A Man in a Distant Field (8 page)

A broken man, he had walked away from his small holding with its blackened walls, its lonesome chimney, a scattering of rooks rising from the byre, the little hill of graves. He had not been able to enter the ruin, could not feel the presence of his women in the rubble and ash that was all that remained of their home. Alive, Eilis had coaxed such flowers from the soil of the yard—radiant hollyhocks, roses grown from slips given her by other women, delphiniums that drank the damp air and grew blue as the sky on a clear day. In the fullness of time, in a peaceful country, if
Eilis had died before him, Declan would have had her buried in the churchyard nearby and lived out his days in the cabin they had made into their home; but the thought of lingering a moment longer than he had to on such a violated ground made him ill. The parish priest had come to talk to him, a one-eyed man who it was rumoured communicated with birds, and spoke of forgiveness, the Black and Tans' foul hearts a result of their own time in France, their souls brutalized by the horrors of the Great War. But forgiveness was not possible, nor was revenge. The priest might have been talking to a bucket, hollow and empty.

The other house burned in the area, the big house owned by an old Anglo-Irish clan, well, that family had fled, too. The daughter and son of that household were enrolled in schools in London, their father not wanting anything to do with the country of his birth until the Troubles had been settled. He wrote angry letters to the newspapers, denouncing violence. Declan heard of these things in a haze of his own grief.

Money was pressed into his hands by well-wishers, and he was urged to make himself scarce. As if he was not scarce enough, a man alone after husbandhood and fatherhood, heart in tatters, eyes scoured by the salt of constant tears. He walked most of the way to Galway and found shelter among distant relations who gave him a bed and raised the money for a passage away. Papers were arranged. He was spirited to Cork, where he was cared for by kind strangers for more than six months until the day came when he was put on a boat and given a list of names of those who would help him on the other side. It was rumoured that Michael Collins himself had opened his pockets.

He had no recollection of the voyage, apart from sickness due to the turbulent waters, the sound of vomiting and the moans of those around him. He was met in New Jersey by a cousin of his mother's who took him to her daughter's home. He spent weeks not rising from the bed except to find his frail
way to the toilet. He would not have the curtain drawn, would not leave the room to enter into the lively discourse of the family, his own kin. He kept a blanket pulled up to his shoulders and slept; when he woke, he would shake with despair until he tired himself enough to sleep. Broth was brought to him, little cakes, mugs of tea. The nightmares were dreadful. He imagined everything that must have happened while he lay in the farm yard, unconscious from the beating. His daughters screamed from windows, Eilis called for him until she was hoarse from the strain and the smoke. The pig ran from the yard, the bristles on its back carrying flames like the coming of angels.

One morning he woke and told the family that he wanted to go to the West Coast and what was the most economical way to get there? On a different ocean he wouldn't be kept awake by the distant crooning of water that knew everything that happened to him, the undertow muttering of murder, of grief, a sky that had watched impassively, pierced by late stars, while his daughters burned. A train, long passages of darkness, pauses in dirty cities, mornings crossing plains that stretched out from the tracks like golden water, then arrival in a jaunty town on the coast. In a library, he'd studied a globe, running his finger up the line that was the Pacific coast, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his blind finger had found the Sechelt Peninsula, north of Vancouver. Checking maps, he discovered a tiny community nestled in one of the bays. He'd travelled up on a boat with crates of seed oysters that rested in the cool darkness of the boat's hold; they were attended by a boy who kept lowering a bucket into the ocean to dampen the sacking that covered the wooden boxes. No one asked questions when Declan arrived at the store on the long-legged pilings but directed him to the Neils, who had an empty cabin. When he said he had no means to get there, he was given a skiff that had belonged to a man lost on the fields of France and told he could pay a few dollars for it later if he was able.

“What is that white flower, like wild garlic, or maybe a lily, that grows on the dry bluff?” Declan asked Mrs. Neil. He had been working on a passage from the poem and had come to the lines where Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades. He puzzled over the lines, wondering how to find words for the sadness and anger in Achilles.

And reading ahead, he had come to the lines where Achilles strides off across the fields of asphodel. He remembered the priest, the one who had been to Greece, telling the class that asphodel was known as the food of the dead. It was a lily, and bulbs of it would be planted near tombs. A white flower, as befits the pale skin of the dead.

She was peeling potatoes on a bench by her door, her apron covered with curls of brown skin, which she then flung to the hens. Eilis had done this, too, on days when the sun would lure a woman from her kitchen to the outdoors. Declan was holding the milk jug but wanted to prolong the moment, to watch a handsome woman's hands deftly scrape a knife across the surface of a potato without having to look. A tendril of brown hair had loosened itself from her bun and graced the side of her face.

“Was it growing among other plants? Blue-flowered ones I'm thinking of in particular.”

He remembered that it had been. And she told him it was the death camas, to be avoided. The blue ones, she said, were also camas and the Native people ate the bulbs that produced them,
drying huge quantities of them. But the white ones were poisonous, sheep each year were lost to them.

“Two small bulbs of it, Mr. O'Malley, contain enough of the poison to kill a person. As for the sheep, I've no idea of how many it would take. Their stomachs are certainly more resilient than our own!”

