“Was it ye, Bride, who cared for the graves and put the harp to shelter?”
She told him it was. The graves looked so forlorn on their slope and sure it was no trouble at all to tidy them up a bit and keep flowers there. Eilis would have done the same, she said. Grainne’s harp surprised them all, coming out of the fire with only the wee bit of damage, but hadn’t enough sorrow come to them?
“And Declan, ye’ll be wondering about the beasts so. We put the cow to our grass and killed the pig with our own last fall. Her hair never came back quite right and she was always nervous after she’d been singed, but what animal wouldn’t so? The cow can come up any time ye’re ready for her, and I’ll have young Seamus bring a side of bacon once ye’ve a place for cooking. When our pig farrows, we’ll give ye two of the wee ones. I can give ye a few chicks once we’ve let the rooster at the hens, too, and maybe a hen or two until then. I’ve no idea where yer hens went but foxes would know they’d nothing to fear of course with the dog gone. Those lads can sniff out a misfortune from the other side of Ben Gorm.”
Her practical kindness made Declan think he had indeed done the right thing, coming back to Delphi, although there were moments, awake in the turf shed in the night, when he had wondered how he could possibly build a life out of such debris—a pile of stones, daisies gone to seed, a scorched harp with melted strings. He still wondered. Yet this piece of land was once as unpromising, before his family had poured their love and labour into its rocky terrain; a forefather had seen the possibility of making a home of the raw stone, of raising a few animals to feed a family, of creating lazy beds for potatoes wherever a little bit of soil might exist to be planted and improved, had named it Tullaglas, the little green hill. This was where his ghosts might greet him daily when he fed the chickens or milked the cow, a few notes from an air for Bridget Cruise hanging in the grey air.
“I stopped in Leenane to buy a loaf and didn’t recognize the woman in the shop. Have there been many changes, Bride?”
“Well, Paddy the shop was accused of burning out the Fitzgeralds at Aasleagh and made himself scarce. An aunt came from Roscommon to take over the shop. That’ll be her ye saw. Nice enough. Fitzgeralds moved away, although there’s someone there now, a cousin, in the old cabin the gardener used, him up and gone after the fire. Mostly it’s us as it’s always been, but I mind that the Troubles have us more careful now and ye don’t know quite how it sits. Some of the younger lads ye taught only a year or two past have taken up guns, Declan, and there’s the damage, I’m thinking. Men like my Fergus refuse to carry arms even though he believes the Free State is not enough and that more must come. Sometimes I am so sick of the names, De Valera, Griffith, poor Michael Collins, rest his soul, that I could spit, if ye’ll forgive the expression. And to see the lads heading into the gap of trees towards Tawnynoran, where ye know they’ve guns and are practising shooting at old sacks filled with straw—well, our old parents would turn over in their graves.”
He did not know yet how he thought about it all. He would need to listen and pay attention to his neighbours. He knew one thing, and that was that the old order was in upheaval. On the boat coming back to Ireland, Declan had met a young student carrying the poems of William Butler Yeats. The two had spoken much over the duration of the crossing, and the student had recited poems in great excitement. One of them had been particularly powerful. Declan had borrowed the book to copy the poem into his journal. The lines shimmered as he recorded them:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
He had a minor quibble with the student about those lines, saying that he felt himself that it wasn’t that the best lacked conviction but perhaps had a sense of what was at stake in a way that the worst mightn’t have. Anyway, conviction was the wrong word for what the poet meant, he believed. Conviction was what kept him giving the scholars at the Bundorragha school their lessons in Gaelic and simple history that did not glorify England but told the long, sad tale of hunger and poverty. He remembered the big talk of the small men who drank for hours in the public house in Leenane and years ago he had marked Paddy the shop as one of them. A man willing to shoot dogs, all right, and to kindle house-burnings under the anonymity of night, but not to face his actions or act over the long term to change things. And the young boys carrying guns into the trees when they should be ... well, what? Could he say that sums were worth more than a free Ireland? There was a question.
