A Man in a Distant Field (26 page)

“Declan, I am of two minds about the guns. This is not an unused road and I know Bride has told you of doings in the gap so I'm thinking they're put there by local men. I'd like to take the bundle out to the middle of Fin Lough and hurl it into the deep water so, for all the good it would do. I know I don't want them here and I'd say ye've the same aversion to them yerself. I'd not tell the Garda. With feelings as they are, I'm thinking that it would not go right with some. It's possible they've been left and forgotten. And just as possible they've not been forgotten. We'll take a cup of Bride's tea and then we'll go and see so.”

One of the Mannion boys was dispatched to take the donkey to Declan's farm and unload the turf, his father asking him to stack it neatly along the wall of the shed. The two men walked back to the bog, carrying some creels, both of them a little uneasy on the road they had known all their lives. From the position of the rickle, they could see the bundle had been removed; the side of the stack had collapsed a little.

“I was that uneasy, Fergus, as though I was being watched, and this a bog I've worked since childhood. That's the way of it, I'm thinking. There are eyes in the country that were not there before.”

Each man filled a creel from the violated rickle, Fergus wincing as the weight nagged his cricked back, carrying it back down the road in order that the trip not be without consequence. They stacked the dry bricks in the pig byre as there was no eastern wall remaining to protect the fuel from the damp winds blowing in from the west and Declan did not want to share the entire of his own shelter with turf, there being scarcely enough room for his bedroll and few belongings.

Fergus Mannion encouraged him to keep the donkey until all his turf was home. Declan hobbled the animal and took the scythe from behind the shed to cut some grass for its
dinner. Then he made a fire with the remains of the old turf and sat in the doorway of the shed, warming his hands over the low, smouldering mound. He would not let the memory of the rifles alter what was in his heart: a gladness for the fire and the stores of fuel, the temporary gift of a donkey to assist with his burden and to offer a kind of company as it munched the grass he had cut for it. Yet he thought of Odysseus, returned to wife and son, revealed to father by his knowledge of the trees, and he could not help but feel alone. There were no photographs, even, although a tinker had sketched Maire at a cattle fair once and Eilis had framed the bit of yellowed paper. That would be gone, too, sent up to the heavens in ash, like the clothing that might still contain a daughter's odour, like the bits of furniture polished clean by their hands. He walked to the graves and sat by them.
They were harpstrings!
He must learn to hear this new music, coming deeply from their earth and the recesses of memory, must learn how to talk to them in the queer language of Hades. It would not happen all at once. How could it? Yet he remembered how comforted he had been to find Bride's jar of flowers and how he had known there was meaning in the act. Wind rustled in the stalks of wild-growing barley, seeded from an unharvested crop, and he leaned into the sound of it, listening. Once he had imagined the voices of those who died near Dhulough, thin cries of hunger as the bodies of the dead were tumbled into bog workings. Listening was a way of keeping something alive, if only names, dates held in a parenthesis of longing.

He had in his mind a letter. He wanted Rose to know he had arrived safely and that Grainne's harp had survived the fire. He wanted her to know about the bog, how his turf was neatly stacked (he would not mention the rifles), still as they'd left it, branded with the prints of his daughters' boots, and how the marsh marigolds had thrown their seed pods to the wind. He
wanted to tell her he had smelled home as soon as he'd been left off in Leenane, the blue smoke leading him to Delphi as surely as any map, while the hedges on the roadsides glowed with the last fuchsias.
Rose
, he would say,
I'm sorry to have missed the salmon but these creeks are running down from Ben Gorm like music and I am after feeding Fergus Mannion's donkey to ready him for a good morn-ing's work. I have put aside the poem for now, Rose, but intend to work on it again once I have more than the turf shed over my head at night. I want to send you the lines where Odysseus visits his father and remembers aloud the trees the two planted, ready to be kissed alive by the god of summer days
.

So a letter would be written and sent off from the post office in Leenane to travel, like the wanderer himself, over two oceans to arrive at Oyster Bay, and then forwarded to Dunvegan, Glengarry County. And a girl, wearing the new knowledge of reading as carefully as one might wear jewels, would sit under an autumn apple tree to read of figs and harps and might, if she closed her eyes, smell the roasting pig, taste the amber wine from vines planted in Odysseus's youth.

He brought a pan of water down from the creek and put it on a flat stone by his shed. It was an old pan, an enamelled one they had used to boil up the hens' mash, flakes of the paint broken off and rust showing through. He wanted to wash away the work of the bog and began by pulling off his shirt. Leaning over the water, he caught sight of himself and startled again to find himself so unchanged. At World's End, he had imagined himself old, at the very end of his days on earth, a man washed up on the furthest shore from home, the man discovered by Nausikaa who hid himself with a fringe of leaves. But this reflective man, he might still be the lad who courted Eilis, hair a little thinner but still dark, eyes blue as a summer sky—he had been told this once and never forgot it—and shoulders as suited for labour as teaching the young their letters. He could use a shave, he supposed,
and would heat water the next day for that purpose, once he'd looked out his gear in his rucksack. For now he dipped a handkerchief in water from a stream whose route he had followed as a boy to its rocky birthplace high on Ben Creggan. A marvel how water emerged from the earth, clean and cold, its entrance heralded by cress and a few reeds. And a marvel to feel it on his chest and arms, drops of it wrung from the square of worn linen and entering the pores of his skin.

