A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place, Mr. O’Malley. You can see for yourself how the bay is busy with islands. My husband is always heading to an island himself, in search of work—Nelson, Minstrel, wherever a gyppo operation might need a man for a week or a month. And boats, well, we’d all be lost here without a boat. But what you say about your lessons is interesting. My brother learned Latin, I remember, but not Greek. What did your family think about that?”

  “It made me different, I’d say, and no one else, none of my classmates, seemed as smitten with the Greek as I did. We lived in a place in County Mayo called Delphi, and the priests told me it was also the name of a pagan temple in Greece. I could not help but want to know more. I made scribbles to myself, tried a line or two of the poem to see what I might make of it on my own. So that will be what I try to do for the next while, try to make an English story of Odysseus’s long journey. There are English versions, I do know that, but they seem awkward to me, unsettling, as though the good parts had been taken out.”

  The woman could tell he was tiring, the day and night of trolling catching up with him. There was some warmth in the spring sun and a drone of bees in the salmonberry that might make anyone sleepy. She yawned herself. The warmth of the fire in the barrel stove made his small domain cosy, although she could smell the musty mattress and made a mental note to look out something more suitable in her attic. He rose with her as she said goodbye to him and asked did he need more milk that evening? He went to stand at the door as she walked away towards her own home and children. The tide was in, lapping at the edge of the clearing where his cabin stood, and a kingfisher screeched from a snag hanging over the creek. She smelled the smoke of his fire all the way back to her house, troubled by him but also intrigued. He was a man with mystery contained in his blue eyes, in the bag where he kept his papers. And some terrible tragedy, too, she thought, remembering an uncle who’d wept so often after the death of his wife that people avoided him and he turned to the bottle for company. No sign of the bottle at World’s End, and it seemed it was the man himself who avoided company (he’d been invited to a gathering at the store, as well as a picnic, but never appeared), not the other way around.

  You could never forget. Could you? And the memory was heavy baggage to be carried with you, slung over your shoulder like a hundredweight sack of potatoes, to be weighed and considered in every activity of your day. To be among the living when your loved ones were so brutally removed to the world of the dead ... And there could not be a God, no, never, to have let such a thing happen to innocent girls, to Eilis who never harmed a soul but who carried mugs of hot broth to the hungry stopping at houses to ask for a crust, a farthing. And his a modest salary, not overly much to carry them all, but with the potatoes they grew, and their chickens, and the butter Eilis made, sure there was food for the table, and to share, and the occasional penny for the girls to take to the shop for a sweet ...

  Odysseus didn’t know that the goddess Athene was plotting, as he slept, a plan to fill the head of a young girl with him, with the idea of him, as a way to get him a boat for the voyage home. Declan O’Malley pondered this for a minute or two and made some scratches on his paper. It was unsettling to think of dreams as something a goddess had planted in your head like seeds, with a particularly outcome in mind. When he dreamed of his family, when those images came with all their sorrow and pain, he tried to find a way to see the good in such dreaming. In one way, it made him less lonely because he could remember he had been Eilis’s beloved, she had told him so in as many words, stroking his face with her long fingers in the early days of their courtship when he had walked out with her on balmy evenings where the boreen turned beyond her family’s farm and kissed her in the lea of a hedge. He would remember with pleasure for a moment. But so soon, too soon, he would be aswim in the pain of it. No God, no, but goddesses at work on the sleeping? It was a thought.

  The thing was to find the accurate way of saying it. Declan was discovering that Greek was so much a language of its place and time—not that he had ever seen the place, but one of the priests at school had travelled there as a young man and had been changed forever by the experience. He described the rocky mountains, clothed in sharp-scented herbs, the stark white temples with columns lying across the ground like fallen gods. Thorny bushes and lemon groves sloping down to a glittering sea. There had been olive trees, he said, alive at the time of Jesus, and their silvery leaves rustled in the wind like dry music. He had never gotten over the warmth. And the storms, coming in to wrap the bowl of the valley in mists like the smoke from incense, and just as fragrant. Declan wondered if there were any similarities between his own Delphi and the temple of the same name. Both of them high in the mountains, tucked into clefts in the rock. The weathers would be different, of course. Ireland’s rain, the intense sun of Greece. And no silvery olives, but the sallies by the river had their own soft leaves and music. And as for being a language of its time, why, the problem Declan could foresee was to find words to tell of honour, how a man would lay down his life for something noble and larger than himself. Where the actions of men reflected something foretold by gods. To find equivalencies for olives, the magnanimity of kings.

