Shannon

A
t the vulnerable age of thirty, Robert Shannon lost his soul. Nothing is worse; no greater danger exists. Only sinners lose their souls, it's said, through the evil that they do. Not Robert Shannon. Incapable of anything but good, he lost his soul through savagery that he witnessed, horrors that he saw. And then, as he was repairing himself and his beliefs, he was ravaged further in the pursuit of his own faith.

When you lose— or have ripped from you— the spirit that directs you, you have two options. Fight for your soul and win it back, and you'll evermore be a noble human being. Fail, and you die from loss of truth.

And so, just before dawn one morning in 1922, Robert Shannon stood on the deck of a slow old freighter on the southwest coast of Ireland and looked inland. This was the point to which he had come in search of his lost best self. If he could have explained clearly what he was doing, he would have said that he wanted to find the man he had been. If he could have described lucidly the essence of his journey across the Atlantic, he would have expressed the wish that here, in the country of his forebears,
some ancient magic of ancestry might restore him. Could it be that in the old land, of which he had so often dreamed, he might find, to begin with, hope? But what he desperately needed to rediscover was belief.

On the port side, the western hills slept low and dark; to starboard rose the tall and ragged box of a ruined castle. A lighthouse came gliding into view, its lanterns beam fading against the opening skies. These were sights he had expected to see, and as they approached they comforted him— insofar as he could feel comfort. The dark rocks, though watching carefully, offered no threat, and the freighter steamed in, composed now in the estuary's calm after weeks of coping with the burly sea.

Find your soul and you'll live.

Ashore, colors began to wake up and stretch. A gray triangle became a lawn of green. In a whitewashed cottage wall, a dark oblong shape developed into a turquoise door. The large house on the hill strengthened from gray to yellow. In a sloping field, black-and-white cows drifted, heavy and swaying, toward their gate, expecting to be milked.

Forward of the ship, seabirds flapped up from the little waves. On a rock a cormorant waited, an etching in black angles. The spreading river shone like gray satin; later it would turn sapphire under the blue sky.

As the light brightened, the captain came and stood at the rail with his lone passenger, for whom he had to find a clear mooring in this uncertain place. Once having landed this man safely and well, he could take the freighter back into the channel.

Not for the first time, Captain Aaronson heard his passenger murmur something and sigh.

The square tower of the village church remained in shadow. Despite the half-light, the ship discovered the little old pier, made a wide curve, and chugged in. Disembarkation took no more than a few minutes. The seamen dropped a ladder over the side, and the passenger took the captain's hand as though he wished to keep it.

“Thank you, Captain. For your”—he halted— “for your— such kindness.”

Without a further word he turned and, with his back to the waiting land, and made hunchbacked by his large rucksack, he descended the ladder. When his feet touched the jetty, he stood for a moment; indeed, he clung to the ladder. Then he took a step backward and turned away.

Looking down from the rail, the captain and some crewmen watched him lurch off, this man who had rarely spoken to them. As one said, “He spooked us all,” because he moved around so silently. He'd slipped and slid with the roll of the sea. He'd taken the rain in his face like a man trying to wake up. He'd inhaled deeply the harsh and icy air through which they had sometimes sailed.

The few seamen who had tried speaking to him had learned nothing. Often the changing watch met him as he ghosted around the decks in the smallest hours of the night. To their greeting he cast down his eyes and stepped aside to let them pass. Among themselves they talked about him without cease. Was he a criminal on the run? Was he a fugitive from the recent German war? Was he being put ashore for secret political reasons? Was he an Irish spy?

Only the captain, a tough little Dutchman, knew anything. He knew why the young traveler remained silent, his pale face closed. The tall distinguished man who had instructed Captain Aaronson in the port of Boston had indicated that his passenger would have little wish to speak.

“Ask him no questions,” he said. “He has seen too much.”

On a shouted order, two seamen hauled up the ladder. The ship's engine growled on the air. Within minutes she was back in the stretch of the river they call Tarbert Roads, chugging her way up to Limerick.

“Do you know what he was saying to himself?” the mate asked the captain.

“No, I could not so well hear.”

But Captain Aaronson was lying. He'd heard perfectly well what the passenger had said— what he had murmured over and over.

Lose your soul and you'll die.

The young American walked no more than a few yards, then stopped and looked back. His arms hung loose; his body sagged like a puppet's; the haversack dragged his shoulders down. He gazed after the departing ship and gasped.

Come back! Don't leave me!

For several minutes he remained in that one place. A harsh bird went
craik-craik.
Mottled hanks of weed, green as the hair of a witch, flopped against the old stone wedges of the jetty. The young man patted his
cheeks as if disbelieving the gentleness of the morning air. Once upon a time this would have been a moment for a prayer, especially as the sky was now brightening fast.

On the evidence of his appearance, this man was neither a farmer nor a laborer; his face was too unweathered, too strained, too pale. Nor was he a clerk or a lawyer; his eyes showed no calm, no control. Could he have been a performer of some sort, an actor, a singer? No, he had no authority in his stance, neither in his body nor in his walk. A doctor? Not at all, no hint of concern. A teacher, perhaps? A leader of men?

Not anymore. This man had been shattered— by war. The systems he had learned since his birth, in his years of impressive education, in the outstanding conduct of his own life— they had all seized and failed and he had become silent, incapable, trapped. Those ropes by which we all pull ourselves forward through the world were, in his life, as thin as cotton threads.

Find your soul and you'll live.
That's why he had come here. Robert Shannon was a Catholic priest, born and raised in the white towns of New England. He had ministered as a beloved pastor; from there he had gone forth to become a war hero: Captain Robert Shannon, a chaplain with the U.S. Marines. With his deeds no more now than somebody else's fable, some handwritten and classified reports in a regimental archive, some family letters full of pride, he walked along that anonymous Irish foreshore because, as is the case with so many heroes, nobody knew for certain what to do with him.

Those few who cared for Father Shannon— his parents, his mentor in the Church, his doctor— wished devoutly to keep him alive. But they also knew that, given his infirm emotions, he stood in danger of taking his own life— especially if he remained in New England. And, as if all this was not enough, there were those— unknown to his guardians— who would soon get ready to help him die, because he had indeed seen too much.