some help—and permission, of course. The Neil lads, for instance. He decided to ask their father if he might move the canoe, telling Neil he’d like to examine it and make some notes about its construction. He felt an explanation was necessary even though he didn’t know himself why he wanted to move it.
Neil was repairing a piece of machinery outside his barn. He barely looked up. “Go ahead, I’ve no use for it. I’ll get my boys to help you with it. It was a heavy bugger to drag there in the first place, and I’m thinking it’ll be waterlogged for sure by now.”
The boys accompanied Declan into the bush with several coils of rope. David, the older boy, looked to be about fifteen and was built sturdily. Tom, whom Declan had already surmised was younger than Rose by a year or two, was a slighter boy, thin legs coming out of wellingtons several sizes too large from the look of it. Dogs followed them, Argos dancing and skittering for the pleasure of being with others, and then Rose came running to the bush, wanting to see whatever it was they were going to do. Declan began to drag the vines away from the wood, pulling and loosening until the canoe was free. David wrapped a rope around the hull, knotting it securely, and then climbed the slope of the hill, stopping as he climbed to knot another length of rope to it to give him enough to take to the trunk of one of the sturdy pines. With Declan, Tom, and Rose pushing, it was a matter of winching the canoe up the slope, using the tree’s strength to take the bulk of the weight. The boys were very strong, trading positions at one point so that Tom continued the work of winching that his brother had begun, his skinny arms straining as he pulled the rope. There was a natural space for the canoe between the pines, and with Declan’s direction they managed to set it upright with the prow facing the bay. They sat on the dry moss and wiped their brows, puffing a little as the four of them looked out to Oyster Bay where a family of Canada geese swam in the eelgrass. One of the boys, David, threw a stone down, landing it in the water with a tiny splash. The geese barely paused in their feeding. Then Tom tried with a stone and missed. The dogs, who had collapsed in the moss after running up and down the slope as the canoe was winched up its face, looked up and whined a little.
“Ye’ve done a grand job, lads. Thanks very much.”
The boys nodded shyly and ran down the easy slope in their great rubber boots, Tom tripping over his feet, then righting himself and catching up with his brother before they disappeared into the bush. Rose lingered a moment longer but then followed them, dogs behind her, while Argos stayed with Declan, watching with her ears alert and a tiny moan in her throat. Perhaps she had known after all that she had been among her tribe.
Well, now what? Declan thought to himself, and then aloud to Argos. The canoe looked expectant, powerful in its upright position, although it looked precarious, too. He found some branches of fallen pine and wedged them under the canoe to keep it stable; pushing against it, he was pleased it didn’t budge. The sun was warm, and he could hear bees in the flowers that bloomed on the bluff. In his mind’s eye, he 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 of Odysseus, 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 law, made him weep with despair.
A broken man, he had walked away from his small holding with its blackened walls, its lonesome chimney, a scattering of rooks rising from the byre, the little hill of graves. He had not been able to enter the ruin, could not feel the presence of his women in the rubble and ash that was all that remained of their home. Alive, Eilis had coaxed such flowers from the soil of the yard—radiant hollyhocks, roses grown from slips given her by other women, delphiniums that drank the damp air and grew blue as the sky on a clear day. In the fullness of time, in a peaceful country, if Eilis had died before him, Declan would have had her buried in the churchyard nearby and lived out his days in the cabin they had made into their home; but the thought of lingering a moment longer than he had to on such a violated ground made him ill. The parish priest had come to talk to him, a one-eyed man who it was rumoured communicated with birds, and spoke of forgiveness, the Black and Tans’ foul hearts a result of their own time in France, their souls brutalized by the horrors of the Great War. But forgiveness was not possible, nor was revenge. The priest might have been talking to a bucket, hollow and empty.
The other house burned in the area, the big house owned by an old Anglo-Irish clan, well, that family had fled, too. The daughter and son of that household were enrolled in schools in London, their father not wanting anything to do with the country of his birth until the Troubles had been settled. He wrote angry letters to the newspapers, denouncing violence. Declan heard of these things in a haze of his own grief.
Money was pressed into his hands by well-wishers, and he was urged to make himself scarce. As if he was
