A Man in a Distant Field (6 page)

“I have enough yet for toasts and cursing and the occasional song,” he said cheerfully, downing his dram. It was redolent of peat and oak, a distillation of weather, sweet water, and barley malt. “I mind to share a whiskey now and then with someone who knows the old language. Come again!”

As they approached World's End, Argos began to whimper and moan. Her hackles rose, and Declan heard growls coming from her throat, not yet articulated in her mouth. He followed her looking as best he could and was startled to see a dark shape reaching for his herring rake. By now Argos was barking, her
voice full and fearsome. The shape turned to see what made such a noise, and Declan recognized the bear. He used his oars to steady the boat, to push against the movement of the tide so that they remained the short distance from the shore. The bear abandoned its attentions to the rake, raising its head to the air, shaking it from side to side, sniffing for them on the wind. Argos barked and scrambled for a foothold on the gunwales in order to jump from the boat, but Declan ordered her to sit. He had never seen a bear so close. He wanted to look at it as long as possible, memorize the heavy head and small eyes, the glossy coat hanging from the body like a cloak several sizes too large. The bear made a noise, as though clacking its teeth together, then turned and ambled away, rake abandoned. Declan waited for it to disappear into the woods before bringing the boat into shore.

The rake still leaned against the cabin. What had been the attraction, he wondered. He brought the tines close to his face and sniffed them. Fish. Of course. Fish had brought the bear. Although he always cleaned his fishing gear when he returned from the water, the smell of the herring impaled on the rake for bait would remain. But surely a bear would not return for the smell if there was no actual fish for it eat? Judging from the scats he found near the creek, the bear was feeding on grasses anyway. Great dark piles of scat, threaded through with long strands of undigested grass, weighted with seedy heads. The Neils told him that there would be many bears on the estuary in the fall when the salmon were running. That made sense, an animal the size of the one he had just seen feeding on salmon. But he marvelled at the thought of such a large beast sustaining itself on grass. Idly he pulled on the ripe head of a tall stalk of grass growing near the rake. The stem came free from its sheath and he chewed on the tender end of it contemplatively. It tasted mild and sweet. He chewed a little further up. It was coarser, more fibrous. But the tender part? He could see making a simple meal of those, maybe
finishing up with a handful or two of ripe berries. He laughed out loud to think he shared such a thing in common with a bear.

The girl was standing by his open door. He'd looked up from his books to ease out a kink in his neck and had seen her there, looking in. On her face was an expression of intense curiosity, a palpable yearning. He followed her eyes to the pile of books on his table.

“Rose! Have ye been there long? I'm sorry to have been so absorbed that I did not notice ye until now.”

She told him not long, she'd not been there long, but had come to ask if the bedding had been enough. Her mother could provide more blankets if he needed them.

“Indeed what I have is grand. Yer mother has been very kind to think of my comfort as she has, with all her tasks for the doing. Now, can I give ye a cup of tea?”

She came in, moving in her shy way to one of the stumps which served as chairs. Declan found the extra mug and poured from the pot of tea stewing on the woodstove. At her nod, he poured in a little milk. He followed her eyes to the small stack of books on the table, his pen and bottle of ink to one side.

“It's the story again, Rose. I told ye the other time how it was a world unto itself and how true that is! I sent for a few books to make my work with it easier and I collected them off the steamship this morning. Would ye like to see them?”

He handed her the little volume he had ordered on a whim,
Tales of Ancient Greece
, by Sir George W. Cox. It was a pretty book, bound in blue cloth with gold stamping on the spine. Rose held it as though it were alive, carefully, and with great attention. She put it to her face and smelled the cloth, inhaling deeply, her eyes closed.
She opened the book to the title page and ran her index finger gently over the illustration bordering the text—cherubic faces and bunches of grapes and winged fairies.

“That's a ‘t',” she said reverently, touching the ornate initial beginning the quote,
This is fairy gold, boy; and twill prove so
.

“Aye, 'tis, Rose. And can ye read any more of it?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head and handed the book back. Taking up her mug, she sipped her tea, glancing at the papers on the table. It was very quiet in the cabin, only a droning of bees in the thimbleberry bushes outside the door to punctuate the still air. She had the look of one of his daughters when taking a pause between tasks, able to deeply relax at a moment's notice.

“Will I read one of the stories to ye, Rose?” Declan suggested, moved at the sight of her in his cabin, his books all around and her not being able to read them. Her reverence for the Cox made him want to give her something, and there was no point in sending her home with a book. Stories were all he could think to offer.

She smiled her assent. Almost at random, he chose “The Sorrow of Demeter,” remembering incompletely the myth of the corn goddess and her young daughter.

In the fields of Enna, in the happy island of Sicily, the beautiful Persephone was playing with the girls who lived there with her. She was the daughter of the Lady Demeter, and everyone loved them both, for Demeter was good and kind to all, and no one could be more gentle and merry than Persephone.

Rose sighed deeply and rested her cheek against her clasped hands. Declan would learn that she loved being read to; it was
one of her favourite things. Mostly her mother was too busy, she told him, but sometimes, particularly if Rose was ill, she would sit on the bed with one of the mildewy books that she'd brought from her childhood home in Glengarry County and read a story while stroking Rose's hair.

She and her companions were gathering flowers from the field to make crowns for their long flowing hair. They had picked many roses and lilies and hyacinths which grew in clusters around them ...

“We do that, Mr. O'Malley! My sister taught me how to make a chain of daisies by splitting their stems with my fingernail! I've never tried roses, although when we pick them for Mum, they fall apart in our hands. The wild ones, I mean. And there are lilies here, too, the orange ones. Those girls are like us!”

