Shannon Page 4

  Nobody as yet knew that the shells exploding around these frontline soldiers were also causing cranial vacuums. The reverberations shifted brain matter inside men's skulls and altered their states of consciousness.

  Even so, back in the United States, Robert Shannon rose from this pit. He climbed out, and resumed his life. Through strength of character and force of will he came back to himself and then propelled himself forward. He improved steadily. They knew he was recovering when they saw his kindness return. Day by day he began to talk to other traumatized men in the hospital, the open mouthed creatures whose spirits were not nearly so firm. He smiled at them, held their hands, brought them small gifts, eased their sobs, listened to their ceaseless, senseless words.

  One day he began to pray with them— and finally he asked whether he could celebrate Mass. Within a month he had braved the outside world again, and eventually a day arrived when he took off his uniform, put his chaplain's black tabs in the drawer, and went back to being a priest.

  Less than a year later came the event that doctors watched for and feared in all such cases: the relapse.

  A soul may also be lost because of serious emotional shock— a heartbreak, a betrayal, a treachery. In 1919 Father Shannon saw, head on and firsthand, behavior among his priestly colleagues that amounted to all three. When certain disgraces in the Archdiocese of Boston seemed beyond refute or defense, a second and much worse wave of emotional trauma crashed in upon him.

  This time, his mind turned blue. Not the blue of the sky, not the blue of the sea; this blue had steel in it, the steel of knives, the sulfur blue at the heart of a naked flame. And all the awful sounds that he had first heard in France returned, only now they were louder and more cacophonic— high wild noises, each word a prolonged screech. He raged and roared and screamed accusations at those to whom he had vowed obedience— accusations with names, dates, facts.

  And they, having the power to do so, silenced him. They locked him in a psychiatric hospital, in a small high room, narrow and bare as a cell. This time, the images that coursed through his brain day and night nearly killed him.

  Back from visiting the bogland and Matt of the unique vocabulary, Robert was calmer. At supper that night he seemed easier than at any other time so far; he even began to converse.

  He asked structured questions— about the river, about the sea, about peat and its harvesting and its fire. In turn he answered their carefully harmless inquiries about life in the United States. He recited “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and told them about the Hotchkiss School, the woods near Sharon, his mother's singing voice, and his father's car. For almost an hour he sustained the most natural exchange in weeks.

  At last, long after his usual bedtime, he lay down on the sofa. No fire tonight; the day had been warm, and the front door stood open. Joe and Molly strolled out to the wall to take their evening view of the river, and Robert drifted off to sleep.

  That night, the war left him alone: no machine guns, no bandages, no shallow graves. Sometimes at the end of his nightmares—and this was a sign of recovery—his imagination rode shining through the dark. The images changed to the maps and the powerful officers, to the early morning sun of France before the guns began, to the smile on the face and the touch of the hand of Nurse Kennedy. If in his dream she teased him or made him coffee or fixed his uniform, good. A comfortable trajectory had returned. His imagination had flown in a familiar arc from the distress of his battlefield to the oasis of her tent.

  But then he always had to fight the sense of loss. Had they all gone? The colonel, awkward but a man of fair play— had he perished? Cooper, the laughing boy from Philly— did he die out there with the others? The Irish nurse, Kennedy, and her jokes and the swiftness with which she created peace— had she been caught in her field hospital by one of those deep awful shells? Had he lost them all forever? All dead and buried in the mud of a French farm? On the O'Sullivans’ couch that night, he had no dreams. He half awoke, missing the images, and not knowing what to do subsided again. Next morning, though, the animal reality of shell shock reached out a new claw.

  The day began quietly, yet Molly whispered, “Is he a bit edgy?”

  They watched as Robert half stormed out of the house and stood glaring down at the river.

  “I think,” said Joe, “it's time for the boat.”

  He kept a small craft on the Shannon, and he used it with respect, because a freak Atlantic tide or an abrupt estuary wave could lash out within seconds.

