Shannon (21 page)

M
r. Reddan had a farewell smile and a handshake.

“You'll enjoy Clonmacnoise, Father. It'll put sugar in your water.”

He said
Au revoir
with so many gutturals that it sounded like a stone rolling downhill. When the wonderful truck chugged away Robert stood on a wide path some miles north of Banagher. Mr. Reddan had directed him to stay on the bank until he came to a riverside house “out in the middle of the country. And mention my name.”

The Shannon that morning had a new color, almost a cobalt blue. Robert checked the skies and saw that, clear though they seemed, they darkened to the west. Since his time in France, thunder alarmed him, and the accompanying heavy rain seemed to sting him more nowadays than it had ever done in the past.

The blue of the river intensified, and lights began to appear, dancing on the water, yellow and gold lights, as though the flames on a thousand candles had begun to glow beneath the surface.

He looked again at the sky. The deep heavy clouds seemed not to be coming straight over after all but to be veering south instead of traveling east, so perhaps the rain might stay away. Impossible to tell, and the far-off
boilings of the high clouds still rolled up the sky, eager to lick the sun. The atmosphere had become as heavy as a bell jar. He took out a packet of cake from the house in Banagher and began to eat as he walked on.
There's no doubt that I feel more placid. There's no doubt that I feel— better.

Ahead, in a field on the far bank, a man worked with a scythe, the farmers’ scimitar, trimming a headland. The mowers had long gone, and the hay had been taken from the field. Now the green aftergrass, the meadow's lovely inheritance, shone for its brief life. When the headlands had been trimmed and cleaned, the plowman would come in:
I must be getting better. I must be improving. I'm beginning to see images of my own life in everything. And I'm getting gifts: I fed a calf I met an interesting boy; I have money in my pocket. Miranda stays in my mind. Silence has its reasons. But silence isn't always healthy.

An accumulation had begun to rise in him, of all the warm experiences he had so far known in Ireland.
And Sheila— Sheila Neary She showed me her spirit. These people. All this kindness.

Robert finished eating his cake, went down to the water's edge, washed his hands in the river, and then cupped them to make a drink:
Will I ever say Mass again? Ever hold out my hands to be washed after the Consecration, the Communion? Is my God too absent? He wasn't in France. He wasn't much to be seen in the Archdiocese of Boston, either.

In the changing light, the aftergrass had become as blue as Kentucky. He drew level with the man in the field on the far bank. The curved blade of the scythe gleamed and swung like a little comet.

Ahead, by a stand of beech trees, a small tall house sat on a height back from the water. A thin plume of smoke rose from the folk-tale chimney. Against the walls, high staves of curved wood leaned, like thin lounging men. The field behind the house had no fences, just wide-open green acreage, with a broad pathway narrowing into the distance. Here and there on the open land, limestone rocks raised their heads from the earth, giving warning glances with their eyes of white lichen.

The house seemed empty. Robert walked up the short path and stood in the open door. An old gentleman, as distinguished as a duke, whitemustached and ruddy-faced, half rose from his chair by the fire.

“Hallo, come in,” said the old man, extending his hand, which felt like leather gloved on wood, dry and gnarled and yet with a sheen.

“Are you the man who builds boats?”

“Oh, we've one nearly finished, and we'll do you a fair price an’ all. We often get Americans here.”

The old man led the way through an open door, into a monkish bedroom with whitewashed walls and a crucifix, and through another open door into a high-ceilinged shed. Robert's nose filled with the holy smell of woodworking decades: varnish, linseed, wax.

The rich skeleton of a long craft perched on struts. Some of the keel spars were already planked, working toward a high curving prow. Robert began to stroke the wood. The old man glanced at him and half nodded to himself.

“I make ‘em specially for the Shannon.” He patted it. “Seventeen feet trimmed.”

Then began one of those little relationships that occur in all good lives, as much silence as speech.

“We were always farmers too,” said the old man. He patted a sector of the boat toward the stern.

Then came a breath of silence.

“I like larch timber myself. And it don't swell.”

Silence.

“You can get a bit of swelling in freshwater.”

