Shannon (25 page)

His father asked, “What's two times twenty?”

Patsy said, “Forty.”

And his father said, “Take off the luck penny,” to which the boy replied, “Thirty-six,” showing Robert that Patsy had been taught transaction arithmetic— to include the buyer's discount when selling ponies.

R
obert said goodbye to the Connors family. From the pathway he could see a dinghy out on the lake, its little sail like a triangle of light. The boat kept pace with him for ten minutes or so, then it turned and began to tack back to Athlone.

The Connors wood smoke followed his nostrils for hundreds of yards. Presently a different and even more exciting aroma replaced it: tobacco. A face descended from the sky and hung like a medallion up ahead of him: his grandfather, a silent man who'd smiled every time he'd looked at the little boy.

Robert began to sing, something he hadn't done since France. If asked, he couldn't have given the song's name, but he stumbled through some of the words: “It's the land of the shillelagh/And my heart goes back there daily.” Behind him came a swishing noise, and a voice said, “Welcome to Athlone.”

He turned to look as a man dismounted from a bicycle and took a huge pipe from his mouth.

“Were they telling you all about him?” The man stuck out a hand. “Francis Carberry from up the road. Talking in riddles; is that what you're thinking?”

Robert smiled. “I guess so.”

“The song you were singing,” said Francis Carberry. “Didn't you hear the boasting?”

Robert held out his hands like a baffled man.

Francis Carberry said, “John McCormack? Right? Athlone never shuts up about him.”

Robert laughed. “Of course.”

He introduced himself, and Francis Carberry laughed out loud.

“Well, that settles the mixture,” he said. “You being called Shannon. Do you know anything about the name, eh?”

“Almost nothing. But I want to find out.”

To which Francis Carberry replied, “Well, you had the bad luck to meet a teacher, eh?”

Robert's grandfather had had a pipe like Francis Carberry's; as a child Robert called it “a pipe with a hill.” A broad silver band connected the plunging curve to the stem, and that morning its wonderful blue clouds rose on the air.

Francis Carberry lived alone. For the next three days Robert stayed in his house and enjoyed the company of an expansive and well-read— and deeply grieving— man. Almost every room of his impeccable if modest house had bookshelves floor to ceiling. A teacher, now on a long summer vacation, he spoke nonstop, like a man who had been desperate for company. His conversation, much of it in monologue form, never proved invasive. If he stopped to ask a question, he proved sensitive and alert.

Within moments of their meeting, as people do, he told Robert his own story— or at least the part of it that occupied his every waking thought.

“I was born not far from here. I live in the house provided by the school. We get ten days off at Easter, six weeks in the summer, and two weeks at Christmas. Mine is a two-teacher school, I met my wife when she came to work here. She's not with me now.”

Robert, neither uncomfortable nor shy, walked at the fast pace of the man beside him. As he waited for an explanation he relished the tobacco smoke and the sun on the waters of the lake.

“We married in our Christmas holidays in nineteen sixteen,” Francis
Carberry said, “the twenty-eighth of December. It was a Thursday. The marriage was a kind of bargain. She wanted to give some service in the war in France, I didn't want her to, but I gave in and she agreed to get married if she could then go off and drive an ambulance. The weather turned very bad and I persuaded her to wait until summer. I was hoping the war would end, but when school closed for the summer, off she went.”

He stopped to relight his pipe and perhaps to keep control of his emotions.

“I went with her to the North Wall—that's the port of Dublin—and I waved her off. She went to Ypres— the soldiers called it Wipers because they couldn't pronounce it— and she was killed the third day after she got there. A bomb hit her ambulance. I had a letter from her after she died—she wrote it on the boat—and you never read a more joyful piece of writing: thanking me for being so understanding and all about the life we'd have when she got back. That letter has seen me through many a dark day.”

Robert stood still, forcing Francis Carberry to stop too. But Robert said nothing; he simply rested his hand on the other man's shoulder. After a moment they walked on.

They reached Francis Carberry's house, and he said, “I assume you're not in a hurry, eh? I mean, can you stay?”

He cooked excellent food: steak, boiled parsnips, the unavoidable potatoes. And at dinner he read to Robert, “A local writer, one of our most famous. I'll take you through his countryside tomorrow: Oliver Goldsmith.”

Tomorrow it rained, however, too heavily to leave the house, so Francis Carberry, having served a breakfast of smoked fish with eggs and freshly baked brown soda bread— to whose early aroma Robert awoke at eight o'clock— began to trace the name Shannon.

He started with a warning. “Bear in mind that I, Francis, a humble schoolteacher, have no genealogical training. What I have is a passion for language, and all ancestry is traced though language. What else do we have but the words in our mouths and the thoughts in our heads, eh?”

Of an actual Shannon family he had no knowledge, but he had two major suggestions as to the roots of the name.

“I don't believe that the river is the only possible origin. Here are two others.” He hauled down books from left, right, and center in his house. “There's a good Irish word called
seanchas”
—he pronounced it
shannacuss—
“and it means
legend
or
lore
or
story,
and the man who tells it is a
seanchai”
—he repeated the word slowly—
“Shanna-kee.
I think that such a storied river could have got its name that way. Or maybe there was once a famous storyteller whose name got changed from Shanna-kee to Shannon; that's possible.”

Robert beamed in delight.

“And here's another thing.” Francis dragged down a book of ancient maps and pointed to the mouth of the river. “You say you came in here. Did a pilot come on board?”

Robert nodded. “I believe so.”

“And did the pilot get off on an island before you got to Tarbert?”

Robert nodded again.