  After breakfast, Joe led Robert across the road and down the steep bank to the river's edge. The rowboat strained at its leash. Joe loaded a shovel, set out the oars, folded burlap sacks on the seats as cushions, stowed a bag of sandwiches, and sat back watching the flow

  “We're going over there,” Joe said, pointing to the far bank. “Labasheeda. D'you know what the word labasheeda means? Some people will tell you it means the bed of the little people, the fairy folk who pull all the tricks and cast all the spells. But it actually means the bed of silk, because the sand there feels like silk. Hop in, Robert.”

  The priest, saying not a word, clambered to a seat.

  For an hour they sat and waited, an hour in which Joe eventually said, “I never move out in the boat till the water is as flat as a fluke.”

  When the breeze fell, the river's feathering ceased. Almost no clouds traveled the powder-blue sky, and the estuary became as quiet as a chapel. Robert sat with his back to the oarsman, which meant Joe could not see the clenched hands, the closed eyes. Joe pushed away from the bank, and was soon hauling rhythmically on the oars like a boatman in a legend.

  No ships or other vessels, large or small, used the river that noon. In midstream Joe pulled and pulled, to take the boat across the fastest current. When he broke through its grip, a sideswipe of the river's flow guided them toward a little beach of mud and then grass. The journey across the river took just under half an hour.

  Joe made no effort to help Robert, extended no hand, merely gave example by disembarking first. Robert followed, picking his steps carefully as the boat rocked. In his hands he held, like a child with a comfort toy, the brown paper bag of food. He muttered and made low noises. Joe eyed him, watching and careful.

  They climbed the grassy bank, onto a hill, from which they descended into a hollow field; Joe carried the shovel from the boat.

  “See this field? The owner's my cousin.”

  No great trees grew there, no tall grasses; the few hawthorns bent toward the land like old men, bowed by the weight of the prevailing westerly wind. The air felt colder than on the water.

  In the lowest scoop of the field, Joe stopped at a small cluster of stones.

  “Digging now, Robert.” Joe took off his jacket, squatted, and began to shift the stones. “Down about three foot or so. Not as deep as a grave anyway.”

  He stood up, spat on his hands, and began to turn the earth with the shovel. Soon he uncovered a tongue of sacking; it lay in the dirt like a large ancient leaf. Joe grew more careful with the shovel, then hunkered again and scraped clear a wider area of the old burlap. As though reaching into a bowl, he stretched his hands down either side of the fabric and eased up a buried package. On the grass, he teased the sacking apart.

  Peering over Joe's shoulder, Robert caught a rough smell and recoiled.

  “Skin of a goat,” said Joe, examining it. “Yep. She'll do.” The sacking contained a brown-and-white hide. “The earth over here has more acid in it than my own fields.”

  Joe refilled the hole, chattering all the while to Robert.

  “One man told me the goat is a Chinese creature. But another man told me, no, ‘tis Egyptian. I don't know what to believe. This goat here, her name was Sheba; she was mostly a nuisance, but we let her live on. I mean she was old. They live to twenty years at the most, and she was nineteen. So we'll go home with her now and we'll scrape her and scrape her. And then when I get her as smooth as a suit, I'll rub her with potash and all kinds of alum a
nd stuff. I have a ring of ash seasoning, and I'll make a bowrawn that'll make the rafters ring. D'you know what a bowrawn is, Robert? A bowrawn is a skin drum.”

  They climbed up out of the hollow field to the top of the slope, Joe with a shovel across his shoulder, Robert a few paces behind, slightly hunched in his unspoken anguish. As they crested the rise, Joe stopped and held his hand out wide to make Robert halt too. Down the slope below them, eight men in uniform stood on the riverbank, guns cocked, inspecting Joe's boat.

  Joe stepped back, drawing Robert with him, back until they could duck out of sight. Just below the hollow's rim they lay on the ground, Joe with a finger to his lips. His concentration elsewhere, he failed to register the aghast face beside him.

