A Man in a Distant Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

harper Carolan, planxties written in the great houses he’d visited. And loveliest of all, his “Farewell to Music,” the last thing he’d played in the house of his patroness, Mrs. McDermot Roe. Declan loved to see his daughter’s hands move across the strings of the harp, urging such beautiful harmonies from them. He imagined the bones of her hands growing strong with the secrets of the music within them. And now, her hands given to worms in the cursed soil of Ireland. He shook his head violently to rid it of her memory and left the girl in her tiny cove, pulling a claw of wood through the sand.
    Back at World’s End, he busied himself with shucking the oysters. There was a way of putting your knife between the lips of the shell and levering until the tight grip suddenly loosened and you could scoop out the meat of the oyster. It did not look appetizing at all, sitting wet in the frilly shell. But he’d been told to heat some milk in a saucepan with a piece of butter (Mrs. Neil had given him a pat) and some of the wild onions that grew in his field and then to add the oysters whole, just heating them through. Doing so, he understood what Mrs. Neil had meant when she told him the stew was for her the very essence of the ocean. You needed no salt, the oysters had a briny taste, like clean seaweed. And the milk provided a mild broth once flavoured with the oyster’s own juice and the pleasant savouriness of the onions. He drank a bowl, and then another. It was like a tonic.

    The tide was nearly to the shingle now and a steam was rising over the top of the water. It took Declan a few minutes to figure out why: the cool water moving over hot mud. Birds were everywhere, and on the far side of the bay he could see something black stirring by the shore. Argos, too, had got wind of whatever it was and began to bark excitedly. The black shape stopped and looked in their direction. Declan could see it was a bear. He was thrilled. He’d heard about bears, had been warned about leaving his food outside, particularly in the autumn when the creek was full of salmon, but he hadn’t seen one until now. And yet it fulfilled every idea he had of bear. That rounded back, the broad shoulders, the way it swayed its head from side to side as it tried to figure them out on their bit of shore. After a few minutes of this, it turned and lumbered into the woods. Even from their distance across the bay, they could hear it moving in the dense brush.
    â€œI’d better wash ye so, Argos, or it’s bait ye’ll be for that bear, smelling as ye do of rotten fish. Come on, lass, and we’ll soon have ye fresh.”
    He took the pup and submerged her in the quick water of the creek. It was icy to his hands, and Argos yelped and squealed. He held her with one firm hand and quickly washed her fur with the other, taking care to ruffle the shoulders, which had taken most of the contact with the fish. Then he rubbed her down with a sack and poured a little of the oyster broth into her pan. She whimpered as she approached her meal, fearful of some other indignity, but soon was lapping up the good juice. When she had finished, she sighed deeply and curled up on her sack of bracken, falling into one of her immediate and profound sleeps.

    The girl was at his door again in the same skimpy dress, telling him that her mother had located a better mattress for him and would he come to help them carry it over the marsh to his cabin?
    He followed her lithe shape over the boardwalk and through the woods to the Neil farm. A dog, the mother of Argos he knew at a glance, came to greet them and sniffed suspiciously at her daughter, licking her face and then pushing her to the ground so she could sniff her underparts to determine where she’d been. It had not yet been long enough for her to forget her maternity although the pups had been given away. When she walked, her teats hung low still and occasional drops of milk