A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  When he slept finally, he dreamed of Rose. Not as a young goddess rising from the waves, her body fair as any man might want, but as the girl he had taught to read, a girl who reminded him of his daughters, the pupils who arrived each morning at the Bundorragha school house in patched frocks, eager for books. He was ashamed to think that he had seen Rose naked, and yet in the dream she was utterly recovered to him in her innocence and youth.

  In the morning, the men made the fire, brewed the strong tea they favoured, and ate the remainder of Declan’s loaf. Then Alex announced it was time to go fishing. He reached into one of the storage boxes in the canoe and brought out a coil of line. It was made of the inner bark of cedar, Declan was told, and it was very strong. It needed to be strong for halibut; they were big fish and put up a fight. Fishing line could also be made of kelp, knotted together, and nettles. Lucy made the cedar line after cutting and preparing the bark, and it was agreed that her fishing lines were best.

  Out of the storage box came hooks, elegant devices made of bent yew wood with a barb of sharpened bone. Albert lashed strips of octopus, kept cool in a vessel made from the bulb-end of bull kelp, onto the hooks below the barb with fine twine, also made of cedar bark. The sinkers were round stones pierced through with holes, fastened to lengths of the cedar line.

  Once the gear was prepared, the men pushed the canoe out into the surf and paddled strongly out to sea. The area where they stopped to drop the lines was a halibut bank, well known to the Indian people, Alex explained.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Albert’s line pulled taut and he began to ease it in. “No hurry,” said Charles, “it’s best to be patient.”

  Declan was unprepared for the fish that fought its way to the surface. It was big, perhaps three feet in length, and flat. One side of it was brown with blotches of white, and one side was ghostly white. It thrashed and flailed, turning its body this way and that. Albert brought it to the side of the canoe and caught its tail with one hand. Charles held the line above the hook and Albert quickly killed the fish, using a polished wooden club to do so. He laid the fish on the bottom of the canoe and carefully removed the hook, cutting it from the fish’s mouth where it had lodged itself. Declan was startled to see that the halibut’s eyes were on the same side of its head, the brown side. It was eerie.

  Alex noticed him examining the eyes and told him that the halibut was a very odd fish, beginning its life by swimming upright in shallower water but gradually sinking down into deep water and lying on its side with its eyes moving to its topside.

  The men caught two more of the fish, bigger than the first one and each putting up a noble fight before being dispatched quickly with the polished club. Examining the hooks after they’d been removed from the halibut mouths, Declan was surprised to see pitting and teeth marks where the fish had attempted to free themselves by biting through the hooks.

  It was late afternoon when they returned to the camp, the three fish covered in seaweed, and Argos waiting for them on the shore. Albert and Charles took the fish aside and cleaned them, disposing of the entrails by throwing them back to the sea, followed by two mewing gulls. They cut generous chunks of the meat, and once the fire had settled, they steamed it in one of the wooden boxes with hot stones and some sliced onions. When the fish was ready, a small jar was set by the box and the Indian men spooned some of its contents over their portion of fish. They told Declan it was grease, made from eulachon, and that he was welcome to try it but in their experience most white people found it too strong. It was indeed strongly flavoured and deeply salty, but Declan thought it very palatable. The halibut was mildly fishy and the grease was a good condiment. He told the Indian men of having to take fish oil, cod he thought it had been, at his school during the winter season, and how many of the boys hated it but he it found it rich and comforting. They nodded, having had a similar experience at the school in Sechelt, but for them the taste reminded them of grease, and for the children who were far from their homes, it was a poor reminder. Charles had made bannock, too, and the men used it to soak up every last drop of the cooking juices on their plates. There was sweet tea to drink and Declan looked into his cup to see a calm face regarding him. It took him a moment to realize it was himself, on a western beach, his clothing alive with woodsmoke.

  No wolves broke the silence of the night, and Declan slept, lulled by waves and a mild wind. Morning came with a fine drizzle of rain and the group broke up camp quickly, after a meal of tea and last night’s bannock spread with eulachon grease. A brief look for a fish carved into a rock but nothing. Charles thought the creek was perhaps too small to sustain a run of salmon. The wind was behind them on the journey back.

  As the canoe glided into Oyster Bay, Declan tried to find a way to thank the men for including him in their days. He looked at each one of them, their strong shoulders and weathered faces, and he wanted to embrace them. Instead, he began to say thank you and Alex touched his arm, held his elbow gently, and said, “It is good for us to know you and let you see something of how we used to live. You are a man who has lost something too.”

  They raised the paddles as they left the bay.