Silence.

Robert touched the boat all the time. The old man watched him.

“The river floods?” asked Robert, finally.

“It does. It does so. That's why we gave up the farming. Built the new house here, back high from the river this time. In case we were ever caught by a flood again. We were once.”

Silence.

Robert walked around the boat.

“I mean, I wasn't born when the bad flood came, the one that drownded my grandmother and the child she was holding on to. The water trapped them in the kitchen of the old house and came in over their heads. That's why my grandfather built boats.”

Silence.

Like a lover Robert drew both hands down the curved spine of the wood.

“But I seen a bad flood here myself. Up to the lip of the door. And the mud: wide, wide streels of it. Like you'd spread it with a flat knife. Dirty black and brown.”

Silence.

“We cut branches off the trees, threw them down on the mud, and covered them with straw for the horse to stand on.”

Silence.

“And I said to myself that day,
How can anybody keep a family safe if they don't have a boat to keep them up out of the flood? And
I told myself I'd build the best boats ever seen, and so I'd best that river. That river is one vicious bitch, that's a fact. But she'll never beat a boat of mine.”

The old man straightened his shoulders and turned to look out the door. Robert looked too and saw only a calm stream today, with branches dipping on the far bank. He stood for a long time, stroking the wood, looking at the river …

In the afternoon the old boatman put food on the table: boiled eggs, soda bread, and tea.

“D'you want to get up to Clonmacnoise?”

“Mr. Reddan, he said—”

The old man interrupted. “Ah, isn't he the sad fellow all the same? The best vet in the county and he sad as a wake. His heart and soul is in that wife of his.” He shook his head.

Robert helped the old man to carry the unexpectedly light boat down to the water. Within minutes they were under sail.

“There's nearly always a westerly wind here,” said the old man. “We get a full sail as regular as wages.”

They saw nobody, not on the river, not on the banks. No drama visited them, except for a little turbulence when they passed a tributary's entrance.

“That's the Blackwater,” said the old man, who, once on his boat, became as nimble as a monkey. “A fairly useless river.”

The sail rarely flapped. Its firmness surprised Robert, who had been a guest on yachts out of Long Island Sound, where the cracking and snapping of canvas added to the thrill of the ocean. This boat rode as light as a leaf.

“Does it take long,” said Robert, “to learn how to sail the Shannon?”

“About three hundred years,” said the old man, with no irony.

A flight of birds swooped across the sky ahead of them, a dipping, floating black smudge.

“Have you ever known anybody who was named Shannon?”

“No.” He pointed downward. “Only herself.”

They went under the beautiful arches of Shannonbridge as smoothly as a smile. Robert felt a scrape on the boat's keel and looked down; he could almost have touched the riverbed. The old man saw his alarm.

“If it hadn't rained last night, I'd have had to go through that arch over there.” He pointed. “They made it deeper there. But it has a throw to it that I don't like. ‘Tis all right when I'm coming back down.”

Robert counted the arches, as the old man watched.

“D'you know that it's different every time you count them? How many did you get?”

“Sixteen,” said Robert.

“Count them again.”

Robert counted. “Sixteen.”

“Ah,” said the old man, and looked disappointed.

The river widened.

“There's a ford up here,” said the old man. “You can nearly walk across.”

Robert had his map on his knee. “How far to—”

The old man pronounced it for him. “Clon … mac … noise. On the river, five miles.”

Between Shannonbridge and Clonmacnoise the water grew quieter than ever before. In places the land sat so low that Robert could look down upon the fields. The river took a wide bend to the west, and colors began to flash.

Stalks among the reeds glowed like tall thin matchsticks, vivid red at the tips. Petals from broken marsh flowers floated in bundles like yellow dolls. Purples and acid greens and startling whites shone through the beige legs of the sedges. Distant fields wore rugs of yellow-gold buttercups.

Robert's shoulders dropped in rest. The peace of this stretch seemed
to descend on the old man too. For the first time he sat down, the tiller a cello in his hands, the river beneath them its music. The airflow lifted his white hair gently from his head, and he raised his face to the sky. Robert closed his own eyes too and felt the breeze.

