Who among us has not been comforted by the words, Let me tell you a story? In my family it was my father who held the talking stick. He was not only a brilliant exaggerator, but he and his three brothers learned the gift of Blarney from their mother who learned it from her Irish grandfather who, we were told, did a short shift as the mayor of New York City. This honor was bestowed on him after he jumped from a ferry to save a woman overboard in New York harbor. You see? Already the stories are piling upon stories, which makes the truth of any one of them indistinguishable from fiction.
My father and his brothers were old pros at storymaking. As young men with more reputable things to do but no will to do them, they rented costumes and cameras and spent summer evenings shooting a series of kitschy home movies. My siblings and I starred in a classic called Blood and Guts. But as we got older and more self-conscious, we no longer wanted to play the role of characters in Dad’s movies, and we were tired of populating his stories. We were grumbling teenagers, a tad self-righteous, offended by any untruth. We’d protest, call him out, and slowly, kid by kid, Dad lost his audience and we lost our place in the family pantheon. Our statues disappeared from the hall of legends and we became tragically ordinary.
And then we became storytellers ourselves. But unlike him, unlike the man who put words in our mouths and showed us to be shinier and brighter than we were, funnier or more outrageous than we ever hoped to be, I want my characters to speak for themselves. It isn’t my story, it’s theirs. I wake in the night and feel the storytelling gene galloping along inside my veins and through the portals of my heart. Dad, I say. Hello. He says nothing but I can feel him there, a presence behind a story’s unfolding. He was there when I wrote “The Jewel of the Jewel of County Cork,” or rather when it wrote itself, and it occurred to me that we were back on Irish soil by no coincidence. If my great-great-grandfather, born in Cobh, County Cork, was indeed the mayor of New York, and did in fact rescue a damsel in distress from the waters of New York harbor, a fair way to honor his memory would be to reverse the flow and eavesdrop on the home country, where it’s calving time at the O’Rahilly farm and cow #219 has thrown a wrench in the works.
If you feel, as many of us do, that life is one thrown wrench after another, that February’s twenty-eight days were twenty-eight days too many except that they led to March, that the year has been long, the isolation disorienting, the long silences lonely, and you are utterly bored with yourself, pause a moment and let me tell you a story.
THE JEWEL OF THE JEWEL OF COUNTY CORK
Cow #219 finally had her calf at four o’clock in the afternoon on a rainy spring Monday, our last day in Ireland. Call her the jewel of County Cork, that cow. All morning she lay at the back of cousin Willie O’Rahilly’s barn, cooling her flank against the whitewashed stone, while we waited. At noon a break in the weather brought the crows and magpies to the fields, and Theresa O’Rahilly’s dog, a black and white sheepdog named Pup, raced in big barking circles around the birds, herding them skyward.
But shortly after that the rain began again, a real rain this time with here and there a clap of thunder. #219’s companions, a dozen double-wide cows waiting to calve, and one little Jersey whose calf had come the night before, shifted nervously at the thunder and licked their noses and started to bellow. The wind came up and rattled the metal roof of the barn and whipped the black plastic that covered the silage, and felled trees from Kanturk to Banteer and stole the coat off little Noreen O’Rahilly, age eight, playing in the schoolyard.
Into this racket #219’s black and white heifer was born, front legs first, diving from the mother. But not before Willie O’Rahilly stood up from his tea, pulled on his boots and jacket and enticed me into mine, and led the way through a farmyard of patient, bovine ladies, one of whom licked my face. #219 had been at it all too long for his liking. She was no heifer, but an experienced cow. There was clearly something amiss with her unborn calf. She lay where she had lain all that day, on clean bedding at the back of the barn. She was a large animal, a cross between milk and meat, Friesian and Angus. She didn’t chew her cud as so many of the expectant mothers did, like nervous teenage girls with gum. She was the color of magpies, of sheepdogs, of dark Irish hair against pale Irish skin—the black and white that stuns the eye when all the rest is green, green, green.
Willie took off his jacket and rolled up his blue sleeves. He kneeled down and his arm disappeared inside the cow with a sloppy, sloshy sound. I could see trouble on his face as he moved onto his belly in the straw, his free hand gripping the tail, the other arm-wrestling some unseen angel. #219’s hindquarters bounced up and down as man and calf struggled. The calf was aimed right, Willie could feel that, with the two little forehoofs leading the way. But its head was thrown back, acting as a brake, and the rest of the body had gathered up behind it, unable to swim out. If nothing was done, #219’s progeny would take its own life soon, straining and breaking the navel cord that kept it from drowning, brought air to its mammal lungs.
But Willie O’Rahilly the farmer dug in, Willie O’Rahilly the midwife. He used the whole force of his body to push the calf back uphill and bring the head down—intense, near-silent work. A bit of scrabbling on the straw, a little sloshing, a gust of wind rattling the roof and the rain falling like handfuls of flung barley. The cow’s expression seemed to say, Whatever his business is, it’s none of mine.
Straw stuck to the man, to his arms, his neck, his hair. He looked tired. He looked older than he had an hour ago. He’ll tell you himself, he’s not a young man anymore. Though his youngest is eight, his eldest is twenty-nine. This work is a younger man’s work. Some nights they’d be milking at three in the morning, then up again at six to do it all again. When he and Theresa have the luxury of time to think, they think about a life of less work. But now it’s spring, it’s calving time, the wind is working mischief with the roof, a sudden great flapping. That will need mending, along with some fences, there’s thirteen calves coming and slurry to spread.
And right now there’s one little one poised for arrival into this loud, clanging world, and Willie O’Rahilly the sailor ties a length of rope to each of the unborn forelegs, for they are showing now, hoofs pale as new teeth. The calf is there but for a bit of encouragement. It needs hauling on, like an anchor. I bring the calving pole—six or eight feet long with a semi-circular brace on one end, designed to fit the hindquarters of a cow. Willie attaches his two ropes to the ratchet handle on the pole. He works the handle as if he were winching a Jeep out of a ditch, and the calf’s knees appear. He works it some more and out comes the tip of the nose.
But twice the cow end slips, releasing the tension on the ropes so the calf disappears once more inside. Have we only imagined it? Finally, Willie has me straddle the pole and wedge the brace against the cow with my legs. I press until I can feel her hipbones through my kneecaps. There is hot blood on my boots. Then Willie O’Rahilly the farmer, midwife, sailor and mechanical engineer, ratchets, and #219 minds what she believes to be her own business, while I, it seems, give birth to the calf. Out it swims, between my two knees, an unstoppable torrent of life once its shoulders are cleared. It shines bright even in the dimness of the barn, a little wet heifer, the jewel of the jewel of County Cork, panting for this new thing called air.
