Shannon (56 page)

Joe said, “Well, it is and it isn't.”

She looked at him.

“We had a fella here,” said Joe, “looking for Robert. Big fella. Blond hair, the color of a girl.”

“American?” said Ellie.

“Ah, yeh. We were in a bad way we were so frightened of him, so we passed the word on, like.”

Ellie said, “It's all been taken care of. If he was a bad hat, Robert knows nothing about it. No need for him to know.”

“No, no, you're right, so long as he's all right. And he's looking great.” Still, Joe seemed less than satisfied. “Where are ye going next?”

“Robert wants to go to Scattery Then— he has this ship in Limerick.”

Joe still seemed uneasy. He shuffled his feet. “What's he going to do?”

Ellie shook her head and looked away, close to tears.

Joe said, “Robert'll do the right thing. That's my guess.”

Ellie thought but did not say,
Yes, but what's the right thing?

And still Joe shuffled his feet; and still he seemed uncomfortable. He took a deep breath.

“That big fair-haired fella. He frightened the life outa Molly.”

“He frightened the life out of us all,” said Ellie. “He stayed with us for two days. Then Robert's bishop came to the house— I don't know how he found us— and he got rid of him.”

“He didn't,” said Joe. “No.”

Ellie looked at him. “Oh, Christ. This is why I've been nervous all day.”

Joe said, “He's in Limerick. A man from the village met him, he was asking about joining the Irregulars.”

“Oh, Jesus God. What do we do?”

But Robert came across at that moment and said, “Joe, there's somebody I have to meet.”

After some conversation with her husband, Molly gave the precise directions, and they set off in the car, Ellie, Robert, and Joe. Ellie drove the little lanes, the small roads.
There is no protection here. And those bloody Irregulars are commandeering motorcars.

Joe identified the house, and Robert knocked on the door. A faded woman appeared.

Robert said, “Excuse me. Are you Mrs. Dargan?”

The woman looked up at him. “I am.”

“I'm a visiting American priest. I was with your son when he died.”

She did nothing. Not a muscle moved. Then she looked away, then back into Robert's eyes. “Was he all right?”

“I was with him. To the very end. He was more than all right.”

“Did you know he was only twenty?”

“I guessed he was young. He was very peaceful.”

“Oh, thanks, Father. Thanks. I won't say no more now.”

To Robert the resemblance to her son seemed striking. She turned away and went into her house and didn't close her door. As Robert watched she halted by a chair, a simple kitchen chair, and rested her hand on the top bar of the chair back. She stood there for a moment and then turned to put both hands on the chair, and then she bowed her head until her forehead touched her hands. Robert watched for a moment and then tiptoed away from this unspeakable grief.

When they returned to the house, Joe said, “We can take you to Scattery on the boat, but we've no room for you to stay tonight. You could go to Kennelly's; they have room over the pub.” He never made a judgmental comment or asked an intrusive question, even though he had seen and assessed the relationship accurately.

While Robert and Ellie remained at the house, Joe rode his bicycle to the village and called to Kennelly's. He made the arrangements and got a key, so that Robert and Ellie could get in through the side door of the pub late that night and not be seen by the drinkers. Joe talked to Denis Kennelly for a long time.

The conversation moved from high anxiety to greater worry to near panic. Both men, old friends, batted back and forth in equal concern.

“What we don't want,” Joe said, “is them stopped on the road and the car taken, and this fella being part of the gang and recognizing my two friends.”

“He's open about it. He was staying in Cruise's Hotel in Limerick last week and talking to everyone. Wants to fight for his country, he says.”

“Will they take him on?”

Denis Kennelly said, “The Irregulars are desperate for men. There was a Cronin boy from here killed last week. They said he was an informer. But he wasn't shot like usual. Bayonet wounds, they said.”

“In Limerick?”

“Yeh,” said Denis Kennelly.

“Oh, God above! My friend— he has to be in Limerick for the ship. Isn't that easy to trace?”

Both men fell silent.

“I have an idea,” said Joe.

Vincent Ryan was not in Limerick that Thursday night. He had indeed been staying there, at Cruise's Hotel, in comfort, patriotic bonhomie, and goodwill. At least that was the side he presented to the world. In the bar he had asked discreet questions about the Irregulars. Soon he was taken to meet them— and he made many fine speeches about Ireland and Irish freedom and the U.S. Marine Corps and war.

