A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  He had in his mind a letter. He wanted Rose to know he had arrived safely and that Grainne’s harp had survived the fire. He wanted her to know about the bog, how his turf was neatly stacked (he would not mention the rifles), still as they’d left it, branded with the prints of his daughters’ boots, and how the marsh marigolds had thrown their seed pods to the wind. He wanted to tell her he had smelled home as soon as he’d been left off in Leenane, the blue smoke leading him to Delphi as surely as any map, while the hedges on the roadsides glowed with the last fuchsias. Rose, he would say, I’m sorry to have missed the salmon but these creeks are running down from Ben Gorm like music and I am after feeding Fergus Mannion’s donkey to ready him for a good morn-ing’s work. I have put aside the poem for now, Rose, but intend to work on it again once I have more than the turf shed over my head at night. I want to send you the lines where Odysseus visits his father and remembers aloud the trees the two planted, ready to be kissed alive by the god of summer days.

  So a letter would be written and sent off from the post office in Leenane to travel, like the wanderer himself, over two oceans to arrive at Oyster Bay, and then forwarded to Dunvegan, Glengarry County. And a girl, wearing the new knowledge of reading as carefully as one might wear jewels, would sit under an autumn apple tree to read of figs and harps and might, if she closed her eyes, smell the roasting pig, taste the amber wine from vines planted in Odysseus’s youth.

  He brought a pan of water down from the creek and put it on a flat stone by his shed. It was an old pan, an enamelled one they had used to boil up the hens’ mash, flakes of the paint broken off and rust showing through. He wanted to wash away the work of the bog and began by pulling off his shirt. Leaning over the water, he caught sight of himself and startled again to find himself so unchanged. At World’s End, he had imagined himself old, at the very end of his days on earth, a man washed up on the furthest shore from home, the man discovered by Nausikaa who hid himself with a fringe of leaves. But this reflective man, he might still be the lad who courted Eilis, hair a little thinner but still dark, eyes blue as a summer sky—he had been told this once and never forgot it—and shoulders as suited for labour as teaching the young their letters. He could use a shave, he supposed, and would heat water the next day for that purpose, once he’d looked out his gear in his rucksack. For now he dipped a handkerchief in water from a stream whose route he had followed as a boy to its rocky birthplace high on Ben Creggan. A marvel how water emerged from the earth, clean and cold, its entrance heralded by cress and a few reeds. And a marvel to feel it on his chest and arms, drops of it wrung from the square of worn linen and entering the pores of his skin.

  On the fence by his path, where his land met the road, he found a note weighted down with a stone. Sir, it read, sorry for your troubles. You were not meant to see what you saw. Don’t worry as we never meant you harm. If you think back to your lessons, you will know why we are doing this. Erin go bragh, and God bless you Mr. O’Malley. He was moved by the note, that fierce young men with dreams of Irish freedom would take the time to apologize to a schoolmaster. He remembered those lessons to be sure but was ashamed to think how sickened he’d felt at the sight of rifles in his turf. What had he imagined would bring his country its independence from British rule? Poetry, or the old tunes of a blind harper? In all his dreams, he had not imagined bloodshed, or rifles as heraldic emblems of boys coming into manhood.

  Word had gone out to say he was back. A passing farmer would stop and offer him a spade, a cabbage, a few hours labour for the rebuilding of his house. A young lad, wearing the gleaming ring of new marriage, stopped to say that his missus had said Declan could be sure of a welcoming meal if ever he would honour them by knocking on their door. It took Declan a few minutes to realize that the young man was Padraig Breen, a boy he had taught and given up after realizing that the lad wanted only to court Pegeen Devaney, daughter of the horse-dealing tinker from beyond Tawnyard Lough. And she would be the missus, Declan decided, as he shook young Breen’s hand and told him he was surely grateful for the invitation.

