A Man in a Distant Field (14 page)

No such hedges here that he'd seen but such rampant growth of ferns, salal, berry bushes, and trees of every description. This was a wilder landscape than Ireland's, not having such an obvious long history of settlement and industry. The Native people had lived on the coast forever, and Declan was often able to identify where their campgrounds had been, the places where they had gathered clams or prepared their fish. He'd see the heaps of broken shell that indicated their clamming areas, and once, having stopped in a small bay on his way back from the store, he sat back against warm rock, stretching out his arms on either side to ease the ache of rowing, and found himself clutching a perfect blade of slate. It had been resting on the little shelf of rock his hand had homed to, and when he examined the area around where he sat, he found mounds of chipped slate where someone had prepared fish knives, sitting right where he sat. He had seen such knives at the Neils' house, unearthed in areas they had turned to garden, along with a stone pestle, a rock pierced through to be used as an anchor, and a disc of stone, carved with serpents, which Mrs. Neil told him was spindle whorl.

There were forests tumbling down to the water's edge that held in them some of the secrets of the universe, Declan increasingly thought. What had happened with the stag and cougar was part of it. How one of them, stately and antlered like a beast out of the Book of Durrow, could come leaping out of the dense thickets, a lean tawny cat in pursuit, how one would enter the water and swim towards the western lands, Tir Na Nog in Irish lore, the land of eternal youth, while the other watched from the shore, uneasy about following. Such things seldom happened in that life in Ireland, although the mountain sheep stepping out of
the famine cabins were nearly as unsettling, bringing with them stories of the dead tangled in their fleeces with bramble and the seed heads of nettles. And the badgers, moving through the grass like small bears, noses to the wind, as they had done for centuries, the
broc
of their Irish name attached to the place like a burr.

Perhaps that is what I find so satisfying in this poem I am contemplating
, he thought.
That mine is not the first loss, that I am not the only man to find himself on a beach in a far country, alone in the world, and that there are possibilities. But are there? I cannot think what, at this moment. I do not wish to be Achilles in Hades, grieving his separation from Peleus
:

I cannot help him
under the sun's rays, cannot be that man
I was on Troy's wide seaboard, in those days
when I made bastion for the Argives
and put an army's best men in the dust
.

And yet I am surrounded by the death camas myself, cousin to pale asphodel, and I put in the dust the burned bodies of my own dear love, our daughters. My own possibilities are unimaginable to me. No bed awaits, strung with ox-hide, and rooted in the earth, a gnarled trunk of olive
.

With the tide agreeable, Declan decided to go out in the skiff to make an exploration of the bay. Argos wriggled with pleasure when she saw him taking the oars down to the shore and was ready to leap into the craft as soon as it had been pushed down into the water. She loved to sit in the prow of the boat like a figurehead, her nose working the air. So many odours, such potent breezes that swept over her, carrying news of the intimate lives of seals, egg-rich fish, an abundance of ducks, drifts of kelp clotted with herring spawn. She liked it when they stopped in shallow bays where she could jump from the boat and investigate each rock, each dimpling in the sand indicating clams or, when really lucky, the siphons of geoduck. Sometimes an exquisitely rotted carcass of a fish or bird would beg to be examined for edible
morsels and rolled over while Declan shouted at her to leave off, then forced her into water to rinse away the smell, never completely successfully. At night, when the oil-drum stove heated the cabin past warm, Argos would steam like a fishy broth until finally Declan was forced to put her bed outside the door. She would whimper, but he found the smell unbearable, and he'd cover his head with the blanket to drown out her cries.

Past the watery thickets of eel-grass streaming over the surface of the bay, past the reeds where nests were concealed, past the tiny cove where Declan had stumbled upon Rose digging for clams with a stick shaped like a bird's claw. There were sandy areas punctuated with oysters, the small Olympics that tasted sweet when you pried their shells open and drank them back like nectar, and there were rocks encrusted with the bigger Pacifics brought from Japan. The man who'd given Declan passage up the coast had told him that he was growing the big oysters on the beach in front of his homestead, hoping to market them to the steamships; he brought boxes of seed by boat from Vancouver, his young son responsible for keeping the boxes damp. “If it's a high sea,” the man had said, “I tie a rope around his middle so he doesn't wash overboard.” Declan imagined them coming up from the strait in wild seas on their boat with the boxes of oyster seed, the child tethered to the wheelhouse while the father steered a straight course for home. He heard the echoes of Odysseus resisting the song of the Sirens, lashed to the mast, while his men rowed past the pretty music. What song might lure a child from the deck of a small boat heading north to Pender Harbour into the dark waters of Georgia Strait? His own children had loved the story of the seals of Lir and listened to their grandmother tell them that humans had followed seals into the ocean and had lived underwater perfectly happily. The stories involved enchanted bridegrooms and trust. On visits to the shore, Maire and Grainne would scan the water and wonder
which of the bobbing heads of curious seals might be the one that they would follow, knowingly, to an underwater home. This they could imagine, yet the thought of a marriage to a Mannion or a King from the hilly farms north of Leenane would cause them to shriek with dismay.

