A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan

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.

    â€œThe 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 wouldbecome 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