A Man in a Distant Field (10 page)

Rose was dancing in the muddy bay like a strand of delicate seaweed, swaying and bending low. She stopped suddenly at the sound of her name being shouted from the direction of her house. It was her father's voice, harsh and angry. Hurriedly she picked up her bucket, unknotting her skirt as she ran towards home. The slow suck of the tide coming in erased her footprints in the mud.

Declan had been wondering how to approach Mrs. Neil for permission to give Rose some lessons. When she brought the milk one morning, he invited her in for a cup of tea.

“Mrs. Neil, I am thinking it would not be a difficult thing to teach young Rose to read so. She is always looking at these books ye see around ye and I would like to do something to repay yer family for its many kindnesses. As I have told ye, I taught school in Ireland and would consider it an honour to help Rose.”

The woman regarded him gently. “There is no need to think you must repay us at all, Mr. O'Malley, but I know Rose has so enjoyed talking to you about your paperwork, and if you could spare her the time, I'll try to make sure she comes to you. My husband ... well, he has old-fashioned ideas about girls and education. He has allowed Martha to go to school because I really did insist but somehow Rose ... oh, there's not enough room in the boat or he wants her to help me with the laundry or some such notion. I've tried a little to help her, but the days are not
long enough, it seems, for the work that needs doing. I would like to keep it from my husband, though. He is a good man but strong in his opinions and it's not always worth arguing with him or challenging him.”

“Mrs. Neil, it would give me great pleasure to teach Rose. And I will say nothing to Mr. Neil. Shall I wet the tea again?”

It was three days before Rose appeared in the door of the cabin. She carried four eggs wrapped in newspaper and the jug of milk. Declan carefully took the eggs from her and put them in a small pudding basin, noticing as he did so the bracelet of bruising around Rose's wrists, as though she had been grabbed and held in anger. He carried the bowl and jug to the creek where he had a little cuddy made of stones and moss, a square of sheet metal level against the creek bed. A slab of cheese in a lard pail was there already, keeping cool. He wondered whether he ought to comment on the marks.

“Mr. O'Malley, have you ever seen a baby caddis fly in its nest?” Rose asked, leaning over the creek and carefully removing a clump of twigs and fir needles. She took a grass stalk and gently prodded one end of the clump. Antennae shot out with a tiny insect behind. She put it into Declan's hand so he could see it close up.

“Rose, it is truly an interesting little construction. How did ye know where to find it?”

She brushed her hair away from her eyes and confessed to spending hours looking into creeks. She'd find as many living things as she could and collect them in a bucket. Her father's friend, a devotee of fly-fishing, identified some of them for her—the larvae of stone flies and May flies, leeches, caddis flies in every sort of casing ... “You'd never know they were there, Mr. O'Malley, unless you looked really closely.”

“In a way, Rose, that is true of stories, too. Here they are in books, in black and white, looking for all the world like hen
tracks. But ye saw what happened when ye looked at a word for a time, how it told ye its name.
Muse
, it was, and near to yer name, ye thought. In a way ye were reading the creek when ye found the little lads that were part of what it was. Can water on its own be a creek or is a creek really a collection of things, like words, that make it real?”

Rose thought about that for a moment. “Well, creeks change, Mr. O'Malley. This creek is full of spring things. In summer it's different, and in fall, different again because of the salmon who lay their eggs in it. And winter, that's the best time to see the bugs and other creatures. Creeks change course, too, when the snow on the mountain melts quickly and makes them too full to stay within the banks. So if a creek is a story, it's never quite the same one.”

“That is such a good way to think of a creek, Rose. I hadn't thought of them ever as stories, and changing ones at that. I think that's true of stories in general, too, would ye not agree? A story my mother told me was always a little different from one my father told. She remembered details he didn't. She would describe meals, who was sitting next to someone at the table, who the grandmother was, and where the grandmother's people came from originally. My father liked the physical details, whether there was a fight or an injury or even an insult. And in his stories, these things became bigger with each telling. And of course in families, each generation has something new to add. The stories we tell about the Great Hunger in Ireland are different, I'm thinking, from the ones that my grandparents might have told, with the sight of the starving still in their minds.”

While they talked, the day became warm although it had not started off that way. Gulls called out on the tide flats and shore birds hunted in the stones for food. Vines of smoke climbed out of Declan's chimney to the blue sky, blossoming into high cloud, and at the mouth of the creek, salmon fry
flipped for joy as they left the fresh water finally for salt. Declan brought some paper outside, and ink, and two pens; he began the task of teaching Rose the alphabet.

Rose was a quick learner. Her mother had spent some time with her, going over her letters, but it had not been a sustained learning, and she had not had the opportunity to apply the letters to actual words. With the
Odyssey
at hand, Declan would find a word using little clusters of letters.

Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and many were the men whose towns he saw ..
.

“This one, Rose, the
m
, then the
a
, then the
n
. Can you try to sound it out?”

And she would make the clear sound of each letter on its own, then shape them together, worrying the three until a word emerged from the soundings. “Man!” she said triumphantly, “Man!” Taking the pen and dipping it into ink, she would form the letters on a piece of paper, copying it several times over. Her list of words grew:
man, need, wide, towns, mind
.

