“My uncle was told it was a dogfish. I think it’s ingenious myself and I’ve used it when fencing areas for my sheep. This rocky soil is murder for sinking fence posts!”
They discussed the fish-traps a little more, how effective they must have been in gathering the large numbers of salmon the Indians needed for winter use, MacIsaac saying that the bay fairly boiled with fish in the fall, returning to the various feeder creeks to spawn. Declan finished his coffee and went on his way, having assured the couple he’d bring back their mail. He felt calmed by his visit with them. Their affection for one another and their home was a balm, scented with apple blossom on a warm spring day.
Out onto the bay again, the skiff slicing through the water easily. Declan had never seen forests like these that grew right down to the sea’s edge, although the old stories told of Irish forests full of elk and wolves. In the poems about the the wild man of the woods, Suibhne, the speaker sang of oaks and hazels, blackthorns, yews draped with ivy, and brown stags belling from the mountains. In his youth, Declan had walked in planted forests, and to be sure there were wooded glens, like those in the Erriff Valley, but he’d never seen trees like these. Sometimes, rowing past these wild headlands to the fishing grounds, he had seen deer walking across the sand. And the trees were extraordinary: cedars with their palmate fronds, the giant they called a Douglas fir, pines, prickly spruce. Often there’d be no trees at all near the shore but stumps so wide your mind had a hard time imagining the tree that had been taken down. Ledges were cut into the sides of the stumps, like stairs to the heavens, where springboards had rested so loggers could stand with their gut-fiddles, felling the trees to the ground like gods.
The store was perched on pilings that walked out into the bay like a long-legged shore bird, one of them bent at the elbow and braced with a splint of cedar. Men were always gathered on the verandah, smoking, their gear piled up around them, or boxes of eggs, or brown jugs that Declan knew held the local spirits. On a mail day, more than the usual number clustered here, waiting for the steamship to announce itself around the headland. When it appeared, most of the men descended to the wharf steps to help with the lines. Declan did not join them but entered the store. There was a smell, always, of wax used on the wide floor boards, strong cheese, smoked fish, blood (if it was a day the storekeeper hung a new side of beef on the hooks suspended from the ceiling joists), cabbages, and an acrid burnt odour that Declan eventually understood to be coffee in a scorched pot which steamed and frothed on the back of the woodstove. He could not imagine drinking it, but the storekeeper was never without a cup.
He had his list—a bucket of lard, a sack of onions, tea, hardtack for his fishing days (as he found his own soda bread did not travel well but grew mould in its wrapping before he could eat it), a few oranges, a bag of turnips.
“If you can wait awhile, O’Malley, I’ll sort through the mail bag once it’s come up from the boat and see what’s there for you. Certainly you can take the MacIsaacs’ mail too. And some beef for stew, you say? It won’t be a minute.” The storekeeper used a huge knife to hack off a chunk of meat, which he then diced, weighed, and wrapped in brown paper that he tied with cord hanging from a spool.
While his order was being filled, Declan wandered the aisles of the store, pausing to look at the tins of hair pomade, big bars of Sunlight soap, boxes of fishing tackle, bins of dusty vegetables, and the grey woolen overshirts the fishermen in the area all favoured. He settled with the storekeeper, packed his groceries and the packet of letters, and returned to his skiff, keeping wide of the steamship, which had docked with a host of volunteers securing its lines; they were now watching a horse, its eyes covered with a blindfold, being lowered to the wharf in a canvas sling.
Coming back with a good wind behind him, Declan eased on the rowing to watch a pair of geese guarding a nest on one of the rocky islets at the mouth of his bay. He had heard they mated for life, and there was a story told of a goose who followed his wounded mate, patient in the sky, while she walked with her broken wing. How did the story end? He couldn’t remember. But these geese watched him, alert to his movements, ready to challenge him should he enter their nursery. He called to them that they had nothing to fear from him and chuckled as they hissed and gabbled back.
