A MAN IN A DISTANT FIELD
A MAN IN A DISTANT FIELD
|A NOVEL|
THERESA KISHKAN
Copyright © Theresa Kishkan, 2004
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Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Andrea Pruss
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kishkan,Theresa, 1955-
A man in a distant field / Theresa Kishkan.
ISBN 1-55002-531-7
I. Title.
PS8571.I75M35 2004 C813'.54 C2004-905467-8
1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04
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A MAN IN A DISTANT FIELD
Acknowledgements
Although this novel is a work of fiction, it is set in two actual places—Oyster Bay on B.C.’s Sechelt Peninsula and Delphi, in County Mayo, Ireland. I’ve tried to make the landscapes as accurate and real as possible, but the characters are products of my imagination, as are their stories, and any resemblance to those living or dead is pure coincidence.
The list of people who helped me with research and encouragement is too long to reproduce here, but I trust that they know who they are and I thank them all. Specific mention must be made of my husband and children, who provide love and good humour in necessary amounts. This book is for them. I would also like to thank Diana Davidson for reading the manuscript at a difficult time in its development and in turn her friend Gwyneth Evans for reading the passages about the harp and correcting a few errors. My editor, Barry Jowett, has been helpful but not intrusive, and I am grateful for that. And I would like to acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and the B.C. Arts Council, whose generous support made much of the work of this novel possible.
I am not a Greek scholar but tried to figure out the kind of translation a passionate but amateur reader of the Odyssey in a late-nineteenth-century edition might come up with. I used the Loeb edition of the Odyssey as a model and the Liddell and Scott standard Greek-English lexicon as well as Cunliffe’s Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Any mistakes of grammar and usage are mine entirely.
Nil aon tintean mar do thintean fein.
There is no fireside like your own fireside.
(Irish proverb)
A man in a distant field, no hearthfires near, will hide a fresh brand in his bed of embers to keep a spark alive for the next day: so in the leaves Odysseus hid himself ...
(The Odyssey, Book Five, lines 487–90, trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
Part One
Oyster Bay, Sechelt Peninsula, British Columbia, Spring to Fall 1922
Chapter One
He was drifting on the tide, curled up small on the bottom of the skiff, feeling a chill through the thin slats of wood separating him from the waters of Oyster Bay. He could not rise to grasp the oars in their locks, to keep the skiff heading in the direction of his cabin, at ease in the current of strong water. Without lifting his head, he knew that the tides would take him back eventually because the bay ended at his steps, fed by the quick tea-coloured water of the creek that ran by his cabin and the other creeks that ran down off the mountain to the east and entered the chuck at the mud flats.
This was not the way he’d intended to return to the cabin, after a day and a night of hand-trolling out beyond the mouth of the bay. He’d sold his salmon to the pot scow—nice bluebacks that he’d wrapped in damp burlap potato sacks—and then begun the hard row home, feeling each pull of the oars right into the muscles of his back. Once he’d come through into the bay, he’d felt he could row until tomorrow at that rate, his shoulder joints oiled by the sweat that dripped down from under his cap into the collar of his pullover. It was seeing the moon in the eastern sky, still visible, though it must’ve been nearly noon by the position of the sun, that had slowed him. A new moon, delicate in the watery spring sky. There had been just such a moon on that other morning, hanging in the western Connemara sky like a sailmaker’s needle, and seeing this one, he was pierced with such intense pain that he had to gather his limbs into his body and rock himself, crying, on the bottom of the skiff.
He must have fallen asleep. He couldn’t remember the craft being pushed onto the shingle, round stones rolling under it, but found himself looking up from the carvel planks into the branches of the apple tree that grew between World’s End and the water. A bird—he’d have called it a thrush, but here they were robins—was singing for all it was worth. Declan O’Malley knew the song had everything to do with territory. The robin had a mate and a nest in the apple tree, a fine construction of sticks and soft moss, a single strand of red wool woven into the sides like a sign to all that this was home. He supposed the bird hadn’t known the wool was so bright, but perhaps it had and had chosen it for that reason, plucking it from a bramble where a garment of someone passing had snagged and then been eased away, leaving a thread behind. After all, in a momentary fit of consolation at having arrived at Oyster Bay, having decided to get himself as far as reasonably possible from the bloody Delphi soil, Declan had scratched “World’s End” on a piece of cedar shake with a bit of charcoal and hammered it over his door.
No one named their habitations here, no farm had the descriptive notion secured to it as in Ireland, where a place might be known by its weather, its placement on a hill, or by a deeper meaning, mostly lost to memory but traceable, as though on a map, if one took the time. The cashels and bailes, the raths and crocs, piercing a place like a nail and fastening it to the long scan of history. His own farm, Tullaglas, named for its small green hill; the neighbouring Ardmor; the dark lake, Dhulough, below. A map of any Irish county would be busy with names, and not just for towns and villages—a countenance of promontories, rocks, wide space softened by sedges and hawthorns, ancient ground containing the remains of a fort, a battle.
