Shannon (5 page)

After a couple of miles, Molly turned her front wheel toward the mouth of a lane. In the distance, across the bogs, a man labored alone, a lanky man with hair white as a seagull.

“Ask this fella questions,” said Molly. “He loves big words.”

“Hah, Molly!” the man called out. “You'd a different boy with you the last time I saw you.”

Molly laughed at the tease. “Matt, this is our young Yank.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” he said, dragging out the note to convey wonder and
appreciation. “The man that's walking up the river. Our insipid voyager.” Matt held out a lanky hand, and Robert came forward to shake it. “Well, I hope you can swim, Father.”

Robert took no note that Matt seemed to know all about him.

“Matt, tell Father what you're doing here in the bog.”

“I'm digging for the carcass of a dragon, Father.”

Robert widened his eyes, and Matt surged at the encouragement.

“Yeh. There was an old dragon over there in the mouth of the river. But one of the saints ran him outa there so he came over here to live— where there's no saints.” He winked at Molly.

She said, “Ah, Matt, tell him your real job.”

“Footing turf.” He picked up a brick of the dark brown peat. “Did you ever see turf, Father? This is a sod of turf for the fire. It'll burn like a bush.”

He handed the brick to Robert, who turned it over, sniffed it, and scrutinized the shades of color, from the black of jet to the brown of tobacco, the wisps of white like facial hair, the dry texture.

Matt watched Robert feel the crumbly brick. “D'you know how old that is, Father?” He answered his own question. “Millions o’ years there in your hand. Half a maternity.”

He took back the brick and began to break it open, bending its soft back, showing the crumbs of fiber.

“There's the bones of old forests in this, Father,” he said, his voice passionate, “and there's heather in it, and God knows what else. I mean, there's bodies reserved in bogs like this— you know, the way a saint's body would be reserved.”

Molly said, “Matt, did you ever hear of a family called Shannon anywhere round here?”

“The only Shannon I ever heard tell of is herself over there. Flowing along like the moon. And she's a true river, I mean, she gets to the sea. ‘Tis the least a river might do.” He looked at Robert. “Are you tracing?”

Molly said, “He is. The Shannon family.”

“What'll you do, Father, if you find out they were sheep stealers? That'd be no kinda pedagogue for a man to have.”

“Ah, Matt,” said Molly, “they went to America a long time ago.”

“No, not a long time, not at all a long time. This turf, now— that's
here since time immoral. If you compare it, Father, your family only left last week. But sure, we all know, comparisons are odorous.”

As they walked away, wheeling their bicycles to the road, Molly whispered, “He's from Lisselton. Joe says the people in Lisselton should only be let out after dark.”

The sun beat down as they rode on. For as long as they could see the bog across the flat parish, Matt's snowy head gleamed against the brown land.

When the trauma first struck him, Captain Shannons brain heaved like the sea. Then it began to swirl, a blood-spattered fog inside his head. In a sudden moment he stopped in his tracks, stock-still and wild-eyed. He turned his head slowly, like a searchlight on a stiff axis, and nobody in the busy tent took heed.

Then he roared, and they looked up in surprise and saw him claw at himself. He plucked at his clothing, his ears, his nose, his hair. He lost his sense of presence and began to lurch and spin. He made vast hand-washing movements, as though to rid himself of some great clinging filth.

They grabbed him and held him and lowered him to a bed in the already overwhelmed field hospital at Lucy-le-Bocage, the village beneath Belleau Wood.

Why did he snap? He had braved so much, why now? Within moments the depth of his trauma became clear. His was a bad case. He recognized nobody; he had forgotten who or what he was and didn't know his own name.

His comrades, though— they knew what he had been and what he had done, and they cared for him now as they cared for no other. A military nurse named Kennedy, with hands cool as grass, took him over and set up the first nurtures. Night and day she watched him, especially as he came out of the harbor of sedation. But his condition never changed; he drooled and yelled, and he knew not a single thing.

Three days later the generals invalided Shannon out to Dieppe, and he stayed there for the next four months in a château converted to a rest home. In late October, the army loaded him on a troopship; one of the officers gave up his cabin so that they could rig a private sick bay for the chaplain's voyage home.

