A Man in a Distant Field (5 page)

“Just so lads. We'll put her here by the door until I can ready the room for it. I can wrestle it through the door to be sure so I'll say thanks to ye for yer trouble. And thanks to ye, young Rose, for bringing the sheets so nicely folded. I'll sleep like a king tonight, I'm thinking.”

He watched the children leaving his cabin, wishing he'd had a bar of chocolate to offer them, a few pennies even. They were as shy as fish, darting away through the dappled leaves. There had been children like them in his classroom; they'd come from hill farms and smelled of turf smoke, sheep. Yet he'd seen their eyes when he'd read to them of the Irish kings and knew there were dreams in them to take them through the days of sums, little food, moving sheep from one small stony field to another. He
watched until the Neil childen had disappeared beyond the marsh, and then he busied himself with his bed.

Once it was arranged and organized, the old mattress put under the lean-to, Declan got out his books and puzzled over the Greek text. Some days he could make perfect sense of the words, their stern rhythms and harsh consonants. Other days he strained to remember, forgetting the tenses, the third declension. The passage he was working on concerned Nausikaa and her maidens. She had dreamed of her marriage linens and was moved to take her clothing to the river to be laundered.
. How the language moved along so rhythmically and how difficult to find the equivalent.
Now when they had cleaned all the stains
... Something like that, or would you specify garments as the object?
became
They spread them out in an orderly way
(but was that felicitous enough? No, he would have to think about it some more)
on the stones of the shore
. And working over the text, he realized that he was smelling the fresh linen on his bed, having seen Mrs. Neil and young Rose taking the sheets from the line where the wind and sun had dried them clean. How lovely that a moment in a life could echo this richer poetry, he thought, and was taken back to Delphi where Eilis and the girls had carefully taken up the clean sheets from the gorse bushes that served as their drying rack, had moved in and out of the folding dance, fingers to fingers as they brought the edges together and smoothed the lengths of white linen.

And hearing the echo and its answer, the smell of clean linen, feminine arms holding cloth in Delphi, on the islands of ancient Greece, in the here and now on Oyster Bay, he knew for a moment a kind of joy in the remembering. Not this time the ache of all his previous memories of home, but a brief, piercing joy for the poetry of linen and women.

The tide had come in and Declan was rowing his skiff over the moving water. It was early, the sky not fully lit, and quiet, with only the muttering of ducks in the reeds and the far-off moans of a cow waiting to be milked. Argos was standing in the prow of the skiff, her nose working the air.

He was rowing to the little community around the point to buy some provisions and to collect what mail might be waiting for him there. He had written away to a bookseller in Vancouver for an English translation of the
Odyssey
and a Greek grammar and lexicon, finding his project compelling enough that he wanted to make a good job of it. A student at the Bundorragha school had found his Greek text and a sheaf of papers containing his musings and attempts at versions of lines and had found a way to send them to Declan's sister. She in turn had sent them on to him. At first he had had no idea of what to do with them.

He supposed at one time he had hoped to use them as a teaching tool, having the occasional bright light who needed something beyond what the standard curricula could offer, supposed that there might have been idle moments in the classroom when he had puzzled over the poem, though he could not now remember. But it was something to keep his mind active now. His Greek was rusty, and he wanted to use the English translation as a rough guide for the passages with which he had difficulty. He had never liked the version the priests had made available to students all those years ago when he was himself a young scholar. Lang, it had been, and he remembered it as prose, not poetry at all, and the wanderer spoke as an English magistrate might, or a minister of God, not as a king of Ithaka. But still it would be fine to have it at hand for making sense of the story when he got lost in the syntax, the datives and the genitives.

A small holding came into view, tucked among apple trees. A couple sitting on the porch of the house waved to him and called out would he like a cup of coffee? He rowed in to shore and pulled his skiff up onto the shingle. The man came down to the shore to help him, introducing himself as MacIsaac. “And no need to tell me who you are, you're the Irishman settled into the Neils' cabin. O'Malley, isn't it?”

“Aye, and ye've a Scottish burr yerself. I'm very pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow Gael.”

MacIsaac told him, as they walked up to the house, that he'd come to the community twenty years earlier, having been left the little farm by an uncle who'd died a childless bachelor.

“It was an opportunity for us, Jeannie and I. We came out from Scotland as newlyweds. I worked on the docks in Vancouver but I missed a wee bit of land and this was a grand place to raise our boys.”

Jeannie MacIsaac had a cup of coffee waiting on the porch where some wicker chairs were gathered in a comfortable grouping.
She shook Declan's hand warmly and moved a cat from a rocking chair so he could sit down by a tray with a jug of cream and a small bowl of sugar. The cat sat a small distance away, looked balefully at them, and began washing itself although its tabby coat gleamed. Argos glanced briefly at the cat and realized it was lord of the demesne, or lady, and that a mere dog would be no match for such confidence. She curled at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch and settled into a deep sleep as though a short row had tired her out completely.

It was pleasant to sit in the early sun with the MacIsaacs and to hear them talk of their apples and lambs while the scent of blossoms wafted around them. They told Declan that their boys had gone off to work in Vancouver but that the youngest was hoping to return to the community to fish.

