A Man in a Distant Field (33 page)

And waiting all the while, in the storage room, was the harp. Declan had cleaned it as thoroughly as he was able, had rubbed mineral oil into the thirsty wood. It drank it in. More would be applied, left briefly, and then rubbed and buffed until something like its original patina began to develop. The smell brought back the image of Grainne working on her
instrument with a small tin of oil and a rag, her hands stroking the harp's lines and learning its contours as a lover would study the body of the beloved. She had entered the earth without having been held by a man, save the embraces of a father, had not been kissed in the drenched air of an Irish evening with the fuchsias blazing in the hedges and the perfume of primroses making a person dizzy with joy. She would never hand Declan a wrapped bundle of child, a granddaughter for him to cradle and adore. Her life was an instrument without music, gone beyond his love. He kept studying the diagram for stringing the harp, trying to make sense of each new term, seeing in them a language as foreign as Greek: tuning peg, pitch, the tension of the frame, not foreign in themselves, as words, but their meaning, relative to the harp, was a puzzle. He wanted to know more before he asked Bernadette Feeny for her assistance. He wanted the strings to be loosely strung, ready for tuning, he wanted to understand the importance of tension and the trick of the knot.

A tussle occurred on the road south of Leenane, not long after the National army converged on Clifden and arrested a number of Republicans; when the dust had cleared, it was discovered that Liam Kenny had disappeared. Where had he gone? His name was not on the lists of prisoners taken to Galway Gaol, unlike a handful of local lads who were taken away by armoured car to Galway; they were released to their families after they signed an undertaking that they would not take up arms against the Irish government, although arguments raged as to what was legitimate government and what wasn't. But Liam Kenny: was he among those who had escaped to the Partry mountains or among those who had spirited away by boat? No one could say. But the school had no master. A contingent came to ask Declan if he would teach. He did not want to do so until his house was finished, and perhaps not then, but was moved to be asked.

“Can you recommend anyone, sir?” he was asked, “And could you keep the idea of it in yer head for the future?”

He considered both things. The first was not difficult. A Conneely from down towards Renvyle had finished his university degree and was willing to come. The second request proved more of a conundrum. He assured the men he would think on it, and think on it he did.

He had never been idle, had never been offered any opportunity to be so. His small holding could certainly fill his time, but it would not allow him to engage young scholars, to offer them the benefit of his knowledge and experience. Seldom had he risen from his bed in the days before the fire and not looked forward to the trek down the Delphi road to the Bundorragha school, often joined by his students for a portion of the walk or the way entire. His daughters had always walked with him and that had been one of the pleasures of his life. As had been the returns, the homecomings, to a warm fire and a loving wife.

So now, he thought, it would be different. But perhaps that was not entirely a bad thing. He would see with his own eyes what Maire had directed him to see—blackbirds gathering nesting material, stitchwort and shepherd's purse coming into bloom, a pine marten disappearing into hazel scrub. And Grainne's great gift of music might find its way into his teaching, somehow.

There was time to think on it, anyhow. Cathal Conneely arrived, and was suitable, if dull. The work on the house was slow, but Declan was nothing if not patient. Some days, on his walks, he would notice a particularly fine stone and would borrow Fergus Mannion's donkey and cart to bring it to his farm where he would find a way to work it into the structure. Down by the lake, where the river emptied into it near the lodge, he found a millstone and mortared it above the entrance lintel. A flat slab of limestone made a splendid step
by the door, and a tall pillar of basalt stood by his gate like a totem from one of the western islands, marking a burial or a death. Or, he fancied, a Janus head, to look out at the world and inward, as well.

Una had gone to London to spend Christmas with her cousin and his family; her parents were joining them from their home in France. Before she left, she handed him a package, wrapped in green tissue, and tied with silver ribbon. “Don't open it until Christmas, Declan. And make no decisions until you've seen it.”

Her cryptic comment puzzled him. But he tucked the parcel away in a corner of his turf shed, wrapped in a clean shirt to protect it against the smoke and dust, and thought no more about it. The Mannions stopped by to ask did he want to go to Mass with them, and he realized it was actually Christmas Day. He declined, politely, still at odds in himself with the notion of God and not wanting to have to explain himself to his good neighbours.

He had a rabbit, skinned and cleaned, to cook in a pot over his fire, he had a few measures of Connemara malt left with which to honour the day, and, he remembered, he had a gift. He removed it from its covering of shirt and untied the ribbons carefully. Inside was a book. It was not a new book but one with a well-worn cover, dog-eared around the corners. The pages were thick paper, very dry to the touch, with a heavy impression of ink. It was a herbal, a book about plant remedies for various illnesses, and each plant entry was illustrated with a woodcut in black and white. Declan opened to the plant he felt he shared with the great Achilles. The wood-cut did not give a detailed view of the plant but simply an impression. Declan read the litany of the plant's names through history—staunchweed, sanguinary, Knight's milfoil, soldiers' woundwort—and how it was one of the herbs dedicated to
the Evil one and had been used for divination purposes. Tisanes were prepared against the ague and cramps and it was useful to stop headaches by its ability to cause nosebleeds, thus drawing the old blood out. How fascinating, he thought, that a plant might have such a history!

