The Hurley-Maker’s Son

My father’s face was long and sturdy-boned, with nimble bushy eyebrows, a humped nose, and a mouth easily moved to smiles. Once, when I was about two or three years of age, he lifted me up in his arms—a rare occurrence—and carried me outdoors. I pushed my fingers through his thick black hair and tiny specks of dust rose, making me cough. He slapped me on the back and laughed. I saw over his shoulder a patch of blue sky and against it the green spires of the cypress trees standing as if spellbound. Through gaps between the trees and then more clearly as we moved over gravelly ground away from the house, I could see the fields with their thick, clay-rampart ditches and feel the breeze against my face, warmer and kinder than a woollen blanket. But mostly I sensed the sun, beaming from a place that was higher than the world, and my eyes told me not to look at it.

We lived on a small farm roughly midway between the towns of Loughrea and Ballinasloe, on the flag plains of East Galway, where he and my mother kept cattle and sheep and grew a variety of crops. During that time—the bleak, depressed Ireland of the 1950s, when jobs were scarce and money hard to come by and people had to provide for themselves—the farm ensured that, whatever else, we would always have our own supply of fresh produce. “Everything except tea,” my mother would say, exaggerating only somewhat.

Beyond the fertile land, though I could hardly have noticed it even from my vantage point high against my father’s shoulder, lay the wetlands known as the Callows. The Callows consisted of a number of large, loosely fenced fields crisscrossed by small rivers and divided among a handful of farms, including that of my parents. The rivers, haphazardly linking into each other and some of them meandering as if lost, would overspill their banks usually in autumn and winter, flooding the Callows and propagating an environment where wading birds and rare water-loving plants thrived.

The Callows formed a little wilderness which, within a short few years, would become my own personal outback, the place where I could lose myself and run free of the inhibitions I often felt while around other people. There I would learn about nature at first hand and feel consoled in the learning. And there, of course, I would shirk the jobs set for me by my parents, especially those that waited in my father’s carpentry shop, the very place he was carrying me toward now.

The workshop, which he called “the shed,” had a pale red or purple barn-door entrance and was full of timber. First we got the smells—of must and sawdust—that would still cause my nose to crinkle even after I became used to them. The timber looked naked, flat-boned as if someone had ironed it. We would edge sideways past things. All our visits close into each other the way objects in the distance seem to do. Which is how, even at the beginning, I saw those visits: as objects more than occasions, my father holding my hand, saying, “Be careful where you step.”

Opposite the workshop door the band saw stood, tall almost as the workshop itself. Its blade ran between two spoked wheels, one mounted above the other on a thick black arm that I would eventually come to imagine as the twisting body of a python. When I reached to trace my finger along the dust of the stout metal table, my father pulled me away.

“Don’t attempt to go near that, ever,” he warned.

I held my hands into my stomach but bit by bit, over several visits, he acquainted me with stakes and sheep troughs, as well as handles for spades and forks and rakes and scythes that jutted from slatted grids stacked toward the rafters. If I craned my neck back, I could follow the electric cables that snaked past the mud nests made by the swallows before coiling up...