A Half-Remembered Irish Folktale

I think my mom read it to me, or maybe a teacher at my Montessori preschool. I associate it with that shadowy period of childhood when reality and imagination blend seamlessly, and images from stories stay in your head and reverberate. There was one from this era about a terrifying nose that detaches itself from its face, and one about a sad country house getting swallowed up by a dark expanding city. And there was this one, about the lazy Irish farm girl and the leprechaun. I've made halfhearted attempts to find it over the years in various collections of Celtic folktales, but I haven't found it yet. If anyone has seen my missing Irish folktale, please let me know! I'd like to know the real story. I'll tell it to you as best as I can, and I'll fill in the parts I don't remember.

The Farm Girl and the Leprechaun

Once, far away on the green Isle of Erin, there lived a young farm girl. She was a farm girl of many qualities, but the most important one for this story is her laziness. She was so lazy that her farm and fields were falling into ruin, and she dreamed of inheriting a large sum of money and emigrating across the water to live in the sunny southwestern United States. It happened one day that she came upon a leprechaun sleeping under the flowers. Now, everyone knows two things about leprechauns: they always have a pot of gold hidden somewhere nearby, and the laws of their fifth dimensional fairyland prevent them from telling lies. She grabbed him and stuffed him in a sack and brought him back to her farmhouse for interrogation.

"Okay, Patty. Where is the loot?" says the farm girl. She has about four feet and one hundred pounds on him, and he cowers in the corner behind the stove.

"I hid it in the barn!" says the leprechaun. "I put it underneath the hay! Don't hurt me!"

"I don't want to have to hurt you," says the farm girl, and she goes out to the barn to look for the pot of gold. She's so lazy that she hasn't been to the barn in weeks. Hay is strewn everywhere in untidy heaps, and dangerous rusty tools stick out of it, threatening tetanus. The poor cow is starving to death. She realizes that she'll have to go about this systematically, so she bails the hay and stacks it neatly in the loft, she gives some of it to the cow and mucks out his stall, she goes through the tools and put them back on their hooks, and even after she's gone through every inch of the barn and made it tidy and spotless, she can't find a pot of gold. 

"You lied to me, you wee fairy bastard," she says to leprechaun. She rolls up her sleeves. She's quite muscular for a lazy person. "You'll pay for this."

"No, stop, I didn't lie!” says the leprechaun." I did hide my pot of gold in the barn. But then I moved it. After I hid it in the barn, I hid it in your kitchen."

"You better be telling the truth this time," says the farm girl, and she goes off to the kitchen to look for it. The kitchen is even worse than the barn. She hasn't done dishes in months, and pots and pans are stacked everywhere in tottering towers held together with moldy mashed potato glue. She boils some water on the stove and gets to work washing dishes, reorganizing cabinets, matching the tops of Tupperware containers to the bottoms of Tupperware containers and removing the science projects from the fridge. In the end, the kitchen looks and smells better than it ever has before. But there was no pot of gold.

"You wee shite, you bloody-arse bastard West Briton!" says the farm girl. "I don't want to hurt you, elf, but in life one is often called to do what one doesn't want to do. Have you ever heard of a Belfast sixpack?"

Indeed, the leprechaun had heard of a Belfast sixpack, but it never came to that. Fairy tales are repetitive; you know where this is going. He didn't lie about hiding the pot of gold in her kitchen, but then he moved it, and he moved it, and he moved it again. He got her to clean out the chicken coop and collect the eggs, he got her to bottle the beer and distill the whiskey, he got her to clean and organize all the weapons and ammunition that were scattered around her living room. In the end, she worked harder than she ever had in her life and did all the things that she should have been doing all along. 

Eventually, the farm girl wises up. She comes down off the roof, which she had just finished re-thatching, and holds her portable drill up to the leprechaun's tiny, white kneecap. "I want to hurt you now, troll," she says. "And when life presents one with the opportunity to do exactly what one wants to do, one must take it as it comes."

"Wait, wait!" says the leprechaun. "I did hide the pot of gold under the roof. But then I moved it."

"Aye, I know you did," says the farm girl. "I'm not falling for that again. Tell me the last place you put it, now, or I'm going to have one more mess to clean up." She conspicuously changes the battery in the drill.

"Alright, don't hurt me!" says the leprechaun, who was finally beginning to get scared. "I'll tell you where it is. I hid in the garden, underneath the spring potatoes. That's the last place I put it, that's where it is right now."

"It better be," says the farm girl.

So she goes out to the garden, where the potatoes are lined up in rows and ready to be harvested before they rot in the ground. She works and works, digging potatoes and filling up her sack until she's almost at the end of the last row. She hasn't found a pot of gold, and she wonders what her chances are of actually finding it. She's dirty and tired, and the leprechaun probably has more tricks up his sleeve. You can't outsmart a leprechaun. "Foock it," she says, and she takes her sack of potatoes and goes back inside, where she drinks a good measure of the whiskey and falls asleep half on, half off the living room couch. 

That night, as the farm girl sleeps among her bountiful harvest , in her pristine farmhouse in its ordered fields, the leprechaun sneaks out. He goes up to the garden where just one potato plant remains. Carefully, he digs it up, and finds his pot of gold underneath, just where he put it. "Hee hee," he laughs, "I said I wasn't lying." He takes his gold and slips back across the diaphanous boundary into the dreamworld of the fairies.

 *               *               *

Okay, maybe that wasn't exactly the story that an adult read to me so long ago, but it's the gist of it. 

Folktales are meant to be retold and repurposed. Its pagan Celtic wisdom has grown more applicable over the years. There is my unending pursuit of good health, a goal that has been as illusory and elusive as the end of a rainbow, and there are the actual things I've gotten done along the way. There are the relationships that I've repaired with my family, there are the addictions that I've given up, the self forgiveness I've cultivated, the art I've made, the art I'm making, the millions of ways this illness has made me face reality and live in reality, in the present moment, where I actually am. These are all really important and positive things that I probably wouldn't have done if I had been given any other choice. 

If I'm a lazy-ass farm girl with a subtle tendency towards violence, pursuing an empty goal, prodded onwards by supernatural beings, at least there are some tangible rewards. Of course, I still want to be healthy again one day, so I don't want to apply the totality of this myth to my problems. I'm not quite ready to give up on health yet. Or maybe there are some illusions I still need to have in order to not give up completely.

Oh, and I know that this story is terribly offensive to all Irish and Irish-Americans. To that I just have to say: Suck it up, Whitey.