Shannon (46 page)

Not a soul could be seen. They dismounted and Squirt availed himself of the silent canal to empty his bladder.

“Now you know why I'm called Squirt,” he called back over his shoulder to Mr. Vincent.

Lack of fastidiousness bothered Vincent Patrick Ryan almost more than anything else in the world. He hated when people sneezed or belched. The bodily functions of others made him recoil. But he also liked it when life brought things together— and here came an opportunity to do something that he wanted and needed to do and at the same time express his loathing for coarseness. He walked softly across to where the laughing Squirt stood.

“Are you decent?” he asked.

As Squirt adjusted his clothing and turned around, he found Mr. Vincent standing immediately behind him— and then found himself lifted off the ground by the chin.

With ease, Mr. Vincent carried the wriggling little man the few feet to the canal's edge and lowered him straight down beside the stone wall. He held him there by the hair, pressing down all the time. Squirt flailed his arms and legs, and Mr. Vincent held his face to one side so that Squirt
would swallow more and more canal water. Squirt flailed again, flailed some more, and then flailed less.

When all the flapping and flailing had stopped, Mr. Vincent lifted him out of the water, checked Squirt's weasel face for signs of life, and, finding none, hauled him up on the bank. He fetched Squirt's bicycle, threaded the little crook's body through it, and dropped the lot into the canal.

What had happened to produce such a psyche? How was Vincent Ryan the killer created? How did he go from the studious thoughtful boy to the ex-soldier killer for hire?

Modern psychology could trace it to a kind of private shell shock, the traumatization that he had suffered as a child. Nobody in the 1890s knew much of this syndrome and probably wouldn't have accepted it. Children suffered cruelty— so what?

If his psychological profile had been made known to the Irish in those days, they'd have said, “Wasn't he born with it?” The superstitious ones would have pushed it further and have muttered, “Don't we all know Ballinagore?”

True, Vincent's birthplace dripped with blood. For decades before he was born, Ballinagore had been rocked by nasty disputes over land. Humans and animals were found hacked to pieces. People were burned in their homes. The recent civil war atrocity had merely confirmed such gloomy opinion.

In Irish fields lurks a tradition called “hungry grass.” Widely reported, never scientifically documented, it has taken its place in folk memory as a piece of superstitious peasant culture. Farmers out walking, traveling journeymen— even, in later years, golfers on the fairway— come home and describe a sudden feeling of unspeakable hunger. It happens when they walk across a particular section of ground, and next time out they test it and it happens again. The knowing ones, hearing this, look at each other, nod, and say, “Ah, yes. Hungry grass.”

In essence the folk myth says that the person feeling starved has walked on a famine grave, those open pits prepared during the Great Famine of the 1840s, when starving people stood in lines along the roadside, waiting for food carts. If the cart didn't arrive in time, they died and conveniently fell backward into a linear communal tomb.

Might there not also be a phenomenon that could be named “bloody grass” or “murdering grass”? So much blood has been spilled in Ireland,
and on so many fields, that “murdering grass” must be unavoidable. Perhaps the young Vincent Patrick Ryan stepped into a particularly deep pool of ancestral killing and absorbed the race memory of murder through the soles of his feet by some primal osmosis.

In Spain, they say of the great flamenco dancers and guitarists that they have the
duende.
It's the spirit that lies deep in the red earth of the country and seeps up into the fiber of the performer through the soles of the feet. Why not in Ireland, for Vincent Patrick Ryan, the
duende
of blood?

William Henry Cardinal O'Connell has been well documented, with books dedicated to his life and times and not all of them wholly complimentary.

He was born on 8 December 1859, the eleventh and last child of Irish immigrants in Lowell, Massachusetts. Not untypical of those in such a sibling position, he fitted uneasily into conditions created by others. He only came into his own power when he could make his own circumstances.

His teachers and peers said he was awkward and self-aggrandizing. Mocked dreadfully at school, only his bulk saved him from physical bullying. The verbal abuse scarred him and he fled deep into his studies. He became a gold-medal student and a church musician and learned to speak several languages, including the Latin required of ordinands in Rome, where he entered the North American College in October 1881.

