Shannon Read online

  Molly ignored him; she chattered on, always swiping away a wisp of hair. Likewise Joe, who half stood from his chair, peered out through the doorway, and sat down again.

  “There'll be a bit of a tide tonight,” he said. “I'd say, Molly, they'll feel it up as far as Portumna.” To Shannon, he said, “Now you'd like a cup of tea, wouldn't you?”

  Shannon said not a word.

  Molly, active as an ant, hummed a tune beneath her breath. Joe stared tranquilly into the fire. Shep came over and rested his head on the priest's quivering knee.

  “The porridge'll be ready in a minute,” Molly said. “You've to stir porridge all the time. And ‘tis lost without the salt. I always use a big pinch, but when ‘tis on the boil—well, isn't it like when the cat is near the milk? You can never take your eye off it. And you never stop stirring it.”

  Shannon said, still needing breath, “There's a boy. Up in the fields.” He pointed to the east. “He was shot. And he's dead. His name is Edward Dargan.”

  Neither Joe nor Molly moved a muscle.

  The O'Sullivans typified a syndrome in Irish life— people of high instinct and sound understanding, mistaken for ignorant but merely uneducated. They had worked out their own codes long ago. Each night they went to sleep like spoons, his arms folded about her; in the deeper night they always somehow kept in touch— a foot, an arm, a hip. This natural couple had never spoken more than a handful of tense words to each other and so far had had only one sadness: failure to conceive in fourteen years of marriage.

  “I'll come over and sit beside you,” said Joe, “and Molly, you'll pour the two of us a cup of tea, won't you? And we'll fix all that business once you tell us where the poor young man is. People are kind of hammering away at each other around here.”

  Shannon, still blinking rapidly and breathing fast, looked sideways at Joe. Then he stared at his rucksack, which he had dumped beside the door when he'd first come in. Joe followed his gaze.

  “Will I get the bag for you, is that it?”

  As Joe rose, Shannon leaped from his chair, grabbed Joe's arm, and forcibly stopped him dead.

  Joe O'Sullivan didn't attempt to ease away from Shannon's fierce grip.

  “All right, all right. C'mon, now, c'mon.”

  Shannon eased; the two men walked like friends across the kitchen floor. Molly watched, alert but not yet alarmed. The priest reached into a side pocket of his rucksack, took out an envelope, long and cream, stamped with red wax and a seal of office, and presented it formally, like the credential it seemed to be. Joe broke the wax, drew out a sheet of paper, and began to read. Shannon stood directly in front of him, eyes searching Joe's face.

  Joe finished reading and then looked up and into Shannon's eyes. Reaching for Shannon's hand, he shook it with passionate sincerity and said, like a recitation, “Father, my brother—he was my twin—he was killed in France with the Munster Fusiliers on the ninth of May, nineteen fifteen, at eight o'clock in the morning. It was a Sunday. So, Father, you're—well, you're very— very— welcome in this house.”

  The words pierced the young priest's fog; neither he nor Joe sought to break the handshake. When they did, Joe handed the letter to his wife.

  “Take a look at this, Molly.”

  Father Shannon's credential, typewritten on stiff formal paper, bore the crest of the Bishop of Hartford.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  The bearer of this letter, Fr. Robert Shannon, is a great American hero. In France as a chaplain during the recent war, Captain Shannon saved hundreds of lives, with no thought to his own safety and with great overcoming of personal fear in dreadful battle circumstances. He has come to Ireland to trace his paternal ancestors, the Shannons, who emigrated to America in the 1700s. All he knows is that they lived by Ireland's biggest river long ago.

  When he presents my letter to you, I know that you, in Ireland, will extend to Father Shannon all the care and kindness for which your country is justly famous. Should you need further elucidation, please write to me at the above address.

  Yours faithfully in Jesus Christ,

  Anthony I. Sevovicz

  Coadjutor of Hartford

  To Shannon, Molly said, “How do you pronounce that gentleman's name?”

  He said, “Sev-oh-vitz. Sevovicz. A Polish name.”

  “Sevovicz,” said Joe and Molly together.