So not unlike asphodel then, he thought—a plant echoing the pallor of Achilles. He couldn't remember poisonous plants in his own childhood or with Eilis raising their girls. Mushrooms, certainly. There were some they collected for the table—the mushroom called St. George and field mushrooms which they had with their breakfast sometimes when the person up early to milk the cow found scatterings of them in the pasture—but mostly they were to be avoided: the red ones with white warty blotches that could be used to kill flies, tiny parasols that grew in the fields among the tasty ones and which paralyzed at a touch to the tongue, or so it was rumoured. He didn't remember flowers, though, had no memory of those that might have killed a person or animal.

Back from the Neils' with a pan of potatoes to use for seed, he mused about what he had learned.
I have put the canoe in a field of deadly flowers
, he thought. Then, moving the poem aside, he took out his fishing gear to polish his spoons.

Rose was at the door. It was late May, and the sun was very warm. Leaves were every shade of green on the trees overhanging the creek, thimbleberries were nearing the end of their blossoming, and the bay was filled with water birds and their young—mergansers, geese, a single loon, golden-eye. There was a hum of industry in the air, of birds at the work of feeding, boats in the far water, a man shouting at the team of horses pulling a plough through the fields of a farm nearly half a mile away.

“Rose, come in. I've just made bread and am about to cut it. Would ye like to try a wedge?”

She smiled and nodded, putting the milk down on the table. She took the bread he offered, dotted with currants and spread liberally with her mother's butter. Declan watched her take small bites, a few crumbs lingering on her mouth. She pronounced it delicious.

“Have ye come for a story?” Declan asked. Rose had begun to visit him often, bringing the milk or messages from her mother, the occasional letter after a trip had been made to the store. He liked her obvious pleasure when he opened
Tales of Ancient Greece
or else recounted the part of the
Odyssey
he was working on when she arrived. Stories made her eyes glow, made her talkative, responding with an account of a boat trip to Nelson Island in a storm or the time her father came home from a logging camp up past Minstel Island with wolf cubs in his skiff, one of them going on to become the mother of the mother of Argos. Declan noted how she liked to hold the books, too, and how she would examine the pages. Sometimes she would announce she had found a certain letter and once her name tucked into a paragraph about flowers, but mostly Declan thought the markings must look the castings of lugworms on the sand looked to him; he knew what they were but not the why and the how of them. Whether they were marks simply of passing or a trail to discover and follow.

“Mr. O'Malley, would you tell something about Ireland, where you come from?”

The simplicity of her request pierced his heart like a flint. He felt the pain of it, couldn't breathe for a moment. Ireland. He could smell the Irish earth he had shovelled over the pine boxes with his potato spade, rich and boggy. Sprays of cowslips, wood sorrel and gorse, carefully arranged on the mound. He closed his eyes to take his bearings, his head spinning with memories like a compass in the presence of a disconcerting metal. When he opened them, Rose was sitting at the table still, eating her soda bread and butter, waiting for him to begin. So he did.

He told her about the area where he'd been born, Delphi, and how there was a temple in Greece with the same name; his Delphi had been named so by the Marquess of Sligo, who had travelled to Greece with a famous English poet, Lord Byron, and
had seen the ancient temple in the bowl of mountain, which reminded him of the area where he'd built a hunting lodge. The Irish Delphi was actually not even a village at all but a townland, a collection of farms where the same families had lived for centuries. Rocky soil, stone walls defining fields, the boreens leading from one small holding to the next, from Tullaglas to Ardmor, winding along the shores of Dhulough, Fin Lough, and the Glenummera River and back into ravines pleated with rock and the odd surprising house built into the side of the hill. As a child, Declan had explored the country surrounding his family's farm with an enthralled curiosity, returning to his hearth with questions. His parents, born Gaelic speakers who acquired English as a slightly unsavoury but necessary second language, were full of the stories of the townland and its families. Their English used a Gaelic syntax, the past being spoken of in the present, and for years he was puzzled as to whether Padraig Og was an uncle or the brother of a great-great-grandparent, whether the landlord of the area, the Marquess, whose hunting lodge provided work for some local families, was given land directly by Cromwell or was a descendant of your man. Old grudges, old loyalties—they were one and the same. If his family had had reason to shun the Joyces three generations earlier, there was no reason for the present family to speak to a contemporary Joyce.

“What's Gaelic, Mr. O'Malley?”

“Ah, Rose, the loveliest language that ever was created, the language of the ancient Celtic people who lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and some in France and Cornwall, too. Let me think what I can say to you in it so ye'll get an idea of its music. Well, yes, here's a bit of poetry.

A bennáin a búiredáin
,
a béicedáin binn
,
is binn linn in cúicherán
do-ní tú ‘sin glinn
.
Éolchaire mo mennatáin
do-rala ar mo chéill—
na lois isin machaire
,
na h-ois isin t-sléib ...”

He paused.“Do you ye like the sound of it then?”

“Oh, it's lovely! Like music, or water. What does it mean?” Rose's face was radiant, and she clasped her hands in front of her in delight. A girl in a shabby dress, her hair braided in two untidy ropes, green eyes alive with the poetry.