Shannon (30 page)

The forester said, “We shouldn't be growing pine anyway; my father
was right, and his father before him. What's wrong with ash? There's nothing wrong with ash. Or beech, come to that.”

“Is this your job?”

“It is, Father.”

There! Again! With no discernible identification, Robert had been recognized as a priest.

He smiled. “How did you know?”

The forester said, “Ah, there's a cut to a man. You'll always know a priest. He's taught to be careful, he kinda walks like his shoes are always polished. Would you like a bite of a sangwidge, Father?”

In a clearing, a horse grazed, unhitched from a cart that stood nearby, its shafts tipped to rest in the earth. Other implements, including a long two-handled saw, projected into the air from the cart's upended rear. The forester found a satchel on the cart, sat down against the wheel, and opened the lunch bag. Taking out two massive sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, he handed one to Robert.

“There y are, Father, get yourself outside that,” the forester said, and bit into his own portion, sending out a little yellow cloud of dried egg.

Robert bit less powerfully— and loved the taste.

“This is very good.”

“Ah, Jody She's a flier”—meaning that his wife made excellent sandwiches and probably good food all round. “Where are you off to, Father? Or are you just out for a walk? Great place for a walk, along here.”

“I hope I'm not trespassing.”

“Ah, Father, what trespass? Isn't the world open to everyone?”

The horse came a little closer, dragging up clumps of grass in great chomping noises, and the forester took another massive bite, spewing egg. Reaching into his satchel, he pulled out a tall bottle of milk, with a fierce twist of newspaper acting as a cork.

“Did you ever drink buttermilk, Father?”

“Buttermilk? I've heard of it.”

“That's what's left in the churn after they form the butter. I always tries to get a bottle of it. Try it, itself.”

He yanked out the paper stopper and handed it over. Robert drank, tested the sweet-sour taste, new to his palate, and liked it. He nodded and handed it back.

“What do you like about being a forester— if that's what you are?”

“Yeh. Or a woodsman. Or a fella who works at the trees.” The forester pulled another fantastic sandwich from his satchel and gave half to Robert. “Well, if you didn't like it, you wouldn't do it. And if you didn't do it, you'd never know it. And if you never knew it— well, you might as well give up. There's days, Father, when I'd nearly run to work, just to be out here.”

So far Robert followed that the young forester so passionately loved his work he could scarcely wait to get up in the morning.

“What is it that— pulls you?”

By now the forester's chewing seemed to harmonize with that of his horse. This new sandwich, thick as a doorstep, contained ham and mustard, and it left a swipe of the mustard on his lower lip, where it sat like a golden scar.

“I'll come out here,” he said, sucking the crumbs from his teeth as he searched his mouth for words, “I'll come out here and it'll be early, half six in the summer, eight o'clock in the winter. And I'll untackle Billy and let him graze, and I'll go over to the trees.

“There'll be birds singing, and often I do see a fox and he'll look at me in the eye and then slope off—not in any hurry, mind you; the red gentleman always takes his time. If there's any animal I'd like to talk to, Father, ‘tis a fox. He'd have clever things to say. Or a badger, he'd be nice to talk to, only he'd gallop away; a badger is as shy as a girl.

“And when I come out here, there'll be dew on the ferns, and the spiders’ webs shining with drops of water. And I'll start to trim a tree or clear away growth from a big root or something.”

Robert sat up a little, tightening like a drum. Here, again, was the kind of voice the archbishop had taught him to look for,
the passion to be found in an ordinary calling.

The forester, with a none-too-clean sleeve, automatically wiped the rim of the bottle after Robert's drinking and took his own lengthy swig. He then swiped his mouth with the same sleeve, rubbing away the mustard scar.

“And there's a smell you get from wood when you cut into it. I mean, timber out here smells different from timber in a shed or a sawmill. There's a fresh smell here, like there's green in the smell that fades later.”

He grew as excited as a sports fan.

“And then you cuts away the old brush an’ that, and the tree gets a bit of room to breathe, like, and you can nearly hear her breathing, and you know that in two or three years she'll be adding leaves to beat the band. Or you're out here in the winter and there's a touch of frost—not that we gets much of it—and you'll see ahead of you a tree with the leaves gone and it standing all by itself like a ghost. And—”

The forester stopped, suddenly embarrassed.

