Shannon (4 page)

Shannon began to rock in his chair. Those who cared for him back home knew this said
pressure
and could mean collapse. Shannon said nothing, just rocked back and forth; he wiped his brow with his sleeve. Some foreign body crackled on the fire, a knot of peat or a twist of wood, and Shannon jumped to his feet. He stood rigid for a second as though at a soldier's attention, and then shook his head. Hopelessly, he sat down again.

Molly ignored him; she chattered on, always swiping away a wisp of hair. Likewise Joe, who half stood from his chair, peered out through the doorway, and sat down again.

“There'll be a bit of a tide tonight,” he said. “I'd say, Molly, they'll feel it up as far as Portumna.” To Shannon, he said, “Now you'd like a cup of tea, wouldn't you?”

Shannon said not a word.

Molly, active as an ant, hummed a tune beneath her breath. Joe stared tranquilly into the fire. Shep came over and rested his head on the priest's quivering knee.

“The porridge'll be ready in a minute,” Molly said. “You've to stir porridge all the time. And ‘tis lost without the salt. I always use a big pinch, but when ‘tis on the boil—well, isn't it like when the cat is near the milk? You can never take your eye off it. And you never stop stirring it.”

Shannon said, still needing breath, “There's a boy. Up in the fields.” He pointed to the east. “He was shot. And he's dead. His name is Edward Dargan.”

Neither Joe nor Molly moved a muscle.

The O'Sullivans typified a syndrome in Irish life— people of high instinct and sound understanding, mistaken for ignorant but merely uneducated.
They had worked out their own codes long ago. Each night they went to sleep like spoons, his arms folded about her; in the deeper night they always somehow kept in touch— a foot, an arm, a hip. This natural couple had never spoken more than a handful of tense words to each other and so far had had only one sadness: failure to conceive in fourteen years of marriage.

“I'll come over and sit beside you,” said Joe, “and Molly, you'll pour the two of us a cup of tea, won't you? And we'll fix all that business once you tell us where the poor young man is. People are kind of hammering away at each other around here.”

Shannon, still blinking rapidly and breathing fast, looked sideways at Joe. Then he stared at his rucksack, which he had dumped beside the door when he'd first come in. Joe followed his gaze.

“Will I get the bag for you, is that it?”

As Joe rose, Shannon leaped from his chair, grabbed Joe's arm, and forcibly stopped him dead.

Joe O'Sullivan didn't attempt to ease away from Shannon's fierce grip.

“All right, all right. C'mon, now, c'mon.”

Shannon eased; the two men walked like friends across the kitchen floor. Molly watched, alert but not yet alarmed. The priest reached into a side pocket of his rucksack, took out an envelope, long and cream, stamped with red wax and a seal of office, and presented it formally, like the credential it seemed to be. Joe broke the wax, drew out a sheet of paper, and began to read. Shannon stood directly in front of him, eyes searching Joe's face.

Joe finished reading and then looked up and into Shannon's eyes. Reaching for Shannon's hand, he shook it with passionate sincerity and said, like a recitation, “Father, my brother—he was my twin—he was killed in France with the Munster Fusiliers on the ninth of May, nineteen fifteen, at eight o'clock in the morning. It was a Sunday. So, Father, you're—well, you're very— very— welcome in this house.”

The words pierced the young priest's fog; neither he nor Joe sought to break the handshake. When they did, Joe handed the letter to his wife.

“Take a look at this, Molly.”

Father Shannon's credential, typewritten on stiff formal paper, bore the crest of the Bishop of Hartford.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

To Shannon, Molly said, “How do you pronounce that gentleman's name?”

He said, “Sev-oh-vitz. Sevovicz. A Polish name.”

“Sevovicz,” said Joe and Molly together.

Shannon reached for his bag again and drew out his cherished map of Ireland. He unfolded it and pointed to the bright red mark at Tarbert. Archbishop Sevovicz, who could turn the words
Good morning
into a sermon, had said, “If we don't know where we are in this world, our fellow man tells us.” Shannon had looked so baffled that the archbishop had— most uncharacteristically— come directly to the point and said, “Ask. Ask. Ask.”

“This?” asked Shannon now, showing the map. “Here?”

Joe looked at Tarbert's red dot and nodded. “Can you stay with us a few days, Father?”

Robert flapped his map and looked into Joe O'Sullivan's green eyes.

“Porridge is terrible if it goes cold,” said Molly. “And you look like you'd sleep, Father.”

Joe said, “If you've Molly's porridge inside you, you'll sleep.”

Before they served the oatmeal, Molly added half a spoon of poteen, their local moonshine, and when the meal ended they prepared the old sofa.

“We'll be quiet as mice,” said Molly, “and Joe'll go out now and get
that other business done, the poor young Dargan boy. So you can stop worrying about it.”

As Shannon stood by watching, Molly and Joe dragged the couch across the floor toward the fire. She patted it and pounded its old cushions, then stood back.

The young priest lay down and wrapped himself in the blanket that they gave him. What little glaze of personality he had built up in the solitude of the ocean had been abruptly and brutally rubbed off at the lean-to out in the fields. Lying on his side, he stared into the fire.

Perhaps he would fall asleep before the reel of images began. Perhaps tonight he would be set free. He waited. Not yet did he see the visions that consoled him: the white clapboard houses of New England, the galloping horses and sweet rivers of Connecticut, the tree-lined streets and everyday neighbors of the town of Sharon. Good— because these awful images were usually pursued hard and driven away by huge field guns, bucking and roaring, by the bloodied faces of weeping men and the vast wounds that they bore, by the burial parties, with the bodies tumbled into the shallow mud of France: the black anatomy of war.