  There was a knock at the door. Opening it, he was surprised to find a girl. He recognized her from the creek, one of the Neil children at play in the reeds. She was fair, like the others, in a skimpy dress of sprigged cotton, with a pullover knotted around her waist. The girl was holding a small black puppy in her arms. It was struggling to get down, whimpering as it wriggled this way and that, a stream of urine falling to the threshold. The girl looked up and met Declan’s eyes. Hers were a startling green, like new leaves, and there was a dusting of freckles across the ridge of her upper cheeks and nose.

  “Please, sir, my mother thought you might want one of Queenie’s pups. They’re old enough to leave her now.”

  “Put the lad down so I can see what ye’ve brought me,” Declan said, coming outside. He rubbed his eyes against the sunshine, which was heating the wet ground around the cabin. Steam rose and there was a smell of damp earth. Birds trilled in the thickets of salmonberry and gulls careened above the receding tide.

  “Sir, it’s a girl, not a lad. Will that matter to you? Queenie’s boy pups have already been promised.”

  The puppy sat for moment on the step and then put its tiny nose in the air, sniffing for its bearings, and, finding something worth following, it moved in a clumsy way toward the creek.

  “I’ve no preference, one way or the other. This little dog will suit me fine. I’ll call her Argos and hope that she will be half as loyal to me as the original Argos was to his master, Odysseus,” he told the girl, smiling.

  “Sir, I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, looking puzzled.

  “Ah, I’m rambling again. It’s the book I’m looking at, ye see. It’s like a world unto itself, and when I’ve been at it for a wee time, it surrounds me and I must work for a bit to leave it off. Have ye ever had a book take ye like that?”

  The girl told him no, she couldn’t read, and they had only a few books, but there were stories told by her mother that seemed so real she was sad to have them finished.

  “Is it the same for all of ye, with the reading?”

  The girl retrieved the puppy from its investigations of water and brought her back to where they stood. “Well, my oldest brother and my sister have gone to school more regular, like, but it’s over around the point and there’s only room in the skiff for Dad to take three, and Tom goes to keep David company. I stay home with my little brother Jack. There is a school boat, it comes to take children from all over the harbour, but my dad had an argument with the man who operates it and won’t let it come for us. And anyway, Dad doesn’t think we need the learning. He never went to school, and he says we’re needed here. My mother went to school when she was a girl in Ontario, and she tried at first to make time for lessons, but it makes my father angry.”

  She stopped talki
ng suddenly, afraid perhaps of giving a stranger too much of a family’s secret drama. Then, in a rush: “I’ve got to get back now, if you’re sure you want the pup?”

  “I’m very grateful to ye for bringing her along. Thank yer mother for thinking of me.”

  He watched the girl walk back through the salal, nimble as a young deer. What age would she be? Twelve or so, most like. The age of Grainne, he supposed. And yet Grainne had been able to read in two languages, her own Gaelic and English, she could recite from memory whole passages of poetry, fragments in Latin of the Aeneid, a poem they read at home. She was hungry for learning and would take a book to the byre where they kept their chickens and the occasional pig; he’d find her reading as she stirred the mash or wiped the eggs. Maire, now, that was a different tale. She could read all right and had a good brain for sums, but she’d rather be exploring the bog, searching for the nests of corn crakes in the small barley field. Bird cries were like music to her, and she recognized in them particular voices or messages. Sometimes she’d bring back an egg that hadn’t hatched and she’d carefully blow out the insides; she kept the fragile shells on the mantle. She would come to him and ... Something licked at his ankle. He’d forgotten the little dog and broke from his remembering to pick it up.

