“Was it growing among other plants? Blue-flowered ones I’m thinking of in particular.”
He remembered that it had been. And she told him it was the death camas, to be avoided. The blue ones, she said, were also camas and the Native people ate the bulbs that produced them, drying huge quantities of them. But the white ones were poisonous, sheep each year were lost to them.
“Two small bulbs of it, Mr. O’Malley, contain enough of the poison to kill a person. As for the sheep, I’ve no idea of how many it would take. Their stomachs are certainly more resilient than our own!”
So not unlike asphodel then, he thought—a plant echoing the pallor of Achilles. He couldn’t remember poisonous plants in his own childhood or with Eilis raising their girls. Mushrooms, certainly. There were some they collected for the table—the mushroom called St. George and field mushrooms which they had with their breakfast sometimes when the person up early to milk the cow found scatterings of them in the pasture—but mostly they were to be avoided: the red ones with white warty blotches that could be used to kill flies, tiny parasols that grew in the fields among the tasty ones and which paralyzed at a touch to the tongue, or so it was rumoured. He didn’t remember flowers, though, had no memory of those that might have killed a person or animal.
Back from the Neils’ with a pan of potatoes to use for seed, he mused about what he had learned. I have put the canoe in a field of deadly flowers, he thought. Then, moving the poem aside, he took out his fishing gear to polish his spoons.
Chapter Four
Rose was at the door. It was late May, and the sun was very warm. Leaves were every shade of green on the trees overhanging the creek, thimbleberries were nearing the end of their blossoming, and the bay was filled with water birds and their young—mergansers, geese, a single loon, golden-eye. There was a hum of industry in the air, of birds at the work of feeding, boats in the far water, a man shouting at the team of horses pulling a plough through the fields of a farm nearly half a mile away.
“Rose, come in. I’ve just made bread and am about to cut it. Would ye like to try a wedge?”
She smiled and nodded, putting the milk down on the table. She took the bread he offered, dotted with currants and spread liberally with her mother’s butter. Declan watched her take small bites, a few crumbs lingering on her mouth. She pronounced it delicious.
“Have ye come for a story?” Declan asked. Rose had begun to visit him often, bringing the milk or messages from her mother, the occasional letter after a trip had been made to the store. He liked her obvious pleasure when he opened Tales of Ancient Greece or else recounted the part of the Odyssey he was working on when she arrived. Stories made her eyes glow, made her talkative, responding with an account of a boat trip to Nelson Island in a storm or the time her father came home from a logging camp up past Minstel Island with wolf cubs in his skiff, one of them going on to become the mother of the mother of Argos. Declan noted how she liked to hold the books, too, and how she would examine the pages. Sometimes she would announce she had found a certain letter and once her name tucked into a paragraph about flowers, but mostly Declan thought the markings must look the castings of lugworms on the sand looked to him; he knew what they were but not the why and the how of them. Whether they were marks simply of passing or a trail to discover and follow.
“Mr. O’Malley, would you tell something about Ireland, where you come from?”
The simplicity of her request pierced his heart like a flint. He felt the pain of it, couldn’t breathe for a moment. Ireland. He could smell the Irish earth he had shovelled over the pine boxes with his potato spade, rich and boggy. Sprays of cowslips, wood sorrel and gorse, carefully arranged on the mound. He closed his eyes to take his bearings, his head spinning with memories like a compass in the presence of a disconcerting metal. When he opened them, Rose was sitting at the table still, eating her soda bread and butter, waiting for him to begin. So he did.