She was very animated, her hands touching her head as though placing a crown of wildflowers upon it, her face bright with excitement. Declan was moved to see what the telling of a story could do to a shy girl, a girl left on shore while her brothers and sister sailed off to school, a girl whose arms bloomed with someone's anger.

“To be sure, Rose. And isn't that the beauty of a story, that sometimes we feel as though it is our story that's being told? But listen, now, because what happens next is not what you'd know about, I'm thinking.”

... the earth opened, and a chariot stood before her drawn by four coal black horses; and in the chariot there was a man with a dark and solemn face, which looked as though he could never smile, and as though he had never been happy.
In a moment he got out of his chariot, seized Persephone around the waist, and put her on the seat by his side. Then he touched the horses with his whip, and they drew the chariot down into the great gulf, and the earth closed over them again.

Rose's face was horror-struck. “Mr. O'Malley, what happens to her? Do you really mean to say that the horses take them underground?”

“Ah, Rose, in these stories we are told many things. How much of it is true, well, that's the thing we don't know. We are told things to make us feel a certain way, to create a certain mood, to explain things in a particular way. Do ye know the meaning of the word
metaphor
?”

Rose shook her head.

“Well, it is when ye use words or phrases that everyone understands to mean certain things, ye use them to make a thing understood in a new or different way. If I told ye that sun was a globe of golden glass, well, ye'd know I didn't really mean that it was, in fact, but ye might take another look at the sun and see it again, with fresh eyes. Do ye see what I mean?”

“I think so,” she said, squinting her eyes and looking at the sun, which was making its way towards the western sky.

“To continue with suns, the ancient Greeks, whom these stories are about, would talk of the sun as something alive that was driven across the sky by a fella called Helios who had a chariot and some special oxen. That little story is a metaphor, really, to explain the passage of the sun from when it rises in the eastern sky to where it sets in the west, where we can see it, each day.”

Declan looked at Rose to see if she was ready to hear the rest of the story. She was far away, gazing out the window. She sighed, and then turned to face him. “Mr. O'Malley, I know a
story that's a bit like the one you've been reading me. Only it's true. All of it.”

“Will ye tell it to me?”

She took a deep breath. “Where we live used to belong to the Indians. They still come up the bay in their canoes sometimes because they think this part here is special. One of them, a lady called Lucy, comes to have tea with my mum and she says her people began here, like we say that Adam and Eve began in a garden called Eden. But none of the Indians have lived here for quite a long time. My dad has pigs, you've seen them, and when he wants an area cleared, he lets the pigs run free. They are good at clearing land because they eat all the tough leaves and vines, and they dig stuff up, roots and such.”

“Aye, their feet are like small spades so,” said Declan, remembering his own pig.

“Well, one day a few years ago, in spring, the pigs dug up a canoe with a skeleton in it. My sister, Martha, saw it first and ran to the house to get my dad. He thought it was funny and let the pigs have the ribs to chew. He rolled the canoe over into the woods—I can show you what's left of it one day—and took the skeleton off; we didn't see where. Martha had nightmares about it.”

“Aye, she would, she would.” And then he wondered if he would also dream of the pigs at work on the long ribs of a man found dead in the earth.

“When Lucy came the next time, my mum asked her about it and she said it must've been a chief from a long time ago, because sometimes they were buried in their canoes with important stuff for them to use on the way to Heaven. It made it seem so wicked that the pigs would dig it up and eat the bones. My mum never told Lucy that part. Do you think it was wicked, Mr. O'Malley?” She seemed so concerned about this that Declan reassured her, saying that the dead man's soul would have long departed and that Lucy would have known this.

“Don't worry yerself so, Rose, but tell me more of the story.”

She smiled at him, grateful for his understanding, and continued. “So then it was fall and my dad put our vegetables in the root cellar. Potatoes from the new area that the pigs had cleared and the other stuff we eat all winter. Turnips and beets that he buries in sand, and cabbages and onions. One dark night, well, it wouldn't have been night really but it gets dark early in winter, he told my sister and me to go to the root cellar under the back part of the house to bring up potatoes for the supper. We hate going in there because it's mostly underground and there are spiderwebs and even rats sometimes. But my sister took a candle and we kept together. We were leaning into the potato bin when we heard this awful sound, like sticks clattering, and my sister held up the candle. There was a skeleton waving its arms around! We screamed and dropped the potatoes and the candle, and we ran as fast as we could around to the kitchen door.”

“Ah, ye poor lasses. Ye'd have been terrified, of course!” Closing his own eyes for moment, he saw the skeleton rise up, its bones clattering.

“My sister was screaming and crying—my mother says she's nervy—and I was afraid that the skeleton would follow us. But then my dad was standing in the doorway, laughing, and he almost never laughs. My mother calmed my sister down, and when my father stopped laughing he told us that he'd fastened strings to the canoe skeleton's arm bones and then ran the strings up into his bedroom, which is right above the root cellar. So he could jiggle the arms by pulling the strings. My sister had bad dreams for weeks—I know because we sleep in the same bed—and she wouldn't speak to my father, which made him really mad. My mother was mad at him too, but then he hit Martha and told her to snap out of it so we tried to forget.”

What a brute the man was, thought Declan, to frighten his daughters so. He remembered the bruises on Rose's arms as he
watched her digging for clams and folding the sheets. Aloud, he told her that the story was an interesting one and she'd told it well. He could see what she'd described, and he was sorry to hear that her sister had been so troubled by the event. His eyes must have revealed his distaste for a man who would strike a child because Rose quickly responded.