  “So, Argos, we’d best find ye a bed, eh, girleen? I’ve a dry sack somewhere and we’ll put some of last year’s bracken in it to make it soft for ye. And a meal ye’ll be wanting, to be sure.”

  The pup licked his face with rapid warm strikes of her tiny tongue. He took her into the cabin and put her by the stove while he sought out the sack. Then he put a crust of soda bread into a battered dish, another relic of the bush, and poured a little milk over it. He warmed it for a few minutes on the stove and put it down for the pup. Argos had only ever fed from her mother’s body and whimpered, not understanding that this was another way of being nourished.

  “Ye’ll learn to eat this or ye won’t grow into anything worthy at all. Here, let’s see what we can do with ye.”

  Declan crouched on the floor next to the puppy. He put his finger into the dish and then into the pup’s mouth. She sucked at the milky finger eagerly. He moved her face down to the dish, keeping his finger in her mouth. Then he eased more of the milk into her mouth until she was taking it on her own. The bread was something again. She sucked at it, unable to get it into her mouth fast enough. So she stepped into the dish with her front feet and held one end of the crust with her paw while she sucked and gnawed at the softened bread. When she had finished, she collapsed into a small black heap and fell immediately into a deep sleep. Declan moved her onto the sack and sat at his table to puzzle over the poem again.

  The tide was low. Lower than he’d ever seen it. From where his cabin stood, he could see no ocean at all, no bay, just a long expanse of mud. It reminded him of Killary Harbour, a narrow finger of water leading from the cold North Atlantic to Leenane, a village near Declan’s home at Delphi. He couldn’t remember tides such as this although there must’ve been because the fisher-folk would collect carragheen, or sea moss, at very low tide to dry on the shore above. It made a pudding that was good when you got the fever, he recalled. Cousins who lived near the water would give them a bag of the moss for winter. A handful of the crisp fronds, eggs, milk, some sugar, and Eilis would add a drop or two of vanilla essence. The girls called it fish-slime because it had a texture that slipped down the throat, all right, but he was fond of it.

  Calling Argos from her bed by the stove, Declan took up a gunny sack and walked down the pebbly bank to the shore. The mud was very dark. It steamed in the sunshine. He walked out gingerly but found it quite firm to the boot. Gulls were swirling in the air and landing on the mud, taking up clams or stranded fish, he supposed. You could see where the creeks ran out into the bay, their waters sidling down into channels in the mud. He wanted to gather some oysters, the namesakes of the bay. Mrs. Neil had shown him how to shuck them with a sharp knife and had told them they made an excellent stew. With Argos at his feet, he strode out into the muddy estuary, following the course of the creek that ran by his cabin. Strands of kelp and other long seaweeds lay across the mud like ropes. A few geese picked at the eelgrass and gabbled nervously to see the dog, who ignored them completely, perhaps knowing instinctively that she would be no match yet for such birds.

  Further down the bay, there were stakes showing in the mud. He’d never noticed them before, but he supposed he wouldn’t see them at any time other than such a low tide. They looked like they were there to mark boundaries of some sort, and he made a mental note to ask Mrs. Neil about them. And yes, there were oysters, plenty of them. He gathered a few dozen of the biggest ones he could find. In Ireland, no one ate oysters that he knew of, though you could see them on the beaches, mussels, too. But for some reason, people believed shellfish to be an inferior kind of food altogether, despite the fact that there had been such a terrible hunger not so very long ago when people had eaten grass like cattle in the fields. In his own village, there were many abandoned cottages whose occupants had either died during the Famine or else fled to North America by the boatload. It had been an eerie thing to enter one of the ruined cabins and see the bits of crockery still about and the cold hearths that had once warmed generations of families who would have known each rock of the stony fields the way he had known the stones of his own small farm, the rocks on the shores of nearby Fin Lough. And there were Famine graves too when you knew what to look for—a single stone or cairn for entire communities buried together in a final intimacy, and some not buried at all but left in cabins with no one to offer the final ceremonies. On the roadside near Dhulough, there was a scattering of rock that his parents told him marked the grave of those who had died after being marched from Louisbourg to Delphi Lodge on orders by Captain Primrose for inspection to determine their status as paupers. Children with the thin legs of crows, women with no flesh left at all who carried infants light as fuchsia branches, men whose eyes were hollowed by hunger, all walking the rough track in the hope of food and instead falling by the wayside and lying unburied for days while crows and dogs fed on the scanty remains. The lucky ones had ridden the Famine boats and survived the dreadful outbreaks of disease that claimed so many even before they set foot on the soil of America. And was he much different from those other exiles? It wasn’t hunger that had driven him to Canada, no, it was violence and loss; still, he imagined someone finding the ruin of his cabin and trying to piece together his own small story.

