A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  They were ears of corn!

  They were apples!

  They were three harpstrings!

  And now their bodies lie underground ...

  And that was the grief of it, in either language, that the living flesh of children could be so quickly consumed. Rather that they were corn, rippling in a calm field, green and gold in sunlight, or apples, veined with pink through the pale flesh. Perhaps he would think of them that way when he had got far away from the fire, in memory and in years, his house a cold and empty hearth, the stools all burned. He might forget the smell, like meat roasting, the hideous stench of feathers and hair.

  The lines were difficult to wrap his mind around. Some days the Greek revealed itself to him so clearly that he might have been reading his own name. Other days he could not for the life of him figure out the meaning; the entries in the lexicon moved in and out of his consciousness without leaving a trace. It had to do with clarity, he knew, in his own mind, with what he brought to the poetry. He closed his eyes and tried to clear out whatever it was that kept him from reading properly. Deep breath. Just get the meaning for now, he thought, and shape it to poetry later. Begin again.

  He was weeping, like Odysseus’s men wept as they gave a fitting burial for Elpenor. Not a hero, Elpenor, but a young man who tumbled in drunkenness off the roof of Circe’s house and who broke his neck in the fall and died. Encountering him in Hades, Odysseus listened to Elpenor’s tale of falling and losing his spirit to the dark and promised his friend that amends would be made for leaving him unceremoniously on the island of the witch.

  The imagery of that passage pierced Declan to his very heart. What had been left of him on the Irish hill where his wife and daughters had been burned and buried, commemorated by pink Connemara granite? He had fled into nothingness, it seemed, spirited away to Cork and then America, a story emptied of its narrator, its action, its consequence. And now, on his own small promontory, he was a cairn of living grief, grey as water.

  He put the poem aside and walked out to the shore. He never tired of the bay, stretching out to open sea. Today the tide was coming in over the exposed mud flats, threaded with silvery runs of fresh water. There were birds everywhere—sandpipers on the shore where he supposed their nests must be, ducks coming in with the tide, a solitary loon, silent in daylight, geese gathered by the small rocky islands where some of them nested. He loved the smell when the tide came in, the rich fecund mud, warmed by the sun, meeting the sharp iodine of the sea. He supposed men had always stood by water, admiring the liveliness of its movement, loving the sight of birds feeding on its shores, fishing its depths with their strong bills.

  There were days when he felt close to Odysseus, when working on parts of the poem that were Odysseus’s story he would stop and think of it as his own story. But truth be told, he had never done anything bold in his life. He’d left his parents’ house to be educated, returned to that very house with a wife, fathered two daughters, taught children the basics of reading and writing and simple geometry at the Bundorragha school, as well as the Irish history and grammar that had been his ruin, taking them on walks by the river below the school to see the trout, the yellow flags of iris. Odysseus journeyed home over a period of years, stopping here and there to prove his worth to gods who had no use for him, but then he was protected by the grey-eyed Athena and managed to survive—although he had lost his men, not least among them young Elpenor. He was not only brave but also clever and could outwit the obstacles in his way. Declan had journeyed a long way by sea but alone. And the biggest difference between them? Odysseus was struggling homeward to a wife and son. Declan had no one. Home was a far country that he wanted no part of.

  He left off his musings and gathered some wood to make a little beach fire to cook his salmon. Mrs. Neil had shown him a way to roast the fish, in turn shown her by Lucy, the Indian woman who had known this bay as a child. He made a fire, using alder sticks from a stash he had cut from branches found on the ground. First he cut off the head of the fish, saving it to roast for Argos. Opening the salmon, he flattened it as well as he could by splitting the backbone. Sharpening a long green stick, he threaded the salmon lengthwise, using slits he’d cut into the tail end, the middle, and the top. Two thin sticks were woven horizontally through slits along the edges of the fish to keep it open and flat. Another long stick was lashed to both ends of the first stick to offer it some support and strength. Once the fire had burned down to hot coals, he staked his salmon on one side of the fire, angled so it leaned into the smoke and heat, then added more alder.

