Shannon (8 page)

A
t nine o'clock Monday morning, 3 July 1922, Robert Shannon crossed the invisible county border from Kerry into Limerick and walked toward the village of Foynes.

“Watch out,” Joe had told him, “for a hill called Knockpatrick. It's where Saint Patrick stood to bless the rest of the west. He wouldn't go any farther; he was afraid of us.”

By the gateway to the little house, Robert had offered his thanks. When he had first arrived at the O'Sullivans’ he'd spoken— if at all— in short sentences: hesitant, tentative, dull. But he had grown less jerky, as the days sauntered by, and had framed longer speeches. Of late he had even asked questions, gathering small information, which he repeated to himself many times.

Essentially, he was restocking his brain. The guerrillas in the fields and the soldiers on the river had not caused a serious halt. His recovery maintained its nervous course.

On this bright morning he had even asked, “What does the name
Tarbert
mean?”

“An isthmus,” Joe had said. “Yes. We think it might be a very old
name, because if you look”—he pointed across the river—”the only chance of a small piece of land connecting two bigger pieces is over there. But they weren't joined since the Ice Age.”

Robert had shaken hands with each of them and set off in the warm air. Shep had trotted with him, tongue like pink rubber; Joe and Molly had stood, waving. Molly had whistled for the dog— on her fingers again, Robert had waved back one more time, and then they had all slipped from his view as he rounded the bend in the road.

Sixteen nights Robert had stayed in Tarbert, and a good measure of strength had come back to him there. In shards and fragments, he recalled things he had forgotten. Small mosaics of memory formed in his mind, jigsaws of personal lore. They amounted to a significant advance, even if they still dissolved before a composed picture was set.

Now one of these fragments snagged him. Next day was Julia Shannon's birthday, since childhood a red-letter day in Robert's year. That morning, as he left Tarbert, he almost remembered it. Something nagged at him, and he said aloud to himself, “Tomorrow: a
special
day.” He wondered whether it indeed had to do with his mother, but that was as far as it went. He struggled for a while to rake up the extra memory. It lingered at the edge of his mind, like a half-wild animal that won't come into the house; then he gave up and strode on. Dr. Greenberg would have called that
progress.

The Shannon River flows quietly past these roads. Widened out and diluted now by the spread of her own estuary, she is twice daily pushed back upon herself by a larger grandeur, the incoming tide from the sea. Farther up, she has always been in command, a stream of mixed pace, dominating the land through which she flows. She has an exotic spirit: There are rapids, lakes, stylish falls, and oxbows.

Not a safe river, she has a temperament all her own. She can throw waves up to thirty feet high; she owns lakes as long as twenty-five miles; she has sweet and plump tributaries. Her riparian living has an ancient feel and her lands can be enviably fertile— if she chooses to bestow an untroubled year.

But her pools and eddies are as wild as the human spirit and rise from as deep a source. The way she caresses her riverbanks, the way she inundates
fields with her savaging floods— these extremes of behavior all spring from a soul that dwells far beneath the plates of the country's bedrock.

Her catchment covers 5,800 square miles—almost one-fifth the area of all Ireland—and she flows for 215 miles, from an infinite hole in the lean stony ground of Leitrim and Cavan in the north to the hardy Atlantic headlands of Kerry and Clare in the southwest.

Her people know their river like they know their weather. The farmers alongside the Shannon live at her whim. How often has she flooded their fields without warning? On how many mornings have they seen their trees standing like elephants’ feet in the water when the floodplain broadens out for several miles on either side of the river's normal course, causing silent havoc? No wonder that she was, to medieval poets, “the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea.”

And she has a tribe of her own, committed to tussling with her: the Shannon boatmakers. They have a skill some call an art; they make a craft dedicated to conquering the river. Some of them live in houses that can only be reached by water. They've always been people of instinct, alert to the river's moods.

In truth, the Shannon has never offered an easy life to anybody. Crossings are scattered; bridges occur infrequently—on average, no more than every twelve miles or so. But in Robert Shannon's time she could still be forded here and there, as she often was in the past, and to great historical effect.

She is one of the great and ancient rivers of the world— Ireland's Nile, a baby Mississippi— and she has long been recognized as such. She was powerful enough to attract the geographer Ptolemy; three hundred years before Christ, his maps bent whole countries out of shape, but he accurately grasped the line of the Shannon. A thousand years later, her water meadows lured monks to her banks, able to see God in the sweetness of the stream. And after them, up the river, came the longboat Vikings to ransack the sacred gold.

Robert Shannon had chosen well for history, geography, mood, and lore. Ahead of him lay a journey that would unfold to him three fine gifts: hope, story, and reward. The hope, dimly in place as a glimmer from childhood, came from his belonging to such a great natural force.

After all, his river could be called the mightiest in the world— if measured in proportion to the nation that it serves.

And, this being Ireland, the story element lay ahead in abundance— rich story, both narrated and experienced; the story in the word
history;
the story that comes up out of the very ground, out of ancient earth, all light and color and fire, and no shortage of voices to tell and embellish it.

As for reward, he faced an unusual experience, often sought by travelers and diminishingly available today. He could actually capture, in great part, the sense, the moral style, and the tempo of the same country his forebears had left a couple of centuries earlier. This nineteen-twenties voyager across Ireland traveled in old times— and, his journey now at last begun in earnest, he could look around him with livelier eyes.

