A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan
the side came away like fragile paper. He wondered how long it had been buried in the earth. Even now the earth was doing its best to reclaim it, embracing it with sinuous vines of bramble and sending vigorous growth of salal up through holes in the bilge, displacing the thwarts.
“The skeleton was lying in it like this,” Rose told him, indicating how the body had been positioned. “His hands were crossed over his chest and he had a basket at his feet and a big stone club with a fish carved into it. My father kept the club but the basket just crumbled away.”
Remnants of red and black pigment showed that the canoe had been decorated inside as well as outside. Looking closely, Declan could see that the hull had been pierced with holes in a regular pattern, for drainage he supposed. There was a pungent smell of rotting cedar, and he could see that an animal, perhaps a field mouse, had constructed a small nest of dried grasses in a protected area under one of the thwarts.
Declan was moved to see the canoe at rest in the bush. He escorted Rose back to her home and then continued on to his own cabin, thinking about the vessel and its former occupant. It struck him as immeasurably lonely, the idea of being buried alone in a boat without the company of one’s family around. There had been finds in his own country, mounds of earth or sometimes cists that contained tombs with single skeletons carried by wagons, some jewellery and jars of wine and tools arranged at their feet. Such belief in the afterlife, he marvelled, and yet what was found was cold bones, wooden wheels, a dagger, with no sign nor evidence of the soul’s ascension. He remembered his rambles as a boy in the hills surrounding Delphi and coming across the Famine cabins with their communal graves nearby, subsequent generations taking the time, if money was available, to erect a stone to acknowledge who lay there. Some of the old townlands had completely disappeared, gone from the maps, having lost their entire populations to hunger, fever, or those dreadful ships. There had been families living in folds of the earth, tucked into ravines, who were gone with hardly a trace: a wisp in an aging memory, initials carved in the bark of a tree, a placement of stones to assist one’s footing on a steep ridge. And yet what would become of him should he die here, so far from his own dead, or the living that had known him? He sighed deeply and went inside to work on his text.
The Greek alphabet reminded him of bird tracks. The sigma, Σ, for instance, and the gamma, Γ, particularly in its lower case, γ. He practised writing the alphabet, wanting the ease and speed of his youth. It was good to have the new texts to consult. The grammar, by Goodwin, was the one they had used at school. The introduction was opinionated but humane, containing moments of humour even, which Declan responded to by wanting to learn the language well. “My own efforts,” declared Goodwin, in commenting on pronunciation, “have been exerted merely towards bringing some order out of this chaos.” And was that not something of Declan’s own intention? To have a project to take up the attentions of one’s heart and mind? When he’d begun his scribbles all those months ago, years by now, in the Bundorragha schoolhouse, it had been a tentative way to take a long view of a life, to find correspondences outside the daily routines. A man’s love for his wife, the complexities of homecoming, a lexicon for courage and honour, the importance of paternity: he hoped to find a way to share these with his students, or for the occasional student who shone with a fierce light and who needed something beyond the parsing of sentences and memorizing of Irish kings, a few equations to help a man account for corn.
He couldn’t get the canoe out of his mind. How it lay at rest in the heavy growth of salal like a fallen idol, knitted into a shroud of vines. The smell of it, a faint resiny odour at the back of rot, a stronger reek that hit you like the back end of a skunk or the plants with the golden lanterns that smelled exactly the same. He went back to the bush again, but it was hard to get a sense of the canoe’s proportions with the tangle of plants all around it. Going a little further to try to find a place from which he could see it entire, he came upon a hillock, covered with pale mosses and ringed with pines. It overlooked the bay, falling away from the clearing in a steep cliff, although the way up from the bush was gradual and clear. Wildflowers grew in a splendid profusion. It would not be difficult to drag the canoe up the hill if he had some help—and permission, of course. The Neil lads, for instance. He decided to ask their father if he might move the canoe, telling Neil he’d like to examine it and make some notes about its construction. He felt an explanation was necessary even though he didn’t know himself why he wanted to move it.
Neil was repairing a piece of machinery outside his barn. He barely looked up. “Go ahead, I’ve no use for it. I’ll get my boys to help you with it. It was a heavy bugger to drag there in the first place, and I’m thinking it’ll be waterlogged for sure by now.”
The boys accompanied Declan into the bush with several coils of rope. David, the older boy, looked to be about fifteen and was built sturdily. Tom, whom Declan had already surmised was younger than Rose by a year or two, was a slighter boy, thin legs coming out of wellingtons several sizes too large from the look of it. Dogs followed them, Argos dancing and skittering for the pleasure of being with others, and then Rose came running to the bush, wanting to see whatever it was they were going to do. Declan began to drag the vines away from the wood, pulling and loosening until the canoe was free. David wrapped a rope around the hull, knotting it securely, and then climbed the slope of the hill, stopping as he climbed to knot another length of rope to it to give him enough to take to the trunk of one of the sturdy pines. With Declan, Tom, and Rose pushing, it was a matter of winching the canoe up the slope, using the tree’s strength to take the bulk of the weight. The boys were very strong, trading positions at one point so that Tom continued the work of winching that his brother had begun, his skinny arms straining as he pulled the rope. There was a natural space for the canoe between the pines, and with Declan’s direction they managed to set it upright with the prow facing the bay. They sat on the dry moss and wiped their brows, puffing a little as the four of them looked out to Oyster Bay where a family of Canada geese swam in the eelgrass. One of the boys, David, threw a stone down, landing it in the water with a tiny splash. The geese barely paused in their feeding. Then Tom tried with a stone and missed. The dogs, who had collapsed in the moss after running up and down the slope as the canoe was winched up its face, looked up and whined a little.
“Ye’ve done a grand job, lads. Thanks very much.”
The boys nodded shyly and ran down the easy slope in their great rubber boots, Tom tripping over his feet, then righting himself and catching up with his brother before they disappeared into the bush. Rose lingered a moment longer but then followed them, dogs behind her, while Argos stayed with Declan, watching with her ears alert and a tiny moan in her throat. Perhaps she had known after all that she had been among her tribe.
Well, now what? Declan thought to himself, and then aloud to Argos. The canoe looked expectant, powerful in its upright position, although it looked precarious, too. He found some branches of fallen pine and wedged them under the canoe to keep it stable; pushing against it, he was pleased it didn’t budge. The sun was warm, and he could hear bees in the flowers that bloomed on the bluff. In his mind’s eye, he was seeing the skeleton recumbant in the boat. Testing the stability of the canoe again, he found himself climbing into it and sitting on the one thwart that was still intact. It was slick with slime. He lay back against the damp wood and closed his eyes. It was as though he floated in calm waters, the sound of bees and water birds in the distance, a few lazy flies landing on his face.
Sound of bees, water birds, Argos snoring in the warm moss ... Declan hadn’t realized he was asleep until he woke in a daze, wondering where he was. He had been dreaming of Odysseus, washed up among the Phaiakians, telling his story to the assembled crowd. Harps, birdsong, the odour of roasting meat, honeyed wine ... he shook his head to clear it. His neck ached, but he felt surprisingly rested. Where was the company of kings and princesses to whom he could tell of his loss, his journey, his discovery of something like peace at the end of the world? Aye, that was the thing. You could not call Neil a king, although his wife had dignity in spades, and the girl, well, Rose was a natural princess, equal in her way to Nausikaa at the river with her handmaidens. He remembered the way she and her mother had lifted and folded the sheets they had laundered for his bed, the harmony of their arms, and the intensity of her listening as he told her the story of Persephone, a maiden of the white arms, and her bridegroom.
He left the