But on the long journey down from Lanesborough, Vincent had been in a welter of depression. He rode some of the way, he stowed his bicycle on trains, he caught a bus. Hour by hour, minute by minute, he fought for focus.
The ship leaves Limerick on Friday. This is my best chance. It'll call for a different tactic.

At no time during the week, however, did he get an unbroken or peaceful night's sleep. A ferocious debate had arisen within him, a discourse that he likened grandly to “a battle for my soul.” He took bath after bath after bath.
Water is supposed to heal, to cleanse, isn't it? What am I cleansing? They told me— they told me what? What did that archbishop say? He's a man of God.

The more he fretted, the more his focus slipped. He vacillated— wild swings between thoughts and feelings. Loneliness, the mood he feared most, swept in, and to his anguish he realized that he missed Robert Shannon.
He could be such a friend to me. A friend like I've never had. What am I thinking of What am I
thinking
of

All week he didn't sleep, and on the day before Ellie and Robert got to Tarbert, he made a major decision.
At least I should try the archbishop's suggestion. At least I should see how I feel. Captain Shannon went back to his roots, and he didn't even know where his roots were. But I know mine.

He jumped out of the bathtub, stood in the middle of the suite, and raised his hands above his head.
I know it. I know I can do it.

In the mouth of the Shannon, over near the coast of Clare, Scattery Island has legendary status in the early Celtic Church. The sixth-century monk Saint Senan, an austere and difficult man, built his monastery there to face not the east but the sun. Women who lived there at that time, Keans and MacMahons, Scanlons and Hanrahans, had to leave, because Senan would tolerate no women near him or his monks.

From this cranky, misogynistic friar arises also the legend that probably became the dragon of Kerry Head, because by all accounts Senan banished a serpent that harassed Scattery Island. His hand raised in blessing, he stood on the bank watching the serpent's coils thrash the water as the beast headed toward the ocean.

People still lived on Scattery when Robert Shannon came through in that summer of 1922. They piloted Captain Aaronson into the estuary before Robert came out on deck that dawn. Had he visited the island, they would have shown their cemetery to Robert with pride, the Temple of the Dead.

He saw it now, as the little party of four walked up into the body of the island. Before they left, Molly said, “Shouldn't I stay at home? You know what they say:
A woman on the island brings a curse, not a cure.”

“Ah, how could you bring a curse on anything?” said her husband.

Ellie Kennedy said, “To hell with that. I'm going.”

Sometimes on the Shannon estuary a remarkable haze shimmers. It's always distant, it's always a few hundred yards away, and it's not silvery like many heat hazes— the Shannon haze has almost a mauve tinge, as though the heather on the headlands had a say in the color. It's the kind of haze that was made when one of the gods found that his wife needed a light cape around her shoulders. That haze shimmered on the day that Joe O'Sullivan and Molly took Robert and Ellie across to Scattery in the white rowing boat. On the journey, Robert, holding Ellie's hand, remained silent.

Joe tried to gain Robert's attention. “I came across here one day and I saw a whale turning back to the sea.”

Robert smiled but said nothing. He had reached the last moments of his journey, and he believed he knew now what he had set out to discover.
The estuary spread its welcome for him, and the water could not have been calmer, could not have shone brighter. When he turned to look back over his shoulder, he could see the little stone pier where Captain Aaronson had put him ashore.

The night before, in the quaint room over Kennelly's bar, he had talked to Ellie.

“I still fear my dreams. And with no warning at all I can still see the piles of rags and hear the guns. When that happens I am rocked and shaken— it's like being hurled to the ground by something I can't see.”

She said, “But look at the change in you. Look at the improvement.”

“Making decisions frightens me. I feel I don't have the tools for the job.”

“Robert, you do. I know you do.”

“But look at the magnitude. I was ordained a priest. And I have been looking for that part of me. That's one of the reasons I came to Ireland. At least I think it is.”

Neither slept. From time to time Robert paced. When he stopped, Ellie paced. In between they lay in each other's arms.

“I always wanted to be a man of God.”

