A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  “Mr. Kenny, are ye drilling the lads? They have been seen entering the gap near Tawnynoran with rifles. And I suppose it is no secret that rifles were hidden in my turf, with it known I was abroad and no one to take the fuel of a family burned out in such a way.”

  “Mr. O’Malley, I was raised to believe in a free Ireland. There are differences of opinion as to how this will come. I mind that the Treaty has not done away with Partition and I hope that negotiation will bring us a sovereign Republic, one that includes Ulster. In the meantime, work must be done—even here, in these lonely mountains.”

  Declan spoke quietly about the boys who had done sums at the desks in his classroom, who had learned the genitives and subjunctives of their grandparents’ language, how he had hoped that they might have opportunities not available for him and his own brothers, particularly the ones at rest in France. He told Liam Kenny that he was opposed to guns and violence, that any loss of life was a tragedy that cast a long shadow over fields that had seen too much bloodshed and sadness already. Yet he too believed in a free Ireland and knew that it would not come without a cost. He did not want his scholars to pay the ultimate price, though, when hardship was what had defined their family histories for too long and the loss of a son was terrible fodder to gain a country.

  “I am thinking we are not at odds in our ideas, Mr. O’Malley. I have not come to argue with you but to ask that you be careful. Or perhaps mindful is what I am hopeful you will be.”

  A week later, while he was working on the house, he was startled to hear a car horn on the road below his farm. So few cars travelled the Delphi road! He was more startled to see it stop on the side of the road by his gate and to see Una emerge from it, laughing. She was wearing trousers and stout leather boots and a cloche pulled down over her hair. The fog-coloured shawl was flung over her shoulders.

  “Declan, look what I have!”

  “How on earth did ye get a car, Una?”

  “Apparently Hugh decided I could not live at Marshlands without one and he arranged for the estate to buy it. Fintan Walsh came by the other morning in a great excitement because a call had come for me to the Post Office, saying I was to take the bus to Galway to collect my automobile. Fintan would not let me wait ...”

  “Aye, he wouldn’t, that one!”

  “No, he had the bus schedule worked out then and there and nothing would do but that I got my old bicycle and rode behind him to Leenane to catch the bus, the one that lugs itself up over the Maam road to Oughterard and then Galway. The Clifden bus would of course been an easier trip but it wasn’t scheduled for another three days and Fintan could never have waited!”

  Declan smiled. Fintan Walsh was a busybody if ever there was one and Una’s description was exactly right. He could see the man racing over the Leenane road on his elderly bicycle to get Una on the bus on time, and no doubt he would have accompanied her to Galway too, given any encouragement.

  “Sure enough, Hugh’s solicitor was waiting at Eyre Station with this little car, having been telegraphed by the Post Office to say I was on my way. I know how to drive a little, David taught me, although it took me ages to figure out these gears.”

  “Did you make the trip in one day so?” Declan asked.

  “No, I stayed overnight in Galway, waking up through the night with the most excited feeling, like Christmas morning, and then remembering that I now owned a car, or at least Marshlands owns a car. I was able to shop for some supplies in Galway, and didn’t I feel proud to tuck them into the boot and then, making sure I had enough petrol, to drive home in this wonderful car. I stalled many times and almost hit a sheep near Ballynahinch, but I got back safe and sound, stopped once by Nationals near Recess who cautioned me about blood-thirsty Republicans near Clifden and once by Republicans near Kylemore who cautioned against trigger-happy Nationals. I gave Fintan first ride as a point of gratitude, and now I’ve come to collect you for a sketching trip!”

  “Were ye not frightened, Una, to be stopped by soldiers?” It unnerved Declan to hear her speak to flippantly of soldiers stopping her on the road, their guns at the ready.

  “I remembered reading something in the Connaght Tribune a year or two ago, when the Republicans held Clifden. They expected everyone to carry a permit and Monsignor McAlpine was quoted as saying he absolutely refused to do so. When he was stopped from visiting a house without permission, he declared he would rather die by the roadside than ask for a permit from boys he had baptised. I feel a little that way myself.”

