“I think we will conclude this discussion now, if you don’t mind, Edward,” Una said briskly. “I fear our differences might lead to unpleasantness. But I would like to show you some drawings, if you would care to see them. Here, this is a little view of the crow garlic. I love the spathes shielding the flowers! Don’t they look just like a monk’s cowl?”
Declan heard the man agreeing too fulsomely for comfort and made that his opportunity to depart, taking up his jacket and borrowing Una’s torch for the long walk home. It was a pleasant night, and he wanted the chance to gather his thoughts, to examine the sour seed of jealousy which had taken root in his heart. On the one hand, Higgins was a man who inhabited a world well known to Una; she had met him, after all, at a dinner party given by her family in London. They had approved of him and had encouraged her to see more of him. And of course there was the shared love of plants, though when Higgins spoke of a plant, it was as though of a personal conquest, but to be fair to him, there was a lot of trekking about in mountains and so forth to locate the plants in the first place. He was not lazy. But on the other hand, he was so English, so sure of his opinions, and weren’t they just rid of the English as an oppressive force? And Declan and Una had an understanding. He thought they did. Didn’t they? Now there was a question. Would he dare to ask her? Was it time to ask her?
Just as he was nearing Tullaglas, the beam of his torch scanning the track up to his gate, he heard the sound of wheels, the clip-clop of a donkey’s hooves on the hard ground of the road, and then Fergus Mannion called out his name. He turned in surprise.
“I was kept overlong in Leenane, Declan, and then took a few pints to fortify me for the drive home. How was yer evening so?”
“Ah, Fergus, I am just thinking on it now. It was a good meal Una prepared, but the man himself was a source of arrogance and irritation. I’m thinking it’s a good thing we’ve sent them packing altogether.”
“Just so. He was in the pub earlier in the day, it seems, boasting about his cousin who served in Cork. And gassing off about our fellas, Griffith and De Valera. He’d be a wiser man if he knew when to hold his tongue.”
“Well, tomorrow Una is taking him by motor car to botanize on Joyce’s River and leaving him there for the day, so they’ll be rid of him for a good stretch anyhow.”
The men bade each other goodnight and went their separate ways, Declan up the track to his dark shed and Fergus further along to his snug cottage and the warm sleeping body of Bride. An owl called from the sycamores down by the lake.
Two days later, Declan was walking down to Tully in light rain to arrange for a new blade for his scythe when a car came over the hill towards him and came to an abrupt stop on the road. It was Una. She looked flustered.
“Declan, you know I offered to drive Edward up the Maam road yesterday morning so he could botanize on his own for the day. He was to get himself back to Leenane, by foot or by flagging down a car on the road. Well, it seems he didn’t come back at all, the publican has told me this, and now I’m a little concerned. Would you mind coming with me to search for him? I’d feel better if there were two of us in the event he has fallen or God knows what.”
“Of course I will come with ye.”
It took most of an hour to get to the place near Joyce’s River where Una had left Edward Higgins off with his vasculum and a rucksack of lunch. The river was very full with spring run-off and raced along its course, gathering in the waters of other smaller rivers coming down off Rinavore and Munterowen. It was raining quite hard when they parked the car and walked east to where Una had suggested Higgins concentrate his attentions on the early purple orchids and the lesser butterfly orchids which grew in relative abundance on the acid soils of the moorlands there. Recent footprints led them along the riverbank and over the small stone bridge to where the road climbed up to a few farms at Lee.
Una saw the body first. She gave a shriek and ran up the slope, Declan quick at her heels. It was Higgins, sprawled in a pool of mud and blood, his face badly puffed and bruised. The fine tweed jacket was in ruins, the sleeves torn from the body of the garment. Nearby, a vasculum lay broken and crushed, its contents scattered on the muddy ground.
“Oh, dear God, what has happened to him?” Una cried, then: “Who has done this to him?” for it became obvious that the man had been beaten. “Is he alive? Can you tell?”
