But there were books at the school, and men who would understood what they meant.”
Rose nodded. Declan intuited that she was beginning to understand what a gift an education might be. She picked up the Odyssey that Declan used as a reference for his translation. She was interested to see that he had made marks in it with a pen, little scribbly marks, and had written words of his own alongside the printed words.
“I can read this word, Mr. O’Malley.” She pointed to the third word in from the beginning of the story, Muse, and said it aloud. “Muse. Muse. It’s close to Rose, and I know M from Mother. My sister told me how the vowels sound so I know this letter is u and sounds like ‘you.’”
“What a clever girl you are, Rose! And you are absolutely right. Muse is just what it is. Do you know what it means?”
She shook her head.
“The Muse is a source of inspiration for poets, a goddess who helps them to sing. This is maybe like the idea of metaphor that I explained to you. There are nine Muses, actually, and each of them is responsible for a particular kind of singing. The poet here is asking Calliope, the one who helps poets writing very long heroic poems, to help him tell the story of Odysseus. ‘Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy; and many were the men whose towns he saw and whose mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the deep, striving to win his own life and the return of his company.’ And throughout the poem, he asks her again and again to help him with his poem.”
He handed her the book and watched as she peered into the text, looking for more words. Loose hair swung over her cheeks, dark gold, and her brow was very serious. The schoolmaster in him determined his plan.
His farm in Delphi had been very small, the grass of two cows as they said in that area, and they had a pig, too. Chickens who roamed the haggard and ate the cabbage stalks boiled with potatoes. A rooster to strut and crow at dawn and impregnate the hens on a regular basis so there were always a few extra chickens for the pot. A dog with brown intelligent eyes and a good sense for sheep. There had once been more land available to the O’Malley family, partly through leases and partly according to the ancient run-dale system which allocated tillage and forage in a fair way to those in the townland. The Famine changed the system and changed the availability of land, both to lease and to own, as the local landlords either went bankrupt or increased their holdings.
The house had been inherited from Declan’s parents, the usual pattern of succession of eldest son interrupted as two brothers had gone to Australia and two to the Western Front, dying on the fields of Ypres. (One sister married and two went to the nuns at Montrath.) It was a typical cabin of the country style—a kitchen, small scullery in the south porch, and two large fireplaces, one in the kitchen with a settle bed alongside and one in the west room where the elder O’Malleys had lived after Eilis and Declan married. The girls slept in a loft while their grandparents were alive, and after their passing Declan and Eilis moved into the vacated west room for its privacy, the girls moving down to the small back bedroom. A pig shed and cow byre were off the gable end. The turf shed was opposite the door, and there was a shed for tools and small pieces of equipment necessary to the keeping of a farm. The farm’s work seldom varied. For Eilis, it was washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, making butter on Thursdays, a trip to the village market on Fridays with that butter imprinted with her mark—a stalk of wheat—and wrapped in greaseproof paper, along with extra eggs. Bread was baked daily, using the soured milk or else buttermilk on butter days, with soda to make a light crumb. Declan had the care of the beasts, apart from milking, which the girls took turns doing; he cut the meagre hay of the meadow and prepared the ground for potatoes, although the entire family planted them and harvested them. The family also helped to cut turf, foot it, and stack it. They were busy and worked hard, but they did not want for anything. Grainne had her harp, which sweetened the long winter evenings. There was a deal table that held the lamp for the kitchen, and on winter nights Declan would sit up late, reading, while the women of the house slept under quilts Eilis had pieced together. Chores were always there for the doing in seasons with light after the tea, but in winter he tried to renew his Latin and read again of the doings of Aeneas, the strange wonders of Pliny.
It was a breezy morning, and Declan called Argos, walked through the bush to the canoe. It was drying out on the rocky bluff, helped by wind and open sky. Gulls wheeled in the air and dropped to pluck stranded fish, for the tide was out, leaving an expanse of mud, and rivulets of fresh water from the feeder creeks trickled out to meet the sea. Steam was rising as the sun warmed the mud flats and the atmosphere was otherworldly, huge trees dark in the background and the white birds swooping and calling. Declan examined the canoe, brushing off dried moss and lichen, and ran his fingers along the decoration at the prow. He could see how traces of the pigment he’d first noticed when the boys had helped him move the canoe remained in lines that had been incised. There was an eye, a ball surrounded by an ovoid socket. Black pigment had coloured the ball. He bent to smell it but could only detect the spongy smell of decaying cedar. There was a face of some sort, a beak. He thought it must be a bird, but it was not any bird he was familiar with. He knelt in the bow of the canoe and looked out to the bay. A figure at the far side caught his eye. It was Rose, her skirts tied behind her to avoid the mud, carrying a bucket. Clams again, he supposed. Her hair was blowing in the wind. The gulls were undeterred by her presence and continued to take up fish and whatever else they found to eat in the mud. The steam blurred her image a little, softened the lines of her limbs. She must have thought she was completely alone, unobserved, because she put her bucket down on a rock and began to dance, her arms slowly swaying and her face upturned to the wind. Declan could see she was barefoot. She looked like a sea-born nymph there on the steaming mud, her long hair unbound, bending and turning to an inner music. He remembered watching his daughter Grainne bringing back the milk cow from a tiny meadow high beyond the house; she had been unaware of anyone watching and had pirouetted with her willow switch above her head like a dancer, an image he recognized from a book on the school’s small library shelf. She was lovely in the moist air, curls escaping from her plaits, a woman shadowing the girl, and remembering brought tears of such deep sadness that he covered his face with his hands.
Rose was dancing in the muddy bay like a strand of delicate seaweed, swaying and bending low. She stopped suddenly at the sound of her name being shouted from the direction of her house. It was her father’s voice, harsh and angry. Hurriedly she picked up her bucket, unknotting her skirt as she ran towards home. The slow suck of the tide coming in erased her footprints in the mud.
Declan had been wondering how to approach Mrs. Neil for permission to give Rose some lessons. When she brought the milk one morning, he invited her in for a cup of tea.
“Mrs. Neil, I am thinking it would not be a difficult thing to teach young Rose to read so. She is always looking at these books ye see around ye and I would like to do something to repay yer family for its many kindnesses. As I have told ye, I taught school in Ireland and would consider it an honour to help Rose.”
The woman regarded him gently. “There is no need to think you must repay us at all, Mr. O’Malley, but I know Rose has so enjoyed talking to you about your paperwork, and if you could spare her the time, I’ll try to make sure she comes to you. My husband ... well, he has old-fashioned ideas about girls and education. He has allowed Martha to go to school because I really did insist but somehow Rose ... oh, there’s not enough room in the boat or he wants her to help me with the laundry or some such notion. I’ve tried a little to help her, but the days are not long enough, it seems, for the work that needs doing. I would like to