Ten years after his ordination and a stint as a curate in New England, he went back to Rome as rector of his old college. There he developed and honed his taste for church politics, and that was when he learned that a conservative who believed in Rome's absolute sway was on the road to church preferment.

He also acquired some Roman style. One biographer describes him as living in an
intentionally grand and relentlessly public manner;
another calls him
gaudy.
Yet he was a smart operator who knew how to manipulate the journalism of the day and how to massage the church ego; indeed, for a long time he had more force in the Church abroad than at home, where his high living upset the mainly modest and humble archbishops across the United States.

Church politics depend almost entirely on word of mouth. Little gets written or printed; the façade must be preserved. The talkers in the American Catholic hierarchy eventually succeeded in defining O'Connell as dishonest, careless, and possibly (although they never more than whispered it) sexually immoral. He did in fact have a long-standing and affectionate liaison with a distinguished Boston doctor, with whom he had gone on walking vacations as a student. When, after a generation-long relationship, the doctor predeceased O'Connell, the cardinal's pain made it clear that they had been lovers for most of their lives.

This relationship, and other parts of his life that had the color of blackmail, inflamed his priestly colleagues and may have compromised O'Connell. Is that why he overlooked or concealed his nephew's un-priestly dancing and his financial misdealings? Or was that simply the cardinal's way? His protection of his family endeared him deeply to his relations, and those for whom he cared felt his unstinting protection as a cub feels a bear's.

His footwork also irked the bishops— he beat them to so many punches and in their eyes beat so many raps. Others around the cardinal, lay advisers and confidants, went to jail for a variety of crimes unrelated to the affairs of the archdiocese. But no matter what became of those around him, O'Connell continued to deal energetically in secular matters with all sorts of associates. And he strode the Boston— and American— stage like the national giants with whom he liked to mix: Honey Fitz, the legendary Boston mayor and ancestor of the Kennedys; and the next mayor, James M. Curley

His loyalty to his faith and to his flock gave him such invulnerability as he had— Cardinal O'Connell chose his fights shrewdly. He made his great speeches of fire to support not only Catholicism in general and its principles and beliefs, and the Irish Catholics of his flock, he made them as an antidote to battling the behind-closed-doors malice of his fellow churchmen. And who can say that his gaudy lifestyle wasn't also chosen to imply that Catholics didn't always have to be downtrodden and could set their own style?

He had grown up seeing the notices,
IRISH AND NEGROES NEED NOT APPLY.
The Puritan lash of Boston Protestant condescension had flicked across his shoulders too. Whatever his very serious shortcomings, O'Connell
had the taste, humanity, and force to attack such rampant prejudice. In the words of one commentator, he supervised “the historic transformation of immigrant consciousness from self-doubt to self-assertion.”

His oratory, his powerful and omnipresent insistence, healed much of the Irish immigrant's crippling self-doubt and fear. (For their part, the Brahmins had not stopped to think, in the abolitionist battles and leadership for which they became appropriately famous, that their excoriation of Irish Catholics was another kind of prejudice.)

O'Connell spoke out too for the popular cause of Irish independence from Protestant— and, by implication, heathen— Britain. In short, his public stance shored up his status and protected him from Rome. He was a politician who appealed to his voters rather than to his own party.

Those who revered him, and they were legion, pointed out his charity, his love for his relatives, his extraordinary generosity to his priests. In return, it has to be said, they had to show unquestioning, even fawning, loyalty. This could be difficult— their leader was a turbulent if loving man, whose life and very being attracted controversy.

O'Connell's career finally went out of balance and faded. He held on in Boston but he lost the internal battles, his enemies triumphed over him. Whatever the public showing of power that he always managed to pull off right up to the end, O'Connell died a reduced man, unable to trust anybody.

But after all that, if he had known of Vincent Patrick Ryan's mission, what would Cardinal O'Connell have done? Would he have immediately sent Sevovicz to rectify the situation, to call off the young black dog? Or would he have complained furiously at having been told? Knowing about it would have meant having to act.

