A Man in a Distant Field (11 page)

Speaking to Mrs. Neil later that day, Declan mentioned the carving on the canoe, explaining he had been looking at it when a raven landed nearby, as if to solve the little riddle of identity. She was amused.

“Mr. O'Malley, the ravens are very clever birds. I wouldn't put it past one to decide to help you out. The Indians hold them in very high esteem, you know. In fact, they believe that the raven brought light to man by stealing the disc of sun from Heaven and that the birds have the power to command the tides. Sometimes when I'm working in the garden or hanging out the wash, one will sit in a tree nearby and talk to me. If I close my eyes, I can almost hear the words, although of course they aren't words exactly.”

One for sorrow, two for joy ..
. Declan found himself noticing the birds as never before. Had they always loitered in the tall cedars around the creek or was this new? The sound of them threaded through the branches, drawing his attention upward. He found them oddly congenial. Going out in his skiff one morning to catch a salmon for his dinner, he saw them tumbling in the sky the way he'd seen boys tumbling in the schoolyard in spring, full of high spirits and energy. Coming back with his salmon and a few herring to fry for Argos, he could see a pair of ravens in a fir near his cabin, looking for all the world like sentinels. One of them croaked as he pulled the skiff up onto the shore. Declan tried to find the sound in his own throat and offered something resembling a
croanq
.
The raven tilted its head and looked him in the eye.
Tok, tok
. Declan made the sound back. The raven answered. Then, as he began unloading his fishing gear, the raven floated down from the tree to the beach and began foraging among the stones. Declan watched as it selected a large mussel and flew up with the shell in its beak. When it was about fifteen feet above the beach, it dropped the mussel over the rocks below and immediately flew down to scoop out the meat from the broken shell. It returned to its perch and looked at Declan.

He was amazed. “What a clever lad ye are!” he called up to the bird.

The raven ruffled its feathers a little and then flew away, followed by the second one, which had not uttered a sound but sat on its branch watching the activity of its partner. Declan saw them rise and drift westward on the May wind. He tucked his salmon in a piece of clean burlap and laid it in the cuddy to keep cool, then took his herrings inside to cook for Argos.

The Black and Tans had come to Tullaglas in the night. He'd awoken from sleep with the sense that something was not right. It was too quiet. That was because they'd slit the throat of the family dog, who might have whined a warning. They'd taken Declan outside in his nightshirt and told him they'd heard of his teaching. The one that seemed to be in charge hit him with the butt of a rifle and asked him if he knew what the penalty was for sedition.

“I am aware of your laws, to be sure, but it is no crime to teach my students what it is to be Irish and to teach them in their own language. Our Gaelic League has made this possible and lawful. We mean no disrespect to your king but one day we
will be a republic, that is certain, and my students will know who they are as citizens of a free Ireland.”

“You are mistaken there, schoolmaster. This lot of pigs and fools could never govern themselves. They can't even keep themselves clean.”

There was more hard talk and more beatings with the rifle butt. He fell to the ground at one point and tried to protect his face. Heavy boots kicked him in the small of the back until he blacked out.

Waking, he smelled the smoke and tried to clear his head. Every part of him hurt and he could taste blood in his mouth and throat. It took him a minute or two to focus his eyes, but then he was fully awake. His house was burning. Fiercely. The thatch acted as a tinder and smoke was pouring from the windows, which had blasted out their glass from the heat. Scrambling to his feet, he called to Eilis, thinking that she must be near, with the girls, perhaps moving the hens or the pig to a safer place. After a few moments of calling, a terrible feeling filled him that she, that they, might still be inside. The door had been braced closed with a fence post, and Declan beat it aside with a spade. The scullery, the main room—both seethed with smoke. Using the spade to push aside burning stools and fallen timbers, he made his way to the west room, where he saw them in the far corner. It did not take a minute to realize he was too late. Their bodies were like candles, intense light flaring fom the wicks of their hair, their cotton nightdresses. Eilis must have told the girls to put on their shoes to escape to the predawn fields, and the shoes hadn't burned. What was the body but tallow and wax, oil for the lamps of British hatred. There was an old poem about burned children, by Aodhagán O Rathaille, he'd recited it in Irish over to his classes over the years, in part because it gave rise to discussion about metaphor, and he'd wanted them to hear the sombre tone of the language; he'd stop to make the lines into English, too.

They were ears of corn!
They were apples!
They were three harpstrings!
And now their bodies lie underground ...

And that was the grief of it, in either language, that the living flesh of children could be so quickly consumed. Rather that they
were
corn, rippling in a calm field, green and gold in sunlight, or apples, veined with pink through the pale flesh. Perhaps he would think of them that way when he had got far away from the fire, in memory and in years, his house a cold and empty hearth, the stools all burned. He might forget the smell, like meat roasting, the hideous stench of feathers and hair.

The lines were difficult to wrap his mind around. Some days the Greek revealed itself to him so clearly that he might have been reading his own name. Other days he could not for the life of him figure out the meaning; the entries in the lexicon moved in and out of his consciousness without leaving a trace. It had to do with clarity, he knew, in his own mind, with what he brought to the poetry. He closed his eyes and tried to clear out whatever it was that kept him from reading properly. Deep breath.
Just get the meaning for now
, he thought,
and shape it to poetry later. Begin again
.

He was weeping, like Odysseus's men wept as they gave a fitting burial for Elpenor. Not a hero, Elpenor, but a young man who tumbled in drunkenness off the roof of Circe's house and who broke his neck in the fall and died. Encountering him in Hades, Odysseus listened to Elpenor's tale of falling and losing his spirit to the dark and promised his friend that amends would be made for leaving him unceremoniously on the island of the witch.

The imagery of that passage pierced Declan to his very heart. What had been left of him on the Irish hill where his wife and daughters had been burned and buried, commemorated by pink Connemara granite? He had fled into nothingness, it seemed, spirited away to Cork and then America, a story emptied of its narrator, its action, its consequence. And now, on his own small promontory, he was a cairn of living grief, grey as water.

He put the poem aside and walked out to the shore. He never tired of the bay, stretching out to open sea. Today the tide was coming in over the exposed mud flats, threaded with silvery runs of fresh water. There were birds everywhere—sandpipers on the shore where he supposed their nests must be, ducks coming in with the tide, a solitary loon, silent in daylight, geese gathered by the small rocky islands where some of them nested. He loved the smell when the tide came in, the rich fecund mud, warmed by the sun, meeting the sharp iodine of the sea. He supposed men had always stood by water, admiring the liveliness of its movement, loving the sight of birds feeding on its shores, fishing its depths with their strong bills.

There were days when he felt close to Odysseus, when working on parts of the poem that were Odysseus's story he would stop and think of it as his own story. But truth be told, he had never done anything bold in his life. He'd left his parents' house to be educated, returned to that very house with a wife, fathered two daughters, taught children the basics of reading and writing and simple geometry at the Bundorragha school, as well as the Irish history and grammar that had been his ruin, taking them on walks by the river below the school to see the trout, the yellow flags of iris. Odysseus journeyed home over a period of years, stopping here and there to prove his worth to gods who had no use for him, but then he was protected by the grey-eyed Athena and managed to survive—although he had lost his men,
not least among them young Elpenor. He was not only brave but also clever and could outwit the obstacles in his way. Declan had journeyed a long way by sea but alone. And the biggest difference between them? Odysseus was struggling homeward to a wife and son. Declan had no one. Home was a far country that he wanted no part of.