A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  Rose ran ahead with Argos, her sandaled feet sure on the grassy slope down from the bluff. She wore a faded blue dress, lines around the bottom where the hem had been let down twice. Seeing her reminded Declan of how he had longed to meet Grainne and Eilis and Maire in his dream. For months he had tried to keep their images from forming in his mind, fearing the grief that accompanied the memories. How he missed them! He would hear a phrase of harp in the wind, a laugh coming over the water from the Neils’ farm, and he would sink to his knees in sorrow. Yet, waking from the dream, he felt curiously close to them. Rose, running ahead in her faded frock, was a thin but tangible thread leading him to ... something, he wasn’t sure what. Through the bush, across the corduroy path over the marsh, and back to World’s End where Declan busied himself for a few minutes gathering together the papers they’d been using, and the books.

  Rose knew the alphabet well now and could write simple words. What she liked best was tracing her finger across the lines of the Lang translation of the Odyssey and figuring out each word in turn. Her memory was good, and she had memorized many of the lines by heart; she loved the names, too, and never forgot their pronunciation after Declan had taken her through it once: Calypso, Telemachus, Menelaus, Laertes, the faithful Penelope.

  “How old are you, Rose? I’m thinking about twelve?”

  “Yes, Mr. O’Malley. I was twelve just after Christmas. My mum cooked roast chicken and made me a coconut cake.”

  “About the age of my Grainne, then. She was the elder of our daughters. Maire was nearly two years younger.”

  “Your daughters in Ireland, Mr. O’Malley? Did they come to Canada, too?”

  “They died in an accident, Rose. The two of them both, and their mother. I buried them and then couldn’t stay there anymore. The life had gone out of the place, you see.” For some reason, he found it easier to talk to her than anyone else thus far.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. O’Malley. We knew something had happened but not that you’d lost your whole family.” Her face looked so sad that Declan stroked her cheek with his finger. Her skin was damp. He was moved that she would shed a tear for girls she’d never known.

  “Ah, Rose, it is not something I have wanted to think much about, let alone speak of. For months I could only weep at the memories of them, living and dead, and everything reminded me—from birds to the moon to poetry. I could not have spoken of them to anyone without my heart breaking again. But these days I want to remember them more, not just grieve them. I have done plenty of that, and it has not brought them back to be sure. I want to know them from this distance we have found for ourselves, them in graves I dug by myself, me on the other side of the earth. My older daughter, Grainne—we named her for the Irish pirate queen, Grainne O’Maille, who was the namesake of my family. Grainne is the Irish for Grace. And Maire is the Irish for Mary. It has been lonesome without them, but thinking of them, remembering Maire’s laugh and the music Grainne could create from the strings of her harp, well, it is a comfort sometimes. Is it enough? No. But in a strange country, even the memories of a family are better than nothing, or so I am thinking.”

  (... my heart longed ...)

  Declan tried to continue this thread, of memory, the way a heart could conjure up wrists and ankles out of thin air, the deep dreaming in the old canoe. But he felt each word stiffen before it left his lips, awkward as speech might be under water.

  So they continued with the lesson, Rose working her way through a passage, stopping to ask about a word, wondering aloud at meaning. The language of the translation was stilted, somewhat, and Declan paraphrased lines so that Rose could understand them in an idiom closer to the one she was familiar with. The haths and didsts, the spakes and needests were replaced with the simpler language of everyday speech. Still, she heard the poem in its beauty hidden in the awkward phrasings, the archaic usages.

  While Rose finished the last few lines he had set her as a brief assignment, Declan made tea and cut them each a piece of soda bread with a slice of cheese. Taking their mugs outside, they chose rocks near the water and sat there, balancing their bread and tea on smaller rocks nearby. Argos, who’d been sleeping in the warm grass behind them, suddenly leapt to her feet and charged off towards the woods. There was something crashing through the bush on the southern side of the bay, something large. Rose and Declan stood up to see whether they could determine what it was while Argos bellowed from within the trees. A deer jumped out of the salal, a stag, and dashed down to the water, its head turning rapidly from side to side. On its head, it wore its rack of antlers like a crown. Behind it, in pursuit, a tawny animal paused at the sight of the pair on the beach. No such caution for the stag, who entered the tide and began to swim strongly out to sea.

