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

to find the equivalent.
Now when they had cleaned all the stains
... Something like that, or would you specify garments as the object?became
They spread them out in an orderly way
(but was that felicitous enough? No, he would have to think about it some more)
on the stones of the shore
. And working over the text, he realized that he was smelling the fresh linen on his bed, having seen Mrs. Neil and young Rose taking the sheets from the line where the wind and sun had dried them clean. How lovely that a moment in a life could echo this richer poetry, he thought, and was taken back to Delphi where Eilis and the girls had carefully taken up the clean sheets from the gorse bushes that served as their drying rack, had moved in and out of the folding dance, fingers to fingers as they brought the edges together and smoothed the lengths of white linen.
    And hearing the echo and its answer, the smell of clean linen, feminine arms holding cloth in Delphi, on the islands of ancient Greece, in the here and now on Oyster Bay, he knew for a moment a kind of joy in the remembering. Not this time the ache of all his previous memories of home, but a brief, piercing joy for the poetry of linen and women.

Chapter Two
    The tide had come in and Declan was rowing his skiff over the moving water. It was early, the sky not fully lit, and quiet, with only the muttering of ducks in the reeds and the far-off moans of a cow waiting to be milked. Argos was standing in the prow of the skiff, her nose working the air.
    He was rowing to the little community around the point to buy some provisions and to collect what mail might be waiting for him there. He had written away to a bookseller in Vancouver for an English translation of the
Odyssey
and a Greek grammar and lexicon, finding his project compelling enough that he wanted to make a good job of it. A student at the Bundorragha school had found his Greek text and a sheaf of papers containing his musings and attempts at versions of lines and had found a way to send them to Declan’s sister. She in turn had sent them on to him. At first he had had no idea of what to do with them.

    He supposed at one time he had hoped to use them as a teaching tool, having the occasional bright light who needed something beyond what the standard curricula could offer, supposed that there might have been idle moments in the classroom when he had puzzled over the poem, though he could not now remember. But it was something to keep his mind active now. His Greek was rusty, and he wanted to use the English translation as a rough guide for the passages with which he had difficulty. He had never liked the version the priests had made available to students all those years ago when he was himself a young scholar. Lang, it had been, and he remembered it as prose, not poetry at all, and the wanderer spoke as an English magistrate might, or a minister of God, not as a king of Ithaka. But still it would be fine to have it at hand for making sense of the story when he got lost in the syntax, the datives and the genitives.
    A small holding came into view, tucked among apple trees. A couple sitting on the porch of the house waved to him and called out would he like a cup of coffee? He rowed in to shore and pulled his skiff up onto the shingle. The man came down to the shore to help him, introducing himself as MacIsaac. “And no need to tell me who you are, you’re the Irishman settled into the Neils’ cabin. O’Malley, isn’t it?”
    â€œAye, and ye’ve a Scottish burr yerself. I’m very pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow Gael.”
    MacIsaac told him, as they walked up to the house, that he’d come to the community twenty years earlier, having been left the little farm by an uncle who’d died a childless bachelor.
    â€œIt was an opportunity for us, Jeannie and I. We came out from Scotland as newlyweds. I worked on the docks in Vancouver but I missed a wee bit of land and this was