A Man in a Distant Field (17 page)

When the beach fire had burned down and the rocks were red hot, the men stopped work. One of them made several trips to the creek with a bucket and tipped water into the canoe until there was six or eight inches of it. Using a shovel, Charles lifted hot rocks, one at a time, and placed them into the water, standing back as the rocks sizzled. He kept adding rocks until steam was billowing out of the canoe. Albert brought a sheet of canvas from the basket and draped it over the canoe to contain the steam. The men waited for a while and then prodded the side of the canoe gently. Alex nodded to Albert, and the latter brought sticks from the edge of the work site. Alex selected a couple and placed them across the width of the canoe, just moving the canvas aside in those areas to keep the steam inside.

About midday, Charles went to the basket and took out another lard pail and a skillet. He put the skillet on a flat stone within the circle of stones to warm it and scooped water from the creek into the pail. Mixing something inside with a clean stick, he then put a lump of lard into the skillet, and when it had melted, he poured in batter from the pail. It spread, like a pancake, and then began to puff up. The most delicious smell filled the air. “Bannocks are ready,” he called to the others, and they came to stand by the fire and eat the pan-bread, moving it quickly from hand to hand because of the heat. Declan had brought a round of his soda bread. He cut it up and handed slices to the men, then offered around chunks of cheese as well. The four of them chewed by the fire, pausing to drink tea. From time
to time, one of them would make a comment or an observation, but the silence, too, was comfortable.

They continued to work on the canoe, urging the sides of the craft to spread with sticks while splashing hot water against the gunwales with a branch of cedar. Wider sticks were cut and used to spring the sides until they eased out. The cedar was very flexible, responding to the sticks, flaring out at the bow and stern. Declan was amazed at the change in the wood, the way it responded to the work of the men, and at their skill in shaping it.

“Why did you choose this place for the carving?” Declan asked.

“Good trees,” was Alex's answer. “Good old cedars, them's the ones. You want them close to water so you don't have to sweat too hard to get them to the shore when you've finished working. A group of them, that's best, so you can pick one. You chisel out a little core to see if there's rot but some of the old ones can tell without that. Branches healthy, eh, and straight growth.”

Declan looked at the trees beyond the work site. He could tell the cedars from the firs but wouldn't know a healthy one for the life of him.

“You bring the log to water and let it float. The side that goes to the bottom, that's your bottom, your keel. It's the north side of the tree, less branches, better grain. Then you haul it back and try to see the canoe.”

“Can you do that, Alex? See the canoe in the raw log?”

Alex smiled. “Not right away, not me anyhow. I walk around it, touch it, get a feel for its shape. You look at lots of canoes to see how the wood helps the carver to decide the shape. It's there all right. Sometimes you dream it. That's best. Then we take wedges of cherry wood or yew, yew is best, to split the log down the centre. It comes open with a loud crack when you do it right.”

Declan tried to imagine the process. Looking at the big living trees and then the unfinished canoe, he could almost see
what Alex meant. But then seeing the tools—the adzes, the axe, and the hand-plane—he knew it was something beyond his own abilities. He would not know where to begin.

What happened when the steaming was finished was that the canoe now possessed elegant lines, flaring in the middle parts and pushed up slightly at the bow and stern. And yet the log was there, as ghost and pattern, the shadow behind the shape. “Could you see that shape beforehand?” Declan asked Alex, thinking about how thick the original sides would have been, newly liberated from the circumference of log. Now he thought they were probably an inch thick, maybe two at the bottom, near the keel. Three men working together, with chisels, wedges, mauls and adzes, had accomplished this in a quiet way on an isolated shore with ravens for company (
nine is a secret
). Perhaps boats passed and their occupants never noticed, the pattern of shadows concealing the raw canoe and the fire in its circle of stones hidden in fog. Declan looked at the canoe again while he waited for Alex to answer.

“Yes, it was there. We just had to give the canoe a chance to become. It will be so much stronger now, too. The steaming makes the wood strong.”

