Leave it to Seamus

Although he worked as a machine tool fitter, like most of the
workers in that factory, Seamus Maguire had no formal qualifications.
And, like the majority of the others, he had his 'bit of land' and 'a
bit of bog' where he would cut his own turf for fuel. He also had a
stutter, which I will leave the reader to imagine, as I consider even
attempting to emulate it in writing would be cruel. Despite being
vulnerable to ridicule from his colleagues, Seamus seemed a good,
reliable sort of bloke who wasn't afraid of hard work.

Unusually for that part of the world, the weather had been extremely
dry and sunny for some considerable time, when Seamus approached me to
say he intended having the following day (Thursday) off to collect his
turf from the bog. "It's cut and dried," he told me, "so all I've got
to do now is bring it home."
I was working on the repair of a machine he was waiting to fit a tool
on, but I wasn't his boss, so I don't really know why he saw the need
to consult me, however I told him it would be OK as I could manage for
a day without him.

As soon as I bumped into Seamus on the Friday morning I made the
mistake of asking him how his day had gone on the bog.
"Don't mention it!" he warned me, "Didn't get a single bloody sod of
turf home."
"Why? What happened?" I asked in all innocence.
"The fuckin' ass!" he said, "Wouldn't go into the shafts of the cart.
There was me pulling' one way and him the other. Sweating my bollix
off, I was. Anyway, in the end I lost my temper and I took a spade and
laid it across his big stupid fuckin' head. Killed the bastard stone
dead, I did. He went down like a ton of bricks... Didn't know what to
do then&;#8230; I had to get rid of him but the ground was baked so
hard by the good weather, I couldn't dig a big enough hole to bury the
bastard. So, I spent the whole of the bloody day chopping him up into
pieces with an axe, and burying the fecker in the smaller holes that I
could dig."

When I relayed this story to Jim Gallagher, a mutual colleague, who
knew Seamus far better than I did, he was totally unsurprised.
"Sounds like Seamus," he said with a shrug, "He killed his
mother-in-law's sow."
He immediately had my attention. "Intentionally?" I asked.
Jim shook his head, "Well not exactly. You see, this pig was a bit of a
Houdini - had a habit of going walkabout from the sty. Seamus'
mother-in-law approached him to see if he had any ideas to keep it
in.

The sty was in a field, next to an oul' wooden pole carrying power
lines to the village. Well, you know Seamus' ingenuity: He connected a
wire from the pole, across the entrance to the sty, with the idea of it
acting as an electric fence. You might laugh but it worked. That sow
never went on walkabout again. When the mother-in-law checked in the
morning, half the town was without electricity and her sow was lying
with its feet stuck up in the air.

Some bucko our Seamus is, I'll tell you. There's not a beast in
Connacht safe while he's around!"