He asked about his turf and was told it was still on the bog. When he wanted to collect it, the Mannions would lend him their donkey and panniers and a couple of boys to help.
“My mam always said that field had a way of producing strays,” Bride mused, looking toward the grassy enclosure sloping down the long hill. “There was an uncle, Declan, was there not, who went astray, disappeared into thin air and returned after a time with no memory of being away? I have thought of your going as that, going astray altogether. One day, I told Fergus, he will find the gap in the wall and come home. Well, ’tis a butter day, Declan, so I’ll leave ye now so. But ye’ve only to come to the door and there’s lads to help with whatever ye need, and the mister himself could be persuaded as well.”
She walked back down the hill towards her own farm. The way she bent to the slope of ground was as familiar as the sight of Fin Lough below; all his life, Declan had seen women move between the farms, help with the animals, trudge the boreens with baskets containing the butter they produced for sale and the extra eggs from their hens. Their voices had something of the weather in them, a low murmur like wind, and when they sang, it would break your heart, for all the sorrow of the old songs was also part of their daily lives: children leaving for America, the memory of starvation never far from the mind, the deliberations of love, washing a dish of earth-crusted potatoes and realizing that youth had gone forever. He minded a time when Bride Mannion was Bride King, a girl with a copper-coloured plait down her back and a quick laugh that drew people to her, including Fergus Mannion, who won her with his fiddle playing and the promise of a new churn.
He’d forgotten the uncle who’d gone astray. Fechin, it had been, a brother of his grandmother. It had been a story told on winter evenings, with other stories of changelings and faery brides. A gap in the wall and a return—ah, if only that had been his own story. A life interrupted but then continuing in the way it had been begun with no memory of hardship or grief.
He surveyed his yard. What first? An oar must be planted for those who would never again see the ocean.
Declan put his raven paddle in the soil near the graves, thinking of the cedar canoe and how much Maire in particular would have loved its speed, and said the words of the ancient poem. Then he walked over the threshold of his front door into the open, derelict space that had been his kitchen. Remnants of a swallow’s nest rested on a shelf in the standing wall, a few shards of eggshell on the ground beneath. He studied what was left, a smear of yolk against the fragile shell, and began to formulate a plan in his head.
Chapter Eleven
Declan was sitting by the graves, reading the Odyssey aloud. The girls had loved the evenings when he read to them in firelight, saying that shadows and darkness made their imaginations work harder. “Aye, and my eyes, too,” was his reply. The day had dawned grey but was not raining, and Declan put in some few hours bracing the walls that still stood with whatever timber he could find, including fence posts; he stacked rocks where he thought they might best fit, and in the shelter of the byre he made a cooking area with stones already blackened with soot. In doing so, he remembered walking the surrounding hills as a boy and finding the strange standing stones, some with whorls of carving, and the ancient, lichened fire-circles at Cartrún An Phúna, indicating a kin
d of occupancy over thousands of years. Sometimes he would encounter an official-looking fellow in plus-fours sketching the sites; the men would ask if he knew other such places, and one of them told him stories of the old tribes that had lived in Ireland, when there were wolves and the elk whose antlers would rise out of the bogs, wide as any tree branch. He showed one man the place on the hill where he had looked down to see stone rubble in the shape of a circle. That man was very excited, and for some time after, Declan would see groups working in the area with shovels and brushes. On Inishdegil, there had been middens, he remembered, full of shells, limpets’ and mussels’, as well as flakes of tools, and it was there he’d been shown the site of a tomb—a wedge of rocks looking out to sea, the entrance so low that a man would have to bend to enter. As in the poem, it would be like entering a passage into the depths of the earth. Would a man emerge as he had gone in? Or was it only in poetry and the Bible that men walked out of the underworld changed but alive?
He boiled a kettle of water on an old grate balanced on his ring of stones, the fire licking the bottom of the vessel. He wished he had a cedar box for cooking, remembering the clean flavour of clams steamed with the hot rocks. What an experience that had been, sitting with his friends on a beach far from any lights or settlement, eating clams, and later listening to wolves. He was suddenly very lonely. He imagined Alex, Charles, and Albert even now paddling over to Cetx’anax, watched by sea lions, the sky hung with eagles. If he remained very still, he could hear them talking, or was it the wind coming down off Oughty Craggy?