  Shannon reached for his bag again and drew out his cherished map of Ireland. He unfolded it and pointed to the bright red mark at Tarbert. Archbishop Sevovicz, who could turn the words Good morning into a sermon, had said, “If we don't know where we are in this world, our fellow man tells us.” Shannon had looked so baffled that the archbishop had— most uncharacteristically— come directly to the point and said, “Ask. Ask. Ask.”

  “This?” asked Shannon now, showing the map. “Here?”

  Joe looked at Tarbert's red dot and nodded. “Can you stay with us a few days, Father?”

  Robert flapped his map and looked into Joe O'Sullivan's green eyes.

  “Porridge is terrible if it goes cold,” said Molly. “And you look like you'd sleep, Father.”

  Joe said, “If you've Molly's porridge inside you, you'll sleep.”

  Before they served the oatmeal, Molly added half a spoon of poteen, their local moonshine, and when the meal ended they prepared the old sofa.

  “We'll be quiet as mice,” said Molly, “and Joe'll go out now and get that other business done, the poor young Dargan boy. So you can stop worrying about it.”

  As Shannon stood by watching, Molly and Joe dragged the couch across the floor toward the fire. She patted it and pounded its old cushions, then stood back.

  The young priest lay down and wrapped himself in the blanket that they gave him. What little glaze of personality he had built up in the solitude of the ocean had been abruptly and brutally rubbed off at the lean-to out in the fields. Lying on his side, he stared into the fire.

  Perhaps he would fall asleep before the reel of images began. Perhaps tonight he would be set free. He waited. Not yet did he see the visions that consoled him: the white clapboard houses of New England, the galloping horses and sweet rivers of Connecticut, the tree-lined streets and everyday neighbors of the town of Sharon. Good— because these awful images were usually pursued hard and driven away by huge field guns, bucking and roaring, by the bloodied faces of weeping men and the vast wounds that they bore, by the burial parties, with the bodies tumbled into the shallow mud of France: the black anatomy of war.

  Joe and Molly sat in their chairs, drinking tea. Shep climbed up on the old sofa, found a place in the lee of Shannon's bent legs, and curled there. Soon, man and dog fell into deep sleep. Outside, a shower off the ocean sprinkled the land and passed over. Inside, the house fell quiet as the hosts settled down to watch over their guest.

  And so, on his first afternoon in Ireland, Robert Shannon, formerly Captain Shannon, chaplain of U.S. Forces, and— in theory if not at heart— Father Robert Shannon of the Diocese of Hartford in the Archdiocese of Boston, slept like a wintering bear. In time, Molly O'Sullivan carefully put back the blanket that the sleeping American had kicked off himself when the dog had jumped up to follow Joe— who, with two other men, bumped through the fields on a neighbor's cart, bearing Edward Dargan's body, which they had covered with a tarpaulin.

  Molly O'Sullivan never left her kitchen that day. She darned socks, she fixed a buttonhole, but mostly she sat quietly in her chair, where Father Shannon could see her if he awoke suddenly and could thus be reassured in a strange house in a strange land.

  In his sleep, Shannon twitched and sometimes half spoke. He had refused to take off his shoes or his jacket and, initially, had lain down with an arm over his eyes, watched by his hosts.

  Molly had never been wooed by any man but Joe. He had known her since she was fourteen; he was twenty-four then, and he had struck up a friendship with her father and brothers for the sole and secret purpose of pursuing her when she came of age. Though
not unaccustomed to men— she had five brothers and a youthful, vivacious father— by the time she married Joe he had become family, and therefore Robert Shannon was the first “other” man she had ever scrutinized.

  When he seemed to have fallen deeply asleep, and with Joe long gone on his mournful task, Molly inched forward to look closer, like a child at the zoo. The young priest's arm had slipped from his eyes. His face, no longer under the rigid control of chomping anxiety, sagged back toward boyhood. The long eyelashes suggested his general innocence, a quality that had endeared the priest to his parishioners. None of his troubles showed; he looked clean and uncomplicated.

  His hands, however, had aged early— pale and wrinkled for a man so young, with the right hand spoiled horridly across the knuckles by a scar like a trench. In general, though, as he lay there, he had a sort of grace about him, a lightness that had not been evident while he was awake. This young man, whatever he had been through, had come from a background of order and care.

