Rose nodded. “I’d better get back, Mr. O’Malley, or my mum will worry. Thank you for the tea and the story.”
“They are a perfect pair, Rose, I’m thinking. Will ye come again?” He suddenly found himself hoping she would say yes.
“I’d love to. I’m sure my mum won’t mind. Goodbye.”
Declan watched Rose walk over the bluff with its crown of arbutus and disappear into a fringe of young cedars. He thought how nice it was to have a young girl to talk to, a girl the age his own had been, one foot in childhood and one in the rich sea of womanhood, uncertain of its tides and dangers. What was it that Nausikaa had been called in the poem? Maiden of the white arms ... Not an epithet for a child, exactly, and yet the princess cavorted with her maids at the river, throwing a ball in a carefree game until it landed in a stream, which woke the naked Odysseus. That was the part he would look at again.
Chapter Three
He had asked Rose to take him to see the canoe. The idea of it, buried with its chief, had been in his mind ever since he’d first heard the story.
They walked up past the farmstead to dense brush—salal, mostly, but trailing bramble and brittle huckleberry made the going difficult. Rose led the way and pushed through the brush until she was stopped short by the bulky shape of the canoe. Declan had never seen anything like it. It looked to have been carved from a single tree and had an elegant prow, shapely, but now rotting and split. When Declan reached to touch the side of the canoe, a little of the side came away like fragile paper. He wondered how long it had been buried in the earth. Even now the earth was doing its best to reclaim it, embracing it with sinuous vines of bramble and sending vigorous growth of salal up through holes in the bilge, displacing the thwarts.
“The skeleton was lying in it like this,” Rose told him, indicating how the body had been positioned. “His hands were crossed over his chest and he had a basket at his feet and a big stone club with a fish carved into it. My father kept the club but the basket just crumbled away.”
Remnants of red and black pigment showed that the canoe had been decorated inside as well as outside. Looking closely, Declan could see that the hull had been pierced with holes in a regular pattern, for drainage he supposed. There was a pungent smell of rotting cedar, and he could see that an animal, perhaps a field mouse, had constructed a small nest of dried grasses in a protected area under one of the thwarts.
Declan was moved to see the canoe at rest in the bush. He escorted Rose back to her home and then continued on to his own cabin, thinking about the vessel and its former occupant. It struck him as immeasurably lonely, the idea of being buried alone in a boat without the company of one’s family around. There had been finds in his own country, mounds of earth or sometimes cists that contained tombs with single skeletons carried by wagons, some jewellery and jars of wine and tools arranged at their feet. Such belief in the afterlife, he marvelled, and yet what was found was cold bones, wooden wheels, a dagger, with no sign nor evidence of the soul’s ascension. He remembered his rambles as a boy in the hills surrounding Delphi and coming across the Famine cabins with their communal graves nearby, subsequent generations taking the time, if money was available, to erect a stone to acknowledge who lay there. Some of the old townlands had completely disappeared, gone from the maps, having lost their entire populations to hunger, fever, or those dreadful ships. There had been families living in folds of the earth, tucked into ravines, who were gone with hardly a trace: a wisp in an aging memory, initials carved in the bark of a tree, a placement of stones to assist one’s footing on a steep ridge. And yet what would become of him should he die here, so far from his own dead, or the living that had known him? He sighed deeply and went inside to work on his text.
The Greek alphabet reminded him of bird tracks. The sigma, Σ, for instance, and the gamma, Γ, particularly in its lower case, γ. He practised writing the alphabet, wanting the ease and speed of his youth. It was good to have the new texts to consult. The grammar, by Goodwin, was the one they had used at school. The introduction was opinionated but humane, containing moments of humour even, which Declan responded to by wanting to learn the language well. “My own efforts,” declared Goodwin, in commenting on pronunciation, “have been exerted merely towards bringing some order out of this chaos.” And was that not something of Declan’s own intention? To have a project to take up the attentions of one’s heart and mind? When he’d begun his scribbles all those months ago, years by now, in the Bundorragha schoolhouse, it had been a tentative way to take a long view of a life, to find correspondences outside the daily routines. A man’s love for his wife, the complexities of homecoming, a lexicon for courage and honour, the importance of paternity: he hoped to find a way to share these with his students, or for the occasional student who shone with a fierce light and who needed something beyond the parsing of sentences and memorizing of Irish kings, a few equations to help a man account for corn.
