A Man in a Distant Field Read Free

long journey. There are English versions, I do know that, but they seem awkward to me, unsettling, as though the good parts had been taken out.”
    The woman could tell he was tiring, the day and night of trolling catching up with him. There was some warmth in the spring sun and a drone of bees in the salmonberry that might make anyone sleepy. She yawned herself. The warmth of the fire in the barrel stove made his small domain cosy, although she could smell the musty mattress and made a mental note to look out something more suitable in her attic. He rose with her as she said goodbye to him and asked did he need more milk that evening? He went to stand at the door as she walked away towards her own home and children. The tide was in, lapping at the edge of the clearing where his cabin stood, and a kingfisher screeched from a snag hanging over the creek. She smelled the smoke of his fire all the way back to her house, troubled by him but also intrigued. He was a man with mystery contained in his blue eyes, in the bag where he kept hispapers. And some terrible tragedy, too, she thought, remembering an uncle who’d wept so often after the death of his wife that people avoided him and he turned to the bottle for company. No sign of the bottle at World’s End, and it seemed it was the man himself who avoided company (he’d been invited to a gathering at the store, as well as a picnic, but never appeared), not the other way around.

    You could never forget. Could you? And the memory was heavy baggage to be carried with you, slung over your shoulder like a hundredweight sack of potatoes, to be weighed and considered in every activity of your day. To be among the living when your loved ones were so brutally removed to the world of the dead ... And there could not be a God, no, never, to have let such a thing happen to innocent girls, to Eilis who never harmed a soul but who carried mugs of hot broth to the hungry stopping at houses to ask for a crust, a farthing. And his a modest salary, not overly much to carry them all, but with the potatoes they grew, and their chickens, and the butter Eilis made, sure there was food for the table, and to share, and the occasional penny for the girls to take to the shop for a sweet ...
    Odysseus didn’t know that the goddess Athene was plotting, as he slept, a plan to fill the head of a young girl with him, with the idea of him, as a way to get him a boat for the voyage home. Declan O’Malley pondered this for a minute or two andmade some scratches on his paper. It was unsettling to think of dreams as something a goddess had planted in your head like seeds, with a particularly outcome in mind. When he dreamed of his family, when those images came with all their sorrow and pain, he tried to find a way to see the good in such dreaming. In one way, it made him less lonely because he could remember he had been Eilis’s beloved, she had told him so in as many words, stroking his face with her long fingers in the early days of their courtship when he had walked out with her on balmy evenings where the boreen turned beyond her family’s farm and kissed her in the lea of a hedge. He would remember with pleasure for a moment. But so soon, too soon, he would be aswim in the pain of it. No God, no, but goddesses at work on the sleeping? It was a thought.

    The thing was to find the accurate way of saying it. Declan was discovering that Greek was so much a language of its place and time—not that he had ever seen the place, but one of the priests at school had travelled there as a young man and had been changed forever by the experience. He described the rocky mountains, clothed in sharp-scented herbs, the stark white temples with columns lying across the ground like fallen gods. Thorny bushes and lemon groves sloping down to a glittering sea. There had been olive trees, he said, alive at the time of Jesus, and their silvery leaves rustled in the wind like dry music. He had