When the men gathered around the fire for their final mug of tea, Declan wanted to ask them about the canoe he had moved to the rocky bluff. He hesitated, wondering if they would think it wrong for him to move something associated with death, but decided he needed to know. He told them how Rose had related the story of the pig digging up the canoe and how he had been so moved to see it there on the forest floor, knitted into its shroud of vines. How he had wanted it out in the light and how the Neil boys had helped him to elevate it to the bluff. There was silence when he finished his story, the men looking into the fire and drinking the last of their tea.

Alex spoke first. “My mother knew the canoe when we passed the place on our way to see Mrs. Neil. She said you must
have needed it. My father said the canoe had done its work already, it had taken its owner from this world to the next, and if it could be of some use again, then that was good.”

“Why would the man have been buried there and not on the islands?” Declan asked.

Charles waited to see if Alex would answer and then he replied, “Different families would treat the dead in different ways. Put them in trees, in canoes, bury them wrapped in special blankets. Now that the priests are here, they say we must bury our dead in their graveyards. Some families do, some don't. Some families went to the islands and took the bones of their people home for church burials.”

Alex added, “My father's father told us that the reason for so many different burial areas was to confuse the souls that were restless and wanted to come back. So maybe that was the reason for the canoe to be where it was. My mother was not happy about the bones when Mrs. Neil told her what her husband done so she went to the place on her own, burned some yarrow and other plants to cleanse the area. It's not that the soul was still there but that proper respect had not been shown.”

Declan thanked them and then they began to gather up their belongings. Alex told Declan that the men would be returning in the next few days to take the new canoe back to the reservation in order to finish it. They'd use sandstone to abrade the surface, then dogfish oil to preserve it. They'd paint a design on each side of the bow. He used his foot to scatter the ashes of the beach fire.

The trip back was quick as the wind was behind them. Declan felt in unison with the three men as they paddled down the coast, coming into his bay with the tide. Argos barked from the shore, excited to see him. He climbed out of the canoe and turned to thank the men for taking him with them but they were already on their way. Charles raised a paddle in farewell.
Declan watched them until they'd disappeared with the sun, the falling notes of a loon bringing the day to a close.

Rose appeared the next morning, clutching a book which had been sent to her by a far-off uncle. “Mr. O'Malley, only look! A book of my own!”

She held out a book,
Tales From Shakespeare
, to show him. Her mother's brother, in Montreal, had sent it to her as a late birthday gift. Her mother told her that she might bring it to show Declan but then she must come quickly back as there was washing to fold from the line.

“Ah, Rose, those are wonderful stories. I had that book in my little school in Ireland and I'm thinking ye will like them as much as the scholars in Bundorragha did. Have ye read any at all then?”

“My mother told me I would like one about an island and a shipwreck. We started that as soon as the parcel arrived but haven't finished it yet. But just look at the pictures, Mr. O'Malley!” She held out the book to Declan and pointed to a picture of Ariel pinching Caliban; Declan recognized the style of Arthur Rackham. He noted that there were a number of colour plates in the book and knew each one would delight Rose, helping to form her understanding of the old stories within. He handed the book back to her.

“How is Tom's arm, Rose? Has it healed at all?”

“My father was angry at my mother for taking him to the doctor. He said she was making a sissy of him. But then he saw the splint, and the special sling the doctor gave Tom. He said Tom could have some time away from chores but that only meant the rest of us had to do more. But then I saw him with Tom in his lap, helping him to flex his fingers as the doctor told Mum he must do, and he didn't say anything else about sissies.”