In the hospital at New Haven he grew milder over time. Officers of all stripes visited him. They knew he might not be able to speak—might not even be awake. It didn't matter to them; they came just to look at this legend of the war, hoping to shake his hand. If and when he calmed down, he had lucid moments and could almost chat with them, and they thought he nearly understood this awful malady that ailed him.

At first, shell shock had been misinterpreted. Officers claimed that such men were playacting in order to avoid fighting, so the generals court-martialed them for malingering or desertion. They even executed some by firing squad, in full view of camps or trenches: a blindfold, a wooden post or tree, a semicircle of rifles, and a victim who didn't know what was happening. Others were disciplined. In one form of punishment the offending man was tied standing up in the field of battle, sent back into the midst of what had damaged him— the incessant noise, the frightful whistle, and the
krummmp!
of the artillery.

Nobody as yet knew that the shells exploding around these frontline soldiers were also causing cranial vacuums. The reverberations shifted brain matter inside men's skulls and altered their states of consciousness.

Even so, back in the United States, Robert Shannon rose from this pit. He climbed out, and resumed his life. Through strength of character and force of will he came back to himself and then propelled himself forward. He improved steadily. They knew he was recovering when they saw his kindness return. Day by day he began to talk to other traumatized men in the hospital, the open mouthed creatures whose spirits were not nearly so firm. He smiled at them, held their hands, brought them small gifts, eased their sobs, listened to their ceaseless, senseless words.

One day he began to pray with them— and finally he asked whether he could celebrate Mass. Within a month he had braved the outside world again, and eventually a day arrived when he took off his uniform, put his chaplain's black tabs in the drawer, and went back to being a priest.

Less than a year later came the event that doctors watched for and feared in all such cases: the relapse.

A soul may also be lost because of serious emotional shock— a heartbreak, a betrayal, a treachery. In 1919 Father Shannon saw, head on and
firsthand, behavior among his priestly colleagues that amounted to all three. When certain disgraces in the Archdiocese of Boston seemed beyond refute or defense, a second and much worse wave of emotional trauma crashed in upon him.

This time, his mind turned blue. Not the blue of the sky, not the blue of the sea; this blue had steel in it, the steel of knives, the sulfur blue at the heart of a naked flame. And all the awful sounds that he had first heard in France returned, only now they were louder and more cacophonic— high wild noises, each word a prolonged screech. He raged and roared and screamed accusations at those to whom he had vowed obedience— accusations with names, dates, facts.

And they, having the power to do so, silenced him. They locked him in a psychiatric hospital, in a small high room, narrow and bare as a cell. This time, the images that coursed through his brain day and night nearly killed him.

Back from visiting the bogland and Matt of the unique vocabulary, Robert was calmer. At supper that night he seemed easier than at any other time so far; he even began to converse.

He asked structured questions— about the river, about the sea, about peat and its harvesting and its fire. In turn he answered their carefully harmless inquiries about life in the United States. He recited “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and told them about the Hotchkiss School, the woods near Sharon, his mother's singing voice, and his father's car. For almost an hour he sustained the most natural exchange in weeks.

At last, long after his usual bedtime, he lay down on the sofa. No fire tonight; the day had been warm, and the front door stood open. Joe and Molly strolled out to the wall to take their evening view of the river, and Robert drifted off to sleep.

That night, the war left him alone: no machine guns, no bandages, no shallow graves. Sometimes at the end of his nightmares—and this was a sign of recovery—his imagination rode shining through the dark. The images changed to the maps and the powerful officers, to the early morning sun of France before the guns began, to the smile on the face and the touch of the hand of Nurse Kennedy. If in his dream she teased him or made him coffee or fixed his uniform, good. A comfortable trajectory
had returned. His imagination had flown in a familiar arc from the distress of his battlefield to the oasis of her tent.

But then he always had to fight the sense of loss. Had they all gone? The colonel, awkward but a man of fair play— had he perished? Cooper, the laughing boy from Philly— did he die out there with the others? The Irish nurse, Kennedy, and her jokes and the swiftness with which she created peace— had she been caught in her field hospital by one of those deep awful shells? Had he lost them all forever? All dead and buried in the mud of a French farm? On the O'Sullivans’ couch that night, he had no dreams. He half awoke, missing the images, and not knowing what to do subsided again. Next morning, though, the animal reality of shell shock reached out a new claw.