  “But surely it could be dangerous?”

  “Oh, what could men who have burned my family home possibly do to me now, apart from shoot me? All the memories of my childhood, the happy rooms—poof, they’re ash. And I will not live my life in fear. My elderly aunt in Donegal had her car taken from her by the IRA, and her a supporter! They needed it for some reason, and when it hadn’t reappeared in her courtyard several days later, she marched down to the Barracks—this was after the Republicans had taken the town—and demanded it back. She reminded the captain she had known him since he was a mewling infant in nappies and that she expected him to behave in a more civilized fashion. All this she told me in a letter as well as the fact that she had received a profuse written apology!”

  Declan simply looked at her. Her lightness, her laughter, made him think of her in one way, and this was a different woman, fierce, refusing to be intimidated. He followed her to the car, an Austin Seven painted dark blue, and let her show him each feature, each wiper, each wheel, as well as the spare tyre in the boot and special tool for jacking up the car if there should be a need to change that tyre. (“Hugh’s solicitor had a man show me how to change a tyre in the parking area for the Great Southern Hotel.”) Una had packed a basket of food along with a flask of tea so all that remained for Declan to do was to gather his waterproof jacket and open the passenger door.

  “I’m going to drive up to Cregganbaun, Declan, as there are some small lakes just west of there with plants I’m hoping to collect. Are we forgetting anything?”

  He didn’t think so. It was a little unsettling to feel the car shake and judder as they left the farm, but Una assured him she was still getting used to the clutch and hoped he would bear with her because it couldn’t take forever, could it? Bride Mannion was bringing in wash as they passed the Mannion farm and Una waved gaily to her, calling out that she’d take Bride for a run to Leenane one of these days if she liked. Bride looked as startled as Declan had been to see a car on the Delphi road, one that didn’t belong to the marquess’s estate, and when he waved to her, when she recognized who Una’s passenger actually was, her amazement showed.

  “Oh, Declan, I’m afraid they’ll have us married off by the end of the day, sure as anything.” Una was laughing, but Declan knew there was an element of truth to her words. Men and women did not spend time together unless they were married or promised. But the Fitzgeralds were a family planted in the area nearly as long as his own, and he felt the differences of their upbringing—the Fitzgeralds were Ascendancy stock, supporters of the Church of Ireland, while he’d had the teachings of Rome inculcated from the cradle—could be put aside for the sake of a friendship. And he knew the Fitzgeralds had entertained proponents of the Gaelic League in their home (in a small community, everything was known; it was not that the walls had ears, exactly, but that the serving people and grooms were from local families), had supported the notion of national pride of language and literature, and surely these were in accordance with his own family’s hopes and dreams, though expressed in the different terms of class and privilege. And both families had lost homes to the Troubles, had lost, temporarily or permanently, their sense of security and belonging. So now he would drive with Una Fitzgerald up the winding road past Dhulough and Glencullin Lough to look for marsh plants on a chilly day in early December and would pinch himself under the guise of adjusting his weight in the passenger seat to make sure he was not dreaming.

  Una had David’s vasculum in the bac
k seat. Declan had never seen such a thing before, a metal box with a domed lid, and many place names and dates engraved on its sides.

  “David used to engrave the place and date of each trip onto the vasculum, a trick he’d learned from a professor at Trinity College. He kept lists of plants, of course, like birders do—he and his friends called them life lists. But he liked to see at a glance where his passion had led him, and when. An uncle who was a jeweller gave him a small engraving tool which he kept fastened to the underside of the cover. In his journals, he’d make detailed notes about the trips, like a mariner exploring foreign seas. Compass bearings, weather notations ... This one, well, this was heaven.”

  Declan looked closely and saw “Dingle Peninsula May 1914” engraved into one side of the vasculum. It was the most recent date he could see. He asked Una how that trip had come about, to County Kerry, a place he’d only heard about.