Argos sniffed the wind happily as they wound in and out of rocky covers. They were paused by an outcropping of granite, watching a seal surface among the kelp, when they saw the canoes. There were five of them, the big canoes of the Sechelt people, each carrying ten or more passengers. Declan steadied his skiff by holding a straggle of fir branch growing out of a crevasse of the rock and watched the progress of the canoes. He could hear chanting and weeping, the sound of a drum, and wondered if he ought to call out that he would come with them if necessary and help with whatever they were doing. The canoes glided in to the shore of a small rocky island near the mouth of the bay, not very far from Declan, and the occupants disembarked, some of them remaining by the canoes while others climbed to the high point of the island, a bluff crowned with a grove of pines. Four men bent over the biggest craft and lifted out a wooden box, its painted surface visible to Declan. They carried the box up to the grove, assisted in the task by those already there; two people reached down to steady the box from above as the carriers secured footholds on the rocks. Several of the men stood by the trees, bent to each other in discussion. Then one of them began to fit some pieces of wood between the trees. Declan could see he used a knife to make the slats fit securely. After some of the others examined the arrangement, the box was lifted up and set on the wood. The group of onlookers chanted while this was happening, and after the box was settled into place, the lifters joined the chant. Declan saw similar arrangements in the other trees, some of them trailing lengths of cloth that he had first thought to be
the pale moss that hung from trees in this part of the world. After a short time, the entire group went back to the canoes and, without a glance at Declan, headed south, paddles moving in unison.

What have I seen?
he wondered. It had been very beautiful, the stately procession of canoes, the painted box, the strange music that sounded like wind or the hollow bonging of logs knocking together in water. He had thought, earlier in the outing with Argos, of exploring the group of islands at the mouth of the bay, but now he was reluctant to go near them. They contained mysteries in their rocks, those stunted trees embracing the wooden boxes, draped in veils.

At Tullaglas, he had dug graves with his potato spade, knocked boxes together of rough pine, lifted each charred body into its final cradle, and wrestled the boxes into the earth. Offers of help had been rejected. No one would do this but himself, his hands blistered and raw. There had not been music, nor a wind to cool the sweat on his neck. The priest came, his cloak billowing behind him in rain like a gloomy shadow, and tried to insist that the coffins be taken to the churchyard for a proper Christian burial. He peered out of the cave of his hood at Declan, his single eye fierce, his hand ready with the rosary. Declan shouted at him to leave his land, that no God on earth nor in heaven would have his prayers forever after, that he considered God to have abandoned him and wanted no part of His terrible mercy.

“Think of His wrath at such words, O'Malley, think of damnation!” the priest reminded him, but Declan shouted back, “And what of my wrath, man? Do ye think I have not been
damned by this burning? If this is not hell, then I don't know what could be. I want no part of yer God, not now and not ever. Ye know nothing of a husband's pain, a father's. Nothing. Do not speak to me again of God.”

When he got back to World's End, Mrs. Neil and Rose were sitting on the beach in front of the cabin. He realized he had never seen the former so still. Always she was hanging out laundry or coming in from the barn with the cans of milk or a bowl of eggs. He had seen her hoeing the garden, running after the dog who had dug in the tomato beds that she had fertilized with living starfish. Once, she had sat in his cabin to drink a cup of tea, but he had been so distressed that he had not been mindful of her comfort. How alike they were, she and Rose, their hair scattered a little by wind. Each had strong shoulders and hands that knew work. Mrs. Neil inclined her head towards her daughter, and Declan thought what a womanly gesture it was, one he had seen Eilis effect towards their daughters; it was a way to give complete attention, of making a private world where the words spoken were between two people, their hair framing them in softness.

“We have brought you your milk, Mr. O'Malley. Rose showed me where you keep it in the creek and I've put the jug there. A clever idea!”

“Thank you, Mrs. Neil. I am just back from a turn around the bay with Argos here, and we saw the strangest thing. Perhaps you can explain it for me.” And he told them of seeing the canoes, hearing the chanting, then watching as the box was taken up the rocky incline to the grove of pines.

“That would be one of their burials, Mr. O'Malley. The islands you speak of are where they bury their dead. Well, they
don't really bury them but put the bodies in those cedar boxes and place them in trees. Sometimes, depending on whether the deceased is of lower rank, the body is wrapped in cloth and placed on the wooden platforms they make, not even in a box. One of my sons brought home some bones once, having found them lying loose on the island, taken down by birds, I suppose, or animals. Of course I made him go back with them and forbade the children to go on the islands at all after that, but it will give you some idea of what happens. This is all changing now with so many of the Indians becoming Christians, but many of the older people still prefer the old way of burial. I saw the canoes once and thought it a beautiful sight, although my husband would not agree, I'm afraid.”

Mrs. Neil declined tea but allowed that Rose might stay for a cup and a lesson. Declan got the paper and books and made a study place on a flat chunk of granite; driftwood logs made convenient benches.

“Because I have just seen the canoes, Rose, and because it was so strange and beautiful, I'd like us to read a passage in the poem about ships visiting the underworld. Our religion calls it Hell, but in the
Odyssey
, it is something else, a place where people talk and wander and eat the asphodel flower. Let me find it now.”