At the MacIsaac farm, he was offered a dram for his trouble. “It was no trouble at all, I assure ye,” he told them, handing their letters over and accepting a glass with a generous measure of whiskey. The men raised their glasses to toast, in Gaelic, each to the other’s surprise. Despite differences in accent and emphasis, they could understand each other, though MacIsaac confessed he had forgotten more of his parents’ language than he’d retained.
“I have enough yet for toasts and cursing and the occasional song,” he said cheerfully, downing his dram. It was redolent of peat and oak, a distillation of weather, sweet water, and barley malt. “I mind to share a whiskey now and then with someone who knows the old language. Come again!”
As they approached World’s End, Argos began to whimper and moan. Her hackles rose, and Declan heard growls coming from her throat, not yet articulated in her mouth. He followed her looking as best he could and was startled to see a dark shape reaching for his herring rake. By now Argos was barking, her voice full and fearsome. The shape turned to see what made such a noise, and Declan recognized the bear. He used his oars to steady the boat, to push against the movement of the tide so that they remained the short distance from the shore. The bear abandoned its attentions to the rake, raising its head to the air, shaking it from side to side, sniffing for them on the wind. Argos barked and scrambled for a foothold on the gunwales in order to jump from the boat, but Declan ordered her to sit. He had never seen a bear so close. He wanted to look at it as long as possible, memorize the heavy head and small eyes, the glossy coat hanging from the body like a cloak several sizes too large. The bear made a noise, as though clacking its teeth together, then turned and ambled away, rake abandoned. Declan waited for it to disappear into the woods before bringing the boat into shore.
The rake still leaned against the cabin. What had been the attraction, he wondered. He brought the tines close to his face and sniffed them. Fish. Of course. Fish had brought the bear. Although he always cleaned his fishing gear when he returned from the water, the smell of the herring impaled on the rake for bait would remain. But surely a bear would not return for the smell if there was no actual fish for it eat? Judging from the scats he found near the creek, the bear was feeding on grasses anyway. Great dark piles of scat, threaded through with long strands of undigested grass, weighted with seedy heads. The Neils told him that there would be many bears on the estuary in the fall when the salmon were running. That made sense, an animal the size of the one he had just seen feeding on salmon. But he marvelled at the thought of such a large beast sustaining itself on grass. Idly he pulled on the ripe head of a tall stalk of grass growing near the rake. The stem came free from its sheath and he chewed on the tender end of it contemplatively. It tasted mild and sweet. He chewed a little further up. It was coarser, more fibrous. But the tender part? He could see making a simple meal of those, maybe finishing up with a handful or two of ripe berries. He laughed out loud to think he shared such a thing in common with a bear.
The girl was standing by his open door. He’d looked up from his books to ease out a kink in his neck and had seen her there, looking in. On her face was an expression of intense curiosity, a palpable yearning. He followed her eyes to the pile of books on his table.
“Rose! Have ye been there long? I’m sorry to have been so absorbed that I did not notice ye until now.”
She told him not long, she’d not been there long, but had come to ask if the bedding had been enough. Her mother could provide more blankets if he needed them.
“Indeed what I have is grand. Yer mother has been very kind to think of my comfort as she has, with all her tasks for the doing. Now, can I give ye a cup of tea?”
She came in, moving i
n her shy way to one of the stumps which served as chairs. Declan found the extra mug and poured from the pot of tea stewing on the woodstove. At her nod, he poured in a little milk. He followed her eyes to the small stack of books on the table, his pen and bottle of ink to one side.
“It’s the story again, Rose. I told ye the other time how it was a world unto itself and how true that is! I sent for a few books to make my work with it easier and I collected them off the steamship this morning. Would ye like to see them?”
He handed her the little volume he had ordered on a whim, Tales of Ancient Greece, by Sir George W. Cox. It was a pretty book, bound in blue cloth with gold stamping on the spine. Rose held it as though it were alive, carefully, and with great attention. She put it to her face and smelled the cloth, inhaling deeply, her eyes closed. She opened the book to the title page and ran her index finger gently over the illustration bordering the text—cherubic faces and bunches of grapes and winged fairies.
