A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

“It is not the reading in itself but that I did it without consulting him. He has a temper and I ought not to have crossed him. Now we will have a cup of tea and you will tell me what you plan to do next.”

  Rose brought out a tray of tea things, asked her mother for permission to swim, and left the two adults to sit under an apple tree. Tea was poured into pretty cups, one handed to him, but Declan could not find his face in its depths, just milky liquid. A few of the braver chickens clustered around them and clucked insistently until Queenie appeared to chase them away. It was very peaceful in the yard. The Neil boys could be heard splashing in the bay in front of the house and there was the sound, far away, of a boat engine kicking along. Seeing Mrs. Neil’s eye, the stray wisps of hair escaping from the neat knot she wore at the base of her neck, the rough skin of her hands which he had seen in laundry suds, wiping milk cans, working the tools of her garden, shucking oysters with a blunt knife, folding the sheets she had found for his bed, and stroking her daughter’s face, made him want suddenly to tell her about Eilis. She listened without saying anything, was quiet when he stopped to swallow the lump in his throat when he came to the part about the fire, refilled his teacup when his voice became strained as he recounted the burials.

  “I had no idea you’d suffered such a loss,” she said finally. “We knew you were here to escape something, but then that is the case with so many men. Even now, these years since the end of the War, a man might come and want only a bolt-hole and a tin to boil water. My husband says that there are shacks up and down the coast, on the islands and up the inlets, where such men live. Mr. O’Malley, I am truly sorry for what has happened. I wish I could continue to offer you a home, modest as it is, but you see for yourself that I don’t make the decisions in my family.”

  “It has been a balm, in many ways, living at World’s End and helping Rose. But I think I was beginning to understand something about what I’d left, too, before this business with your husband. I have yearned for Eilis and our girls, kept finding them in my dreams, kept hearing Grainne’s fingers plucking the strings of her harp. And working on the poem, I couldn’t see what was in front of my eyes all along.”

  “And what was that, Mr. O’Malley?” She was leaning forward in her chair, as though wanting something of great importance to be his answer.

  “That I was like yer man Odysseus. Oh, not in courage or cunning, but in the way I was trying to find my way home and fearful of what I might find there. I have the knowledge that he hadn’t, I know my family won’t be waiting for me as his most certainly will be, although he does not yet ken that. But I am thinking, Mrs. Neil, that a home is something more, is it not, than simply the walls of a house?”

  She looked at him with tenderness. “Does this mean you will return to Ireland, Mr. O’Malley?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, but fingered the delicate handle on the teacup, the worn gilding of its rim. “It is like this. Things have changed now that the Irish Free State has come to be.”

  He told her something of what had happened in Ireland over the past year, the Treaty signed which gave Ireland a constitutional status like Canada’s, but not yet a completely independent nation. After centuries of oppression under British rule, it was a chance for Ireland to take control of her own destiny. There were those who felt that change could be brought about little by little, with the Treaty as a beginning; and there were those, the Republicans, who wanted all or nothing, who wanted no part of a Treaty that allowed Northern Ireland to opt out and remain with Britain.

  “My sister writes to tell of these things so. In many ways, it is not the place that I swore I’d never return to, if that is to matter anymore. And yet I don’t know what I’d be returning to. I have my bit of land, still, and the means to buy a few beasts, a pig and a cow, some hens. There is still not peace but at least that sad yoke of British control is gone. And I might be able to be of some use, though I couldn’t say how as of this minute. I am of two minds, if truth be told.”

  “In what way do you mean?” She passed the plate of sugar cookies to Declan, who took one, breaking it in two without looking at it, then in two again.

