We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  Dad had told us that if anyone in Portarlington asked where we lived we were to say, “Just past Lee Castle.” If a jobber knew we would have to drive unsold cattle home again for six miles, he would have Dad by the scruff of the neck when it came to bargaining.

  When we arrived at the Market Square several farmers had already gathered, their small herds separated from each other by flailing ashplants and loud shouting. Forced to stand against the walls of the surrounding buildings, the frightened animals attempted to escape whenever they saw the opportunity, but they usually slipped and fell in cow dung or urine, slapped their chins against the hard surface, and then were shouted back into place as they tried to regain their hooves. When the cattle turned their rear ends to the walls and divested themselves of shovelfuls of sloppy dung, the green shite slithered down the pebble dashing to the pavement. But when they faced the walls and relaxed their sphincters, geysers spewed out onto the street, the splashes bouncing like buckshot off the road and splattering the boots and lower legs of the bystanders.

  Even to a child of a farmyard like myself, the confusion, mooing, shouting, and the nervousness of the animals was unsettling.

  Once we had claimed a space, Dad undid the bundle of hay in the cart and fed some of it to the bullocks, who munched while Dad and I stood guard. Ned and Eddie brought the pony-and-cart to the yard at the back of a farmer’s shop, where they tied Black to a post and gave her food and water. Then they left for home on the bike, Ned pedaling, Eddie on the bar.

  One of my jobs at the fair was to eavesdrop on the farmers and jobbers arguing over the price of an animal. The information I brought back gave Dad some idea of what price he could ask for his bullocks.

  When the buyers approached Dad, they opened the hostilities by disparaging the animals.

  “God! They’re a hungry-looking bunch.”

  “Will you look at them bags of bones!”

  “You must have run out of grass months ago.”

  Dad hated cattle jobbers as intensely as he hated rats, but he could not afford to let his temper loose on them. So on this day, he managed the would-be buyers by ignoring their insults, only speaking to them when they asked his price.

  “Are you buying?”

  “I might be.”

  “Are you selling?”

  “I might be . . . I might be selling the three of them together.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Out near Lee Castle.”

  “The one in the middle doesn’t look too good.”

  I was always surprised at Dad’s dealing with jobbers. He simply didn’t answer when they tried to put him on the defensive. When he stated his price and the buyer came back with a meaningless offer, Dad didn’t even look at the man. He went through the motions of taking care of his animals, rubbing one of them on the calming spot beside the tail.

  “Well?” the jobber asked.

  Dad ignored the man, went to another animal, and put it at ease with his magic fingers. He kept at it until the haggler had raised his offer within bargaining distance of Dad’s price. After that, the deal was reached rather quickly.

  From Dad’s struggle to keep a smile off his face I knew he believed that even if he hadn’t beaten the jobber, the jobber had not beaten him either.

  Days later, Dad would unleash his feelings, shouting, “Bloody bastards!” while swinging a billhook at the stem of a bush as if it were a jobber’s neck.

  26

  THE EARLY LIVES OF PIGLETS

  Between Dad’s three sows and Alice Burns’s eager boar, the pighouse beneath our loft was seldom empty. When Dad was out in the fields and I was doing my chores at my own pace instead of his, one of my distractions was to stand at the Dutch door of the pighouse and watch the current litter of piglets.

  In their confined, straw-strewn space, they were as frolicsome as lambs on a grassy hillside in springtime. They danced and squealed and flapped their ears and bucked up their hindquarters and chased each other in gleeful and snorty exuberance. After a performance of some pig-game in the straw, they would assemble inside the door as a group, gazing up at me as if waiting for applause. It was obvious from their expressions, their cocked ears, their twitching snouts, and their joyful eyes that they had a sense of humor.

  Pigs are clever and curious. But they sometimes carry their cleverness a little too far, protecting their babies from marauders by swallowing them. Pigs also have excellent manners; they use one corner of their house to dispose of their droppings, thus keeping their soft straw bedding and themselves clean. Urban dwellers believe pigs are dirty because “as dirty as a pig” is part of the lexicon handed down to them.

