He was dreaming in sunlight, wishing for Eilis. Where are ye? he thought. When the tide moves in, I half-expect to see ye swimming strongly in its current though for the life of me I never saw ye swim, washing up on my bit of beach like Magdean Mara or a seal, the lovely grey seals of the Connemara coast. I am no one without ye, without yer hands bringing my face to yer breast, or holding my waist from behind me as we sleep. I remember each small place, each bone quietly covered with soft skin, the plump fullness of yer hips, the shallow bowl of yer neck which I filled with kisses, each a drop of tenderness coming from my deep heart. I am drenched with yer memory, drenched in each remembered gesture, the far grey of yer eyes and yer copper hair threaded with silver. I am a shipwrecked sailor washed up at the end of the world, no one to take me into the bed of a long marriage, held secret by the trunk of a living tree. Our oaken bed, brought from yer parents’ house as a dowry, along with a grove of pines the age of yerself, planted by yer father at yer birth. When can ye be, my love, so long away that I am forgetting yer voice as it sang the old Irish songs to our lasses, keening low and rich so that each note held the sadness and pleasure of our kin, so our girls would know who they were in the world.
The pup was licking his ankles, moaning. Looking around him, rubbing his eyes back to wakefulness, Declan saw that the tide had advanced almost to where he was sitting. He jumped down into the mud quickly and made his way to the shore. He would have to return to World’s End by clambering along the rocks because he didn’t think he could beat the tide as it eased over the mud flats. Slinging his bag of oysters over his back, he began to scramble towards his cabin.
He almost tripped over the girl who was crouched in the sand of a tiny cove. It was the girl who’d brought Argos to him, and she was scraping the sand with a claw of wood. The curled fingers of the claw brought up lumps that looked like stones, but he realized they were cockles, or clams they called them here. A bucket, sitting in the tide to keep cool, was nearly full. Argos ran to the girl and licked her face rapidly; the girl responded by kissing the pup’s soft nose and trying to avoid the tongue which moved with surprising dexterity to find ears, nostrils, a salty mouth, for the girl had been eating sea lettuce, a tiny leaf of it stuck to her bottom lip. Bruises flowered on her upper arms, petals shaped like the ball of a thumb, her pullover on a nearby rock, taken off in the heat of digging.
“Do ye like the clams then?”
She thought for a moment. “Mum makes chowder, with potatoes and onions and milk, and I like that. I think it’s my favourite supper because she always makes biscuits to go with it. But for themselves, I don’t know as I could eat one on its own. I have lots. Would you like to take some back with you?”
“No need. Yer mother has me picking oysters, as ye can see. I’ll make them for my own tea.”
There was something familiar in her movements, a kind of grace balanced against the awkwardness of lengthening limbs. He’d seen it in his own girls and in the girls he’d taught over the twenty years he was master of the Bundorragha school. They’d come as infants, nearly, and leave in the fullness of young womanhood, and in between, they’d be both one and the other. Bent over their slates, their hair falling across the scarred wood of the desks, cheeks flushed with concentration, or laughing at the antics of one of the lads, he’d see in them such promise. Often as not, they’d marry as soon as they left the school and find themselves mothers of six or eight children before they were thirty. The boys would leave to work, either migrating to the cities or England or else making roads for the Congested Districts Board, but Ireland provided fewer choices for women; he had been determined that his own daughters would have opportunities to further their education if they chose, or in the case of Grainne, perhaps music school. She’d been given a harp: one of the older families had no use for it, no one who wanted to learn, and they had passed it along. She’d found someone to teach her to play it, Bernadette Feeny from the mountains. Sheet music was hard to come by but through some miracle—it had seemed so to them—a whole pile of music had surfaced: sweet airs by the blind harper Carolan, planxties written in the great houses he’d visited. And loveliest of all, his “Farewell to Music,” the last thing he’d played in the house of his patroness, Mrs. McDermot Roe. Declan loved to see his daughter’s hands move across the strings of the harp, urging such beautiful harmonies from them. He imagined the bones of her hands growing strong with the secrets of the music within them. And now, her hands given to worms in the cursed soil of Ireland. He shook his head violently to rid it of her memory and left the girl in her tiny cove, pulling a claw of wood through the sand.
Back at World’s End, he busied himself with shucking the oysters. There was a way of putting your knife between the lips of the shell and levering until the tight grip suddenly loosened and you could scoop out the meat of the oyster. It did not look appetizing at all, sitting wet in the frilly shell. But he’d been told to heat some milk in a saucepan with a piece of butter (Mrs. Neil had given him a pat) and some of the wild onions that grew in his field and then to add the oysters whole, just heating them through. Doing so, he understood what Mrs. Neil had meant when she told him the stew was for her the very essence of the ocean. You needed no salt, the oysters had a briny taste, like clean seaweed. And the milk provided a mild broth once flavoured with the oyster’s own juice and the pleasant savouriness of the onions. He drank a bowl, and then another. It was like a tonic.
