A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  Some days he would sit on the table and brood on what the poetry told him about living. It was as though life was a long series of obstacles in which a man’s own nature was put in opposition to something he could not see—the fickle bickering of the gods and goddesses, the capricious whims of a witch.

  In early July, he had begun to bathe in the sea. The days were often hot and his cabin was stuffy. During the cooler months, he had heated water from the creek on his stove and washed himself by lamplight; now he chose early morning to enter the sea, if the tide was right, and plunge himself down into its chilly depths. He could not swim. As a boy growing up near Fin Lough and Dhulough, he had heard of people who could swim, but his parents shared the fatalism of most of the country people in the area, particularly those who fished for a living: if the sea wanted you, it would have you, and there was no point in resisting. But as children would, he paddled his feet in the lough and loved the freedom of following the course of a creek down from the side of a mountain, bare-footed and stepping from stone to stone when the creek ran too deep or cold for comfort.

  The sea was something again all right. Bone-chilling at first, but gradually the body appreciated its coolness, its brine and soft currents. The mud under his feet felt luxurious. Some days, when the tide was far out when he rose from his bed, he would wait until it had sidled in to shore; he would enter the water over the rocks, warmed by the sun, and sit in a shallow depression in a large boulder. Steam would rise where the cold water met the warm rock. Leaving the water, he felt like a new man, his pale limbs tingling and his eyes stinging a little from the salt. A month passed and his skin softened with its acquaintance with the sea.

  Once, after his bath, he climbed to the canoe, leaving his clothing to drop to the ground beside him. The grasses on the bluff were dry and crisp underfoot and the flower pods had withered away. The air was warm, bees at work in yellow flowers tumbling down the rock face, and the water was calm. In the distance he could hear the Neils’ cow mooing for her calf, which had recently been weaned. Looking into the canoe, he saw a lattice of spiderweb woven from gunwale to gunwale. Off to the sides of the construction, spiders rested. There was peace in the sight, peace even in the sight of the tiny wrapped corpses of flies who had been unlucky enough to drift into the webs. Nature in all its cycles went on as it should. He brushed away spider silk and reclined in the warm canoe. For a brief moment, he felt utterly content, a naked man in the vessel of the dead, accompanied by the ancient pharaohs in their spidery winding cloths.

  He heard splashing, and the sound of laughter. Startled, he walked to the edge of the bluff and looked down. Nothing. But then the sound again, and he followed it with his ear to its source. He was startled to see Rose, naked and poised on the edge of the shore. Her dog was trying to chase a goose and she was laughing. She tossed her hair back and plunged into the tide, swimming strongly against it towards the mouth of the bay. She would stroke forward, then flip to her back and kick her legs in a scissor movement, her hair drifting behind her like kelp. Her dog swam with her, paddling determinedly to keep up. After a few minutes, Rose turned and swam back to shore, walking up from the shallow water carefully to avoid the sharp stones and shells littering the tide line. Water dripped from her torso and limbs like liquid silver and the weeds of her hair hung down her back and shoulders. Declan realized he had stopped breathing.

  (Oh, maiden of the white arms ...)

  Rose was a girl, yet her body was becoming womanly. Her hips gently flared out from her waist, and her breasts were swelling like small apples. He imagined Nausikaa, at play with her maidens at the river of Skheria. She was preoccupied, having dreamed of her bridegroom; Rose seemed as open as the sky.

  Declan averted his face, feeling as though he had come upon one of his daughters naked, but then returned to the sight of her. He could not keep his eyes off her and was filled with something exquisite, not desire exactly, but tenderness: for her innocence, her beauty, the way she moved in the water as easily as a fish, her laughter. He did not want her to know he was there and slowly backed up the bluff until he was beyond her sight.

  Declan put his clothing on quickly. He took care to return to his cabin by the long road way rather than circling around the Neils’ homestead. He was certain they would know from his face, the tremble in his hands, that he had seen their daughter bathing. In ancient Greece, perhaps he would have been set upon by hounds, having glimpsed the virgin goddess. And yet he had not sought the sight of her. But he had not turned away. He sat on the rocks in front of his cabin and thought about that.