“Does one have to be ordained to be a person of God?” she said. She opened the window and put out her head. “Come over here. Smell the sea.”

He walked to the window; a traveler in the street below would have seen two heads glowing side by side in the faint light of the starry night. Together they sniffed like hounds.

“This was my first smell of Ireland,” he said. “The morning I landed. I stood down on the jetty, terrified. There were green weeds flapping in the water.”

As they lay down, timelessly side by side again, he took her hand.

“Here's how my mind has been working,” he said. “Given my vows, what is the honorable thing to do? And is it the best thing I can do for everybody? How can I behave with equal honor all round? This is the tyranny of choice.”

Ellie began to laugh.

“What's so amusing?”

She raised herself on an elbow and looked at him; in the darkness she could still see his face.

“I was laughing,” she said, “because this isn't the first time that I said to myself, ‘He's cured.’ That's what I was laughing at.”

She paused. “And by the way. Suppose that it isn't tyranny. Suppose it's the magic of choice?”

Vincent didn't join the Irregulars. He made a symbolic gift of his bayonet to the commandant, whom he met in a safe house, and returned to his room, to his thoughts and preparations.
If I find solace, I will know what I am meant to do. If I don't find healing there, I will also know what I am meant to do. Whatever, I know it will be the right thing.

It took him three hours to ride from Limerick to south Tipperary He slowed down many times, past houses whose family names he now recalled, seeing hillside woodlands in the distance. The best days that he remembered had been in the open fields, looking at rabbits or hiding in long grass. In one grove behind the house he had known every tree, because he had climbed them all.

At Ballinagore he swung into the lane; nothing much had changed. Were the bushes a little bushier, the trees fuller and taller? The house had never been visible from the road, and he freewheeled down the slope as the sun began its long slide down the sky. The lane had even more potholes now. Rounding the corner by the gate that still hung askew, he staggered the bicycle to an abrupt stop. The place had been destroyed.

After the bomb atrocity and the deaths of the men roped together, nobody, it seemed, had attempted to repair the place. The kitchen table lay half in, half out, of the building and all the accoutrements of the house had been scattered; rain since then had further reduced them. Wet books and papers, old clothes, drenched footwear— devils from a black and sodden hell had rampaged here.

Vincent dismounted and, averting his eyes, walked to the rear of the house. The tree in which he used to hide from his father still flourished and his hiding place in the high branches had grown deeper and greener and safer. At least that gave him something. He found his initials— VPR— now bulging from the bark.

The field up which he used to run and the grove that had a crab-apple tree— they still looked as comforting, were still welcoming. Those bushes across the lane from the front door, those friendly bushes where he had hidden so often— they had grown higher and much, much thicker: comfort there
too.
Is this what that archbishop meant? Is this the kind of feeling that Captain Shannon found?

When they landed on Scattery Island, Robert leaped from the boat and walked toward the ancient ruins like a man possessed by joy. He had always been gripped by the attention of fascination. It had brought him to Ireland; it had almost certainly saved his life. He had always had the capacity to retreat from the world into a cause, a near obsession; hence his fascination with the River Shannon.

He walked here, he walked there, he looked out at the estuary and beyond it to the broad Atlantic. He settled his feet squarely on the ground.
Is this it? Is this, after all, my family's footprint? Let me feel it. Let me feel the soles of my feet on the earth of this place.

The others watched him, delighted at his delight. They sat on the grass with him, they listened to his sheer enthusiasm— and they smiled at this man, a boy again.

And they jumped to their feet, startled to their boots, when a big man came striding through the grass of the ruins toward them.

Vincent turned to the house and forced himself to walk in. Obviously a bomb had done this. Some cleaning had been attempted— probably of bodies. The alcove to which they had moved his mother's bed by the fire for her last illness had been shattered. Globs of old brown mortar had been blurted from within the whitewashed walls above where her head had once lain. The people who had moved in after the Ryans had made an extra room by dividing the big family bedroom. That new wall had been blown down too, and Vincent looked into the room where he used to sleep. The ceiling to which he used to look up, and on which he drew imaginary pictures, bore streaks and blasts of black exactly above the place where he used to lie. Three beds had stood there. They had been mostly destroyed by the bomb and their bedding hung in wrinkled dark-stained hanks from the iron bedposts.