A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan Page B

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 ofOdysseus, 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 canoe perched on its bluff, hoping it would dry out in the sunlight, and made his way through the brush to his cabin, his dog at his heels like a shadow. He could smell the rotting cedar on his hands and body, not an unpleasant odour but, like the forest, living and dead at the same time. There were logs he would come upon, big fellas like the one that had become the canoe, fallen in the dense woods. Sometimes he would see new sprouts coming from the roots, while in the length of decaying log small trees were growing, and ferns, salal, tall bushes of huckleberry, weird fungus. He remembered reading in the newspaper at home an account of men discovering a fifty-foot canoe at Lurgan, in County Galway—they’d been cutting turf and had come up against an enormous length of what they first thought was bog oak. The newspaper had a grainy photograph of the canoe being carried through the streets, a dozen men holding it upside down with their heads concealed in its ancient interior. That could happen here, he imagined, though not in a bog, but a man navigating these dense forests might come up against a canoe, partly hidden by ferns, and pass it by, thinking it a fallen tree.

    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