A Man in a Distant Field (28 page)

He could not simply walk past the school as he had on the way home to Delphi. Voices buzzed from within the walls like bees in an industrious hive. He walked to the door and knocked tentatively. A young man in shirtsleeves, tie askew, opened the door and looked relieved. “I ought to be wearing my jacket of course, but the fire is fierce today and I was drilling them in the times table and got a bit excited. I am so pleased you are not the Inspector. Will you come in?”

Declan began to introduce himself, but a chorus of children called his name as he entered the familiar classroom.

“Ah, Mr. O'Malley, is it? I am so pleased to make your acquaintance, sir. The scholars are full of your lessons, the ones you taught. There is no end of reminders to me that you would have asked this of them, or would have expected them to know their sums before handing out a storybook. I am grateful for your mentorship, even if it has come to me second-hand, so to speak.”

The children were delighted to see him. Mr. Kenny, the present master, allowed them to gather around him, leaving their slates on their desks, and stood back smiling. Declan was shown neat papers of handwriting, sketches of the classroom with its rows of long desks and rough benches, poems copied from books and surrounded with borders of pansies and traveller's joy. He took his leave, wishing the present master well. Mr. Kenny followed him to the door.

“I am so pleased to have met you, sir, and invite you to visit us at any time. There is a point I would like to discuss with you, it would be improper for me to say more just at present, and I wonder if I might come to you one evening? I am boarding with the Byrnes who are just by the Skeery bridge.”

“Mr. Kenny, I can promise you a measure of whiskey, if not a sitting room in which to drink it. And a willing ear, to be sure. It is warming to see the children so settled and content, given the state of our country. I'll say goodbye now, and bless ye.”

He continued down the road to where it met Killary Harbour, the Bundorragha River having gathered into itself the waters of seven or eight smaller streams idling down Ben Gorm. A few boats were on the water, coming in from fishing. He watched a heron rise from the muddy shore and head towards the tall evergreens by Clogh where brown fields stood stripped of their forage by sheep down for the winter. It was landscape plainer in its bones than the one surrounding Oyster Bay but he saw it with his heart as well as his eyes. It was as though it took the fuss of those coastal rainforests, the lush growth of the estuary, to make this one clear to him. Now there was a reference point, a transparency to hold to the land of his birth, to make its contrasts evident, shaped by stone and a history of hardship.

He noted, when passing, that Una's fire was burning behind the shrubbery that kept her cabin hidden from the road. In Leenane, he went about his errands, calling into the shop for provisions, only what he could carry, and he ordered some windows from the builder, as well as other materials he would need before spring. It was arranged that the builder's helper would bring the supplies by cart once they'd arrived from Galway and Cong. At the publican's, he bought a bottle of whiskey; he'd found that a small measure of it before he slept helped his body to adjust more easily to the ground, lumpy even with Mrs.
O'Leary's ticking, and the chilly air of the turf shed now that the dark season had arrived.

He turned into the lane that led to the Fitzgerald demesne. He could see the ruin of the big house, the walls with their pretty wash of pink lime scorched and destroyed. Even the stable yard, where Una's cousin had kept a pair of carriage horses as well as a hunter for himself and ponies for his children, had been ruined. Ivy was creeping up the side of the chimney, which still stood, as his own did; nettles flourished in the rose garden, though brown with frost. Before he could knock on the door of the groundskeeper's cabin, Una was standing there on the threshold, smiling.

“I saw you pass earlier and thought you might stop in on your way back to Delphi. It gave me time to bake some scones to offer you with a cup of tea!”

Declan looked around the cabin. It was like many of the others of its sort in the area—a large room which was the sitting room with kitchen facilities at one end, doors leading off either side of this, and a narrow staircase rising to a second floor. But it was bigger than his own house had been and spoke of something more than hard country lives. It was furnished simply but comfortably: two chairs, covered in a faded rose-patterned chintz, faced each other and the fire with a low table in between them, a long pine table under one window with an assortment of chairs around it, some grander than others, a proper cooker with a hot-water reservoir to one side, wide sinks, cheerful braided rugs on the slate floors. Paintings hung on the walls and pots of bright leaves and late flowers graced almost every surface. A piano against a wall with photographs on its polished top. On the low table by the fire, a cloth had been laid with a napkin-covered plate, some cups, a jug of milk, a small dish with a square of butter, and a jar of jam. Declan realized he was very hungry, having done the walk to Leenane and this far back with only his morning porridge.

“These are fine scones, Una!” he declared, buttering his fourth. “It's been a long time since the morning porridge, and me with the walk to Leenane under my belt.”