The tide was nearly to the shingle now and a steam was rising over the top of the water. It took Declan a few minutes to figure out why: the cool water moving over hot mud. Birds were everywhere, and on the far side of the bay he could see something black stirring by the shore. Argos, too, had got wind of whatever it was and began to bark excitedly. The black shape stopped and looked in their direction. Declan could see it was a bear. He was thrilled. He’d heard about bears, had been warned about leaving his food outside, particularly in the autumn when the creek was full of salmon, but he hadn’t seen one until now. And yet it fulfilled every idea he had of bear. That rounded back, the broad shoulders, the way it swayed its head from side to side as it tried to figure them out on their bit of shore. After a few minutes of this, it turned and lumbered into the woods. Even from their distance across the bay, they could hear it moving in the dense brush.
“I’d better wash ye so, Argos, or it’s bait ye’ll be for that bear, smelling as ye do of rotten fish. Come on, lass, and we’ll soon have ye fresh.”
He took the pup and submerged her in the quick water of the creek. It was icy to his hands, and Argos yelped and squealed. He held her with one firm hand and quickly washed her fur with the other, taking care to ruffle the shoulders, which had taken most of the contact with the fish. Then he rubbed her down with a sack and poured a little of the oyster broth into her pan. She whimpered as she approached her meal, fearful of some other indignity, but soon was lapping up the good juice. When she had finished, she sighed deeply and curled up on her sack of bracken, falling into one of her immediate and profound sleeps.
The girl was at his door again in the same skimpy dress, telling him that her mother had located a better mattress for him and would he come to help them carry it over the marsh to his cabin?
He followed her lithe shape over the boardwalk and through the woods to the Neil farm. A dog, the mother of Argos he knew at a glance, came to greet them and sniffed suspiciously at her daughter, licking her face and then pushing her to the ground so she could sniff her underparts to determine where she’d been. It had not yet been long enough for her to forget her maternity although the pups had been given away. When she walked, her teats hung low still and occasional drops of milk fell from them to the ground.
Mrs. Neil was standing by the screen door, using a small broom to brush dust off a mattress leaning against her house. It was covered with blue and white ticking, faded and worn, but Declan could see that it promised far more comfort than the lumpy mattress he currently slept upon.
“I fo
und a couple of sheets, too, in the attic that I’d put there for winter mending and then forgot about, Mr. O’Malley. I’ve got them airing over the line now. I made a few patches, rather quickly I’m afraid, and they aren’t anything to look at, but you’re welcome to them. Two of the boys and Rose, who came for you, can help carry it back for you.” She stopped her vigorous brushing and put the broom down on a bench by the door. She called out towards the barn, and after a few moments two boys, an adoloscent and one who looked a year or two younger than Rose, came running. She introduce them as David and Tom. Declan gravely shook hands with them.
“No school, then, boys?” he asked.
One of them, David, shuffled his feet and blushed. “Our dad’s taken the boat and we’ve no way of getting over to the school.”
Their mother smiled and admitted she was happy to have them home to help her sort out the attic. “Help me fold these sheets now, Rose, and the three of you can help Mr. O’Malley get his new bed home.”
The woman and the girl held a sheet out and moved towards one another to bring the corners together. Declan had seen his own wife and daughters fold sheets that had wind-dried in the Irish morning. It was like a dance, each moving apart with an end of white cotton, then coming together to place palms against palms, a graceful smoothing of surfaces, stepping back to pull the length taut. He was moved to think that Mrs. Neil had sought out sheets for him when he had been prepared, even grateful, to sleep under coarse blankets for the rest of his days. He was taken back by the scene, somewhere, but where exactly he couldn’t say. He noticed that the bruising on Rose’s arms was fading, pale finished blossoms against the white of her skin.
He took one side of the mattress with Rose just behind him, the sheets carefully draped over her shoulders like a shawl, and the boys grasped the other side of the mattress. Over the marsh, along the trail of logs, the four of them quiet and careful as they moved up the hill where the arbutus trees hummed with their cargo of bees.
“Just so lads. We’ll put her here by the door until I can ready the room for it. I can wrestle it through the door to be sure so I’ll say thanks to ye for yer trouble. And thanks to ye, young Rose, for bringing the sheets so nicely folded. I’ll sleep like a king tonight, I’m thinking.”
He watched the children leaving his cabin, wishing he’d had a bar of chocolate to offer them, a few pennies even. They were as shy as fish, darting away through the dappled leaves. There had been children like them in his classroom; they’d come from hill farms and smelled of turf smoke, sheep. Yet he’d seen their eyes when he’d read to them of the Irish kings and knew there were dreams in them to take them through the days of sums, little food, moving sheep from one small stony field to another. He watched until the Neil childen had disappeared beyond the marsh, and then he busied himself with his bed.
