Shannon (6 page)

Joe stepped back, drawing Robert with him, back until they could duck out of sight. Just below the hollow's rim they lay on the ground, Joe with a finger to his lips. His concentration elsewhere, he failed to register the aghast face beside him.

After many minutes during which they lay facedown and utterly still, Joe rose and tiptoed up the slope. He surveyed left, he surveyed right, then turned and beckoned to Robert. The soldiers had gone downriver. Several hundred yards away they began to climb into a longboat, manned by two other men in uniform. One of these cast off, and the other began to row the boat into midstream. At that moment, as Joe watched, one of the soldiers fired three quixotic rounds into the mound of the riverbank, and the laughter of the others came upriver on the wind. Then the stream took their boat down toward Tarbert and no soldier looked back.

Down the slope behind Joe, Robert had not moved, but at the sound of the gunfire he began to tremble and grunt. Joe walked back toward him, and as he drew near Robert stood up. He grabbed the shovel and attacked Joe— fierce, grim, sudden, and hard. Joe fended off a blow that would have split his temple; a glancing blow scraped his cheek; he retreated a few yards, covering his head. Robert, flummoxed, stopped; then, savage and red-faced, ran at Joe again, who, more composed now, grabbed the shovel's long handle. They wrestled like gladiators; Joe won the shovel from Robert and tossed it aside.

Robert stood back— then raged forward again, his only sound a grunt that could have been pain. Soundless and wide-eyed, he scrabbled for Joe's face, neck, hair, arms, shirt. His grunting heavier, he kicked out. He tried to form words, but no sense came forth.

When his scrabbling for a grip failed, he tried to land punches— serious blows. Joe stood his ground, never yielding an inch yet never fighting back, using all his strength to sap the blows, cushioning them with his forearms. He talked; he soothed; he calmed. “Easy now, Robert, ‘tis all right. Easy, easy.”

Suddenly Robert began to weep, and the attack ended. He began to sink, a subsiding pillar. Joe took Robert's forearms and guided him to the ground, to his knees.

“Easy now. Easy. Easy. Stay here a minute, Robert. Are you all right now?” He knelt beside him. “Stay here a minute.” Robert moaned; Joe stayed with him, patting his shoulder.

In time Joe went back to fetch all their goods. He returned and squatted beside Robert, who still wept. Joe patted his shoulder.

“You're all right now, Robert, you're all right.”

T
o grasp the Ireland of 1922, think of Persia. Think of rural India. Think of old
National Geographic
magazines with their photographs of charming poverty. In Ireland too, the hopeful wary faces of the native folk looked winsomely up at the lens. Think also of those interested, well-meaning Tocqueville-esque travelers who for centuries had come, seen, and commented. The country that they reported had always been tense, depressed, and poor.

Robert Shannon got to Ireland six months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed after a sapping war of independence which itself had caused division, as not everybody agreed with its aims or conduct. Now, as though to add incest to injury, a bitter civil war had begun. Scarring and dire, its bombs were undermining the new state's structure and delaying the pleasure of nationhood.

And the ground was shaking in even greater ways. Irish Catholics, the previously underprivileged majority, had become the new rulers—the Risen People, they called themselves— and they were taking their country back from the king of England. In a policy ringing with emotion, this new government was buying up the great landlorded estates and redistributing
the land. Henceforth 85 percent of the people would again own 85 percent of the island and not the 15 percent, the few barren acres, that had been tossed to them like scraps long ago.

The Anglo-Irish Protestants, who had long formed the ruling class, could see the writing on their demesne walls. Most disliked what they read and were deciding to leave; they were the people with the money. However, it wasn't happening fast, and for many of the Irish without the money, there was still no joy and they were leaving too.

For them, poverty and subjugation had been a way of life for thirty generations, intensifying with successive British regimes.

The emigrant ship, long the only avenue of escape, would one day become so for yet one more family. This father, mother, and nine children had been living in a small quiet place called Ballinagore, fifty miles east of Tarbert, and the family name was Ryan.

Larry Ryan, an unskilled farm laborer from the South Riding of County Tipperary had a household so large he could not fully support it. They shared spoons, they shared bowls; they had so few clothes between them that all the children couldn't be out of doors at the same time.

For this desperate existence Larry Ryan blamed everybody: the landlords, the politicians, the English, the ruling class. He was a fit and capable man, and the system gave him nothing but an earthen floor in a long damp thatched cottage. By the time he was thirty-five, Larry Ryan had already borne in his arms, from that cottage to the graveyard, three small white infant coffins supplied by the parish.

Such conditions raised no shouts. The Ryans typified hundreds of thousands of Irish, people who had little and received nothing. Larry Ryan scrabbled hard and responsibly for what he could earn, but— typical in another way— driven by bitterness and grind, he drank as much as he could get. His was an old tale, common and grim.

However, this lean, hardy man possessed some character, and his efforts to obtain employment never flagged. He might have caused havoc and hunger by failing to come straight home from work, but he knew that a life could be made, if only he had the chance. After the death of the third infant he managed to stand still and take stock.

His wife, Joan, had quiet ways and at last she had a moment in which she could try to make him hear. They could no longer be sure, she said,
of the mortality of any new baby. She had borne ten children by the age of thirty seven had survived, and she had no idea how many more would arrive.