His map gave him no idea of what textures lay ahead; he had only the road in red ink. But the place-names called to him like bells: Glin, Limerick, Castleconnell, Killaloe, Portumna, Athlone. He felt steadier; he was excited. For a moment that morning—just one moment—he had been a little rocky. When he lost sight of the O'Sullivans, the familiar stricture of fear reached his throat. He swallowed hard, as Dr. Greenberg had instructed, and it worked. By now the urge to claw at his mouth was no more than a faint memory of a distasteful reflex. He no longer put his fingers down his throat until he retched.

Molly had packed sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and instructed him not to eat them all at once. Nevertheless he opened the packet and savored the welter of tastes. He argued to himself that he didn't know when he'd eat that day. The O'Sullivans had never queried him as to where he might next come to rest— and Robert never observed that they felt no need to ask.

When they talked about him that night, as they did almost every day for a month after he'd gone, they again mentioned his eyes. Robert knew about them himself from his proud mother; Julia said that he'd inherited their color from her own grandfather, a man who'd owned whaling ships out of New Bedford and whose eyes had the faded blue of distant seas. Now those eyes viewed the road and the river ahead.

When the Irish Project was finally mapped out, the archbishop sat Robert down. He had arranged the room's two leather armchairs face-to-face, a few feet apart.

“I have to look at you, Robert, into your face, into your eyes, as I tell you this.”

In his farmer's walk he lumbered down the room and locked the door. When he came back, Robert sat upright, waiting.

Once in his chair, Anthony Sevovicz sent a massive hand over his large face. As usual, he used twenty words where one would have done.

“If I have judged your vital matters accurately, Robert, if I have measured the progress of your spirit in the way that best tells me how you are feeling—and shows me the point to where your recovery has progressed— I believe you are indeed ready to undertake this Irish journey.”

Then, as he did with everything, he made himself the most important person in the exchange.

“I myself am familiar with adventures. I too have walked a great journey. It is important to you that I tell you about it. In the month before my ordination to the priesthood, I suffered deep qualms of faith and vocation. Did I truly wish to serve God in this exclusive manner, or was I merely attempting to dress myself in good cloth—and, of course, please my parents? A son who is a priest carries his parents to God. Ordination would also make me the most important member of my large family. Poland is like that; in Poland, the priest is the prince of the family. I would become such a prince, and I would also become a prince of the Church.”

The archbishop had hands as big as garden spades, with chewed fingernails. His incapacity to speak briefly stemmed from his love of authority. Robert, even though emotionally less than complete, had learned how to nip in when the big man paused for breath.

“I understand, Your Grace.”

“Therefore, when I was about to be ordained, I took advantage of the seminary's offer of time for contemplation before final vows. I decided to go to Warsaw, to the big city. This was not, as you might immediately think, an essay to test myself against the pleasures of a brighter life. I sought the journey more than I needed the destination. So I walked. I walked and I walked. A long journey: many days, many hours, many nights and mornings. That is, in part, why I believe that you should undertake
this travel to Ireland. I, in my peregrination, had but a month. You shall have as long as you need.”

A sharper Robert might have found a delicate way to bring the archbishop to the point, but as it was he merely listened.

“In my walking I contemplated— as I had intended— my vocation. And in my walking I met and examined people, ordinary people of Poland— good people. I looked at them closely; I observed what they did. More important, I tried to measure”—he paused—”measure. To measure. Music is measured. Yes, measure. I tried to measure how they did what they did. Did I know what I was seeking from them? Looking for? In them? Yes, I think so. I was seeking to measure commitment. Vocation, if you like. Yes, vocation. Calling.”

He leaned forward. Robert returned his gaze with, as ever, the trust of a child.

“I see that you understand me, Robert. This is wonderful.”

Sevovicz had always wept easily, and now he shed a tear.

“Go on your journey, Robert. Go to Ireland. Go to your holy river. Think of vocation. Big letters.” He raised his voice a little, but carefully, given Robert's antipathy to noise. “V-O-C-A-T-I-O-N, Robert. Vocation. And measure your vocation against those whom you meet. Observe the ordinary people in their ordinary callings. I did; they taught me. You will see what I mean. They will teach you.”

Robert Shannon had always possessed a good stride. In the army it improved when he marched all day. Since then he had gained further strength, which could keep him going for miles. The archbishop had trained him in this. Those long walks they took, many miles at random and then regular afternoons, building up pace first, to establish confidence, and then distance, to establish stamina— Anthony Sevovicz put major faith in the powers of walking and its rhythms.

It helped that he and Robert had similarly long legs. And it helped that Sevovicz had been a considerable track athlete, his seminary's middle-distance champion. Sevovicz had a naive psychology of walking. “Walking takes us forward, Robert. We cannot slip back while we are moving forward.”

After Tarbert, then, Robert strode onward in a northeasterly direction,
up toward the heart of Ireland. He had no cultural sense of where he was going. He knew nothing of the textures waiting ahead. He would only— for the moment— tick off place-names on a map.

In the first quarter hour he ate all the food that Molly had packed for him. Rarely did he take his eyes off the river. He walked and he looked and he looked and he walked. A traveler to his rear, observing him from a few yards’ distance, would have seen this tall thin walker's impressive stride and would have strained to keep up with him.

Carried by that stride, Robert reached a long natural archway of trees, whose cathedral shade he relished. As he cleared the arches he saw, just ahead on his right, an elaborate miniature castle. It turned out to be a gateway with a pair of towers and a crust of battlements along the top. Through this structure he saw its parent, a full-blown castle with a façade as stretched as a parade that ended in a tall citadel. White, with battlements, it looked like an iced cake, with each corner rounded and windowed. Robert stopped at the gateway, intrigued by this echo of France: a château in an Irish field.