  “Could I find work in Vancouver, I wonder, or should I be going back to Delphi? I am thinking I might be best off trying to find any small piece of what we had as a family there. I have even dreamed of me own mother, Mrs. Neil, and her giving out in speech I’d never heard from her lips. A ghost she was, and yet it was her, I’d know her anywhere, though I mind her best in our own west room, in a chair by the fire, with a basket of Eilis’s darning at her feet. It is a lonely business, meeting the dead in a strange land.” His hands worried the handle of his cup as he talked. It was like a knuckle, the curve of a finger. He stroked it, remembering the small hands of the children he’d taught clutching at him, wanting him to see a drawing, to approve their arithmetic, and he also remembered the wishbone of the Christmas goose, cleaned and dried to the texture of this china, breaking apart as he wished for the good health of Grainne, the happiness of Maire.

  They spent the next half-hour finishing their tea and working out the details of Declan’s departure from Oyster Bay. The steamship schedule was known to everyone who lived on the bay; they’d see it round the rocky point on its way up to the small ports of call on the islands and up the lonely inlets where logging camps and canneries depended on its service for supplies and the transportation of everything from cooks to schoolteachers to sewing machines to horses arriving to plough the forest floor on remote homesteads. Everyone knew when to expect the sound of a whistle piercing the quiet of the small communities and word could go out ahead to alert the captain to a passenger. Taking his leave of the Neil garden table and his hostess with her one blackened eye, he realized he had never known her Christian name.

  There would not be much to pack. The sheets would be shaken, folded and returned to the Neils. The books and papers he would take, of course, apart from Tales of Ancient Greece; Mrs. Neil agreed it might be left for the children.

  (“My husband has no objection in principle to them reading, Mr. O’Malley. It is my underhandedness that angered him.”

  “But why should Rose be the child to remain uneducated?”

  “I’m not saying it makes sense, Mr. O’Malley, I’m just presenting his side.”

  “Will she ever go to school so?”

  “That I cannot say.”)

  His few clothes, one or two personal effects. After a great deal of thought, he decided to take his paddle with him. It would be awkward to carry, but he wanted a solid reminder of his travels with Alex, Charles, and Albert, a talisman created out of one of the trees he had come to know like the sallies of Ireland. Any of the minor improvements he had made to the cabin, its stove and rudimentary furnishings, those would benefit the next poor soul who might find within its walls the slow and imperfect peace he had begun to find.

  And what about Argos? he asked himself, looking at the young dog lying faithfully at his feet. What can I do about her? It hurt to know he couldn’t take her, particularly as he had no real idea of how his days would proceed after leaving Oyster Bay. He decided to ask to the MacIsaacs about her.

  MacIsaac helped him to secure his skiff and they walked up to the house, Argos following. On the porch, his host poured Declan a measure of the golden whiskey and they touched glasses with a few words of their mutual language.

  “Sir, I have a problem. Neil wants me away from the place as he has discovered I was teaching young Rose to read. I am minded in a way to have it out with him but he has not been kind to his wife over this and I would not like her to suffer more for it. So I will be leaving in a few days’ time and I am thinking to go back to Ireland. The problem is the wee doggie ye see at my feet. I cannot take her with me with my plans so unsettled like. I am wondering if ye need a dog or might know of someone who does. She is a good lass, no trouble really, apart from her liking of old fish for rolling in.”

  MacIsaac laughed, a big loud guffaw. “O’Malley, I have ne
ver known a dog to avoid dead fish, or anything dead for that matter. We’ll take Argos, to be sure. Our old Nellie is a little too stiff now to keep the deer from the orchard and could use some help in keeping the lambs safe from cougars. Think no more of it. She’s a fine dog. Neil has his weaknesses, all right, but he has always had good dogs.”

  They enjoyed their whiskey and then Declan took his leave, saying he would drop Argos off with them on his way to board the steamship when it made its call at the store en route to Vancouver. “Saol fada chugat to the both of you,” Declan told them as he left.

  Declan made his arrangements—the forwarding of his mail, for instance, and reserving passage on the steamship south to Vancouver by asking the postmaster to pass the word—and was preparing for departure. One morning he was surprised to see Rose and her sister, Martha, running to his cabin from the arbutus bluff. Their feet turned up dry leaves and scattered a grouse feeding on salal berries. With the fluttering of the grouse’s wings, Declan could also hear that the girls were crying. He opened the door to them and waited while they caught their breath.

