A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  And with the book there was a card, hand-drawn by Una, showing a pretty stand of pines. Her note read, “Happy Christmas to you, Declan. I am so grateful to have found you as a friend! And I am hopeful that you might consider working with me on a project, for which this little volume might serve us as one model. A few sleepless nights led me to an idea: I have in mind a book about the plants of our area but not a flora such as David and I might have produced. I have been talking to some of the older women in Leenane about the dyeing process for wool and realize there is a huge repository of plant knowledge here, not just the medicinal or decorative or food use, but their place in the economy, in folklore, agriculture, and so forth. We would include the Gaelic names and some of the lore surrounding the native taxonomy. If you go back to the school, and I am so hopeful that you will, perhaps the children might be included in gathering information for such a book by talking to their families and observing the plants around them. Think how exciting it could be, Declan! I do look forward to seeing you in the New Year. With my very warm wishes, Una.”

  He didn’t know what to think for a moment. He couldn’t help her with a book; what on earth could he possibly do? She had the skill and knowledge to do such a thing, not him. Sure he was only just learning the proper way to classify, and him a middle-aged man. He wondered if it might be too late for him to learn something so complicated and new, although he suspected Una would tell him there was nothing new about it at all and it was the stuff of life and he was already familiar with so much about it that it was only a matter of learning its vocabulary. (“All your life,” he could hear her voice telling him, “you have watched bees enter the flowers, transferring the pollen from the stamen to the stigma, you’ve told me Eilis collected seed of her favourite annuals, and you’ve kept seed of necessity from the cabbages and onions. So that was botany, Declan, although you didn’t call it that.”)

  Weather that Christmas was mild and he worked hard on his house, borrowing a crude ladder from the O’Learys to place the ridge beam from gable end to gable end; he nailed on the rafters and prepared strapping for the slates, then applied them, working up from the eaves to the ridge beam. It made all the difference. The interior dried out, and Declan began to think about plastering the walls and washing them with lime. It was beginning to look like a house that might be lived in, although there was still a deceptive amount of work to be done. He noticed how the rain sounded on the slates, more noticeable than on thatch, sharper, pointed. Fergus Mannion told him that some in the area thought him foolish for using slates instead of barley straw, but Declan remembered how his house had burned, the thatch acting as a wick for the fierce flames, and how he kept to himself the smell of smoky thatch in his nostrils for months after, like a harsh and caustic punishment. Fergus helped him fit the windows in their frames.

  And he walked as he always had, sometimes uneasy although the young men had been captured, although Liam Kenny had disappeared like smoke. There would be a sound, a fox yipping, a cry, something almost like a phrase of music—and he would start. Yet there had always been ghosts abroad in these hills. Once, walking near one of the lakes beyond Tullaglas as a boy, Declan had found a number of small, uninscribed stones in loose rows; his father had told him it was a cillín, a children’s burial ground, that if he looked closely he would see the diminutive head and foot stones to indicate a child lay under the earth. A place of early grief, huddled in a corner of an old enclosure where dug-away bog revealed drystone walls, the remains of a shelter. When he asked his father how he knew it was children buried there, his father told him it had always been known.

  Una returned from her holiday and surprised him with an embrace as she came through the gate.

  “How was your time in London?” he asked, the weight of her arms around his shoulders an unsettling sensation long after she’d released him.

  She told him about the concerts she’d attended with her cousin’s family and the pleasure of seeing her parents. She had visited Kew and described the abundance of rare tropical plants kept under glass, a grove of evergreens she had enjoyed for their resemblance to the plantation of pines near the Aasleagh Falls. But she’d begun to long for the West of Ireland not three days into the holiday.

  “Everyone advised against me coming back, of course. Lloyd George has them thinking that the Irish are all bloodthirsty. I had to remind those in the company that I am Irish and that I want a free Ireland, too. My parents agreed with me on that point but were unhappy I was coming back to uncertainty. I had to tell them that we never see any sign of the Troubles around here and then was promptly stopped on the way back and asked to account for myself, a woman driving alone on the Maam Road. ‘If you are worried that I am carrying gelignite,’ I told them, ‘then by all means search the boot. ’They let me go on.”

  Looking down at her hands, she confessed that attempts had been made to encourage a courtship, a lanky Englishman who owned a castle and a title. He was a fervent collector of rare lilies, climbing mountain ranges to bring back the seeds of beauties from China and Turkey.

  “He spoke as though his mouth was filled with marbles,” she laughed, “and owned that a woman just might be able to classify as well as a man but could they sleep in tents, could they boil a kettle on a spirit stove? My mother thought I was mad to spurn what I suppose amounted to advances, although made in such an odd and chilly way that I could be forgiven for having imagined him to be indifferent.”

  Declan felt a little stab of something, a sour sting of ... well, what would he call it? And then thought: that’s it, envy. And then he looked at Una again, the rich weight of her embrace still warm upon his shoulders. He wondered if she’d given the collector of lilies a book with a note that she hoped to work with him on a project. It surprised him to find he hoped desperately that she hadn’t.