He couldn’t get the canoe out of his mind. How it lay at rest in the heavy growth of salal like a fallen idol, knitted into a shroud of vines. The smell of it, a faint resiny odour at the back of rot, a stronger reek that hit you like the back end of a skunk or the plants with the golden lanterns that smelled exactly the same. He went back to the bush again, but it was hard to get a sense of the canoe’s proportions with the tangle of plants all around it. Going a little further to try to find a place from which he could see it entire, he came upon a hillock, covered with pale mosses and ringed with pines. It overlooked the bay, falling away from the clearing in a steep cliff, although the way up from the bush was gradual and clear. Wildflowers grew in a splendid profusion. It would not be difficult to drag the canoe up the hill if he had some help—and permission, of course. The Neil lads, for instance. He decided to ask their father if he might move the canoe, telling Neil he’d like to examine it and make some notes about its construction. He felt an explanation was necessary even though he didn’t know himself why he wanted to move it.
Neil was repairing a piece of machinery outside his barn. He barely looked up. “Go ahead, I’ve no use for it. I’ll get my boys to help you with it. It was a heavy bugger to drag there in the first place, and I’m thinking it’ll be waterlogged for sure by now.”
The boys accompanied Declan into the bush with several coils of rope. David, the older boy, looked to be about fifteen and was built sturdily. Tom, whom Declan had already surmised was younger than Rose by a year or two, was a slighter boy, thin legs coming out of wellingtons several sizes too large from the look of it. Dogs followed them, Argos dancing and skittering for the pleasure of being with others, and then Rose came running to the bush, wanting to see whatever it was they were going to do. Declan began to drag the vines away from the wood, pulling and loosening until the canoe was free. David wrapped a rope around the hull, knotting it securely, and then climbed the slope of the hill, stopping as he climbed to knot another length of rope to it to give him enough to take to the trunk of one of the sturdy pines. With Declan, Tom, and Rose pushing, it was a matter of winching the canoe up the slope, using the tree’s strength to take the bulk of the weight. The boys were very strong, trading positions at one point so that Tom continued the work of winching that his brother had begun, his skinny arms straining as he pulled the rope. There was a natural space for the canoe between the pines, and with Declan’s direction they managed to set it upright with the prow facing the bay. They sat on the dry moss and wiped their brows, puffing a little as the four of them looked out to Oyster Bay where a family of Canada geese swam in the eelgrass. One of the boys, David, threw a stone down, landing it in the water with a tiny splash. The geese barely paused in their feeding. Then Tom tried with a stone and missed. The dogs, who had collapsed in the moss after running up and down the slope as the canoe was winched up its face, looked up and whined a little.
“Ye’ve done a grand job, lads. Thanks very much.”
The boys nodded shyly and ran down the easy slope in their great rubber boots,
Tom tripping over his feet, then righting himself and catching up with his brother before they disappeared into the bush. Rose lingered a moment longer but then followed them, dogs behind her, while Argos stayed with Declan, watching with her ears alert and a tiny moan in her throat. Perhaps she had known after all that she had been among her tribe.
Well, now what? Declan thought to himself, and then aloud to Argos. The canoe looked expectant, powerful in its upright position, although it looked precarious, too. He found some branches of fallen pine and wedged them under the canoe to keep it stable; pushing against it, he was pleased it didn’t budge. The sun was warm, and he could hear bees in the flowers that bloomed on the bluff. In his mind’s eye, he was seeing the skeleton recumbant in the boat. Testing the stability of the canoe again, he found himself climbing into it and sitting on the one thwart that was still intact. It was slick with slime. He lay back against the damp wood and closed his eyes. It was as though he floated in calm waters, the sound of bees and water birds in the distance, a few lazy flies landing on his face.
