Shannon (12 page)

Many loathed this war: Joe O'Sullivan, for instance, refused to take sides. But he knew its rules, and he'd feared for Robert after Eddie Dargan's death. That was why he had made Robert hide in the hollow field; innocent men were getting shot on sight by both sides.

As for Robert himself, Dr. Greenberg and his colleagues might have made the judgment that somewhere in the recesses of Robert's mind their patient had grasped some of this. That might have explained why he had attacked Joe: frustration, incomprehension, and fear, a classic trigger for recurring shell shock. Part of the original ailment came from bewilderment at the very threat of carnage and death.

Now in Limerick, Robert was bewildered again, stung by the sights that had led him into shock in the first place: soldiers everywhere, rifles pointing, two officers with handguns ten feet from his head—his eyes blurred at the sight of their uniforms.

And he knew not why these guns were aimed. Nobody had explained Edward Dargan's death, because in real terms the civil war had not yet directly begun. Ireland itself had been watching and asking, “Is this a war or isn't it?” Standoffs had continued for months, as each side maneuvered for control.

Research— even from the United States— would easily have revealed the situation. A general election to appoint the first new government, bombs and gunfire in the streets of Dublin— these events had made the American front pages. And although Sevovicz could be forgiven for not having this knowledge, His Eminence Cardinal O'Connell, with his Irish connections, knew the news from Ireland full well. But nobody postponed Robert's travels.

Robert himself had had no chance to prepare. He had not yet begun to read again; also, some of the major news had broken while he was sailing over. Therefore he had had no idea that he was headed for a country alive with strife. He had not only landed in it, he was at that moment climbing deeper into the hotbed, because the Irregulars were pitching to control Limerick City, gateway to the south and the west.

The world of the Irish republicans had turned upside down. Michael Collins, their hero and formerly their leader, had become their greatest foe. Chief of staff of the new army, he issued ultimatums. Being from the south himself, Collins knew what to expect there, and he mustered troops to Limerick even before they were needed. Hence the boatload of
soldiers firing bullets into the river's banks; hence the truckloads of troops and their officers in Limerick. By the time Robert arrived, the city was jangling and on edge.

“Do you fellas have wives?” Maeve MacNulty said. “Women love a uniform.”

The officers laughed. Neither man looked at Robert; they included him in the permission they gave her to pass, and waved her on. Robert tried to quell his shivers.

Minutes later she drove into a square as lean and ordered as elegance itself. Over the front door of each tall house arched a pretty fanlight; long windows caught the sun.

They climbed high steps and knocked on one of the beautiful doors.

“Sheila Neary's the best cook in the city,” Miss Maeve MacNulty said as the door opened. A woman appeared; her thin mouth drew a crooked line like a gash. “Sheila, I brought a man for you. He has lovely manners.”

Sheila Neary wore a heliotrope scarf at the neck of a black dress.

“We were at school together,” said Maeve MacNulty to Robert. “I was the wild one, so you're safe here.”

Sheila Neary of the thin mouth looked Robert up and down, not unpleasantly.

“Sheila's husband ran off and left her, and then he died of yellow fever, didn't he, Sheila?”

“He died too quickly,” said Sheila.

“Yes, he should have had a lingering death,” said Maeve.

“In pain,” said Sheila.

“In bad pain,” said Maeve.

Standing on the ornate tiled floor in the hallway beside the tall green plant in the jade pot, Maeve MacNulty looked at Sheila Neary with a conspirator's understanding.

“I think this man'll be glad to sit down for a while.” Then she said, “Sheila, I have to go. I have a fellow waiting for me in William Street.”

“We can't all say that,” said Sheila Neary.

W
hen the door closed, a housekeeper appeared. “Will I make tea, ma'am?”

Sheila nodded and led Robert in. A tall drawing room glowed with portraits and lace. She walked him around; she walked and talked slowly and kept her tone quiet. This ancestor had made millions, that one had sailed a famous yacht; judging from the portraits alone, the Nearys had had wealth and clout. Her parents had owned a large farm on the outskirts of the city in Dooradoyle, which supplied the city's milk. Sheila Neary eyed Robert all the time; when she could do so without his noticing, she looked him up, down, and sideways, assessing him.

The housekeeper came back with tea.

“Do you take sugar, Father?” Sheila asked.

“Please call me Robert.”

“I'll compromise: Father Robert. And, Father Robert, I'll be the only person you'll meet in Ireland who has no family connections at all in America.”

He nodded.

“My mother has two cousins in Phoenix, but I've no relations there myself.”

Robert blinked, because she spoke without irony. In the past he would have laughed and asked the obvious question, but laughter had not yet come to stay. All the medical evidence suggested that it would be the last faculty to return.

“And, Father Robert, is it your name that brings you to the river?” she asked.

He nodded again.

“I can understand that,” she said. “And isn't the Shannon a great river? Where would we be without it?”

In the spring of 1918, Father Robert Shannon shook “Uncle Sam's right hand”—he volunteered for chaplaincy of forces and joined the United States Marines in France. As Captain Shannon he met them ten miles west of the Marne River valley. These thousands of men had been waiting long weeks for action, any action. He sat with them, he marched with them, he hung around and talked, waiting for orders and transport.

Other than at a ball game he had never seen so many men in one place— rows and rows of fit shining troops, all in their twenties or so. He never deviated from the first thought that came to him as he looked at them:
This doesn't make sense. They should be at work, at school, at their benches and desks.

A chaplain's rank gave him no power. He listened when officers spoke; he answered when asked a question. He met General Harbord briefly. He shook hands with Major Wise. Spiritual care— that was his job, that and, as he would discover, leading the management of the dead. As he moved east with the lines he spoke to as many men as he could. With informed attention he identified the medics; they would be his vital colleagues.