“That’s a ‘t’,” she said reverently, touching the ornate initial beginning the quote, This is fairy gold, boy; and twill prove so.
“Aye, ’tis, Rose. And can ye read any more of it?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head and handed the book back. Taking up her mug, she sipped her tea, glancing at the papers on the table. It was very quiet in the cabin, only a droning of bees in the thimbleberry bushes outside the door to punctuate the still air. She had the look of one of his daughters when taking a pause between tasks, able to deeply relax at a moment’s notice.
“Will I read one of the stories to ye, Rose?” Declan suggested, moved at the sight of her in his cabin, his books all around and her not being able to read them. Her reverence for the Cox made him want to give her something, and there was no point in sending her home with a book. Stories were all he could think to offer.
She smiled her assent. Almost at random, he chose “The Sorrow of Demeter,” remembering incompletely the myth of the corn goddess and her young daughter.
In the fields of Enna, in the happy island of Sicily, the beautiful Persephone was playing with the girls who lived there with her. She was the daughter of the Lady Demeter, and everyone loved them both, for Demeter was good and kind to all, and no one could be more gentle and merry than Persephone.
Rose sighed deeply and rested her cheek against her clasped hands. Declan would learn that she loved being read to; it was one of her favourite things. Mostly her mother was too busy, she told him, but sometimes, particularly if Rose was ill, she would sit on the bed with one of the mildewy books that she’d brought from her childhood home in Glengarry County and read a story while stroking Rose’s hair.
She and her companions were gathering flowers from the field to make crowns for their long flowing hair. They had picked many roses and lilies and hyacinths which grew in clusters around them ...
“We do that, Mr. O’Malley! My sister taught me how to make a chain of daisies by splitting their stems with my fingernail! I’ve never tried roses, although when we pick them for Mum, they fall apart in our hands. The wild ones, I mean. And there are lilies here, too, the orange ones. Those girls are like us!”
She was very animated, her hands touching her head as though placing a crown of wildflowers upon it, her face bright with excitement. Declan was moved to see what the telling of a story could do to a shy girl, a girl left on shore while her brothers and sister sailed off to school, a girl whose arms bloomed with someone’s anger.
“To be sure, Rose. And isn’t that the beauty of a story, that sometimes we feel as though it is our story that’s being told? But listen, now, because what happens next is not what you’d know about, I’m thinking.”
... the earth opened, and a chariot stood before her drawn by four coal black horses; and in the chariot there was a man with a dark and solemn face, which looked as though he could never smile, and as though he had never been happy. In a moment he got out of his chariot, seized Persephone around the waist, and put her on the seat by his side. Then he touched the horses with his whip, and they drew the chariot down into the great gulf, and the earth closed over them again.
Rose’s face was horror-struck. “Mr. O’Malley, what happens to her? Do you really mean to say that the horses take them underground?”
“Ah, Rose, in these stories we are told many things. How much of it is true, well, that’s the thing we don’t know. We are told things to make us feel a certain way, to create a certain mood, to explain things in a particular way. Do ye know the meaning of the word metaphor?”
Rose shook her head.
“Well, it is when ye use words or phrases that everyone understands to mean certain things, ye use them to make a thing understood in a new or different way. If I told ye that sun was a globe of golden glass, well, ye’d know I didn’t really mean that it was, in fact, but ye might take another look at the sun and see it again, with fresh eyes. Do ye see what I mean?”
“I think so,” she said, squinting her eyes and looking at the sun, which was making its way towards the western sky.
“To continue with suns, the ancient Greeks, whom these stories are about, would talk of the sun as something alive that was driven across the sky by a fella called Helios who had a chariot and some special oxen. That little story is a metaphor, really, to explain the passage of the sun from when it rises in the eastern sky to where it sets in the west, where we can see it, each day.”
Declan looked at Rose to see if she was ready to hear the rest of the story. She was far away, gazing out the window. She sighed, and then turned to face him. “Mr. O’Malley, I know a story that’s a bit like the one you’ve been reading me. Only it’s true. All of it.”
“Will ye tell it to me?”