  O’Learys below brought up a few hens, one of which Miceal admitted would be as good in the pot as out, she was that stringy and no great layer. But Declan thought the occasional egg would prove more useful than one meal of tough chicken and let the bird peck for bugs in the haggard. Mrs. O’Leary, whose family had owned the farm for as many generations as Declan’s had owned theirs, an unusual length of ownership for lands so close to those held by the Marquess of Sligo, came up the hill with a much-mended blanket and a small stool. After surveying the turf shed, she returned with a ticking made of faded flour sacks stuffed with feathers. She told him she would not hear of the schoolmaster sleeping direct on the bare ground and if there was anything else he could think of, he was to let her know and she would find a way to help him.

  People appeared with tools and the means for making mortar and slowly the walls of the house were constructed. The gamekeeper at the nearby hunting lodge came with a window, someone else had enough boards for a door. The tinkers from beyond Tawnyard Lough made hinges and hasps and provided a kettle, Devaney remembering how patient Declan had been with his children who came to school so sporadically that they forgot more about sums than they remembered although there were no children like them for their knowledge of animals and the river. They could catch trout with their bare hands, and one of the girls could summon otters with a curious call that was almost the only sound she made.

  At night Declan would sit in the doorway of the turf shed with his small fire sizzling in rain and listen to his hens fuss in their makeshift coop. Foxes lurked in his fields, and he knew he would have to get a dog before the winter was through. Some mornings he would see the vixen in her pretty coat and she would meet his eye for a moment or two before vanishing into the side of the hill. He salvaged potatoes from forgotten beds, scrubbing them in creek water, and once marvelling at one, perfectly round, on which the markings of earth outlined the continents of the world as exact as a globe. He remembered jabbing his finger at random on the library globe in Seattle that day when he’d been directed by fate to Oyster Bay. He turned the potato in his hands, brushing at the soil until the world disappeared.

  He was waiting for something, he couldn’t have said what, but one morning he looked up from fitting a window into the eastern wall of the house and saw a woman framed within it, standing at the top of the boreen leading up from the Delphi road. He thought at first it was a warping of the glass, a flaw, so that looking through it a man would be dizzy, disoriented, and he rubbed at the window. She was still there, hatless, with dark hair in a plait reaching down below her shoulder, and she was carrying a basket. He put down his tools and walked around to the other side of the house, his hand extended in welcome.

  Chapter Twelve

  She was the cousin of the man from the big house near Aasleagh Falls, the house that had been burnt, the one with the wolfhounds and the harp-playing daughter. Una Fitzgerald, she was called, and he remembered that Eilis had met her when the cousin had been staying at the big house. Eilis had been invited to make some tinctures with Elizabeth Fitzgerald and came home to tell of a young woman of uncommon intelligence, who argued with her cousin in a spirited way about politics and religion. Hugh and Elizabeth had moved to London, unable to reconcile themselves to living in the area after the fire, and Una had joined them for a time, her own parents having removed themselves to France, but she missed Ireland, “even though many don’t consider me Irish at all!” After returning to live for a time in a flat overlooking Stephen’s Green in Dublin, she had come to Marshlands to live in the groundskeeper’s cabin, which had not been burned; and certainly a groundskeeper was no longer needed for a garden gone wild, haunted by peacocks and pheasants left to fend for themselves.

  “It was our grandfather’s house,” Una told him, “and there were so many happy summers, wading in the river and rowing in Killary Harbour. I do understand why Hugh couldn’t stay. Being burne
d out by people you’ve known for years, well, how could you want to go on living there, as though nothing had happened, always wondering who had given the order? No one was willing to do anything about it afterwards. Yet I do believe that it wasn’t directed at Hugh and Elizabeth personally, if I may say that, but at what they represented. And Elizabeth was so distressed by your tragedy that I think it was part of what made them certain they couldn’t live here any longer.”

  Declan thought about this for a moment. “Aye, the problem was never between our families so. Eilis’s first thought at hearing about Marshlands was to offer whatever she could. But as ye know, the retaliation was swift and terrible. I mind that your cousin made such generous gifts to the school, and of course there was the sheet music your younger cousin gave to Grainne. Ah, the whole thing was so sad, it drove me to Canada, a little cabin by the ocean.”