“Father, did you ever work a crosscut?”

“What's a crosscut?”

“Ah, you didn't so.”

The forester jumped to his feet, pulling the remains of the meal together and stuffing them into the satchel. He took down from the cart the long two-handled saw.

“This is a crosscut. It needs two men.”

Across the clearing stood two powerfully built sawhorses. They looked as though they lived there; grass clung to their firm wooden feet. Nearby sat a pyramid of logs, some aged, some new. The forester, with the long saw bouncing over one shoulder, headed to the sawhorses and Robert followed.

He and the forester manhandled a log into place on the horses. The forester took a small tomahawk from his cart and hacked a deep notch into the log. Nodding to Robert, he picked up his end of the saw, and together they fitted the center of the blade to the deep notch.

“Now. Allow a while for the saw to get to know the wood,” he said. Robert took up a position that mimicked the forester's stance and grip. “You have to hit a kinda smooth thing between the two of us. All right, Father, I'll pull first.”

Robert held the blade straight as the forester pulled. It ran smoothly enough.

“Now you pull.” Again, a certain smoothness seemed to occur.

“Now, Father, we'll do it twice in a row.”

Pull-pull, pull-pull. Soon the rhythm began to build. Soon, too, the sweat began to build on Robert's forehead and the salt of it to sting his eyes.

“Hey, God, Father, you're powerful at this, powerful. Take that coat off you and you'll be flying.”

For the next several minutes Robert sawed with the crosscut, exercised and elated. The blade bit into the firm yellow wood in a cut so clean that even the forester admired it.

“Ah, Father, you'll never go back on the altar after this!”

Soon, the saw had come to the lowest rim of the log and the forester said, “Right, Father, now we take it easy. We'll go softer and slower, just a bit of a pull from me and then from you, so we can get the saw through clean.”

They pulled with greater care, and then—”Watch your leg!” said the forester, and the saw suddenly fell heavily into their grasp. They had cut clean through the log, whose halves now said goodbye to each other.

The forester inspected the cut. “Grand!” he declared. “God, Father, we'll make a woodsman of you yet. Where you off to now?”

“I'm keeping close to the river. And I'm looking for any people called Shannon. Do you know any?”

The forester looked at him. “My wife was a Shannon. I s'pose you knew that when you stopped. Oh-ho, you'll have to meet her.
And
her mother.”

Robert stayed in the woods all morning; he chopped and he hauled: branches, cords of wood, logs. Not for years had he exerted himself in physical labor, and he enjoyed it almost frenziedly He poured on energy; he lifted great weights of wood; he swung the ax in wide but precise circles. The blisters that formed on his hands felt like badges. The rough textures of the logs gave him the touch of Nature herself. The sweat pouring down his face and his back and from under his arms washed his body like a new freedom.

“Father,” said the forester, “I'm not letting you leave here.”

At two o'clock the forester's wife arrived, the former Jody Shannon, the flier at making sandwiches.

“He's always making friends,” was her greeting. She unwrapped a large newspaper parcel of food. “I've enough here for two and more.”

“Guess what this man's name is,” said the forester, smiling at his wife as though she had brought him jewels.

“He's always riddling me,” she said to Robert, and laughed. “He says he likes to keep me guessing.”

“He has your name,” said the forester.

“Josephine?” said the wife. “And do they call you Jody?”

All three laughed, and Jody said, “Don't tell me you're a Shannon?”

“He is, he is,” said her husband.

They offered Robert a bed for the night; they wanted him to stay for a week. His delight at their cottage charmed them. He said it came straight from the fairy tales of his childhood: a woodcutter's house at the edge of the forest with a red door, dormer windows of small panes, and Gothic woodworked braiding details on the eaves.

They had two children “and another invoiced,” as the forester put it, although Jody showed no signs of pregnancy. Her mother had taken the children for a walk in the woods. A fox had had cubs not far away, and they went out in the late afternoon every day hoping to see the cubs at play. Before the children came back, the forester and his wife asked Robert about his journey. They marveled that he had come all the way from Tarbert.

When he mentioned Francis Carberry they exulted.

“Outside Athlone? He's a cousin of mine,” said the forester.

