A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan

      ... the earth opened, and a chariot stood before her drawn by four coal black horses; and in the chariot there was a man with a dark and solemn face, which looked as though he could never smile, and as though he had never been happy. In a moment he got out of his chariot, seized Persephone around the waist, and put her on the seat by his side. Then he touched the horses with his whip, and they drew the chariot down into the great gulf, and the earth closed over them again.

      Rose’s face was horror-struck. “Mr. O’Malley, what happens to her? Do you really mean to say that the horses take them underground?”

      “Ah, Rose, in these stories we are told many things. How much of it is true, well, that’s the thing we don’t know. We are told things to make us feel a certain way, to create a certain mood, to explain things in a particular way. Do ye know the meaning of the word metaphor?”

      Rose shook her head.

      “Well, it is when ye use words or phrases that everyone understands to mean certain things, ye use them to make a thing understood in a new or different way. If I told ye that sun was a globe of golden glass, well, ye’d know I didn’t really mean that it was, in fact, but ye might take another look at the sun and see it again, with fresh eyes. Do ye see what I mean?”

      “I think so,” she said, squinting her eyes and looking at the sun, which was making its way towards the western sky.

      “To continue with suns, the ancient Greeks, whom these stories are about, would talk of the sun as something alive that was driven across the sky by a fella called Helios who had a chariot and some special oxen. That little story is a metaphor, really, to explain the passage of the sun from when it rises in the eastern sky to where it sets in the west, where we can see it, each day.”

      Declan looked at Rose to see if she was ready to hear the rest of the story. She was far away, gazing out the window. She sighed, and then turned to face him. “Mr. O’Malley, I know a story that’s a bit like the one you’ve been reading me. Only it’s true. All of it.”

      “Will ye tell it to me?”

      She took a deep breath. “Where we live used to belong to the Indians. They still come up the bay in their canoes sometimes because they think this part here is special. One of them, a lady called Lucy, comes to have tea with my mum and she says her people began here, like we say that Adam and Eve began in a garden called Eden. But none of the Indians have lived here for quite a long time. My dad has pigs, you’ve seen them, and when he wants an area cleared, he lets the pigs run free. They are good at clearing land because they eat all the tough leaves and vines, and they dig stuff up, roots and such.”

      “Aye, their feet are like small spades so,” said Declan, remembering his own pig.

      “Well, one day a few years ago, in spring, the pigs dug up a canoe with a skeleton in it. My sister, Martha, saw it first and ran to the house to get my dad. He thought it was funny and let the pigs have the ribs to chew. He rolled the canoe over into the woods—I can show you what’s left of it one day—and took the skeleton off; we didn’t see where. Martha had nightmares about it.”

      “Aye, she would, she would.” And then he wondered if he would also dream of the pigs at work on the long ribs of a man found dead in the earth.

      “When Lucy came the next time, my mum asked her about it and she said it must’ve been a chief from a long time ago, because sometimes they were buried in their canoes with important stuff for them to use on the way to Heaven. It made it seem so wicked that the pigs would dig it up and eat the bones. My mum never told Lucy that part. Do you think it was wicked, Mr. O’Malley?” She seemed so concerned about this that Declan reassured her, saying that the dead man’s soul would have long departed and that Lucy would have known this.

      “Don’t worry yerself so, Rose, but tell me more of the story.”

      She smiled at him, grateful for his understanding, and continued. “So then it was fall and my dad put our vegetables in the root cellar. Potatoes from the new area that the pigs had cleared and the other stuff we eat all winter. Turnips and beets that he buries in sand, and cabbages and onions. One dark night, well, it wouldn’t have been night really but it gets dark early in winter, he told my sister and me to go to the root cellar under the back part of the house to bring up potatoes for the supper. We hate going in there because it’s mostly underground and there are spiderwebs and even rats sometimes. But my sister took a candle and we kept together. We were leaning into the potato bin when we heard this awful sound, like sticks clattering, and my sister held up the candle. There was a skeleton waving its arms around! We screamed and dropped the potatoes and the candle, and we ran as fast as we could around to the kitchen door.”

      “Ah, ye poor lasses. Ye’d have been terrified, of course!” Closing his own eyes for moment, he saw the skeleton rise up, its bones clattering.

      “My sister was screaming and crying—my mother says she’s nervy—and I was afraid that the skeleton would follow us. But then my dad was standing in the doorway, laughing, and he almost never laughs. My mother calmed my sister down, and when my father stopped laughing he told us that he’d fastened strings to the canoe skeleton’s arm bones and then ran the strings up into his bedroom, which is right above the root cellar. So he could jiggle the arms by pulling the strings. My sister had bad dreams for weeks—I know because we sleep in the same bed—and she wouldn’t speak to my father, which made him really mad. My mother was mad at him too, but then he hit Martha and told her to snap out of it so we tried to forget.”

      What a brute the man was, thought Declan, to frighten his daughters so. He remembered the bruises on Rose’s arms as he watched her digging for clams and folding the sheets. Aloud, he told her that the story was an interesting one and she’d told it well. He could see what she’d described, and he was sorry to hear that her sister had been so troubled by the event. His eyes must have revealed his distaste for a man who would strike a child because Rose quickly responded.

      “She’s fine now, sir, and my father didn’t really hit her hard, and later he brought her a moonsnail shell for her collection, without a single chip off it, but don’t you see that the stories are the same in a way?”

      “Oh, aye. And in this story I’m working on, there’s a woman, ye might call her a witch more rightly, who turns some men into pigs who then cry human tears. Our man Odysseus is saved from her magic by carrying a little sprig of wild onion within his clothing. So pigs, and the ground opening, and a king coming up from under the earth, from Greece to this Pacific. And indeed I’d like to see that canoe one day, if ye’d show me.”

      Rose nodded. “I’d better get back, Mr. O’Malley, or my mum will worry. Thank you for the tea and the story.”

      “They are a perfect pair, Rose, I’m thinking. Will ye come again?” He suddenly found himself hoping she would say yes.

      “I’d love to. I’m sure my mum won’t mind. Goodbye.”

      Declan watched Rose walk over the bluff with its crown of arbutus and disappear into a fringe of young cedars. He thought how nice it was to have a young girl to talk to, a girl the age his own had been, one foot in childhood and one in the rich sea of womanhood, uncertain of its tides and dangers. What was it that Nausikaa had been called in the poem? Maiden of the white arms ... Not an epithet for a child, exactly, and yet the princess cavorted with her maids at the river, throwing a ball in a carefree game until it landed in a stream, which woke the naked Odysseus. That was the part he would look at again.

      Chapter Three

      He had asked Rose to take him to see the canoe. The idea of it, buried with its chief, had been in his mind ever since he’d first heard the story.

      They walked up past the farmstead to dense brush—salal, mostly, but trailing bramble and brittle huckleberry made the going difficult. Rose led the way and pushed through the brush until she was stopped short by the bulky shape of the canoe. Declan had never seen anything like it. It looked to have been carved from a single tree and had an elegant prow, shapely, but now rotting and