  They had wanted Grainne to have music lessons. She’d been taught rudimentary fingering for the harp by an old woman in Leenane who had played the harp in her youth. Another local woman, though from farther afield, would stop in to offer Grainne assistance from time to time, but she was the mother of a large family living in an isolated area so her visits were regrettably few and far between. At first Grainne’s fingers bled—the wire strings were like nothing her hands had encountered and her fingernails were not long enough to allow her to pluck in the traditional manner—but eventually calluses formed, her nails grew, and she coaxed song after song from the plangent strings. She learned to read music, a language in itself, and studied the sheets for hours, humming bars and tapping out sections to learn the timing. She would listen to a tune at a ceilidh, say a fiddle piece, and Declan could see her lips move, her fingers pluck the air as she transposed the song in her mind. A daughter from one of the wealthier families, Maeve Fitzgerald, had studied harp for a time at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, and she passed along her workbooks to Grainne. It was the latter’s hope to sit for the Local Centre Examinations and perhaps go on to the RIAM herself. She became very proficient, playing whenever she could, and the music eased them through the dark winter afternoons.

  Legend told of the wife of Dagda, a faery king, who had given birth to three strong sons. During her confinements, Dagda’s harpist played to make the pains of the labours pass more easily. As the first son was being born, the harp moaned sadly, as if in pain. During the second labour, the harp’s music was merry and light. And as the third son was being born, the harper played a mysterious air, soft and sweet. Each son was named for the music that accompanied his birth, and Irish music ever after contained those three strands: the notes of pain, joy, and enchantment. Grainne loved the planxties of Carolan, with their animated melodies, a series of triplets that she played quickly, hearing harmonies in the strings to accompany the melody line. Declan’s favourites were the laments; he heard in them the yearnings of his boyhood when he roamed the fields and famine cabins, feeling the ache of loss, although he didn’t have a specific occasion to which he could attach the feeling. Not then, when his girls grew like healthy corn and his wife welcomed them to the table with floury potatoes splitting their jackets and cabbage cooked with the bacon of their own pig. Now he could not bear to hear a lament with its inconsolable phrasing.

  There was keening enough in the wind and the strange cries of the loons piercing the night and his sleep that he would rise and go to the door, wondering at the loneliness of the birds who made such sounds. And where was Grainne’s harp now, with its elegant curves of bog oak and its strings of brass that rang under her fingers like bells? Gone up in smoke, as transitory as weather. The house of the family that had given her the sheet music had been burned before his own, the wolfhounds shot by Paddy the shop to keep them quiet (or so it was rumoured), the family given a moment’s notice to leave in the darkness in their nightclothes, and it was said that the burning of Declan’s home was a retaliation by the Black and Tans for that atrocity. And yet, despite their class and religious differences, the two families had been friendly. The woman of the demesne had consulted Eilis about her arthritis, sharing the aches and pains of aging over a cup of tea in sunlight by the cabin door, roses wreathed above the entrance, while the woman’s horse waited, tethered to a bit of gate. The mister brought cartons of children’s book
s to the school for the young scholars, and their daughters, Grainne and Maeve, loved the same music, played the same instrument. It made no sense.