Declan bent to the body and reached under Higgins’s neck, feeling around until there was a place where the pulse made a small slow thump against his fingers. Declan felt his own pulse race as he realized how weak his rival was, how pathetic.
“He’s alive, yes, and if ye’re able, I think ye must go on yer own to get help. I’ll stay here with him so. But hurry, Una. There’s nothing I can do for him but cover him with my jacket for the warmth.”
Higgins groaned and his eyes fluttered. Una ran down the slope and over the bridge to the car and Declan removed his jacket, arranging it over the man’s shoulders, patting them gently as he did so.
“I don’t know if ye can hear me or not. I’m not going to move ye in case it does more damage but I’m here and Una has gone for help. She’ll be here as soon as she can. We’ll do what we can for ye and we’ll not leave ye alone.”
The man’s eyes fluttered again, and he made sounds of pain in his throat. He moved his mouth, but Declan could see that his jaw was damaged, perhaps even broken, and he touched Higgins’s arm.“Don’t try to talk. All that can come later.”
Jackdaws were nesting nearby and made their usual noise. Tchack, tchack, they called from a tree at the edge of a wood where a nest hole was visible. In a different country, Declan might have believed they were telling him the story of an attack, naming those who had struck and kicked Edward Higgins and left him for dead on an isolated slope. But try as he might, he could not decode what these birds were voicing, and anyway this was no time for frivolity. If there was a message in their calls, it was a warning to stay away from their eggs in the adjoining sparse woodland. Declan was not proud at that moment to remember how he had imagined pushing Una’s carving knife into the heart that was now struggling to keep its owner alive.
When Una returned, it was with the gardai and the doctor in a separate vehicle, the latter’s Austin van. An improvised stretcher was brought up the slope, and the doctor made an examination of the body while the two gardai took notes.
“His right arm is broken, as are some fingers, I’m certain. The jaw is dislocated, if not broken. I can’t tell just now with all the swelling. That’s a nasty gash on the back of his head, which I’m going to just dress quickly and then we’ll hoist him onto the board. Time is of the essence here. I’d like at least one of you”—he addressed this to the gardai—“to accompany me to Clifden with him. There’s no time to lose, and we can’t wait for an ambulance. We’ll hope that the road is in good repair because he has lost a lot of blood, that’s evident, and there may be complications along the way.”
He reached into his bag and took out cotton for dressing the head wound. And then the men carefully moved the body onto the stretcher, wrapped blankets snugly around it, and began the descent to the road, Higgins groaning as they stumbled with the weight of him down the hill over rough ground. At the vehicles, a few words were spoken about contacting the man’s family and then the van carrying the doctor, one garda, and their bloody cargo sped off towards the Clifden road. The other three got into Una’s car and drove towards Leenane, subdued. The garda asked a few questions—how long had Una known Higgins, did he have family in the country, who should be contacted with the news of his injuries? Una answered in a perfunctory way, naming a brother in London, parents in Sussex, and then said, “I hardly knew him at all.” They dropped the garda at the Killary Arms. Una was very quiet as they continued on to Marshlands.
“Declan, I couldn’t bear to be alone tonight. Tell me you’ll stay?”
“Of course. As long as you need me.”
They went in to the cold house and busied th
emselves with making a fire, putting the kettle on. Then Una began to cry. She turned to him, her face very anxious, and wet with tears.
“I feel so responsible, Declan.”
“Responsible, Una? How could ye be responsible? Ye were not even there. Violence was done to the man by other men, ye saw for yerself how broken up his face was, and how much blood he’d lost. I think he was left for dead. And he is lucky ye thought to look for him, that much is sure.”
Una took a deep breath, sobbed, and then said, in a soft voice, “The reason why I didn’t accompany Edward in his botanizing was because I had a Cumann na mBán meeting mid-morning. I’m afraid I was not discreet in my comments about him. I mocked him. I even told of his terrible cousin and his problems with Irish ‘discipline.’”