  The two of them talked carefully. Una Fitzgerald was surprised to see that Declan had embarked upon rebuilding his house and he was surprised to learn that she would not be doing the same at Marshlands. She explained that she did not want to live in a house of ghosts; everything had been lost, and she felt that it would be too much like trying to recover childhood with its odours and feelings, the wolfhounds waiting by the door for a walk up to the bog or along the shore.

  “I’m content enough with the cabin,” Una said. “It’s bigger than the flat I’d been living in and it has its garden, a little shed for hens if I decide to keep some. I’m going to have some work done inside, making two little rooms into a studio, but apart from that, it suits me perfectly well.”

  A studio? Declan noted she had a drawing block in her basket and a bundle of pencils and asked was she an artist?

  She laughed and confessed that she was only now thinking of herself as one. “It was put aside for years, Mr. O’Malley. I did train as a botanical artist at the Dublin School of Art and Design and did some illustration work for the National Botanic Gardens, assisting with a flora they were producing.” And then her face went sad. She sorted her pencils into a row according to length, her long fingers busy with nothing. “I was to marry, you see. A botanist I met while at school. We hoped to collaborate on a book of the wildflowers of the West—I grew up in Donegal and of course spent summers here, and David’s grandparents live down near Clifden so while he grew up in Dublin, he knew the West quite well from visits to them. I think our happiest days were spent walking the Sky Road near Clifden and taking samples of bog cotton and primroses.”

  “Aye, they are a pretty sight, the primroses. Eilis used to dig up bunches of the earliest ones and bring them into the house in an old teacup so she could look at them while she washed the dishes.”

  “I’d never seen such beautiful drifts of primroses as the ones growing in a stretch of hedge near Streamstown,” the woman continued, her eyes shining with the memory. “David carried his vasculum everywhere, kept damp with his grandmother’s tea towels, and was always looking for the perfect specimen. And I made notes about colour and skies and how the late-afternoon light changed the yellow of the primrose from butter to gold.”

  “It sounds grand, I’d say. Will he join ye at Marshlands so?”

  Tears came to Una Fitzgerald’s eyes. “David joined the army and was killed at Suvla Bay.”

  “Oh, Miss Fitzgerald, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to ...”

  She interjected quickly, brushing her eyes impatiently, a single tear lingering. “You weren’t to know. How could you? But I mourned for too long, I think, giving up all the things I did regularly, and I spent days in my bed, weeping. I couldn’t bear to think about painting for years. I’d hear his voice telling me to notice how the bees plunged into the spur of the toadflax to get at the nectar and I’d lose myself to days of weeping. And yet he would have wanted me to keep on with my work, especially wildflowers. It was what drew us to one another, after all.”

  Declan was quiet, listening to her. It was a story so unlike his own and yet its theme was loss; there was a similarity in the days of weeping. Her fingers did not stop arranging the pencils while she spoke, a nervousness not apparent in her voice. “What have ye been sketching on a day like this one then? I’m thinking there’s not much in bloom to catch yer eye so.”

  She showed him a drawing of dog rose, bare of leaves, and told him it was just as important to record the seeds nestled in the soft lining of the hips as it was to match the various pinks of the blooms. Blackberry, with its little fringe of flower remains clinging to the frostbitten fruit, a canister of seeds that followed the silken poppies. A palette changed from season to season like a wardrobe—the fresh greens of spring through the brilliant yellows and oranges and pinks of summer, the russets and reds of autumn hedges, the duns and dull ochres of winter. Well, thought Declan, a wardrobe did not change for those of us in these cabins, but he did not say it aloud. Una told him it reminded her of life again, observing the plants in their seasons. She was not sure she could continue with the book—she was not a writer by nature—but she would make a record of the plants in their seasons, working from the checklist they had compiled, as well as David’s life list.

