A Man in a Distant Field (13 page)

He was falling, down into the opened earth. He saw nothing but fields covered with fog, the same fog that swept across Oyster Bay like cold smoke. Coming across the fields was his mother, dressed in her burial smock. It was Tullaglas and it wasn't, some of the trees at the edge of the view were the tall firs beyond World's End. “Is this a dream, Mother?” he called to her, and the answer she spoke made Declan's blood run cold.

O my son, alas,
most sorely tried of men, the god's daughter,
Persephone, knits no illusion for you.
All mortals meet this judgement when they die.
No flesh and bone are here, none bound by sinew,
since the bright-hearted pyre consumed them down—
the white bones long exanimate—to ash;
dreamlike the soul flies, insubstantial.

“Are you my mother?” he called, surprised at such language coming from the throat of the Gaelic-speaking, rough-dressed
woman of the house of his memory. In answer, she turned from him while shadows crowded around them. He reached out, but she had disappeared into the fog. He had no lambs to offer, no blood to pour into a trench for her sustenance. Would he see Eilis and Grainne and Maire, and what he would say to them, how he could ever explain that he would have saved them from the fire had he not been knocked out by a rifle butt? He had not heard their screams in time, had woken to smoke, the house in flames, their bodies ignited like torches. What would they want of him? Would they blame him for surviving, for fleeing the earth that held their sorry remains? Half-fearful, yes, and yet he yearned for them, watched for the sight of their familiar faces, their shoulders, the heartbreaking turn of their ankles. To encounter them in this swirl, their strong bodies fog-hidden in the fields of shadows—he would give his own life for such a meeting. There were shapes in the fog, but try as he might, he could not discern his own lost women. In panic he strode across the fields, trying to see the faces of the shades.

Here was great loveliness of ghosts
.

Is that what he was seeing then? The words came to him from the book, he was gasping for air, surrounded by the wraiths and fog, he was trying to climb back the great height from which he had fallen ...

“Mr. O'Malley, are you all right, sir?” He opened his eyes, blinked, looked around to see where he was. Rose was standing by the canoe where Declan had fallen into a deep sleep, his open book across his chest.

Ah, the canoe. Grabbing the gunwales, he pulled himself up, wincing a little as his muscles announced their displeasure at having been cramped against damp wood for such a time. “I was reading the poem, Rose, and must've fallen asleep. For a minute there, I couldn't place myself at all.”

(But my heart
longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.)

“My mother said I could come for a lesson and I didn't see you there. Your boat was ashore, and your oars leaning on the cabin, so I knew you wouldn't be far. I called for you and Argos came running from this direction so I thought you might be up here doing something with the canoe.” She didn't tell him how she had been startled to find him stretched out in the canoe and had thought him dead for a minute, the length of him in his shabby trousers and faded shirt absolutely still. She had watched for a few minutes before trying to wake him and realized how sad she would be if he was indeed dead. His soft voice was something she tried to conjure up sometimes before sleep, his patience a gift she was only beginning to appreciate, having thought that adults were mostly like her father—quick to anger, dismissive of a child's feelings, impatient with clumsiness, but also capable of a brief tender word.

He brushed his hand across his hair and closed the book. “Certainly ye may have a lesson, Rose. We'll just walk back to the cabin so.”

Rose ran ahead with Argos, her sandaled feet sure on the grassy slope down from the bluff. She wore a faded blue dress, lines around the bottom where the hem had been let down twice. Seeing her reminded Declan of how he had longed to meet Grainne and Eilis and Maire in his dream. For months he had tried to keep their images from forming in his mind, fearing the grief that accompanied the memories. How he missed them! He would hear a phrase of harp in the wind, a laugh coming over the water from the Neils' farm, and he would sink to his knees in sorrow. Yet, waking from the dream, he felt curiously close to them. Rose, running ahead in her faded frock, was a thin but tangible thread leading him to ... something, he wasn't
sure what. Through the bush, across the corduroy path over the marsh, and back to World's End where Declan busied himself for a few minutes gathering together the papers they'd been using, and the books.

Rose knew the alphabet well now and could write simple words. What she liked best was tracing her finger across the lines of the Lang translation of the
Odyssey
and figuring out each word in turn. Her memory was good, and she had memorized many of the lines by heart; she loved the names, too, and never forgot their pronunciation after Declan had taken her through it once: Calypso, Telemachus, Menelaus, Laertes, the faithful Penelope.

