Desire

‘Rugadh marbh an lao’ – the calf was stillborn. Thus opens a four-page story by Aran-islander, Irish language writer, Liam O’Flaherty in his short story collection Dúil – Desire.

I was a bored thirteen-year-old, the story, a prescribed text. Irish language classes were a penance; I hid English novels below the lip of my desk and read, all the while keeping an ear cocked so I wouldn’t be caught.

But then I heard the nun who taught us Irish read ‘Rugadh marbh an lao’ and I sat up. Each sentence slowly followed its predecessor: ‘The woman rubbed the cow’s matted forehead and there was a tear in her eye, for she was a mother too.’ The story continued, now with my undivided attention, as the men dragged the calf’s body across the field and tossed it over the edge of the cliff. It lay in ‘a pulped mass on the rocks.’

Then they returned home, the woman crying over the dead calf while apologising to God for her sorrow, for it was, as she declared, the will of God.

The cow’s owner remained in the field awaiting the afterbirth which he buried beneath a cairn of stones. With soil, he made the muddy sign of the cross on the cow’s flank. Then he too left.

The cow went mad with grief.

Here was a story, set in a wet field, on an island, with pain etched in every line. The story stayed with me, and with it, the quite thud of recognition that I am of this place and this language, no more, no less, than the cow, bereft in her handkerchief-sized field or the woman who understands the cow’s pain. And, though I could not articulate it at the time, there grew in me a quiet recognition that stories such as these were no less worthy than my usual diet of novels set in manor houses or in English boarding schools.

Re-reading Bás na Bó – The Cow’s Death, I recognise the skill with which Liam O’Flaherty delivers each sentence, carefully building our understanding of the cow’s anguish, for example, in her disregard of a wound near her udder, self-inflicted as she breaks through the drystone wall of the field in the wake of her calf, following its trail to the cliff edge.

And then beyond.

Back then all I felt was empathy with the beast in the field; it resulted in a lifetime’s vegetarianism. I now realise that this was accompanied by a fledgling pride in my homeland, its language, and its storytellers – though I, like so many Irish people before me, was still to emigrate and leave it all behind.

Bás na Bó made me hungry for stories of who we are, we who inhabit this island. Over the years I have read my way through them all: Frank O’Connor, Brian Moore, Edna O’Brien, Maeve Brennan, William Trevor…

Now, recently returned to live in Ireland, I take my pen and write.