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

when we heard this awful sound, like sticks clattering, and my sister held up the candle. There was a skeleton waving its arms around! We screamed and dropped the potatoes and the candle, and we ran as fast as we could around to the kitchen door.”
    â€œAh, ye poor lasses. Ye’d have been terrified, of course!” Closing his own eyes for moment, he saw the skeleton rise up, its bones clattering.
    â€œMy sister was screaming and crying—my mother says she’s nervy—and I was afraid that the skeleton would follow us. But then my dad was standing in the doorway, laughing, and he almost never laughs. My mother calmed my sister down, and when my father stopped laughing he told us that he’d fastened strings to the canoe skeleton’s arm bones and then ran the strings up into his bedroom, which is right above the root cellar. So he could jiggle the arms by pulling the strings. My sister had bad dreams for weeks—I know because we sleep in the same bed—and she wouldn’t speak to my father, which made him really mad. My mother was mad at him too, but then he hit Martha and told her to snap out of it so we tried to forget.”
    What a brute the man was, thought Declan, to frighten his daughters so. He remembered the bruises on Rose’s arms as hewatched her digging for clams and folding the sheets. Aloud, he told her that the story was an interesting one and she’d told it well. He could see what she’d described, and he was sorry to hear that her sister had been so troubled by the event. His eyes must have revealed his distaste for a man who would strike a child because Rose quickly responded.
    â€œShe’s fine now, sir, and my father didn’t really hit her hard, and later he brought her a moonsnail shell for her collection, without a single chip off it, but don’t you see that the stories are the same in a way?”
    â€œOh, aye. And in this story I’m working on, there’s a woman, ye might call her a witch more rightly, who turns some men into pigs who then cry human tears. Our man Odysseus is saved from her magic by carrying a little sprig of wild onion within his clothing. So pigs, and the ground opening, and a king coming up from under the earth, from Greece to this Pacific. And indeed I’d like to see that canoe one day, if ye’d show me.”
    Rose nodded. “I’d better get back, Mr. O’Malley, or my mum will worry. Thank you for the tea and the story.”
    â€œThey are a perfect pair, Rose, I’m thinking. Will ye come again?” He suddenly found himself hoping she would say yes.
    â€œI’d love to. I’m sure my mum won’t mind. Goodbye.”
    Declan watched Rose walk over the bluff with its crown of arbutus and disappear into a fringe of young cedars. He thought how nice it was to have a young girl to talk to, a girl the age his own had been, one foot in childhood and one in the rich sea of womanhood, uncertain of its tides and dangers. What was it that Nausikaa had been called in the poem?
Maiden of the white arms ..
. Not an epithet for a child, exactly, and yet the princess cavorted with her maids at the river, throwing a ball in a carefree game until it landed in a stream, which woke the naked Odysseus. That was the part he would look at again.

Chapter Three
    He had asked Rose to take him to see the canoe. The idea of it, buried with its chief, had been in his mind ever since he’d first heard the story.
    They walked up past the farmstead to dense brush—salal, mostly, but trailing bramble and brittle huckleberry made the going difficult. Rose led the way and pushed through the brush until she was stopped short by the bulky shape of the canoe. Declan had never seen anything like it. It looked to have been carved from a single tree and had an elegant prow, shapely, but now rotting and split. When Declan reached to touch the side of the canoe, a little of the side came away like fragile