A Man in a Distant Field (23 page)

She began to cry. Thinking that tea might help, Declan went to the kitchen where he exchanged a few words with the women there. They poured a cup for her as well as one for himself and put the cups on a tin tray printed with faded roses, one arranging the cups while the other took down a tin for biscuits. While he waited for the tray, he looked around him. A small parade of wooden animals, some native to the area and some fanciful—a giraffe, an elephant—stood on the dresser with the plates and bowls. He touched one, a little bear. It was very nicely made. One of the women told him that Harry had carved the animals and put them in the children's Christmas stockings each year. Declan stroked the smooth wood of the bear's back and thought how very unsettling it was to think of a man who would strike his wife, break his son's arm in anger, carving tiny animals to wait in the toe of a Christmas stocking. He felt that he ought to try harder to convince Mrs. Neil to allow him to help her with the small holding, but hadn't he sat with her only a short time earlier and listened to her offer him solace, suggesting that his place was in Ireland, putting his own ghosts to rest? She was a determined woman in some ways, he felt that, and he was certain that she would know what was best for her children and herself in the face of such tragedy. From his location on the sofa facing the open door to the kitchen, he could see the boots sitting by the stove as if waiting for someone to fill them—and he knew somehow that he was not the man to do so. He finished
his tea and rose to take his leave, offering again any assistance he might be able to provide.

Rose returned from her chores and asked her mother if she might walk back partway with Declan. Mrs. Neil nodded her assent. The two walked slowly over the fields to where the trail led to Declan's bay; Argos was quiet at their heels. Rose said nothing for a few minutes but sniffed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. Declan handed her his handkerchief. Then she turned to him, clasping his arm between her two hands.

“Who will take my brothers and sister to school now? Mr. O'Malley, please don't leave. You could stay now and even move to our farm. Argos would love to be near Queenie and you could teach all of us about Odysseus. How will any of them get to school? I know how much the others would love to hear your stories. You could teach us sums and even geometry—David has been showing me how to measure the sides of a triangle and I just know there's so much more to learn. Please don't leave me here now that you've become my only friend.”

Declan was stricken by her plea. He had shifted his heart towards home and had begun to dream of Dhulough, its dark waters. He could smell the peaty earth of his garden, the rich clotted blossoms of gorse; he could not wait to fill his mouth with rain, the western rain of Ireland which had its own flavour, wild with hawthorn and flint. He told Rose that he knew her mother had plans that would be best for all of them and if it was any consolation, he would write to her from Ireland, even send her books from time to time. He would leave her his marked copy of the Lang
Odyssey
, the pretty edition of
Tales of Ancient Greece
where she had traced the ornate “t” with her finger in what now seemed another life. She wept at his refusal to stay on Oyster Bay and turned from him, running back to her mother without a word. The word
sat in his chest like a stone, but one whose weight he was becoming accustomed to carrying.

The morning of departure was misty and grey. Declan rose early and went outside with his mug of tea, wanting a final imprint of the place. The roses had long finished and their seed pods had formed, turning scarlet as the nights cooled. He could smell clover, reminding him of the scent of it on the breath of the family cow, and how rich the milk was when she'd been feeding on new clover. He could smell the sea, too, and knew he would miss its familiar sound and iodine sting as he lowered his body into it on August mornings. A scattering of ducks swam by the perimeter of the bay, feeding in the wash of the creek. Rose had told him it was a favourite feeding place for mergansers when the salmon were spawning; they waited for the stray eggs to float out on the freshets, gorging themselves on the rich morsels. It would be insects now the ducks were eating, he supposed, and was stung for a moment by the thought that he would not see the salmon runs he had spent the last months hearing about. The bay boiled with them, MacIsaac had said, and the Indian men told him that the creek by World's End was known far and wide for its
yah'no-kwuh
, or chum salmon, which they smoke-dried in great numbers. There had been no tide low enough during waking hours for Declan to search for a rock with the calling fish, no chance to look for a bowl on the shore nearby still carrying traces of its pigments, red ochre and soot.

Argos whined for her breakfast, and Declan cleared out his cuddy of a few pieces of cold rock cod, a lump of cheese, and an inch or two of milk in the jug. Putting the remains in the dog's dish, he crumbled a wedge of soda bread over it and set the bowl by the door for her. He had taken such delight in her over the months as she chased her tail and bumblebees in sunlight, swam like a seal, went deeply into sleep seconds after
throwing herself down at his feet, trusting as any lover. He would miss her company.

He hummed a little, and then realized it was Carolan's “Farewell to Music” that he had in his mind and would not leave him alone. How many times had he heard Grainne struggle to get the harmonies right, her fingernails plucking the metal strings, a bell-like note ringing out and stopping as she paused to think it through again, listening to something only she could hear. For himself, it held the beauty and sadness of a life—the beginning, slow footfalls of the harper's horse as he headed for one house or another, the lonely wind, silvery water from creeks coming down from the high hills as he rode from Roscommon to Athenry, the startled cry of a moorcock as it rose from the side of the wild boreen, a bit of revelry and quick dance, a last mournful plea for remembrance. A farewell, written in old age and illness by a quiet window in a room near Ballaghadereen, before the harpist died in the home of his patron, before the wake which lasted four days and which would certainly have provided a drop of whiskey to the mourners, and perhaps a few renditions of the planxties performed by travelling harpers in honour of his passing.

