A Man in a Distant Field by Theresa Kishkan Read Free Book Online

cloth, inhaling deeply, her eyes closed.She opened the book to the title page and ran her index finger gently over the illustration bordering the text—cherubic faces and bunches of grapes and winged fairies.
    â€œThat’s a ‘t’,” she said reverently, touching the ornate initial beginning the quote,
This is fairy gold, boy; and twill prove so
.
    â€œAye, ’tis, Rose. And can ye read any more of it?” he asked quietly.
    She shook her head and handed the book back. Taking up her mug, she sipped her tea, glancing at the papers on the table. It was very quiet in the cabin, only a droning of bees in the thimbleberry bushes outside the door to punctuate the still air. She had the look of one of his daughters when taking a pause between tasks, able to deeply relax at a moment’s notice.
    â€œWill I read one of the stories to ye, Rose?” Declan suggested, moved at the sight of her in his cabin, his books all around and her not being able to read them. Her reverence for the Cox made him want to give her something, and there was no point in sending her home with a book. Stories were all he could think to offer.
    She smiled her assent. Almost at random, he chose “The Sorrow of Demeter,” remembering incompletely the myth of the corn goddess and her young daughter.
    In the fields of Enna, in the happy island of Sicily, the beautiful Persephone was playing with the girls who lived there with her. She was the daughter of the Lady Demeter, and everyone loved them both, for Demeter was good and kind to all, and no one could be more gentle and merry than Persephone.
    Rose sighed deeply and rested her cheek against her clasped hands. Declan would learn that she loved being read to; it wasone of her favourite things. Mostly her mother was too busy, she told him, but sometimes, particularly if Rose was ill, she would sit on the bed with one of the mildewy books that she’d brought from her childhood home in Glengarry County and read a story while stroking Rose’s hair.
    She and her companions were gathering flowers from the field to make crowns for their long flowing hair. They had picked many roses and lilies and hyacinths which grew in clusters around them ...
    â€œWe do that, Mr. O’Malley! My sister taught me how to make a chain of daisies by splitting their stems with my fingernail! I’ve never tried roses, although when we pick them for Mum, they fall apart in our hands. The wild ones, I mean. And there are lilies here, too, the orange ones. Those girls are like us!”
    She was very animated, her hands touching her head as though placing a crown of wildflowers upon it, her face bright with excitement. Declan was moved to see what the telling of a story could do to a shy girl, a girl left on shore while her brothers and sister sailed off to school, a girl whose arms bloomed with someone’s anger.
    â€œTo be sure, Rose. And isn’t that the beauty of a story, that sometimes we feel as though it is our story that’s being told? But listen, now, because what happens next is not what you’d know about, I’m thinking.”
    ... the earth opened, and a chariot stood before her drawn by four coal black horses; and in the chariot there was a man with a dark and solemn face, which looked as though he could never smile, and as though he had never been happy.In a moment he got out of his chariot, seized Persephone around the waist, and put her on the seat by his side. Then he touched the horses with his whip, and they drew the chariot down into the great gulf, and the earth closed over them again.
    Rose’s face was horror-struck. “Mr. O’Malley, what happens to her? Do you really mean to say that the horses take them underground?”
    â€œAh, Rose, in these stories we are told many things. How much of it is true, well, that’s the thing we don’t know. We are told things to make us feel a certain way, to create a certain mood, to