Back from the Neils’ with a pan of potatoes to use for seed, he mused about what he had learned. I have put the canoe in a field of deadly flowers, he thought. Then, moving the poem aside, he took out his fishing gear to polish his spoons.
Chapter Four
Rose was at the door. It was late May, and the sun was very warm. Leaves were every shade of green on the trees overhanging the creek, thimbleberries were nearing the end of their blossoming, and the bay was filled with water birds and their young—mergansers, geese, a single loon, golden-eye. There was a hum of industry in the air, of birds at the work of feeding, boats in the far water, a man shouting at the team of horses pulling a plough through the fields of a farm nearly half a mile away.
“Rose, come in. I’ve just made bread and am about to cut it. Would ye like to try a wedge?”
She smiled and nodded, putting the milk down on the table. She took the bread he offered, dotted with currants and spread liberally with her mother’s butter. Declan watched her take small bites, a few crumbs lingering on her mouth. She pronounced it delicious.
“Have ye come for a story?” Declan asked. Rose had begun to visit him often, bringing the milk or messages from her mother, the occasional letter after a trip had been made to the store. He liked her obvious pleasure when he opened Tales of Ancient Greece or else recounted the part of the Odyssey he was working on when she arrived. Stories made her eyes glow, made her talkative, responding with an account of a boat trip to Nelson Island in a storm or the time her father came home from a logging camp up past Minstel Island with wolf cubs in his skiff, one of them going on to become the mother of the mother of Argos. Declan noted how she liked to hold the books, too, and how she would examine the pages. Sometimes she would announce she had found a certain letter and once her name tucked into a paragraph about flowers, but mostly Declan thought the markings must look the castings of lugworms on the sand looked to him; he knew what they were but not the why and the how of them. Whether they were marks simply of passing or a trail to discover and follow.
“Mr. O’Malley, would you tell something about Ireland, where you come from?”
The simplicity of her request pierced his heart like a flint. He felt the pain of it, couldn’t breathe for a moment. Ireland. He could smell the Irish earth he had shovelled over the pine boxes with his potato spade, rich and boggy. Sprays of cowslips, wood sorrel and gorse, carefully arranged on the mound. He closed his eyes to take his bearings, his head spinning with memories like a compass in the presence of a disconcerting metal. When he opened them, Rose was sitting at the table still, eating her soda bread and butter, waiting for him to begin. So he did.
He told her about the area where he’d been born, Delphi, and how there was a temple in Greece with the same name; his Delphi had been named so by the Marquess of Sligo, who had travelled to Greece with a famous English poet, Lord Byron, and had seen the ancient temple in the bowl of mountain, which reminded him of the area where he’d built a hunting lodge. The Irish Delphi was actually not even a village at all but a townland, a collection of farms where the same families had lived for centuries. Rocky soil, stone walls defining fields, the boreens leading from one small holding to the next, from Tullaglas to Ardmor, winding along the shores of Dhulough, Fin Lough, and the Glenummera River and back into ravines pleated with rock and the odd surprising house built into the side of the hill. As a child, Declan had explored the country surrounding his family’s farm with an enthralled curiosity, returning to his hearth with questions. His parents, born Gaelic speakers who acquired English as a slightly unsavoury but necessary second language, were full of the stories of the townland and its families. Their English used a Gaelic syntax, the past being spoken of in the present, and for years he was puzzled as to whether Padraig Og was an uncle or the brother of a great-great-grandparent, whether the landlord of the area, the Marquess, whose hunting lodge provided work for some local families, was given land directly by Cromwell or was a descendant of your man. Old grudges, old loyalties—they were one and the same. If his family had had reason to shun the Joyces three generations earlier, there was no reason for the present family to speak to a contemporary Joyce.
“What’s Gaelic, Mr. O’Malley?”
“Ah, Rose, the loveliest language that ever was created, the language of the ancient Celtic people who lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and some in France and Cornwall, too. Let me think what I can say to you in it so ye’ll get an idea of its music. Well, yes, here’s a bit of poetry.
A bennáin a búiredáin, a béicedáin binn, is binn linn in cúicherán do-ní tú ‘sin glinn. Éolchaire mo mennatáin do-rala ar mo chéill— na lois isin machaire, na h-ois isin t-sléib ...”
He paused.“Do you ye like the sound of it then?”
“Oh, it’s lovely! Like music, or water. What does it mean?” Rose’s face was radiant, and she clasped her hands in front of her in delight. A girl in a shabby dress, her hair braided in two untidy ropes, green eyes alive with the poetry.
Declan thought for a minute, wanting to give her equal joy in an English version. “It means something like this, Rose. I will try to make it poetry as well. It’s from a long poem about a sort of hermit, living on his own after being a prince of Ulster and going mad in battle:
Little antlered one, little belling one,
melodious little bleater,
sweet I think the lowing
that you make in the glen.”
He stopped. “So that’s the first bit, Rose, about a deer or a young stag, I guess. And this is what follows:
Homesickness for my little dwelling
has come upon my mind,
the calves in the plain,
the deer on the moor ...”
Rose exclaimed again and clapped her hands. Declan had seen this in the past, when a girl from a mountain farm, with knowledge of sheep and turf cutting, would hear, in poetry, a chord that struck deep within her heart. He wished it could become more for them than a momentary fragment of joy in the classroom. The future held little poetry for these girls. Marriages would be arranged for some, others would enter service in a country house, some would work in the wool industry in Leenane, carding or spinning or weaving, and most would lose their bloom early with the harsh conditions that awaited them. One young woman in the nearby village had disgraced herself and her family by consorting with an English soldier and had been publicly stripped, her hair shorn, tar roughly painted onto her young body, and the feathers of geese and ducks shaken over her. Declan had known her father and knew the shame that he felt when the young woman left for England and word came back that she was carrying the child of the soldier. He hadn’t heard whether the man took her in or not. He felt such pity for the girl and wished there had been something he could have done besides making his opinion known, in the quiet way he was known for, as he had always done. Sometimes love did not strike in a seemly or proper way—having taught school for years made him alert to the sighs of a boy yearning for a strapping lass twice his size or to the sight of a shadow against a stone wall splitting in two as his presence parted an embrace between a mountain girl, shoeless and clad in homespun, and a lad from a village family.
“Have ye heard of the Famine, Rose, the potato famine in Ireland? My parents called it the Black Hunger.” Declan led the way back to the cabin, carrying a covered dish holding cheese.
She