Time to set out, time to look once more at the worn door whose hinges he had rubbed with lard, the stove he had coaxed to bake bread, the windows that let in mosquitoes, tree frogs which would cling to the glass with their tiny hands, peering out in surprise, stray birds, moths, but also the scent of wildflowers and sea-spray and which looked due east and due west, both to the rising and setting of this Pacific sun. He had said his goodbye to Mrs. Neil, though Rose had hidden away and could not be found. He made a small packet of the books as well as a letter for her, his Irish address printed out with the hope she would write to him.

Time to gather Argos's bowl and her burlap bed—the MacIsaacs might have other plans for her but these would comfort
her once the skiff had rounded the point, gone from her forever. He would not look back, once Argos had been left off with the Scottish couple and the obligatory measure of whiskey had been downed with a
Slainte, sonas agus beartas
and a quick firm handshake. He had the lines in his mind, lines he had only just translated, before the trouble with Rose and the wrath of her father.

Were they tears in his eyes or mist off the water as he rowed to the settlement? Whatever, he brushed the moisture away with his hand.

Delphi, County Mayo, Ireland, Fall 1922 to Spring 1923

He had managed a ride as far as Leenane with a man driving home to Crossmolina from a job in Galway Town. A pleasant chap who had driven quietly, commenting now and then on current events and the dreadful state of the road, murmuring at one point that the barracks they passed had been a target of one of the flying squads. A small photograph of Michael Collins hung on a hook above the windshield. The man asked no questions, not even why a fellow would want to be let off in Leenane, not why a man carried a paddle painted with the image of a bird, fantastic as St. John's eagle from the Book of Kells. A dog in the back of the automobile sniffed Declan's arm briefly, then curled up in a neat ball on a piece of old rug.

“Can I give ye a pint for yer trouble?” Declan asked as the man stopped on the main street.

“Sure it was no trouble to give a traveller a lift. Thanks all the same but I am expected home,” the man answered. “Good luck to ye then.”

Declan stopped in the shop to buy a loaf, some matches, and a few other provisions. He didn't recognize the woman at the counter. She commented on the weather and asked did he have far to go. He replied he was not certain how far and left before she could pursue it. It was a day of soft weather, fine mist that dampened the hair and skin but did not soak the clothing. Not so different from days at Oyster Bay, thought Declan, as he followed the road north of Leenane to where the main route followed under the shadow of Croagh Patrick to Westport and the sub-road left to meander along the northern finger of Killary Harbour where the Erriff River drained into it. He could hear the Aasleagh Falls pouring down, sounding for all the world like the waterfalls he'd heard while travelling in the Indian canoes, overhung with bushes—rhododendron and sloes and the mountain rowans—as dense as the salal and devil's club, hard-hack and vine maple of the Pacific. Yet this land smelled different, in part from the turf smoke held close to the earth by cloud as it left the chimneys of the isolated houses. He felt he could follow his nose right up into the Dhulough Valley, nestled between the Mweel Rea Mountains and the Sheefry Hills, the green fields watered by rain and the clean rivers running down into Glencullin Lough, Dhulough, and Fin Lough, which his own small holding overlooked.

A farmer walking beside a horse and cart loaded with turf passed him on the road, and the man lifted his cap. It was Eamon O'Toole, but he walked by without recognition.
Am I so changed
, thought Declan,
an Odysseus riding the stream back to Ocean, paddling as fierce as ever he could until the wind helped him out? And it's true: I am not the man who left, carrying his grief like a broken bowl, fearful that the last few drops might spill out onto the road. All the same,
I ought to have taken a moment to speak to Eamon. It's his children I'm after teaching, and him helping to cut the pig
.

It did not occur to him that he may have been disguised, as was Odysseus for the long walk home, Athene saying to him,

... not a soul will know you,
the clear skin of your arms and legs shrivelled,
the chestnut hair all gone, your body dressed
in sacking ...

His sacking, a coat bought on Hastings Street in Vancouver, made of oilcloth, his burden a rucksack and a cedar paddle. The mists of Ithaka, the mists of the rising track into Delphi.

The track took its familiar climb up from Tully and Lettereeragh, past a couple of isolated farms where the dogs barked but no one came to see the stranger passing by. A curtain might have twitched, a figure in a garden might have straightened, but it was though the man was smoke on the holy trail, and the days so unsettled with civil unrest that breathing inside might stop until the smoke disappeared up the track, a puff from a rifle or a torch made of rushes. The school on his left at Bundorragha, windows closed against the rain and a wisp undulating from the chimney with a chorus of the times tables carried to heaven from the mouths of young scholars. The beautiful creeks flowed down from Ben Gorm, and Declan paused to drink the water, blessing himself by instinct without thinking until the words
Holy Spirit
faded from his lips. And then it was Tullaglas, where his old life had ended.