  She had also located and purchased a copy of a book Maeve had recommended to help Declan with the harp. It was The Ancient Music of Ireland, a collection of airs for harp collected by Edward Bunting at the great gathering of harp players in Belfast in 1792. Bunting had not only notated the performances of the harpers, among them Denis O’Hampsey, but he had talked to them, gathered information on their playing, on the harps themselves, and put together the book, prefacing it with an excellent and useful dissertation. Declan recognized the name from some sheet music Grainne had been given. Bunting was a great man for the harp. The airs were arranged for piano, and Una, insisting she was no musician, very ably played a selection of them.

  “I’ll try this one, Declan, Scott’s lamentation for the Baron of Loughmoe, composed in 1599,” she announced, reading aloud from the notes. “Imagine! It’s one of the pieces that O’Hampsey played, presumably on the bog oak harp.”

  Declan noticed, in leafing through the book, that Bunting was not particularly keen on Carolan, calling him a genius to be sure, but also calling into question his delight in the Italian and German schools of composition, feeling that the delight translated into something less than a total commitment to the ancient music of his own country. “Like me and the poem,” wondered Declan to himself, “an Irishman hungry for the lines of Greek ...?” And yet, though totally unschooled in music and only a little more in poetry, Declan had always felt a deep Irish current in the Carolan compositions so beloved by Grainne. There were threads of melody you could hear in the fiddle playing at the Leenane pub or in the room at any ceilidh, even in the tune hummed by a farmer as he brought home the sheep. Irish is as Irish does, he thought.

  And then Una was asking, “Have you heard this piece?” and she was playing something so achingly lovely that he felt tears come to his eyes. It entered his heart, played the strings of memory and yearning, and when she finished playing, she told him it was a lament for Grainne Mhael. He did not know it from his own Grainne but it felt like a piece of music that might have been fitting to accompany her into the earth, had he known or been willing for anything like a ceremony.

  And lines came to him, lines he had
in the recent past laboured over, never sensing in them a message but hearing now the act of persuasion.

  “Una, I think I will try those strings now.”

  They brought the harp into the big room and lit all the lamps. Each string was wrapped in a bit of paper with its note written on it. There was a chart as well, which gave him the Irish names for the strings, or combination of strings, and a pattern for the stringing itself.

  First, the Sisters, two strings in unison, which would be the first to be tuned to the proper pitch. They divided the instrument into bass and treble and answered to tenor G on the violin. There were holes in the sound box of the harp, through which one pushed one’s hand in order to thread the string through the tiny string hole. The ends were taken up to the tuning pegs and put through the holes in the pegs and wound on. It took ages to do this; Declan found his hands were too big, his concentration not right. The first time he did it, he neglected to tie off the string he was threading through and the whole length of it slid out as he was trying to wind it on the tuning peg. He stabbed his finger with a sharp end of wire and it bled more than he would have imagined possible. The clean cotton that Una wrapped around it made everything more difficult.

  Several of the strings went through more easily. A was called Servant to the Sisters, and B, Second String Over the Sisters. Then there were the Sinews, the half-tone F, and G was Answering. It was a curious language of relationships, one he felt he might be on the verge of understanding. Of course he had no idea of the tuning but that would be Bernadette Feeny’s province. Grainne had used a tuning fork, he thought, and sometimes asked Maire to sound a note on the tin whistle. He wished he had paid more attention. The book cautioned against tightening the strings too excessively. It would be asking a frame to take hundreds of pounds of tension right from the start, and the wood needed time to adjust to, or in this case remember, the tension. Tighten the strings just enough to keep them from sagging, the book suggested. The wrench Maeve had sent was used for this purpose. He thought to himself, What is a schoolmaster and erstwhile fisherman doing stringing a harp? And then he remembered Grainne, her deep and abiding hope for herself as a musician, the way her eyes shone when Maeve Fitzgerald told her about the courses that the latter had taken at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and how Eilis would tell her that they would have to see what happened, she had years yet to practise and play, but that God worked in miraculous ways, and he read the instructions again, made his fingers seek out the tiny string holes again. The book also recommended a particular knot for tying off the strings and advised slipping a thin length of stick through the loop to anchor the knot. The first few strings Declan tied off began to slip, and he followed the book’s advice on the sticks.

  Finally he had completed the stringing and he returned to the instructions, studying them again to make certain he had followed them correctly. Running his thumb across the strings, he was satisfied that they were all fastened securely to their tuning pegs. From what he could understand, the range of tension between untuned and tuned was narrow. Too little tension, and the sound was twangy. Too much could damage the soundboard. Now he could only send a message to Bernadette Feeny and wait.