  He had been the father of two daughters. When they were infants, he had loved to see Eilis bathe them in a basin by the fire. He had delighted in the folds of their plump arms, their stomachs, the softness of their buttocks. After they learned to walk, Eilis began to bathe them in private. He felt sadness that the tableaux had ended—him in his chair with a mug of tea, Eilis laughing and gently splashing an infant girl, then wrapping her in a linen towel and handing the child to him to dandle on his lap. He would count their toes in Irish, nuzzle their clean necks, kiss their plump shoulders, and sing them lullabies half-remembered from his own infancy.

  But Rose was not his daughter and she was not an infant. He was troubled that he had seen her in the tide like a young Artemis, troubled and ashamed. He kicked a stone out to sea and watched some tiny mottled crabs scuttle sideways from the shadow of one rock to another. Argos whimpered at his feet, wanting to be fed. He went to the creek and took some fried herring, wrapped in old newspaper, out of his cuddy and put some in the dog’s dish. It was too hot to cook and he was glad he’d made the effort to prepare things in the cool of the morning. A bit of bread, some meat in a tin, a handful of berries—that was a midday meal for August. He had planted a small bed of potatoes and looked forward to digging the first hills. He was restless, wanting new potatoes boiled in their jackets and something else, something he had no words for. He had been immersed in the sorrow of the fire and the deaths of his women, everything coloured by it, and now he felt ready for, well, what? It was as though bathing in the sea had washed off the stale skin of grief and made him new. In the canoe, he had been aware of his body, the feel of worn cedar against his buttocks and warm wood behind his bare shoulders. Soft air had moved through his chest hairs, the nest of his groin, arousing him slightly. He had not felt that way in more than a year. Two, and more. He was not surprised that he dreamed of making love to Eilis, their naked bodies meeting under the weight of blankets, creating a heat which he still felt upon waking.

  And not surprised, a morning or two later, to see the Indian canoe nosing into his shore. He went out to meet the men and was told they were going up the coast for a few days and did he want to accompany them? When he mentioned his dog, they told him to bring her. Without another thought, he went in to the cabin, made sure the stove fire was out, rolled up his blanket, took a mug and a tin plate, and put the remains of a loaf of bread into a sack. He lifted his paddle from its position against the cabin and went down to the canoe.

  He stashed his sack above the bilge and positioned himself on his thwart, Argos between his legs. They were heading into the breeze that was bringing the tide in and it felt good against his face. Once out of the bay, they headed north, keeping to the west of Nelson Island, and rounding the northwestern tip of Hardy Island. A pod of killer whales passed them as they paddled into the passage between Hardy Island and what the men told Declan was mostly Sliammon territory. It was frightening to see the dorsals, maybe twenty of them slicing through the water like an image out of a nightmare, but the whales went on their way without bothering the canoe. Mountains rose high on the eastern mainland, their shape mimicking the dorsal fins, white still with snow in the middle of summer. The sound of water was everywhere, splashing off the paddles when they were lifted as the men paused, unseen water falling with great force from the rocky cliffs, swift streams tumbling down from the slopes and entering the sea, losing their clean, clea
r silver to the green salt of the ocean.

  Declan lost track of direction. A stop had been made on a deserted shore to show him a carving of a fish on a rounded boulder and a bowl, scooped out of a slab of sandstone above the high tide line, filled with rainwater. Looking into it, Declan saw himself more clearly than in any mirror. Alex told him the bowl had probably been carved out for mixing ochre and other pigments to colour the fish when it needed to call its brothers to the mouth of the creek. There were such streams and such images all around the territory, Alex said. “More power back then than now but still something there, I think. Probably a painting where you live if you look. Sometimes they are covered in seaweed but it doesn’t matter. They know their job.”

  They had followed the wind and been followed by it. Gulls plunged in their wake and once, looking behind them, Declan saw the small head of a seal, then another. He had to urinate and hoped that a stop would be made before too long. Just as he was thinking he would have to ask that they make land, the canoe was nosing into a tiny bay overhung with arbutus trees. A slope of golden grass rose gently from a sandy shore, strewn with boulders, and a stream fell to the ocean down a series of steps of mossy rocks. Declan headed into the bushes, quickly relieved himself, then joined the men on the shore.