He told her about the area where he’d been born, Delphi, and how there was a temple in Greece with the same name; his Delphi had been named so by the Marquess of Sligo, who had travelled to Greece with a famous English poet, Lord Byron, and had seen the ancient temple in the bowl of mountain, which reminded him of the area where he’d built a hunting lodge. The Irish Delphi was actually not even a village at all but a townland, a collection of farms where the same families had lived for centuries. Rocky soil, stone walls defining fields, the boreens leading from one small holding to the next, from Tullaglas to Ardmor, winding along the shores of Dhulough, Fin Lough, and the Glenummera River and back into ravines pleated with rock and the odd surprising house built into the side of the hill. As a child, Declan had explored the country surrounding his family’s farm with an enthralled curiosity, returning to his hearth with questions. His parents, born Gaelic speakers who acquired English as a slightly unsavoury but necessary second language, were full of the stories of the townland and its families. Their English used a Gaelic syntax, the past being spoken of in the present, and for years he was puzzled as to whether Padraig Og was an uncle or the brother of a great-great-grandparent, whether the landlord of the area, the Marquess, whose hunting lodge provided work for some local families, was given land directly by Cromwell or was a descendant of your man. Old grudges, old loyalties—they were one and the same. If his family had had reason to shun the Joyces three generations earlier, there was no reason for the present family to speak to a contemporary Joyce.
“What’s Gaelic, Mr. O’Malley?”
“Ah, Rose, the loveliest language that ever was created, the language of the ancient Celtic people who lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and some in France and Cornwall, too. Let me think what I can say to you in it so ye’ll get an idea of its music. Well, yes, here’s a bit of poetry.
A bennáin a búiredáin,
a béicedáin binn,
is binn linn in cúicherán
do-ní tú ‘sin glinn.
Éolchaire mo mennatáin
do-rala ar mo chéill—
na lois isin machaire,
na h-ois isin t-sléib ...”
He paused.“Do you ye like the sound of it then?”
“Oh, it’s lovely! Like music, or water. What does it mean?” Rose’s face was radiant, and she clasped her hands in front of her in delight. A girl in a shabby dress, her hair braided in two untidy ropes, green eyes alive with the poetry.
Declan thought for a minute, wanting to give her equal joy in an English version. “It means something like this, Rose. I will try to make it poetry as well. It’s from a long poem about a sort of hermit, living on his own after being a prince of Ulster and going mad in battle:
Little antlered one, little belling one,
melodious little bleater,
sweet I think the lowing
that you make in the glen.”
He stopped. “So that’s the first bit, Rose, about a deer or a young stag, I guess. And this is what follows:
Homesickness for my little dwelling
has come upon my mind,
the calves in the plain,
the deer on the moor ...”
Rose exclaimed again and clapped her hands. Declan had seen this in the past, when a girl from a mountain farm, with knowledge of sheep and turf cutting, would hear, in poetry, a chord that struck deep within her heart. He wished it could become more for them than a momentary fragment of joy in the classroom. The future held little poetry for these girls. Marriages would be arranged for some, others would enter service in a country house, some would work in the wool industry in Leenane, carding or spinning or weaving, and most would lose their bloom early with the harsh conditions that awaited them. One young woman in the nearby village had disgraced herself and her family by consorting with an English soldier and had been publicly stripped, her hair shorn, tar roughly painted onto her young body, and the feathers of geese and ducks shaken over her. Declan had known her father and knew the shame that he felt when the young woman left for England an
d word came back that she was carrying the child of the soldier. He hadn’t heard whether the man took her in or not. He felt such pity for the girl and wished there had been something he could have done besides making his opinion known, in the quiet way he was known for, as he had always done. Sometimes love did not strike in a seemly or proper way—having taught school for years made him alert to the sighs of a boy yearning for a strapping lass twice his size or to the sight of a shadow against a stone wall splitting in two as his presence parted an embrace between a mountain girl, shoeless and clad in homespun, and a lad from a village family.
“Have ye heard of the Famine, Rose, the potato famine in Ireland? My parents called it the Black Hunger.” Declan led the way back to the cabin, carrying a covered dish holding cheese.