“How old are you, Rose? I'm thinking about twelve?”

“Yes, Mr. O'Malley. I was twelve just after Christmas. My mum cooked roast chicken and made me a coconut cake.”

“About the age of my Grainne, then. She was the elder of our daughters. Maire was nearly two years younger.”

“Your daughters in Ireland, Mr. O'Malley? Did they come to Canada, too?”

“They died in an accident, Rose. The two of them both, and their mother. I buried them and then couldn't stay there anymore. The life had gone out of the place, you see.” For some reason, he found it easier to talk to her than anyone else thus far.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. O'Malley. We knew something had happened but not that you'd lost your whole family.” Her face looked so sad that Declan stroked her cheek with his finger. Her skin was damp. He was moved that she would shed a tear for girls she'd never known.

“Ah, Rose, it is not something I have wanted to think much about, let alone speak of. For months I could only weep at the memories of them, living and dead, and everything reminded me—from birds to the moon to poetry. I could not have spoken of them to anyone without my heart breaking again. But these days I want to remember them more, not just grieve them.
I have done plenty of that, and it has not brought them back to be sure. I want to know them from this distance we have found for ourselves, them in graves I dug by myself, me on the other side of the earth. My older daughter, Grainne—we named her for the Irish pirate queen, Grainne O'Maille, who was the namesake of my family. Grainne is the Irish for Grace. And Maire is the Irish for Mary. It has been lonesome without them, but thinking of them, remembering Maire's laugh and the music Grainne could create from the strings of her harp, well, it is a comfort sometimes. Is it enough? No. But in a strange country, even the memories of a family are better than nothing, or so I am thinking.”

(... my heart longed ...)

Declan tried to continue this thread, of memory, the way a heart could conjure up wrists and ankles out of thin air, the deep dreaming in the old canoe. But he felt each word stiffen before it left his lips, awkward as speech might be under water.

So they continued with the lesson, Rose working her way through a passage, stopping to ask about a word, wondering aloud at meaning. The language of the translation was stilted, somewhat, and Declan paraphrased lines so that Rose could understand them in an idiom closer to the one she was familiar with. The haths and didsts, the spakes and needests were replaced with the simpler language of everyday speech. Still, she heard the poem in its beauty hidden in the awkward phrasings, the archaic usages.

While Rose finished the last few lines he had set her as a brief assignment, Declan made tea and cut them each a piece of soda bread with a slice of cheese. Taking their mugs outside, they chose rocks near the water and sat there, balancing their bread and tea on smaller rocks nearby. Argos, who'd been sleeping in the warm grass
behind them, suddenly leapt to her feet and charged off towards the woods. There was something crashing through the bush on the southern side of the bay, something large. Rose and Declan stood up to see whether they could determine what it was while Argos bellowed from within the trees. A deer jumped out of the salal, a stag, and dashed down to the water, its head turning rapidly from side to side. On its head, it wore its rack of antlers like a crown. Behind it, in pursuit, a tawny animal paused at the sight of the pair on the beach. No such caution for the stag, who entered the tide and began to swim strongly out to sea.

“A cougar, Mr. O'Malley! That's a cougar chasing the deer!”

Declan had never seen such an animal before. It was big, much bigger than the big dogs people favoured in this area. It looked like a lion but without the heavy mane he'd seen in pictures. Powerful legs, a heavy body, a long tail behind it, and Argos barking for all she was worth fifty feet away. Seeing the cougar was like looking at a painting, its tawny colour set against the tapestry of greens in the background. The cat looked at the stag swimming, the dog howling, and the people watching from not far enough away, quite, for its comfort, and then it turned, loping back into the woods. Argos pursued it for a minute or two but then ran to join Declan and Rose on the beach, panting and trembling.

“What a brave girl ye are,Argos,” Declan told the dog, rubbing her head.“But I'm thinking ye'd be no match for a cat like that if it decided to turn on ye.”

Rose was watching the stag. He was beyond the first small island and hadn't looked back. She wondered aloud if he knew the cougar had given up on the chase. The sun was over the western sky and for a moment, it hung between the stag's antlers like a burnished lamp. It was like poetry, she said, like the poem Declan had told her in Gaelic, and she turned to ask him to recite it for her.

“Little antlered one,
little belling one,
melodious little bleater
sweet I think the lowing
that you make in the glen.”
“Is there poetry for everything, Mr. O'Malley?”