  “A cougar, Mr. O’Malley! That’s a cougar chasing the deer!”

  Declan had never seen such an animal before. It was big, much bigger than the big dogs people favoured in this area. It looked like a lion but without the heavy mane he’d seen in pictures. Powerful legs, a heavy body, a long tail behind it, and Argos barking for all she was worth fifty feet away. Seeing the cougar was like looking at a painting, its tawny colour set against the tapestry of greens in the background. The cat looked at the stag swimming, the dog howling, and the people watching from not far enough away, quite, for its comfort, and then it turned, loping back into the woods. Argos pursued it for a minute or two but then ran to join Declan and Rose on the beach, panting and trembling.

  “What a brave girl ye are,Argos,” Declan told the dog, rubbing her head.“But I’m thinking ye’d be no match for a cat like that if it decided to turn on ye.”

  Rose was watching the stag. He was beyond the first small island and hadn’t looked back. She wondered aloud if he knew the cougar had given up on the chase. The sun was over the western sky and for a moment, it hung between the stag’s antlers like a burnished lamp. It was like poetry, she said, like the poem Declan had told her in Gaelic, and she turned to ask him to recite it for her.

  “Little antlered one,

  little belling one,

  melodious little bleater

  sweet I think the lowing

  that you make in the glen.”

  “Is there poetry for everything, Mr. O’Malley?”

  “Rose, there is a poem for any moment, any feeling. And sometimes one poem might say it all. That poem ye like, about the deer, has very sorrowful passages, too, because although the poet finds so many things in nature to give him joy, he has also given up another life. Dismal is this life, he says, to be without a soft bed; a cold frosty swelling, harshness of snowy wind. But he wouldn’t give up his life as wild man of the woods, I don’t think, because he keeps telling us how much he likes cress and cold water from the clean brook. He’s a bit like myself, Rose, I’m thinking. I’ve had salmon today, and mugs of the cleanest water I’ve ever tasted, and a handful of cress! Though you like the fat and meat, the poet says, which are eaten in the drinking halls, I like better to eat clean watercress in a place without sorrow.”

  When Rose left, Declan put away the books, emptied the teapot into the bushes, banked his fire for the evening. Well, I have buried Elpenor, burned his corpse and his weapons, he thought. And in a way, I have saved Odysseus today, he mused, helped him with the words to climb on a spar and row himself to shore. I have slept in the canoe of a dead man myself while waiting for a girl to wake me, in fields of dying asphodel. Did I know I was waiting? And I have thought of Grainne playing her harp, remembering her hands without weeping. Eaten a fish which was the best I’ve ever tasted. Ah, maybe yet there is hope for a fellow like me, a drinker of creek water, an eater of cress.

  Sorrows could visit a place, come unbidden through the windows and doors, hover in the trees like birds, and they could leave, too, taken by tides, or cracked open and eaten like a night-coloured mussel by a bird half-capable of speech.

  Chapter Six

  What was that smell? Waking, Declan inhaled deeply, the cabin filled with a scen
t so sweet and wild he imagined he might be in Paradise. Flinging back his bedclothes, he went to the open window and leaned out. Ahhh ... The shrubby bushes around his cabin were roses, he could see that now, and the morning sun had caused hundreds of buds to open. Pale pink, deeper pink, some half-opened, some fully, the roses scented his cabin like a rare perfume. He could hear the hum of bees among the blossoms, and looking closely he saw them stagger from flower to flower with their pollen sacs laden. Each bloom had a wreath of gold in its centre that dusted the legs of the bees as they extracted nectar from the flower.

