hate going in there because it’s mostly underground and there are spiderwebs and even rats sometimes. But my sister took a candle and we kept together. We were leaning into the potato bin when we heard this awful sound, like sticks clattering, and my sister held up the candle. There was a skeleton waving its arms around! We screamed and dropped the potatoes and the candle, and we ran as fast as we could around to the kitchen door.”
“Ah, ye poor lasses. Ye’d have been terrified, of course!” Closing his own eyes for moment, he saw the skeleton rise up, its bones clattering.
“My sister was screaming and crying—my mother says she’s nervy—and I was afraid that the skeleton would follow us. But then my dad was standing in the doorway, laughing, and he almost never laughs. My mother calmed my sister down, and when my father stopped laughing he told us that he’d fastened strings to the canoe skeleton’s arm bones and then ran the strings up into his bedroom, which is right above the root cellar. So he could jiggle the arms by pulling the strings. My sister had bad dreams for weeks—I know because we sleep in the same bed—and she wouldn’t speak to my father, which made him really mad. My mother was mad at him too, but then he hit Martha and told her to snap out of it so we tried to forget.”
What a brute the man was, thought Declan, to frighten his daughters so. He remembered the bruises on Rose’s arms as he watched her digging for clams and folding the sheets. Aloud, he told her that the story was an interesting one and she’d told it well. He could see what she’d described, and he was sorry to hear that her sister had been so troubled by the event. His eyes must have revealed his distaste for a man who would strike a child because Rose quickly responded.
“She’s fine now, sir, and my father didn’t really hit her hard, and later he brought her a moonsnail shell for her collection, without a single chip off it, but don’t you see that the stories are the same in a way?”
“Oh, aye. And in this story I’m working on, there’s a woman, ye might call her a witch more rightly, who turns some men into pigs who then cry human tears. Our man Odysseus is saved from her magic by carrying a little sprig of wild onion within his clothing. So pigs, and the ground opening, and a king coming up from under the earth, from Greece to this Pacific. And indeed I’d like to see that canoe one day, if ye’d show me.”
Rose nodded. “I’d better get back, Mr. O’Malley, or my mum will worry. Thank you for the tea and the story.”
“They are a perfect pair, Rose, I’m thinking. Will ye come again?” He suddenly found himself hoping she would say yes.
“I’d love to. I’m sure my mum won’t mind. Goodbye.”
Declan watched Rose walk over the bluff with its crown of arbutus and disappear into a fringe of young cedars. He thought how nice it was to have a young girl to talk to, a girl the age his own had been, one foot in childhood and one in the rich sea of womanhood, uncertain of its tides and dangers. What was it that Nausikaa had been called in the poem? Maiden of the white arms ... Not an epithet for a child, exactly, and yet the princess cavorted with her maids at the river, throwing a ball in a carefree game until it landed in a stream, which woke the naked Odysseus. That was the part he would look at again.
Chapter Three
He had asked Rose to take him to see the canoe. The idea of it, buried with its chief, had been in his mind ever since he’d first heard the story.
They walked up past the farmstead to dense brush—salal, mostly, but trailing bramble and brittle huckleberry made the going difficult. Rose led the way and pushed through the brush until she was stopped short by the bulky shape of the canoe. Declan had never seen anything like it. It looked to have been carved from a single tree and had an elegant prow, shapely, but now rotting and split. When Declan reached to touch the side of the canoe, a little of the side came away like fragile 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.
“The 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 would become 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 odour at the back of rot, a stronger reek that hit you like the back end of a skunk or the plants with the golden lanterns that smelled exactly the same. He went back to the bush again, but it was hard to get a sense of the canoe’s proportions with the tangle of plants all around it. Going a little further to try to find a place from which he could see it entire, he came upon a hillock, covered with pale mosses and ringed with pines. It overlooked the bay, falling away from the clearing in a steep cliff, although the way up from the bush was gradual and clear. Wildflowers grew in a splendid profusion. It would not