  “We’ll camp here,” Alex told him. “This is a good beach for clams and there’s fresh water. Charles wants to fish for halibut with the new canoe and there’s deep water out there where we’ve caught halibut before. We thought you’d like to try fishing, too.”

  The site reminded Declan of a trip he had made with his mother’s cousin who lived on an island beyond the mouth of Killary Harbour, an island called Inishdegil Mor, to distinguish it from the smaller Inishdegil Beg. He had collected Declan at Clogh, where the boreen leading down from Delphi met the Leenane Road. His boat was one of the Galway hookers, a craft called a gleoiteog, which sported three sails made of dark brown calico, the jib extended beyond the bow on a bowsprit. Declan had never been on a boat, apart from a few brief pulls on Fin Lough in a currach, and this was a big boat compared to that. Twenty-six feet, his mother’s cousin told him, and he remembered the hull was decked, although apart from the decking there was barely a flat timber used in the construction. They’d kept close to the coastline, the boat low with its load of turf. The cousin brought the hooker into a small bay where he’d set some lobster pots a day earlier and put down an anchor while he pulled up the pots and showed Declan how to remove the lobsters, grabbing them by the back legs to avoid the claws. They put them in a box, baited the pots again with chunks of dogfish, and let them down again into green water. A few of the pots accompanied them to Inishdegil Mor to be mended, the willow broken in places and affording a clever lobster exit room. Seeing the land slope up from the water, covered with flowering gorse, Declan had felt strangely restless—so much of his own country he would never see or know! A track led down to the bay, and what would be encountered if one followed the track to its place of origin? The mountains on that side of Killary Harbour were wild and wind-swept, but he knew flocks of sheep wandered the hillsides, and tracks like the one they saw threaded the grassy hills, leading to small holdings, hidden lakes, even a few isolated townlands. Doovilra, for instance, where his cousin said fine horses could be found, and long tawny beaches at Carrickwee. Island life was much the same as in his own small village, apart from the proximity of the sea. Stories filled the evenings, and music, and a few beautiful women step-dancing to fiddle tunes while the bachelors looked on hopelessly; this could have been Delphi, with the men from the hill cabins coming down for the craic. But the trip by boat had made him aware of all he didn’t know, from the names of sails and rigging, species of seabirds and fish, the pattern of human travel over the Mweel Rea Mountains. When he had returned home from that time, he’d felt the world was a different place, larger and more various.

  Seeing the men steam the canoe caused him to feel that old way. Here was a world of skills and knowledge, of form and utility, but it was not his. He helped to bring gear from the canoe to a place above the high-tide line, under a tangle formed by two close-growing arbutus trees; each man laid out his bedroll on soft moss.

  Charles used his knife to cut a branch with a claw at its tip and began to dig for clams. He put them into an open-work basket of withes, and then, when he had enough, he rinsed them by dipping the basket in the tide. Meanwhile Albert had made a fire and heated rounded stones. He brought fresh water from the creek in a lard pail.

  “We want to show you how our people cooked food before lard pails and cooking pots,” Alex told Declan. He brought two wooden boxes from the canoe, tipping some fresh water into each of them. Using a pair of tongs, which he also took from the canoe, he plucked stones from the fire, rinsed them of ashes in the smaller box, then put them into the bigger box. Steam began to billow out. Charles brought the basket of clams and set it into the bigger box and then covered the box with a cedar mat.

  “In a few minutes, the clams will be done!” said Alex happily. “Nothing tastes better than clams steamed in a cedar cooking box.”

  Charles used a big spoon made of horn to ladle clams onto each man’s plate, and Declan sliced his soda loaf, handing each man a thick round of it. He watched how the other men removed the meat from its shell and did as they did. Some shells contained enough of the clam’s juices to sip as broth. It tasted of the ocean and seaweed. There was tea made in a lard pail. Albert disappeared for half an hour and reappeared with a basket filled with red berries.

  “Now for a treat,” he said. “Soopolallie, we call it. Indian ice cream!”

