A Man in a Distant Field (27 page)

“I'm content enough with the cabin,” Una said. “It's bigger than the flat I'd been living in and it has its garden, a little shed for hens if I decide to keep some. I'm going to have some work
done inside, making two little rooms into a studio, but apart from that, it suits me perfectly well.”

A studio? Declan noted she had a drawing block in her basket and a bundle of pencils and asked was she an artist?

She laughed and confessed that she was only now thinking of herself as one. “It was put aside for years, Mr. O'Malley. I did train as a botanical artist at the Dublin School of Art and Design and did some illustration work for the National Botanic Gardens, assisting with a flora they were producing.” And then her face went sad. She sorted her pencils into a row according to length, her long fingers busy with nothing. “I was to marry, you see. A botanist I met while at school. We hoped to collaborate on a book of the wildflowers of the West—I grew up in Donegal and of course spent summers here, and David's grandparents live down near Clifden so while he grew up in Dublin, he knew the West quite well from visits to them. I think our happiest days were spent walking the Sky Road near Clifden and taking samples of bog cotton and primroses.”

“Aye, they are a pretty sight, the primroses. Eilis used to dig up bunches of the earliest ones and bring them into the house in an old teacup so she could look at them while she washed the dishes.”

“I'd never seen such beautiful drifts of primroses as the ones growing in a stretch of hedge near Streamstown,” the woman continued, her eyes shining with the memory. “David carried his vasculum everywhere, kept damp with his grandmother's tea towels, and was always looking for the perfect specimen. And I made notes about colour and skies and how the late-afternoon light changed the yellow of the primrose from butter to gold.”

“It sounds grand, I'd say. Will he join ye at Marshlands so?”

Tears came to Una Fitzgerald's eyes. “David joined the army and was killed at Suvla Bay.”

“Oh, Miss Fitzgerald, I am so sorry. I didn't mean to ...”

She interjected quickly, brushing her eyes impatiently, a single tear lingering. “You weren't to know. How could you? But I mourned for too long, I think, giving up all the things I did regularly, and I spent days in my bed, weeping. I couldn't bear to think about painting for years. I'd hear his voice telling me to notice how the bees plunged into the spur of the toadflax to get at the nectar and I'd lose myself to days of weeping. And yet he would have wanted me to keep on with my work, especially wildflowers. It was what drew us to one another, after all.”

Declan was quiet, listening to her. It was a story so unlike his own and yet its theme was loss; there was a similarity in the days of weeping. Her fingers did not stop arranging the pencils while she spoke, a nervousness not apparent in her voice. “What have ye been sketching on a day like this one then? I'm thinking there's not much in bloom to catch yer eye so.”

She showed him a drawing of dog rose, bare of leaves, and told him it was just as important to record the seeds nestled in the soft lining of the hips as it was to match the various pinks of the blooms. Blackberry, with its little fringe of flower remains clinging to the frostbitten fruit, a canister of seeds that followed the silken poppies. A palette changed from season to season like a wardrobe—the fresh greens of spring through the brilliant yellows and oranges and pinks of summer, the russets and reds of autumn hedges, the duns and dull ochres of winter.
Well
, thought Declan,
a wardrobe did not change for those of us in these cabins
, but he did not say it aloud. Una told him it reminded her of life again, observing the plants in their seasons. She was not sure she could continue with the book—she was not a writer by nature—but she would make a record of the plants in their seasons, working from the checklist they had compiled, as well as David's life list.

It was a window opening, thought Declan, into a life, a partnership, so different from his own. He could not imagine such
travels with Eilis. For one, they hadn't enough money; for another, her parents would not have allowed her to go off with Declan unchaperoned, beyond a walk or perhaps to a ceilidh in a neighbouring house. After another word or two about the sketches, she abruptly said goodbye and disappeared down the road, telling him she hoped they'd meet again, her basket swinging from her arm, shawl enveloping her like the mists of Athene.

Thinking about the visit, Declan was undecided how he felt about Una Fitzgerald. She had the mannerisms of her class, a regal air that came with generations of deference from men such as himself. But he could not deny she was friendly and that her company was not unwelcome. Did he hope they would meet again? He decided he did. And what a sad story about her fiancé getting himself killed overseas. It was a war which had caused any amount of argument in Leenane, and other parts, he was thinking. There were those who felt the Irish lads should support the English effort and those who believed a more important war was taking place on their own soil, perhaps not so dramatically, but Irishmen were needed to further the cause of Republicanism at home. Yet there was the opportunity, in remote County Mayo, to remain silent in such discussions. From what Una had said, he realized how the issue was not simply relevant to one religion and class. He wondered how she felt about her David enlisting, and when they met again, near the river where he'd come upon her sketching on a folding easel, he tried to ask as gently as he could.

It took her a long time to answer. At first her mouth struggled for words. Then she began to sing softly, and it was a song Declan knew.

Right proudly high over Dublin town
They hung out a flag of war.
'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky
Than at Suvla or Sudel Bay.
And from the plains of Royal Meath
Strong men came hurrying through;
While Britannia's sons with their long-range guns
Sailed in from the foggy dew.
'Twas England bade our wild geese go
That small nations might be free.
Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves
On the fringe of the grey North Sea.

Declan found he was singing the last phrase with her and realized he had never once thought where exactly Suvla might be.

“The Gallipoli Peninsula,” answered Una.“So far away for an Irishman to be buried. I never wanted him to go. Britain had such a nerve, Redmond such a colossal nerve to ask, given our history. And yet David felt it was his duty. There were sermons preached which told young men it was their duty. So he joined, with a number of his former classmates from Trinity College, and they left in April of 1915 for training in England. I was relieved that a colleague from the Royal Botanic Gardens was also in his regiment for at least they could do a little botanizing. At first I think he saw it as an adventure ...”

