A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan

out ways to preserve meat and fish, but I can’t imagine him baking a loaf to save his life.”

      “To save his life, Mrs. Neil?”

      His face, which had seemed to her to have relaxed with her praise of the bread, had suddenly become the saddest face she’d ever seen. Putting down her tea, she reached over to the rock where he sat and took his hand in her own, holding it briefly and then releasing it. “Just a saying, Mr. O’Malley, something we say without thinking. To indicate a thing is out of the realm of the possible, if you know what I mean.”

      “To save my life, Mrs. Neil, I am working on a project of translation. From Greek, which I learned as a lad from the priests at school, to English. My Greek is as rusty as the iron pot I found in the brush but looking at the letters—and they are not our alphabet, like Latin would be—is like looking at the tracks of a bird. If I take them into my mind, slowly, they make a sense after a bit. Once I could read them easily, and I’m hoping I will be able to again so.” He had brightened in the telling of this, his blue eyes alight.

      Mrs Neil remembered Greece from the globe in her own schoolroom all those years ago, in Glengarry County, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember anything else about it, apart from its reputed heat, shepherds, and stories of gods and goddesses walking the earth, wreaths of laurel on their heads, and making trouble.

      “And what are you turning into English?”

      “Ah, Mrs. Neil, it’s a great poem about the sea and a man who made his way from Troy, which as far as I can figure out is where Turkey is now, to a little island off the west coast of Greece. He was called Odysseus, and his story, the Odyssey, which means a wandering sort of adventure. And it is that, to be sure.”

      Mrs. Neil searched her memory for something, an echo, a name, and asked, “There was someone like that called Ulysses, wasn’t there? I remember a poem, Tennyson, I think. My brother had a book, he’d read the poems aloud to us.”

      “Just so. He was called Ulysses by the Romans, later on. When I was a lad, I loved to imagine myself a wandering seafarer, though my father was a farmer. When the priests read to us of Odysseus, I’d put myself in his place, I loved every word, and it made me fierce to learn Greek as well as I could so I could read it for myself in the poet’s own words. I wanted to go out in a boat and hear the siren’s song and end up on an island like he did.”

      “Well, you’ve come to the right place, Mr. O’Malley. You can see for yourself how the bay is busy with islands. My husband is always heading to an island himself, in search of work—Nelson, Minstrel, wherever a gyppo operation might need a man for a week or a month. And boats, well, we’d all be lost here without a boat. But what you say about your lessons is interesting. My brother learned Latin, I remember, but not Greek. What did your family think about that?”

      “It made me different, I’d say, and no one else, none of my classmates, seemed as smitten with the Greek as I did. We lived in a place in County Mayo called Delphi, and the priests told me it was also the name of a pagan temple in Greece. I could not help but want to know more. I made scribbles to myself, tried a line or two of the poem to see what I might make of it on my own. So that will be what I try to do for the next while, try to make an English story of Odysseus’s long journey. There are English versions, I do know that, but they seem awkward to me, unsettling, as though the good parts had been taken out.”

      The woman could tell he was tiring, the day and night of trolling catching up with him. There was some warmth in the spring sun and a drone of bees in the salmonberry that might make anyone sleepy. She yawned herself. The warmth of the fire in the barrel stove made his small domain cosy, although she could smell the musty mattress and made a mental note to look out something more suitable in her attic. He rose with her as she said goodbye to him and asked did he need more milk that evening? He went to stand at the door as she walked away towards her own home and children. The tide was in, lapping at the edge of the clearing where his cabin stood, and a kingfisher screeched from a snag hanging over the creek. She smelled the smoke of his fire all the way back to her house, troubled by him but also intrigued. He was a man with mystery contained in his blue eyes, in the bag where he kept his papers. And some terrible tragedy, too, she thought, remembering an uncle who’d wept so often after the death of his wife that people avoided him and he turned to the bottle for company. No sign of the bottle at World’s End, and it seemed it was the man himself who avoided company (he’d been invited to a gathering at the store, as well as a picnic, but never appeared), not the other way around.

      You could never forget. Could you? And the memory was heavy baggage to be carried with you, slung over your shoulder like a hundredweight sack of potatoes, to be weighed and considered in every activity of your day. To be among the living when your loved ones were so brutally removed to the world of the dead ... And there could not be a God, no, never, to have let such a thing happen to innocent girls, to Eilis who never harmed a soul but who carried mugs of hot broth to the hungry stopping at houses to ask for a crust, a farthing. And his a modest salary, not overly much to carry them all, but with the potatoes they grew, and their chickens, and the butter Eilis made, sure there was food for the table, and to share, and the occasional penny for the girls to take to the shop for a sweet ...

      Odysseus didn’t know that the goddess Athene was plotting, as he slept, a plan to fill the head of a young girl with him, with the idea of him, as a way to get him a boat for the voyage home. Declan O’Malley pondered this for a minute or two and made some scratches on his paper. It was unsettling to think of dreams as something a goddess had planted in your head like seeds, with a particularly outcome in mind. When he dreamed of his family, when those images came with all their sorrow and pain, he tried to find a way to see the good in such dreaming. In one way, it made him less lonely because he could remember he had been Eilis’s beloved, she had told him so in as many words, stroking his face with her long fingers in the early days of their courtship when he had walked out with her on balmy evenings where the boreen turned beyond her family’s farm and kissed her in the lea of a hedge. He would remember with pleasure for a moment. But so soon, too soon, he would be aswim in the pain of it. No God, no, but goddesses at work on the sleeping? It was a thought.

      The thing was to find the accurate way of saying it. Declan was discovering that Greek was so much a language of its place and time—not that he had ever seen the place, but one of the priests at school had travelled there as a young man and had been changed forever by the experience. He described the rocky mountains, clothed in sharp-scented herbs, the stark white temples with columns lying across the ground like fallen gods. Thorny bushes and lemon groves sloping down to a glittering sea. There had been olive trees, he said, alive at the time of Jesus, and their silvery leaves rustled in the wind like dry music. He had never gotten over the warmth. And the storms, coming in to wrap the bowl of the valley in mists like the smoke from incense, and just as fragrant. Declan wondered if there were any similarities between his own Delphi and the temple of the same name. Both of them high in the mountains, tucked into clefts in the rock. The weathers would be different, of course. Ireland’s rain, the intense sun of Greece. And no silvery olives, but the sallies by the river had their own soft leaves and music. And as for being a language of its time, why, the problem Declan could foresee was to find words to tell of honour, how a man would lay down his life for something noble and larger than himself. Where the actions of men reflected something foretold by gods. To find equivalencies for olives, the magnanimity of kings.

      There was a knock at the door. Opening it, he was surprised to find a girl. He recognized her from the creek, one of the Neil children at play in the reeds. She was fair, like the others, in a skimpy dress of sprigged cotton, with a pullover knotted around her waist. The girl was holding a small black puppy in her arms. It was struggling to get down, whimpering as it wriggled this way and that, a stream of urine falling to the threshold. The girl looked up and met Declan’s eyes. Hers were a startling green, like new leaves, and there was a dusting of freckles across the ridge of her upper cheeks and nose.

      “Please,