“He wanted the bright lights and nothing would keep him home but now he's yearning for the company of the lads he grew up with. He's got MacKay over at Whiskey Slough building him a small gill-netter and he's working around the clock in the city to pay for it. His mother will be happy to know he's close again.”

Jeannie MacIsaac smiled and touched her husband's arm. “And you
won't
be, my dear?”

Declan asked them about the stakes he had seen in the mud at low tide, how firmly they had been planted, impossible to budge. MacIsaac knew their story.

“My uncle came here first in 1890, when the Indians still lived at your end of the bay. They fished here and those stakes were part of a system they used to trap salmon before they entered the creeks to spawn. Here, let me just show you the pile-driver my uncle found.”

He reached down to a stone lying amongst others on the deck and lifted it up. It was wedge-shaped, with a face carved into one flat surface and two grooves worked into the underside.
Raising it up, he showed Declan how it would have been used to pound stakes into the mud bottom of the bay, or anywhere else for that matter; the user's thumbs fit neatly into the depressions created by the eyes, and the fingers used the grooves on the underside for gripping.

“My uncle was told it was a dogfish. I think it's ingenious myself and I've used it when fencing areas for my sheep. This rocky soil is murder for sinking fence posts!”

They discussed the fish-traps a little more, how effective they must have been in gathering the large numbers of salmon the Indians needed for winter use, MacIsaac saying that the bay fairly boiled with fish in the fall, returning to the various feeder creeks to spawn. Declan finished his coffee and went on his way, having assured the couple he'd bring back their mail. He felt calmed by his visit with them. Their affection for one another and their home was a balm, scented with apple blossom on a warm spring day.

Out onto the bay again, the skiff slicing through the water easily. Declan had never seen forests like these that grew right down to the sea's edge, although the old stories told of Irish forests full of elk and wolves. In the poems about the the wild man of the woods, Suibhne, the speaker sang of oaks and hazels, blackthorns, yews draped with ivy, and brown stags belling from the mountains. In his youth, Declan had walked in planted forests, and to be sure there were wooded glens, like those in the Erriff Valley, but he'd never seen trees like these. Sometimes, rowing past these wild headlands to the fishing grounds, he had seen deer walking across the sand. And the trees were extraordinary: cedars with their palmate fronds, the giant they called a Douglas fir, pines, prickly spruce. Often there'd be no trees at all near the shore but stumps so wide your mind had a hard time imagining the tree that had been taken down. Ledges were cut into the sides of the stumps, like stairs to the heavens, where
springboards had rested so loggers could stand with their gut-fiddles, felling the trees to the ground like gods.

The store was perched on pilings that walked out into the bay like a long-legged shore bird, one of them bent at the elbow and braced with a splint of cedar. Men were always gathered on the verandah, smoking, their gear piled up around them, or boxes of eggs, or brown jugs that Declan knew held the local spirits. On a mail day, more than the usual number clustered here, waiting for the steamship to announce itself around the headland. When it appeared, most of the men descended to the wharf steps to help with the lines. Declan did not join them but entered the store. There was a smell, always, of wax used on the wide floor boards, strong cheese, smoked fish, blood (if it was a day the storekeeper hung a new side of beef on the hooks suspended from the ceiling joists), cabbages, and an acrid burnt odour that Declan eventually understood to be coffee in a scorched pot which steamed and frothed on the back of the woodstove. He could not imagine drinking it, but the storekeeper was never without a cup.

He had his list—a bucket of lard, a sack of onions, tea, hardtack for his fishing days (as he found his own soda bread did not travel well but grew mould in its wrapping before he could eat it), a few oranges, a bag of turnips.

“If you can wait awhile, O'Malley, I'll sort through the mail bag once it's come up from the boat and see what's there for you. Certainly you can take the MacIsaacs' mail too. And some beef for stew, you say? It won't be a minute.” The storekeeper used a huge knife to hack off a chunk of meat, which he then diced, weighed, and wrapped in brown paper that he tied with cord hanging from a spool.

While his order was being filled, Declan wandered the aisles of the store, pausing to look at the tins of hair pomade, big bars of Sunlight soap, boxes of fishing tackle, bins of dusty vegetables, and
the grey woolen overshirts the fishermen in the area all favoured. He settled with the storekeeper, packed his groceries and the packet of letters, and returned to his skiff, keeping wide of the steamship, which had docked with a host of volunteers securing its lines; they were now watching a horse, its eyes covered with a blindfold, being lowered to the wharf in a canvas sling.

Coming back with a good wind behind him, Declan eased on the rowing to watch a pair of geese guarding a nest on one of the rocky islets at the mouth of his bay. He had heard they mated for life, and there was a story told of a goose who followed his wounded mate, patient in the sky, while she walked with her broken wing. How did the story end? He couldn't remember. But these geese watched him, alert to his movements, ready to challenge him should he enter their nursery. He called to them that they had nothing to fear from him and chuckled as they hissed and gabbled back.

At the MacIsaac farm, he was offered a dram for his trouble. “It was no trouble at all, I assure ye,” he told them, handing their letters over and accepting a glass with a generous measure of whiskey. The men raised their glasses to toast, in Gaelic, each to the other's surprise. Despite differences in accent and emphasis, they could understand each other, though MacIsaac confessed he had forgotten more of his parents' language than he'd retained.