A Man in a Distant Field (21 page)

There were some pines in a grove up a long slope of scorched grass, now slippery with rain. He dragged himself up to the small shelter they provided and sat to wait out the storm.
His hands ached with the burns they'd sustained from his fight with the lingcod. He leaned against a tree, felt it moving in the wind, and something fell to the ground beside him. It looked like the bone of an animal. Idly Declan touched it, then recoiled as he remembered the burial he had witnessed, when the canoes had brought their sad cargo to the islands at the head of Oyster Bay.
Dear Lord
, he thought in panic,
I am stranded on a burial island
. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself.

He opened his eyes. The wind was very wild and branches whipped around, seed heads cast their fine litter to the air, long strands of moss flew from the trees. The bone was very smooth. It would have belonged to someone like Alex or Charles, he told himself, someone familiar with these waters. Someone who knew winds like these and who might have fished for lingcod in those very kelp beds. Or a woman who had cooked what was brought back from such expeditions, who might have dug for camas on slopes of golden grass, or taken clams from the sand, or softened sinew for stitching skin clothing by chewing on it. Someone who heard the wolves and watched seals, who knew the healing powers of nettles, the pain of devils club.

Looking up, he could see a platform fastened to a natural gap between three pines. The trees were alive in the wind, and the platform creaked as the trees pulled it this way and that. Shreds of cloth blew off what he supposed must be a skeleton. There was a clatter and then another bone fell to the ground beside him. Taking a deep breath, he rose and carefully replaced the bone—what was it, the long bone of an arm?—on the platform, which he could just reach. The ends of his fingers felt cloth, felt bones, felt wood that must have been part of a box to hold the corpse. He was no longer afraid but bent to pick up the other bone to replace it, bracing the platform as best he could by securing branches of pine beneath it and around it to cradle it against the storm. Other storms had raged around this island, and when he looked, he could
see that other remains had fallen from trees not this time but in storms past. Trees too had fallen and lay upon the ground with their mortuary boxes in fragments around them. Birds had scoured the bones, had taken thread of the fibres for their nests.
How could it be otherwise
, he thought.
The dead must be honoured but they have left their bodies and, like the trees returning to earth, the dead leaves turning to soil, their remains will enrich the earth, a compensation for what the living are given in the way of berries, of timber, of slate for tools and the roots of cedar for fishing line
. Declan settled himself back down in his shelter and waited out the storm, feeling himself to be a small peaceful nest of calm as the weather raged and the white horses of waves broke themselves upon the shore.

When the storm had exhausted itself, he made his way back to his cabin where Argos waited and where he cooked his lingcod over a beach fire, washing it down with strong tea. That night he slept the long sleep of a man who had known storms and death but who was nourished by the sweet flesh of a fish brought up from the kelp, lured by the glitter of abalone shell and the smell of herring.

This passage was giving him some trouble. What man, once returned to his home after an absence of nearly twenty years,
would want to stay still, talking to a swineherd and watching the pigs fatten? Yet Athene counselled just that.

And what man would not want to see his wife and son immediately? Yet for that, too, Athene had her explanation—he would visit his palace in disguise once his son arrived back from the home of Menelaos and that beauty, Helen—and her comment:

Declan shivered to think of such treachery. He thought of that Greek word for homecoming,
,
nostos
, and how it was something a traveller carried inside him as a kind of expectation, a certainty. Throughout the poem, Homer would say that a home-coming was assured if the sacred cattle were avoided, if the proper measures were taken towards the gods. Within this notion was the deep knowledge of home, the way it shaped a man and all he did. A man might meet any number of obstacles with this in his heart. And looking up, he saw young Rose before him in her
faded blue dress. It was the first time he'd seen her since he'd witnessed her swimming naked in the tide. She looked a girl this time, any womanly development hidden by her dress and her old shoes, the girl he had dreamed of on the northern shore after waking to wolves. He was relieved.

“Ah, Rose, I am after reading of our man's homecoming. It is not happening as he hoped—no grand scene of reunion with Penelope and Telemachus, no moment of glory. The goddess Athene has dressed him in rags and is up to her old tricks, I'm thinking. Have ye time for a lesson?”

