Shannon (48 page)

Mr. Vincent noted the lake and the sailboat or two on it, and when his mood changed he stopped to make— again fruitless— inquiries of fishermen and men in the fields. With some contempt he rode by houses not worth looking at, too common and low for him now, and traveled on toward the town of Lanesborough, where he planned to stay for the night in, he hoped, a hotel better than the one in Athlone where the hall porter was drunk.

To Ellie, the tension seemed to grow— largely because she had no idea of what might lie ahead. Some nights they lay down and slept all night together, chaste as siblings. On other nights Robert went to bed early in his own room and closed the door.

Robert perceived none of the pressure that she might be feeling. He hadn't come from a background of emotional trading with the opposite sex, and for him life just seemed to get better and better. Sometimes he put together a succession of two or three mornings when he woke up fully lucid and comprehending and with a great sense of his old life.

His daytime lapses of mood and memory grew fewer. He remedied most of them by walking with Ellie. If the bad emotions bit, they chewed him hard, and in the truly awful moments he went back to bed— alone. But those long daytime slumbers, those visits to the cellars far below the floor of his consciousness— they were shorter, these days, and safer.

Then the routine of their household changed. Unexpectedly, Ellie was called back to the hospital. In a house fire near Athlone the parents had died and five of the six small orphans received severe burns. The hospital sent a telegram; they needed— echo of war— Ellie's experience with burns.

In her absence, Robert, for the first time since the war, began to run his own life under a roof. As she left the house that morning, the car engine awakened him but he went back to sleep. When he did rise, he found under the tent of a starched tray cloth the breakfast that she had left for him, and he made tea for himself— a major achievement. Then he cleared everything away and ventured out.

He didn't travel far, just to the end of the garden, where he stood looking down at the river. Choosing a direction, he walked along the bank, found a little road and walked a mile, then turned back.

On the way home, he recognized that his curiosity seemed to increase in great leaps. He began to take stock of himself.
My knuckles—they're fully healed. I can cope with hunger— not that I've been asked to. The weeping fits— they've stopped. Yes, Clonmacnoise brought tears, but I had hands at my throat and a gun to my head.

That first day Ellie came home late— to a clean kitchen and a smiling man.

On the final day of her hospital work, Robert set out again on yet another walk and found yet another little road. Once again the dog had declined an invitation to walk. The rain came in, and to shelter he stopped, midafternoon, in what seemed like a deserted pub. When he opened the door he found the place packed with drinkers; they lined the bar, they leaned against the walls.

“Soft enough day out there'n that, I'd say,” said the barman, who had an earlobe missing. “And ‘tisn't even a Saturday.”

In his preparations for Ireland, Robert hadn't considered a language barrier. So far he'd been lucky— but he was about to step into a morass, because he had entered a bar full of local reference. Everybody there knew what everybody else meant when they spoke. The barman meant, “The weather is mild outdoors and we might get some rain— which is not unusual here in my opinion— but it would be surprising to get it on
a weekday, since most of the rain that we get seems to come at weekends.”

Robert nodded in vague agreement and sat on a stool.

“Any hammer yet?” said the man next to him.

Robert looked blank— and the man beyond the man next to him said, “Hammer away. They'll never get it.”

“And they shouldn't,” said the first man, with some vigor. “All the soup they took.”

“Sure, isn't that how they got there?” said a third man as vehemently. “Off our backs.”

Everybody in the pub knew the references. Some land, probably a farm, was being sold that day at auction: that is, under the auctioneer's hammer. The owners had set what was considered a high reserve price, beneath which they would not sell; the barflies believed it to be too high, no matter what the auctioneer's skills. The family had a bad reputation in the neighborhood because, in the famine of the previous century, they had accepted the life-preserving soup offered to Catholics who were prepared to ditch their religion in favor of the queen's Anglicanism. And later, because they had changed their religion to that of the Anglican monarch, they were allowed to buy land from which a Catholic family had been evicted.