  “Mr. O’Malley, oh, a terrible thing has happened.” Rose was crying as she tried to talk.

  “Rose, try to calm yourself. I am putting the kettle on the stove for tea,” he said, drawing the girls inside and then going out to fill his kettle from the bucket by the door. Rose and Martha were sobbing, gasping, as they filled the small space with their distress.

  “It’s our father. He’s ... he’s been killed!” Rose cried out the words and then covered her face with her hands.

  Declan reached out to her, his arms enfolding her, her hair damp with tears and sweat. Martha crouched on the floor beside them, her shoulders shuddering as she wept.

  “What has happened to him?” Declan asked as he patted Rose’s back and knelt down to Martha. It was a shock, so soon after Neil’s censure of his teaching Rose her letters. A foul man, in his opinion, but the father of five children, a husband, a man who tended his fields diligently and well, bringing cleared forests to life with apple trees, hay, animals with their young: some sympathy was due his family.

  The story came out gradually, between bouts of anguished weeping. Their father had been working on Texada Island, for a small gyppo company. Around noon, two days previous, he and the fellow he was working with heard the lunch whistle sound and began to climb down the wooded side hill to the place where their lunch buckets were kept. Neil went a little further into the bush—to relieve himself, the other man thought—below the area where the fallers were working, and was decapitated by a dropping tree. The rest of the crew was stunned. The donkey puncher swore up and down that he had not sounded the whistle, but Neil’s partner insisted he’d heard it too. The only explanation anyone could come up with was that the ravens who haunted every work site, particularly the areas where food might be given them, and who were superb mimics, had imitated the whistle. Men told of accidents in other camps, of ravens creating havoc with bells and with whistles, two sounds they could simulate with ease. Neil’s body was not being returned, given its grisly condition, but had been buried in the woods; a limestone slab was to be brought in from the quarry and his name chiselled in by a fellow who made stone carvings as a pastime. Once that had been done, the family would go to Texada for a ceremony. His boots had been brought back, caulks which were still in good condition and which someone, maybe even one of his sons, could use.

  What words could Declan tell them that would help? He could think of none but tried his best, offering tea and a little piece of candied ginger from a pot his sister had sent. He took a piece of clean flannel and wet it in the cool water of the creek, giving it to each girl in turn to wipe her face. And when they had stopped crying, he walked with them back to their home where their mother, ashen-faced, was tidying her kitchen after serving tea to the bearers of the terrible news; two women had stayed to help her, one of them scrubbing potatoes and the other taking a basket out to the clothesline to bring in the laundry. Declan could see the departing boat, carrying their husbands, from the kitchen window. He could also see the boots, well-greased and the laces knotted together, on the floor by the stove.

  “I am sorry for yer troubles,” he told Mrs. Neil quietly. “You must just say if there’s anything I can do for ye.”

  She smiled at him and wiped at her eyes with her apron. She led him to the parlour, a room he had never been in. “I thank you, Mr. O’Malley. It seems like a bad dream still and yet here we are awake, the day going on as though it had not happened. The men who came were very kind and said a collection is being taken up in the area so we will have no immediate worries about money, I suppose. I’ve sent David to the post office to send a telegram to my family in Ontario. And for now we must just go on.” Before sitting on a deep red sofa, she called out to her daughters: “Martha, you must bring in the cow and milk her, please. Rose, the hens haven’t been fed. There’s a bucket by the door with some scraps for the pig. Put that over the fence on your way.”

  Declan marvelled at her gentle and capable way with her children in such a difficult time. Her eye was still bruised, though fading. He felt he must say something, anything, that might be of practical use to her.

  “I have booked passage on the Cassiar for Tuesday week but I would be honoured to stay on to help ye. Ye have only to say.”

  “I am so grateful for your offer, Mr. O’Malley, but the men who came to tell me of Harry’s accident have already made arrangements for us. Someone is coming in the morning to draw up a list of what will need doing. Although I haven’t really had a chance to even think about it, I think that the sensible thing will be for the children and I to go to my family in Ontario.”