“Well, he has been gassing off in the Arms about the cousin, Fergus Mannion told me as much when I left after dinner the other night. So he has not been discreet himself, and him a guest in our country. Do not blame yerself for what happened.”
“But Declan, what if one of those women went home—we were finished by noon—and told her husband or son or for goodness’ sake anyone at all? It’s clear he was beaten by someone who must have known he was there, isn’t it? Or do you think he might have strayed upon something he was not meant to see?” Her face actually brightened somewhat as she thought of the latter possibility. But then she broke down crying again, saying she would have to try to call his family and see what they wanted her to do with his things.
Declan comforted her and made the tea, bringing her a cup of it well-sweetened and pale with milk; he was afraid she would not be able to stop crying, that she might go into shock. He too had been indiscreet, he realized, remembering his conversation with Fergus Mannion on the dark track two nights earlier. If he looked into his conscience deeply, would he discover that he had hoped that more might come of that conversation? There was the knife. Had he mentioned his thought about what he wanted to do with the knife to Fergus? He could not remember.
He would say nothing to Una, he decided. He had known Fergus all his life, but does anyone ever truly know another? Fergus had helped him a great deal since his return, as had Bride, but there was the day he had found the rifles in his turf pile and Fergus’s counsel that he not tell the Garda. It might have been Fergus, might have been him putting a word in another’s ear. A chill ran up his spine and along his shoulders. It did not bear thinking about. That night they made love quietly and at length, wanting the small peace they had begun to find before Edward Higgins wired to say he was coming to the Killary Arms. Una cried in her sleep, and Declan held her, only falling asleep himself when light began to ease into the room through the soft curtains.
As it turned out, Higgins was indeed severely injured but was expected to recover. His jaw had been wired shut to heal, his broken arm set, the gash on his scalp stitched and dressed. He had no memory of the attack but woke after two days’ sleep to mumble when he might go home; he was given a pad and a pen to write out his questions because even the mumbling hurt. Una drove to Clifden to visit him and encountered his mother at his bedside. She was polite but chilly, accepting the flowers that Una brought, the basket of sweetmeats, the drawing of crow garlic that he had admired in her home. It was clear she was in Ireland reluctantly and probably would not come again.
Rumours abounded about the attack but nothing clear was determined, no one was arrested, and after a few weeks, the event was tucked away in memory, not forgotten, but not cherished, like the small Republican victories, the spiriting away of wounded men by boat right under the noses of the English. A brief tale might be told in a pub of how a loudmouthed Englishman was dealt with by Joyce’s River, but apart from a few smiles that could be thought secretive, that was the extent of its course. Una never heard from Edward Higgins again.
A few weeks later, Una arranged to drive up to Westport and take the train to Donegal to visit her aunt and uncle for a month now that the rail lines were open. She wanted time away from an area redolent with the blood of both sacrifice and revenge; she wanted to sleep in a house where she would not be awakened by a knock that might take her to a boy crying from the pain of his injuries or a telegram advising of a visit. When Declan left her after their final night together before her departure, she told him she would miss him terribly and that he should feel welcome to use her cabin at any time. So he left his papers there and stopped in regularly to light a fire and spend time with Odysseus. His nightshirt hung behind Una’s door like a hopeful ghost, the sleeves patient and the placket undone.
