Walking home, he encountered an old woman on the road, gathering plants. He asked what she had in her basket. She showed him dyer’s rocket and a kind of woad, the one giving yellow, she said, and the other a clear blue. She had cress, for a soup, and a stem of hound’s tongue against a dog she had to pass on her way back to Gobnamona. She had the clouded eyes of the very old, and yet she bent to the ground and examined the ditch without a complaint. “And this,” she said, “is bedstraw, a fine plant for setting the cheese. I’ve a great old goat these days and the milk makes a fearsome cheese. I’ll send some for ye at the school, will I?”
(News travelled like wild seeds or magpies ...)
In May, he was washing the newly plastered walls of his house with lime and water, a little blue added to keep it bright. The roof was sound, the windows kept out the wind. All he owned fit into a small corner, but a fire made in his hearth was warm enough for the whole house. Over the lintel of the main doorway, he painted a proverb in deep green paint from a tube of colour that Una had left behind after a sketching trip: Ar scath a chéile a mhaireas na daoine, In the shadows of each other we must build our lives. It looked like a scribble of delicate vine.
One morning he awoke in the turf shed to small drifts of snow that had come in with fierce northerly wind, and he remembered how he had once felt like Suibhne. The very cold sleep on a whole night, listening to the billowy sea, the multitudinous voices of the birds... Magpies were beginning to pair up for the season (two for joy), and he saw wild swans flying to the great loughs of the midlands. The weather could be so unsettled, first the snow, then fine sunlight.
He looked up from passing his brush over the new wall to see Una coming through his gate where the basalt pillar watched for those arriving as well as those leaving. She was looked beautiful, rested, the dark shadows that had appeared under her eyes after Higgins’s beating gone, her skin clear and glowing.
“I am just on my way home from Donegal, Declan, and I came this way so I could stop to see if the asphodel at Cregganbaun was showing itself yet. And doesn’t your house look fine! A fire burning, the sound of birds, and look, even a jug of bittersweet on the sill! I’d like to introduce you to Bran, a gift from my uncle.”
Reaching into the basket she carried, she lifted out a puppy, brown with odd, wiry hair. “Believe it or not, he is a wolfhound although he has some growing to do yet before we can consider him a dog at all. But he has enjoyed the drive down from Westport and would like to explore, I think, if you don’t mind.” She put the puppy down on the ground where it immediately peed, then began to run in the direction of the potato bed.
Declan laughed as he watched the young pup follow its nose on the scent of something, obeying some old order. It had something in its movements of Argos on the other shore, bold and awkward. Una smiled and then embraced him, her breath warm against his neck. He was wearing one of her grandfather’s shirts and a well-darned gansey which Bride Mannion had given him for the warmth she said he’d need to get through the winter. Here it was, May already, with the weather so unsettled! And yet, in Una’s arms, he was fierce with happiness and wouldn’t have noticed the cold even if he were out in it naked. She brushed his hair away from his eyes and laughed.
“And what do you think of this, Declan? I am certain we are going to have a child. I thought so before I left but I wanted to be sure before I told you. I will not be a young mother, of course, and my doctor has a few concerns, but I feel wonderful and wanted you to know.”
He could only hold her tighter, his heart aching for what was lost and found.
The new rooms of his house glowed, clean and ready. Far away, on Oyster Bay, he imagined the gulls fishing and the ravens talking in the cedars. What were they saying? Old stories, new sightings, even a man asking at the store where a shelter might be found, a boat borrowed, a voyage taken to a campsite where clams were cooked on a beach fire and where wolves made themselves known in the night. Bones had been found in an old canoe and used to frighten children but the soul of the dead man soared up to the heavens like a feather on the wind, cleansed by yarrow. With time, the body of the man who had found the bones might rest also in peace on an island within spitting distance of his farm. The Lurgan boat, put to earth in some forgotten ceremony, and taken from it in wonder ... In the soil, seeds waited for the sun and rain to urge them back to life, while withered roots slept in their own anticipation. Even a harp might be buried in a bog near Limerick, then brought forth to be played again, its strings remembering both joys and sorrows. Even a man in a distant field, keeping alive the means for fire, might be found by a woman at a river, cleaned and robed, and taken home to tell his story.
A Man in a Distant Field Page 28