The day began quietly, yet Molly whispered, “Is he a bit edgy?”

They watched as Robert half stormed out of the house and stood glaring down at the river.

“I think,” said Joe, “it's time for the boat.”

He kept a small craft on the Shannon, and he used it with respect, because a freak Atlantic tide or an abrupt estuary wave could lash out within seconds.

After breakfast, Joe led Robert across the road and down the steep bank to the river's edge. The rowboat strained at its leash. Joe loaded a shovel, set out the oars, folded burlap sacks on the seats as cushions, stowed a bag of sandwiches, and sat back watching the flow

“We're going over there,” Joe said, pointing to the far bank. “Labasheeda. D'you know what the word
labasheeda
means? Some people will tell you it means
the bed of the little people,
the fairy folk who pull all the tricks and cast all the spells. But it actually means
the bed of silk,
because the sand there feels like silk. Hop in, Robert.”

The priest, saying not a word, clambered to a seat.

For an hour they sat and waited, an hour in which Joe eventually said, “I never move out in the boat till the water is as flat as a fluke.”

When the breeze fell, the river's feathering ceased. Almost no clouds traveled the powder-blue sky, and the estuary became as quiet as a chapel. Robert sat with his back to the oarsman, which meant Joe could not see the clenched hands, the closed eyes. Joe pushed away from the
bank, and was soon hauling rhythmically on the oars like a boatman in a legend.

No ships or other vessels, large or small, used the river that noon. In midstream Joe pulled and pulled, to take the boat across the fastest current. When he broke through its grip, a sideswipe of the river's flow guided them toward a little beach of mud and then grass. The journey across the river took just under half an hour.

Joe made no effort to help Robert, extended no hand, merely gave example by disembarking first. Robert followed, picking his steps carefully as the boat rocked. In his hands he held, like a child with a comfort toy, the brown paper bag of food. He muttered and made low noises. Joe eyed him, watching and careful.

They climbed the grassy bank, onto a hill, from which they descended into a hollow field; Joe carried the shovel from the boat.

“See this field? The owner's my cousin.”

No great trees grew there, no tall grasses; the few hawthorns bent toward the land like old men, bowed by the weight of the prevailing westerly wind. The air felt colder than on the water.

In the lowest scoop of the field, Joe stopped at a small cluster of stones.

“Digging now, Robert.” Joe took off his jacket, squatted, and began to shift the stones. “Down about three foot or so. Not as deep as a grave anyway.”

He stood up, spat on his hands, and began to turn the earth with the shovel. Soon he uncovered a tongue of sacking; it lay in the dirt like a large ancient leaf. Joe grew more careful with the shovel, then hunkered again and scraped clear a wider area of the old burlap. As though reaching into a bowl, he stretched his hands down either side of the fabric and eased up a buried package. On the grass, he teased the sacking apart.

Peering over Joe's shoulder, Robert caught a rough smell and recoiled.

“Skin of a goat,” said Joe, examining it. “Yep. She'll do.” The sacking contained a brown-and-white hide. “The earth over here has more acid in it than my own fields.”

Joe refilled the hole, chattering all the while to Robert.

“One man told me the goat is a Chinese creature. But another man told me, no, ‘tis Egyptian. I don't know what to believe. This goat here,
her name was Sheba; she was mostly a nuisance, but we let her live on. I mean she was
old.
They live to twenty years at the most, and she was nineteen. So we'll go home with her now and we'll scrape her and scrape her. And then when I get her as smooth as a suit, I'll rub her with potash and all kinds of alum and stuff. I have a ring of ash seasoning, and I'll make a bowrawn that'll make the rafters ring. D'you know what a bowrawn is, Robert? A bowrawn is a skin drum.”

They climbed up out of the hollow field to the top of the slope, Joe with a shovel across his shoulder, Robert a few paces behind, slightly hunched in his unspoken anguish. As they crested the rise, Joe stopped and held his hand out wide to make Robert halt too. Down the slope below them, eight men in uniform stood on the riverbank, guns cocked, inspecting Joe's boat.