  At six o'clock, a deeper, heavier rain began to sweep in. Molly rose softly from her chair and went to the door. The tide on the river had turned; she hoped the wind wouldn't rise, lash the rain against the windows, and wake her sleeping visitor. She heard Joe's step and opened the door from the inside, to prevent noise. Shep came wagging in, shaking off raindrops; Joe raised an eyebrow and Molly whispered, “Still asleep.” They tiptoed to the fire and sat quietly, each glancing at their visitor from time to time. On the couch, he stirred in what might have been a fierce moment of dreams, and they started in anxiety, but he continued to sleep.

  For supper they had slices of soda bread and butter, with thick slivers of ham, and two glasses of milk.

  They ate by the fire and looked out at the rain.

  Inside an hour, the evening sun shone again and Joe tiptoed from the kitchen, taking the dog out into the bronze light.

  Hour by hour, day by day the O'Sullivans drew Father Robert Shannon into their care. No quirk or anguish of his gave them pause. They never intruded, and thus his silent griefs could breathe. In the lee of their kind instincts, he calmed down and slid into their friendship.

  Nor for a moment did they consider the entire matter of Robert Shannon and his lengthening stay in their house odd or unusual; they never questioned it. A distressed visitor belonged in the fold of human nature; so be it. Their priest had told his parishioners, “If you see a young American walking the roads on his own who looks a bit lost, he's a priest who's over here for a while. He hasn't been well. Make him feel welcome.” They had agreed to do so; that was all.

  Furthermore, they had seen in the towns and villages the silent men who had come back from the war, who walked the world aimlessly or leaned empty-faced against walls and would never work again.

  In the beginning, Shannon needed great stretches of rest, and a routine developed. Around nine o'clock in the evening, he settled to sleep. Shep climbed up and tucked himself against the visitor's legs. Molly and Joe sat on their chairs facing each other, Molly usually sewing, Joe reading the newspaper or merely smoking his pipe and gazing into the fire. The quiet was broken only by the snuffling of the dog or the crackle of the flames.

  This wheel rolled on for eight days and nights. Their chatter included him, and they never seemed fazed that he rarely replied; if he did speak, he offered no more than a syllable or two. During the day he either sat by the fire or on the wall outside, where he gazed for hours at the river. Somewhere inside him he knew that his inner journey still consisted of taking two steps forward and one and three-quarter steps back.

  When his stretches of calm lengthened, they lifted their care a notch and began to treat him as an American cousin, a tourist almost. And as with any such visitor, they wished him to see the sights; they were as natural aristocrats to a houseguest.

  For his first excursion, Molly took out the bicycles.

  “Robert, we're going for a spin. I bet as a young lad you had a bike.”

  He had asked them to stop calling him Father. They agreed, yet they warned him that everywhere he went in Ireland he would be recognized as having the stamp of a priest on him. Joe added, “We'd recognize a priest naked. I mean— if you saw a giraffe up the fields, you'd know it was a giraffe.”

  Robert mounted the bicycle and pedaled a few yards to find his balance. Then, with Molly leading, they wobbled into the wider countryside.

  The narrow road barely allowed them to ride abreast. With the sun in their eyes and the breeze on their faces, they entered flat unbounded lands of brown and cream. This was the open bogland of North Kerry, where random piles of peat bricks stood in the fields like rough old tribal monuments.

  After a couple of miles, Molly turned her front wheel toward the mouth of a lane. In the distance, across the bogs, a man labored alone, a lanky man with hair white as a seagull.

  “Ask this fella questions,” said Molly. “He loves big words.”

  “Hah, Molly!” the man called out. “You'd a different boy with you the last time I saw you.”

  Molly laughed at the tease. “Matt, this is our young Yank.”

  “Ohhhhhhh,” he said, dragging out the note to convey wonder and appreciation. “The man that's walking up the river. Our insipid voyager.” Matt held out a lanky hand, and Robert came forward to shake it. “Well, I hope you can swim, Father.”

  Robert took no note that Matt seemed to know all about him.

  “Matt, tell Father what you're doing here in the bog.”

  “I'm digging for the carcass of a dragon, Father.”

  Robert widened his eyes, and Matt surged at the encouragement.

