Shannon (17 page)

“Oh, Father, they coulda been anything. They could have been outlandish things, like—I mean, Baptists or Methodists, any of that sort of crazy thing.”

“Would Protestants have been evicted?”

“A lot were,” said the Lion. “One of the big religious persecutions in Ireland was when the Anglicans— Episcopalians, you call them— tried to drive out the real Protestants, the Presbyterians and them folk.”

“The reform churches?” said Robert. He followed this line of information as though it led to safety— the safety of once again being able to take in and retain knowledge.

“Yeh, the very thing. That's it.”

“Could the Shannons have been reform church?”

“Ah, people could be anything back then, they could be Quakers or Zulus and what did it matter in the long run? There's a Heaven and there's a Hell, and that's the deal closed.”

The Lion stood, went to a closet, and took out a bottle.

“Father, what kind of a man am I that I didn't ask you if you have a mouth on you?”

Robert said, “I—um—don't drink.”

The Lion spun as though stung.

“What? Get away with that! You don't drink? How in the name of God are you going to get yourself up through Ireland with a dry mouth on you? Eh? Eh?”

Michael the Lion filled himself a tumbler of whiskey large enough to kick-start a shore leave.

From the rear of the house came a noise and a call. “Michael?”

“Oh,” said the Lion, hiding his whiskey glass on the floor beside his chair. “That's Herself.” He called back, “We've a visitor here, so mind your language.”

A woman taller than six feet came to the door of the living room; her sandy hair, in curls tight to her head, made Robert think of a mop. She hung back, in the manner of the dreadfully shy.

“Hello.”

“What is he?” said the Lion. “You've to guess what he is.”

“Would you like a cup of tea, Father?”

“Hah! Ya see? You can't beat Herself for guessing.”

Herself disappeared. The Lion winked at Robert, reached down for his tumbler, took a champion's swig, concealed the glass again, and rubbed his hands.

“Now. Here's the thing about ancestry. When a lot of the Yanks comes over here tracing their families, they already know what they're looking for. But they don't know that they know it. Do you follow me, Father?”

The Lion rose again and reached up to a bookshelf. He took down what looked like a countinghouse ledger, a tall thick book with red marbled covers and a burgundy spine. When he had spread the ledger open on the table, he invited Robert to look.

“See, Father. Here's a Hogan family from Philadelphia that I traced two years ago. And here's the first family that I ever traced, MacCombers in Canada. They came in here one day out of the blue, and they were dripping jewels; they own forests in New Brunswick.”

The ledger had charts, family trees in colored inks, dates and accounts of sea passages, myriad names— all executed in exquisite handwriting, neat as a monk's.

“And this is what the Yanks don't know. When they find out where they came from, they're lifted up by it. They make a connection— here, I'll show ya.”

He thumbed the great leaves of the ledger as reverently as a priest with an ancient vellum and found a page of grand arrangements. The family tree spread across the top and from it depended hosts of sons and daughters— names in neat lines.

“This is a family called O'Connor, living in Chicago. They came to me through the Bishop of Killaloe. I was able to go back to the last High
King of Ireland, Rory O'Connor, and show how they were descended from him. It wasn't a direct line, but they wrote to me and said that what was important— and they never knew it would be— was that it gave them a good place in the past to go to, not just some emigrant ship. The past is often the best place.”

Robert stood back, to gain a better perspective on the two great pages.

“I've imagined,” Robert said, “a small house, high above the river.”

The Lion clapped his hands. “But if you saw that very ground? If you stood there? I mean to say, Father— it'd give your heart an armchair to sit down in, wouldn't it?”

As Robert struggled with that image, Herself came into the room with a tray. On it sat two book-sized wedges of fruitcake, glistening black with raisins and currants, and one cup and saucer.

Robert lifted the teacup and looked inquiringly from the Lion to Herself. She blushed and said, “I don't want any myself, Father, and he has his whiskey.”

Herself then disappeared, and Michael the Lion went for the hidden glass once more. He drank, burbled a little, set the glass down, and visibly gathered his senses.

“Father, I have— I have …” And he stopped.

Robert waited, looking around the room. A maned stuffed toy with the—superfluous—label
LION
around its neck sat on the upright piano. Two great pictures of lions in black japanned frames hung on either side of the mirror above the fireplace. A small marble statue of a lion stood on a plinth that said
KING OF THE JUNGLE.

Michael the Lion had more stains on his clothing than Robert had ever seen. And the more Robert stared, the more some of them began to look like lion's heads. Michael started to speak again.

“I have serious things to say about people tracing their family. The reason we want to discover our ancestors is a very strong thing. ‘Tis as strong, in certain ways, if you'll forgive me, Father, as prayer. Here's what I'm saying. If I said you're forty years of age, and all you know about yourself is that you were born, say, over the hill over there, in some old bit of a house, you've nothing to go on. You've, like, no bank account. I mean, what was there before you, your father and maybe your grandfather? If that's as far back as you can go, God help you, for you're a poor man.”

He had caught Robert's attention, as much with his passion as with his ideas. Robert leaned forward, trying as hard as he had ever done to concentrate and retain.

“A poor man?” he repeated.

“Yes, Father, a poor man. A very poor man.”

The Lion hit the arm of his chair with a thump— and Robert did not start in fright.