And with the book there was a card, hand-drawn by Una, showing a pretty stand of pines. Her note read, “Happy Christmas to you, Declan. I am so grateful to have found you as a friend! And I am hopeful that you might consider working with me on a project, for which this little volume might serve us as one model. A few sleepless nights led me to an idea: I have in mind a book about the plants of our area but not a flora such as David and I might have produced. I have been talking to some of the older women in Leenane about the dyeing process for wool and realize there is a huge repository of plant knowledge here, not just the medicinal or decorative or food use, but their place in the economy, in folklore, agriculture, and so forth. We would include the Gaelic names and some of the lore surrounding the native taxonomy. If you go back to the school, and I am so hopeful that you will, perhaps the children might be included in gathering information for such a book by talking to their families and observing the plants around them. Think how exciting it could be, Declan! I do look forward to seeing you in the New Year. With my very warm wishes, Una.”

He didn't know what to think for a moment. He couldn't help her with a book; what on earth could he possibly do? She had the skill and knowledge to do such a thing, not him. Sure he was only just learning the proper way to classify, and him a middle-aged man. He wondered if it might be too late for him to learn something so complicated and new, although he suspected Una would tell him there was nothing new about it at all and it was the stuff of life and he was already familiar with so much about it that it was only a matter of learning its vocabulary. (“All your life,” he could
hear her voice telling him, “you have watched bees enter the flowers, transferring the pollen from the stamen to the stigma, you've told me Eilis collected seed of her favourite annuals, and you've kept seed of necessity from the cabbages and onions. So that
was
botany, Declan, although you didn't call it that.”)

Weather that Christmas was mild and he worked hard on his house, borrowing a crude ladder from the O'Learys to place the ridge beam from gable end to gable end; he nailed on the rafters and prepared strapping for the slates, then applied them, working up from the eaves to the ridge beam. It made all the difference. The interior dried out, and Declan began to think about plastering the walls and washing them with lime. It was beginning to look like a house that might be lived in, although there was still a deceptive amount of work to be done. He noticed how the rain sounded on the slates, more noticeable than on thatch, sharper, pointed. Fergus Mannion told him that some in the area thought him foolish for using slates instead of barley straw, but Declan remembered how his house had burned, the thatch acting as a wick for the fierce flames, and how he kept to himself the smell of smoky thatch in his nostrils for months after, like a harsh and caustic punishment. Fergus helped him fit the windows in their frames.

And he walked as he always had, sometimes uneasy although the young men had been captured, although Liam Kenny had disappeared like smoke. There would be a sound, a fox yipping, a cry, something almost like a phrase of music—and he would start. Yet there had always been ghosts abroad in these hills. Once, walking near one of the lakes beyond Tullaglas as a boy, Declan had found a number of small, uninscribed stones in loose rows; his father had told him it was a cillín, a
children's burial ground, that if he looked closely he would see the diminutive head and foot stones to indicate a child lay under the earth. A place of early grief, huddled in a corner of an old enclosure where dug-away bog revealed drystone walls, the remains of a shelter. When he asked his father how he knew it was children buried there, his father told him it had always been known.

Una returned from her holiday and surprised him with an embrace as she came through the gate.

“How was your time in London?” he asked, the weight of her arms around his shoulders an unsettling sensation long after she'd released him.

She told him about the concerts she'd attended with her cousin's family and the pleasure of seeing her parents. She had visited Kew and described the abundance of rare tropical plants kept under glass, a grove of evergreens she had enjoyed for their resemblance to the plantation of pines near the Aasleagh Falls. But she'd begun to long for the West of Ireland not three days into the holiday.

“Everyone advised against me coming back, of course. Lloyd George has them thinking that the Irish are all bloodthirsty. I had to remind those in the company that I
am
Irish and that I want a free Ireland, too. My parents agreed with me on that point but were unhappy I was coming back to uncertainty. I had to tell them that we never see any sign of the Troubles around here and then was promptly stopped on the way back and asked to account for myself, a woman driving alone on the Maam Road. ‘If you are worried that I am carrying gelignite,' I told them, ‘then by all means search the boot. 'They let me go on.”

Looking down at her hands, she confessed that attempts had been made to encourage a courtship, a lanky Englishman who owned a castle and a title. He was a fervent collector of rare lilies, climbing mountain ranges to bring back the seeds of beauties from China and Turkey.

“He spoke as though his mouth was filled with marbles,” she laughed, “and owned that a woman just might be able to classify as well as a man but could they sleep in tents, could they boil a kettle on a spirit stove? My mother thought I was mad to spurn what I suppose amounted to advances, although made in such an odd and chilly way that I could be forgiven for having imagined him to be indifferent.”

Declan felt a little stab of something, a sour sting of ... well, what would he call it? And then thought: that's it,
envy
. And then he looked at Una again, the rich weight of her embrace still warm upon his shoulders. He wondered if she'd given the collector of lilies a book with a note that she hoped to work with him on a project. It surprised him to find he hoped desperately that she hadn't.