“I'm not allowed to come anymore.” Her face was very serious. “Only now, to tell you. Dad found out I've been learning to read, he heard me reading the book my uncle sent, and he got into a rage. He said it was up to him to send me to school or not. He was so angry at Mum for sending me behind his back that he hit her and now she's got a black eye. Oh, Mr. O'Malley, I'm so sorry, I loved learning about Odysseus and Suibhne and your little school in Ireland. He can't take knowing how to read away from me, though, and I need to thank you for giving me that.”

What kind of man would rage against a child's education or hit a woman, the mother of his children? Declan was so upset he was shaking. Rose noticed and came to him to put her arms around him. He entered her embrace, smelling the laundry soap her mother used and a slightly sour odour of perspiration.

“Rose, I never meant for harm to come to ye or yer mother. I'll talk to yer father and explain the way of it.” He held her at arm's length and looked tenderly into her eyes.

“It's no use, Mr. O'Malley. He never changes his mind. And anyway, he's gone for a month to work on Texada Island for the logging company. He wants you gone when he gets back because he says you can't be trusted to know your place.”

The bully
, thought Declan. For a moment, anger flared in his heart, then subsided. A small voice inside him told him he
was guilty, not of what Neil believed him to be, but of being a man who had looked upon his daughter naked. It was an act the priests at home would have an opinion on, he was certain. If he was to be entirely honest with himself, he would have to admit that the sight of her had been what had led to his arousal later. He had told himself then that he was thinking of Eilis and in fact had dreamed of her, of making love to her in the old sweet way they had had with each other. But the image in his mind had been Rose. He imagined himself in the dusty confessional and the silence on the other side as the priest listened, the click of the rosary beads after as he went through the process of penance. He could not confront Neil with anything approaching innocence, he decided. He would take the man at his word as he had proved no match for ruffians with a case against him in the past.

“Come, Rose, I'll walk ye back. I'd like to speak to yer mother, apologize for her troubles.”

Mrs. Neil was feeding her chickens when Declan and Rose entered the yard. She turned to them, her face puffy and one eye badly bruised. She showed no signs of embarrassment, though, asking Rose to put a kettle on the stove and extending her hand to Declan. “I am very sorry, Mr. O'Malley, that you will have to leave. My husband is not a bad man, but he has his own ideas and one of them is that he makes the decisions about his family. I knew that, of course, and should not have involved you in Rose's education.”

“Mrs. Neil, the apology is mine to make, not yours. For the life of me, I cannot see how Rose learning to read should result in your husband striking ye as he has.” He could not tell her about watching Rose bathe. His hands, clasping one another, read the knots of each knuckle in an act of contrition.

“It is not the reading in itself but that I did it without consulting him. He has a temper and I ought not to have crossed
him. Now we will have a cup of tea and you will tell me what you plan to do next.”

Rose brought out a tray of tea things, asked her mother for permission to swim, and left the two adults to sit under an apple tree. Tea was poured into pretty cups, one handed to him, but Declan could not find his face in its depths, just milky liquid. A few of the braver chickens clustered around them and clucked insistently until Queenie appeared to chase them away. It was very peaceful in the yard. The Neil boys could be heard splashing in the bay in front of the house and there was the sound, far away, of a boat engine kicking along. Seeing Mrs. Neil's eye, the stray wisps of hair escaping from the neat knot she wore at the base of her neck, the rough skin of her hands which he had seen in laundry suds, wiping milk cans, working the tools of her garden, shucking oysters with a blunt knife, folding the sheets she had found for his bed, and stroking her daughter's face, made him want suddenly to tell her about Eilis. She listened without saying anything, was quiet when he stopped to swallow the lump in his throat when he came to the part about the fire, refilled his teacup when his voice became strained as he recounted the burials.

“I had no idea you'd suffered such a loss,” she said finally. “We knew you were here to escape something, but then that is the case with so many men. Even now, these years since the end of the War, a man might come and want only a bolt-hole and a tin to boil water. My husband says that there are shacks up and down the coast, on the islands and up the inlets, where such men live. Mr. O'Malley, I am truly sorry for what has happened. I wish I could continue to offer you a home, modest as it is, but you see for yourself that I don't make the decisions in my family.”

“It has been a balm, in many ways, living at World's End and helping Rose. But I think I was beginning to understand something about what I'd left, too, before this business with your husband. I have yearned for Eilis and our girls, kept finding them in
my dreams, kept hearing Grainne's fingers plucking the strings of her harp. And working on the poem, I couldn't see what was in front of my eyes all along.”