A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  They ate their lunch in the shadow of the tomb, its lichened rocks providing support for their backs.

  “What a place to be buried!” exclaimed Una. “The mountains to the south, these lakes, the glorious bog ... It is humbling, don’t you believe, to imagine people living here thousands of years ago and commemorating their dead with such a handsome dolmen?”

  Declan agreed. He told her about what he’d seen as a boy and how the archaeologists had come to study the cathair he had told them about. “I never felt alone when I explored the land as a boy,” he explained. “Always there were the shadows of people who had hunted and farmed, and the sad ruins of the houses tumbled into nothing during the Famine. I think it was what I yearned for most in Canada, though it took me a fair few months to determine that. I knew some Indian men who travelled by canoe and knew every rock, knew where there was water deep enough for halibut fishing, and knew where the summer camps of their old people had been, even though no one had lived that way for at least a generation. It was wonderful but lonely-making, too. Even though I haven’t much here, not even a house really, and me sleeping in the turf shed, it’s right to have come back, to be among my own people, even the dead ones. Even Eilis and the girls, planted in my land same as potatoes or corn. There is more company to the dead than most living people think.”

  Una could think of no response to such eloquent words and quietly began to gather up the remains of their lunch. Listening was proving surprising. On the way back, Declan asked if they might stop by the Famine grave on the shore of Dhulough, where those who had been ordered to present themselves for inspection at Delphi Lodge and whose famished bodies did not survive the sixteen-mile march from Westport through mountain passes and over this same rough road as they now travelled were buried. It was only a pile of stones but memory preserved the knowledge that those stones marked a mass grave. For years Declan’s mother had told them of this site, cousins of her mother’s having been among the unfortunate dead. A relation had sent her mother a clipping about the event from the Mayo Constitution, dated April 10, 1849, and it was kept within the pages of the family bible, which had been reduced to ash with everything else but the harp, it seemed, when the house had been torched.

  The place was very silent, just the mountain coming down to the shore of Dhulough and the road cut through, a low mound of broken stone to indicate a grave, and grass eaten to the quick by sheep. Wind punctuated the quiet, rustled the reeds, but did not interfere with the peace of the place; it was as though the stones issued forth a low keening to keep one mindful of sorrow and loss. Over the far hill, light filtered through dark cloud, you could not call it sun exactly, but a brightness that gave the moment of their stopping a brief clarity.

  After Una had dropped him off, refusing tea in her eagerness to take her plants back to press and catalogue, Declan surveyed his work thus far. The house was coming along, slowly but surely. On his last trip to Leenane, he’d ordered slates for the roof and hoped to have the structure ready for them in the early part of the new year. He made a fire and sat by it, thinking of the day he had spent, unexpected, and how his life and Una’s were so different, yet overlapped in ways he was only beginning to understand. She had left him with one of her plant books after he had asked her how he might become better acquainted with wildflowers. “You are already acquainted with them, Declan. On intimate terms, one might say. You just don’t know their proper names. Read the little introduction to this book. It explains taxonomy and such. You’ll find out that the main things you’ll need to know are family, genus, and species. Once you’ve figured that out, it’s really a lot easier. And knowing those things makes the plants so interesting. I’m very fond of genus—you’ll figure out such a lot about the history of botany by knowing that. A bit like how our surnames reflect our history: Miller, Baker, etc. Now, what would be the Irish equivalent? Oh, I don’t have time to work it now but next time we meet?”

