A Man in a Distant Field (30 page)

“I am looking for a few good characters, Declan, a few things my herbarium is without. One is the bog asphodel ...”

Declan interrupted. “Do ye mean to say that asphodel grows here?” His voice was so tremulous that Una was suddenly a little concerned.

“Well, yes ...,” she began.

“The same asphodel that grows in Hades, that Homer calls the food of the dead? Do ye remember Achilles, striding off across the fields of asphodel?”

Una was surprised to hear him refer to Homer, and with such familiarity, as though he was talking of a family member or character in the community. She had not thought of him as a scholar, particularly, although he was known in the area as an excellent
teacher. She thought for a moment and then said, “I think the asphodel in Homer must be the white asphodel, or Royal Staff.
Asphedelus. Ramosus
, that's the one that would occur in the Mediterranean. So, no, not the same plant, Declan, although I suppose they'd both belong to the same family,
Liliaceae
. This one is
Narthecium ossifragum
and it grows in boggy areas here and in England. The
ossifragum
part is interesting because it means “bone breaking” and refers to the belief that people had, still have, that it causes that disease called cruppary in sheep, where the bones break easily. The thing is, it doesn't cause cruppary at all but sheep eating in areas where it grows are feeding on fairly un-nutritious fodder so their bones might well break easily because of deficiencies in their diet, not the bog asphodel. But how odd that you would mention it. Have you read Homer then?”

He told her about his project, before the fire and in Canada, of translating parts of the
Odyssey
, how it had worked nicely into Rose's education, how it began to echo his life without Eilis and the girls. He told her about the canoe and how he would lie in it on its bluff and dream of home or Elpenor and would wake, disoriented, and how he had noticed the flowers which Mrs. Neil told him were the death camas growing all around the canoe, his initial dread, and then how it seemed to him a mirror of the pale fields that Achilles strode through, mourning his afterlife. It was all so unexpected to her, and to him, after so much time, this story of a life two entire oceans away. She had in her a tremendous capacity to talk and did not always stop to listen carefully to what was said in reply. She wondered if she'd heard him tell any of this earlier but decided she would have remembered, although there
had
been a reference made to planting Odysseus's oar, perhaps. Or had she imagined that? And as was her way, she determined to try a little harder to listen.

“This is terribly interesting, Declan. In a funny way, I have felt certain plants to be companions of mine, the pancratium for
instance, after David's death, and the delphiniums my grandfather grew, of which I found survivors in the long stretch near the stable wall and have saved seed from for my own border, and the foxgloves that grew at Dunquin. I hope we'll find some of the asphodel so you can see what our own looks like, although it does seem prosaic, doesn't it, after thinking of its reputation in Homer, to be looking for a plant thought to cause broken bones in sheep!”

“I haven't seen the asphodel in Homer, though, Una; I just know how it is described—the fields of it, pale as ghosts. So ye see, it will be a new thing for me. Although I am thinking it will not look like much this time of year so.”

“I have done some drawings of the flowering plant, in July, when it is very pretty, with its yellow flowers, and the fruiting plant later on, in September, when areas of the bogs can appear to be cloaked in orange. Now I want just the plain plant with its withered leaves but the stand I had used, near Marshlands, has been eaten by sheep, more's the pity for them, poor sods. However, Ciaran O'Murchu told me that he had seen it up this way, in abundance, when he came to see a man about a horse a couple of months ago. Luckily Ciaran hates it with a vengeance as he has had trouble with his own sheep, so he remembered the orange coverage.”

They left the car and walked down towards the shore of the lake where rushes were fluttering a little in the wind. Declan stopped and pointed to the far shore where a small herd of red deer grazed on the rough grasses. One animal lifted her head and stared at them, then returned to feeding. Moving carefully through the boggy ground, Una paused to examine a clump of something Declan didn't recognize.

“Remind me to come back here late in the spring, Declan. Well, I'll make a note of this exact place, if you don't mind waiting a minute while I draw a little map.” She extracted a notebook
from her haversack and made a quick sketch with a pencil, arrows and approximate distances noted. “There! I can see that at least three kinds of orchid are growing here. Nothing much to see now, of course, but this one here is the marsh orchid, unless I'm very much mistaken, and this one just here is the fly orchid. They're both somewhat rare and I'd like to draw them in situ once they're blooming. This other one—and I'm not entirely certain about this, as it's so discoloured—is the common spotted orchid. Oh, and the devil's bit scabious, another good find! I'll just lift one of each for the dormant portrait, but only after we've found the asphodel as that's really what I've come for.”

She kept taking out a small notebook and making quick notations, looking to the road and obviously estimating distance and scale. And then she found what she was looking for, some wintry plants of bog asphodel, which Declan had expected to look somehow monumental and which were instead brown leaves with stalks holding hollow pods, nothing he would have stopped for, unknowing. But he remembered the death camas stems, dry on their bluff of tawny grass, papery seed pods broken open by wind, and watched while Una took a trowel from her bag and carefully dug up a single plant, brushing the soil away from the root system. Making sure she had the plant entire, she opened the vasculum and laid the plant inside on a damp cloth, covering it with a second square of cloth. She made more notes, asking him at one point what he thought the temperature might be, crumbling a bit of the surrounding earth with her fingers to get an idea of its composition, squinting into the sky for a reading of the light. Then, after lifting a plant each of the orchids and scabious, and placing them carefully into the vasculum, she announced she was perishing with hunger and needed to eat. They returned to the car, stowed away the gear, and took out the basket of food and the flask of tea. There was cold pheasant—a casualty from Una's first attempt to park the car under a
rhododendron hedge at Marshlands; the hen had been frightened to death by the sight of the vehicle approaching its roosting branch—and wholemeal bread with wrinkled apples from surviving Marshland trees.

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: