A Man in a Distant Field (40 page)

As it turned out, Higgins was indeed severely injured but was expected to recover. His jaw had been wired shut to heal, his broken arm set, the gash on his scalp stitched and dressed. He had no memory of the attack but woke after two days' sleep to mumble when he might go home; he was given a pad and a pen to write out his questions because even the mumbling hurt. Una drove to Clifden to visit him and encountered his mother at his bedside. She was polite but chilly, accepting the flowers that Una brought, the basket of sweetmeats, the drawing of crow garlic that he had admired in her home. It was clear she was in Ireland reluctantly and probably would not come again.

Rumours abounded about the attack but nothing clear was determined, no one was arrested, and after a few weeks, the event was tucked away in memory, not forgotten, but not cherished, like the small Republican victories, the spiriting away of wounded men by boat right under the noses of the English. A brief tale might be told in a pub of how a loudmouthed Englishman was dealt with by Joyce's River, but apart from a few smiles that could be thought secretive, that was the extent of its course. Una never heard from Edward Higgins again.

A few weeks later, Una arranged to drive up to Westport and take the train to Donegal to visit her aunt and uncle for a month now that the rail lines were open. She wanted time away from an area redolent with the blood of both sacrifice and revenge; she wanted to sleep in a house where she would not be awakened by a knock that might take her to a boy crying from the pain of his injuries or a telegram advising of a visit. When Declan left her after their final night together before her departure, she told him she would miss him terribly and that he should feel welcome to use her cabin at any time. So he left his papers there and stopped in regularly to light a fire and spend time with Odysseus. His nightshirt hung behind Una's door like a hopeful ghost, the sleeves patient and the placket undone.

He had made a draft of the passages he loved best, the ones that spoke out of the poem to him and his life. He had no son, no father, no bright wife waiting. There had been a suitor, not slain but certainly damaged, perhaps not by him, but he could not completely absolve himself from that possibility. He thought of Rose, wondering if she had been his princess at the river with her dream of a bridegroom, her clean linens drying in the hot sun on rocks, her kindness. No mention had been made of erotic interest on Odysseus's part, yet Declan remembered how he had awoken in the canoe to watch Rose bathe naked in Oyster Bay like a sea-born daughter of Aphrodite, his body responding to the sight of a maiden of the white arms at play in the water. He wanted to do something for her, give something to her, so she would remember their time on Oyster Bay as he now remembered it, softened by distance (he had almost forgotten the loneliness, the days of weeping in the small close cabin, the nights in the skiff by Outer Kelp waiting for dawn so he could drop his spoons with their baits of herring, the unsettling night on the rocky island while he waited out a storm, bones falling from their platforms in the trees), an interlude which had given him back
himself, not whole but able to find in the words of a poem something of a map to lead him home. In his best handwriting, he wrote out the first three hundred lines of Book 6, Odysseus's meeting with Nausikaa and his journey to her father's palace. In Greek and English, he made a version of himself and Rose, of a princess and a wanderer, a mother who knew the solace of a fire and good food, a father who made possible the means of return. He reminded her of the sheets she had folded with her mother, patched linen washed on the stones of Anderson Creek. Then he sent the package off to her in brown paper.

One day while he sat with the poem, there was a knock at Una's door. It was Bernadette Feeny.

“I was passing and saw the smoke, Declan, and I thought I'd make sure the harp was keeping in tune.”

He invited her in, explained Una's absence and his presence, and she listened to the harp strings, adjusting several to bring the instrument true. He watched her cradle the harp and suddenly wanted to know how it felt to hold it in that way. She turned to him and saw the longing in his eyes.

“Come, Declan, draw up a stool. Ye could try this for yerself so.”

The harp was placed between his knees with its shoulder resting on his right shoulder. Then Bernadette took his right hand and showed him how to touch the strings, thumb up and fingers extended, as though holding the knob of a door in readiness to open it

“Keep your hand so that the thumb and first three fingers rest in the middle of the string,” she advised him. “Forget about the small finger so. Ye'll not need it. Then do the same with the other hand so that the two hands face one another. The right hand plays the melody, Declan, and the left follows with chords or graces. Just so. Yer hands are as they should be. Try to take that string there, yes, that one, with the first finger, and that one
there, yes, leaving off the one in between, and stroke it with yer thumb. Pluck them in a motion as a scissor might work, striking up with the thumb. Ah, that's it. But difficult, I'm thinking. So now just put yer nail on the string and pluck.”

Surprisingly, a brief note sounded, not unpleasing. Declan was so startled he laughed out loud. He tried it again.

“This harp has a very pretty harmonic curve,” Bernadette told him, tracing the line of the harp's neck with her hand. “Yer own hands should echo that.”

What he liked was the way the harp rested against his shoulder while his arms supported it, embraced it. How many times had he watched Grainne holding this very harp in the same embrace, her fingers meeting through the strings? He had the sensation, briefly, of holding his daughter, the manageable weight of her body, while his hands sought out her music from strings that had never known her fingers.

Bernadette placed her hand on his right one and helped him to pluck out the opening phrase of the beautiful “Mabel Kelly.” Ah, it was sweet, the melody with its lilting notes, the dignified chording. With her left hand she dampened the strings so they didn't ring out so long; Declan remembered her telling him of this when she'd first tuned the instrument. Bernadette sang softly as they played, “Lucky the husband who puts his hand beneath her head ... Music might listen to her least whisper, learn every note, for all are true.” And her hand upon his took them through the ancient modal air: “Lamp loses light when placed beside her ... Her beauty is her own and she is not proud.”

“There, Declan O'Malley, that's what it's like to play the harp so though 'tis easier for me to guide the smaller hands of a child, I'd say. But ye did well enough. See how ye are holding the shoulder with yer hand. It is like ye've always known it.”

Declan saw her to the door and closed it behind her. Her words sounded in his mind,
it is like ye've always known it
, and he
thought how it was not quite accurate. It was not the music he had sought, although he would try to play the harp again, perhaps with Bernadette's guidance, and could tell that he would enjoy the challenge of finding the notes within the strings, fitting the shape of his hands to the harmonic curve of the instrument. It was for the moment of embrace, when he held Grainne in his arms, feeling her in the polished wood, his shoulder taking the weight of the harp as hers had.

Walking home, he encountered an old woman on the road, gathering plants. He asked what she had in her basket. She showed him dyer's rocket and a kind of woad, the one giving yellow, she said, and the other a clear blue. She had cress, for a soup, and a stem of hound's tongue against a dog she had to pass on her way back to Gobnamona. She had the clouded eyes of the very old, and yet she bent to the ground and examined the ditch without a complaint. “And this,” she said, “is bedstraw, a fine plant for setting the cheese. I've a great old goat these days and the milk makes a fearsome cheese. I'll send some for ye at the school, will I?”

(News travelled like wild seeds or magpies ...)

In May, he was washing the newly plastered walls of his house with lime and water, a little blue added to keep it bright. The roof was sound, the windows kept out the wind. All he owned fit into a small corner, but a fire made in his hearth was warm enough for the whole house. Over the lintel of the main doorway, he painted a proverb in deep green paint from a tube of colour that Una had left behind after a sketching trip:
Ar scath a chéile a mhaireas na daoine, In the shadows of each other we must build our lives
. It looked like a scribble of delicate vine.

One morning he awoke in the turf shed to small drifts of snow that had come in with fierce northerly wind, and he remembered how he had once felt like Suibhne.
The very cold sleep on a whole night, listening to the billowy sea, the multitudinous voices of the birds..
. Magpies were beginning to pair up for the season (
two for joy
), and he saw wild swans flying to the great loughs of the midlands. The weather could be so unsettled, first the snow, then fine sunlight.

He looked up from passing his brush over the new wall to see Una coming through his gate where the basalt pillar watched for those arriving as well as those leaving. She was looked beautiful, rested, the dark shadows that had appeared under her eyes after Higgins's beating gone, her skin clear and glowing.

“I am just on my way home from Donegal, Declan, and I came this way so I could stop to see if the asphodel at Cregganbaun was showing itself yet. And doesn't your house look fine! A fire burning, the sound of birds, and look, even a jug of bittersweet on the sill! I'd like to introduce you to Bran, a gift from my uncle.”

Reaching into the basket she carried, she lifted out a puppy, brown with odd, wiry hair. “Believe it or not, he is a wolfhound although he has some growing to do yet before we can consider him a dog at all. But he has enjoyed the drive down from Westport and would like to explore, I think, if you don't mind.” She put the puppy down on the ground where it immediately peed, then began to run in the direction of the potato bed.

Declan laughed as he watched the young pup follow its nose on the scent of something, obeying some old order. It had something in its movements of Argos on the other shore, bold and awkward. Una smiled and then embraced him, her breath warm against his neck. He was wearing one of her grandfather's shirts and a well-darned gansey which Bride Mannion had given him
for the warmth she said he'd need to get through the winter. Here it was, May already, with the weather so unsettled! And yet, in Una's arms, he was fierce with happiness and wouldn't have noticed the cold even if he were out in it naked. She brushed his hair away from his eyes and laughed.

“And what do you think of this, Declan? I am certain we are going to have a child. I thought so before I left but I wanted to be sure before I told you. I will not be a young mother, of course, and my doctor has a few concerns, but I feel wonderful and wanted you to know.”

He could only hold her tighter, his heart aching for what was lost and found.

The new rooms of his house glowed, clean and ready. Far away, on Oyster Bay, he imagined the gulls fishing and the ravens talking in the cedars. What were they saying? Old stories, new sightings, even a man asking at the store where a shelter might be found, a boat borrowed, a voyage taken to a campsite where clams were cooked on a beach fire and where wolves made themselves known in the night. Bones had been found in an old canoe and used to frighten children but the soul of the dead man soared up to the heavens like a feather on the wind, cleansed by yarrow. With time, the body of the man who had found the bones might rest also in peace on an island within spitting distance of his farm. The Lurgan boat, put to earth in some forgotten ceremony, and taken from it in wonder ... In the
soil, seeds waited for the sun and rain to urge them back to life, while withered roots slept in their own anticipation. Even a harp might be buried in a bog near Limerick, then brought forth to be played again, its strings remembering both joys and sorrows. Even a man in a distant field, keeping alive the means for fire, might be found by a woman at a river, cleaned and robed, and taken home to tell his story.