“And he married a girl I was in school with,” said his wife. “Lily. She died in the war; it nearly killed him. She ran off with a fella, an English officer she met in Athlone; she went over to France after him.”

Robert started. This tale had a different ring. Francis Carberry had said nothing of it.
Poor Francis!

Jody continued, “I don't think Francis knew at all. Lily was always wild.”

The forester said, “And he never told you we were here, Shannons an’ all?”

Jody said, “Maybe he didn't think of it.”

The children arrived with their grandmother: nine-year-old twin girls, Mary Josephine and Josephine Mary. Robert guessed at but did not allude to a certain devoutness behind the choice of names.

All sat to a meal. The grandmother, face like an amiable prune, said, “I was Shannon and I married Shannon. My own name was Philomena Shannon, and I married Paddy Shannon.”

“From where?” asked Robert.

“From down the river,” she said. “Lough Ree. I'm from Portlick, and my late husband was from Horseleap.”

“Does your name come from the river?” asked Robert.

“No. We were Shanahans, but my great-grandfather shortened it because he didn't like his father.”

Robert said, “And your husband's name?”

Jody chipped in. “Daddy always said that we were Scotch, didn't he?”

“That's because his grandfather came into Dublin from Scotland.”

The forester wrapped up the debate. “So, Father, I'm afraid there's no blood here for you. You'll have to keep walking.”

After dinner Robert asked for stories of the Shannon. The forester said, “There's an island up at the top of Lough Ree, near where Nana is from. The real name is Inchcleraun. But ‘tis known too as Quaker Island or Mad Island. Nana has a great tale about it, haven't you, Nana?”

The grandmother obliged.

“Queen Maeve of Connacht”—as Nana told it—”like Bathsheba in the Bible, enjoyed bathing in the open air. But the great queen had powerful enemies— including the King of Ulster, from whom she, at the head of a band of her men, had rustled a favorite and famous brown bull, the Brown Bull of Cooley And when all was said and done and she was still laughing at her triumph, the king's son killed her with a stone from his sling when she was sunning herself after a swim.”

To tell her story, the grandmother folded her hands in her lap and spoke more formally than in conversation. The twin girls, who had heard this tale many times, sat enthralled, as did Robert.

“Yes, he fitted a stone to his sling until it nestled there, neat and round and shiny. Seven times he swung the sling around his head until it made a great whizzing circle. And then he let go one end. The stone flew through the air for exactly one mile and hit Queen Maeve in the middle of the forehead and stuck there.

“She reached up to puzzle out what had hit her, and when she put her finger on the stone, she cursed all the stones there. The curse was that anybody who ever attempted to build anything of stone on that island would go mad. And then Queen Maeve died, and nobody ever built anything of stone on Inchcleraun. Irish people are very respectful of a curse.

“Many centuries later, a good and quiet monk came to this island”— the twin girls glanced at Robert—”to build his monastery. His name was Dermot. The island people told him not to touch the stones because they were cursed. They said that if they ever tried to build anything with
stone, their animals foamed at the mouth and died. Even if they kicked a stone along the road, the dog got a cough.

“Dermot, being a good monk, knew how to fix a curse. So he turned north, he turned south, he turned west, and lastly he turned east, and he bowed his head to God and blessed every stone on the island. The curse abated, and he built his monastery. He died there after years of prayer and good works, and the pope made him a saint.”

The twin girls said, “Don't forget Mr. Fairbrother! Don't forget Mr. Fairbrother!” The grandmother moved smoothly on.

“Many centuries after Saint Dermot—about ninety years ago, in fact—a Quaker gentleman by the name of Mr. Fairbrother was out fishing one day on Lough Ree, and he landed on Inchcleraun. He loved it so much that he bought the whole island and decided to build a house there. It was ideal, he felt—and not only that, the place had plenty of stones from ruined old buildings. So he began to cart the stones to his own building site.

“But the stones came from Saint Dermot's monastery, and when the first load of stones went onto the cart, Mr. Fairbrother's horse went mad. He galloped off, swinging to the left, swinging to the right, and his mouth foamed, and his head rolled. Off he went, tearing in a circle around the island, and the stones went flying off his cart here there and everywhere.