She was holding her book as though it was a small living animal, stroking the binding of blue-green cloth, and tracing her finger over the gold titles, the border surrounding the cover. It
occurred to Declan that it was her only book. A world had opened for her with reading, he thought as he watched her run back to her home across the marsh. He had seen this in other children, of course, but this girl, in this place, seemed to be opening a door of the world for him, too. Her joy in the stories, her curiosity, the transparency of her emotional responses—these were serving to coax his heart back to life. At times it was unbearably painful to be in the company of a girl similar in age to his own daughters. What might they have become, in the fullness of time, with their love of music, birds, their patriotism forming against the backdrop of violence? He and Eilis had wanted them to be bold, to know their hearts, their own place in the family, the community, their country as it emerged, as it must do, from behind the shadow of British oppression. Each recollection carried with it the fierce pain of loss and the bottomless depth of his love for them. He hummed a little of an air Grainne had loved, a planxty for Mrs. Judge, and felt awash on the shore of a foreign land. Which he was, to be sure. Even the Scottish fishermen over near Whiskey Slough, who sometimes spoke a Gaelic not too far removed from what he knew, belonged to this place because of the boats they'd built and skippered and the children they'd sired; strong boats and sons alike a rugged connective tissue. Whereas he might be a name in a story, a momentary pause while the teller explained what was known of him, where he had lived, the cut of his boat. He thought of the pieces that Grainne played, composed to remember the harpist's sojourns in houses around Ireland, for the wives of prosperous men, and the men themselves—George Barbazon, O'Reilly, Doctor John Stafford, immortalized for prescribing a cure for depression which included whiskey. Grainne went through a phase of just playing the melody, the single lines of music, which was how the score was printed. But as she became more proficient, she could not help but double some notes, simply
at first, then embellished, decorated counterpoint, arpeggios which improvised upon the melody. The ringing of the strings was encouraged and damped. He could not get Mrs. Judge out of his mind, humming the opening; its sweetness brought him briefly home.

A few notes only. That's all it took. He followed the planxty air, its sweet, plangent notes, back to the house on the stony hill near Delphi.A cabin only, but four-square and tidy. The west room with its fireplace and marriage bed. The scullery where the hens hurried when the door was open to peck at the clean-swept floor until Eilis noticed them and scurried them out with the goose-wing she used as a duster. The weather outside with all its humours: soft rain and strong winds, hail, clear blue skies with a few white clouds scudding across as if in a hurry, mists that enveloped the entire mountain and all its valleys and slopes, rubbing out the grazing sheep and moorcocks. The beloved hills were quilted with stone walls, coarse durable stitches anchoring forage to the rocks beneath. A heart could be lodged in a cleft of rock among the gorse and tough grasses and never know itself to be lost, gazing to the purple of wild rhododendron denoting streams, bog earth. A boreen tramped over by generations of O'Malleys would be imprinted with the shape of their boots like an inky thumb pressed onto paper. Here, the smoke from the chimney at World's End was indistinguishable from the smoke of the Neils, the MacIsaacs. What lasted were the cedar stakes in the mud, a blade of worked slate.

A month earlier, Declan had fished for a day near Moore Point and he had gone into shore for a look-see. Once he'd got his bearings, he found he had pulled his boat up onto a rocky peninsula sheltering a small bay white with clamshells. The tide was low, and he walked over to the other side of the bay where he saw orange flowers in bloom. Looking at what remained as the tide receded, he could see a pattern of stones
on the bottom of the bay. Half-circles, layered upon one another, making bowls that he could see held water as the tide moved out. When he had looked long enough, he became convinced it was a way of trapping fish, and a clever way at that. The tide might wash in feed and, with it, hungry fish; drifting out, it would leave the fish trapped in the half-circles of stones where they could easily be scooped out. The mid-dens of shells told him this was a beach used for a long time. Clams, obviously, fish, oysters nestled against the rocky peninsula. Looking up, he'd seen the platforms of sticks created by eagles for nesting their young, and turning he saw the remains of fire-circles, little piles of slate chips. He began to understand that the landscape could be read like a book, if you knew the alphabet. No gammas or epsilons, no deltas or omegas, but stones ingeniously placed to create bowls on the ocean floor, stakes pounded into estuary bottoms to hold lattices made of sticks and cordage, graceful hammer stones, and knives for slicing open the belly of a fish. Picking one of the orange flowers, a lily it looked like, he'd tucked it into a pocket for Mrs. Neil to identify.