and cake out to the men at one o’clock. Then at six, she fed all the workers in the kitchen before they headed home. On threshing days, with neighborly assistance, she cooked for a couple dozen men.
I don’t remember Mam ever sitting at the table with us while we ate, not even on Christmas Day. When everyone else’s needs were tended to, she sat at the fire with her plate in her lap. Perhaps this made it easier to serve any needs that cropped up at the table; perhaps her family had not eaten together when she was growing up in Derrycloney; perhaps she was taking a break from us children. As a result, Dad was the one who instructed us in basic table manners. But his lessons were not motivated by concern for our dining etiquette; he was teaching us the safe use of eating utensils.
“Don’t ever put your knife in your mouth; if you do, you might cut your lips. Or your tongue.”
“Don’t point at anyone with a knife or fork; you might poke their eye out.”
Dad’s lifelong closeness to the earth and animals had inured him to things an average person would balk at. He inserted his whole arm into cows to move misaligned calves onto the proper track for birthing; he handled afterbirth; he broke newborn pigs’ milk teeth with pliers; he squashed flocks of cabbage-eating green caterpillars between his fingers; he paunched, skinned, and otherwise prepared rabbits for the dinner pot; he burned the incipient horns off young calves with a stick of caustic soda; he held turkeys and chickens between his thighs, bent up their necks, and cut their throats; he stuck his forefinger and thumb into the nostrils of cattle to immobilize them; he whacked aging hens on the back of their heads with a knobby stick to put them out of their misery; he castrated young bulls and pigs; he once castrated a young stallion with a cut-throat razor; he lopped the tails off pups; he crawled along drills to thin out sugar beet seedlings and encountered every kind of slimy creepy-crawly with his bare hands; he taught us how to impale wiggling worms on barbarous fishhooks.
Yet when it came to eating, Dad was easily put off by the sight of anything that reminded him of the farmyard. Runny eggs were never served in his presence; the flowing yolk looked too much like something too disgusting to mention; macaroni was also reminiscent of something too disgusting to mention; the smell of onions, raw or cooked, was that of horse farts. Slurping at the table was forbidden, not just because it was impolite, but also because it reminded Dad of a hairy-faced sow, jaw-deep in its slop; a child’s open, food-filled mouth was like the rear of a cow at a moment too disgusting to mention; loud chewing noises were rats gnawing turnips; food around the mouth was that hairy-faced sow again; banging plates with a knife or fork was Peetie Flanagan in his forge that stunk of anthracite and equine emanations.
Dad’s own table manners were those of a country person who had never been burdened with the choices presented at a formal dining table. One knife, one fork, and one spoon were sufficient unto whatever was served. At the kitchen table, when he was poured a cup of tea, he sugared it, milked it, stirred it, and poured a third of it into his saucer. Then he picked up the saucer with one hand and drank. When the saucer was empty, he put it back on the table, placed his cup on it, and drank the rest of his tea from the cup. When we children asked Dad why he did this, he meowed.
In the days following Christmas, Mam served turkey at dinnertime until the bird’s bones were bare. But because Dad could not tolerate waste, the carcass was put on his plate for one last picking. As I silently recited grace, my eyes were drawn to the remains of the turkey, looking like the ribs of a rotten ship floating in a tiny lake.
Dad raised the skeleton to his mouth and tore off small pieces of flesh. He poked in bony corners with his two-pronged, buck-handled knife. Many times, his face was completely hidden by the ribs as he hunted for more evasive morsels; he sucked at them until he caught them between his teeth. He held the rear end of the skeleton to his eye and peeped out through the hole at the other end where the neck had once been anchored.
He was a sailor on the deck of a ship, looking through a glass. As he pointed the telescope from child to child, he said, “Whale ahoy! And I see a yack on the horizon.”
My brothers and I laughed and begged, “Do it again!”
But my sister said, “It’s a yacht! Not a yack!” in a tone to show she was not amused.
Next, with crackings and snappings, Dad broke the ribs off the backbone. He examined each bone, and if bearing any prize, subjected it to sucking lips and reaching teeth. A few times, he pretended to play the mouth organ on a bone, humming and acting out a tremolo with his right hand while peeping through his eyelashes at us children. Around his plate, the cleaned bones piled up until there was nothing left in his hands but the notched backbone. This piece took a long time to be rendered meatless, as every nook and cranny was explored with fingers, fork, and tongue. When it finally found its place on the pile of debris, Dad said to my sister, “I’m finished. You can put the turkey back together now.” We all laughed, except Dad. I never once heard him give a loud or hearty laugh.