Joe and Molly sat in their chairs, drinking tea. Shep climbed up on the old sofa, found a place in the lee of Shannon's bent legs, and curled there. Soon, man and dog fell into deep sleep. Outside, a shower off the ocean sprinkled the land and passed over. Inside, the house fell quiet as the hosts settled down to watch over their guest.

And so, on his first afternoon in Ireland, Robert Shannon, formerly Captain Shannon, chaplain of U.S. Forces, and— in theory if not at heart— Father Robert Shannon of the Diocese of Hartford in the Archdiocese of Boston, slept like a wintering bear. In time, Molly O'Sullivan carefully put back the blanket that the sleeping American had kicked off himself when the dog had jumped up to follow Joe— who, with two other men, bumped through the fields on a neighbor's cart, bearing Edward Dargan's body, which they had covered with a tarpaulin.

Molly O'Sullivan never left her kitchen that day. She darned socks, she fixed a buttonhole, but mostly she sat quietly in her chair, where Father Shannon could see her if he awoke suddenly and could thus be reassured in a strange house in a strange land.

In his sleep, Shannon twitched and sometimes half spoke. He had refused
to take off his shoes or his jacket and, initially, had lain down with an arm over his eyes, watched by his hosts.

Molly had never been wooed by any man but Joe. He had known her since she was fourteen; he was twenty-four then, and he had struck up a friendship with her father and brothers for the sole and secret purpose of pursuing her when she came of age. Though not unaccustomed to men— she had five brothers and a youthful, vivacious father— by the time she married Joe he had become family, and therefore Robert Shannon was the first “other” man she had ever scrutinized.

When he seemed to have fallen deeply asleep, and with Joe long gone on his mournful task, Molly inched forward to look closer, like a child at the zoo. The young priest's arm had slipped from his eyes. His face, no longer under the rigid control of chomping anxiety, sagged back toward boyhood. The long eyelashes suggested his general innocence, a quality that had endeared the priest to his parishioners. None of his troubles showed; he looked clean and uncomplicated.

His hands, however, had aged early— pale and wrinkled for a man so young, with the right hand spoiled horridly across the knuckles by a scar like a trench. In general, though, as he lay there, he had a sort of grace about him, a lightness that had not been evident while he was awake. This young man, whatever he had been through, had come from a background of order and care.

At six o'clock, a deeper, heavier rain began to sweep in. Molly rose softly from her chair and went to the door. The tide on the river had turned; she hoped the wind wouldn't rise, lash the rain against the windows, and wake her sleeping visitor. She heard Joe's step and opened the door from the inside, to prevent noise. Shep came wagging in, shaking off raindrops; Joe raised an eyebrow and Molly whispered, “Still asleep.” They tiptoed to the fire and sat quietly, each glancing at their visitor from time to time. On the couch, he stirred in what might have been a fierce moment of dreams, and they started in anxiety, but he continued to sleep.

For supper they had slices of soda bread and butter, with thick slivers of ham, and two glasses of milk.

They ate by the fire and looked out at the rain.

Inside an hour, the evening sun shone again and Joe tiptoed from the kitchen, taking the dog out into the bronze light.

H
our by hour, day by day the O'Sullivans drew Father Robert Shannon into their care. No quirk or anguish of his gave them pause. They never intruded, and thus his silent griefs could breathe. In the lee of their kind instincts, he calmed down and slid into their friendship.

Nor for a moment did they consider the entire matter of Robert Shannon and his lengthening stay in their house odd or unusual; they never questioned it. A distressed visitor belonged in the fold of human nature; so be it. Their priest had told his parishioners, “If you see a young American walking the roads on his own who looks a bit lost, he's a priest who's over here for a while. He hasn't been well. Make him feel welcome.” They had agreed to do so; that was all.

Furthermore, they had seen in the towns and villages the silent men who had come back from the war, who walked the world aimlessly or leaned empty-faced against walls and would never work again.

In the beginning, Shannon needed great stretches of rest, and a routine developed. Around nine o'clock in the evening, he settled to sleep. Shep climbed up and tucked himself against the visitor's legs. Molly and Joe sat on their chairs facing each other, Molly usually sewing, Joe reading
the newspaper or merely smoking his pipe and gazing into the fire. The quiet was broken only by the snuffling of the dog or the crackle of the flames.

This wheel rolled on for eight days and nights. Their chatter included him, and they never seemed fazed that he rarely replied; if he did speak, he offered no more than a syllable or two. During the day he either sat by the fire or on the wall outside, where he gazed for hours at the river. Somewhere inside him he knew that his inner journey still consisted of taking two steps forward and one and three-quarter steps back.

When his stretches of calm lengthened, they lifted their care a notch and began to treat him as an American cousin, a tourist almost. And as with any such visitor, they wished him to see the sights; they were as natural aristocrats to a houseguest.

For his first excursion, Molly took out the bicycles.

“Robert, we're going for a spin. I bet as a young lad you had a bike.”

He had asked them to stop calling him Father. They agreed, yet they warned him that everywhere he went in Ireland he would be recognized as having the stamp of a priest on him. Joe added, “We'd recognize a priest naked. I mean— if you saw a giraffe up the fields, you'd know it was a giraffe.”

Robert mounted the bicycle and pedaled a few yards to find his balance. Then, with Molly leading, they wobbled into the wider countryside.

The narrow road barely allowed them to ride abreast. With the sun in their eyes and the breeze on their faces, they entered flat unbounded lands of brown and cream. This was the open bogland of North Kerry, where random piles of peat bricks stood in the fields like rough old tribal monuments.