in tatters, eyes scoured by the salt of constant tears. He walked most of the way to Galway and found shelter among distant relations who gave him a bed and raised the money for a passage away. Papers were arranged. He was spirited to Cork, where he was cared for by kind strangers for more than six months until the day came when he was put on a boat and given a list of names of those who would help him on the other side. It was rumoured that Michael Collins himself had opened his pockets.
He had no recollection of the voyage, apart from sickness due to the turbulent waters, the sound of vomiting and the moans of those around him. He was met in New Jersey by a cousin of his mother’s who took him to her daughter’s home. He spent weeks not rising from the bed except to find his frail way to the toilet. He would not have the curtain drawn, would not leave the room to enter into the lively discourse of the family, his own kin. He kept a blanket pulled up to his shoulders and slept; when he woke, he would shake with despair until he tired himself enough to sleep. Broth was brought to him, little cakes, mugs of tea. The nightmares were dreadful. He imagined everything that must have happened while he lay in the farm yard, unconscious from the beating. His daughters screamed from windows, Eilis called for him until she was hoarse from the strain and the smoke. The pig ran from the yard, the bristles on its back carrying flames like the coming of angels.
One morning he woke and told the family that he wanted to go to the West Coast and what was the most economical way to get there? On a different ocean he wouldn’t be kept awake by the distant crooning of water that knew everything that happened to him, the undertow muttering of murder, of grief, a sky that had watched impassively, pierced by late stars, while his daughters burned. A train, long passages of darkness, pauses in dirty cities, mornings crossing plains that stretched out from the tracks like golden water, then arrival in a jaunty town on the coast. In a library, he’d studied a globe, running his finger up the line that was the Pacific coast, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his blind finger had found the Sechelt Peninsula, north of Vancouver. Checking maps, he discovered a tiny community nestled in one of the bays. He’d travelled up on a boat with crates of seed oysters that rested in the cool darkness of the boat’s hold; they were attended by a boy who kept lowering a bucket into the ocean to dampen the sacking that covered the wooden boxes. No one asked questions when Declan arrived at the store on the long-legged pilings but directed him to the Neils, who had an empty cabin. When he said he had no means to get there, he was given a skiff that had belonged to a man lost on the fields of France and told he could pay a few dollars for it later if he was able.
“What is that white flower, like wild garlic, or maybe a lily, that grows on the dry bluff?” Declan asked Mrs. Neil. He had been working on a passage from the poem and had come to the lines where Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades. He puzzled over the lines, wondering how to find words for the sadness and anger in Achilles.
And reading ahead, he had come to the lines where Achilles strides off across the fields of asphodel. He remembered the priest, the one who had been to Greece, telling the class that asphodel was known as the food of the dead. It was a lily, and bulbs of it would be planted near tombs. A white flower, as befits the pale skin of the dead.
She was peeling potatoes on a bench by her door, her apron covered with curls of brown skin, which she then flung to the hens. Eilis had done this, too, on days when the sun would lure a woman from her kitchen to the outdoors. Declan was holding the milk jug but wanted to prolong the moment, to watch a handsome woman’s hands deftly scrape a knife across the surface of a potato without having to look. A tendril of brown hair had loosened itself from her bun and graced the side of her face.
“Was it growing among other plants? Blue-flowered ones I’m thinking of in particular.”
He remembered that it had been. And she told him it was the death camas, to be avoided. The blue ones, she said, were also camas and the Native people ate the bulbs that produced them, drying huge quantities of them. But the white ones were poisonous, sheep each year were lost to them.
“Two small bulbs of it, Mr. O’Malley, contain enough of the poison to kill a person. As for the sheep, I’ve no idea of how many it would take. Their stomachs are certainly more resilient than our own!”
So not unlike asphodel then, he thought—a plant echoing the pallor of Achilles. He couldn’t remember poisonous plants in his own childhood or with Eilis raising their girls. Mushrooms, certainly. There were some they collected for the table—the mushroom called St. George and field mushrooms which they had with their breakfast sometimes when the person up early to milk the cow found scatterings of them in the pasture—but mostly they were to be avoided: the red ones with white warty blotches that could be used to kill flies, tiny parasols that grew in the fields among the tasty ones and which paralyzed at a touch to the tongue, or so it was rumoured. He didn’t remember flowers, though, had no memory of those that might have killed a person or animal.
Back from the Neils’ with a pan of potatoes to use for seed, he mused about what he had learned. I have put the canoe in a field of deadly flowers, he thought. Then, moving the poem aside, he took out his fishing gear to polish his spoons.
Chapter Four
Rose was at the door. It was late May, and the sun was very warm. Leaves were every shade of green on the trees overhanging the creek, thimbleberries were nearing the end of their blossoming, and the bay was filled with water birds and their young—mergansers, geese, a single loon, golden-eye. There was a hum of industry in the air, of birds at the work of feeding, boats in the far water, a man shouting at the team of horses pulling a plough through the fields of a farm nearly half a mile away.
“Rose, come in. I’ve just made bread and am about to cut it. Would ye like to try a wedge?”
She smiled and nodded, putting the milk down on the table. She took the bread he offered, dotted with currants and spread liberally with her mother’s butter. Declan watched her take small bites, a few crumbs lingering on her mouth. She pronounced it delicious.
“Have ye come for a story?” Declan asked. Rose had begun to visit him often, bringing the milk or messages from her mother, the occasional letter after a trip had been made to the store. He liked her obvious pleasure when he opened Tales of Ancient Greece or else recounted the part of the Odyssey he was working on when she arrived. Stories made her eyes glow, made her talkative, responding with an account of a boat trip to Nelson Island in a storm or the time her father came home from a logging camp up past Minstel Island with wolf cubs in his skiff, one of them going on to become the mother of the mother of Argos. Declan noted how she liked to hold the books, too, and how she would examine the pages. Sometimes she would announce she had found a certain letter and once her name tucked into a paragraph about flowers, but mostly Declan thought the markings must look the castings of lugworms on the sand looked to him; he knew what they were but not the why and the how of them. Whether they were marks simply of passing or a trail to discover and follow.
“Mr. O’Malley, would you tell something about Ireland, where you come from?”
The simplicity of her request pierced his heart like a flint. He felt the pain of it, couldn’t breathe for a moment. Ireland. He could smell the Irish earth he had shovelled over the pine boxes with his potato spade, rich and boggy. Sprays of cowslips, wood sorrel and gorse, carefully arranged on the mound. He closed his eyes to take his bearings, his head spinning with memories like a compass in the presence of a disconcerting metal. When he opened them, Rose was sitting at the table still, eating her soda bread and butter, waiting for him to begin. So he did.
He told her about the area where he’d been
