A Man in a Distant Field (2 page)

“Ma, the man's crying again. I didn't leave the milk because he looked too sad to bother with only a jug of milk.”

The child looked to his mother, who was washing a tin bucket with scalding water from a kettle sitting on a stump. “Take this to the barn, Jack, and I'll take the milk myself. Did you spill any? I thought I'd filled the jug more than this.”

“I tripped on a root and some splashed out. I didn't mean to. Duke licked it up before it had a chance to soak into the path, so it weren't really wasted.”

His mother smiled at him. “That's one way to look at it, Jack. Now, take this bucket and mind you cover it with one of the clean rags on the bench so that it'll be ready for the evening milking. I'll be back soon.”

She wiped her hands dry on her apron, which she then untied and hung on the pump. The trail to the cabin their tenant called World's End led through salal and oregon grape, dipping down at one place into a reedy marsh where her husband had made a corduroy walk of young cedars stripped of their branches and scored with an axe for traction. She was careful with her footing, balancing the jug of milk in her right hand and using her left to steady herself on the logs, which
were slippery despite their scorings. Up a little hill, along a bluff of arbutus in full creamy bloom this middle of April, past the midden of clam and oyster shells, and along the muddy shore to World's End.

Declan O'Malley was inside by now, she could see smoke coming out of his chimney, the blue smoke that indicated he'd just lit a fire, using cedar kindling from the pile in the shelter of a big tree. The old oars they'd given him were standing under his eaves, sanded and oiled, and a herring rake she had seen before, too, a few strands of kelp between its tines. She knocked once on his weathered door. He came immediately.

“Jack brought this earlier but didn't want to trouble you. I'm sorry he spilled a bit on the trail. If you need more, we can let you have another jug after the evening milking, but I've used the earlier milk for my baking. Fishing, were you?”

“I'm much obliged, Mrs. Neil. Aye, I'd the boat out since yesterday morning, over to Outer Kelp by the point. Caught a few, too, now that I've the knack of it. I'm sorry a second trip had to be made with the milk. Will ye have a cup of tea?”

She looked past him into the cabin, wondering again at the fact that he had so little with which to make a life. Nearly two months he'd been there, a shadowy presence seen occasionally from her kitchen window, rowing out to fish or for provisions. With all the work of a stump farm and five children, she had no time to seek him out in a neighbourly way as she might have liked, yet was surprised to find him still camping (that was all you could call it) in the cabin, without anything much more than had been there when he'd arrived. A table, two rough benches he'd made from stumps. A blanket laid out neatly on the old mattress that had been in the cabin since the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of the century. And there were books, a big canvas bag with paper and ink, several bottles of it she'd seen.

“A cup of tea would be welcome, Mr. O'Malley. We could sit outside. It seems a shame to be inside when this sun is such a rare treat.”

“We could of course.” They sat with their tea on warm rocks at the edge of the clearing. Declan placed the teapot on a piece of driftwood pulled up from the shore and indicated branches carrying deep cerise flowers. “Now tell what are these flowers that the hummingbirds are fierce for?”

“We call them salmonberries, those bushes. The berries, when they come, are very flavourful and look a little like salmon roe, clusters of roe, I suppose. There's another one, too, with white blossoms, we call thimbleberry. You'll see those soon. I make jam with them when I can persuade the children to pick enough. A softer berry, too.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and then continued. “Mr. O'Malley, I don't want to intrude on your privacy, but if there's anything I can do for you, will you let me know? In a small community like ours, we are used to troubles, our own and our neighbours', and it's no burden to help. You have only to say.”

Declan looked at his feet, then turned his mug in his hands, peering inside as though the leaves might tell a fortune, a caution. “Mrs. Neil, you are very kind. I cannot speak of my own trouble, not yet, but I do thank ye from my heart for yer concern. I'd no thought or hope at all that I would find such kindness at the end of such a journey. I've no biscuit to offer ye with the tea, but perhaps ye'll take a bit of bread?”

Mrs. Neil looked at the piece of cedar shake he was holding in her direction. A round loaf with a slice or two taken from it:
Quite a coarse crumb, not a yeast bread
, she thought.

“However did you make bread, Mr. O'Malley? You have only that old stove the people before you rigged up from an oil barrel ...”

“I'm thinking ye have never heard of a bastable, Mrs. Neil. In Ireland the bread is often baked in the coals of an open fire in a little three-legged lad of cast iron. Well, to be sure I've nothing so formal as that, of course, but I found an old iron pot in the brush and scrubbed off the rust, oiled it up nicely as could be, and I've experimented with it, balanced on rocks in the coals of the stove, and this bread ye see is the result.”

“But the bread itself, how did you know to bake it? Most men around here could make bannock, or fry bread, but it's hardly a bread at all, just flour and lard and leavening if they happen to have it, a mess they cook in a skillet and often as not is raw in the centre. Something to fill them up when they're in the bush.”

“My mother taught me to bake when I was a boy as there were no sisters yet to learn, they came later, and me hanging around her, watching her work, she must've thought I might as well be useful. Buttermilk we used in Ireland, but sour milk, if it turns before I've used it in my tea, makes a good loaf with some bread soda. I'm sorry there's no butter to offer ye, but will ye have a bit of cheese?”

Mrs. Neil took the cheese he offered and broke a corner of bread off her slice. She tasted thoughtfully. “It's very good bread, Mr. O'Malley. How resourceful you've been! My husband is a great man for building and figuring out ways to preserve meat and fish, but I can't imagine him baking a loaf to save his life.”