Mam removed the ossuary and threw it in the fire. Dad asked, “Tom, what’s that saying about the
crows and food?”
“If you throw food away, you’ll follow the crows for it over the mountain.”
“All those scraps of meat came from Mam’s hard work with the turkeys. Never waste your mother’s labor.”
As the acrid smell of the burning bones filled the kitchen, Mam gave Dad a rag and he wiped the grease off his face.
Every day, Dad organized the cleaning up after dinner, with himself doing the washing. We children dried the dishes, put them away, and swept the concrete floor. As we worked, Mam sat at the fire, reading the death notices on the front page of the Irish Independent or about the royal family in Woman’s Weekly. It was another little act of love by Dad.
7
MY FIFTY-TWO-ACRE PLAYGROUND
From the time we grew out of our nappies, the fifty-two acres of Dad’s farm were our playground. My brothers and sisters and I knew every dip and rise in the fields, where a nest of cowslips grew, where the first primroses sent forth their perfume. We knew the floral residents of every hedge, where a bunch of purple violets came back every year, where hazelnuts turned brown and fell from their cups, where honeysuckle made its tempting but poisonous berries, where crab apple trees waited for the first frost to turn their bitter fruit sweet, where wild gooseberry bushes hid among the fierce protection of the blackthorns.
All the dividing hedges in the fields grew out of banks of earth, and it was here we checked for rabbit burrows and badger setts and fox dens, examining the entrances for fresh tracks. We knew all the hedge gaps we could creep through without fear of jabbing thorn, stinging nettle, or barbed wire.
We visited the birds’ nests we had seen being built, and lifted each other up to look at the eggs or the newly hatched scalds. We could touch the eggs if our fingers were wet with spit, and it was permissible to take one egg; the bird would not miss it.
In the summer, when fresh bovine plops were plentiful, the yellow, translucent dung flies feasted. “Look out!” one brother would shout, as his ashplant whizzed through the air and split the dung, sent it flying, and killed the flies. And then, in imitation of the SOS messages broadcast on Radio Eireann, another brother would announce: Will Mister Christopher Fly, last heard of in Manchester thirty-five years ago, please call the garda barracks in Clonaslee for an important message about his cowplop cousins?
On Sundays we always went “across the fields” to play, but also to escape from Dad. Sunday or not, he could not tolerate idleness in adult or child. We never got lost but, if we had, we would easily have found our bearings by looking for Joe Mack’s Tree and the church spire in the town.
One summer Sunday when my brother Eddie and I were sneaking silently around the field hedges with our pellet guns, looking for small birds to shoot, we ended up at the Beech Trees. The trees were close to a lane that ran along the bank of the canal. When we heard someone yelling, “Will yiz stop yer talking and frightnen the fishes!” we peeped through the leafy hedge and saw a group of men and boys from the town scattered along the far Canal Bank, all fishing for roach. We knew they were fishing for roach because in front of each fisherman a cork was sitting in the water. The corks, which had been scrounged out of the local pubs, kept the roach bait off the bottom of the canal. The bait consisted of flour mixed with water and strands of sheep wool to keep it on the hook, and the fishing poles were all homemade, created from hazel striplings.
Soon, Eddie and I decided we’d climb up into one of the Beech Trees and shoot pellets at the fishermen’s corks. As quiet as stalking cats, we settled ourselves behind a screen of leafy branches. We fired and a pellet sent up a spurt of water near a floating cork.
“Didja see dat?” a man roared.
“I heard a shot!” another yelled.
We let off another salvo.
“Someone’s shooting out of dem trees!” a man shouted. Then he dropped his fishing pole and ran toward the bridge that would take him across to our side.
“Get deh cur!” another man cried and he, too, headed to the bridge.
Terrified, Eddie and I scrambled down out of the tree and ran with our guns across the Rushes into the field at Frank’s Lane. Down Joe Mack’s Lane we galloped, the fear of being murdered urging us on. Out into Frank’s Big Field we clamored through the strands of barbed wire, but before we got to the far side, the fishermen were coming over the fence in the same place.
Over the gate into Frank’s Pasture we vaulted and out onto the cart track running down past the Crutcheen, the Back Batens, and out into the Long Field. Tears of fear were blinding me. We were deep into the countryside now, half a mile from the nearest house. But we were so winded that we couldn’t go any farther. We quickly hid our guns under the dry weeds growing across a drain. Then we lay down in the grass to await our fate.