Now came the crucial question to Robert.

“And yourself?”

Meaning, I hope you're not a returned Yank who's hoping to buy that land because, if you are, stay clear; one of our own is entitled to buy it, and if we had our way there would probably be no more than one bidder.

Robert said, “I'm trying to trace my ancestors.”

His quiet tone convinced them, and they immediately relaxed.

“Ah, weren't you at Mrs. Halpin's in River View a few weeks back?” And indeed the man who spoke had one white opaque eye. “God, you're making tracks. You musta had a boat.”

“What's the name anyway?” asked somebody else.

“Loby what's wrong with your hand?” said yet another to the barman. Meaning, You, barman, nicknamed Loby on account of your one earlobe, why aren't you pouring a drink for this visitor?

“A short?” said Loby, reaching for a whiskey bottle.

“My great-great-grandfather was a man named Shannon— that's all I know,” Robert said. And, to the offer of liquor, “No, no. No, thank you.”

“Something softer, Loby” said somebody else. “The Yanks don't have the stomach.” And Loby the barman began to pull a pint of Guinness.

“There's a fella up the road, he'll know,” said the pearl-eyed man.

“Is his name Shannon?” said Robert hesitantly, in hope.

“No. But he's dead anyway,” said someone else.

Since nobody attempted to bridge this seeming chasm of logic, Robert said nothing. He reached in his pocket for the Mass offerings money, and a man at the far end of the bar, a man as fat as a barrel whose pants were hoisted up to his rib cage and held there by hairy honey-colored twine that made the lip of his stomach pout as hugely as a whale, called out, “Are ye all savages down there or what?” By which he meant, It would be an act of barbarous inhospitality for the men at Robert's end of the bar to let a visitor pay for his own drink.

“Keep your hand where ‘tis,” said the man next to Robert, who immediately froze his hand in his pocket; it crossed his mind that they thought he carried a gun. “Are you far from Kankakee, yourself? There's a fellow from here in a job out there; he lives with his sister, like.”

“Didn't she marry or something?” another joined in.

“No, no, she left the convent,” said someone else.

If Irish code breakers traveled with Robert, they would have whispered in his ear to point out that this question constituted an attempt to find out whence he hailed. He answered it anyway.

“I come from New England.”

“Badly needed,” called somebody, and many cackled, realizing he meant that the world needs a “new” England since the “old” England has so much wrong with it.

“Are we far from Auburn?” Robert asked, thinking fondly again of Francis Carberry

“ ‘The loveliest village of the plain.’ Go back down the river.”

“And Glassan?” Robert asked.

“Spit,” said a man, “and there you have it; that's Glassan.” Meaning that it could hardly be nearer.

One man at the bar asked, “Did you hit it yet?” He held out his hands. “They're that big this week,” he said. “You'll do great. Mind the
teeth, like.” Meaning, Have you fished on the river yet? This is an excellent locality for pike fishing, and pike have very sharp teeth.

Loby the barman reached over to plant a pint of black stout porter in front of Robert.

“Hairs on your chest,” said his neighbor and, as Robert went to lift the glass, added, “Hold on, hold on. You can't rush it.”

“No,” said another, “a good pint needs to wait.”

Robert lifted his glass and inspected it.

“D'you know anything about that glass?” asked his neighbor.

Robert clearly didn't.

“The priest's collar.” His neighbor reached out a long unwashed hand and delineated on the glass the depth of the cream head on the black drink. “That has to be the same depth when you're finished.”

“There you are now,” said the man next to his neighbor. Robert didn't know and would probably never learn that
There you are now
had absolutely no meaning.

The bar fell silent and every eye covetously watched that black pint of stout porter. After many, many minutes, a voice from somewhere called, “Go ahead, now, go for the drought,” meaning, Pick up your glass and quench your thirst.