  Mist enveloped the shore when Declan woke the next morning. He could see no farther than the back of his hand, held at arm’s length. Ravens muttered in the trees but he couldn’t see whether there were two or seven (for joy, for a journey). He had dreamed he was home, and this time it was his farm at Delphi, it was Tullaglas, where animals waited to be fed but the house still smouldered. There was no sign of Eilis or the girls so he knew they were dead. In the dream, he fed the animals and began to gather stones to rebuild the house. A cairn of them grew, before long, as he brought offerings from old field walls and famine cabins, using his donkey and cart to carry them back. Potato plants were blooming in the lazy beds and mint was riotous in the damp corner of the garden. My life is in this soil, he said as he gathered stones, his shoulders tight with the work of it, my garden must be tended, my potatoes dug for the winter. Declan woke with the clear image on the stones in his eyes, the smell of boggy soil in his nostrils. When he walked out into the fog, he might have been anywhere, Oyster Bay, Delphi, even the cove on Ithaka where Odysseus was left by the sailors of Skheria to make his own way home.

  Chapter Nine

  Declan had a mind to fish for lingcod. The Indian men told him it was a prized fish, with firm white flesh or, in the case of young lingcod, vivid green, a colour that would disappear upon cooking. They gave him a special hook to jig with, carved of yew, with a lure of abalone shell tied above the shank. He loaded his gear into his skiff, along with a small loaf and a chunk of cheese; he expected to be gone for the day and knew he would be hungry. For this trip, he left Argos behind.

  Out past the settlement, past the rocky headlands with their peeling arbutus, to the kelp beds where he’d been told it was not uncommon to catch a fish of forty pounds or more. He baited his hook with a piece of herring and lowered his line, easing it down with a long pole. Then, keeping his boat steady with his oars, he waited.

  Within ten minutes, Declan was hauling in something that looked more like a serpent than a fish, its body thrashing to break away from the hook. It was dark blue, with tracings of orange, and its mouth showed large teeth. Its fight shocked him, and he realized he was not expecting anything like it. He wrestled with it, losing line at one point but then recovering it, wrapping it around his hands and pulling until they bled. He decided he was willing to lose both the fish and his hook when suddenly the fish gave in, and he saw that its stomach had emerged through its mouth as it decompressed, following the herring up from the kelp bottom. It was still alive but had no fight left in it. Its eyes met his, the fish’s shadowed with a fleshy plume. Declan apologized to it for causing it pain and, mindful of the spines on its cheeks, he quickly killed it with his club and opened it to clean it.

  He had not noticed the weather turning, the wind rising, so absorbed had he been in the business of the lingcod. Washing hi
s bloody hands over the side of his skiff and wincing at the resulting sting, he realized that a chop had come up and it had begun to rain, huge drops quickly forming puddles in the bilge. He had to think quickly. Two small islands lay off the headlands, closer to him by far than the shore, and he decided he had better make for them as directly as he could, as he did not feel he could safely make it to the beach below the rocks north of the settlement. It was a hard row, pushing against the current and the wind, and he wondered if it might not be best to make for the shore, but could not imagine controlling his skiff in the turbulent sea. Finally he dragged his skiff up onto the smaller island’s shingle, soaked through to the skin. His bag of bread and cheese was mush.

  There were some pines in a grove up a long slope of scorched grass, now slippery with rain. He dragged himself up to the small shelter they provided and sat to wait out the storm. His hands ached with the burns they’d sustained from his fight with the lingcod. He leaned against a tree, felt it moving in the wind, and something fell to the ground beside him. It looked like the bone of an animal. Idly Declan touched it, then recoiled as he remembered the burial he had witnessed, when the canoes had brought their sad cargo to the islands at the head of Oyster Bay. Dear Lord, he thought in panic, I am stranded on a burial island. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself.

  He opened his eyes. The wind was very wild and branches whipped around, seed heads cast their fine litter to the air, long strands of moss flew from the trees. The bone was very smooth. It would have belonged to someone like Alex or Charles, he told himself, someone familiar with these waters. Someone who knew winds like these and who might have fished for lingcod in those very kelp beds. Or a woman who had cooked what was brought back from such expeditions, who might have dug for camas on slopes of golden grass, or taken clams from the sand, or softened sinew for stitching skin clothing by chewing on it. Someone who heard the wolves and watched seals, who knew the healing powers of nettles, the pain of devils club.

  Looking up, he could see a platform fastened to a natural gap between three pines. The trees were alive in the wind, and the platform creaked as the trees pulled it this way and that. Shreds of cloth blew off what he supposed must be a skeleton. There was a clatter and then another bone fell to the ground beside him. Taking a deep breath, he rose and carefully replaced the bone—what was it, the long bone of an arm?—on the platform, which he could just reach. The ends of his fingers felt cloth, felt bones, felt wood that must have been part of a box to hold the corpse. He was no longer afraid but bent to pick up the other bone to replace it, bracing the platform as best he could by securing branches of pine beneath it and around it to cradle it against the storm. Other storms had raged around this island, and when he looked, he could see that other remains had fallen from trees not this time but in storms past. Trees too had fallen and lay upon the ground with their mortuary boxes in fragments around them. Birds had scoured the bones, had taken thread of the fibres for their nests. How could it be otherwise, he thought. The dead must be honoured but they have left their bodies and, like the trees returning to earth, the dead leaves turning to soil, their remains will enrich the earth, a compensation for what the living are given in the way of berries, of timber, of slate for tools and the roots of cedar for fishing line. Declan settled himself back down in his shelter and waited out the storm, feeling himself to be a small peaceful nest of calm as the weather raged and the white horses of waves broke themselves upon the shore.

