John Connell's memoir "The Farmer's Son" opens with Connell in a barn on the family farm in Ireland, both arms shoulder-deep inside of a cow.
He's helped with births before, but this is the first time he's done it alone. "My father has been in charge of the calving for twenty-five years, and when he wasn't, my brother took over, but now that I'm home, it's me," he writes.
After nearly 10 years abroad — in Australia and in "the concrete embrace" of Toronto — Connell has returned to County Longford to heal and to write. His years away have given him a new appreciation for a life he thought he'd left behind forever. Farmers, he realizes now, are "poets of the field, bards of the land."
"The Farmer's Son" is part memoir, part classic father-son battle and part history (of Ireland and of cows), and all of those pieces work quite well together; it is a fascinating read.
Connell is a thoughtful, serious writer, deeply observant. The book moves slowly, covering just four months in 200 pages, but it never drags.
January through April is calving season, the busiest time of year. Instead of writing a novel, as he had planned, Connell is helping sheep and cows give birth, getting up three times a night to check on the babies and feed them, hauling hay and moving cows to pasture and back, all during a historically wet and cold winter when the fields are flooded and the air is icy cold.
His memoir is infused with his love of nature ("It is now that I think that life was meant to be shared with animals, not just other people," he writes), but it is devoid of sentimentality. There are wee lambs and calves, but there is also death, and most of these animals are meant for the slaughterhouse.
"There are times in farming when nothing can be done," he writes grimly, in late February, after a birth goes terribly wrong. "The beast is too old, the calf too sick, the man too worn out."