Once it was arranged and organized, the old mattress put under the lean-to, Declan got out his books and puzzled over the Greek text. Some days he could make perfect sense of the words, their stern rhythms and harsh consonants. Other days he strained to remember, forgetting the tenses, the third declension. The passage he was working on concerned Nausikaa and her maidens. She had dreamed of her marriage linens and was moved to take her clothing to the river to be laundered.. How the language moved along so rhythmically and how difficult to find the equivalent. Now when they had cleaned all the stains ... Something like that, or would you specify garments as the object? became They spread them out in an orderly way (but was that felicitous enough? No, he would have to think about it some more) on the stones of the shore. And working over the text, he realized that he was smelling the fresh linen on his bed, having seen Mrs. Neil and young Rose taking the sheets from the line where the wind and sun had dried them clean. How lovely that a moment in a life could echo this richer poetry, he thought, and was taken back to Delphi where Eilis and the girls had carefully taken up the clean sheets from the gorse bushes that served as their drying rack, had moved in and out of the folding dance, fingers to fingers as they brought the edges together and smoothed the lengths of white linen.
And hearing the echo and its answer, the smell of clean linen, feminine arms holding cloth in Delphi, on the islands of ancient Greece, in the here and now on Oyster Bay, he knew for a moment a kind of joy in the remembering. Not this time the ache of all his previous memories of home, but a brief, piercing joy for the poetry of linen and women.
Chapter Two
The tide had come in and Declan was rowing his skiff over the moving water. It was early, the sky not fully lit, and quiet, with only the muttering of ducks in the reeds and the far-off moans of a cow waiting to be milked. Argos was standing in the prow of the skiff, her nose working the air.
He was rowing to the little community around the point to buy some provisions and to collect what mail might be waiting for him there. He had written away to a bookseller in Vancouver for an English translation of the Odyssey and a Greek grammar and lexicon, finding his project compelling enough that he wanted to make a good job of it. A student at the Bundorragha school had found his Greek text and a sheaf of papers containing his musings and attempts at versions of lines and had found a way to send them to Declan’s sister. She in turn had sent them on to him. At first he had had no idea of what to do with them.
He supposed at one time he had hoped to use them as a teaching tool, having the occasional bright light who needed something beyond what the standard curricula could offer, supposed that there might have been idle moments in the classroom when he had puzzled over the poem, though he could not now remember. But it was something to keep his mind active now. His Greek was rusty, and he wanted to use the English translation as a rough guide for the passages with which he had difficulty. He had never liked the version the priests had made available to students all those years ago when he was himself a young scholar. Lang, it had been, and he remembered it as prose, not poetry at all, and the wanderer spoke as an English magistrate might, or a minister of God, not as a king of Ithaka. But still it would be fine to have it at hand for making sense of the story when he got lost in the syntax, the datives and the genitives.
A small holding came into view, tucked among apple trees. A couple sitting on the porch of the house waved to him and called out would he like a cup of coffee? He rowed in to shore and pulled his skiff up onto the shingle. The man came down to the shore to help him, introducing himself as MacIsaac. “And no need to tell me who you are, you’re the Irishman settled into the Neils’ cabin. O’Malley, isn’t it?”
“Aye, and ye’ve a Scottish burr yerself. I’m very pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow Gael.”
MacIsaac told him, as they walked up to the house, that he’d come to the community twenty years earlier, having been left the little farm by an uncle who’d died a childless bachelor.
“It was an opportunity for us, Jeannie and I. We came out from Scotland as newlyweds. I worked on the docks in Vancouver but I missed a wee bit of land and this was a grand place to raise our boys.”
Jeannie MacIsaac had a cup of coffee waiting on the porch where some wicker chairs were gathered in a comfortable grouping. She shook Declan’s hand warmly and moved a cat from a rocking chair so he could sit down by a tray with a jug of cream and a small bowl of sugar. The cat sat a small distance away, looked balefully at them, and began washing itself although its tabby coat gleamed. Argos glanced briefly at the cat and realized it was lord of the demesne, or lady, and that a mere dog would be no match for such confidence. She curled at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch and settled into a deep sleep as though a short row had tired her out completely.
It was pleasant to sit in the early sun with the MacIsaacs and to hear them talk of their apples and lambs while the scent of blossoms wafted around them. They told Declan that their boys had gone off to work in Vancouver but that the youngest was hoping to return to the community to fish.
“He wanted the bright lights and nothing would keep him home but now he’s yearn
ing for the company of the lads he grew up with. He’s got MacKay over at Whiskey Slough building him a small gill-netter and he’s working around the clock in the city to pay for it. His mother will be happy to know he’s close again.”
Jeannie MacIsaac smiled and touched her husband’s arm. “And you won’t be, my dear?”
Declan asked them about the stakes he had seen in the mud at low tide, how firmly they had been planted, impossible to budge. MacIsaac knew their story.
“My uncle came here first in 1890, when the Indians still lived at your end of the bay. They fished here and those stakes were part of a system they used to trap salmon before they entered the creeks to spawn. Here, let me just show you the pile-driver my uncle found.”
He reached down to a stone lying amongst others on the deck and lifted it up. It was wedge-shaped, with a face carved into one flat surface and two grooves worked into the underside. Raising it up, he showed Declan how it would have been used to pound stakes into the mud bottom of the bay, or anywhere else for that matter; the user’s thumbs fit neatly into the depressions created by the eyes, and the fingers used the grooves on the underside for gripping.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 3