Cattle Rows: The Farmer’s Son by John Connell
By: Bart Schaneman
Tags: Agriculture, Books, Review, Ireland, Farming

My father and I would wake up in the middle of the cold western Nebraska winter night. Swaddle ourselves in sweatshirts and coveralls and work boots. Drive out to the snow-covered corn stalks, spotlighting the black Angus shapes, looking for a circling cow pawing at the ground to make a bed, a raised tail before the calf comes, or, if we were lucky, a baby wobbling on shaky legs that wasn’t there during the day.

When we weren’t lucky the mother couldn’t calve on her own. We’d herd her back to the corral and reach in to hook up straps or the calf puller and help her best we could. Failing our own efforts, we’d take her into the vet for more serious procedures. By the time we reached that point we usually were in a rage of frustration and stress and desperation over the time running out to save the life.

My relationship with my own father was never more strained than when we ran a cow-calf operation on his farm, specifically during calving season. Perhaps the sleep deprivation from checking the cows to see if they were in labor in the middle of the night during the thick of winter didn’t help. That I was a willful, reluctant farmhand surely did not.

When I read The Farmer’s Son I learned this wasn’t a unique experience. We read to learn about the world, but sometimes we have the rare fortune to read something that shows us we’re not alone. The fights between John Connell, the author of this memoir, and his father taught me that my father wasn’t angrier than any other father in a similar situation. The author references how the major Irish writer John McGahern also got in a fistfight with his farmer father and never spoke with him again. “I knew that Da and I too could have come to blows, and that everything then would have been ruined beyond repair,” Connell writes.

Connell moved back to his family farm to write a novel, and ended up writing a bestseller about calving and lambing on the home place in rural Ireland. Toward the end of the season, a few of the baby calves and lambs are sick and some haven’t made it. This is normal, Connell learns. He rightly conveys that to create life on a farm is also to endure the occasional death. There’s no way around it, but it’s what a farmer spends the days fighting against. The stress of an unexpected death can weigh heavy. Farming is often done by instinct. There is no manual or playbook. No two catastrophes are the same. The solutions can be arrived at in different ways depending on the man. Which is all to say that the potential for conflict is high.

Connell’s at his best when writes about this dynamic. There are untold scores of us who educated ourselves out of our rural birthrights. We wonder what it would be like to return to the farm or ranch. Connell clearly shows us it can be done, but that it won’t be simple, or easy.

The other threads he weaves into the story — the researched origins of cattle, his bouts with depression and lost loves, the legends of local characters — are less realized and read more as filler, as what an editor might suggest a memoir ought to contain, rather than what the story really needs. A few short passages on the cattle drives of the American West don’t really inform the narrative of raising livestock in Ireland and feel unnecessary, as though they belong in another book.

The real strength of this work lies in the poignancy of living as a farmer in today’s rural country, and the challenges of our younger generations to make a life in that world when it seems more removed from modern pursuits than ever. And how going home is never as peaceful as we might imagine.