  “David’s grandfather knew a priest in Dunquin who invited us to visit—he loved botanizing and wanted the opportunity to show his favourite places to us. We went down by train and then bus, over wild country. It was so beautiful. I remember the bus winding up the Conor Pass and seeing the fields and bogs laid out below like swatches of velvet. The priest met us in Dingle and drove us in a battered old car to his home in Dunquin. He lived beside the old graveyard, which seemed to exist over a community of beehive huts, quite wonderful. You’d be walking along, looking at graves, and suddenly you’d realize that you were standing on a mound from which poked the capstone of a clochan. And the wildflowers, oh, they were exquisite, Declan, particularly the saxifrages.”

  “And were ye long in Kerry?”

  “We spent the whole of a week there, almost entirely outside, even when it rained the way it can only rain in the West of Ireland. We would get soaked to the skin without even noticing, and David would spend his evenings with the priest, preparing his specimen for his herbarium, while I read books I’d only ever heard of before, never seen, because Father Mulcahy had the most eccentric library, with our wet clothing sizzling by the fender. And we’d be served huge dinners by a housekeeper who plainly disapproved of Protestants sleeping under the same roof as her employer. She was grim, but the food was delicious.”

  The road was rough and the car rattled as Una navigated the potholes and rubble. Damage had been done during the time of the Black and Tans and repairs had yet to be executed; if Liam Kenny was to be believed, there was every chance that the roads would remain dreadful for some time yet. Hills on either side of the road were dressed in the russets and browns of winter with the occasional vivid red as a tree still clung to its last leaves. A standing stone stood impassive on one shoulder as they approached the little hamlet of Cregganbaun, watching for the side road to the lakes Una wanted to visit. It was more a sheep track than a road when they found it, deeply rutted and overhung with trees. It threaded its way over tussocks and gravel, over the rushing water of the Carrownisky River, and sidled up to Lough Mahaltora after passing an ancient tomb standing on the road like a patriarch. This was where the car stopped and Una began to unload her equipment, pulling on wellingtons as she talked.

  “I am looking for a few good characters, Declan, a few things my herbarium is without. One is the bog asphodel ...”

  Declan interrupted. “Do ye mean to say that asphodel grows here?” His voice was so tremulous that Una was suddenly a little concerned.

  “Well, yes ...,” she began.

  “The same asphodel that grows in Hades, that Homer calls the food of the dead? Do ye remember Achilles, striding off across the fields of asphodel?”

  Una was surprised to hear him refer to Homer, and with such familiarity, as though he was talking of a family member or character in the community. She had not thought of him as a scholar, particularly, although he was known in the area as an excellent teacher. She thought for a moment and then said, “I think the asphodel in Homer must be the white asphodel, or Royal Staff. Asphedelus. Ramosus, that’s the one that would occur in the Mediterranean. So, no, not the same plant, Declan, although I suppose they’d both belong to the same family, Liliaceae. This one is Narthecium ossifragum and it grows in boggy areas here and in England. The ossifragum part is interesting because it means “bone breaking” and refers to the belief that people had, still have, that it causes that disease called cruppary in sheep, where the bones break easily. The thing is, it doesn’t cause cruppary at all but sheep eating in areas where it grows are feeding on fairly un-nutritious fodder so their bones might well break easily because of deficiencies in their diet, not the bog asphodel. But how odd that you would mention it. Have you read Homer then?”

  He told her about his project, before the fire and in Canada, of translating parts of the Odyssey, how it had worked nicely into Rose’s education, how it began to echo his life without Eilis and the girls. He told her about the canoe and how he would lie in it on its bluff and dream of home or Elpenor and would wake, disoriented, and how he had noticed the flowers which Mrs. Neil told him were the death camas growing all around the canoe, his initial dread, and then how it seemed to him a mirror of the pale fields that Achilles strode through, mourning his afterlife. It was all so unexpected to her, and to him, after so much time, this story of a life two entire oceans away. She had in her a tremendous capacity to talk and did not always stop to listen carefully to what was said in reply. She wondered if she’d heard him tell any of this earlier but decided she would have remembered, although there had been a reference made to planting Odysseus’s oar, perhaps. Or had she imagined that? And as was her way, she determined to try a little harder to listen.