  Argos was down on the mud, rubbing her shoulders against something, licking at it, then pressing her face into it. Declan hurried over to see what it could be. A fish—it looked like a small shark—was dead in the mud, its body decomposing. He didn’t think it had ben stranded by this particular tide because it was missing its eyes and its side had been torn open by birds; oily fluid seeped out of the gash. There was a terrible smell, and Argos was rubbing her body with great joy against the rotting flesh.

  “Leave off, girl,” Declan shouted, and pushed her away with his foot. She yelped and ran ahead, shaking herself as she moved, her whole body wet with mud and stinking of fish. Declan’s boots made sucking sounds as he walked, and everywhere he could smell the tang of seaweed and salt. There was a big rock with a flat top ahead, dry and warm from the sun. Brushing away barnacles, he made a place for himself and sat, looking down the bay towards the strait. It was easy in the salt air to be lulled into a kind of trance where you could hear the birds and the suck of water as the tide began to come in, drawn first into the channels and then the pools. It was almost peaceful.

  He was thinking about Odysseus. Thinking of him lying under olive leaves waiting for the princess to find him. And then walking to meet her with only an olive bough to save him the shame of being seen naked. Still, the handmaidens fled at the sight of him, and the young princess must have been quite brave to have stood her ground. But her head had been turned by the goddess to thoughts of bridegrooms, and maybe she hoped he was a
potential husband. So she encouraged her servants to bathe him and anoint him with sweet oil and clothe him in the few bits they’d conveniently brought to the river to wash out and dry on the banks. And then he followed her carriage into the city where he was welcomed to the palace in the way a stranger would always be welcomed. Food given, comforts, a bowl of water brought so that the stranger might wash. And you never knew, the stranger might be a god in disguise, testing your capacity for hospitality, kindness. In the case of Odysseus, it was the mother of the girl who recognized in the stranger a measure of nobility and worthiness. He’d been given a harp in the evening and, stringing it with authority and skill, he’d told them something of his wanderings.

  There was loneliness and there was solitariness. What did he feel, himself, as he walked the long mud flats, searching for oysters and then sitting on the rock like a seal? He was not wanting human company this day. It was enough to be out with the young dog and her droll puppy behaviours, and anyway, if a man took a minute to take his bearings, if he looked around himself, it was evident he was not alone. There were the geese, yes, and some black fellas with yellow eyes and long red bills prying open oysters themselves, whistling a piercing eep, eep as they flew and then settling down to the business of shells. Gulls everywhere, some of them feeding on the purple starfish clinging to the undersides of exposed rocks. And when you moved aside a rock with your boot, small crabs scuttled off sideways, waving their pincers. Far, far out in the bay, almost where it met the strait, he could see a few boats, probably heading to the gathering of buildings in an adjacent bay with deep moorage. A store, a hospital, a hotel ... he collected his mail at the store, going by skiff once a fortnight. There was never much, but his sister wrote with news of Ireland, and occasionally a bank draft arrived, no return address or note, but the postmark was Galway, and so he imagined one of his cousins, involved with the Republicans, was sending him the kind of solace arranged for men such as himself. It paid for the use of the cabin, some provisions, paper and ink, an occasional bottle of the stuff they called whiskey but which was nothing at all like the bottles kept by Miceal Walsh in the Leenane pub; he’d pour you a drop of Connemara malt on market day and it was like swallowing sunshine, for the warmth of it spread through your body, tasting like the smoke of a turf fire captured in clear water off Ben Gorm. And the money paid for the odd book, too, ordered by letter from a bookseller in Vancouver.