He had made a draft of the passages he loved best, the ones that spoke out of the poem to him and his life. He had no son, no father, no bright wife waiting. There had been a suitor, not slain but certainly damaged, perhaps not by him, but he could not completely absolve himself from that possibility. He thought of Rose, wondering if she had been his princess at the river with her dream of a bridegroom, her clean linens drying in the hot sun on rocks, her kindness. No mention had been made of erotic interest on Odysseus’s part, yet Declan remembered how he had awoken in the canoe to watch Rose bathe naked in Oyster Bay like a sea-born daughter of Aphrodite, his body responding to the sight of a maiden of the white arms at play in the water. He wanted to do something for her, give something to her, so she would remember their time on Oyster Bay as he now remembered it, softened by distance (he had almost forgotten the loneliness, the days of weeping in the small close cabin, the nights in the skiff by Outer Kelp waiting for dawn so he could drop his spoons with their baits of herring, the unsettling night on the rocky island while he waited out a storm, bones falling from their platforms in the trees), an interlude which had given him back himself, not whole but able to find in the words of a poem something of a map to lead him home. In his best handwriting, he wrote out the first three hundred lines of Book 6, Odysseus’s meeting with Nausikaa and his journey to her father’s palace. In Greek and English, he made a version of himself and Rose, of a princess and a wanderer, a mother who knew the solace of a fire and good food, a father who made possible the means of return. He reminded her of the sheets she had folded with her mother, patched linen washed on the stones of Anderson Creek. Then he sent the package off to her in brown paper.
One day while he sat with the poem, there was a knock at Una’s door. It was Bernadette Feeny.
“I was passing and saw the smoke, Declan, and I thought I’d make sure the harp was keeping in tune.”
He invited her in, explained Una’s absence and his presence, and she listened to the harp strings, adjusting several to bring the instrument true. He watched her cradle the harp and suddenly wanted to know how it felt to hold it in that way. She turned to him and saw the longing in his eyes.
“Come, Declan, draw up a stool. Ye could try this for yerself so.”
The harp was placed between his knees with its shoulder resting on his right shoulder. Then Bernadette took his right hand and showed him how to touch the strings, thumb up and fingers extended, as though holding the knob of a door in readiness to open it
“Keep your hand so that the thumb and first three fingers rest in the middle of the string,” she advised him. “Forget about the small finger so. Ye’ll not need it. Then do the same with the other hand so that the two hands face one another. The right hand plays the melody, Declan, and the left follows with chords or graces. Just so. Yer hands are as they should be. Try to take that string there, yes, that one, with the first finger, and that one there, yes, leaving off the one in between, and stroke it with yer thumb. Pluck them in a motion as a scissor might work, striking up with the thumb. Ah, that’s it. But difficult, I’m thinking. So now just put yer nail on the string and pluck.”
Surprisingly, a brief note sounded, not unpleasing. Declan was so startled he laughed out loud. He tried it again.
“This harp has a very pretty harmonic curve,” Bernadette told him, tracing the line of the harp’s neck with her hand. “Yer own hands should echo that.”
What he liked was the way the harp rested against his shoulder while his arms supported it, embraced it. How many times had he watched Grainne holding this very harp in the same embrace, her fingers meeting through the strings? He had the sensation, briefly, of holding his daughter, the manageable weight of her body, while his hands sought out her music from strings that had never known her fingers.
Bernadette placed her hand on his right one and helped him to pluck out the opening phrase of the beautiful “Mabel Kelly.” Ah, it was sweet, the melody with its lilting notes, the dignified chording. With her left hand she dampened the strings so they didn’t ring out so long; Declan remembered her telling him of this when she’d first tuned the instrument. Bernadette sang softly as they played, “Lucky the husband who puts his hand beneath her head ... Music might listen to her least whisper, learn every note, for all are true.” And her hand upon his took them through the ancient modal air: “Lamp loses light when placed beside her ... Her beauty is her own and she is not proud.”
“There, Declan O’Malley, that’s what it’s like to play the harp so though ’tis easier for me to guide the smaller hands of a child, I’d say. But ye did well enough. See how ye are holding the shoulder with yer hand. It is like ye’ve always known it.”
Declan saw her to the door and closed it behind her. Her words sounded in his mind, it is like ye’ve always known it, and he thought how it was not quite accurate. It was not the music he had sought, although he would try to play the harp again, perhaps with Bernadette’s guidance, and could tell that he would enjoy the challenge of finding the notes within the strings, fitting the shape of his hands to the harmonic curve of the instrument. It was for the moment of embrace, when he held Grainne in his arms, feeling her in the polished wood, his shoulder taking the weight of the harp as hers had.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 27