  “I thought yer brother was in Montreal so? Did he not send Rose the book?”

  “Ah, yes, my brother is there. But my sister and her husband farm our old family place near Dunvegan, in Glengarry County, and there is plenty of room. They weren’t able to have children, and Martha—our Martha is named for her—has often written to invite us for an extended visit. She knew that things were difficult for us ...”

  She stopped for a minute and put a finger to her lips as though to tell him, shush.

  “I am not speaking of my husband’s temper though I knew you were upset by his reaction to Rose’s reading ...”

  “I do not want to speak ill of the dead so but the man hit ye. Ye’ve the bruising still.”

  She continued as though she had not heard him. “... but of our hardships earlier in our lives when a child died and there was a problem about Harry’s enlisting in the army. He had done it without my knowledge, on a trip to Vancouver for machine parts, and could see no other way to feed us. But he was refused because of his health—he was consumptive for a time in the early years of our marriage though working this place made all the difference—and then things improved with fishing and our pigs have done so well so we were able to make some improvements on our place here. He was not a bad man, Mr. O’Malley, although that was how many saw him, I know. He did love us and do his best for us.”

  She began to cry. Thinking that tea might help, Declan went to the kitchen where he exchanged a few words with the women there. They poured a cup for her as well as one for himself and put the cups on a tin tray printed with faded roses, one arranging the cups while the other took down a tin for biscuits. While he waited for the tray, he looked around him. A small parade of wooden animals, some native to the area and some fanciful—a giraffe, an elephant—stood on the dresser with the plates and bowls. He touched one, a little bear. It was very nicely made. One of the women told him that Harry had carved the animals and put them in the children’s Christmas stockings each year. Declan stroked the smooth wood of the bear’s back and thought how very unsettling it was to think of a man who would strike his wife, break his son’s arm in anger, carving tiny animals to wait in the toe of a Christmas stocking. He felt that he ought to try harder to convince Mrs. Neil to allow him to help her with the small holding, but h
adn’t he sat with her only a short time earlier and listened to her offer him solace, suggesting that his place was in Ireland, putting his own ghosts to rest? She was a determined woman in some ways, he felt that, and he was certain that she would know what was best for her children and herself in the face of such tragedy. From his location on the sofa facing the open door to the kitchen, he could see the boots sitting by the stove as if waiting for someone to fill them—and he knew somehow that he was not the man to do so. He finished his tea and rose to take his leave, offering again any assistance he might be able to provide.

  Rose returned from her chores and asked her mother if she might walk back partway with Declan. Mrs. Neil nodded her assent. The two walked slowly over the fields to where the trail led to Declan’s bay; Argos was quiet at their heels. Rose said nothing for a few minutes but sniffed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. Declan handed her his handkerchief. Then she turned to him, clasping his arm between her two hands.

  “Who will take my brothers and sister to school now? Mr. O’Malley, please don’t leave. You could stay now and even move to our farm. Argos would love to be near Queenie and you could teach all of us about Odysseus. How will any of them get to school? I know how much the others would love to hear your stories. You could teach us sums and even geometry—David has been showing me how to measure the sides of a triangle and I just know there’s so much more to learn. Please don’t leave me here now that you’ve become my only friend.”

  Declan was stricken by her plea. He had shifted his heart towards home and had begun to dream of Dhulough, its dark waters. He could smell the peaty earth of his garden, the rich clotted blossoms of gorse; he could not wait to fill his mouth with rain, the western rain of Ireland which had its own flavour, wild with hawthorn and flint. He told Rose that he knew her mother had plans that would be best for all of them and if it was any consolation, he would write to her from Ireland, even send her books from time to time. He would leave her his marked copy of the Lang Odyssey, the pretty edition of Tales of Ancient Greece where she had traced the ornate “t” with her finger in what now seemed another life. She wept at his refusal to stay on Oyster Bay and turned from him, running back to her mother without a word. The word sat in his chest like a stone, but one whose weight he was becoming accustomed to carrying.