Shannon (2 page)

Shannon was setting out with a simple aim. There had always been Irish pride in his family, a deep and good sense of belonging to a great and ancient race— and to a family that got its name from the Shannon River. The ancestors who came to America in the 1700s had reputedly lived on its banks; a painting of a Shannon River scene hung in the family's
hallway. And where young Robert Shannon's friends and contemporaries had newspaper prints of sports stars or horses on their walls, this boy had filled his bedroom with Irish memorabilia, including the large map he now carried in his rucksack.

Shell-shock victims, it had been found, often used childhood memories to anchor themselves. Amid his newfound terrors and rages, Father Shannon had found again the great shining force of childhood tales. From deep inside him, he had managed to haul out the emotional force to believe, to trust, that this storied river could heal him. To possess such a mighty name— that must add up to something, mustn't it?

Now, at last, he would embrace the river. Simply and determinedly, he would hike north on the east bank of the Shannon, visit the very source, the dark pool of its birth, and walk back south on the west bank. Somewhere along the way he would step into the early footprints of his people. And, his blood rekindled, he would return to the point opposite this morning's landing at Tarbert and, on a day yet to be decided, join a ship to take him home again. In planning this journey he had found what he needed most at that point in his life— focus.

Truth to tell, he had grasped little else for some years. Most days he had no more than a fractured knowledge of himself, nothing greater than a jagged sense of his confused mind. On better mornings he glimpsed a snapshot of the man he had once been. Like a battlefield flare, it lit the sky of his mind, but he hadn't the mental power to prolong the brilliance, and it fell away. On such occasions he seemed almost normal for a time, but the effort fatigued him. And on the very worst days he merely succumbed to the remembered trauma of the battlefield and lay down. This morning, exhausted from the ship and unsure of his ability to make this journey, he looked as he had done so often in the past few years: three quarters broken and greatly lost.

But if all went well—if the green stillness of Ireland brought recovery, if the river healed him, if in his roots he found the way back to himself— he could resume his true life. This belief, based solely on hope, gave him such little energy as he felt.

He also had beneath him a curious safety net, a network set up by his mentor, an odd fish of an archbishop named Sevovicz. In order to manage the known factors— Father Shannon's fragility, his exhausting struggle to recover himself, his sudden outbursts— and to try to guard against
possibilities yet unknown, Archbishop Sevovicz had written in some detail to the Irish bishops whose dioceses touched the Shannon. These men had then contacted the priests in their multiple parishes, and thus, all along the river, on the thick red line that the young man had drawn on his boyhood map of Ireland, local Irish people waited, talking to one another about him, watching out for him, willing to help him take his anxious steps. Father Shannon knew nothing of this.

From Tarbert Pier a broad lap of the river nudges in toward the rear of the village. With this inlet to his left, past the old stone jail to his right, and up the sloping road, the young priest reached the crossroads. Here he turned left. In these houses slept O'Connors, MacCormacks, O'Flahertys, Kennellys, as they do today and as they've done since before Christ was born. Nothing moved, no sign of life. Tarbert has a long main street; ahead stretched empty distance. He took a deep breath.

Clear of the houses, he stopped by a great beech tree. Below, to his left, the departing freighter had left a small foaming wake that gleamed in the last of the early shadows. To get a clearer view he stepped into the rough land at the side of the road, made his way down the slope a few paces, and stood for several minutes gazing out over the brambles and scrub.

Dawn came down the river from the east. The day would grow sunny and warm, a good start, and everything he saw offered the first signs of peacefulness.
Yes, it might be all right here.

The estuary feathered a little under a slight breeze, but it looked calm and supple, reassuringly level after that bully, the Atlantic. He lingered, then climbed back up to the road and faced ahead.

And then he stopped— halted abruptly. Before him in the roadway stood three men, two of them seemingly much younger than himself. They carried rifles; they wore bandoliers. He glanced behind him to check whether they had companions— and the gunmen turned and saw him. No hiding now. Shannon stepped away from the great beech tree and into the roadway.