  “Yeh. There was an old dragon over there in the mouth of the river. But one of the saints ran him outa there so he came over here to live— where there's no saints.” He winked at Molly.

  She said, “Ah, Matt, tell him your real job.”

  “Footing turf.” He picked up a brick of the dark brown peat. “Did you ever see turf, Father? This is a sod of turf for the fire. It'll burn like a bush.”

  He handed the brick to Robert, who turned it over, sniffed it, and scrutinized the shades of color, from the black of jet to the brown of tobacco, the wisps of white like facial hair, the dry texture.

  Matt watched Robert feel the crumbly brick. “D'you know how old that is, Father?” He answered his own question. “Millions o’ years there in your hand. Half a maternity.”

  He took back the brick and began to break it open, bending its soft back, showing the crumbs of fiber.

  “There's the bones of old forests in this, Father,” he said, his voice passionate, “and there's heather in it, and God knows what else. I mean, there's bodies reserved in bogs like this— you know, the way a saint's body would be reserved.”

  Molly said, “Matt, did you ever hear of a family called Shannon anywhere round here?”

  “The only Shannon I ever heard tell of is herself over there. Flowing along like the moon. And she's a true river, I mean, she gets to the sea. ‘Tis the least a river might do.” He looked at Robert. “Are you tracing?”

  Molly said, “He is. The Shannon family.”

  “What'll you do, Father, if you find out they were sheep stealers? That'd be no kinda pedagogue for a man to have.”

  “Ah, Matt,” said Molly, “they went to America a long time ago.”

  “No, not a long time, not at all a long time. This turf, now— that's here since time immoral. If you compare it, Father, your family only left last week. But sure, we all know, comparisons are odorous.”

  As they walked away, wheeling their bicycles to the road, Molly whispered, “He's from Lisselton. Joe says the people in Lisselton should only be let out after dark.”

  The sun beat down as they rode on. For as long as they could see the bog across the flat parish, Matt's snowy head gleamed against the brown land.

  When the trauma first struck him, Captain Shannons brain heaved like the sea. Then it began to swirl, a blood-spattered fog inside his head. In a sudden moment h
e stopped in his tracks, stock-still and wild-eyed. He turned his head slowly, like a searchlight on a stiff axis, and nobody in the busy tent took heed.

  Then he roared, and they looked up in surprise and saw him claw at himself. He plucked at his clothing, his ears, his nose, his hair. He lost his sense of presence and began to lurch and spin. He made vast hand-washing movements, as though to rid himself of some great clinging filth.

  They grabbed him and held him and lowered him to a bed in the already overwhelmed field hospital at Lucy-le-Bocage, the village beneath Belleau Wood.

  Why did he snap? He had braved so much, why now? Within moments the depth of his trauma became clear. His was a bad case. He recognized nobody; he had forgotten who or what he was and didn't know his own name.

  His comrades, though— they knew what he had been and what he had done, and they cared for him now as they cared for no other. A military nurse named Kennedy, with hands cool as grass, took him over and set up the first nurtures. Night and day she watched him, especially as he came out of the harbor of sedation. But his condition never changed; he drooled and yelled, and he knew not a single thing.

  Three days later the generals invalided Shannon out to Dieppe, and he stayed there for the next four months in a château converted to a rest home. In late October, the army loaded him on a troopship; one of the officers gave up his cabin so that they could rig a private sick bay for the chaplain's voyage home.

  In the hospital at New Haven he grew milder over time. Officers of all stripes visited him. They knew he might not be able to speak—might not even be awake. It didn't matter to them; they came just to look at this legend of the war, hoping to shake his hand. If and when he calmed down, he had lucid moments and could almost chat with them, and they thought he nearly understood this awful malady that ailed him.

  At first, shell shock had been misinterpreted. Officers claimed that such men were playacting in order to avoid fighting, so the generals court-martialed them for malingering or desertion. They even executed some by firing squad, in full view of camps or trenches: a blindfold, a wooden post or tree, a semicircle of rifles, and a victim who didn't know what was happening. Others were disciplined. In one form of punishment the offending man was tied standing up in the field of battle, sent back into the midst of what had damaged him— the incessant noise, the frightful whistle, and the krummmp! of the artillery.