The harp rested in its corner of the shed. Declan polished it again to remove every bit of soot, the dark oak gleaming, and as much for the sense that it was something he had seen Grainne do again and again. She had discovered that it was not common for a harp to be made of bog oak. Mostly they were ash, or walnut, or willow. There was one, called the Downhill harp for the place of its making two hundred years earlier; it was bog oak, she learned, and played by an Ulster harpist named Denis O’Hampsey. Grainne had read about him and knew the harp still existed in someone’s collection. She had hoped to see the famous harps if she managed to find a way to attend the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin; the Brian Boru harp was kept at Trinity College, and there were others she knew of. Declan determined, as he rubbed at the soot, to see them for her one day. He would rebuild the house and try to see the world as his daughters had dreamed to, the way his wife, lingering by the doorstep with her broom, had foreseen the passage of the girls to Dublin or Cork or beyond.
He would go to the bog for his turf, he decided. He might be able to salvage bits and scraws from the corners of the shed, enough for a week or two, but that would not do to offer comfort when the winter promised to be hard enough: no house proper, no potatoes but what might be left in the lazy beds, no prospect of music of an evening when the chores were done and the kettle filled for the morning.
Fergus Mannion was happy to lend his donkey and the hazel creels for bringing back the turf. He’d be happy to come himself, he said, but was after hurting his back digging the spuds. Young Mannions were produced and offered, but Declan said he’d be fine on his own with the donkey. The tea Bride produced went down nicely, along with a piece of her bread spread with thick butter and crabapple jelly. They shared some talk of the area—who had married, who had died, God rest their souls—and then there was a silence. Fergus Mannion cleared his throat.
“Just so it’s said, Declan. The men, the Black and Tans, who burned ye out were taken by a few of the lads and shot in the backs as they were being marched towards Westport where the Republicans were conducting trials. That’s the way of it. We need not speak of it again. But ye will find, being back, that opinions differ as to the direction the country should be moving towards, with Ulster or without. I mind that we are all Irish, have our families to provide for, and each other, and the sun is still setting across the Mweel Rea Mountains, same as it always has, for my parents, and theirs before. And my family still needs potatoes, Treaty or not. There has been too much bloodshed for family to be against family so. And neighbours, for that matter.”
Declan thanked him for the information. To be sure, he had had moments when he thought he must do something other than weep—file a report, find the men; there was no telling what might be done. As he walked up onto the bog with the placid donkey, he mused about what he had been told. He was not a vengeful man, or had not yet known himself to be so. When he had been teaching the local children, there had been a father, now and then, who would make life difficult for him, who would not want his child to learn about evolution, or who would grudge the time a daughter spent in the classroom when she might be scrubbing floors in one of the big houses in the area or else carding wool at Leenane. Declan would speak to the man as reasonably as he could, keeping in mind that most wanted the best for their children and felt helpless at their own lack of learning when they believed their wishes were being ignored. Sometimes the child would carry the father’s hostility, and Declan would remind himself that hard lives awaited many of these young people and he would strive to make his school harmonious. What times they were passing through. A Civil War they called it, with Sinn Fein and those supporting the Treaty struggling against one another. There was insurrection and violence. How ironic, Declan thought, that civil and civility had the same root.
His was the only turf still on the bog, the rickles standing like cairns on the dark earth, visible for miles. The girls had helped with the footing, and Declan touched a few of the turfs for the comfort of their footprints, the passage of ghosts over the surface of the rickle. Then he began to load the creels. At one point, he noticed some turfs dislodged at the side of a rickle and poked with his toe to see if an animal might emerge from what looked like a tunnel. His toe came up against something that was not turf and was not an animal seeking shelter in the drying earth. He reached into the tunnel and touched cloth of some kind. He pulled. Something heavy, something wrapped in oilcloth. He pulled it all the way out to discover it was a bundle of rifles, Enfields, all oiled and gleaming.