“Well, I'd guess the pilot lives on that island. ‘Tis called Scattery and it's the far side of the estuary from where you stayed. Scattery Island is famous for the monastery of Saint Senan. A cranky man, but holy by all accounts. There's an old theory that the river took its name from Senan; he was there around the year five hundred Anno Domini. You should make sure to track him down on the way back. Senan: Shannon. You can hear the connection, can't you?”

Robert almost yelled in glee. He heard a
ching!
as the links in the chain joined up.

He said, “Senan was the saint whom Kieran of Clonmacnoise visited.”

“My goodness, you're well informed,” said Francis Carberry

The rain teemed down. No place so far, not even the gentle O'Sullivan home or the opulence of Sheila Neary's town house, had felt as comfortable. On the second night Robert offered his Sevovicz letter to Francis, who read it and then shook Robert's hand as though meeting him for the first time.

“Were you afraid in the war?” he asked.

Robert said, his voice close to a murmur, “I— I don't know.”

Francis Carberry said, “My hunch is that we don't know the half of what we do. And we spend the rest of our lives getting over what we've done.”

Over dinner of vegetable soup, followed by pork chops in apple sauce, he regaled Robert with the life of Oliver Goldsmith, the writer from nearby “whose very name,” he said, “brings a smile to so many lips.”

Robert had never heard of Goldsmith.

“He wrote one famous novel,
The Vicar of Wakefield,
and one famous play,
She Stoops to Conquer.
The third famous piece is a long poem,
The Deserted Village.”
Francis began to quote:

“How often have I paused on every charm, The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm, The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topped the neighboring hill, The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade. “

For a moment his eyes almost misted.

“You're right beside it here, the village of Auburn. ‘Twas a real place. And there was a local story of a man who stopped at a private house, went in and asked for a bed for the night, and proceeded to order food and drink; he thought he was at an inn. That's the plot of
She Stoops to Conquer”

Robert sat as though mesmerized, his chin resting on his folded hands as he listened to this natural-born teacher delivering, in essence, a lesson in Irish literature and speaking as though he would never have anything so important to do again.

“What intrigues me about Goldsmith is how such an awkward man came to be so loved. Nobody would marry him. He looked like a monkey, big bald head and a shambling crouch of a walk. The children used to throw stones at him because he was such a figure of fun. But everybody who knew him loved him.”

Francis Carberry broke off. “Am I very peculiar? I mean, here you are in this stranger's house, a man who cooks his own meals— there aren't two men in the county who do that. And a man who talks at you without stopping.”

Robert smiled and made a gesture that said,
I like it.

“D'you know why I do it?”

Robert waited.

“When Lily died, I said to myself, ‘Francis, you have a choice now; you can live or you can die.’ Dying was what I wanted. My brain went away from me. I had no willpower, because every day I was fighting feelings that I was pretending to have. I was pretending to like everybody. I was pretending to be responsible and conscientious. And I was screaming in my head with rage all the time at these people who were alive and she wasn't. Then I decided I would do every task, every job, every chore with my full attention. I called it
saving my life. Insurance,
I called it. Insurance that I'd live.”

Robert was jolted. “Insurance?”

“Insurance,” said Francis Carberry

“May I ask you a question?” said Robert.

Francis Carberry nodded, his eyes keen with fear.

“How much— how much does the loss hurt?”

Francis Carberry never took his eyes from the young American's face. “Some days I can't breathe. Some days I don't want to breathe. I have— I seem to have— I have no soul left. My soul is gone.”

“Maybe,” said Robert, “maybe your soul has just changed its shape.”

Francis Carberry looked at him, not understanding the thought.

Robert said, “Are you kinder now than you were? A better teacher?”

Francis Carberry smiled and nodded. He thought for many seconds and said, “Yes, I am. Yes. I think I see what you mean.”

Robert stayed with Francis Carberry one more day, a day of more reading and food, a day of wonderful cadences in poems and prose, a day of translations from the Irish language, a day of beautiful speech and delicious eating. Had there been an invisible scribe following Robert, walking a few feet behind him, noting down every mood, move, and change in him, the scribe would have reported a new relaxation. Some opening up. And a new thoughtfulness. Even some emotional vigor.

On his last night, sitting by the fire opposite Francis, with the rain beating down outside and making the house cold, Robert came farther out of his shell than he had so far done with anybody, even the archbishop.

“You have told me, read to me, so many wonderful things, Francis.” His use of the personal name would have astounded Dr. Greenberg, who had long observed the shell-shocked victim's abhorrence of intimacy.

Francis Carberry replied, “Maybe I just like the sound of my own voice, eh?”

Robert demurred. “To my advantage, to my gain,” he said. “You remind me of my grandfather.”

“Oh, my God, I hope I'm younger than that. I'm only thirty-nine.”

Robert, serious as a child, said, “No, it's not a matter of age. He was a warm generous man who smoked a pipe. And he made people feel cherished. As you do.”

Francis Carberry did not answer. Nor did he look anywhere but into the fire. Then he said, very softly, “If you give up too much for other people, be prepared for terrible damage to yourself.”

Next morning, the sun shone like a polished disk. When the two men left the house after breakfast, the land seemed drowned. Water pooled everywhere. Francis wondered whether the lake had risen but said that the levels had been low before the rain. He told Robert of “wonderful pathways” along the shores of Lough Ree. They found a point, dry and high, where Robert could join such a path, and as they shook hands to part, Francis Carberry said, “Let me tell you one last story.”

He restoked his pipe, got it going again, and turned his brown eyes to look at the lake.

“I shall think of Saint Senan as your true ancestor, Robert. And it isn't just the name; it isn't because Senan and Shannon sound about the same. There's a great legend about Senan.