She hadn’t, and so he told something of it, how a terrible blight had killed the potato plants overnight, and overnight, seventy-five years ago, life had changed for the Irish forever. Most people depended utterly upon the potato for daily life; a few, like his father’s family, also grew modest crops and animals for market and didn’t fare quite so badly, but they, with their small amount of cash, were the exception. The populations of entire townlands disappeared, villages emptied of their occupants. Those who could fled for America, assisted in some cases by the Crown or by landlords who wanted them off the land, their rents so far in arrears that the landlords pleaded insolvency but still ate regularly, kept good horses who ate precious grains, and sent their children to fine schools. Human dignity was reduced to the lowest possible denominator as cows were bled for the sustenance their blood provided, people fed on grass and the herbs of the fields, fevers raged through the shelters constructed over ditches after the cabins had been tumbled by bailiffs and soldiers, and entire families died with no one to bury or mourn them or keep the dogs from their bodies. Afterwards, people carried the Famine with them like a sacred object, a prayer to protect them against such tragedy again. Declan told Rose what a sad thing it was to come upon the remains of the cabins, roofless, surrounded by thistles, cleansed by decades of wind. Sorrow attached itself to the stones, to the abandoned thresholds, made a syllabary of the grass stalks. Wind said the names quietly—O’Leary, Mannion, Murphy, Cronin. Sometimes a noise would issue from one of the ruined cabins and the young Declan would wait, trembling, until a black-faced mountain sheep trotted out, as startled as he was by the encounter.
Rose was quiet at first, knowing nothing of hunger and perhaps trying to imagine a table without bread or fish or over-wintered potatoes. And all she had known of death was a baby born too early and buried on their property, a jam jar of wild-flowers kept by the small stone, and the kittens her father drowned in a bucket thrown to the shore for eagles.
“Did you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, finally. She silently accepted another slice of currant bread, this time with some cheese, and ate it almost without noticing.
“I had four brothers and three sisters. I was in the middle, a dreamy boy whom they could not keep from books. I am grateful to my parents for not attempting to do so. The Irish have a great respect for learning; before my time, some schoolmasters even set up classes in the shelters of hedges, before the National Schools were built and schooling was made possible for most children, Catholics and Protestants. A way was found to send me from Tullaglas to the priests for further education.”
“How did you get there?” she wondered.
“By donkey-cart, Rose. I’d never been away from home and pined for the first few weeks. We slept in long rooms, fifty boys to a room, and I could not wander the hills as I had in Delphi. I pined for the dog, the ravine behind our cabin, the sound of wind in our fuchsia bushes—as well as my moth-er’s barmbrack ...”
“What’s barmbrack, Mr. O’Malley?”
“A bread like the soda bread, Rose, but with some peel in it, sultanas, a bit of spice. But there were books at the school, and men who would understood what they meant.”
Rose nodded. Declan intuited that she was beginning to understand what a gift an education might be. She picked up the Odyssey that Declan used as a reference for his translation. She was interested to see that he had made marks in it with a pen, little scribbly marks, and had written words of his own alongside the printed words.
“I can read this word, Mr. O’Malley.” She pointed to the third word in from the beginning of the story, Muse, and said it aloud. “Muse. Muse. It’s close to Rose, and I know M from Mother. My sister told me how the vowels sound so I know this letter is u and sounds like ‘you.’”
“What a clever girl you are, Rose! And you are absolutely right. Muse is just what it is. Do you know what it means?”
She shook her head.
“The Muse is a source of inspiration for poets, a goddess who helps them to sing. This is maybe like the idea of metaphor that I explained to you. There are nine Muses, actually, and each of them is responsible for a particular kind of singing. The poet here is asking Calliope, the one who helps poets writing very long heroic poems, to help him tell the story of Odysseus. ‘Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy; and many were the men whose towns he saw and whose mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the deep, striving to win his own life and the return of his company.’ And throughout the poem, he asks her again and again to help him with his poem.”
He handed her the book and watched as she peered into the text, looking for more words. Loose hair swung over her cheeks, dark gold, and her brow was very serious. The schoolmaster in him determined his plan.