  A week later, she arrived in a donkey cart with her shawl and her tuning key. Through a complicated set of transmissions, she had let Declan know when she needed to go to Leenane on errands and he arranged to be at Una’s cabin to assist her. She greeted them both and then conveyed her sorrow at hearing of the fires. The Feeny farm was beyond Delphi, at Glenummera, nestled in a hollow of the Sheefry Hills. It was very isolated. Declan had not seen a Feeny since before his house had burned. The Feeny children had only attended school when they could arrange to stay with cousins for a week or so as the distance was too far for them to travel on a daily basis. But Bernadette and her husband, Joseph, had assisted them with their lessons at home and one of them, Tomás, had gone on to the college in Galway and was on his way to becoming a doctor. Bernadette was a fine harp player herself and was in as much demand as one could be, living so far from the centres of population. She played at weddings and funerals whenever possible, and at ceilidhs, too, alongside silent, toothless men on fiddles who could pull reels or slow airs out of their instruments like lengths of many-coloured yarn.

  Una gave Bernadette a cup of tea and hung her shawl by the fire. They chatted for a few minutes as they both sipped their tea. Then Bernadette turned to the harp, which had been moved to an area near a window. She praised the job Declan had done of stringing it and then showed him a few tricks that would have simplified the job. She told him she would tune it to the natural key, in Irish called Leath Gleas. She affixed the small wrench to a tuning peg and turned it slightly. She listened, then pushed the string a little with her finger.

  “I am only to take the slack out of them this first day so,” she told them. “Ye cannot expect the poor harp to take any more strain. But I will stay with my sister in Leenane and come back for the next few days and we will get it to pitch over time.”

  Declan told her how grateful he was and how he hoped he was not giving her too much trouble.

  “Ah, sir,” she laughed. “I will have a good visit with my sister and she will do some spinning for me, I’ve that much wool from our sheep this year! So she’ll spin for me and I’ll tune for ye and God willing ye’ll teach our children again so. And I won’t say no to another cup of tea.”

  Declan was surprised to hear her mention the teaching but then reflected that word must’ve got around about him being asked and not saying no, and it was ever so: there were seldom secrets even though the distances between houses were great and there was scarcely a telephone in the area. News travelled like wild seeds or magpies, settling wherever a little area of welcome might exist. Indeed, he learned the comings and goings, births and deaths, of all the families in Glenummera and beyond simply by sharing a cup of tea with Bernadette Feeny. And as good as her word, Bernadette returned almost daily, working in the warm room with her wrench and tuning fork, sometimes asking Una to give her a particular note on the piano. From full notes to semi-tones, she adjusted and listened, until the harp sounded true. She cautioned that the tuning might just slip and new strings were notorious for losing their pitch until they had wrestled with the wood of the frame enough to find a way of holding their own against its greater strength. It was as though they were speaking of an animal, a spirited horse being gentled to the plough, learning to harness its strength to a practical task. Bernadette stroked the harp, praising its comely waist, the deep glow of its wood.

  “Do ye have someone in mind to play it?”

  “I haven’t. But it seemed a terrible thing to leave it unstrung.”

  “Aye, just so. Someone will come along who will know its beauty and whose fingers will long to bring out its airs.”

  Bernadette had been playing short passages of music, long silvery argeggios, in order to complete the tuning, and now Declan asked her if she would favour them with a song. When she asked did he have a particular piece in mind, he nodded, his throat already filling.

  “‘The Farewell to Music,’ Bernadette. Can ye play that one?”

  “I can.”

  It was as he remembered, the slow beginning, the musical images of a life lived, roads travelled, the sound of a passing horse, birdsong, the revelry at the end of a dark road, and then the sweet, sad notes of a man anticipating the end of his days. He did not wipe the tears from his eyes but let them spring forth, a weeping for all that he had lost, each specific thing given a note, a rising scale, a specific relationship between fingers and strings, ringing and dampening, melody suggesting harmony, and the dignified conclusion.

  Bernadette said, as she rose from her seat, “Declan, we call an air like that a tiompán. I am thinking one was never played for the women of the house so.”

  None had. He had left without arranging the proper rites. And would still have done the same, knowing what he knew. Their lament had to come from a place it could never hav
e come from on that day, when he had nailed the boards together for their coffins. He had known such sadness in the days that followed, had crossed water, watched sunrises across the plains of America, gone by boat in darkness to find a tiny bay where a man had been buried in his own canoe and then dug up by a pig. A girl had come to him for poetry. A dog had slept at his feet and would have followed him wherever he went, even if it meant losing everything she had known. He had seen the death camas and the healing herb of Achilles. He wept for that, for the memory of a face in lamplight, for the tree frogs that stared at him from window glass, and for the wild roses that beckoned him out of his solitary shack to bury himself in them like a bee might and then lift his face, golden with pollen. And for the men who ferried him over deep water to eat clams and bread salty with the grease of decaying fish, who made him a paddle, slept around him like brothers while wolves howled under stars. For the man, cruel but loved by a tender woman, who had been decapitated through the work of ravens, perhaps the same ravens who had befriended him on that far bay. And when his tears stopped, he embraced Bernadette Feeny and thanked her for bringing the harp back to life.