The two men came upon us. “Where’s the guns?”
“What guns?” we asked, our voices wobbling.
“We know you lads are Phelans. . . . Your father will be hearing about this!”
“About what?” I asked, shakily getting to my feet.
“You eejits! We know you were shooting at us. A pellet could bounce off the water, go into someone’s eye, and blind them.” They were so angry I was afraid they might knock us unconscious with a knuckled fist under the chin like in the cowboy pictures. Or maybe they’d hang us.
“Why did you run away from us?”
“We didn’t run away from you.”
“Why are you breathing like that then?”
“We just ran from that hedge down there up to here when we saw them two lads running across the field.” I pointed. My voice was still hobbling along on a rubber crutch.
They looked across the field. They looked at each other.
“You’re a liar.”
“No, I’m not.”
We were asked to describe the two boys we had seen.
“They were too far away . . . we only saw them for a second before they went through the gap.”
“How big were they?”
“About our size.”
“What kind of trousers were they wearing?”
“Short, like ours.”
“You’re a liar.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, y’are.”
“If you do it again we’ll kill the two of you.”
“Do what?”
“Oh, shag off!”
As they turned to go away, one of them said, “Little feckers!”
At a terrified distance, Eddie and I followed them across the fields until we saw them going back out onto the Canal Line. Then we went back and retrieved our weapons. We took a long way home, around by Joe Mack’s Tree.
We must have sowed doubt in the minds of the two fishermen because they never told Dad what we did. I know this for a fact because I am still alive.
8
THE LOVELY CHURCH
The war was blamed for many things; the price of everything had gone up since the war started. Flour wasn’t milled properly anymore, and Granny sieved out the impure bits in an old stocking while a fine cloud drifted down to a sheet of newspaper on our kitchen table. The inner tubes of bikes were repaired so often that the patches themselves were patched. Petrol was rationed, Mister Hayden used TVO—Tractor Vaporizing Oil—to run his van, and sparks in showers flew out from the exhaust pipe. Instead of sugar, saccharine pills sat in egg cups on tables, so sweet they burned the tongue when surreptitiously slipped into the mouth. Tobacco was scarce and some people put beet pulp in their pipes. Tea leaves were saved and reused and, when they had no more to give, they were dried and smoked in pipes or in tubes made from newspaper. The smokers coughed like cows with the hoose. The war squeezed the color out of clothes until all that was left were navy blues and browns. Only for the green grass and the blue sky and the flowers of spring and summer, the world was black and white; except in the church—the huge, magnificent, spotless, colorful, musical church built and adorned to house God.
We can never know the utter astonishment our mediev
al ancestors felt when they approached one of the great cathedrals for the first time. Our forebears lived in dark, cold, low-roofed, leaking, draughty, smoky huts. For the well-off, wattle and daub served as walls; tree branches and grassy clods kept some of the rain out. When the peasantry, at the behest of wandering monks, set out on pilgrimages to cathedrals in Chartres, Salzburg, Paris, York, Cologne, Winchester, or Lincoln, they walked barefooted along dark and narrow forest paths. Traveling inside leafy tunnels for weeks, with their faces bent to the ground, they carefully picked their way over roots and rocks and holes. Along the way, they ate berries off bushes, drank from forest streams. When they got lost, they stumbled around in circles for days until they found the path again. Some got sick and some died. During the long trip, they must have wondered if the monks had scammed them, wondered if, while they were plodding off on the pilgrimage, the monks back home were prodding their wives, as Rabelais suspected.
Then one day, the pilgrims unexpectedly emerged into a sunlit clearing and were faced with the most immense, stupendous, most infinite and massive, most overwhelming and frightening thing they had ever encountered. They might as well have been prehistoric canoeists on a small lake, suddenly aware the Titanic was bearing down on them. They did not know what it was, but what they were seeing rose up into the sky where God lived. They weakened at the knees and dropped to the ground on the spot.
Eventually, when they saw other people approaching this gargantuan edifice, they summoned the strength to stand. Shyly and fearfully, they sidled up to the massive entrance, exposed their dirty arses every time they tripped over a step and fell their way up to the eighteen-foot-high entrance. There in the bronze castings on the doors were tiny, naked people falling down into leaping flames; an angel with a flaming sword; a man and woman slinking into a pile of bushes; a giant’s head with a boy holding it up by the hair; goats, sheep, trees; crowds on knees staring up at a dancing sun; a goat with a man’s face standing on its rear hooves and laughing, horns on its head and a long tail; a man pouring water over another man’s head.