The Great War began in the golden fall of 1914, one of western Europe's most beautiful Septembers ever. Within weeks the conflict took on a shape never seen before: massive artillery bombardments raining down
upon men huddled in head-high trenches. Little more than a year later the medical journals of western Europe, with palpable consternation, began to discuss a new condition reported from the battlefield. The doctors had no name for it; they called it
nerve strain
or
war strain
or even
hysteria
or
war shock.
Eventually, by means of general usage, they settled on what they agreed was a popular but inadequate title:
shell shock.

Over the four or so years of the war, doctors began internationally to define shell shock by the suddenly altered behavior of the soldiers and the lasting impact on victims’ minds. Reports emerged from France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the United States. The afflicted troops numbered in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, and no two cases were identical.

Nobody knew how to treat the condition; all the medical profession could do was react. The baffled doctors, nurses, and students saw over and over, at fearsomely close quarters, these sad or violent or withdrawn or overactive men who couldn't sleep, who had lost their memories— of everything, including their names— who woke up in the night screaming and trying to run from appalling dreams, who twitched in every limb as though they had Saint Vitus’ dance, and who could not grasp simple concepts anymore.

They shouted, they argued violently, they misbehaved. “One of the symptoms of their illness,” reported an observer, “is a morbid irritability—they tend to become upset and to take offense at the merest trifles— and this leads to trouble with the other patients, the nurses, and the medical officers responsible for discipline.”

In a natural reaction and in the absence of knowing what on earth to do, isolation became the preferred treatment; they shut them away like mental patients. Over time, a broader regime was generally accepted. It had kindness at its base, good food and plenty of it, deep and constant care, and gradual resocializing, and it drew many of the shell-shocked men back to normal. Or so it seemed. But in some cases relapses occurred, with the second recovery taking much longer than the first.

The most lasting medical success occurred with patients who received close individual attention to begin with, and who began to understand that they then had to help themselves. A fear always remained, however, that any unseemly pressure or severe emotional jarring could resurrect— and worsen— the original condition and the sufferer could once again
turn violent, to others or himself, and could even take on the symptoms of lunacy or total nervous collapse.

That had been the final diagnosis of marine chaplain Captain Robert Shannon. The army now knew what had caused his ailment— the experience of war, especially this war, with its many awful casualties that had never before been seen, from weaponry that had never before been used.

According to the psychiatrists, the severity of Captain Shannon's case “might derive in part from the extraordinary degree and frequency of his heroic actions in the face of enemy guns massed against him”—this because, as they had observed with other sufferers, the chaplain had repeatedly tried, in his dementia, to return to the front lines.

Now, in his first few minutes in Ireland, the former Captain Shannon once again looked down the barrels of guns. All three men came to confront him. While walking, the oldest bandit raised his weapon to his shoulder, sighted it on the young American's head, and curled his finger into the trigger guard. The others followed suit.

They stopped ten feet away, a small firing squad, rifles cocked and aimed. Shannon, rapidly losing breath, spread his arms and hands. He began to tremble in the way that he had been struggling against for the past three years, a head-to-toe shaking that rattled his teeth and brought an unstoppable whimper into his throat.

In France to begin with, and long afterward in the hospital at New Haven, this had been the most alarming response. In such a seizure he could breathe only through his nose, flaring his nostrils like a scared horse; at times they thought he would never breathe again. Now he fought for breath; he wished he could close his eyes, but the eyelids refused to work. He also knew he had no power in his hands or fingers— he could barely raise his arms above his shoulders.

“Where's Clancy?” the leader said.

Shannon failed to reply; the power of speech had abandoned him again, as it had done many times before. Swallowing and swallowing, he pushed his hands higher, arms out wide. One of the men wore a tweed cap with the peak turned backward; he bit constantly at his lip.