  After many minutes during which they lay facedown and utterly still, Joe rose and tiptoed up the slope. He surveyed left, he surveyed right, then turned and beckoned to Robert. The soldiers had gone downriver. Several hundred yards away they began to climb into a longboat, manned by two other men in uniform. One of these cast off, and the other began to row the boat into midstream. At that moment, as Joe watched, one of the soldiers fired three quixotic rounds into the mound of the riverbank, and the laughter of the others came upriver on the wind. Then the stream took their boat down toward Tarbert and no soldier looked back.

  Down the slope behind Joe, Robert had not moved, but at the sound of the gunfire he began to tremble and grunt. Joe walked back toward him, and as he drew near Robert stood up. He grabbed the shovel and attacked Joe— fierce, grim, sudden, and hard. Joe fended off a blow that would have split his temple; a glancing blow scraped his cheek; he retreated a few yards, covering his head. Robert, flummoxed, stopped; then, savage and red-faced, ran at Joe again, who, more composed now, grabbed the shovel's long handle. They wrestled like gladiators; Joe won the shovel from Robert and tossed it aside.

  Robert stood back— then raged forward again, his only sound a grunt that could have been pain. Soundless and wide-eyed, he scrabbled for Joe's face, neck, hair, arms, shirt. His grunting heavier, he kicked out. He tried to form words, but no sense came forth.

  When his scrabbling for a grip failed, he tried to land punches— serious blows. Joe stood his ground, never yielding an inch yet never fighting back, using all his strength to sap the blows, cushioning them with his forearms. He talked; he soothed; he calmed. “Easy now, Robert, ‘tis all right. Easy, easy.”

  Suddenly Robert began to weep, and the attack ended. He began to sink, a subsiding pillar. Joe took Robert's forearms and guided him to the ground, to his knees.

  “Easy now. Easy. Easy. Stay here a minute, Robert. Are you all right now?” He knelt beside him. “Stay here a minute.” Robert moaned; Joe stayed with him, patting his shoulder.

  In time Joe went back to fetch all their goods. He returned and squatted beside Robert, who still wept. Joe patted his shoulder.

  “You're all right now, Robert, you're all right.”

  To grasp the Ireland of 1922, think of Persia. Think of rural India. Think of old National Geographic magazines with their photographs of charming poverty. In Ireland too, the hopeful wary faces of the native folk looked winsomely up at the lens. Think also of those interested, well-meaning Tocqueville-esque travelers who for centuries had come, seen, and commented. The country that they reported had always been tense, depressed, and poor.

  Robert Shannon got to Ireland six months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed after a sapping war of independence which itself had caused division, as not everybody agreed with its aims or conduct. Now, as though to add incest to injury, a bitter civil war had begun. Scarring and dire, its bombs were undermining the new state's structure and delaying the pleasure of nationhood.

  And the ground was shaking in even greater ways. Irish Catholics, the previously underprivileged majority, had become the new rulers—the Risen People, they called themselves— and they were taking their country back from the king of England. In a policy ringing with emotion, this new government was buying up the great landlorded estates and redistributing the land. Henceforth 85 percent of the people would again own 85 percent of the island and not the 15 percent, the few barren acres, that had been tossed to them like scraps long ago.

  The Anglo-Irish Protestants, who had long formed the ruling class, could see the writing on their demesne walls. Most disliked what they read and were deciding to leave; they were the people with the money. However, it wasn't happening fast, and for many of the Irish without the money, there was still no joy and they were leaving too.

  For them, poverty and subjugation had been a way of life for thirty generations, intensifying with successive British regimes.

  The emigrant ship, long the only avenue of escape, would one day become so for yet one more family. This father, mother, and nine children had been living in a small quiet place called Ballinagore, fifty miles east of Tarbert, and the family name was Ryan.