  Declan opened the book and began to look for things he recognized. Ah, there was the yellow iris, well known to him from the banks of the Bundorragha River, golden with it in May. Family: Iridacae. Yes, fine. Then: Iris pseudacorus. He knew from his days with the priests that “pseuda” meant false. Reading a little of the text, he could see that it came from the plant’s resemblance to Acorus calamus, or sweet flag, and that similarity related to the shape of the leaves. That would be why it was so often called the flag iris, he thought. And iris itself, now there was a tale. From the Greek, referring to a messenger of the gods who was also a goddess, Iris, her name also meaning rainbow, touching heaven and earth, linking the two realms. He was beginning to see that this could be an engrossing pastime. And then he was looking at a plant so familiar to him, a plant Eilis had used to make a simple salve to encourage the healing of wounds, a plant he had drunk as a tea to ward off the onset of a cold. Yarrow. But here he learned its noble origins. Achillea millefolium, named for the great Achilles, who had been held by the heels and dipped in the River Styx to make him immortal, yet was vulnerable in the one area untouched by the powerful waters and who used the plant to heal his men wounded at Troy. And “millefolium” for its multitude of leaves.

  Declan was so surprised to learn that a plant as common as yarrow had its provenance in the world of his beloved poem. While he had been thinking of its landscape as remote and exotic, grey-green with olives and strong herbs, it had been populated with the plants of his own Delphi. And with a plant Lucy had used to cleanse the violated ground where the canoe and its occupant had been dug up by pigs. He put the book down and went to the rise beyond the turf shed where he found some yarrow, brown now in winter but still releasing its pungent oils to his hand as he gently crushed the leaves. He inhaled deeply. Looking at it in his hands, he thought he would try the trick of making himself invulnerable. The next time he filled his basin with water heated over his turf fire, he would sweep his body with branches of yarrow, taking care not to miss his heels or any part that might prove his downfall if unprotected. Wrapping some stalks of yarrow with a length of supple grass, he hung the clump over the doorway of his shed. It brushed his head as he entered and departed, reminding him of Achilles, and the herb they kept in common.

  Everything traced a path to the poem, he sometimes thought. A plant, weather, the look of the mountains. He took out his copy of the Odyssey and opened it at random. Book 11, the journey to the underworld. He mused that of course this was where the book would open as he had spent so much time with these lines of intense encounters. It was Odysseus’s mother again, telling him news of home. His son, she tells him, holds the household together. But Laertes, his father, has taken to the farmed area, sleeping among his slaves in winter on the floor by the fire’s ashes, his body wrapped in old skins. And in summer—and here Declan paused to think deeply about the lines:

  He closed the book and clasped his hands together. I have become my father, he thought, or has he always been in me all along? No slaves, of course, but the foolish hens who must be kept safe from foxes, no vineyard but these hills of potatoes and the sloes which make a drink they say to keep away the winter chill. And although it’s cold today, soon the blackthorns will be blooming and soon they’ll be dandling those mealy bitter sloes. And I am hoping that I will not be sleeping by the ashes of my fire for evermore.

  A letter came from Rose, written with the careful handwriting of one new to the craft. Dear Mr. O’Malley, she wrote.

  Just after the salmon finished in Anderson Creek, we left for Ontario. It was sad to leave. I said goodbye to your little house and to Argos. The MacIsaacs are good to her and she loves Mrs. MacIsaac but when I went to say goodbye, she followed me back to my boat and howled as I rowed back to our house. Dunvegan is lovely. My aunt Martha has made things so nice for us and Mum has stopped crying so much. We’re going to school in the same schoolhouse where our mother and aunt and uncles went. At first I was put with the smaller children because I am a late starter, the master calls me, but thanks to you I am now with
those my own age and the teacher says I am his top scholar for my years. Our readers are nothing like the Odyssey and when I told the master this, he went very quiet and then came to me later with a book he said I could use instead. It is about a girl called Jane Eyre who loses her parents and lives with mean relations, nothing at all like Aunt Martha and Uncle Oscar, but then she becomes something called a governess. Some of the words are hard but the master showed me how to use a dictionary and oh, that has helped such a lot. I am so glad the harp has survived. Your friend, Rose Neil.

  He would not think of Rose, dancing in the tide, her white arms raised like wings. He would not remember those arms dark with bruises, would not think of Argos. Not now. But the harp ... Ah, yes, it had survived, but Declan would look at it with its broken strings and wonder what might be done with it. He worried that the frame might warp in an unheated turf shed, or worse, that the moisture in the wood might freeze and expand, causing cracking, and it would be impossible to repair. He felt responsible for making sure it continued to produce music although the why and how of it was beyond him. When he next saw Una, he asked her for advice.

