A clipping arrived in the mail from Galway, sent by a cousin, the crisp black letters describing an attack in a village by a group of Black and Tans, the men brought from Britain as reinforcements for the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were a hard bunch, young men returned from four years of trench warfare who had not found a place for themselves in post-war Britain. So much of their work was conducted at night—their Crossley tenders roaring up to a house and men leaping off, hammering on doors with their weapons, searching rooms while a terrified family watched. Rumours of their activities had arrived even in Delphi, and then the men themselves, a sight in their khaki uniforms with the dark hats and belts of the constabulary. The clipping described a night of drinking at the village pub and then a devastating aftermath—a house burned, two men shot, others shackled and loaded into the armoured car to be taken to a barracks where one was hung and several mutilated. The cousin’s letter asked Declan to take note of the name of the man hung—it was their own, O’Malley, Cathal O’Malley, another cousin, whom Declan remembered as a soft-eyed youth, a reader of sagas. The thought of young Cathal, grown to manhood but still a dreamer, strung from a barracks beam by rough rope, prodded by drunken thugs acting in the name of British law, made him weep with despair.
A broken man, he had walked away from his small holding with its blackened walls, its lonesome chimney, a scattering of rooks rising from the byre, the little hill of graves. He had not been able to enter the ruin, could not feel the presence of his women in the rubble and ash that was all that remained of their home. Alive, Eilis had coaxed such flowers from the soil of the yard—radiant hollyhocks, roses grown from slips given her by other women, delphiniums that drank the damp air and grew blue as the sky on a clear day. In the fullness of time, in a peaceful country, if Eilis had died before him, Declan would have had her buried in the churchyard nearby and lived out his days in the cabin they had made into their home; but the thought of lingering a moment longer than he had to on such a violated ground made him ill. The parish priest had come to talk to him, a one-eyed man who it was rumoured communicated with birds, and spoke of forgiveness, the Black and Tans’ foul hearts a result of their own time in France, their souls brutalized by the horrors of the Great War. But forgiveness was not possible, nor was revenge. The priest might have been talking to a bucket, hollow and empty.
The other house burned in the area, the big house owned by an old Anglo-Irish clan, well, that family had fled, too. The daughter and son of that household were enrolled in schools in London, their father not wanting anything to do with the country of his birth until the Troubles had been settled. He wrote angry letters to the newspapers, denouncing violence. Declan heard of these things in a haze of his own grief.
Money was pressed into his hands by well-wishers, and he was urged to make himself scarce. As if he was not scarce enough, a man alone after husbandhood and fatherhood, heart in tatters, eyes scoured by the salt of constant tears. He walked most of the way to Galway and found shelter among distant relations who gave him a bed and raised the money for a passage away. Papers were arranged. He was spirited to Cork, where he was cared for by kind strangers for more than six months until the day came when he was put on a boat and given a list of names of those who would help him on the other side. It was rumoured that Michael Collins himself had opened his pockets.
He had no recollection of the voyage, apart from sickness due to the turbulent waters, the sound of vomiting and the moans of those around him. He was met in New Jersey by a cousin of his mother’s who took him to her daughter’s home. He spent weeks not rising from the bed except to find his frail way to the toilet. He would not have the curtain drawn, would not leave the room to enter into the lively discourse of the family, his own kin. He kept a blanket pulled up to his shoulders and slept; when he woke, he would shake with despair until he tired himself enough to sleep. Broth was brought to him, little cakes, mugs of tea. The nightmares were dreadful. He imagined everything that must have happened while he lay in the farm yard, unconscious from the beating. His daughters screamed from windows, Eilis called for him until she was hoarse from the strain and the smoke. The pig ran from the yard, the bristles on its back carrying flames like the coming of angels.
One morning he woke and told the family that he wanted to go to the West Coast and what was the most economical way to get there? On a different ocean he wouldn’t be kept awake by the distant crooning of water that knew everything that happened to him, the undertow muttering of murder, of grief, a sky that had watched impassively, pierced by late stars, while his daughters burned. A train, long passages of darkness, pauses in dirty cities, mornings crossing plains that stretched out from the tracks like golden water, then arrival in a jaunty town on the coast. In a library, he’d studied a globe, running his finger up the line that was the Pacific coast, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his blind finger had found the Sechelt Peninsula, north of Vancouver. Checking maps, he discovered a tiny community nestled in one of the bays. He’d travelled up on a boat with crates of seed oysters that rested in the cool darkness of the boat’s hold; they were attended by a boy who kept lowering a bucket into the ocean to dampen the sacking that covered the wooden boxes. No one asked questions when Declan arrived at the store on the long-legged pilings but directed him to the Neils, who had an empty cabin. When he said he had no means to get there, he was given a skiff that had belonged to a man lost on the fields of France and told he could pay a few dollars for it later if he was able.
“What is that white flower, like wild garlic, or maybe a lily, that grows on the dry bluff?” Declan asked Mrs. Neil. He had been working on a passage from the poem and had come to the lines where Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades. He puzzled over the lines, wondering how to find words for the sadness and anger in Achilles.
And reading ahead, he had come to the lines where Achilles strides off across the fields of asphodel. He remembered the priest, the one who had been to Greece, telling the class that asphodel was known as the food of the dead. It was a lily, and bulbs of it would be planted near tombs. A white flower, as befits the pale skin of the dead.
She was peeling potatoes on a bench by her door, her apron covered with curls of brown skin, which she then flung to the hens. Eilis had done this, too, on days when the sun would lure a woman from her kitchen to the outdoors. Declan was holding the milk jug but wanted to prolong the moment, to watch a handsome woman’s hands deftly scrape a knife across the surface of a potato without having to look. A tendril of brown hair had loosened itself from her bun and graced the side of her face.
“Was it growing among other plants? Blue-flowered ones I’m thinking of in particular.”
He remembered that it had been. And she told him it was the death camas, to be avoided. The blue ones, she said, were also camas and the Native people ate the bulbs that produced them, drying huge quantities of them. But the white ones were poisonous, sheep each year were lost to them.
“Two small bulbs of it, Mr. O’Malley, contain enough of the poison to kill a person. As for the sheep, I’ve no idea of how many it would take. Their stomachs are certainly more