And if a robin sang for territory, who could blame it, the poor bugger, because wasn’t that what begetting and working your land and raising your children was about? Making a place for them in the world where they could be safe and grow like trees? He wished he’d done that in any country but the troubled one he’d been born in because he might yet be walking home to Tullaglas from the Bundorragha schoolhouse, a daughter on each side of him, looking forward to the thin plume of smoke in their chi
mney and Eilis greeting them with hot tea and a bit of barmbrack. It came again, the terrible sorrow, and he wept as he brought the skiff up above the high tide line, fastening its rope to the apple tree. He wept as he took the green cotton line from his boat to remove the strands of seaweed and to repair the breaks, took the little box of spinners to clean, took the oars, which he carefully leaned against the shake-clad wall of his cabin, along with the herring rake, and he was still weeping as he went in to start a fire so he could cook himself a meal, draping his sweat-damp pullover on a rock to dry. Some days were like this, the tears a river he could not for the life of him control.
In the distance, he could hear children, the children of the man who let him use the cabin; often they could be seen doing the work of men and women, ploughing a rough field behind a steady grey horse, washing clothing in the creek, leading a cow from one pasture to another. Encountered in this way, they looked to the ground or averted their eyes as they passed, a polite hello coaxed from the older ones. But he could tell, this time, that they were playing, their voices sounding so far away in the weather, though he knew they were only around the cove, at the mouth of a quick creek, where long grass hid the nests of geese and the passing of deer in the morning. Their voices were full of joy and youth, and he wept as he listened, for himself and for all the children of the world who would learn that no amount of love could keep grief from the door.
“Ma, the man’s crying again. I didn’t leave the milk because he looked too sad to bother with only a jug of milk.”
The child looked to his mother, who was washing a tin bucket with scalding water from a kettle sitting on a stump. “Take this to the barn, Jack, and I’ll take the milk myself. Did you spill any? I thought I’d filled the jug more than this.”
“I tripped on a root and some splashed out. I didn’t mean to. Duke licked it up before it had a chance to soak into the path, so it weren’t really wasted.”
His mother smiled at him. “That’s one way to look at it, Jack. Now, take this bucket and mind you cover it with one of the clean rags on the bench so that it’ll be ready for the evening milking. I’ll be back soon.”
She wiped her hands dry on her apron, which she then untied and hung on the pump. The trail to the cabin their tenant called World’s End led through salal and oregon grape, dipping down at one place into a reedy marsh where her husband had made a corduroy walk of young cedars stripped of their branches and scored with an axe for traction. She was careful with her footing, balancing the jug of milk in her right hand and using her left to steady herself on the logs, which were slippery despite their scorings. Up a little hill, along a bluff of arbutus in full creamy bloom this middle of April, past the midden of clam and oyster shells, and along the muddy shore to World’s End.
Declan O’Malley was inside by now, she could see smoke coming out of his chimney, the blue smoke that indicated he’d just lit a fire, using cedar kindling from the pile in the shelter of a big tree. The old oars they’d given him were standing under his eaves, sanded and oiled, and a herring rake she had seen before, too, a few strands of kelp between its tines. She knocked once on his weathered door. He came immediately.
“Jack brought this earlier but didn’t want to trouble you. I’m sorry he spilled a bit on the trail. If you need more, we can let you have another jug after the evening milking, but I’ve used the earlier milk for my baking. Fishing, were you?”
“I’m much obliged, Mrs. Neil. Aye, I’d the boat out since yesterday morning, over to Outer Kelp by the point. Caught a few, too, now that I’ve the knack of it. I’m sorry a second trip had to be made with the milk. Will ye have a cup of tea?”
She looked past him into the cabin, wondering again at the fact that he had so little with which to make a life. Nearly two months he’d been there, a shadowy presence seen occasionally from her kitchen window, rowing out to fish or for provisions. With all the work of a stump farm and five children, she had no time to seek him out in a neighbourly way as she might have liked, yet was surprised to find him still camping (that was all you could call it) in the cabin, without anything much more than had been there when he’d arrived. A table, two rough benches he’d made from stumps. A blanket laid out neatly on the old mattress that had been in the cabin since the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of the century. And there were books, a big canvas bag with paper and ink, several bottles of it she’d seen.
“A cup of tea would be welcome, Mr. O’Malley. We could sit outside. It seems a shame to be inside when this sun is such a rare treat.”