  Declan watched as he washed out the smaller of the cedar boxes. Albert put in a few handfuls of the berries and then tipped in the same amount of fresh water. Using his hands, he whipped up the berries and water to a froth, adding a little sugar towards the end. Each man held out his drinking mug and Albert scooped some of the froth into the mugs. Declan tasted it. Despite the sugar it was bitter but not unpleasant, and he was not surprised to see the other men hold out their mugs for more. He held out his own, smiling: “The first time I had ice cream was when I went away to school. We had it the first night and I thought it was not such a scary place so. It never appeared on the table again!”

  “The priests brought it to our people, too, for special days. It would arrive on the steamship at the dock in Sechelt and whoever had gone to bring back the provisions would have a little group of children following. I ate it so fast once I got a headache but that didn’t stop me from wanting more. Careful how fast you eat the soopolallie, though. You won’t get a headache but maybe a bellyache.”

  They talked quietly after rinsing out their dishes in the creek. The fire was low and warm and the sun was falling behind a big hump to the west, which the men told Declan was called Texada. A few mosquitoes whined but not many—bats kept swooping down out of the trees to make a meal of them. Argos was curled up near the fire and the men laughed as her feet began to move in her sleep.

  “Dreaming she is chasing a cougar maybe,” said Albert, chuckling.

  “Or running from one anyhow,” added Charles.

  Declan told them of seeing the cougar coming out of the bush in pursuit of a deer and how Argos had chased it back into the woods. He remembered how lovely the deer had looked, swimming out to sea with the sun between its antlers, and wondered if it had drowned or found safe landing. It mattered, suddenly, in the soft air, that a wild thing had not come to harm. As darkness fell, the men found their bedrolls and wrapped themselves up for the night.

  At first, Declan could not remember where he was. It was very dark and he was outside. In panic, he moved his hands around his body and found Argos alert at his side. There was snoring coming from quite nearby. Ah, yes, he was camping with the Indian men somewhere on the edge of the world. Why had he woken? And then he heard the sound, the sound that had Argos tensed and ready beside him. Wolves, it must be, and near, too, from the sound of them. What an unearthly noise, lonely
and cold. He could see one of the men, Charles, he thought, sitting up, too. Declan called to him softly.

  “Is it wolves?”

  “Yes, but nothing to worry about. There are lots of them around here. Your dog probably comes from them, with a head like that. I like to hear them at night. It reminds me of being a boy, heading out to the summer village, and stopping for the night in places like this.”

  Declan remembered the story of Queenie’s dame coming down from a logging camp in Neil’s small boat, one of a litter of wolf pups. It was as though Argos’s relatives were calling for her and she was alert to it, listening to each voice. But she had forgotten their language, lost her deep bond with the wild night.

  “It’s all right, girl. Ye’ve another place now, not with them. Go back to sleep so.”

  Argos moaned and whimpered, but once the howling had moved farther away, perhaps in pursuit of deer, she sighed heavily and went back to sleep.

  Declan was wide awake now, and listening to the wolves made him feel lonesome. It was that kind of sound; it entered your ears and made its way to your heart, awakening the ache of your loss and your homelessness. How far away he was, held only by the frailest of threads to their memories. In his mind, he heard the shivery strings of a harp, felt the strong arms of Eilis surround his shoulders, touching him there and there, smelled sweet turf burning hot in the grate. How far away, and how long it had been. Even now, called to them in this way, he had no way of knowing if anything might be found, or where. And he felt far from World’s End, its temporary protection. These men he was with seemed so self-contained, carrying their boxes to cook in, their lengths of fishing cord, in a craft they had taken from standing tree to completion. Yet this was, or had been, their home—this entire length of coast with its seasonal villages, its campsites, the slopes of kinnikinick ready for gathering. It was all familiar and known, as a small plot of potato soil had been known to Declan. And, he supposed, as the western slope of Ben Creggan and Ben Gorm, the streams running down from the mountain loughs, the billowy clouds announcing rain, had all been known to the generations of his family in their shadows. How a stone from the Sheefry Hills might find its way into a sheep fence or a house wall, an anchor against rootlessness, and how a man idly thumbing a worn flint or stumbling upon an ancient cooking ring would know himself to be hinged to the place by such fittings. The hinge both a part of the structure and the door, as well as the means of its opening.