Sound of bees, water birds, Argos snoring in the warm moss ... Declan hadn’t realized he was asleep until he woke in a daze, wondering where he was. He had been dreaming of Odysseus, washed up among the Phaiakians, telling his story to the assembled crowd. Harps, birdsong, the odour of roasting meat, honeyed wine ... he shook his head to clear it. His neck ached, but he felt surprisingly rested. Where was the company of kings and princesses to whom he could tell of his loss, his journey, his discovery of something like peace at the end of the world? Aye, that was the thing. You could not call Neil a king, although his wife had dignity in spades, and the girl, well, Rose was a natural princess, equal in her way to Nausikaa at the river with her handmaidens. He remembered the way she and her mother had lifted and folded the sheets they had laundered for his bed, the harmony of their arms, and the intensity of her listening as he told her the story of Persephone, a maiden of the white arms, and her bridegroom.
He left the canoe perched on its bluff, hoping it would dry out in the sunlight, and made his way through the brush to his cabin, his dog at his heels like a shadow. He could smell the rotting cedar on his hands and body, not an unpleasant odour but, like the forest, living and dead at the same time. There were logs he would come upon, big fellas like the one that had become the canoe, fallen in the dense woods. Sometimes he would see new sprouts coming from the roots, while in the length of decaying log small trees were growing, and ferns, salal, tall bushes of huckleberry, weird fungus. He remembered reading in the newspaper at home an account of men discovering a fifty-foot canoe at Lurgan, in County Galway—they’d been cutting turf and had come up against an enormous length of what they first thought was bog oak. The newspaper had a grainy photograph of the canoe being carried through the streets, a dozen men holding it upside down with their heads concealed in its ancient interior. That could happen here, he imagined, though not in a bog, but a man navigating these dense forests might come up against a canoe, partly hidden by ferns, and pass it by, thinking it a fallen tree.
A clipping arrived in the mail from Galway, sent by a cousin, the crisp black letters describing an attack in a village by a group of Black and Tans, the men brought from Britain as reinforcements for the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were a hard bunch, young men returned from four years of trench warfare who had not found a place for themselves in post-war Britain. So much of their work was conducted at night—their Crossley tenders roaring up to a house and men leaping off, hammering on doors with their weapons, searching rooms while a terrified family watched. Rumours of their activities had arrived even in Delphi, and then the men themselves, a sight in their khaki uniforms with the dark hats and belts of the constabulary. The clipping described a night of drinking at the village pub and then a devastating aftermath—a house burned, two men shot, others shackled and loaded into the armoured car to be taken to a barracks where one was hung and several mutilated. The cousin’s letter asked Declan to take note of the name of the man hung—it was their own, O’Malley, Cathal O’Malley, another cousin, whom Declan remembered as a soft-eyed youth, a reader of sagas. The thought of young Cathal, grown to manhood but still a dreamer, strung from a barracks beam by rough rope, prodded by drunken thugs acting in the name of British law, made him weep with despair.
A broken man, he had walked away from his small holding with its blackened walls, its lonesome chimney, a scattering of rooks rising from the byre, the little hill of graves. He had not been able to enter the ruin, could not feel the presence of his women in the rubble and ash that was all that remained of their home. Alive, Eilis had coaxed such flowers from the soil of the yard—radiant hollyhocks, roses grown from slips given her by other women, delphiniums that drank the damp air and grew blue as the sky on a clear day. In the fullness of time, in a peaceful country, if Eilis had died before him, Declan would have had her buried in the churchyard nearby and lived out his days in the cabin they had made into their home; but the thought of lingering a moment longer than he had to on such a violated ground made him ill. The parish priest had come to talk to him, a one-eyed man who it was rumoured communicated with birds, and spoke of forgiveness, the Black and Tans’ foul hearts a result of their own time in France, their souls brutalized by the horrors of the Great War. But forgiveness was not possible, nor was revenge. The priest might have been talking to a bucket, hollow and empty.