“We could of course.” They sat with their tea on warm rocks at the edge of the clearing. Declan placed the teapot on a piece of driftwood pulled up from the shore and indicated branches carrying deep cerise flowers. “Now tell what are these flowers that the hummingbirds are fierce for?”
“We call them salmonberries, those bushes. The berries, when they come, are very flavourful and look a little like salmon roe, clusters of roe, I suppose. There’s another one, too, with white blossoms, we call thimbleberry. You’ll see those soon. I make jam with them when I can persuade the children to pick enough. A softer berry, too.”
She paused, took a deep breath, and then continued. “Mr. O’Malley, I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, but if there’s anything I can do for you, will you let me know? In a small community like ours, we are used to troubles, our own and our neighbours’, and it’s no burden to help. You have only to say.”
Declan looked at his feet, then turned his mug in his hands, peering inside as though the leaves might tell a fortune, a caution. “Mrs. Neil, you are very kind. I cannot speak of my own trouble, not yet, but I do thank ye from my heart for yer concern. I’d no thought or hope at all that I would find such kindness at the end of such a journey. I’ve no biscuit to offer ye with the tea, but perhaps ye’ll take a bit of bread?”
Mrs. Neil looked at the piece of cedar shake he was holding in her direction. A round loaf with a slice or two taken from it: Quite a coarse crumb, not a yeast bread, she thought.
“However did you make bread, Mr. O’Malley? You have only that old stove the people before you rigged up from an oil barrel ...”
“I’m thinking ye have never heard of a bastable, Mrs. Neil. In Ireland the bread is often baked in the coals of an open fire in a little three-legged lad of cast iron. Well, to be sure I’ve nothing so formal as that, of course, but I found an old iron pot in the brush and scrubbed off the rust, oiled it up nicely as could be, and I’ve experimented with it, balanced on rocks in the coals of the stove, and this bread ye see is the result.”
“But the bread itself, how did you know to bake it? Most men around here could make bannock, or fry bread, but it’s hardly a bread at all, just flour and lard and leavening if they happen to have it, a mess they cook in a skillet and often as not is raw in the centre. Something to fill them up when they’re in the bush.”
“My mother taught me to bake when I was a boy as there were no sisters yet to learn, they came later, and me hanging around her, watching her work, she must’ve thought I might as well be useful. Buttermilk we used in Ireland, but sour milk, if it turns before I’ve used it in my tea, makes a good loaf with some bread soda. I’m sorry there’s no butter to offer ye, but will ye have a bit of cheese?”
Mrs. Neil took the cheese he offered and broke a corner of bread off her slice. She tasted thoughtfully. “It’s very good bread, Mr. O’Malley. How resourceful you’ve been! My husband is a great man for building and figuring out ways to preserve meat and fish, but I can’t imagine him baking a loaf to save his life.”
“To save his life, Mrs. Neil?”
His face, which had seemed to her to have relaxed with her praise of the bread, had suddenly become the saddest face she’d ever seen. Putting down her tea, she reached over to the rock where he sat and took his hand in her own, holding it briefly and then releasing it. “Just a saying, Mr. O’Malley, something we say without thinking. To indicate a thing is out of th
e realm of the possible, if you know what I mean.”
“To save my life, Mrs. Neil, I am working on a project of translation. From Greek, which I learned as a lad from the priests at school, to English. My Greek is as rusty as the iron pot I found in the brush but looking at the letters—and they are not our alphabet, like Latin would be—is like looking at the tracks of a bird. If I take them into my mind, slowly, they make a sense after a bit. Once I could read them easily, and I’m hoping I will be able to again so.” He had brightened in the telling of this, his blue eyes alight.
Mrs Neil remembered Greece from the globe in her own schoolroom all those years ago, in Glengarry County, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember anything else about it, apart from its reputed heat, shepherds, and stories of gods and goddesses walking the earth, wreaths of laurel on their heads, and making trouble.
“And what are you turning into English?”
“Ah, Mrs. Neil, it’s a great poem about the sea and a man who made his way from Troy, which as far as I can figure out is where Turkey is now, to a little island off the west coast of Greece. He was called Odysseus, and his story, the Odyssey, which means a wandering sort of adventure. And it is that, to be sure.”
Mrs. Neil searched her memory for something, an echo, a name, and asked, “There was someone like that called Ulysses, wasn’t there? I remember a poem, Tennyson, I think. My brother had a book, he’d read the poems aloud to us.”
“Just so. He was called Ulysses by the Romans, later on. When I was a lad, I loved to imagine myself a wandering seafarer, though my father was a farmer. When the priests read to us of Odysseus, I’d put myself in his place, I loved every word, and it made me fierce to learn Greek as well as I could so I could read it for myself in the poet’s own words. I wanted to go out in a boat and hear the siren’s song and end up on an island like he did.”
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