Shannon (42 page)

“I'll do anything for the woman I'm mad about,” said Dominic. And to Robert he added, “This woman saved my life, and she won't marry me. You could marry us here now, couldn't you, Father?” And he winked.

“Come on now, Dominic,” Ellie said. “You've a good audience here.”

She sat in her chair and arranged herself as though about to listen long and enjoyably. Robert took his cue from her and made sure he could see Dominic's face. Dominic rubbed his hands, cleared his throat, took a few seconds of silence, and began his tale.

“When you live by a river you're always watching it. You watch it flowing, you wonder if it flowed as fast or as slow yesterday or last year. And you throw a stick into it, to see where the river takes it.
There goes that stick,
you say to yourself,
bobbing and dancing and thrashing down the stream like myself traveling across my own life.
You're hypnotized, mesmerized by looking at the current.

“But if you're born by that river, that's a different case entirely. You don't just look at the river, you
feel
the river. I can tell when I wake up in
the morning, before I look out the window— I can tell what mood the river is in. My bones know it. And my very veins know it.

“If my body is ninety percent water, eighty-nine percent of that ninety percent is the Shannon. And therefore I'm delighted to meet a man who is named after that river. I never before met a man with the name of Shannon— but I can tell you now, it's going to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

“So I understand very clearly why you want to know the origin of your name and the name of our great river. The origin of your name I can stab a guess: that your family was thrown off their land in the Plantations that went on from the late fifteen hundreds to the year eighteen hundred and after.

“And that your family took to the roads and that they found a pleasant spot of commonage somewhere along the banks of the river, a place they wouldn't be thrown off of, because nobody wanted land that poor. But it was a strong enough place for them to build a mud cabin and get in out of the wind and the rain. And you'll probably never find that mud cabin, because it had no foundation. There won't even be a mark on the ground.

“So, Father Shannon, you're following the journeys of your ancestors in a deeper way than you know, because they too wandered along the banks of the river. And where they came to rest and built their mud cabin, the local people didn't know them and so they called them ‘the Shannons’—that is to say, the people, those strangers, who're living over by the river.

“At least that's how I'd guess it happened. And I'd say I'm not far wrong. As to the origins of the river's own name and how she came to be called Shannon? Ah, that's a thing of magic that comes from the past, from back in the days when you'd look up to the hills and you'd see a god looking down at you and you'd hope he'd be smiling. And now I'll tell you the story of how the Shannon got her name.

“All over Ireland, where a river forms a quiet pool or a little oxbow pond, there you'll find growing a stand of hazel trees. The countryside around here is alive with hazel trees, and in September the children go out with bags and baskets and gather thousands of the nuts.

“The hazelnut has a hard shell, but when you crack it open it has a
kernel that gave rise to the saying
As sweet as a nut—
because it has a perfect little body and tastes delightful, especially if you flick a little tang of salt onto it.

“Now over there in the chalky flinty mountains where the Shannon rises, there grew nine hazel trees, by the pool of the Shannon's fount, the Shannon Pot. This was called Connla's Well in ancient times, after the man who owned the land where flowed the pool.

“By the way, this pool was so famous that to this very day you'll find people arguing over where it was. ‘Twas known too as the Pool of Knowledge, and there's people so keen to lay claim to this place and its nine hazels that they'll say it was on their own land, be that farm a hundred miles and more from here. The people of Ormond down in Munster, they're very keen to insist that it was their well on their territory. Not at all. This is where it is, up in them stony hills, and this is where it always was, ever since a god put his finger down on the ground and made a hole for water to come up.

“Ancient Ireland was governed by gods; there was whole families of them. One of our most famous gods was Lir, or Lear, on whom it is said William Shakespeare the Englishman modeled his crazy old fellow. But our man was a different fellow altogether.

“Now he had a son called Mannanan MacLir, and this son was a god in his own right. He lived in the middle of the Irish Sea, on the island we call to this day the Isle of Man, after Mannanan the son of Lir. Sometimes he lived above the waves on the land, sometimes he lived in the kingdom under the sea. He had three legs, a curious physical property, which enabled him to leap across the mountains like a goat or swim through the waves like a magic sea creature.

“Now Mannanan MacLir had a beautiful granddaughter called Sionnan. It can be pronounced
See-o-nan
or
Shunnan,
and she was a very clever girl. Sitting beside her grandfather's throne one day, she heard him tell some visitors all about the Pool of Knowledge. He described for them how the water that bubbled out of the ground was as good as a medicine for all ills.

“And he told of how the water changed color into a healing purple when the hazelnuts from the nine trees overhanging the pool fell into the water as they ripened in September. Then he told them of the faculties of the Nine Hazels; these were the most important trees in his world.

“One was the Hazel of Science, one was the Hazel of Philosophy, one was the Hazel of Color, one was the Hazel of Poetry, one was the Hazel of Dancing, one was the Hazel of Carving, and so on; these trees were known as the Many-Melodied Hazels of Knowledge. And he told his listeners that when the nuts from these trees fell into the pool, the salmon swimming there took them, cracked them in their teeth, and ate them, thus acquiring all the knowledge in the world.

“This, as you can imagine, made the pool a place that every druid in Ireland wanted to visit. They all went there, secretly or on pilgrimages, but none of them ever caught a salmon, and therefore none of them ever imbibed all the knowledge of the world. Only one man ever did— that was much later— and he was the great warrior god Finn MacCool. But that's a story for another time and another day.