The woman they called the Irish nurse, Ellie Kennedy, led him into that world. She, a Catholic, knew the link between wounded and priest. He met her first one night of fog, in a field hospital west of Bouresches. Some troops had already been there for more than ten days, and others were drifting in. She was busy but not crucially so— and everybody wanted her near.

Captain Shannon introduced himself.

“I heard you were arriving,” she said, “but I thought you'd be different.”

“Different?”

“Long and flowing,” she said.

He looked puzzled.

“We've a river named after you,” she said.

Now he laughed. “Are you actually from Ireland?”

“I was. Well, I suppose I still am. If you're a monkey you're always from a tree.”

Captain Robert Shannon sat down and began to tell the Irish nurse of his childhood love for her country. He would have enthralled a stadium with his passion and his pride.

“To you it's home, Nurse— but to me it's a place of dreams. I know all the old stories; I've heard of Finn MacCool and Deirdre of the Sorrows.”

“We've a lot like her still,” said Nurse Kennedy. “And they're always willing to tell you their troubles.”

He told her how, as a boy he read stories of Ireland more than he read about soldiers or cowboys. “I had pictures of old castles and scenes with boatmen. We used to have a picture of the river hanging in our hall.
The Falls of Doonass,
it was called. Where's Doonass, Nurse?”

“I don't know. Somewhere on the Shannon.”

“Hence the falls?”

“You're quick, Captain.”

“What's the river like?”

She said, “I used to see it a lot. It's very often silver.”

“Silver? But that's how I've always imagined it! And where it rises up in the north; what's it called? The Shannon Pot.”

“Did you ever hear such a bad name for such a great place?” she said.

“I used to dream of seeing it,” he said. “I still have dreams about Ireland.”

“What d'you think Ireland's like, Captain? Is it full of little green men of mischief, or is it haunted and full of old ghosts, or is it very green and rainy?”

He knew she was playing with him, but he still reflected. “All three, I hope. But I'll take
very green and rainy.
And when the sun comes out, the drops of rain look like diamonds on the leaves. And there are ghosts on the hills and little green men under the bushes.”

Ellie Kennedy laughed. “It
is
very green, Captain, but that's because it
rains a lot. And it's not the ghosts on the hills that we worry about, it's the fellows coming down from the hills who'd steal the milk out of your tea and come back for the sugar.”

He asked her whether she'd heard a lot of fairy tales. She said, “Yes, but not the kind you'd think.”

When he seemed baffled, she explained.

“My father's a very generous man. A big, big heart. People borrow money off him all the time and they have all kinds of excuses. One man told him he needed the hundred he was borrowing to buy his uncle a new wooden leg. My mother asked was the leg hollow for keeping drink in it. She calls these excuses
the fairy tales of Ireland”

Robert asked, “Did you hear many tales when you were growing up?”

“No. Mostly jokes.”

“Tell me a joke from Ireland.”

Nurse Kennedy stopped and thought. “My father tells a story of two drunks going from Boyle to Carrick-on-Shannon one night and they're walking. They don't know how long it'll take them, and they stop somebody and ask, ‘How far is it to Carrick-on-Shannon?’ and they're told ‘Ten miles.’ And one says to the other, ‘Well, that's only five miles each.’ “

Their next meetings had no jokes, and not long after that he wouldn't have known a joke if she told one. But in her he had met his first living witness to the river of his dreams.

Evening came to Limerick, and Sheila Neary quartered Robert well. His room had a desk and a great leather chair. Books lined the walls. An ancestor in an oval frame hung over the fireplace. Robert sat by fine long windows and looked out on a fine Georgian square. Shadows gathered in the park.

The house had fallen still. As the last tremors of the military left him he calmed right down. Now and again he heard a distant
clip-clop
of some late hooves, a rhythm of further peace. And the silence of the child, Miranda— somehow it still reached him, and instead of disturbing him he felt a comradeship with it. He dozed, was awakened by the smell of cooking, and presently Sheila Neary knocked at his door.

By gesture in the dining room he apologized for the unsuitability of his clothing. She waved a dismissive hand and served lamb with mint
sauce. Then she began to talk, and for the next two hours— as was her style— Sheila Neary spoke only of herself. He, in any case, had said fewer than a dozen words.

She had changed her clothes; she wore a dinner dress of emerald green with deeper green beading at the modest neckline. Her right hand bore rings, not her left. When she saw Robert glancing at them, she explained.

“I took off my wedding rings when my husband left me. And when he died, I put them back on. But I put them on my right hand, so that I was a kind of widow but not a widow.”

She took the rings off her right hand and transferred them to her left. Head to one side she studied them, turning her hand to the light. She looked at the rings for a long time, then returned them to her right hand.

“I don't see myself as a widow, I see myself as deserted, an abandoned woman.”

Her voice hit a droning note.

“I'm older than I look, and I have two grown children. They're married and I told them not to marry; they can expect no good of it. My husband abandoned me when they were small, and they're now in their twenties. They live near me, and every time I see them, I remind them what an awful man their father was. I made sure”—her voice reached for triumph—”that he never saw them again. He lived very near, but they never saw him. I wouldn't let them.”

Despite the edge in her tone and her tale, the food touched Robert's mood; the meat was superbly fresh and the mint sauce piqued the back of his throat. Although he wished he had a wider choice of clothing, he felt better, more aware, than he had for some time. He looked carefully at Sheila Neary and tried to gather and keep every sentence she made.

When she paused in her monologue of martyrdom, Robert asked, “When did your husband leave you?”