Up the river at Shannonbridge, alone now, Vincent took lunch at
THE BRIDGE BAR, PROPRIETOR J. QUIGLEY,
who chatted but gave little help. Yes, he'd seen walkers coming through; yes, fishermen mostly. “But no Yanks, no, definitely not, ‘cause you'll always know a Yank.”

After his sandwich, Vincent sat a long time on the bridge, gazing out on the water. With his mind clearer he could concentrate better, and he modified his process: Continue to visit towns and places of interest, but stay by the Shannon. And question every riverside gossip or resident;
somebody might have seen something, somebody might have met someone.

“The walkers who aren't fishermen— where do they go?” he asked J. Quigley

“Well, it's a funny thing, but now and again you'll get a kind of a pilgrim heading to Clonmacnoise.”

A part of Anthony Sevovicz, an unresolved romanticism, quite liked being a traveler in a strange land. He had wandered pleasantly in Austria and France and, more recently, on the eastern seaboard of the United States. New sights pleased him, and new people gave him the chance to test and keep alive the charms that he appreciated in himself. He relished sitting alone in a luxurious foreign hotel, ordering excellent food and wine and gazing at the other diners.

On such occasions— and he had tried to give himself a few of these vacations every year— he cast himself as a mysterious figure who had come to that country to bring it benefits. He saw himself as perhaps a visiting adviser to the local head of state who first wished to travel incognito among the people of the country, learn a little of their strange ways, and thus be able to advise their king, emperor, or president more fully on their problems.

Not in Ireland. That fantasy didn't play here. Over and over he had to spell it out: Sev-oh-vitz. On his motorbike, speeding along bad roads, bumped on his saddle by potholes, he said out loud, again and again,
I do not like this stupid country
and
This is one stupid place.

He found some entertainment— not much— in enumerating the problems. No country in the world had such bad roads: unpaved and narrow, subject to potholes and floods. Nor had he met people so cunning; they asked him questions all the time. Sevovicz had persuaded himself that they wanted money from him. This had an attendant problem: He couldn't prove it was money they wanted because he didn't know what they were saying to him.

The more he tried to communicate, the thornier the language barrier. Having established Robert's possible route he had tried on many occasions to ask whether anybody had seen the young hiking American.

In Castleconnell, for instance, his way was barred by a funeral.

Sevovicz waited; he even removed his tweed cap and goggles. When the funeral had passed, and he had bowed respectfully to the tall curly-haired widow weeping behind the hearse, he asked another spectator, “Do you live here?”

“Well, I do and I don't.”

The man meant he traveled a great deal for his work, but Sevovicz never understood that and didn't seek to.

He had then asked, “The Shannon River— have you seen a man who is hiking?”

The speaker, who had no top teeth—
Has dentistry not reached this island?—
had understood Sevovicz to say, “Have you seen the man who is High King?”

“Ah, no, not at all, not for centuries now, like. The last was Brian Ború. But he was only the king of Munster, like. He was never on Tara. Along the Shannon, okay, yeh, he was around here, all right.”

Since the countryside around Castleconnell teems with stories of Brian Ború, his Shannonside kingdom, and the High King at Tara, the misunderstanding was not surprising.

Soon after that, Sevovicz met the half-blind postman, who told him that Robert was staying
— Yes, he said staying, I heard him—
with the nuns at Portroe, whereas Robert had gone from there several weeks before. And in Banagher he met a woman in the hotel who told him, “The hot water is extra for a bath.”

“Extra what, madam?”

“You know. Extra.”

“Yes, madam, but extra like what? Extra hot? Extra cold? Extra liquid— I mean, does it flow faster? Do you pipe it from the Shannon?”

“Ah, no, extra, like.”

“Like what?” He fumed.

Why do they say like all the time? Like what? They are like nothing I have seen in the civilized world. They are like a primitive tribe. If it weren't for the Church these people would be pagans—
a reasonable conclusion but not in the way that Sevovicz meant it. He did not have a hot bath.