As tears formed, Shannon managed at last to close his eyes. The cold voice bit at him again.

“I said, Where's Clancy? Is he with you?”

“I— I'm a stranger.”

One of the others murmured, “He don't know.” Then, quickly, “He's a Yank, isn't he?”

The third member of the gun party asked, “You're very tidy. What are you, a priest or something?”

Father Shannon, eyes still closed, nodded. A silence began that lasted several seconds. Then he heard a sharp
clink!—
a gun lowered to the paved road.

Said the oldest, “Come on.”

Father Shannon opened his eyes.

One ahead, two behind, they jostled him forward. They strode off the roadway, pushed through a gap in the hedge, and half ran up the hill toward the trees. The priest with his rucksack kept up as best he could.

At the top of the hill, the leader turned back to check that he stayed close. Thinking they looked at something else, Shannon also turned his head and saw that dawn had established itself in all its bright friendship. Far down below them, below the roadway, the river had turned silver, and the sight of the wide stream and the distant ship, now a toy, helped him to breathe again.

Breathing had everything to do with it. So insisted Dr. Greenberg, the New York consultant who had reveled in the opportunity to study this extraordinary new psychological woe. He called it
a true cataplexy,
and along with his copious note taking he applied some practical measures.

In one exercise, he asked Father Shannon to breathe in time to his, Dr. Greenberg's, finger counting; in due course— it took many weeks— he trained the priest to do it on his own. And he trained him to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth when in difficulty. Shannon had found this especially awkward, but eventually he mastered it. Now, in this wild Irish field, moving at the speed of a forced march, he began to resort to that technique.

For perhaps another twenty minutes, they hustled Shannon over moors, across streams, and through rocky fields, into land that grew wilder and more remote. He saw— at most— two houses in the distance and
glimpsed them only through gaps in the many woodlands through which the gunmen led him. Crows flew by black as widows; one squatted on a road signpost that said
MOYVANE—2 MILES.

Then the fierce little group came to the gaping cube of what must long ago have been a beautiful mansion. Hugging the old walls and stumbling on overgrown stones, they followed a line of ivied ruins out into an open place. Ahead stood a partly fallen square of red bricks— the old kitchen-garden walls. At a wide breach, the gunmen dropped to their hands and knees and began to clamber like insects over mounds of bricks and loose rubble. Shannon, with difficulty, followed. They had chosen their hiding place cleverly; most pursuers would have searched the greater ruins.

Now he was inside the kitchen garden, where the ancient fruit trees still lined up in ranks. As though in a storybook, the two men ahead vanished into greenery. When Shannon and his guard pursued them, a lean-to materialized. It also had been chosen well; in a natural camouflage, thick tendrils of ivy had interlaced with the branches of a great tree to make a shapeless undetectable roof.

The leader reemerged, reached his rifle forward loosely, and tapped the side of Shannon's head with the gun barrel. Shannon gasped and flinched, then obeyed the gesture by ducking under the flap of branches that the others held up for him. He entered a dim room with a thick covering of straw on the floor and a brick rear wall; it had once been a gardener's hut. The leader stood behind with his gun barrel lying on Shannon's neck.

For many seconds nobody moved. The leader raised his gun and tapped Shannon's head hard with the barrel. He said, “You're never to tell anyone this.”

The American nodded.

In darkness thick as wool he now began to see. A form and face appeared— a young man sprawled on an old garden bench; his matted hair would have been blond had it not been darkened with his own blood. The chalk whiteness of his pallor gave the gloom its only point of light. He rolled his head a little, trying to open his eyes. Dried blood flaked the sides of his silent mouth; he sweated.

The gun party stood aside for Shannon to look.

Nobody spoke.

The leader of the party bent down untenderly: “Eddie, we've a priest here for you, like you asked for.”

No response.

“We thought ‘twas a flesh wound only, like,” said one of the younger men.

“Yeh, only,” said the third, the lip-biter, who looked scared beyond reason.