  The salmon was ready, he thought, and carefully removed the stake from the proximity of the fire, planting the fish closer to water to cool it a little so he could eat it. He’d roasted the head in the embers and scooped it out with a stick so Argos could eat the meaty bits. The ravens were back, drawn by the smell of cooking fish. When the salmon was cool enough, Declan laid it across a rock washed clean by the tide and pulled morsels away from the skin. Chewing slowly, he knew it was possible he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life. Slightly oily, slightly sweet, the salmon flesh, muscular and firm, tasted of the sea, of tides, of journeys through wild waters. He paused in his eating and went to the cabin to bring out his tin mug filled with creek water from the jug. There was sacrament in consuming the flesh of this fish, in drinking water of the creek that fed into the bay, nurturing a season’s worth of infant salmon and gently releasing them to the ocean. He ate until he could not eat another mouthful, then walked over to the creek to pull up a handful of the peppery cress growing there; chewing it took away the slightly greasy glaze against his tongue. He scooped up another mug of water, straight from the creek this time, and returned to the edge of the bay. There was sun and the wash of waves against the rocky shore and the mutter of water birds over the tide. Declan tidied up the remains of his fire on the beach, scattering the ash, throwing he fish bones as far out to sea as he could. For a moment, the skeleton skimmed the current, light as air, the spirit of the fish lit by the falling light before sinking under a wave.

  Looking up into the trees, he made the tok, tok against his palate. The ravens tilted their heads and looked down at him. “Here, lads,” he called, and tossed shreds of salmon skin down the shore. The birds kept looking at him, a steady gaze from each pair of eyes. He moved down the shore with his mug of water and busied himself washing his hands in the sea. When he looked up, one of the ravens was tugging at the skin he’d thrown. It would stop, tilt its head back to swallow, and then, holding the skin in place against the pebbles, it would tear off another morsel. After a few minutes of this, it hopped along the beach a little and the second raven glided down from the tree and took its turn to tug and tear at the skin. Their feathers in sunlight were blue-black and shining. Declan watched them for a time and then returned to his cabin to continue his work.

  The days passed, whole weeks passed, with ravens visiting, the tides going out and coming in, the occasional fish leaping right outside his cabin. There was not a pattern to the days, exactly, but Declan tried to make sure that work was done on the poem and that Rose got as much help with her reading as he was able to give. She began to blossom as a reader, needing help less and less as they worked through the passages. It was as though a framework had been in place, provided by her mother’s scanty lessons and Rose’s natural intelligence, and the framework was strong enough, and true, for what it was to hold. He could not rid himself of a small sour anger, though, when he’d see the boat leaving in the morning to take the other Neil children to school, the father grimly rowing them around to the other side of the harbour, Tom in the bow with the lines. Declan determined to make Rose’s lessons as useful as he could, thinking of questions about geography and mathematics to fit into their reading. Sketch-maps of the Mediterranean on paper or in the sand, simple scales to work out relative distances, even a chart to plot the family connections of the House of Atreus to make the war that Odysseus was returning from something of a reality across the centuries. Rose was hungry for all of it.

  On his next visit to the canoe, Declan took his copy of the Odyssey to read. He was working on the passages where Odysseus’s men had angered the gods by feasting on the cattle of Hyperion; Zeus sent a storm to destroy them all. Only Odysseus survived, riding the spar of his ship to the island of Calypso where he was cared for and loved by the goddess. So many storms in the poem! He imagined waters around Greece to be constantly turbulent, various forces at work to make life difficult for sailors: Sirens luring boats to grief on the rocks; the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the one a monster with many arms and the other a whirlpool that sucked boats down to a watery grave. Homer was a poet who had paid attention to what men told him of their sea adventures, thought Declan, and his poem made particularly vivid the storms at sea. Odysseus had clung to a fig tree overhanging Charybdis, waiting for parts of his ruined ship to appear in the spume; he used a spar as a canoe, his arms as oars, to take him to Ogygia and Calypso.