Robert raised the glass with both hands and tasted the pint; he didn't like the taste and his face squirmed.

“What did I say?” called the man who had vouchsafed his opinion that visiting Americans might find Irish drinks not to their taste. “He'll be billess”—meaning
bilious.

“No harm done,” said his neighbor. “Would you like something else? Loby, give the man a mineral.”

Someone down the counter said, “Go on, Bobby, help the man out.”

Robert slipped his scarcely touched pint away from him along the bar to his neighbor, who moved an elbow the merest fraction, no more than the few inches necessary to establish ownership of the great black-and-cream glass.

“God, Bobby,” called somebody else, “you'd take a drink off of a child.”

Said Bobby, “Doesn't everybody in the parish know I'd suck a pint off a sore leg.”

The door burst open and a hook-nosed man charged in, carrying an ax over his shoulder, his face blurting with annoyance.

“They got it,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, and more.”

“More?” someone cried in an aghast voice.

“The shaggers. Eight thousand more. The shaggers. Ah, look, there's no shaggin’ justice.”

By now Robert more or less guessed that the auction had gone well for the disliked vendors.

He began to drift away.

“You're not goin’?” cried one man.

They raised their glasses to him as he left. Within minutes he would be within sight of his river; the day had come sunny again, with a breeze now on the water.

Robert looked at his watch: five o'clock. Ellie might be home by now. He reached a bridge over a stream that flowed into the river and stood to look down into the water. An undercurrent, probably swirling beneath the legs of the little bridge, was causing a vortex that generated a short backflow, and the water formed ravishing patterns in the sun and shade. As he walked across the bridge, Robert stared at the stream's hypnotic spinning— and was snapped out of it by the sound of wailing.

Ahead of him, a man leaned on the farther end of the bridge, an elderly man, his elbows on the parapet's shelf and his face buried in his hands. He wept like a child, his breath catching in surges of distress. Robert stood, fearing intrusion. Not able to bear it further, he asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

The man, without lifting or turning his face, waved Robert away, a gesture so strong and dismissive that Robert walked quickly and softly past him and crossed the bridge without looking back.

When he reached the house, Ellie had returned. Vivid with agitation, she said, “Did you hear what happened?”

He said, “I saw a man weeping on the bridge.”

“They shot Michael Collins.”

Robert looked blank. “I don't know enough—”

“That's as bad for us as when they shot President Lincoln,” she said.

She explained to him the circumstances of Collins's reputation and the intricacies of the Irish civil war.

Robert said, “I had my own civil war.” He told her of the dying boy in the fields, the gunfire on the riverbank, the soldiers at the sandbags in Limerick, the strangling gunmen in Clonmacnoise, the truckload of troops firing bullets into the trees. Ellie stared at him, appalled.

He told her about the pub. She was walking in and out of the house, preparing the table outside for yet another alfresco meal in the glorious weather, and he moved in and out, talking to her; he was full of energy and vim.

Ellie stopped to look at him. He was gesturing and handsome and fine. She walked around the table, and Robert, smiling like the sun, held his arms out to her.

D
inner did not take place immediately. Ellie led him to the hallway, still holding hands after a long silent embrace. Robert looked more lucid than she had seen him since France, the hesitations and blinkings far fewer than at any time since his arrival at her house. And yet she had to be so careful.

She tried to remain objective, aware of the dangers of emotional shock. They edged up the stairs, with him talking all the time, trying to remember for her as much as he could of the pub conversation. Step after step they stopped and stood, as his excitement continued and her agitation increased.

Robert Shannon, the chaplain of forces, the war hero, the young pastor from the Berkshires— those green rolling hills of New England so startlingly like the Ireland that he had come to see— this man could not have defined, summarized, or described that moment. His personal familiarities and intimacies had all been subsumed to his life in the cloth of a priest, and the only women who had ever touched his naked skin had been his mother and her housekeeper— and not since he was seven years old.