  Larry Ryan, an unskilled farm laborer from the South Riding of County Tipperary had a household so large he could not fully support it. They shared spoons, they shared bowls; they had so few clothes between them that all the children couldn't be out of doors at the same time.

  For this desperate existence Larry Ryan blamed everybody: the landlords, the politicians, the English, the ruling class. He was a fit and capable man, and the system gave him nothing but an earthen floor in a long damp thatched cottage. By the time he was thirty-five, Larry Ryan had already borne in his arms, from that cottage to the graveyard, three small white infant coffins supplied by the parish.

  Such conditions raised no shouts. The Ryans typified hundreds of thousands of Irish, people who had little and received nothing. Larry Ryan scrabbled hard and responsibly for what he could earn, but— typical in another way— driven by bitterness and grind, he drank as much as he could get. His was an old tale, common and grim.

  However, this lean, hardy man possessed some character, and his efforts to obtain employment never flagged. He might have caused havoc and hunger by failing to come straight home from work, but he knew that a life could be made, if only he had the chance. After the death of the third infant he managed to stand still and take stock.

  His wife, Joan, had quiet ways and at last she had a moment in which she could try to make him hear. They could no longer be sure, she said, of the mortality of any new baby. She had borne ten children by the age of thirty seven had survived, and she had no idea how many more would arrive.

  Although he listened, he took time to respond. But after two more— successful— pregnancies, Larry Ryan began to calm down. To everybody's surprise he weaned himself off liquor. Life improved almost the same day; he got steady work and a second job, and the family's hungers eased.

  The trade-off, though, had a difficult edge. Alcohol had always softened him, and now a harder man appeared. Curt and sarcastic, with a new self-regard, he bore down on his home like a lout. He scrutinized, criticized, brutalized. All his children suffered, especially his wife's two favorites. One of them, the oldest, was sent to an aunt in San Francisco at the age of twelve; her father's “discipline” had blackened her eye in a chastening over chores. But the other, the second youngest child, Vincent, didn't get away.

  Vincent Patrick Ryan was born in 1892. A difficult birth dragged him by the head from the warm darkness near his mother's heart to the damp light of a winter candle. Yet he emerged a most winning child, the sweetest of that brood. From the outset he charmed people, and when his many baby grimaces became indentifiable as little fat smiles, he gave them willingly and drew everybody to his light.

  Except his father. Vincent grew up on a seesaw. His father scowled at him on sight, so his mother's love went underground. She had made her bargain. The relief of a sober husband never dimmed, and she constantly sought to appease him. So she split her care of her second youngest; behind the scenes she cosseted Vincent and he clung to her neck, but openly she sided with the father's bile. At each gibe and blow she winced inside; later, in secret, she spoke l
oving words as the child sat on her lap.

  Larry Ryan, not unshrewd, saw the tactic and countered it. He saved his deepest cuts for Joan's absence and spoke piercing words when alone with Vincent. Over and over he said, “You're useless, that's what you are.” Time after time he bent down and whispered his favorite taunt: “You'll end up at the end of a rope. You'll swing.”

  At first Vincent had to have this explained. When his older brothers showed him the illustration of a hanged felon, he took the point with tears and fear— he was, at the time, four years old.

  The siblings had been happy to tell him such tales. They saw the father's attitude as a favorable wind. If they hoisted their sails and went with it, they might escape some of the daily ire. So they were glad to gang up on the small boy; he had too much charm for them anyway.

  Who can say why Larry Ryan behaved so foully— and to such a golden child? As the three pregnancies before Vincent had been stillborn and Joan had almost died twice, had he feared that Vincent's birth threatened his mother's life? Was Vincent a replacement child for the three dead births, with all the attached black baggage? Or was the father simply being “normal”?

  His behavior was not unique. Many Irish parents, especially the men, in all strata of society, dealt out similar abuse to their children, disguising rancor or plain dislike as discipline. Not a thought went toward feelings, not a breath spoke the word love—indeed, a church teaching suggested that children existed at their parents’ bidding.