  One of Dad’s streams of income came by way of having three litters of piglets to sell every year. When the time was near for a sow to deliver, he placed a chair in the porcine maternity ward, the defensive chair serving the same purpose as a lion tamer’s. He often warned us that sows become dangerous if they think their young are threatened.

  When the sow stretched herself out on the straw and showed signs of imminent delivery, Dad sneaked into her house with a cardboard box. Silently, and with one hand grasping the chair, he knelt at the sow’s rear end. Every time the sow grunted and sent forth a piglet looking like a glistening sausage, Dad picked it up and put it in the box. Once the entire litter had been born, but before the sow struggled to her feet to inspect her children, Dad escaped into the farmyard with his shivering collection.

  Carrying his future income into the kitchen, he placed the box near the fire to keep the newborns warm.

  “How many had she?” Mam asked.

  “Twelve and a runt.” There was always a runt.

  “Thanks be to God,” Mam said.

  As the children fled to avoid the birthy smell and the imminent squealing of the piglets, Dad named one of the boys to stay and serve as his assistant.

  Piglets are born with sharp teeth. While suckling, they sometimes bite their mother’s teats and make her so sore she refuses to feed them. So, before they got to the sow for their first meal, Dad broke off the piglets’ teeth with a pair of pliers. Sitting on a kitchen chair beside the pig box, he chose a piglet, placed it on the sack on his lap, opened its mouth, and snapped off its two front teeth at the gums. Beyond giving a sharp cry, the infants didn’t seem to feel any subsequent pain. Before Dad put the gummy piglet back in the box, his assistant dabbed it with black shoe polish to show it had been to the dentist.

  When the piglets were two months old, the males were subjected to another medical procedure: castration. Castration dulled their aggressive temperament, prevented the impregnating of female kin, and kept the meat tender.

  One afternoon when I was eleven, Dad appointed Eddie and me as his surgical assistants. Armed with his chair, Dad had already evicted the sow from the pighouse. But instead of driving her out into the pasture, well away from the operating theatre, he left her in the farmyard. Then he tied the top half of the door to the wall to let in the light.

  While we were setting up for surgery the sow began poking the lower door and snuffling suspiciously.

  “Don’t mind her,” Dad said. He sat on his chair and spread a burlap sack on his lap, transforming it into an operating table. In the breast pocket of his jacket was his cut-throat razor, sharpened on a roof slate dampened with oil. In his side pockets were a tin of boot polish and a bottle of Jeyes Fluid.

  The assistants herded the piglets into a corner. When Eddie caught one by the back leg, it squealed piercingly, and immediately the sow’s two trotters and head appeared over the half door. Eddie and I gaped at the threatening, slobbering, grunting head with its large flopping ears, sniffing snout, and little red eyes.

  “Don’t mind her,” Dad said again.

  Keeping one eye on the sow, Eddie glanced at the piglet’s rear end and declared, “Girl!” I dabbed on a streak of polish and Eddie released her.

  The second captive was a boy. When it squealed, the murderous snuffling of the sow at the door went u
p an octave.

  Eddie placed the piglet on its back on Dad’s lap and held its rear legs apart. I held the front legs steady. The piglet screamed, the sow shook the door, and Dad wielded the razor. He slit the barely bulging scrotum, fingered out the testicles, cut their anchors, and flung them over the sow’s head and into the yard. The sow dropped off the door, sniffed around until she found the delicacies, and then gobbled them up. By the time her head and trotters were back on the door, Dad had dripped some Jeyes Fluid on the surgical wound, I had applied the polish, and the piglet was back with its siblings, wondering what all the fuss had been about.

  That day Dad performed seven surgeries and the sow feasted on seven hors d’oeuvres.

  When we emerged from the operating room, Mam was standing at the kitchen door. Frowning and with reprimand in her voice, she said, “JohnJoe! I was standing here terrified the sow would break down the pighouse door.” I had never heard Mam speak so strongly to Dad. But her children had been threatened along with the sow’s.