  “Well, I’ll write to Maeve, of course, and ask her what to do. I know she has found a teacher in London and has continued her studies. She will know, if anyone does.”

  And a letter came back from London as part of a package containing a book that demonstrated the stringing of harps and a number of lengths of harp-string and a tool for affixing the brass wires. Maeve was very excited to know that the harp had come through the fire intact, but for strings, and wrote that the stringing was not too difficult. The book she was sending had a clear chart, and Bernadette Feeny, near Glenummera, would be able to help them with the tuning as the strings would have to be tuned to pitch morning and evening, for five days ideally, or at least over the period of a week.“What a fine way to honour Grainne, Mr. O’Malley!” she wrote. “I hope to visit Una next summer and will of course help you then if you find this too daunting.”

  It would in a way be the measure of him, he thought, the stringing of the harp. To make true peace with Eilis, Maire, and his beloved Grainne, to take the only thing to survive the fire almost whole, apart from himself, and make it usable again. He had left Delphi in pieces and returned patched and mended as an old shoe, wearable—but for what? He was building a house from salvaged walls, stones that might have come from more ancient structures and which contained within them the silences of history. If he could restore to the harp its old utility and power to make music, he might find in the task a way forward for himself, too. Once the house was finished, was he to milk a cow daily for himself only, was he to grow potatoes to fill his own belly? Would he end up like one of the isolated hill bachelors, coming down once a year to buy some tobacco or to sell a pig, the jackets falling off their backs for want of a stitch, their skins tanned by turf smoke and tea? Or would he learn to pluck the strings of a harp and sing for his supper as some of the composers loved by Grainne had done, would he put on his wedding shirt and ask some apple-cheeked maiden to become mistress of his hearth? The thought of any of it made him want to curl up in his bedroll like old Laertes and sleep among the ashes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  One morning, walking along the fenceline to check for gaps—he was going to take a calf from Mannions to his grass—Declan saw movement across the water at Tawnynoran. Light figures moving among the trees, one here, one there, perhaps a dozen altogether. It was a Sunday, and he was not surprised to recognize, even from that distance, the tall profile of Liam Kenny among them. Where the trees grew thicker by the damp banks of Sruhaughboy where it washed down from Oughty Craggy, the figures disappeared.

  It was like seeing ghosts, Declan thought, an army of boys, lost into fretful history. Republicans again had taken Clifden to the south and the mood was uneasy, for it was felt violence was to come. There was a line running down the length of Connemara, with the west being Republican-held and the territory east of the mountains contained by Nationals. Padraic O’Maille, Deputy Speaker of the Dail and a Kilmilkin man himself from the Leenane Road west of Maam Cross, had been shot in Dublin, had taken ten bullets, including one lodged near his spine, though he was expected to recover. Boats ran men up and down the coast, Lewis guns were hidden away in old pig sheds, and the stories circulated about explosions and wild fist fights in local pubs as friends and neighbours fought at the slightest provocation. Declan found this desperately sad, that those who had faced the enemy together both on native soil and in France and elsewhere now could not agree to disagree about whether or not Collins and the others ought to have settled for the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty which gave Ireland dominion status. The names were flung about with astonishing familiarity that was Irish to the core: de Valera, Brugha, Collins, Griffith. Boys whom he knew could never keep the Irish kings straight for more than a minute were suddenly experts on constitutional matters and willing to shoot their brothers. It was all too much, and yet he had returned to be Irish on his own soil.

  He met three boys on the boreen, with a look in their eyes of heroes and rebellion.

  “Lads, ye are not long out of school. Are ye in work yet?”

  “No, Mr. O’Malley. But we ... oww!” and the one that had been about to say something of their activities was kicked sharply in the leg by the boy beside him.

