Free A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan Page A

insolvencybut still ate regularly, kept good horses who ate precious grains, and sent their children to fine schools. Human dignity was reduced to the lowest possible denominator as cows were bled for the sustenance their blood provided, people fed on grass and the herbs of the fields, fevers raged through the shelters constructed over ditches after the cabins had been tumbled by bailiffs and soldiers, and entire families died with no one to bury or mourn them or keep the dogs from their bodies. Afterwards, people carried the Famine with them like a sacred object, a prayer to protect them against such tragedy again. Declan told Rose what a sad thing it was to come upon the remains of the cabins, roofless, surrounded by thistles, cleansed by decades of wind. Sorrow attached itself to the stones, to the abandoned thresholds, made a syllabary of the grass stalks. Wind said the names quietly—O’Leary, Mannion, Murphy, Cronin. Sometimes a noise would issue from one of the ruined cabins and the young Declan would wait, trembling, until a black-faced mountain sheep trotted out, as startled as he was by the encounter.
    Rose was quiet at first, knowing nothing of hunger and perhaps trying to imagine a table without bread or fish or over-wintered potatoes. And all she had known of death was a baby born too early and buried on their property, a jam jar of wild-flowers kept by the small stone, and the kittens her father drowned in a bucket thrown to the shore for eagles.
    â€œDid you have brothers and sisters?” she asked, finally. She silently accepted another slice of currant bread, this time with some cheese, and ate it almost without noticing.
    â€œI had four brothers and three sisters. I was in the middle, a dreamy boy whom they could not keep from books. I am grateful to my parents for not attempting to do so. The Irish have a great respect for learning; before my time, some schoolmasters even set up classes in the shelters of hedges,before the National Schools were built and schooling was made possible for most children, Catholics and Protestants. A way was found to send me from Tullaglas to the priests for further education.”
    â€œHow did you get there?” she wondered.
    â€œBy donkey-cart, Rose. I’d never been away from home and pined for the first few weeks. We slept in long rooms, fifty boys to a room, and I could not wander the hills as I had in Delphi. I pined for the dog, the ravine behind our cabin, the sound of wind in our fuchsia bushes—as well as my moth-er’s barmbrack ...”
    â€œWhat’s barmbrack, Mr. O’Malley?”
    â€œA bread like the soda bread, Rose, but with some peel in it, sultanas, a bit of spice. 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.
    â€œI 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.’”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œThe 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 poethere is asking Calliope, the one who helps poets writing very long heroic poems, to help him tell the story of Odysseus.