A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan

and dogs fed on the scanty remains. The lucky ones had ridden the Famine boats and survived the dreadful outbreaks of disease that claimed so many even before they set foot on the soil of America. And was he much different from those other exiles? It wasn’t hunger that had driven him to Canada, no, it was violence and loss; still, he imagined someone finding the ruin of his cabin and trying to piece together his own small story.

      Argos was down on the mud, rubbing her shoulders against something, licking at it, then pressing her face into it. Declan hurried over to see what it could be. A fish—it looked like a small shark—was dead in the mud, its body decomposing. He didn’t think it had ben stranded by this particular tide because it was missing its eyes and its side had been torn open by birds; oily fluid seeped out of the gash. There was a terrible smell, and Argos was rubbing her body with great joy against the rotting flesh.

      “Leave off, girl,” Declan shouted, and pushed her away with his foot. She yelped and ran ahead, shaking herself as she moved, her whole body wet with mud and stinking of fish. Declan’s boots made sucking sounds as he walked, and everywhere he could smell the tang of seaweed and salt. There was a big rock with a flat top ahead, dry and warm from the sun. Brushing away barnacles, he made a place for himself and sat, looking down the bay towards the strait. It was easy in the salt air to be lulled into a kind of trance where you could hear the birds and the suck of water as the tide began to come in, drawn first into the channels and then the pools. It was almost peaceful.

      He was thinking about Odysseus. Thinking of him lying under olive leaves waiting for the princess to find him. And then walking to meet her with only an olive bough to save him the shame of being seen naked. Still, the handmaidens fled at the sight of him, and the young princess must have been quite brave to have stood her ground. But her head had been turned by the goddess to thoughts of bridegrooms, and maybe she hoped he was a potential husband. So she encouraged her servants to bathe him and anoint him with sweet oil and clothe him in the few bits they’d conveniently brought to the river to wash out and dry on the banks. And then he followed her carriage into the city where he was welcomed to the palace in the way a stranger would always be welcomed. Food given, comforts, a bowl of water brought so that the stranger might wash. And you never knew, the stranger might be a god in disguise, testing your capacity for hospitality, kindness. In the case of Odysseus, it was the mother of the girl who recognized in the stranger a measure of nobility and worthiness. He’d been given a harp in the evening and, stringing it with authority and skill, he’d told them something of his wanderings.

      There was loneliness and there was solitariness. What did he feel, himself, as he walked the long mud flats, searching for oysters and then sitting on the rock like a seal? He was not wanting human company this day. It was enough to be out with the young dog and her droll puppy behaviours, and anyway, if a man took a minute to take his bearings, if he looked around himself, it was evident he was not alone. There were the geese, yes, and some black fellas with yellow eyes and long red bills prying open oysters themselves, whistling a piercing eep, eep as they flew and then settling down to the business of shells. Gulls everywhere, some of them feeding on the purple starfish clinging to the undersides of exposed rocks. And when you moved aside a rock with your boot, small crabs scuttled off sideways, waving their pincers. Far, far out in the bay, almost where it met the strait, he could see a few boats, probably heading to the gathering of buildings in an adjacent bay with deep moorage. A store, a hospital, a hotel ... he collected his mail at the store, going by skiff once a fortnight. There was never much, but his sister wrote with news of Ireland, and occasionally a bank draft arrived, no return address or note, but the postmark was Galway, and so he imagined one of his cousins, involved with the Republicans, was sending him the kind of solace arranged for men such as himself. It paid for the use of the cabin, some provisions, paper and ink, an occasional bottle of the stuff they called whiskey but which was nothing at all like the bottles kept by Miceal Walsh in the Leenane pub; he’d pour you a drop of Connemara malt on market day and it was like swallowing sunshine, for the warmth of it spread through your body, tasting like the smoke of a turf fire captured in clear water off Ben Gorm. And the money paid for the odd book, too, ordered by letter from a bookseller in Vancouver.

      He was dreaming in sunlight, wishing for Eilis. Where are ye? he thought. When the tide moves in, I half-expect to see ye swimming strongly in its current though for the life of me I never saw ye swim, washing up on my bit of beach like Magdean Mara or a seal, the lovely grey seals of the Connemara coast. I am no one without ye, without yer hands bringing my face to yer breast, or holding my waist from behind me as we sleep. I remember each small place, each bone quietly covered with soft skin, the plump fullness of yer hips, the shallow bowl of yer neck which I filled with kisses, each a drop of tenderness coming from my deep heart. I am drenched with yer memory, drenched in each remembered gesture, the far grey of yer eyes and yer copper hair threaded with silver. I am a shipwrecked sailor washed up at the end of the world, no one to take me into the bed of a long marriage, held secret by the trunk of a living tree. Our oaken bed, brought from yer parents’ house as a dowry, along with a grove of pines the age of yerself, planted by yer father at yer birth. When can ye be, my love, so long away that I am forgetting yer voice as it sang the old Irish songs to our lasses, keening low and rich so that each note held the sadness and pleasure of our kin, so our girls would know who they were in the world.

      The pup was licking his ankles, moaning. Looking around him, rubbing his eyes back to wakefulness, Declan saw that the tide had advanced almost to where he was sitting. He jumped down into the mud quickly and made his way to the shore. He would have to return to World’s End by clambering along the rocks because he didn’t think he could beat the tide as it eased over the mud flats. Slinging his bag of oysters over his back, he began to scramble towards his cabin.

      He almost tripped over the girl who was crouched in the sand of a tiny cove. It was the girl who’d brought Argos to him, and she was scraping the sand with a claw of wood. The curled fingers of the claw brought up lumps that looked like stones, but he realized they were cockles, or clams they called them here. A bucket, sitting in the tide to keep cool, was nearly full. Argos ran to the girl and licked her face rapidly; the girl responded by kissing the pup’s soft nose and trying to avoid the tongue which moved with surprising dexterity to find ears, nostrils, a salty mouth, for the girl had been eating sea lettuce, a tiny leaf of it stuck to her bottom lip. Bruises flowered on her upper arms, petals shaped like the ball of a thumb, her pullover on a nearby rock, taken off in the heat of digging.

      “Do ye like the clams then?”

      She thought for a moment. “Mum makes chowder, with potatoes and onions and milk, and I like that. I think it’s my favourite supper because she always makes biscuits to go with it. But for themselves, I don’t know as I could eat one on its own. I have lots. Would you like to take some back with you?”

      “No need. Yer mother has me picking oysters, as ye can see. I’ll make them for my own tea.”

      There was something familiar in her movements, a kind of grace balanced against the awkwardness of lengthening limbs. He’d seen it in his own girls and in the girls he’d taught over the twenty years he was master of the Bundorragha school. They’d come as infants, nearly, and leave in the fullness of young womanhood, and in between, they’d be both one and the other. Bent over their slates, their hair falling across the scarred wood of the desks, cheeks flushed with concentration, or laughing at the antics of one of the lads, he’d see in them such promise. Often as not, they’d marry as soon as they left the school and find themselves mothers of six or eight children before they were thirty. The boys would leave to work, either migrating to the cities or England or else making roads for the Congested Districts Board, but Ireland provided fewer choices for women; he had been determined that his own daughters would have opportunities to further their education if they chose, or in the case of Grainne, perhaps music school. She’d been given a harp: one of the older families had no use for it, no one who wanted to learn, and they had passed it along. She’d found someone to teach her to play it, Bernadette Feeny from the mountains. Sheet music was hard to come by but through some miracle—it had seemed so to them—a whole pile of music had surfaced: sweet airs by the blind harper Carolan, planxties