  Seamus Heaney in The Early Purges wrote, “ ‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town, / but on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.” City dwellers might think Dad’s treatment of young pigs was savagely cruel; however, aside from the necessary physical intrusions, the piglets received tender and loving care in the warmth of their little house from the day they were born. When their mother’s teats ran dry, they were put on a tasty diet of bran, pollard, cow’s milk, and potatoes and grew plump and healthy.

  When Dad was satisfied with the weight of the piglets, he prepared the pony’s cart for their journey to the Portarlington pig fair. He stapled burlap sacks onto the creels; made a burlap roof, leaving a small space at the front for himself to stand up in; he spread an armful of soft barley straw over the floor; and stowed three waterproof capes in a corner of the cart to cover the piglets if it rained. This pony-pulled conveyance measured five feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high from the axle.

  In the pighouse, Eddie and I grabbed each piglet by the tail, slipped an arm under its belly, lifted the animal, as wriggly as a fish on a hook, and held it close to our chests. The piglets sang ear-piercing arias while being removed from the only home they had ever known. Gently we placed them in the pony’s cart.

  Bringing the pigs to the fair was a two-person job; on arrival, Dad would bring the pony off to a stable, and I would stay at the cart to discourage pignapping. And so when the pigs had been loaded and before the rear creel was latched in place, I climbed in the cart and settled in a back corner in the straw. From the front of the cart, the piglets sniffed and twitched their curious snouts at the smell of my wellingtons and Uncle Jack’s heavy topcoat, which I was wearing over my own. When they decided I was not a wolf in Uncle Jack’s clothing, the pigs went about exploring their new quarters. Perhaps they were looking for the breakfast Dad had denied them to keep them from throwing up due to motion sickness.

  Mam and all my siblings were at the kitchen door to wave us off into the big world with Dad’s little harvest, Mam moving her lips in prayer for the safety of her men—and for a good price.

  It was because of the black pony’s easy gait that Dad used her to haul the pigs. When Black took her first step, all the pigs fell as the world beneath them moved. Unnerved, they piled into the corner beside me at the back of the cart, several of them stretched across my legs. It was only because I was wearing wellingtons that I endured the sharp-hoofed jabs of the ever-moving bodies.

  I could not see through the protective sacking on the creels. Covered with piglets to the knees, I was relieved that I was hidden from the world; the town boys would be denied new fodder for their “dirty oul farmer” jeers. By the time we arrived in Portarlington, the piglets and I had been jogged to sleep.

  During the selling process I discovered a side of Dad I had not known. When an abrasive middleman looked in at the piglets and said, “God, dem’s terrible tin yokes altogether,” Dad went right back at him.

  “You don’t look so good yourself, you gobshite. You wouldn’t know a pig from a ferret. Feck off and don’t come back.”

  By noon the piglets had been sold, and without any emotion we handed over the litter that had lived with us for three months.

  The last mile of the road home ran parallel to Laragh Lane, a half-mile distant. Across the fields separating the Portarlington road from our lane floated the jangling of the draughts, the clattering of the wheels, the jingle of the britchen’s two short chains, and the clip-clop of Black on the hard surface. Snug in my straw, I knew Mam would hear the unique music of our cart. Not only would she be glad for the safe return of her men, but she would also know by the lightness in the music that the cart was empty.

  27

  HORSES

  On clear days when I went out with Dad to the Back of Fitzes field carrying a handful of crushed oats in a bucket, our horses trotted toward us no matter how far away they were grazing. At the last moment they played catch-me-if-you-can by turning and throwing their heels into the air, displaying their hindquarters, and sometimes sending out crackling farts. But the sound and smell of the oats quickly overcame their antics. When the horses dipped into the bucket we caught them by the forelocks and slipped the winkers over their heads.

  It was an adventure catching the horses on a foggy morning. The grey walls shut out the world, and Dad and I were isolated in a huge igloo where the light was strange and sounds were muffled. Water-soaked grass, bent over with the weight of so many droplets, demanded the wearing of wellingtons.

  Hidden in the fog, the horses played games of catch-me in the five acres of the Back of Fitzes. Dad and I stood in our igloo swishing the oats and listening for a snort or a plod, for any clue as to where the horses were.

