A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan

sort, a beak. He thought it must be a bird, but it was not any bird he was familiar with. He knelt in the bow of the canoe and looked out to the bay. A figure at the far side caught his eye. It was Rose, her skirts tied behind her to avoid the mud, carrying a bucket. Clams again, he supposed. Her hair was blowing in the wind. The gulls were undeterred by her presence and continued to take up fish and whatever else they found to eat in the mud. The steam blurred her image a little, softened the lines of her limbs. She must have thought she was completely alone, unobserved, because she put her bucket down on a rock and began to dance, her arms slowly swaying and her face upturned to the wind. Declan could see she was barefoot. She looked like a sea-born nymph there on the steaming mud, her long hair unbound, bending and turning to an inner music. He remembered watching his daughter Grainne bringing back the milk cow from a tiny meadow high beyond the house; she had been unaware of anyone watching and had pirouetted with her willow switch above her head like a dancer, an image he recognized from a book on the school’s small library shelf. She was lovely in the moist air, curls escaping from her plaits, a woman shadowing the girl, and remembering brought tears of such deep sadness that he covered his face with his hands.

      Rose was dancing in the muddy bay like a strand of delicate seaweed, swaying and bending low. She stopped suddenly at the sound of her name being shouted from the direction of her house. It was her father’s voice, harsh and angry. Hurriedly she picked up her bucket, unknotting her skirt as she ran towards home. The slow suck of the tide coming in erased her footprints in the mud.

      Declan had been wondering how to approach Mrs. Neil for permission to give Rose some lessons. When she brought the milk one morning, he invited her in for a cup of tea.

      “Mrs. Neil, I am thinking it would not be a difficult thing to teach young Rose to read so. She is always looking at these books ye see around ye and I would like to do something to repay yer family for its many kindnesses. As I have told ye, I taught school in Ireland and would consider it an honour to help Rose.”

      The woman regarded him gently. “There is no need to think you must repay us at all, Mr. O’Malley, but I know Rose has so enjoyed talking to you about your paperwork, and if you could spare her the time, I’ll try to make sure she comes to you. My husband ... well, he has old-fashioned ideas about girls and education. He has allowed Martha to go to school because I really did insist but somehow Rose ... oh, there’s not enough room in the boat or he wants her to help me with the laundry or some such notion. I’ve tried a little to help her, but the days are not long enough, it seems, for the work that needs doing. I would like to keep it from my husband, though. He is a good man but strong in his opinions and it’s not always worth arguing with him or challenging him.”

      “Mrs. Neil, it would give me great pleasure to teach Rose. And I will say nothing to Mr. Neil. Shall I wet the tea again?”

      It was three days before Rose appeared in the door of the cabin. She carried four eggs wrapped in newspaper and the jug of milk. Declan carefully took the eggs from her and put them in a small pudding basin, noticing as he did so the bracelet of bruising around Rose’s wrists, as though she had been grabbed and held in anger. He carried the bowl and jug to the creek where he had a little cuddy made of stones and moss, a square of sheet metal level against the creek bed. A slab of cheese in a lard pail was there already, keeping cool. He wondered whether he ought to comment on the marks.

      “Mr. O’Malley, have you ever seen a baby caddis fly in its nest?” Rose asked, leaning over the creek and carefully removing a clump of twigs and fir needles. She took a grass stalk and gently prodded one end of the clump. Antennae shot out with a tiny insect behind. She put it into Declan’s hand so he could see it close up.

      “Rose, it is truly an interesting little construction. How did ye know where to find it?”

      She brushed her hair away from her eyes and confessed to spending hours looking into creeks. She’d find as many living things as she could and collect them in a bucket. Her father’s friend, a devotee of fly-fishing, identified some of them for her—the larvae of stone flies and May flies, leeches, caddis flies in every sort of casing ... “You’d never know they were there, Mr. O’Malley, unless you looked really closely.”

      “In a way, Rose, that is true of stories, too. Here they are in books, in black and white, looking for all the world like hen tracks. But ye saw what happened when ye looked at a word for a time, how it told ye its name. Muse, it was, and near to yer name, ye thought. In a way ye were reading the creek when ye found the little lads that were part of what it was. Can water on its own be a creek or is a creek really a collection of things, like words, that make it real?”

      Rose thought about that for a moment. “Well, creeks change, Mr. O’Malley. This creek is full of spring things. In summer it’s different, and in fall, different again because of the salmon who lay their eggs in it. And winter, that’s the best time to see the bugs and other creatures. Creeks change course, too, when the snow on the mountain melts quickly and makes them too full to stay within the banks. So if a creek is a story, it’s never quite the same one.”

      “That is such a good way to think of a creek, Rose. I hadn’t thought of them ever as stories, and changing ones at that. I think that’s true of stories in general, too, would ye not agree? A story my mother told me was always a little different from one my father told. She remembered details he didn’t. She would describe meals, who was sitting next to someone at the table, who the grandmother was, and where the grandmother’s people came from originally. My father liked the physical details, whether there was a fight or an injury or even an insult. And in his stories, these things became bigger with each telling. And of course in families, each generation has something new to add. The stories we tell about the Great Hunger in Ireland are different, I’m thinking, from the ones that my grandparents might have told, with the sight of the starving still in their minds.”

      While they talked, the day became warm although it had not started off that way. Gulls called out on the tide flats and shore birds hunted in the stones for food. Vines of smoke climbed out of Declan’s chimney to the blue sky, blossoming into high cloud, and at the mouth of the creek, salmon fry flipped for joy as they left the fresh water finally for salt. Declan brought some paper outside, and ink, and two pens; he began the task of teaching Rose the alphabet.

      Rose was a quick learner. Her mother had spent some time with her, going over her letters, but it had not been a sustained learning, and she had not had the opportunity to apply the letters to actual words. With the Odyssey at hand, Declan would find a word using little clusters of letters.

      Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and many were the men whose towns he saw ...

      “This one, Rose, the m, then the a, then the n. Can you try to sound it out?”

      And she would make the clear sound of each letter on its own, then shape them together, worrying the three until a word emerged from the soundings. “Man!” she said triumphantly, “Man!” Taking the pen and dipping it into ink, she would form the letters on a piece of paper, copying it several times over. Her list of words grew: man, need, wide, towns, mind.

      “I’ve a mind to tell ye a story, Rose, which this talking of muses and towns has prompted, though I am still not certain of its meaning. When I was riding the train across America from my cousins in New Jersey to, well, what became this although I didn’t know it at the time, the train made a stop in a town on the great plains. What state it was in, I have no idea. We had a few hours while the train took on freight of some sort. It was a cold day but clear, and I thought I’d walk to loosen up my joints, all cramped they were from the days and nights I’d spent already on the seat. It didn’t take long for me to leave the little town completely behind and before I knew it I was standing by a field, watching a woman feed her pigs. They were big ones, black and white, a few tawny, and she was putting out some grain for them. They were polite animals, or so it seemed to me, and the woman spoke gently to them as she fed them, assuring them that there would be enough for all of them. When she saw me, she beckoned to me