A Man in a Distant Field (4 page)

He was thinking about Odysseus. Thinking of him lying under olive leaves waiting for the princess to find him. And then walking to meet her with only an olive bough to save him the shame of being seen naked. Still, the handmaidens fled at the sight of him, and the young princess must have been quite brave to have stood her ground. But her head had been turned by the goddess to thoughts of bridegrooms, and maybe she hoped he was a potential husband. So she encouraged her servants to bathe him and anoint him with sweet oil and clothe him in the few bits they'd conveniently brought to the river to wash out and dry on the banks. And then he followed her carriage into the city where he was welcomed to the palace in the way a stranger would always be welcomed. Food given, comforts, a bowl of water brought so that the stranger might wash. And you
never knew, the stranger might be a god in disguise, testing your capacity for hospitality, kindness. In the case of Odysseus, it was the mother of the girl who recognized in the stranger a measure of nobility and worthiness. He'd been given a harp in the evening and, stringing it with authority and skill, he'd told them something of his wanderings.

There was loneliness and there was solitariness. What did he feel, himself, as he walked the long mud flats, searching for oysters and then sitting on the rock like a seal? He was not wanting human company this day. It was enough to be out with the young dog and her droll puppy behaviours, and anyway, if a man took a minute to take his bearings, if he looked around himself, it was evident he was not alone. There were the geese, yes, and some black fellas with yellow eyes and long red bills prying open oysters themselves, whistling a piercing
eep, eep
as they flew and then settling down to the business of shells. Gulls everywhere, some of them feeding on the purple starfish clinging to the undersides of exposed rocks. And when you moved aside a rock with your boot, small crabs scuttled off sideways, waving their pincers. Far, far out in the bay, almost where it met the strait, he could see a few boats, probably heading to the gathering of buildings in an adjacent bay with deep moorage. A store, a hospital, a hotel ... he collected his mail at the store, going by skiff once a fortnight. There was never much, but his sister wrote with news of Ireland, and occasionally a bank draft arrived, no return address or note, but the postmark was Galway, and so he imagined one of his cousins, involved with the Republicans, was sending him the kind of solace arranged for men such as himself. It paid for the use of the cabin, some provisions, paper and ink, an occasional bottle of the stuff they called whiskey but which was nothing at all like the bottles kept by Miceal Walsh in the Leenane pub; he'd pour you a drop of Connemara malt on market day and it was like swallowing sunshine,
for the warmth of it spread through your body, tasting like the smoke of a turf fire captured in clear water off Ben Gorm. And the money paid for the odd book, too, ordered by letter from a bookseller in Vancouver.

He was dreaming in sunlight, wishing for Eilis.
Where are ye?
he thought.
When the tide moves in, I half-expect to see ye swimming strongly in its current though for the life of me I never saw ye swim, washing up on my bit of beach like Magdean Mara or a seal, the lovely grey seals of the Connemara coast. I am no one without ye, without yer hands bringing my face to yer breast, or holding my waist from behind me as we sleep. I remember each small place, each bone quietly covered with soft skin, the plump fullness of yer hips, the shallow bowl of yer neck which I filled with kisses, each a drop of tenderness coming from my deep heart. I am drenched with yer memory, drenched in each remembered gesture, the far grey of yer eyes and yer copper hair threaded with silver. I am a shipwrecked sailor washed up at the end of the world, no one to take me into the bed of a long marriage, held secret by the trunk of a living tree. Our oaken bed, brought from yer parents' house as a dowry, along with a grove of pines the age of yerself, planted by yer father at yer birth. When can ye be, my love, so long away that I am forgetting yer voice as it sang the old Irish songs to our lasses, keening low and rich so that each note held the sadness and pleasure of our kin, so our girls would know who they were in the world
.

The pup was licking his ankles, moaning. Looking around him, rubbing his eyes back to wakefulness, Declan saw that the tide had advanced almost to where he was sitting. He jumped down into the mud quickly and made his way to the shore. He would have to return to World's End by clambering along the rocks because he didn't think he could beat the tide as it eased over the mud flats. Slinging his bag of oysters over his back, he began to scramble towards his cabin.

He almost tripped over the girl who was crouched in the sand of a tiny cove. It was the girl who'd brought Argos to him,
and she was scraping the sand with a claw of wood. The curled fingers of the claw brought up lumps that looked like stones, but he realized they were cockles, or clams they called them here. A bucket, sitting in the tide to keep cool, was nearly full. Argos ran to the girl and licked her face rapidly; the girl responded by kissing the pup's soft nose and trying to avoid the tongue which moved with surprising dexterity to find ears, nostrils, a salty mouth, for the girl had been eating sea lettuce, a tiny leaf of it stuck to her bottom lip. Bruises flowered on her upper arms, petals shaped like the ball of a thumb, her pullover on a nearby rock, taken off in the heat of digging.

“Do ye like the clams then?”

She thought for a moment. “Mum makes chowder, with potatoes and onions and milk, and I like that. I think it's my favourite supper because she always makes biscuits to go with it. But for themselves, I don't know as I could eat one on its own. I have lots. Would you like to take some back with you?”

“No need. Yer mother has me picking oysters, as ye can see. I'll make them for my own tea.”