“A very poor man, because supposing you did know who you were in the long-term backwards— and suppose you knew that in the long-term backwards there was a wonderful sportsman or artist or a woman famous for her piano playing in your family—well, you'd go forward in a different mood, wouldn't you? And you'd want to know, were you any small bit like them, wouldn't you? And if you were— well, wouldn't that lift your spirits? Those are the benefits of the past.”

The Lion grabbed his glass and sat forward.

“Father, if we don't come from somebody, we're nobody. If we don't come from somewhere, we come from nowhere. And if we don't know where we come from, how do we know where to go?”

The Lion delivered this last flash of rhetoric with the air of a man nailing a thesis to a cathedral door. Robert nodded, certain that he should embrace the Lion's belief— but, like many before him, not at all certain why or indeed how.

M
ichael the Lion had a clock on the mantel, a pretty white-faced clock with Roman numerals and lions with upraised paws on either side. Knowing that he had to make Killaloe before nightfall, Robert took his leave of the Lion at two o'clock. Herself appeared and pressed a newspaper-wrapped package into his hand— more of the fruitcake—and when he opened it a hundred yards farther on, it was delicious to the last crumb.

The Lion had said as a farewell, “Make sure you're on your own when you eat it, Father. Or you'll have some chancy hoor who'll want every bit of that cake.”

Obviously Father Robert Shannon had heard the word
whore
before; it had been in Shakespeare after all, at school, and the boys had debated its root. In his lexicon it meant, naturally,
prostitute
or, more generally, a term of female derogation: loose morals, unfastened behavior, lax attitudes. Not anymore. He had just heard it in “Irish,” as it were; the Lion had used it casually, to describe jokingly a grasping person, an individual so cheap he'd take another man's cake.

For the Irish, though, it multiplies in meaning like a cell divides, with many shades and tones.

Sympathy comes into it:
poor hoor
is a term of condolence, as in “The poor hoor put his shirt on a horse last Saturday.” Incompetence, too: “And d'you know what, that hoor of a horse is still running.” It can be admiring, as in
clever hoor,
meaning
smart boy.
Or it can be a term of general approbation, as in “them Murphys is hoors,” meaning, “a decent family when all is said and done.” Some use it with a nod to its general origins in bad behavior; a fouling sportsman will be
a dirty hoor;
a dangerous individual is
a vicious hoor.

It connects to the emotion of surprise. Break good news to someone and they'll say, “Ah, you hoor!”—meaning
amazing.
Or it depicts someone being difficult: “He was a hoor about that.” Men use the word to agree stoutly on someone's excellence in a chosen field: “a hoor at the plowing” means a plowman who can carve the straightest of furrows. And, most comprehensive of all, “I never saw a bigger hoor” does not suggest that the speaker has just glimpsed an unusually large lady of the evening, it means anything from praise to contempt, from admiration to hate.

Robert Shannon, of impeccable education and elegant vocabulary, had just sailed into the harbor of this flexible, versatile word. He raised an eyebrow at the Lion and almost looked up and down to see whether by some amazing social accident a twilight woman had just appeared on this empty country road.

At a steady and good-humored pace, Robert reached sight of Killaloe in some hours; this was his longest, most sustained walk yet. A cart or two passed him, going in the opposite direction. Dogs barked from behind gates. Cows in the fields swung their heads and looked at him. Two horses galloped to a wall by the road and hoped for apples.

Limerick had offered plenty of advice: Ancient town, Killaloe; ask for Mrs. Horgan's— she has the best breakfast; her husband has great stories—stay overnight. On the bridge he stood and watched a man fishing—the long looping swings of the line arching through the air like a lazy letter S and then the fly settling on the calmer plates of the water— and he realized that if he stayed in Killaloe he would have to cross the Shannon. The archbishop had said, “Be consistent. Go up one side of the river, come down the other side. A constructed journey, Robert. Do not cross the river.”

Notwithstanding that he had now come to a legendary place, he walked on; he had some hours to go before nightfall. As he walked he looked across the river at the town. They said it had once been the most important place in Ireland. And they said that all the Church's power was once concentrated there. To Robert, though, if he hadn't found his roots, Killaloe was a last chance to be picked up on his return journey. He walked on.

“Don't forget to ask about the banquets,” they said in Limerick, and they told him how the great king Brian Ború fed his soldiers in their fort from his kitchens at his castle, and a line of a hundred servants had passed the food down along the riverbank at Killaloe.

He ate as he walked, the last of Sheila Neary's lamb-and-onion sandwiches; he drank the milk she had given him and stood the bottle gently by a roadside tree.

After an hour he began to tire. No building carried a
BED AND BREAKFAST
sign, nor had he yet seen a house in which he might have liked to stay. Tiredness, he knew, brought its problems; exhaustion concerned them all.

“Avoid fatigue,” said Dr. Greenberg.

“Six hours a day,” said the archbishop, “and no more.”

He had walked five.

Ahead, a man in the uniform of a postman worked at a gate. Robert approached him; the man wrestled with a broken catch. When Robert said, “Excuse me,” the man jumped.

“Yeh. God, you gave me a fright. This catch has me scuttered.” Then he looked at Robert and lifted his shiny-peaked cap. “Sorry, Father. And amn't I right calling you Father?”

“This is Lough Derg?” said Robert anxiously.