A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan Page B

tilted their heads and looked down at him. “Here, lads,” he called, and tossed shreds of salmon skin down the shore. The birds kept looking at him, a steady gaze from each pair of eyes. He moved down the shore with his mug of water and busied himself washing his hands in the sea. When he looked up, one of the ravens was tugging at the skin he’d thrown. It would stop, tilt its head back to swallow, and then, holding the skin in place against the pebbles, it would tear off another morsel. After a few minutes of this, it hopped along the beach a little and the second raven glided down from the tree and took its turn to tug and tear at the skin. Their feathers in sunlight were blue-black and shining. Declan watched them for a time and then returned to his cabin to continue his work.

    The days passed, whole weeks passed, with ravens visiting, the tides going out and coming in, the occasional fish leaping right outside his cabin. There was not a pattern to the days, exactly, but Declan tried to make sure that work was done on the poem and that Rose got as much help with her reading as he was able to give. She began to blossom as a reader, needing help less and less as they worked through the passages. It was as though a framework had been in place, provided by her mother’s scanty lessons and Rose’s natural intelligence, and the framework was strong enough, and true, for what it was to hold. He could not rid himself of a small sour anger, though, when he’d see the boat leaving in the morning to take the other Neil children to school, the father grimly rowing them around to the other side of the harbour, Tom in the bow with the lines. Declan determined to make Rose’s lessons as useful as he could, thinking of questions about geography and mathematics to fit into their reading. Sketch-maps of the Mediterranean on paper or in the sand, simple scales to work out relative distances, even a chart to plot the family connections of the House of Atreus to make the war that Odysseus was returning from something of a reality across the centuries. Rose was hungry for all of it.
    On his next visit to the canoe, Declan took his copy of the
Odyssey
to read. He was working on the passages where Odysseus’s men had angered the gods by feasting on the cattle of Hyperion; Zeus sent a storm to destroy them all. Only Odysseus survived, riding the spar of his ship to the island of Calypso where he was cared for and loved by the goddess. So many storms in the poem! He imagined waters around Greece to be constantly turbulent, various forces at work to make life difficult for sailors: Sirens luring boats to grief on the rocks; the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the one a monster with many arms and the other a whirlpool thatsucked boats down to a watery grave. Homer was a poet who had paid attention to what men told him of their sea adventures, thought Declan, and his poem made particularly vivid the storms at sea. Odysseus had clung to a fig tree overhanging Charybdis, waiting for parts of his ruined ship to appear in the spume; he used a spar as a canoe, his arms as oars, to take him to Ogygia and Calypso.

    Idly, Declan dangled his own arms outside the canoe. They would make terrible oars, he decided, barely reaching into what would be water. Grasses tickled his forearms. In Ireland, oars on boats were very long, their long blades reaching deep to propel the currach forward. They were fitted over thole-pins on the gunwales of the craft, and the pins were kept damp so that the oars didn’t squeak. He had brass oarlocks on his own skiff, little windows on the marine world. Declan would use them to sight a headland or the bobbing heads of kelp where fish might be found. Leaning back, he lowered himself down into the canoe, one hand clutching a tuft of ripe grass. No oarlock to view the view, just the tiny holes drilled in the bottom to drain away rain. Down he slid, and farther down to the bilge