  It was a window opening, thought Declan, into a life, a partnership, so different from his own. He could not imagine such travels with Eilis. For one, they hadn’t enough money; for another, her parents would not have allowed her to go off with Declan unchaperoned, beyond a walk or perhaps to a ceilidh in a neighbouring house. After another word or two about the sketches, she abruptly said goodbye and disappeared down the road, telling him she hoped they’d meet again, her basket swinging from her arm, shawl enveloping her like the mists of Athene.

  Thinking about the visit, Declan was undecided how he felt about Una Fitzgerald. She had the mannerisms of her class, a regal air that came with generations of deference from men such as himself. But he could not deny she was friendly and that her company was not unwelcome. Did he hope they would meet again? He decided he did. And what a sad story about her fiancé getting himself killed overseas. It was a war which had caused any amount of argument in Leenane, and other parts, he was thinking. There were those who felt the Irish lads should support the English effort and those who believed a more important war was taking place on their own soil, perhaps not so dramatically, but Irishmen were needed to further the cause of Republicanism at home. Yet there was the opportunity, in remote County Mayo, to remain silent in such discussions. From what Una had said, he realized how the issue was not simply relevant to one religion and class. He wondered how she felt about her David enlisting, and when they met again, near the river where he’d come upon her sketching on a folding easel, he tried to ask as gently as he could.

  It took her a long time to answer. At first her mouth struggled for words. Then she began to sing softly, and it was a song Declan knew.

  Right proudly high over Dublin town

  They hung out a flag of war.

  ’Twas better to die ’neath an Irish sky

  Than at Suvla or Sudel Bay.

  And from the plains of Royal Meath

  Strong men came hurrying through;

  While Britannia’s sons with their long-range guns

  Sailed in from the foggy dew.

  ’Twas England bade our wild geese go

  That small nations might be free.

  Their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves

  On the fringe of the grey North Sea.

  Declan found he was singing the last phrase with her and realized he had never once thought where exactly Suvla might be.

  “The Gallipoli Peninsula,” answered Una.“So far away for an Irishman to be buried. I never wanted him to go. Britain had such a nerve, Redmond such a colossal nerve to ask, given our history. And yet David felt it was his duty. There were sermons preached which told young men it was their duty. So he joined, with a number of his former classmates from Trinity College, and they left in April of 1915 for training in England. I was relieved that a colleague from the Royal Botanic Gardens was also in h
is regiment for at least they could do a little botanizing. At first I think he saw it as an adventure ...”

  “Aye, others have said the same,” concurred Declan.

  “... and he wrote the most brilliant letters home, always including a wildflower so I could imagine the surroundings. I’d check them against the map—the Dardanelles, Cape Helles, Achi Baba ... I imagined wild tulips and the sorts of things we knew only as rare plants grown under glass although I suppose there would have been plenty of grey prickly things as well. Thistles, thorn trees ...”

  She was quiet, remembering his letters, gay at first and full of the humour of finding himself on a ship heady with grease and the fumes of fuel. He had loved Alexandria, where the regiment had stopped and been marched through the streets, where a carpet on the ground indicated a shop, a tumble of amphora, baskets of figs and dates, where fruit sellers beckoned with slices of melon held on the tip of a knife, where everyone was robed and veiled, and where they were finally given a meal of salty cheese and tomatoes and cups of coffee thick as syrup. He wrote wonderfully, bringing the same attention to his descriptions of what waited on the Gallipoli Peninsula—the flowers, certainly, but also the squalor of the trenches, the endless digging both to try to drain the flooding water and to provide more safety, a visit from Lord Kitchener, the men instructed to shave as best they could and to polish their buttons, where daily a man would rush to the latrines and not return, victim of a sudden, deadly dysentery. He described the smell of decay overlaid with sage and other strong herbs, wild rosemary bushes displaced by graves, and the horrifying sight of the carcasses of mules, ribs exposed like ships’ timbers, half in the tide, their eye sockets filled with tiny crabs.