She smiled and took the plate away to replenish its contents, wetting the tea again from the kettle suspended on a hook above the fire. After she had given him more scones, Una went to a dresser on the other side of the room and removed a folder from a drawer. She returned to her chair by the fire and handed the folder to Declan.

“These are some of the drawings I did of plants on Ben Gorm. You saw the rose, of course, when we first met, but I thought you might be interested in the others. I've added some wash to a few.”

Declan opened the folder and carefully lifted the first sheet. The drawing was done in pencil but he recognized immediately the furze of the open fields. The detail was impressive, from the spines to the veining on the flowers. Such shading and delicacy of line! He could almost smell that odour that Eilis remarked was near the almond essence she put into the cakes at Christmas. The next drawing was a clump of marsh marigolds and again there was the fine detail, even to a bit of a withered leaf. Inset showed an open blossom with a small fly entering to drink, while the anther waited, heavy with pollen. Each drawing had tiny notes alongside, describing light, colour, time of day, surrounding landscape.

“These are truly fine, Una!” He looked through the folder at what remained: bell heather and bilberry, willow herb, pelli-tory-of-the-wall, and hemp agrimony. “Did ye mean to paint them as well? I see that ye have these notes with them so, and these little patches of colour.”

“Ah, well, yes. I have painted some, in watercolour, but have meant to do more, and will, once I've my studio set up. It's not easy to cart my painting supplies to the sites where the
plants are, although I do take a small box of paints to make those small palettes to remember, and notes of course, though even with notes, it's difficult to paint from memory. I intend to do more of them, of course. Some artists are now taking photographs, and there is even some thought that the photographs might well take the place of drawings and so forth, but I have yet to see a photograph that manages to get the plant in all its dimensions. I never use one single plant for a model, you see, but study many of them to get a sense of the possibilities of variance in form. Soils and weathers can affect the depth of colour, the habit of the plant. Looking at many will allow me to develop a prototype, you might call it, or the ideal plant, perhaps.”

Declan enjoyed hearing her speak of her work. She obviously knew a lot about the wild plants and loved them; listening to her, it was like hearing a version of a story, one he hadn't heard yet but which made the story he did know larger and more various. There was a priest when he'd been away at school who believed that no one could know Ireland who didn't know Gaelic, that it was a way to understand the country in all its complexity. Declan had been interested in this, knowing that the ancient methods of land use in his own area made sense when you knew the Gaelic names for the fields themselves and the common pastures, and that a place itself echoed its history in its name:
Baile
, which had come to mean town but previously indicated both settlement and the landhold together,
Dun
, where a fort had been,
Doolough
or
Dhulough
, the dark lake, even Leenane, its Gaelic name
Lionan Cinn Mhara
, which meant something like “a place filled by tides at the head of the bay.”

She showed him where she worked at present, a table pushed up against the window in one of the two small rooms on the second floor. A microscope, partly covered with a tea towel, stood close to the window. Una described her plan to
have the interior wall knocked out and skylights installed to let in more light. Shelves held paper and tubes of pigment, as well as books, jars of liquids, and powders. There were jam pots filled with brown stems hung with seed pods, branches of hawthorn and rowan with bunches of berries beginning to dry out and wrinkle, clumps of grasses, a collections of nests, the fragile skull of a bird. A few framed paintings of flowers hung on the walls, and a deep cabinet took up half the length of the room: it was her herbarium, she explained, where she kept her dried plants, pressed and mounted. A tray with several cups, a teapot, some dry crusts of bread: it was evident Una spent a good deal of time in this room, and Declan could see how a larger space would make it easier to spread her work out, how more light would make the new room congenial and bright. He wanted to see everything, to understand about everything, but he realized he was getting tired and thought of the long walk ahead of him.

When he took his leave, he asked her to stop for him the next time she was sketching in his area. He wanted to know more about the plants on the mountain he had known all his life. She stood in the doorway and waved until he was beyond the Aasleagh Falls, the smoke from her fire visible above the wych-elms and sycamores by the river.

When he returned to his shed, he found himself seeking his
Odyssey
. Because of weather and the lack of a good place to spread out his papers, he had not been working on his translation for some time, although sometimes he would take the Greek text out to puzzle through a passage he was reminded of. This day it was Penelope's dream he had thought about as he'd
walked the last mile or so. He found the lines and read them over and over, wondering for the life of him why the images kept appearing before his inner eye.

A message was contained there, about husbands and mourning, but he didn't know how to take it into his life. Take what was blessed and good, and expect the worst? Zeus would appear in the form of an eagle and take the soft geese away?
Around his walls, tall grasses rustled in the wind off Fin Lough, where the wild ducks swam in the reeds, fat with stolen grain. One of these days, Miceal O'Leary would appear on his threshold with a string of them, tied by their wings, offering one for his fire.