“Well, the princess Sionnan's ears flapped when she heard this tale, and without saying a word to anybody she decided that she would be the one to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. When the palace was asleep, she went up onto the battlements and gathered her cloak around her.

“The cloak was a present from her grandfather for her twenty-first birthday, and it had a magic property. When she gathered it around her, it made her capable of flying; all she had to do was nod in the direction she wanted to go and she flew there, high above the trees. The tightness of the cloak kept her warm.

“As dawn broke she landed gently and safely on the little slope that you've seen below the Pot, where the river bubbles up from beneath the ground. She waited for a little while for the sun to rise fully over the mountain, and when she had enough light she went forward to the pool and knelt down.

“At first she saw her own reflection in the waters. And then, when she looked closer and a helpful sunbeam lit the pool, she saw a wonderful salmon. He was as silver as a ring and as pink as a baby and he looked so intelligent that she knew he must be the Salmon of Knowledge. (In truth, she didn't need to catch that one fish; any salmon from that pool— if caught, cooked, and eaten— would have delivered the same load of learning.)

“Sionnan kept very still. She watched and she waited and she waited and she watched. Now what she didn't know was that women were expressly forbidden even to look at the Nine Hazels— Nurse Kennedy loves
this part of the story, don't you, Nurse? And here was she, a young woman, looking up at these wonderful trees and their abundant branches, and about to feast, she believed, on Art and Music and Science and Thought and Dancing, especially Dancing, and all the other wonders of which she had ever dreamed.

“Keeping very cool, she lowered her hands into the water. The beautiful salmon saw the lovely hands and swam toward their enticement. But the minute the salmon touched the girl's hands a mighty rush of sound was heard. A wave, big as an ocean's billow, rose up in that little pool and sucked the lovely princess right off the bank and into the water. The pool boiled like a kettle, took her down three times, and drowned the girl.

“And then what happened? A hundred yards along from the pool, the Pot expelled her and she came out of the ground with the water and flowed down the stream, her body in its white gown, rigid and straight on the surface. Down the stream she flowed, jostled a little here and there, until the stream connected to the wider stream farther down, the stream called the Owenmore, which means
big river,
and from there into Lake Allen.

“But Lough Allen didn't want this renegade princess, and the stream had to leave that lake and flow on down. And on down it flowed, on down and down, through all the other lakes: Ree, the lake of kings, and Derg, the red lake. None of them would keep the dead Princess Sionnan in her long white gown— until eventually all the streams and tributaries took pity on her and decided to take her body back to the sea that was governed by her grandfather.

“And so they took the Princess Sionnan down the length of Ireland and out into the ocean, where her bereft grandfather, Mannanan MacLir, the great god with the three legs, met the corpse and took it with him down to his palace on the seabed, where he mourned her for three hundred days and three hundred nights.

“Then he gave the grand order that the stream now flowing down through Ireland— the stream that the waters themselves formed to carry the dead Princess Sionnan— that it now had the status of a river and must henceforth be known as the river of Sionnan. And that's how the Shannon got its name.

“Now I've heard tell of different origins for the name. I've been told that the word
Shannon
comes from a cranky old monk called Senan who lived down in the river estuary and didn't like women.

“And I've been told too that the word
Shannon
is made up of two words
— sean
or
shan,
meaning
old,
and
abhann
or
owann,
meaning
river—
but that's such a dull idea you'd have to ask what good it is to anyone.”

W
hen they left Dominic's house, Robert seemed animated, much more like the man Ellie had known in France. He made no reference to the picnic or what had taken place between them. On his return, he helped swiftly and coordinatedly with preparations for an evening meal. He dropped nothing on the floor. And he did not, this evening, crash into the furniture.

But Ellie had difficulty with her own control. She felt knocked off balance, not as much by the actions between them as by the unspoken questions— and their possible answers. Over and over she had asked herself,
These are the key questions. Is he, does he consider himself, still a priest? Is this turning into something?

She had watched Robert's every move, had observed him more closely than anybody had ever done, and her report would have fascinated Dr. Greenberg. In the first days after Robert's arrival, she would have described his progress as two steps forward, two steps back. For every hour he spent in “normal” mode, he spent an equal hour in a fazed state. By that she meant that she found him out of tune with himself and the world, much too prone to falling heavily asleep.

Deliberately, if by instinct, she had fed Robert copiously. After a meal he enjoyed, she thought him more loquacious and less frayed. Seeing such a result, she planned three meals and three snacks a day. When he kept to her schedule of the day, he ate breakfast, a midmorning snack, lunch, a midafternoon snack, an evening meal, and a bedtime sandwich. Sometimes he missed breakfast, sometimes he missed dinner. After a week or two she woke him from any sleeps that would have obliterated a mealtime.

He gained no weight; he had a greyhound's frame. Nonetheless, she walked him for exercise every day, wet or fine. And always by the river; the water, she saw, calmed him and stimulated his curiosity.

At no time in those weeks did Robert show any amorous interest. Although his shyness fell away within hours of his arrival, she attributed that to the powerful shared experience of the war. Thereafter, in normal moods, he moved through the house like an absentminded husband; when she reflected upon it, she marveled at the immediate and complete ease between them.

Now she wanted the relationship to develop but had no idea how it could. Priests, she had always known, constituted the most forbidden fruit of all, more off-limits even than cousins or other women's husbands. Yet here in her home dwelt this man who had touched her spirit from the first moment she saw him— in very different circumstances. And now he lived with her as though that was intended, sharing everything except her bed.
What's to be done? Is he priest first and man second? Or the other way around?