A Man in a Distant Field (31 page)

He closed the book and clasped his hands together.
I have become my father
, he thought,
or has he always been in me all along? No slaves, of course, but the foolish hens who must be kept safe from foxes, no vineyard but these hills of potatoes and the sloes which make a drink they say to keep away the winter chill. And although it's cold today, soon the blackthorns will be blooming and soon they'll be dandling those mealy bitter sloes. And I am hoping that I will not be sleeping by the ashes of my fire for evermore
.

A letter came from Rose, written with the careful handwriting of one new to the craft.
Dear Mr. O'Malley
, she wrote.

Just after the salmon finished in Anderson Creek, we left for Ontario. It was sad to leave. I said goodbye to your little house and to Argos. The MacIsaacs are good to her and she loves Mrs. MacIsaac but when I went to say goodbye, she followed me back to my boat and howled as I rowed back to our house. Dunvegan is lovely. My aunt Martha has made things so nice for us and Mum has stopped crying so much. We're going to school in the same schoolhouse where our
mother and aunt and uncles went. At first I was put with the smaller children because I am a late starter, the master calls me, but thanks to you I am now with those my own age and the teacher says I am his top scholar for my years. Our readers are nothing like the
Odyssey
and when I told the master this, he went very quiet and then came to me later with a book he said I could use instead. It is about a girl called Jane Eyre who loses her parents and lives with mean relations, nothing at all like Aunt Martha and Uncle Oscar, but then she becomes something called a governess. Some of the words are hard but the master showed me how to use a dictionary and oh, that has helped such a lot. I am so glad the harp has survived. Your friend, Rose Neil.

He would not think of Rose, dancing in the tide, her white arms raised like wings. He would not remember those arms dark with bruises, would not think of Argos. Not now. But the harp ... Ah, yes, it had survived, but Declan would look at it with its broken strings and wonder what might be done with it. He worried that the frame might warp in an unheated turf shed, or worse, that the moisture in the wood might freeze and expand, causing cracking, and it would be impossible to repair. He felt responsible for making sure it continued to produce music although the why and how of it was beyond him. When he next saw Una, he asked her for advice.

“Well, I'll write to Maeve, of course, and ask her what to do. I know she has found a teacher in London and has continued her studies. She will know, if anyone does.”

And a letter came back from London as part of a package containing a book that demonstrated the stringing of harps and a
number of lengths of harp-string and a tool for affixing the brass wires. Maeve was very excited to know that the harp had come through the fire intact, but for strings, and wrote that the stringing was not too difficult. The book she was sending had a clear chart, and Bernadette Feeny, near Glenummera, would be able to help them with the tuning as the strings would have to be tuned to pitch morning and evening, for five days ideally, or at least over the period of a week.“What a fine way to honour Grainne, Mr. O'Malley!” she wrote. “I hope to visit Una next summer and will of course help you then if you find this too daunting.”

It would in a way be the measure of him, he thought, the stringing of the harp. To make true peace with Eilis, Maire, and his beloved Grainne, to take the only thing to survive the fire almost whole, apart from himself, and make it usable again. He had left Delphi in pieces and returned patched and mended as an old shoe, wearable—but for what? He was building a house from salvaged walls, stones that might have come from more ancient structures and which contained within them the silences of history. If he could restore to the harp its old utility and power to make music, he might find in the task a way forward for himself, too. Once the house was finished, was he to milk a cow daily for himself only, was he to grow potatoes to fill his own belly? Would he end up like one of the isolated hill bachelors, coming down once a year to buy some tobacco or to sell a pig, the jackets falling off their backs for want of a stitch, their skins tanned by turf smoke and tea? Or would he learn to pluck the strings of a harp and sing for his supper as some of the composers loved by Grainne had done, would he put on his wedding shirt and ask some apple-cheeked maiden to become mistress of his hearth? The thought of any of it made him want to curl up in his bedroll like old Laertes and sleep among the ashes.

One morning, walking along the fenceline to check for gaps—he was going to take a calf from Mannions to his grass—Declan saw movement across the water at Tawnynoran. Light figures moving among the trees, one here, one there, perhaps a dozen altogether. It was a Sunday, and he was not surprised to recognize, even from that distance, the tall profile of Liam Kenny among them. Where the trees grew thicker by the damp banks of Sruhaughboy where it washed down from Oughty Craggy, the figures disappeared.

It was like seeing ghosts, Declan thought, an army of boys, lost into fretful history. Republicans again had taken Clifden to the south and the mood was uneasy, for it was felt violence was to come. There was a line running down the length of Connemara, with the west being Republican-held and the territory east of the mountains contained by Nationals. Padraic O'Maille, Deputy
Speaker of the Dail and a Kilmilkin man himself from the Leenane Road west of Maam Cross, had been shot in Dublin, had taken ten bullets, including one lodged near his spine, though he was expected to recover. Boats ran men up and down the coast, Lewis guns were hidden away in old pig sheds, and the stories circulated about explosions and wild fist fights in local pubs as friends and neighbours fought at the slightest provocation. Declan found this desperately sad, that those who had faced the enemy together both on native soil and in France and elsewhere now could not agree to disagree about whether or not Collins and the others ought to have settled for the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty which gave Ireland dominion status. The names were flung about with astonishing familiarity that was Irish to the core: de Valera, Brugha, Collins, Griffith. Boys whom he knew could never keep the Irish kings straight for more than a minute were suddenly experts on constitutional matters and willing to shoot their brothers. It was all too much, and yet he had returned to be Irish on his own soil.