For a moment, Declan could not think straight, could only feel sick and bruised. He looked around, half-expecting to see someone watching him. It was an ugly find, rifles in his winter fuel. Who had placed the bundle here, taking advantage of the fact that no one would touch the turf of a man who had lost a family, who might never return? And what could be done with the rifles? He wanted them to disappear into thin air but supposed that would not happen, so he pushed the bundle back into its burrow like a reluctant weasel. At least it did not snap at his ankle. He finished filling the creels and walked beside the donkey down from the bog towards his home. He passed a few men working on a length of wall. They waved and said ’twas a good day for bringing home the turf. Stopping at Mannions, he told Fergus what he’d found in the turf pile.
Fergus was quiet. For a moment Declan wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake telling anyone about the rifles. He had been away, he didn’t know who might be drilling the lads in the gap by Tawnynoran. But he quickly remembered that Fergus had lent his donkey, that Bride had been upset about the boys and their drills; they wouldn’t send him to his own turf if they knew it held a cache of rifles.
“Declan, I am of two minds about the guns. This is not an unused road and I know Bride has told you of doings in the gap so I’m thinking they’re put there by local men. I’d like to take the bundle out to the middle of Fin Lough and hurl it into the deep water so, for all the good it would do. I know I don’t want them here and I’d say ye’ve the same aversion to them yerself. I’d not tell the Garda. With feelings as they are, I’m thinking that it would not go right with some. It’s possible they’ve been left and forgotten. And just as possible they’ve not been forgotten. We’ll take a cup of Bride’s tea and then we’ll go and see so.”
One of the Mannion boys was dispatched to take the donkey to Declan’s farm and unload the turf, his father asking him to stack it neatly along the wall of the
shed. The two men walked back to the bog, carrying some creels, both of them a little uneasy on the road they had known all their lives. From the position of the rickle, they could see the bundle had been removed; the side of the stack had collapsed a little.
“I was that uneasy, Fergus, as though I was being watched, and this a bog I’ve worked since childhood. That’s the way of it, I’m thinking. There are eyes in the country that were not there before.”
Each man filled a creel from the violated rickle, Fergus wincing as the weight nagged his cricked back, carrying it back down the road in order that the trip not be without consequence. They stacked the dry bricks in the pig byre as there was no eastern wall remaining to protect the fuel from the damp winds blowing in from the west and Declan did not want to share the entire of his own shelter with turf, there being scarcely enough room for his bedroll and few belongings.
Fergus Mannion encouraged him to keep the donkey until all his turf was home. Declan hobbled the animal and took the scythe from behind the shed to cut some grass for its dinner. Then he made a fire with the remains of the old turf and sat in the doorway of the shed, warming his hands over the low, smouldering mound. He would not let the memory of the rifles alter what was in his heart: a gladness for the fire and the stores of fuel, the temporary gift of a donkey to assist with his burden and to offer a kind of company as it munched the grass he had cut for it. Yet he thought of Odysseus, returned to wife and son, revealed to father by his knowledge of the trees, and he could not help but feel alone. There were no photographs, even, although a tinker had sketched Maire at a cattle fair once and Eilis had framed the bit of yellowed paper. That would be gone, too, sent up to the heavens in ash, like the clothing that might still contain a daughter’s odour, like the bits of furniture polished clean by their hands. He walked to the graves and sat by them. They were harpstrings! He must learn to hear this new music, coming deeply from their earth and the recesses of memory, must learn how to talk to them in the queer language of Hades. It would not happen all at once. How could it? Yet he remembered how comforted he had been to find Bride’s jar of flowers and how he had known there was meaning in the act. Wind rustled in the stalks of wild-growing barley, seeded from an unharvested crop, and he leaned into the sound of it, listening. Once he had imagined the voices of those who died near Dhulough, thin cries of hunger as the bodies of the dead were tumbled into bog workings. Listening was a way of keeping something alive, if only names, dates held in a parenthesis of longing.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 17