His farm in Delphi had been very small, the grass of two cows as they said in that area, and they had a pig, too. Chickens who roamed the haggard and ate the cabbage stalks boiled with potatoes. A rooster to strut and crow at dawn and impregnate the hens on a regular basis so there were always a few extra chickens for the pot. A dog with brown intelligent eyes and a good sense for sheep. There had once been more land available to the O’Malley family, partly through leases and partly according to the ancient run-dale system which allocated tillage and forage in a fair way to those in the townland. The Famine changed the system and changed the availability of land, both to lease and to own, as the local landlords either went bankrupt or increased their holdings.
The house had been inherited from Declan’s parents, the usual pattern of succession of eldest son interrupted as two brothers had gone to Australia and two to the Western Front, dying on the fields of Ypres. (One sister married and two went to the nuns at Montrath.) It was a typical cabin of the country style—a kitchen, small scullery in the south porch, and two large fireplaces, one in the kitchen with a settle bed alongside and one in the west room where the elder O’Malleys had lived after Eilis and Declan married. The girls slept in a loft while their grandparents were alive, and after their passing Declan and Eilis moved into the vacated west room for its privacy, the girls moving down to the small back bedroom. A pig shed and cow byre were off the gable end. The turf shed was opposite the door, and there was a shed for tools and small pieces of equipment necessary to the keeping of a farm. The farm’s work seldom varied. For Eilis, it was washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, making butter on Thursdays, a trip to the village market on Fridays with that butter imprinted with her mark—a stalk of wheat—and wrapped in greaseproof paper, along with extra eggs. Bread was baked daily, using the soured milk or else buttermilk on butter days, with soda to make a light crumb. Declan had the care of the beasts, apart from milking, which the girls took turns doing; he cut the meagre hay of the meadow and prepared the ground for potatoes, although the entire family planted them and harvested them. The family also helped to cut turf, foot it, and stack it. They were busy and worked hard, but they did not want for anything. Grainne had her harp, which sweetened the long winter evenings. There was a deal table that held the lamp for the kitchen, and on winter nights Declan would sit up late, reading, while the women of the house slept u
nder quilts Eilis had pieced together. Chores were always there for the doing in seasons with light after the tea, but in winter he tried to renew his Latin and read again of the doings of Aeneas, the strange wonders of Pliny.
It was a breezy morning, and Declan called Argos, walked through the bush to the canoe. It was drying out on the rocky bluff, helped by wind and open sky. Gulls wheeled in the air and dropped to pluck stranded fish, for the tide was out, leaving an expanse of mud, and rivulets of fresh water from the feeder creeks trickled out to meet the sea. Steam was rising as the sun warmed the mud flats and the atmosphere was otherworldly, huge trees dark in the background and the white birds swooping and calling. Declan examined the canoe, brushing off dried moss and lichen, and ran his fingers along the decoration at the prow. He could see how traces of the pigment he’d first noticed when the boys had helped him move the canoe remained in lines that had been incised. There was an eye, a ball surrounded by an ovoid socket. Black pigment had coloured the ball. He bent to smell it but could only detect the spongy smell of decaying cedar. There was a face of some sort, a beak. He thought it must be a bird, but it was not any bird he was familiar with. He knelt in the bow of the canoe and looked out to the bay. A figure at the far side caught his eye. It was Rose, her skirts tied behind her to avoid the mud, carrying a bucket. Clams again, he supposed. Her hair was blowing in the wind. The gulls were undeterred by her presence and continued to take up fish and whatever else they found to eat in the mud. The steam blurred her image a little, softened the lines of her limbs. She must have thought she was completely alone, unobserved, because she put her bucket down on a rock and began to dance, her arms slowly swaying and her face upturned to the wind. Declan could see she was barefoot. She looked like a sea-born nymph there on the steaming mud, her long hair unbound, bending and turning to an inner music. He remembered watching his daughter Grainne bringing back the milk cow from a tiny meadow high beyond the house; she had been unaware of anyone watching and had pirouetted with her willow switch above her head like a dancer, an image he recognized from a book on the school’s small library shelf. She was lovely in the moist air, curls escaping from her plaits, a woman shadowing the girl, and remembering brought tears of such deep sadness that he covered his face with his hands.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 6