“Rose, there is a poem for any moment, any feeling. And sometimes one poem might say it all. That poem ye like, about the deer, has very sorrowful passages, too, because although the poet finds so many things in nature to give him joy, he has also given up another life.
Dismal is this life
, he says,
to be without a soft bed; a cold frosty swelling
,
harshness of snowy wind
. But he wouldn't give up his life as wild man of the woods, I don't think, because he keeps telling us how much he likes cress and cold water from the clean brook. He's a bit like myself, Rose, I'm thinking. I've had salmon today, and mugs of the cleanest water I've ever tasted, and a handful of cress!
Though you like the fat and meat
, the poet says,
which are eaten in the drinking halls, I like better to eat clean watercress in a place without sorrow
.”

When Rose left, Declan put away the books, emptied the teapot into the bushes, banked his fire for the evening.
Well, I have buried Elpenor, burned his corpse and his weapons
, he thought.
And in a way, I have saved Odysseus today
, he mused,
helped him with the words to climb on a spar and row himself to shore. I have slept in the canoe of a dead man myself while waiting for a girl to wake me, in fields of dying asphodel. Did I know I was waiting? And I have thought of Grainne playing her harp, remembering her hands without weeping. Eaten a fish which was the best I've ever tasted. Ah, maybe yet there is hope for a fellow like me, a drinker of creek water, an eater of cress
.

Sorrows could visit a place, come unbidden through the windows and doors, hover in the trees like birds, and they could leave, too, taken by tides, or cracked open and eaten like a night-coloured mussel by a bird half-capable of speech.

What was that smell? Waking, Declan inhaled deeply, the cabin filled with a scent so sweet and wild he imagined he might be in Paradise. Flinging back his bedclothes, he went to the open window and leaned out. Ahhh ... The shrubby bushes around his cabin were roses, he could see that now, and the morning sun had caused hundreds of buds to open. Pale pink, deeper pink, some half-opened, some fully, the roses scented his cabin like a rare perfume. He could hear the hum of bees among the blossoms, and looking closely he saw them stagger from flower to flower with their pollen sacs laden. Each bloom had a wreath of gold in its centre that dusted the legs of the bees as they extracted nectar from the flower.

He built a fire, filled with kettle from the bucket by the door, and put it on the stove to boil for tea. Then he went outside to bury his face in roses, ignoring the prickles and the bees.
It was a smell that went directly to the heart, reminding one of all the times the scent of roses had been inhaled. This plant was different from the roses that grew near Declan's place of birth in Ireland. These flowers were large, some of them three inches across, in varying shades of pink, from light to deep. Declan remembered smaller flowers in Ireland but sweetly scented, blooming in a tangle amongst the hedgerows of fuchsia, elder-berry, and haw, and then the red hips alight in the dark canes of winter. And always birdsong coming from within the depths of the vegetation. What birds sang in those hedges, he wondered, as he listened to the robin whistle in the wild roses at World's End. Thrushes, he supposed, and then he remembered chaffinches feeding on the berries in autumn, hedge-sparrows pecking for worms, small birds plucking the seed heads of old man's beard for lining nests tucked inconspicuously into the branches.

The hedges fenced off the small holdings, kept the cattle and sheep from the boreens. Some of them were very old, surrounding ancient hill-forts and barrows, following the demarcations of stone walls down hillside paths to the roads. Once, at dusk, coming from the schoolhouse, Declan had seen a badger coming out from its sett within the hedge, peering at him before retreating. He had listened to the scuttle of the animal among the trunks of haw, thinking how there must be a whole maze of tunnels through the hedges and how safe it must feel tucked with its mate and their offspring in amongst the roots of the sleeping vegetation. His father had told him, in boyhood, that badger setts were often hundreds of years old, each generation adding its adjustment or extension. Another time, walking down to the village of Leenane in early evening, he had observed two badgers on the grass beyond the hedgerow by the Erriff River, and when he'd stopped to watch, he could see that they were playing with their cubs; he had entered Leenane dazzled with the mystery of it. On a spring day he had come upon the soiled bracken and hay of their winter sett, taken up through the
roots of the hawthorns. As with the stag and cougar, he'd had the sense that he was looking into a picture of ancient meaning, an embellishment of the Gospels, the text of his days surrounded by images of beasts and plants.