The other house burned in the area, the big house owned by an old Anglo-Irish clan, well, that family had fled, too. The daughter and son of that household were enrolled in schools in London, their father not wanting anything to do with the country of his birth until the Troubles had been settled. He wrote angry letters to the newspapers, denouncing violence. Declan heard of these things in a haze of his own grief.
Money was pressed into his hands by well-wishers, and he was urged to make himself scarce. As if he was not scarce enough, a man alone after husbandhood and fatherhood, heart in tatters, eyes scoured by the salt of constant tears. He walked most of the way to Galway and found shelter among distant relations who gave him a bed and raised the money for a passage away. Papers were arranged. He was spirited to Cork, where he was cared for by kind strangers for more than six months until the day came when he was put on a boat and given a list of names of those who would help him on the other side. It was rumoured that Michael Collins himself had opened his pockets.
He had no recollection of the voyage, apart from sickness due to the turbulent waters, the sound of vomiting and the moans of those around him. He was met in New Jersey by a cousin of his mother’s who took him to her daughter’s home. He spent weeks not rising from the bed except to find his frail way to the toilet. He would not have the curtain drawn, would not leave the room to enter into the lively discourse of the family, his own kin. He kept a blanket pulled up to his shoulders and slept; when he woke, he would shake with despair until he tired himself enough to sleep. Broth was brought to him, little cakes, mugs of tea. The nightmares were dreadful. He imagined everything that must have happened while he lay in the farm yard, unconscious from the beating. His daughters screamed from windows, Eilis called for him until she was hoarse from the strain and the smoke. The pig ran from the yard, the bristles on its back carrying flames like the coming of angels.
One morning he woke and told the family that he wanted to go to the West Coast and what was the most economical way to get there? On a different ocean he wouldn’t be kept awake by the distant crooning of water that knew everything that happened to him, the undertow muttering of murder, of grief, a sky that had watched impassively, pierced by late stars, while his daughters burned. A train, long passages of darkness, pauses in dirty cities, mornings crossing plains that stretched out from the tracks like golden water, then arrival in a jaunty town on the coast. In a library, he’d studied a globe, running his finger up the line that was the Pacific coast, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his blind finger had found the Sechelt Peninsula, north of Vancouver. Che
cking maps, he discovered a tiny community nestled in one of the bays. He’d travelled up on a boat with crates of seed oysters that rested in the cool darkness of the boat’s hold; they were attended by a boy who kept lowering a bucket into the ocean to dampen the sacking that covered the wooden boxes. No one asked questions when Declan arrived at the store on the long-legged pilings but directed him to the Neils, who had an empty cabin. When he said he had no means to get there, he was given a skiff that had belonged to a man lost on the fields of France and told he could pay a few dollars for it later if he was able.
“What is that white flower, like wild garlic, or maybe a lily, that grows on the dry bluff?” Declan asked Mrs. Neil. He had been working on a passage from the poem and had come to the lines where Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades. He puzzled over the lines, wondering how to find words for the sadness and anger in Achilles.
And reading ahead, he had come to the lines where Achilles strides off across the fields of asphodel. He remembered the priest, the one who had been to Greece, telling the class that asphodel was known as the food of the dead. It was a lily, and bulbs of it would be planted near tombs. A white flower, as befits the pale skin of the dead.
She was peeling potatoes on a bench by her door, her apron covered with curls of brown skin, which she then flung to the hens. Eilis had done this, too, on days when the sun would lure a woman from her kitchen to the outdoors. Declan was holding the milk jug but wanted to prolong the moment, to watch a handsome woman’s hands deftly scrape a knife across the surface of a potato without having to look. A tendril of brown hair had loosened itself from her bun and graced the side of her face.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 5