Although he listened, he took time to respond. But after two more— successful— pregnancies, Larry Ryan began to calm down. To everybody's surprise he weaned himself off liquor. Life improved almost the same day; he got steady work and a second job, and the family's hungers eased.

The trade-off, though, had a difficult edge. Alcohol had always softened him, and now a harder man appeared. Curt and sarcastic, with a new self-regard, he bore down on his home like a lout. He scrutinized, criticized, brutalized. All his children suffered, especially his wife's two favorites. One of them, the oldest, was sent to an aunt in San Francisco at the age of twelve; her father's “discipline” had blackened her eye in a chastening over chores. But the other, the second youngest child, Vincent, didn't get away.

Vincent Patrick Ryan was born in 1892. A difficult birth dragged him by the head from the warm darkness near his mother's heart to the damp light of a winter candle. Yet he emerged a most winning child, the sweetest of that brood. From the outset he charmed people, and when his many baby grimaces became indentifiable as little fat smiles, he gave them willingly and drew everybody to his light.

Except his father. Vincent grew up on a seesaw. His father scowled at him on sight, so his mother's love went underground. She had made her bargain. The relief of a sober husband never dimmed, and she constantly sought to appease him. So she split her care of her second youngest; behind the scenes she cosseted Vincent and he clung to her neck, but openly she sided with the father's bile. At each gibe and blow she winced inside; later, in secret, she spoke loving words as the child sat on her lap.

Larry Ryan, not unshrewd, saw the tactic and countered it. He saved his deepest cuts for Joan's absence and spoke piercing words when alone with Vincent. Over and over he said, “You're useless, that's what you are.” Time after time he bent down and whispered his favorite taunt: “You'll end up at the end of a rope. You'll swing.”

At first Vincent had to have this explained. When his older brothers showed him the illustration of a hanged felon, he took the point with tears and fear— he was, at the time, four years old.

The siblings had been happy to tell him such tales. They saw the father's attitude as a favorable wind. If they hoisted their sails and went with it, they might escape some of the daily ire. So they were glad to gang up on the small boy; he had too much charm for them anyway.

Who can say why Larry Ryan behaved so foully— and to such a golden child? As the three pregnancies before Vincent had been stillborn and Joan had almost died twice, had he feared that Vincent's birth threatened his mother's life? Was Vincent a replacement child for the three dead births, with all the attached black baggage? Or was the father simply being “normal”?

His behavior was not unique. Many Irish parents, especially the men, in all strata of society, dealt out similar abuse to their children, disguising rancor or plain dislike as
discipline.
Not a thought went toward feelings, not a breath spoke the word
love—
indeed, a church teaching suggested that children existed at their parents’ bidding.

Whatever the root of the behavior or the culture that supported it, an incident came one day that altered Vincent Ryan.

A winter evening, a Saturday night, a bath before bedtime. It was Vincent's turn to wear the good clothes available for Mass next morning, and his mother loved showing him off. Two of the older boys carried the zinc tub from the yard and set it on the earth floor in front of the hearth. Their mother took down the heavy kettle of hot water from the hooks over the fire. With, next, the temperature established from a bucket of cold water, Vincent began to step in.

One of his brothers pushed him in horseplay and he stumbled and half fell. Water splashed everywhere, muddying the earthen floor. At that moment his father walked in on this scene and saw only one side of what he called “tomfoolery.” Larry Ryan took down the ash switch that he kept for punishments and cut its thin swish through the air. He grabbed the five-year-old by the ear, twisted him over into a jackknife, and lashed at the sweet pink body. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty full-force laborer's blows— nobody in that dim interior was counting.

An ash switch cuts the skin; it draws blood. The terrorized child twisted, screeched, and gasped. Released at last, he danced like a dervish in bewildered, unbearable, inconsolable pain.

O
n the day after the shovel attack, Robert Shannon shone anew; his spirits seemed up, his energy strong. He showed no remorse because he had no remembrance—a feature of his condition.

Molly asked no questions about the blood on Joe's arm and cheek; his eyes deterred her. That night he explained. Lying together, they invoked the agreement they had been offered by the priest who had asked them to watch out for this visitor. At the first sign of danger, he told them, the “poor young man” must move on. Ruthless it might be, but it would “save the fellow from himself.” The archbishop in America had made this clear.

Some doctors, based on observation of this new shell-shock phenomenon, had noted that the violent responses of the sufferers went two ways, introversion or extroversion; they attacked themselves or they attacked others. Men who continued to do both proved incurable.

Such success as they had seen came with those who graduated from attacking themselves to attacking others— it seemed to mean that the illness was being externalized: The sufferer was rejecting it, trying to put it outside of himself. Therefore, Robert's attack on Joe O'Sullivan was a
kind of progress, especially as Robert had not caused damage to himself for several months.

Deep in the night, in the small house at Tarbert, his hosts yearned for guidance. How could they send him onward? Wouldn't that be throwing him out? They discussed Robert's raised spirits and reasoned that he surely couldn't have known what he'd done. Or, since he hadn't uttered a word about it, he had wiped the attack from his memory. Either possibility gave them their tact and their tactic— if their guest didn't feel he'd done anything wrong, they had no need to fear seeming vengeful.