  Idly, Declan dangled his own arms outside the canoe. They would make terrible oars, he decided, barely reaching into what would be water. Grasses tickled his forearms. In Ireland, oars on boats were very long, their long blades reaching deep to propel the currach forward. They were fitted over thole-pins on the gunwales of the craft, and the pins were kept damp so that the oars didn’t squeak. He had brass oarlocks on his own skiff, little windows on the marine world. Declan would use them to sight a headland or the bobbing heads of kelp where fish might be found. Leaning back, he lowered himself down into the canoe, one hand clutching a tuft of ripe grass. No oarlock to view the view, just the tiny holes drilled in the bottom to drain away rain. Down he slid, and farther down to the bilge where the damp wood smelled of old earth and rot, where he had to brace his arms against the sides to keep himself from sinking lower to where the drain holes pierced the hull. Where was he bound for in this broken canoe, marooned on a bluff of poisonous flowers gone to seed? Who waited to dry him and offer wine and fresh linens, the use of a harp so he could sing his story? No goddess emerged from the trees in a shaft of golden light, no fire burned in readiness for meat.

  He was falling, down into the opened earth. He saw nothing but fields covered with fog, the same fog that swept across Oyster Bay like cold smoke. Coming across the fields was his mother, dressed in her burial smock. It was Tullaglas and it wasn’t, some of the trees at the edge of the view were the tall firs beyond World’s End. “Is this a dream, Mother?” he called to her, and the answer she spoke made Declan’s blood run cold.

  O my son, alas,

  most sorely tried of men, the god’s daughter,

  Persephone, knits no illusion for you.

  All mortals meet this judgement when they die.

  No flesh and bone are here, none bound by sinew,

  since the bright-hearted pyre consumed them down—

  the white bones long exanimate—to ash;

  dreamlike the soul flies, insubstantial.

  “Are you my mother?” he called, surprised at such language coming from the throat of the Gaelic-speaking, rough-dressed woman of the house of his memory. In answer, she turned from him while shadows crowded around them. He reached out, but she had disappeared into the fog. He had no lambs to offer, no blood to pour into a trench for her sustenance. Would he see Eilis and Grainne and Maire, and what he would say to them, how he could ever explain that he would have saved them from the fire had he not been knocked out by a rifle butt? He had not heard their screams in time, had woken to smoke, the house in flames, their bodies ignited like torches. What would they want of him? Would they blame him for surviving, for fleeing the earth that held their sorry remains? Half-fearful, yes, and yet he yearned for them, watched for the sight of their familiar faces, their shoulders, the heartbreaking turn of their ankles. To encounter them in this swirl, their strong bodies fog-hidden in the fields of shadows—he would give his own life for such a meeting. There were shapes in the fog, but try as he might, he could not discern his own lost women. In panic he strode across the fields, trying to see the faces of the shades.

  Here was great loveliness of ghosts.

  Is that what he was seeing then? The words came to him from the book, he was gasping for air, surrounded by the wraiths and fog, he was trying to climb back the great height from which he had fallen ...

  “Mr. O’Malley, are you all right, sir?” He opened his eye
s, blinked, looked around to see where he was. Rose was standing by the canoe where Declan had fallen into a deep sleep, his open book across his chest.

  Ah, the canoe. Grabbing the gunwales, he pulled himself up, wincing a little as his muscles announced their displeasure at having been cramped against damp wood for such a time. “I was reading the poem, Rose, and must’ve fallen asleep. For a minute there, I couldn’t place myself at all.”

  (But my heart

  longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.)

  “My mother said I could come for a lesson and I didn’t see you there. Your boat was ashore, and your oars leaning on the cabin, so I knew you wouldn’t be far. I called for you and Argos came running from this direction so I thought you might be up here doing something with the canoe.” She didn’t tell him how she had been startled to find him stretched out in the canoe and had thought him dead for a minute, the length of him in his shabby trousers and faded shirt absolutely still. She had watched for a few minutes before trying to wake him and realized how sad she would be if he was indeed dead. His soft voice was something she tried to conjure up sometimes before sleep, his patience a gift she was only beginning to appreciate, having thought that adults were mostly like her father—quick to anger, dismissive of a child’s feelings, impatient with clumsiness, but also capable of a brief tender word.

  He brushed his hand across his hair and closed the book. “Certainly ye may have a lesson, Rose. We’ll just walk back to the cabin so.”