  “Bastards!” Dad said. Then he began to call, “Pyoh, pyoh, pyoh,” and swished the oats in the bucket. Pyoh was an imitation of the sound of a horse’s long upper lip vibrating. We listened. We walked farther out into the field. “Pyoh, pyoh, pyoh,” Dad said, then added, “You call too, Tom.” So I pyohed along with Dad as he shook the bucket.

  “Bastards!”

  Then thirty feet away, like the head of a dead deer on a rich man’s wall, we saw Lame Mare’s head hanging on the side of the igloo. Dad held out the bucket and pyohed. The mare backed away, then disappeared.

  “Bastard!”

  Even though Dad used his worst swear word on Lame Mare, he had special affection for her. He had once yoked her to a log that was heavier than he thought, and when she pulled she hurt herself. Ever since, she walked with a limp in her right hip. But despite her lameness she was a dedicated worker with a serene and patient personality.

  Lame Mare’s daughter, Whiteface, was a perpetual teenager, forever trying to get out of working hard, never pulling her weight in a team, always stopping to snatch a grassy mouthful on the headlands, always distracted, always more difficult to catch.

  Our other horse, Timahoe, was not related to Lame Mare or her willful daughter. She was named after the local village where she was bought. Taller than the other two, she was black while the others were red.

  Dad and I walked to the spot where Lame Mare had disappeared, but as the wall of the igloo moved away in front of us, there was no sign of her except the marks of her hooves in the sopping grass. We began to follow the hoof marks but had taken only a few steps when we heard a pyoh behind us. We turned and on the far wall saw her. Dad lifted handfuls of oats and let them drop noisily down into the bucket. We approached the mare in the foggy igloo, but we never seemed to get closer. She kept backing away from us.

  “Bastard! She’s playing.”

  Her head disappeared and behind us we heard a snort. Whiteface was hanging on the far wall. She pyohed and I glimpsed her long teeth through her vibrating lip. But then Timahoe spoiled the game by walking into the circle and sticking her head in the bucket. The others had no choice but to run in and claim their share of oats.

  * * *

  THE HORSES WER
E an intimate part of our farming lives. For weeks each spring Dad spent his days holding the handles of the plough, the reins over one shoulder as he plodded behind the mares pulling the plough. Whenever I was the one to bring him his four-o’clock tea, I stayed to walk behind him in the fresh furrow made by the curving plough. The lifting of Dad’s boots in front of me, the solid plodding of the horses, the nonstop turning over of the new sod smoothed by the plough’s wing, the sailing of the seagulls, the cries of the small birds, and the shouts of the bigger ones following us to grab upturned worms, gave me the feeling of being immersed in Dad’s world and circumstances.

  Dad often repeated his rule about dealing with horses: “Never stand behind a horse’s rear end or walk up to it.” He had known a man who came up behind his horse, gave him an affectionate slap on the rump, and said “Hupp!”, unknowingly frightening it. The horse lashed out with a hoof, hit the man in the stomach, and killed him.

  At sugar beet harvest time, a notice arrived in the mail that a ten-ton train wagon would be available to Dad on a certain date to bring our crop to the factory. Ned and Dad loaded the cart from the roadside pile that had been drawn out of our field weeks before. Even though Timahoe was strong and fast, this enterprise required hard work of man and animal. The men loaded a ton of beet by way of eight-tined forks; Timahoe hauled the ton two miles to the train station, where the load was tipped onto the ground. Then, a hired man threw the sugar beet in over the side of the wagon, which was eight feet off the tracks.

  No time could be lost. On one of his ten return trips from the station, Ned was trotting Timahoe one step short of a gallop when the horse stumbled and fell. Ned was thrown forward and sideways out of the cart, landing on all fours. As Timahoe struggled unaided to her feet, a woman passing by on her bike stopped and scolded the prostrate Ned. “You were running the horse too fast. Look at his knees; they are all skinned.”

  Ned held up his bleeding palms and said, “Fuck the horse! Look at my hands and knees.”