On the fence by his path, where his land met the road, he found a note weighted down with a stone.
Sir
, it read,
sorry for your troubles. You were not meant to see what you saw. Don't worry as we never meant you harm. If you think back to your lessons, you will know why we are doing this. Erin go bragh, and God bless you Mr. O'Malley
. He was moved by the note, that fierce young men with dreams of Irish freedom would take the time to apologize to a schoolmaster. He remembered those lessons to be sure but was ashamed to think how sickened he'd felt at the sight of rifles in his turf. What had he imagined would bring his country its independence from British rule? Poetry, or the old tunes of a blind harper? In all his dreams, he had not imagined bloodshed, or rifles as heraldic emblems of boys coming into manhood.

Word had gone out to say he was back. A passing farmer would stop and offer him a spade, a cabbage, a few hours labour for the rebuilding of his house. A young lad, wearing the gleaming ring of new marriage, stopped to say that his missus had said Declan could be sure of a welcoming meal if ever he would honour them by knocking on their door. It took Declan a few minutes to realize that the young man was Padraig Breen, a boy he had taught and given up after realizing that the lad wanted only to
court Pegeen Devaney, daughter of the horse-dealing tinker from beyond Tawnyard Lough. And she would be the missus, Declan decided, as he shook young Breen's hand and told him he was surely grateful for the invitation.

O'Learys below brought up a few hens, one of which Miceal admitted would be as good in the pot as out, she was that stringy and no great layer. But Declan thought the occasional egg would prove more useful than one meal of tough chicken and let the bird peck for bugs in the haggard. Mrs. O'Leary, whose family had owned the farm for as many generations as Declan's had owned theirs, an unusual length of ownership for lands so close to those held by the Marquess of Sligo, came up the hill with a much-mended blanket and a small stool. After surveying the turf shed, she returned with a ticking made of faded flour sacks stuffed with feathers. She told him she would not hear of the schoolmaster sleeping direct on the bare ground and if there was anything else he could think of, he was to let her know and she would find a way to help him.

People appeared with tools and the means for making mortar and slowly the walls of the house were constructed. The gamekeeper at the nearby hunting lodge came with a window, someone else had enough boards for a door. The tinkers from beyond Tawnyard Lough made hinges and hasps and provided a kettle, Devaney remembering how patient Declan had been with his children who came to school so sporadically that they forgot more about sums than they remembered although there were no children like them for their knowledge of animals and the river. They could catch trout with their bare hands, and one of the girls could summon otters with a curious call that was almost the only sound she made.

At night Declan would sit in the doorway of the turf shed with his small fire sizzling in rain and listen to his hens fuss in their makeshift coop. Foxes lurked in his fields, and he knew he would
have to get a dog before the winter was through. Some mornings he would see the vixen in her pretty coat and she would meet his eye for a moment or two before vanishing into the side of the hill. He salvaged potatoes from forgotten beds, scrubbing them in creek water, and once marvelling at one, perfectly round, on which the markings of earth outlined the continents of the world as exact as a globe. He remembered jabbing his finger at random on the library globe in Seattle that day when he'd been directed by fate to Oyster Bay. He turned the potato in his hands, brushing at the soil until the world disappeared.

He was waiting for something, he couldn't have said what, but one morning he looked up from fitting a window into the eastern wall of the house and saw a woman framed within it, standing at the top of the boreen leading up from the Delphi road. He thought at first it was a warping of the glass, a flaw, so that looking through it a man would be dizzy, disoriented, and he rubbed at the window. She was still there, hatless, with dark hair in a plait reaching down below her shoulder, and she was carrying a basket. He put down his tools and walked around to the other side of the house, his hand extended in welcome.

She was the cousin of the man from the big house near Aasleagh Falls, the house that had been burnt, the one with the wolfhounds and the harp-playing daughter. Una Fitzgerald, she was called, and he remembered that Eilis had met her when the cousin had been staying at the big house. Eilis had been invited to make some tinctures with Elizabeth Fitzgerald and came home to tell of a young woman of uncommon intelligence, who argued with her cousin in a spirited way about politics and religion. Hugh and Elizabeth had moved to London, unable to reconcile themselves to living in the area after the fire, and Una had joined them for a time, her own parents having removed themselves to France, but she missed Ireland, “even though many don't consider me Irish at all!” After returning to live for a time in a flat overlooking Stephen's Green in Dublin, she had come to Marshlands to live in the groundskeeper's cabin, which had
not been burned; and certainly a groundskeeper was no longer needed for a garden gone wild, haunted by peacocks and pheasants left to fend for themselves.

“It was our grandfather's house,” Una told him, “and there were so many happy summers, wading in the river and rowing in Killary Harbour. I do understand why Hugh couldn't stay. Being burned out by people you've known for years, well, how could you want to go on living there, as though nothing had happened, always wondering who had given the order? No one was willing to
do
anything about it afterwards. Yet I do believe that it wasn't directed at Hugh and Elizabeth personally, if I may say that, but at what they represented. And Elizabeth was so distressed by your tragedy that I think it was part of what made them certain they couldn't live here any longer.”

Declan thought about this for a moment. “Aye, the problem was never between our families so. Eilis's first thought at hearing about Marshlands was to offer whatever she could. But as ye know, the retaliation was swift and terrible. I mind that your cousin made such generous gifts to the school, and of course there was the sheet music your younger cousin gave to Grainne. Ah, the whole thing was so sad, it drove me to Canada, a little cabin by the ocean.”

The two of them talked carefully. Una Fitzgerald was surprised to see that Declan had embarked upon rebuilding his house and he was surprised to learn that she would not be doing the same at Marshlands. She explained that she did not want to live in a house of ghosts; everything had been lost, and she felt that it would be too much like trying to recover childhood with its odours and feelings, the wolfhounds waiting by the door for a walk up to the bog or along the shore.