He met three boys on the boreen, with a look in their eyes of heroes and rebellion.

“Lads, ye are not long out of school. Are ye in work yet?”

“No, Mr. O'Malley. But we ... oww!” and the one that had been about to say something of their activities was kicked sharply in the leg by the boy beside him.

“I have me own idea, boys, of what ye are up to, in the gap near Tawnynoran. Didn't I plant the seeds meself, with our readings of Oisin and the high kings. But I mind ye have families, have something in front of ye that is precious, though ye might not ken that yet. Ireland needs brave men, to be sure, but wise men are needed too, and I am asking ye to think hard before ye act.”

The boys murmured that they would keep his words in mind before they ran down the road towards their homes, the weight of the guns left behind in a secret cache a thrill that their shoulders remembered while they fed the pigs, repaired walls
with silent fathers, joined their families in the rosary before bed. When they slipped out of those beds, over the sleeping bodies of their brothers, to take up arms in Tawnynoran, their mothers would weep beside the still shapes of husbands, a cow would stop in its chewing to watch them disappear down the slope of a field to where others waited for them in the dull light of a tallow candle filched from a dresser drawer. What did they tell their priest at confession, Declan wondered, and did they take the communion with the rest of their families? The one-eyed priest had gone to Limerick and another had come in his place, a young fellow with a voice like a choirboy; it was said that he was altogether more human than his predecessor. Who knew, perhaps he even counselled the lads to take up arms for Ireland, whatever that meant.

The harp had been moved to Una's cabin after Declan had read Maeve's book and learned that a harp needed a stable environment, neither too damp nor too warm and dry. He wondered if it might even now be too late. But examining the instrument carefully, he could find so sign of cracks or twisting. Perhaps it had been a blessing that the strings had broken and melted as they might otherwise have caused the harp to pull itself apart from the tension.

Una collected the harp in her car, wrapped in an old blanket. When she and Declan lifted it out at Marshlands, it was like carrying a child, one of them at each end, supporting the harp's weight with their arms.

“Let's hope no one is watching,” Una laughed, as they struggled through the doorway with their cargo. “I wouldn't want it talked around that we are smuggling guns or invalids into my
house. It might get back to Hugh and he would decide there was nothing for it but to confiscate my car.”

It was natural to want to place the harp near the fire, but Una wisely asked that it be set in the little room off the main room; she thought the heat from the fire and sunlight streaming in the southern window might dry out the wood and damage the finish.
Well
, Declan thought to himself,
any finish it had was lost to the fire
. When he ran his thumb along the grain, small blisters could be felt on the surface of the wood. He remembered Grainne smoothing mineral oil into the wood periodically and then buffing it with a clean soft cloth until it shone with the deep glow that bog oak could attain, if cared for. The heat would certainly have caused the oil to blister, and he would find a way to restore the patina.

Una was making a meal for them before Declan walked back home. A chicken was roasting in the oven and potatoes were being scrubbed in the deep sink. He asked could he do anything, and she had him scraping carrots over a basin. She hummed while she worked, as Eilis had done, and it was pleasant in her warm room with the smell of cooking and some books on the table to look at once the carrots were scraped and rinsed.

“Declan, I brought down some floras and such from David's collection. I thought you might enjoy seeing the real masters of the work I'm trying to do. I'll pour you a glass of sherry and you can look through them while I finish making our dinner. I've also brought this, which had been an inspiration to David; it's the results of the Clare Island Survey, done around 1910, I believe, by experts in every field—botany, zoology, geology, archaeology, family and place names, even the native names for flowers and things—and then published in these three rather large volumes. It was meant to echo work done on an island off Dublin, Lambay, but in fact the proportions of the Clare Island survey grew beyond anyone's expectations. Anyway, look at them all if you like.”

Declan carefully lifted one of the books,
Flora Londinensis
, and opened it. He recognized many of the plants—a primrose, a clump of the stinky plant that often tangled itself in amongst the potatoes and which he learned was
Geranium robertianum
, or Herb Robert. The plates were nicely done, delicately coloured. “Una, what is the meaning of the bits the fella has drawn on either side of the plant?”

She came and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, yes, well, those are called dissections. The idea is not just to portray the plant itself but also its function, its anatomy, how it reproduces itself. That all began, really, with the artists who illustrated Linnaeus.”

“Linnaeus? Should I know the name?”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Una laughed. “I am so immersed in this that I imagine everyone must know exactly what I know. Which isn't much, mind you. Well, Linnaeus. He was a Swede, born in the eighteenth century, and he spent his life working as a botanist. He was a bit odd, but I think his brilliance lay mostly in his efforts to simplify the way plants were classified. Remember I told you a little about taxonomy when I lent you that book? He came up with the binomial system, really, the one I explained to you—the genus and then the specific name. The first designates and the second sort of describes. It's a bit more complicated than that when you get into things like classes dependent on sexual parts or lack of them, but the basics of it are brilliant.”