She took a deep breath. “Where we live used to belong to the Indians. They still come up the bay in their canoes sometimes because they think this part here is special. One of them, a lady called Lucy, comes to have tea with my mum and she says her people began here, like we say that Adam and Eve began in a garden called Eden. But none of the Indians have lived here for quite a long time. My dad has pigs, you’ve seen them, and when he wants an area cleared, he lets the pigs run free. They are good at clearing land because they eat all the tough leaves and vines, and they dig stuff up, roots and such.”
“Aye, their feet are like small spades so,” said Declan, remembering his own pig.
“Well, one day a few years ago, in spring, the pigs dug up a canoe with a skeleton in it. My sister, Martha, saw it first and ran to the house to get my dad. He thought it was funny and let the pigs have the ribs to chew. He rolled the canoe over into the woods—I can show you what’s left of it one day—and took the skeleton off; we didn’t see where. Martha had nightmares about it.”
“Aye, she would, she would.” And then he wondered if he would also dream of the pigs at work on the long ribs of a man found dead in the earth.
“When Lucy came the next time, my mum asked her about it and she said it must’ve been a chief from a long time ago, because sometimes they were buried in their canoes with important stuff for them to use on the way to Heaven. It made it seem so wicked that the pigs would dig it up and eat the bones. My mum never told Lucy that part. Do you think it was wicked, Mr. O’Malley?” She seemed so concerned about this that Declan reassured her, saying that the dead man’s soul would have long departed and that Lucy would have known this.
“Don’t worry yerself so, Rose, but tell me more of the story.”
She smiled at him, grateful for his understanding, and continued. “So then it was fall and my dad put our vegetables in the root cellar. Potatoes from the new area that the pigs had cleared and the other stuff we eat all winter. Turnips and beets that he buries in sand, and cabbages and onions. One dark night, well, it wouldn’t have been night really but it gets dark early in winter, he told my sister and me to go to the root cellar under the back part of the house to bring up potatoes for the supper. We hate going in there because it’s mostly underground and there a
re spiderwebs and even rats sometimes. But my sister took a candle and we kept together. We were leaning into the potato bin when we heard this awful sound, like sticks clattering, and my sister held up the candle. There was a skeleton waving its arms around! We screamed and dropped the potatoes and the candle, and we ran as fast as we could around to the kitchen door.”
“Ah, ye poor lasses. Ye’d have been terrified, of course!” Closing his own eyes for moment, he saw the skeleton rise up, its bones clattering.
“My sister was screaming and crying—my mother says she’s nervy—and I was afraid that the skeleton would follow us. But then my dad was standing in the doorway, laughing, and he almost never laughs. My mother calmed my sister down, and when my father stopped laughing he told us that he’d fastened strings to the canoe skeleton’s arm bones and then ran the strings up into his bedroom, which is right above the root cellar. So he could jiggle the arms by pulling the strings. My sister had bad dreams for weeks—I know because we sleep in the same bed—and she wouldn’t speak to my father, which made him really mad. My mother was mad at him too, but then he hit Martha and told her to snap out of it so we tried to forget.”
What a brute the man was, thought Declan, to frighten his daughters so. He remembered the bruises on Rose’s arms as he watched her digging for clams and folding the sheets. Aloud, he told her that the story was an interesting one and she’d told it well. He could see what she’d described, and he was sorry to hear that her sister had been so troubled by the event. His eyes must have revealed his distaste for a man who would strike a child because Rose quickly responded.
“She’s fine now, sir, and my father didn’t really hit her hard, and later he brought her a moonsnail shell for her collection, without a single chip off it, but don’t you see that the stories are the same in a way?”
“Oh, aye. And in this story I’m working on, there’s a woman, ye might call her a witch more rightly, who turns some men into pigs who then cry human tears. Our man Odysseus is saved from her magic by carrying a little sprig of wild onion within his clothing. So pigs, and the ground opening, and a king coming up from under the earth, from Greece to this Pacific. And indeed I’d like to see that canoe one day, if ye’d show me.”
A Man in a Distant Field Page 4