  He built a fire, filled with kettle from the bucket by the door, and put it on the stove to boil for tea. Then he went outside to bury his face in roses, ignoring the prickles and the bees. It was a smell that went directly to the heart, reminding one of all the times the scent of roses had been inhaled. This plant was different from the roses that grew near Declan’s place of birth in Ireland. These flowers were large, some of them three inches across, in varying shades of pink, from light to deep. Declan remembered smaller flowers in Ireland but sweetly scented, blooming in a tangle amongst the hedgerows of fuchsia, elder-berry, and haw, and then the red hips alight in the dark canes of winter. And always birdsong coming from within the depths of the vegetation. What birds sang in those hedges, he wondered, as he listened to the robin whistle in the wild roses at World’s End. Thrushes, he supposed, and then he remembered chaffinches feeding on the berries in autumn, hedge-sparrows pecking for worms, small birds plucking the seed heads of old man’s beard for lining nests tucked inconspicuously into the branches.

  The hedges fenced off the small holdings, kept the cattle and sheep from the boreens. Some of them were very old, surrounding ancient hill-forts and barrows, following the demarcations of stone walls down hillside paths to the roads. Once, at dusk, coming from the schoolhouse, Declan had seen a badger coming out from its sett within the hedge, peering at him before retreating. He had listened to the scuttle of the animal among the trunks of haw, thinking how there must be a whole maze of tunnels through the hedges and how safe it must feel tucked with its mate and their offspring in amongst the roots of the sleeping vegetation. His father had told him, in boyhood, that badger setts were often hundreds of years old, each generation adding its adjustment or extension. Another time, walking down to the village of Leenane in early evening, he had observed two badgers on the grass beyond the hedgerow by the Erriff River, and when he’d stopped to watch, he could see that they were playing with their cubs; he had entered Leenane dazzled with the mystery of it. On a spring day he had come upon the soiled bracken and hay of their winter sett, taken up through the roots of the hawthorns. As with the stag and cougar, he’d had the sense that he was looking into a picture of ancient meaning, an embellishment of the Gospels, the text of his days surrounded by images of beasts and plants.

  No such hedges here that he’d seen but such rampant growth of ferns, salal, berry bushes, and trees of every description. This was a wilder landscape than Ireland’s, not having such an obvious long history of settlement and industry. The Native people had lived on the coast forever, and Declan was often able to identify where their campgrounds had been, the places where they had gathered clams or prepared their fish. He’d see the heaps of broken shell that indicated their clamming areas, and once, having stopped in a small bay on his way back from the store, he sat back against warm rock, stretching out his arms on either side to ease the ache of rowing, and found himself clutching a perfect blade of slate. It had been resting on the little shelf of rock his hand had homed to, and when he examined the area around where he sat, he found mounds of chipped slate where someone had prepared fish knives, sitting right where he sat. He had seen such knives at the Neils’ house, unearthed in areas they had turned to garden, along with a stone pestle, a rock pierced through to be used as an anchor, and a disc of stone, carved with serpents, which Mrs. Neil told him was spindle whorl.

  There were forests tumbling down to the water’s edge that held in them some of the secrets of the universe, Declan increasingly thought. What had happened with the stag and cougar was part of it. How one of them, stately and antlered like a beast out of the Book of Durrow, could come leaping out of the dense thickets, a lean tawny cat in pursuit, how one would enter the water and swim towards the western lands, Tir Na Nog in Irish lore, the land of eternal youth, while the other watched from the shore, uneasy about following. Such things seldom happened in that life in Ireland, although the mountain sheep stepping out of the famine cabins were nearly as unsettling, bringing with them stories of the dead tangled in their fleeces with bramble and the seed heads of nettles. And the badgers, moving through the grass like small bears, noses to the wind, as they had done for centuries, the broc of their Irish name attached to the place like a burr.

  Perhaps that is what I find so satisfying in this poem I am contemplating, he thought. That mine is not the first loss, that I am not the only man to find himself on a beach in a far country, alone in the world, and that there are possibilities. But are there? I cannot think what, at this moment. I do not wish to be Achilles in Hades, grieving his separation from Peleus:

  I cannot help him

  under the sun’s rays, cannot be that man

  I was on Troy’s wide seaboard, in those days

  when I made bastion for the Argives

  and put an army’s best men in the dust.

  And yet I am surrounded by the death camas myself, cousin to pale asphodel, and I put in the dust the burned bodies of my own dear love, our daughters. My own possibilities are unimaginable to me. No bed awaits, strung with ox-hide, and rooted in the earth, a gnarled trunk of olive.

