A Man in a Distant Field. Theresa Kishkan
potato plants overnight, and overnight, seventy-five years ago, life had changed for the Irish forever. Most people depended utterly upon the potato for daily life; a few, like his father’s family, also grew modest crops and animals for market and didn’t fare quite so badly, but they, with their small amount of cash, were the exception. The populations of entire townlands disappeared, villages emptied of their occupants. Those who could fled for America, assisted in some cases by the Crown or by landlords who wanted them off the land, their rents so far in arrears that the landlords pleaded insolvency but still ate regularly, kept good horses who ate precious grains, and sent their children to fine schools. Human dignity was reduced to the lowest possible denominator as cows were bled for the sustenance their blood provided, people fed on grass and the herbs of the fields, fevers raged through the shelters constructed over ditches after the cabins had been tumbled by bailiffs and soldiers, and entire families died with no one to bury or mourn them or keep the dogs from their bodies. Afterwards, people carried the Famine with them like a sacred object, a prayer to protect them against such tragedy again. Declan told Rose what a sad thing it was to come upon the remains of the cabins, roofless, surrounded by thistles, cleansed by decades of wind. Sorrow attached itself to the stones, to the abandoned thresholds, made a syllabary of the grass stalks. Wind said the names quietly—O’Leary, Mannion, Murphy, Cronin. Sometimes a noise would issue from one of the ruined cabins and the young Declan would wait, trembling, until a black-faced mountain sheep trotted out, as startled as he was by the encounter.
Rose was quiet at first, knowing nothing of hunger and perhaps trying to imagine a table without bread or fish or over-wintered potatoes. And all she had known of death was a baby born too early and buried on their property, a jam jar of wild-flowers kept by the small stone, and the kittens her father drowned in a bucket thrown to the shore for eagles.
“Did you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, finally. She silently accepted another slice of currant bread, this time with some cheese, and ate it almost without noticing.
“I had four brothers and three sisters. I was in the middle, a dreamy boy whom they could not keep from books. I am grateful to my parents for not attempting to do so. The Irish have a great respect for learning; before my time, some schoolmasters even set up classes in the shelters of hedges, before the National Schools were built and schooling was made possible for most children, Catholics and Protestants. A way was found to send me from Tullaglas to the priests for further education.”
“How did you get there?” she wondered.
“By donkey-cart, Rose. I’d never been away from home and pined for the first few weeks. We slept in long rooms, fifty boys to a room, and I could not wander the hills as I had in Delphi. I pined for the dog, the ravine behind our cabin, the sound of wind in our fuchsia bushes—as well as my moth-er’s barmbrack ...”
“What’s barmbrack, Mr. O’Malley?”
“A bread like the soda bread, Rose, but with some peel in it, sultanas, a bit of spice. But there were books at the school, and men who would understood what they meant.”
Rose nodded. Declan intuited that she was beginning to understand what a gift an education might be. She picked up the Odyssey that Declan used as a reference for his translation. She was interested to see that he had made marks in it with a pen, little scribbly marks, and had written words of his own alongside the printed words.
“I can read this word, Mr. O’Malley.” She pointed to the third word in from the beginning of the story, Muse, and said it aloud. “Muse. Muse. It’s close to Rose, and I know M from Mother. My sister told me how the vowels sound so I know this letter is u and sounds like ‘you.’”
“What a clever girl you are, Rose! And you are absolutely right. Muse is just what it is. Do you know what it means?”
She shook her head.
“The Muse is a source of inspiration for poets, a goddess who helps them to sing. This is maybe like the idea of metaphor that I explained to you. There are nine Muses, actually, and each of them is responsible for a particular kind of singing. The poet here is asking Calliope, the one who helps poets writing very long heroic poems, to help him tell the story of Odysseus. ‘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 and whose mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the deep, striving to win his own life and the return of his company.’ And throughout the poem, he asks her again and again to help him with his poem.”
He handed her the book and watched as she peered into the text, looking for more words. Loose hair swung over her cheeks, dark gold, and her brow was very serious. The schoolmaster in him determined his plan.
His farm in Delphi had been very small, the grass of two cows as they said in that area, and they had a pig, too. Chickens who roamed the haggard and ate the cabbage stalks boiled with potatoes. A rooster to strut and crow at dawn and impregnate the hens on a regular basis so there were always a few extra chickens for the pot. A dog with brown intelligent eyes and a good sense for sheep. There had once been more land available to the O’Malley family, partly through leases and partly according to the ancient run-dale system which allocated tillage and forage in a fair way to those in the townland. The Famine changed the system and changed the availability of land, both to lease and to own, as the local landlords either went bankrupt or increased their holdings.
The house had been inherited from Declan’s parents, the usual pattern of succession of eldest son interrupted as two brothers had gone to Australia and two to the Western Front, dying on the fields of Ypres. (One sister married and two went to the nuns at Montrath.) It was a typical cabin of the country style—a kitchen, small scullery in the south porch, and two large fireplaces, one in the kitchen with a settle bed alongside and one in the west room where the elder O’Malleys had lived after Eilis and Declan married. The girls slept in a loft while their grandparents were alive, and after their passing Declan and Eilis moved into the vacated west room for its privacy, the girls moving down to the small back bedroom. A pig shed and cow byre were off the gable end. The turf shed was opposite the door, and there was a shed for tools and small pieces of equipment necessary to the keeping of a farm. The farm’s work seldom varied. For Eilis, it was washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, making butter on Thursdays, a trip to the village market on Fridays with that butter imprinted with her mark—a stalk of wheat—and wrapped in greaseproof paper, along with extra eggs. Bread was baked daily, using the soured milk or else buttermilk on butter days, with soda to make a light crumb. Declan had the care of the beasts, apart from milking, which the girls took turns doing; he cut the meagre hay of the meadow and prepared the ground for potatoes, although the entire family planted them and harvested them. The family also helped to cut turf, foot it, and stack it. They were busy and worked hard, but they did not want for anything. Grainne had her harp, which sweetened the long winter evenings. There was a deal table that held the lamp for the kitchen, and on winter nights Declan would sit up late, reading, while the women of the house slept under quilts Eilis had pieced together. Chores were always there for the doing in seasons with light after the tea, but in winter he tried to renew his Latin and read again of the doings of Aeneas, the strange wonders of Pliny.
It was a breezy morning, and Declan called Argos, walked through the bush to the canoe. It was drying out on the rocky bluff, helped by wind and open sky. Gulls wheeled in the air and dropped to pluck stranded fish, for the tide was out, leaving an expanse of mud, and rivulets of fresh water from the feeder creeks trickled out to meet the sea. Steam was rising as the sun warmed the mud flats and the atmosphere was otherworldly, huge trees dark in the background and the white birds swooping and calling. Declan examined the canoe, brushing off dried moss and lichen, and ran his fingers along the decoration at the prow. He could see how traces of the pigment he’d first noticed when the boys had helped him move the canoe remained in lines that had been incised. There was an eye, a ball surrounded by an ovoid socket. Black pigment had coloured