  “I have me own idea, boys, of what ye are up to, in the gap near Tawnynoran. Didn’t I plant the seeds meself, with our readings of Oisin and the high kings. But I mind ye have families, have something in front of ye that is precious, though ye might not ken that yet. Ireland needs brave men, to be sure, but wise men are needed too, and I am asking ye to think hard before ye act.”

  The boys murmured that they would keep his words in mind before they ran down the road towards their homes, the weight of the guns left behind in a secret cache a thrill that their shoulders remembered while they fed the pigs, repaired walls with silent fathers, joined their families in the rosary before bed. When they slipped out of those beds, over the sleeping bodies of their brothers, to take up arms in Tawnynoran, their mothers would weep beside the still shapes of husbands, a cow would stop in its chewing to watch them disappear down the slope of a field to where others waited for them in the dull light of a tallow candle filched from a dresser drawer. What did they tell their priest at confession, Declan wondered, and did they take the communion with the rest of their families? The one-eyed priest had gone to Limerick and another had come in his place, a young fellow with a voice like a choirboy; it was said that he was altogether more human than his predecessor. Who knew, perhaps he even counselled the lads to take up arms for Ireland, whatever that meant.

  The harp had been moved to Una’s cabin after Declan had read Maeve’s book and learned that a harp needed a stable environment, neither too damp nor too warm and dry. He wondered if it might even now be too late. But examining the instrument carefully, he could find so sign of cracks or twisting. Perhaps it had been a blessing that the strings had broken and melted as they might otherwise have caused the harp to pull itself apart from the tension.

  Una collected the harp in her car, wrapped in an old blanket. When she and Declan lifted it out at Marshlands, it was like carrying a child, one of them at each end, supporting the harp’s weight with their arms.

  “Let’s hope no one is watching,” Una laughed, as they struggled through the doorway with their cargo. “I wouldn’t want it talked around that we are smuggling guns or invalids into my house. It might get back to Hugh and he would decide there was nothing for it but to confiscate my car.”

  It was natural to want to place the harp near the fire, but Una wisely asked that it be set in the little room off the main room; she thought the heat from the fire and sunlight streaming in the southern window might dry out the wood and damage the finish. Well, Declan thought to himself, any finish it had was lost to the fire. When he ran his thumb along the grain, small blisters could be felt on the surface of the wood. He remembere
d Grainne smoothing mineral oil into the wood periodically and then buffing it with a clean soft cloth until it shone with the deep glow that bog oak could attain, if cared for. The heat would certainly have caused the oil to blister, and he would find a way to restore the patina.

  Una was making a meal for them before Declan walked back home. A chicken was roasting in the oven and potatoes were being scrubbed in the deep sink. He asked could he do anything, and she had him scraping carrots over a basin. She hummed while she worked, as Eilis had done, and it was pleasant in her warm room with the smell of cooking and some books on the table to look at once the carrots were scraped and rinsed.

  “Declan, I brought down some floras and such from David’s collection. I thought you might enjoy seeing the real masters of the work I’m trying to do. I’ll pour you a glass of sherry and you can look through them while I finish making our dinner. I’ve also brought this, which had been an inspiration to David; it’s the results of the Clare Island Survey, done around 1910, I believe, by experts in every field—botany, zoology, geology, archaeology, family and place names, even the native names for flowers and things—and then published in these three rather large volumes. It was meant to echo work done on an island off Dublin, Lambay, but in fact the proportions of the Clare Island survey grew beyond anyone’s expectations. Anyway, look at them all if you like.”

  Declan carefully lifted one of the books, Flora Londinensis, and opened it. He recognized many of the plants—a primrose, a clump of the stinky plant that often tangled itself in amongst the potatoes and which he learned was Geranium robertianum, or Herb Robert. The plates were nicely done, delicately coloured. “Una, what is the meaning of the bits the fella has drawn on either side of the plant?”

  She came and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, yes, well, those are called dissections. The idea is not just to portray the plant itself but also its function, its anatomy, how it reproduces itself. That all began, really, with the artists who illustrated Linnaeus.”