  “This is terribly interesting, Declan. In a funny way, I have felt certain plants to be companions of mine, the pancratium for instance, after David’s death, and the delphiniums my grandfather grew, of which I found survivors in the long stretch near the stable wall and have saved seed from for my own border, and the foxgloves that grew at Dunquin. I hope we’ll find some of the asphodel so you can see what our own looks like, although it does seem prosaic, doesn’t it, after thinking of its reputation in Homer, to be looking for a plant thought to cause broken bones in sheep!”

  “I haven’t seen the asphodel in Homer, though, Una; I just know how it is described—the fields of it, pale as ghosts. So ye see, it will be a new thing for me. Although I am thinking it will not look like much this time of year so.”

  “I have done some drawings of the flowering plant, in July, when it is very pretty, with its yellow flowers, and the fruiting plant later on, in September, when areas of the bogs can appear to be cloaked in orange. Now I want just the plain plant with its withered leaves but the stand I had used, near Marshlands, has been eaten by sheep, more’s the pity for them, poor sods. However, Ciaran O’Murchu told me that he had seen it up this way, in abundance, when he came to see a man about a horse a couple of months ago. Luckily Ciaran hates it with a vengeance as he has had trouble with his own sheep, so he remembered the orange coverage.”

  They left the car and walked down towards the shore of the lake where rushes were fluttering a little in the wind. Declan stopped and pointed to the far shore where a small herd of red deer grazed on the rough grasses. One animal lifted her head and stared at them, then returned to feeding. Moving carefully through the boggy ground, Una paused to examine a clump of something Declan didn’t recognize.

  “Remind me to come back here late in the spring, Declan. Well, I’ll make a note of this exact place, if you don’t mind waiting a minute while I draw a little map.” She extracted a notebook from her haversack and made a quick sketch with a pencil, arrows and approximate distances noted. “There! I can see that at least three kinds of orchid are growing here. Nothing much to see now, of course, but this one here is the marsh orchid, unless I’m very much mistaken, and this one just here is the fly orchid. They’re both somewhat rare and I’d like to draw them in situ once they’re blooming. This other one—and I’m not entirely certain about this, as it’s so discolou
red—is the common spotted orchid. Oh, and the devil’s bit scabious, another good find! I’ll just lift one of each for the dormant portrait, but only after we’ve found the asphodel as that’s really what I’ve come for.”

  She kept taking out a small notebook and making quick notations, looking to the road and obviously estimating distance and scale. And then she found what she was looking for, some wintry plants of bog asphodel, which Declan had expected to look somehow monumental and which were instead brown leaves with stalks holding hollow pods, nothing he would have stopped for, unknowing. But he remembered the death camas stems, dry on their bluff of tawny grass, papery seed pods broken open by wind, and watched while Una took a trowel from her bag and carefully dug up a single plant, brushing the soil away from the root system. Making sure she had the plant entire, she opened the vasculum and laid the plant inside on a damp cloth, covering it with a second square of cloth. She made more notes, asking him at one point what he thought the temperature might be, crumbling a bit of the surrounding earth with her fingers to get an idea of its composition, squinting into the sky for a reading of the light. Then, after lifting a plant each of the orchids and scabious, and placing them carefully into the vasculum, she announced she was perishing with hunger and needed to eat. They returned to the car, stowed away the gear, and took out the basket of food and the flask of tea. There was cold pheasant—a casualty from Una’s first attempt to park the car under a rhododendron hedge at Marshlands; the hen had been frightened to death by the sight of the vehicle approaching its roosting branch—and wholemeal bread with wrinkled apples from surviving Marshland trees.