Accepting Unwanted Kindnesses With Grace

Whether your family keeps Hanukkah, Christmas or simply the spirit of “the season,” this is the time of year when generous gestures abound.

The rewards to be had from giving are obvious and easily appreciated; it takes a special--and far more rare--grace to accept a gift, particularly an unwanted one, according to the spirit in which it was given. For most of us, in fact, the only thing worse than being made the object of someone else’s unsolicited good intentions is having to listen to the awful sound of their good advice.

But when I think about how gracefully that can be accomplished, I think of my friend Eileen, who keeps a tiny dairy farm on a rocky headland on the wind-scourged west coast of Ireland’s County Cork. My wife and I spend a month or so each year in West Cork. On one such visit several years ago, we rented a decrepit old farmhouse just outside the village of Glandore. The house had white-washed walls, slate floors, a fragrant turf-burning fireplace and spectacular views of the bay.

Eileen, a woman in her mid-50s, was our neighbor and looked after our place and a few others for their absentee owners. Our house sat hard against a bend in the narrow road out from town, which, like the surrounding fields, was edged with walls of unmortared stone. A half a mile or so farther on, the road ended alongside the gate to Eileen’s farm. She lived there alone in the cottage in which she, her father and grandfather were born. Her farm consisted of about five rock-strewn, heather-covered acres on which she grazed nine cows. The sale of their milk provided most of her meager income.

Her life was--and is--hard but happy. And her considerable kindness to people and animals had made her one of the best-liked people in the district, which is sometimes called the Carbery Coast.

And it is an altogether remarkable district, for a number of reasons. In their indispensable “Literary Guide to Ireland,” for example, Susan and Thomas Cahill note that “in addition to its pretty scenery,” it contains “the most concentrated collection of batty inhabitants you are likely to stumble on anywhere. . . . The country cottages and leaking, ramshackle Big Houses still shelter roguish horse dealers, carpenters who have never used a hammer, titled and dotty Anglo-Irish relicts and their wily, zany servants. . . . Lunacy is usual here. You cannot be more than an hour or so in these parts without running smack into the gleeful, hopeless inefficiency of the Carbery people.”

A writer I know tells of checking into a hotel there after an interminable and exhausting day of travel. No sooner had he settled into his bath when there was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” he called.

“It’s only me, sir,” came the voice of the chambermaid. “I’ve a telegram for you, sir.”

“Well, I’m in the bath,” he growled. “Just slip it under the door.”

“Oh, sir, I can’t, sir,” she replied. “It’s on a tray.”

Two farms away from the house we rented lived three elderly brothers, all bachelors, of course. In the 1940s, the Irish government began to pay monthly pensions to the elderly and the mentally infirm. As the local story went, the three brothers found the temptation of free money too hard to resist. And, unable to advance their age, they began to feign madness.

They stopped going into the village a few miles away. They stopped tilling their fields. After a few months, the district nurse certified them as mentally incompetent and they were awarded their pensions, which in dollars came to about $20 per man per month. It was wasn’t much, but it was free for the faking. So, from that day to this, they’ve never left their farm, which to this day has neither electricity nor running water.

On a walk one cold, foggy day, I rounded a bend in the path and encountered one of the brothers, pale and insubstantial as the fog itself. He was unshaven and dressed in a tweed cap, tattered sweater and ragged trousers. He stood half hidden in a hedge of blackberry bushes staring off into space.

“Good morning,” I said.

“A fine soft day, surely,” he said, a look of horror convulsing his face as he retreated back into the brambles. Was he still faking or had he, in fact, become what he once had pretended to be?

“Who can tell,” Eileen said. “Ach, pension or not, they always were a daft lot, that family.”

Her own eccentricities had a far less Gothic cast and revolved primarily around the cows. I first encountered the beasts and their leader--an alarmingly large Holstein named Judy--early one wild, wet afternoon. I was working at my typewriter when my wife came in from outside, a perplexed expression on her face.

“There are,” she said, “cows in the yard.”

“Huh?” I retorted snappily.

“Cows,” she repeated. “Very, very large cows.”

Sure enough, out on the lawn that ran down from the back of the house were nine cows munching contentedly on the lush, if untidy, grass. They’d obviously entered through the gate we’d left ajar that morning.

“I’ll go and see Eileen,” I said. “Maybe she’ll know whose they are.”

She did, indeed.

“Mother of God,” she bellowed, “are they out again?”

Back down the road we went. Eileen was in the lead, switch in hand and her immense black dog, Ben, at her heel. I came trailing behind. Within a few minutes the two of them had gathered her little herd and had it moving back down the road.

“Get on with you, you bold bitches,” she shouted. “Ach, you’re a cunning, evil girl, Judy. I’ll have the hide off you yet.”

It wasn’t hard to find the place where Judy and her sisters had pushed their way through the wall, and we drove them back through the breach and set to restacking the stones.

“Ah, you must come from grand people,” she said, “you a scholar and still taking the time to lend a hand this way. You know your way around a cow, that’s for sure.”

I strolled back down the road, flush with pleasure in the strangest and most undeserved compliment of my life.

Over the next few weeks, collecting Eileen’s truant cattle became virtually a daily ritual. Morning after morning, as I sat by the window drinking my coffee, I would hear the click of their hooves coming down the road. Before they could round the bend, I would race off, a switch of my own now at hand, and drive them back to Eileen’s place.

Despite her girth, Judy, as I quickly discovered, could leap walls like an antelope, and Eileen’s walls, I began to notice, were the lowest and most dilapidated for miles around. Still, with each additional cattle roundup, the warmth and enthusiasm of Eileen’s gratitude increased.

I began to tell the tale of my morning ritual at dinner parties and down at the pubs in Glandore. “Sure, don’t I know those cows of hers meself,” a farmer in the bar of the Glandore Inn agreed one day. “And aren’t they a menace to the countryside for miles around.”

The rest of the bar shook its collective head in apparent agreement, though I thought I detected a twinkle of crafty West Cork humor in the corner of more than one eye.

It took a year and another visit before I figured out why. Cows give milk according the quality and volume of their feed. Nine cows subsisting on the poor grazing offered by Eileen’s five desolate seaside acres wouldn’t have given enough milk to keep a church mouse alive. She hadn’t the money to lease additional grazing.

But if a poor but well-loved woman left her walls in disrepair and if her undisciplined cattle strayed two or three times a week onto her neighbors’ richer grass and if those neighbors simply looked the other way--well, she could take a living from nine cows and keep her dignity intact.

And if a well-meaning but blundering visitor took it upon himself to disrupt their old and unspoken arrangement, a good woman like Eileen even could find it in her heart to thank and wish him and his people well.

There’s more than grace in that. But as they like to say in West Cork, the folk of Eileen’s district are “very airy, very airy people, indeed.”