  With the tide agreeable, Declan decided to go out in the skiff to make an exploration of the bay. Argos wriggled with pleasure when she saw him taking the oars down to the shore and was ready to leap into the craft as soon as it had been pushed down into the water. She loved to sit in the prow of the boat like a figurehead, her nose working the air. So many odours, such potent breezes that swept over her, carrying news of the intimate lives of seals, egg-rich fish, an abundance of ducks, drifts of kelp clotted with herring spawn. She liked it when they stopped in shallow bays where she could jump from the boat and investigate each rock, each dimpling in the sand indicating clams or, when really lucky, the siphons of geoduck. Sometimes an exquisitely rotted carcass of a fish or bird would beg to be examined for edible morsels and rolled over while Declan shouted at her to leave off, then forced her into water to rinse away the smell, never completely successfully. At night, when the oil-drum stove heated the cabin past warm, Argos would steam like a fishy broth until finally Declan was forced to put her bed outside the door. She would whimper, but he found the smell unbearable, and he’d cover his head with the blanket to drown out her cries.

  Past the watery thickets of eel-grass streaming over the surface of the bay, past the reeds where nests were concealed, past the tiny cove where Declan had stumbled upon Rose digging for clams with a stick shaped like a bird’s claw. There were sandy areas punctuated with oysters, the small Olympics that tasted sweet when you pried their shells open and drank them back like nectar, and there were rocks encrusted with the bigger Pacifics brought from Japan. The man who’d given Declan passage up the coast had told him that he was growing the big oysters on the beach in front of his homestead, hoping to market them to the steamships; he brought boxes of seed by boat from Vancouver, his young son responsible for keeping the boxes damp. “If it’s a high sea,” the man had said, “I tie a rope around his middle so he doesn’t wash overboard.” Declan imagined them coming up from the strait in wild seas on their boat with the boxes of oyster seed, the child tethered to the wheelhouse while the father steered a straight course for home. He heard the echoes of Odysseus resisting the song of the Sirens, lashed to the mast, while his men rowed past the pretty music. What song might lure a child from the deck of a small boat heading north to Pender Harbour into the dark waters of Georgia Strait? H
is own children had loved the story of the seals of Lir and listened to their grandmother tell them that humans had followed seals into the ocean and had lived underwater perfectly happily. The stories involved enchanted bridegrooms and trust. On visits to the shore, Maire and Grainne would scan the water and wonder which of the bobbing heads of curious seals might be the one that they would follow, knowingly, to an underwater home. This they could imagine, yet the thought of a marriage to a Mannion or a King from the hilly farms north of Leenane would cause them to shriek with dismay.

  Argos sniffed the wind happily as they wound in and out of rocky covers. They were paused by an outcropping of granite, watching a seal surface among the kelp, when they saw the canoes. There were five of them, the big canoes of the Sechelt people, each carrying ten or more passengers. Declan steadied his skiff by holding a straggle of fir branch growing out of a crevasse of the rock and watched the progress of the canoes. He could hear chanting and weeping, the sound of a drum, and wondered if he ought to call out that he would come with them if necessary and help with whatever they were doing. The canoes glided in to the shore of a small rocky island near the mouth of the bay, not very far from Declan, and the occupants disembarked, some of them remaining by the canoes while others climbed to the high point of the island, a bluff crowned with a grove of pines. Four men bent over the biggest craft and lifted out a wooden box, its painted surface visible to Declan. They carried the box up to the grove, assisted in the task by those already there; two people reached down to steady the box from above as the carriers secured footholds on the rocks. Several of the men stood by the trees, bent to each other in discussion. Then one of them began to fit some pieces of wood between the trees. Declan could see he used a knife to make the slats fit securely. After some of the others examined the arrangement, the box was lifted up and set on the wood. The group of onlookers chanted while this was happening, and after the box was settled into place, the lifters joined the chant. Declan saw similar arrangements in the other trees, some of them trailing lengths of cloth that he had first thought to be the pale moss that hung from trees in this part of the world. After a short time, the entire group went back to the canoes and, without a glance at Declan, headed south, paddles moving in unison.