“Aye, others have said the same,” concurred Declan.

“... and he wrote the most brilliant letters home, always including a wildflower so I could imagine the surroundings. I'd check them against the map—the Dardanelles, Cape Helles, Achi Baba ... I imagined wild tulips and the sorts of things we knew only as rare plants grown under glass although I suppose there would have been plenty of grey prickly things as well. Thistles, thorn trees ...”

She was quiet, remembering his letters, gay at first and full of the humour of finding himself on a ship heady with grease and the fumes of fuel. He had loved Alexandria, where the regiment
had stopped and been marched through the streets, where a carpet on the ground indicated a shop, a tumble of amphora, baskets of figs and dates, where fruit sellers beckoned with slices of melon held on the tip of a knife, where everyone was robed and veiled, and where they were finally given a meal of salty cheese and tomatoes and cups of coffee thick as syrup. He wrote wonderfully, bringing the same attention to his descriptions of what waited on the Gallipoli Peninsula—the flowers, certainly, but also the squalor of the trenches, the endless digging both to try to drain the flooding water and to provide more safety, a visit from Lord Kitchener, the men instructed to shave as best they could and to polish their buttons, where daily a man would rush to the latrines and not return, victim of a sudden, deadly dysentery. He described the smell of decay overlaid with sage and other strong herbs, wild rosemary bushes displaced by graves, and the horrifying sight of the carcasses of mules, ribs exposed like ships' timbers, half in the tide, their eye sockets filled with tiny crabs.

“When the beautiful
Pancratium maritimum
arrived, wrapped in David's monogrammed handkerchief, still damp, I couldn't have been more surprised, particularly as he'd added the note that it grew profusely among the sand dunes. I forgot for a moment that he was not on a plant-collecting trip but at war. When we were notified of his death and given a date, I realized from his note that the plant must've been collected and put into the mailbag that same day. I kept going to the Botanic Gardens to see the living plant, thinking how dreadful it was to have your life bracketed in such a way: October 20, 1890 to August 28, 1915. To be contained within such an artificial frame when we always expected our three score and ten, and how like the brief lives of things grown under glass. David ought to have grown old gathering plants on the Sky Road with the wind and ocean and rainstorms. I am not putting this very well, but I feel you must know what I mean.”

Declan could not think of anything to say to her at that moment, hearing the catch in her voice and seeing moistness in her eyes. He reached for her hand and patted it gently. When she had cried a little and dried her eyes with a handkerchief, he told her that he had gone to Canada so that he would not have to think of Eilis and his girls contained within the mound of earth marked by granite. “It seemed to me then to have nothing to do with who they were, and I could not bear it. Yet now, strangely, I am comforted by the sight of the stone. They have become something else to me, I am thinking. A source, maybe. And I don't feel them confined anymore. I have planted my oar for them, as Odysseus did in his poem, so they will know where I've been and that I mean to farm our land again.”

“Is that what you'll do, Mr. O'Malley? Farm this land?”

“Aye, I suppose I will. There have been O'Malleys at Tullaglas for centuries, with lives harder than mine, and losses aplenty. But please, call me Declan. Our families have been neighbours for nearly as long!”

Tears dried, she smiled at him. “And will you call me Una? In Leenane, it's Miss Fitzgerald this and Miss Fitzgerald that and sometimes I forget who I am with no one to call me by my name. Miss Fitzgerald is so obviously a spinster, and when I'm at Marshlands, I always feel like a girl of thirteen. So it would be so generous of you if you'd indulge me and let me be her!”

“Una it is. A fine Irish name to be sure. If ye would not take offense, I could make ye a cup of tea if ye came back to the farm, but it's only an old pan I have for the making and cups ye won't have seen the likes of. It's our own water, though, and sweet as ever there was.”

“I would be honoured to have a cup of tea with you. It's the tea I'm thirsty for, not a fine china cup.”

They walked back in mist. Declan busied himself with the fire and kettle and produced two mugs of strong tea, offering
milk from the Mannion's cow. They drank their tea and then Una took her leave, asking Declan to visit her when he came down into Leenane.

“Either I'll be in and happy to give you tea or I'll be sketching, in which case you can come in and make a cup for yourself if you like. If I knew ahead, I'd make sure to be there but this isn't Dublin with regular post and even telephones now. Perhaps we could get messenger pigeons, Declan, to take notes over the mountain! That would be something, would it not?”

He had not seen a woman like her for some time. She was handsome rather than pretty, an angular face with strong cheekbones and grey eyes, a confident way of talking, as though she expected to be taken seriously, and she was not worn in her person as were the women he was accustomed to speaking with. Hard work had not lined her face and chapped her hands, poor diet had not taken her teeth, and her clothing was not pieced together from whatever might be at hand. Briefly he put his hand to his hair, smoothed it a little, wondered if she had noticed that his shirt was missing three of its buttons and could certainly use a washing in creek water with good lye soap.

The next time Declan walked down to Leenane to order some materials for his building project, he found himself noting plants as he passed the fields. Many of them he knew, of course, and he had always listened to Maire when she described a flower she had seen or an unusual tree. There had been a few books with plates in the school's modest collection, and Maire was not shy about asking people who might know—an old woman famous for her simples, the dyers in Leenane who collected plants and barks for the vats of colour that the wool would be immersed in before
weaving. Harder work to know a plant without its flower, he thought, bending down to examine some sticky leaves that he thought must be corn spurry. And the fleshy leaves growing out of a length of old wall would be house-leek. Down by the river the tall straps of iris were browning and the nests they concealed, in amongst themselves and the bulrushes, looked forlorn without the hovering blackbirds. Kingfishers nested along this river, too, but built tunnels in the steeper banks to conceal their young.