“I've a mind to tell ye a story, Rose, which this talking of muses and towns has prompted, though I am still not certain of its meaning. When I was riding the train across America from my cousins in New Jersey to, well, what became this although I didn't know it at the time, the train made a stop in a town on the great plains. What state it was in, I have no idea. We had a few hours while the train took on freight of some sort. It was a cold day but clear, and I thought I'd walk to loosen up my joints, all cramped they were from the days and nights I'd spent already on the seat. It didn't take long for me to leave the little town completely behind and before I knew it I was standing by a field, watching a woman feed her pigs. They were big ones, black and white, a few tawny, and she was putting out some grain for them. They were polite animals, or so it seemed to me, and the
woman spoke gently to them as she fed them, assuring them that there would be enough for all of them. When she saw me, she beckoned to me to come to where she was. I told her I was off the train and what fine animals she had. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘they are better than humans for company most of the time for a woman on her own.' She explained that the farm was hers, she worked hard, but with her horses and her goats and especially her pigs, she wanted for nothing.”

Rose murmured that her father's pigs were too fierce to talk to, always wanting to root around and find more to eat, but maybe these ones never had to work for their food.

“These pigs were almost courtly, Rose, the way they waited for her, one of them sniffing her wrists. When I said I was thirsty and might she have a glass of water, she took me to her pump and drew off a jug of the most beautiful water and poured some into a tin cup. I have never tasted any like it. We talked and there was sun and the sound of her pigs eating their fill of dinner. When at last I thought to check my watch, Rose, the old pocket watch I have here, I saw I would be pressed to be back at the train on time. The woman suggested I might not want to leave, that there was work for a man like me on her farm, and for a moment I was tempted to stay. It was like a spell had been cast over me for that moment, Rose. It was all I could do to say my farewells and run along that country road to the town where the train was building up steam for its leave-taking. I have occasionally wondered what my life would be like if I'd stayed. She struck me as something of a muse, that woman, a lass to inspire a man to do something fine, there with her pigs and her fields. But I never found out what I might have done. That's it, Rose, my little tale, and in telling it, I see that it still mystifies me now as it did then. Let's look at the poem again and see what you can make of these lines.”

They worked at the task until Rose said she must go, her mother would need her help with dinner as a chicken had been
killed and must be plucked. Declan watched her disappear beyond the bluff, then set about making a simple meal for himself. He felt he had been a coward for his inability to mention the bruises to Rose but was also reluctant to enter into another family's troubles.
Sure each has its own difficult times
, he thought,
and who is a stranger to judge another man's actions?
He sat on a rock by the shore, eating his cheese and the end of a loaf of his brown bread. A line came to him, from the poem he had recited to Rose.
Homesickness for my little dwelling has come upon my mind
. Was it the mind where homesickness struck, he wondered, or the heart? He felt it in his heart, of a sudden, like a grey bruise, but the heart surely could not summon up the image of home? The two must work together then, the one passing the memory along to the other to be yearned for and hungered for. What the mind offered, in clarity and purpose, the heart turned to grief. Looking out at the water, he could see a boat far away in the strait. His heart felt like that boat, alone on the ocean, buoyed up by salty water, a bottomless pool of tears.

Four days of rain when he didn't want to get out of his bed and couldn't remember where he was, Delphi or New Jersey or Oyster Bay. Four days when he called to whichever Neil brought the milk to just leave it by the door, thanks, and he would bring it in later. Four days of daylight dreaming and weeping. “Cold icy wind, faint shadow of a feeble sun, the shelter of a single tree: Suibhne indeed,” he wept.

On the fifth day, he rose, dressed, called Argos, and walked to the canoe.

The deadly flowers were finished now, drying seed pods opened on the stalks, rustling as the breeze rubbed them together. You could not tell which had been the white camas and which the blue. Tiny pink blooms covered the bluff. The moss was spongy underfoot, and the canoe was wet again, a puddle collecting where part of the wood had warped and created a
depression. The drain holes took the rest of the rain away. Declan touched the beak at the prow. It reminded him a little of a rook's beak. Those birds had haunted every farm he'd ever known, waiting to eat afterbirth, scattered grain, their nests in a grove of high trees nearby, untidy formations of sticks and broken vines. His daughters had loved a rhyme about crows in a collection of nursery poems,
One is for bad news, two is for mirth
. A note on the text told them that the rhyme often used magpies instead and that there were variants:
One is for sorrow, two for joy
was one they liked, too. As Declan was examining the carved beak, he heard a strange noise from the sky.
Klook, klook, klook
. Looking up, he saw two black birds floating above him.
Klook, klook
, and then a run of notes like gurgling water. Ah, ravens. He'd seen these birds before, sitting in trees near the creek or tumbling down the sky like groups of boys doing acrobatics. One of the Neil boys had told him what they were and that they were cousins to the crow, which he could understand; they did look like the Irish rooks, only bigger, heavier. One of them flew to the bluff and settled in one of the pines, looking down at him curiously. A sound came from it like knuckles on hollow wood. It tilted its head and made the sound again. Declan found he could make the same sound in his own mouth by clicking his tongue hard against the back of his palate.
Tok, tok
. The bird answered. It was perched so he could see its profile, a smooth head with the beak extending, extending ... quickly he looked to make certain, yes, extending just like the one he was seeing on the prow of the canoe.

“So ye are the lad I see here,” he called up to the raven. “Mirth, to be sure!” The bird preened itself, adjusting its wings, and looked away. The other raven had settled in a tree further down the bay. Declan took advantage of the bird's presence to compare its profile with the carved bird. There were differences, of course. The real raven's eye was round and alive, not ovoid and bald. The shape of the beak was very similar, but the carved beak
was open, holding a tiny disc. The real raven uttered another of the watery cries and flew up, circling the bluff lazily before flying to meet its mate down the bay. “Thank you,” Declan called to it, “thank you for letting me know who this is.”