“To save his life, Mrs. Neil?”

His face, which had seemed to her to have relaxed with her praise of the bread, had suddenly become the saddest face she'd ever seen. Putting down her tea, she reached over to the rock where he sat and took his hand in her own, holding it briefly and then releasing it. “Just a saying, Mr. O'Malley, something we say without thinking. To indicate a thing is out of the realm of the possible, if you know what I mean.”

“To save my life, Mrs. Neil, I am working on a project of translation. From Greek, which I learned as a lad from the priests at school, to English. My Greek is as rusty as the iron pot I found in the brush but looking at the letters—and they are not our alphabet, like Latin would be—is like looking at the tracks of a bird. If I take them into my mind, slowly, they make a sense after a bit. Once I could read them easily, and I'm hoping I will be able to again so.” He had brightened in the telling of this, his blue eyes alight.

Mrs Neil remembered Greece from the globe in her own schoolroom all those years ago, in Glengarry County, but for the life of her she couldn't remember anything else about it, apart from its reputed heat, shepherds, and stories of gods and goddesses walking the earth, wreaths of laurel on their heads, and making trouble.

“And what are you turning into English?”

“Ah, Mrs. Neil, it's a great poem about the sea and a man who made his way from Troy, which as far as I can figure out is where Turkey is now, to a little island off the west coast of Greece. He was called Odysseus, and his story, the
Odyssey
, which means a wandering sort of adventure. And it is that, to be sure.”

Mrs. Neil searched her memory for something, an echo, a name, and asked, “There was someone like that called Ulysses, wasn't there? I remember a poem, Tennyson, I think. My brother had a book, he'd read the poems aloud to us.”

“Just so. He was called Ulysses by the Romans, later on. When I was a lad, I loved to imagine myself a wandering seafarer, though my father was a farmer. When the priests read to us of Odysseus, I'd put myself in his place, I loved every word, and it made me fierce to learn Greek as well as I could so I could read it for myself in the poet's own words. I wanted to go out in a boat and hear the siren's song and end up on an island like he did.”

“Well, you've come to the right place, Mr. O'Malley. You can see for yourself how the bay is busy with islands. My husband is always heading to an island himself, in search of work—Nelson, Minstrel, wherever a gyppo operation might need a man for a week or a month. And boats, well, we'd all be lost here without a boat. But what you say about your lessons is interesting. My brother learned Latin, I remember, but not Greek. What did your family think about that?”

“It made me different, I'd say, and no one else, none of my classmates, seemed as smitten with the Greek as I did. We lived in a place in County Mayo called Delphi, and the priests told me it was also the name of a pagan temple in Greece. I could not help but want to know more. I made scribbles to myself, tried a line or two of the poem to see what I might make of it on my own. So that will be what I try to do for the next while, try to make an English story of Odysseus's long journey. There are English versions, I do know that, but they seem awkward to me, unsettling, as though the good parts had been taken out.”

The woman could tell he was tiring, the day and night of trolling catching up with him. There was some warmth in the spring sun and a drone of bees in the salmonberry that might make anyone sleepy. She yawned herself. The warmth of the fire in the barrel stove made his small domain cosy, although she could smell the musty mattress and made a mental note to look out something more suitable in her attic. He rose with her as she said goodbye to him and asked did he need more milk that evening? He went to stand at the door as she walked away towards her own home and children. The tide was in, lapping at the edge of the clearing where his cabin stood, and a kingfisher screeched from a snag hanging over the creek. She smelled the smoke of his fire all the way back to her house, troubled by him but also intrigued. He was a man with mystery contained in his blue eyes, in the bag where he kept his
papers. And some terrible tragedy, too, she thought, remembering an uncle who'd wept so often after the death of his wife that people avoided him and he turned to the bottle for company. No sign of the bottle at World's End, and it seemed it was the man himself who avoided company (he'd been invited to a gathering at the store, as well as a picnic, but never appeared), not the other way around.

You could never forget. Could you? And the memory was heavy baggage to be carried with you, slung over your shoulder like a hundredweight sack of potatoes, to be weighed and considered in every activity of your day. To be among the living when your loved ones were so brutally removed to the world of the dead ... And there could not be a God, no, never, to have let such a thing happen to innocent girls, to Eilis who never harmed a soul but who carried mugs of hot broth to the hungry stopping at houses to ask for a crust, a farthing. And his a modest salary, not overly much to carry them all, but with the potatoes they grew, and their chickens, and the butter Eilis made, sure there was food for the table, and to share, and the occasional penny for the girls to take to the shop for a sweet ...

Odysseus didn't know that the goddess Athene was plotting, as he slept, a plan to fill the head of a young girl with him, with the idea of him, as a way to get him a boat for the voyage home. Declan O'Malley pondered this for a minute or two and
made some scratches on his paper. It was unsettling to think of dreams as something a goddess had planted in your head like seeds, with a particularly outcome in mind. When he dreamed of his family, when those images came with all their sorrow and pain, he tried to find a way to see the good in such dreaming. In one way, it made him less lonely because he could remember he had been Eilis's beloved, she had told him so in as many words, stroking his face with her long fingers in the early days of their courtship when he had walked out with her on balmy evenings where the boreen turned beyond her family's farm and kissed her in the lea of a hedge. He would remember with pleasure for a moment. But so soon, too soon, he would be aswim in the pain of it. No God, no, but goddesses at work on the sleeping? It was a thought.