Great shrines have their sacred time of day. To visit Delphi, where Greece's ancient soul still dwells, you must climb down from Mount Parnassus at dawn. Some pilgrims have followed Christ's Via Dolorosa from Jerusalem, on their knees, to arrive at Calvary by three o'clock in the afternoon, the moment of death. The ancient Celtic monastery of Clonmacnoise yields most when approached from the river and seen at sunset.

Five hundred yards upstream, the old man brought his boat to the right bank. He tapped Robert on the shoulder—”Start looking over there”—and trimmed sail. The boat swung and slowed down. Robert stared. Long red streamers of clouds floated from the western skies; shadows had come to rest on the left bank. Then Robert saw what the nuns had meant, what the strange Mr. Reddan found thrilling, what the old man and his boat wanted him to see.

A group of ruined buildings came gliding into view. Tinged by light here and shade there, a tall round tower stood on a little hill, its top broken off. Just beneath it, like children around a teacher, gray crosses clustered, the austere headstones of a cemetery. Beyond them stood the fractured and pointed gable of what must have been a church. And now came another tower, with a damaged cone for a hat.

Had he seen pictures of it in his childhood, or did some race memory trigger his brain? Without needing to be told anything, he felt the mystery. He was looking at one of old Christianity's powerhouses, founded fourteen hundred years earlier.

This air whispered with ancient prayers, spoken by monks in rough linen robes, men whose hair had been cut in the circular tonsure that replicated Christ's crown of thorns; men who had made brilliant sacred manuscripts of vellum, painted in the world's brightest colors from vegetable dyes; men who had prayed with every step they took, every task they worked at, every blink of an eye; men who had given every instant of their lives to their art and, through their art, to their God.

From this heritage too, Robert had sprung. Or so he had the right to
believe, because from this race had sprung his ancestors. Whoever they had been, wherever they had lived on this river's banks, the Shannon family, he believed, had come from the same nation race that had bred these men— these monks without malice, these devout priests, these humble, prayerful beings.

The old man asked him where he proposed to stay; Robert opened the letter from the nuns: a farm address. The old man knew the people. He edged the boat to the bank and pointed out the house across the fields. Robert stepped onto the grass, reached back, and shook the old man's hand.

“Thank you. Very much.”

The old boatman said, “Godspeed.”

Robert climbed the slope and looked back at the boat as it set off downstream.
He'll have a faster journey home. Will darkness fall? But he has hundreds of years of knowledge. A boatman? An old boatman? In my life now?

For a long moment he looked in at the ancient ruins. A blackbird, out late, hopped among the thick graves, its yellow-orange bill a flash of light. In a tree somewhere, a crow swore.

If only Archbishop Sevovicz could have seen Robert that evening! Here was his charge looking with deep if undefined respect and awe into one of the most famous ancient places of the Church. This could be perfect.

Sevovicz had become obsessed with Robert Shannon. He might as well have fallen in love. Customarily, women gravitated to Sevovicz more than men, and women he charmed. Men he dominated— except Robert, whom he saw as a version of himself, a view that became a fantasy, a fantasy that became a belief. Day in, day out, Sevovicz added up the points.

First, they had the Church in common. Second, ambition: He had had the ambition to become an archbishop. So, he guessed, did Robert. Indeed, Sevovicz wondered whether ambition had been, in part, what had taken Robert to war. A stint as a chaplain, especially on the winning side, could do nothing but good.

Next, when he had met Robert he was astounded by what he saw as physical resemblance. Sevovicz fondly believed they looked alike, even if to an objective bystander only height connected them.

In addition, there was emotion; Sevovicz had lost a brother in the war. Five years younger, Mikolai Sevovicz had had wonderful energy, tremendous inner drive, and a capacity to make people adore him. Archbishop Sevovicz had heard those very same terms used repeatedly to describe the prewar Father Shannon. By all accounts, Robert had been able to walk into a room, connect with everybody, and get people's best responses— the same galvanizing effect on people as Mikolai. Even in his reduced condition, people wanted to help Robert, needed to smile at him.