  When the storm had exhausted itself, he made his way back to his cabin where Argos waited and where he cooked his lingcod over a beach fire, washing it down with strong tea. That night he slept the long sleep of a man who had known storms and death but who was nourished by the sweet flesh of a fish brought up from the kelp, lured by the glitter of abalone shell and the smell of herring.

  This passage was giving him some trouble. What man, once returned to his home after an absence of nearly twenty years, would want to stay still, talking to a swineherd and watching the pigs fatten? Yet Athene counselled just that.

  And what man would not want to see his wife and son immediately? Yet for that, too, Athene had her explanation—he would visit his palace in disguise once his son arrived back from the home of Menelaos and that beauty, Helen—and her comment:

  Declan shivered to think of such treachery. He thought of that Greek word for homecoming, , nostos, and how it was something a traveller carried inside him as a kind of expectation, a certainty. Throughout the poem, Homer would say that a home-coming was assured if the sacred cattle were avoided, if the proper measures were taken towards the gods. Within this notion was the deep knowledge of home, the way it shaped a man and all he did. A man might meet any number of obstacles with this in his heart. And looking up, he saw young Rose before him in her faded blue dress. It was the first time he’d seen her since he’d witnessed her swimming naked in the tide. She looked a girl this time, any womanly development hidden by her dress and her old shoes, the girl he had dreamed of on the northern shore after waking to wolves. He was relieved.

  “Ah, Rose, I am after reading of our man’s homecoming. It is not happening as he hoped—no grand scene of reunion with Penelope and Telemachus, no moment of glory. The goddess Athene has dressed him in rags and is up to her old tricks, I’m thinking. Have ye time for a lesson?”

  “I’m not allowed to come anymore.” Her face was very serious. “Only now, to tell you. Dad found out I’ve been learning to read, he heard me reading the book my uncle sent, and he got into a rage. He said it was up to him to send me to school or not. He was so angry at Mum for sending me behind his back that he hit her and now she’s got a black eye. Oh, Mr. O’Malley, I’m so sorry, I loved learning about Odysseus and Suibhne and your little school in Ireland. He can’t take knowing how to read away from me, though, and I need to thank you for giving me that.”

  What kind of man would rage against a child’s education or hit a woman, the mother of his children? Declan was so upset he was shaking. Rose noticed and came to him to put her arms around him. He entered her embrace, smelling the laundry soap her mother used and a slightly sour odour of perspiration.

  “Rose, I never meant for harm to come to ye or yer mother. I’ll talk to yer father and explain the way of it.” He held her at arm’s length and looked tenderly into her eyes.

  “It’s no use, Mr. O’Malley. He never changes his mind. And anyway, he’s gone for a month to work on Texada Island for the logging company. He wants you gone when he gets back because he says you can’t be trusted to know your place.”

  The bully, thought Declan. For a moment, anger flared in his heart, then subsided. A small voice inside him told him he was guilty, not of what Neil believed him to be, but of being a man who had looked upon his daughter naked. It was an act the priests at home would have an opinion on, he was certain. If he was to be entirely honest with himself, he would have to admit that the sight of her had been what had led to his arousal later. He had told himself then that he was thinking of Eilis and in fact had dreamed of her, of making love to her in the old sweet way they had had with each other. But the image in his mind had been Rose. He imagined himself in the dusty confessional and the silence on the other side as the priest listened, the click of the rosary beads after as he went through the process of penance. He could not confront Neil with anything approaching innocence, he decided. He would take the man at his word as he had proved no match for ruffians with a case against him in the past.

  “Come, Rose, I’ll walk ye back. I’d like to speak to yer mother, apologize for her troubles.”

  Mrs. Neil was feeding her chickens when Declan and Rose entered the yard. She turned to them, her face puffy and one eye badly bruised. She showed no signs of embarrassment, though, asking Rose to put a kettle on the stove and extending her hand to Declan. “I am very sorry, Mr. O’Malley, that you will have to leave. My husband is not a bad man, but he has his own ideas and one of them is that he makes the decisions about his famil
y. I knew that, of course, and should not have involved you in Rose’s education.”

  “Mrs. Neil, the apology is mine to make, not yours. For the life of me, I cannot see how Rose learning to read should result in your husband striking ye as he has.” He could not tell her about watching Rose bathe. His hands, clasping one another, read the knots of each knuckle in an act of contrition.