There was something familiar in her movements, a kind of grace balanced against the awkwardness of lengthening limbs. He'd seen it in his own girls and in the girls he'd taught over the twenty years he was master of the Bundorragha school. They'd come as infants, nearly, and leave in the fullness of young womanhood, and in between, they'd be both one and the other. Bent over their slates, their hair falling across the scarred wood of the desks, cheeks flushed with concentration, or laughing at the antics of one of the lads, he'd see in them such promise. Often as not, they'd marry as soon as they left the school and find themselves mothers of six or eight children before they were thirty. The boys would leave to work, either migrating to the cities or England or else making roads for the Congested Districts Board, but Ireland provided fewer choices for women;
he had been determined that his own daughters would have opportunities to further their education if they chose, or in the case of Grainne, perhaps music school. She'd been given a harp: one of the older families had no use for it, no one who wanted to learn, and they had passed it along. She'd found someone to teach her to play it, Bernadette Feeny from the mountains. Sheet music was hard to come by but through some miracle—it had seemed so to them—a whole pile of music had surfaced: sweet airs by the blind harper Carolan, planxties written in the great houses he'd visited. And loveliest of all, his “Farewell to Music,” the last thing he'd played in the house of his patroness, Mrs. McDermot Roe. Declan loved to see his daughter's hands move across the strings of the harp, urging such beautiful harmonies from them. He imagined the bones of her hands growing strong with the secrets of the music within them. And now, her hands given to worms in the cursed soil of Ireland. He shook his head violently to rid it of her memory and left the girl in her tiny cove, pulling a claw of wood through the sand.

Back at World's End, he busied himself with shucking the oysters. There was a way of putting your knife between the lips of the shell and levering until the tight grip suddenly loosened and you could scoop out the meat of the oyster. It did not look appetizing at all, sitting wet in the frilly shell. But he'd been told to heat some milk in a saucepan with a piece of butter (Mrs. Neil had given him a pat) and some of the wild onions that grew in his field and then to add the oysters whole, just heating them through. Doing so, he understood what Mrs. Neil had meant when she told him the stew was for her the very essence of the ocean. You needed no salt, the oysters had a briny taste, like clean seaweed. And the milk provided a mild broth once flavoured with the oyster's own juice and the pleasant savouriness of the onions. He drank a bowl, and then another. It was like a tonic.

The tide was nearly to the shingle now and a steam was rising over the top of the water. It took Declan a few minutes to figure out why: the cool water moving over hot mud. Birds were everywhere, and on the far side of the bay he could see something black stirring by the shore. Argos, too, had got wind of whatever it was and began to bark excitedly. The black shape stopped and looked in their direction. Declan could see it was a bear. He was thrilled. He'd heard about bears, had been warned about leaving his food outside, particularly in the autumn when the creek was full of salmon, but he hadn't seen one until now. And yet it fulfilled every idea he had of bear. That rounded back, the broad shoulders, the way it swayed its head from side to side as it tried to figure them out on their bit of shore. After a few minutes of this, it turned and lumbered into the woods. Even from their distance across the bay, they could hear it moving in the dense brush.

“I'd better wash ye so, Argos, or it's bait ye'll be for that bear, smelling as ye do of rotten fish. Come on, lass, and we'll soon have ye fresh.”

He took the pup and submerged her in the quick water of the creek. It was icy to his hands, and Argos yelped and squealed. He held her with one firm hand and quickly washed her fur with the other, taking care to ruffle the shoulders, which had taken most of the contact with the fish. Then he rubbed her down with a sack and poured a little of the oyster broth into her pan. She whimpered as she approached her meal, fearful of some other indignity, but soon was lapping up the good juice. When she had finished, she sighed deeply and curled up on her sack of bracken, falling into one of her immediate and profound sleeps.

The girl was at his door again in the same skimpy dress, telling him that her mother had located a better mattress for him and would he come to help them carry it over the marsh to his cabin?

He followed her lithe shape over the boardwalk and through the woods to the Neil farm. A dog, the mother of Argos he knew at a glance, came to greet them and sniffed suspiciously at her daughter, licking her face and then pushing her to the ground so she could sniff her underparts to determine where she'd been. It had not yet been long enough for her to forget her maternity although the pups had been given away. When she walked, her teats hung low still and occasional drops of milk fell from them to the ground.

Mrs. Neil was standing by the screen door, using a small broom to brush dust off a mattress leaning against her house. It was covered with blue and white ticking, faded and worn, but Declan could see that it promised far more comfort than the lumpy mattress he currently slept upon.

“I found a couple of sheets, too, in the attic that I'd put there for winter mending and then forgot about, Mr. O'Malley. I've got them airing over the line now. I made a few patches, rather quickly I'm afraid, and they aren't anything to look at, but you're welcome to them. Two of the boys and Rose, who came for you, can help carry it back for you.” She stopped her vigorous brushing and put the broom down on a bench by the door. She called out towards the barn, and after a few moments two boys, an adoloscent and one who looked a year or two younger than Rose, came running. She introduce them as David and Tom. Declan gravely shook hands with them.

“No school, then, boys?” he asked.

One of them, David, shuffled his feet and blushed. “Our dad's taken the boat and we've no way of getting over to the school.”

Their mother smiled and admitted she was happy to have them home to help her sort out the attic. “Help me fold these
sheets now, Rose, and the three of you can help Mr. O'Malley get his new bed home.”

The woman and the girl held a sheet out and moved towards one another to bring the corners together. Declan had seen his own wife and daughters fold sheets that had wind-dried in the Irish morning. It was like a dance, each moving apart with an end of white cotton, then coming together to place palms against palms, a graceful smoothing of surfaces, stepping back to pull the length taut. He was moved to think that Mrs. Neil had sought out sheets for him when he had been prepared, even grateful, to sleep under coarse blankets for the rest of his days. He was taken back by the scene, somewhere, but where exactly he couldn't say. He noticed that the bruising on Rose's arms was fading, pale finished blossoms against the white of her skin.

He took one side of the mattress with Rose just behind him, the sheets carefully draped over her shoulders like a shawl, and the boys grasped the other side of the mattress. Over the marsh, along the trail of logs, the four of them quiet and careful as they moved up the hill where the arbutus trees hummed with their cargo of bees.