Shannon Page 6

  Now one of these fragments snagged him. Next day was Julia Shannon's birthday, since childhood a red-letter day in Robert's year. That morning, as he left Tarbert, he almost remembered it. Something nagged at him, and he said aloud to himself, “Tomorrow: a special day.” He wondered whether it indeed had to do with his mother, but that was as far as it went. He struggled for a while to rake up the extra memory. It lingered at the edge of his mind, like a half-wild animal that won't come into the house; then he gave up and strode on. Dr. Greenberg would have called that progress.

  The Shannon River flows quietly past these roads. Widened out and diluted now by the spread of her own estuary, she is twice daily pushed back upon herself by a larger grandeur, the incoming tide from the sea. Farther up, she has always been in command, a stream of mixed pace, dominating the land through which she flows. She has an exotic spirit: There are rapids, lakes, stylish falls, and oxbows.

  Not a safe river, she has a temperament all her own. She can throw waves up to thirty feet high; she owns lakes as long as twenty-five miles; she has sweet and plump tributaries. Her riparian living has an ancient feel and her lands can be enviably fertile— if she chooses to bestow an untroubled year.

  But her pools and eddies are as wild as the human spirit and rise from as deep a source. The way she caresses her riverbanks, the way she inundates fields with her savaging floods— these extremes of behavior all spring from a soul that dwells far beneath the plates of the country's bedrock.

  Her catchment covers 5,800 square miles—almost one-fifth the area of all Ireland—and she flows for 215 miles, from an infinite hole in the lean stony ground of Leitrim and Cavan in the north to the hardy Atlantic headlands of Kerry and Clare in the southwest.

  Her people know their river like they know their weather. The farmers alongside the Shannon live at her whim. How often has she flooded their fields without warning? On how many mornings have they seen their trees standing like elephants’ feet in the water when the floodplain broadens out for several miles on either side of the river's normal course, causing silent havoc? No wonder that she was, to medieval poets, “the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea.”

  And she has a tribe of her own, committed to tussling with her: the Shannon boatmakers. They have a skill some call an art; they make a craft dedicated to conquering the river. Some of them live in houses that can only be reached by water. They've always been people of instinct, alert to the river's moods.

  In truth, the Shannon has never offered an easy life to anybody. Crossings are scattered; bridges occur infrequently—on average, no more than every twelve miles or so. But in Robert Shannon's time she could still be forded here and there, as she often was in the past, and to great historical effect.

  She is one of the great and ancient rivers of the world— Ireland's Nile, a baby Mississippi— and she has long been recognized as such. She was powerful enough to attract the geographer Ptolemy; three hundred years before Christ, his maps bent whole countries out of shape, but he accurately grasped the line of the Shannon. A thousand years later, her water meadows lured monks to her banks, able to see God in the sweetness of the stream. And after them, up the river, came the longboat Vikings to ransack the sacred gold.

  Robert Shannon had chosen well for history, geography, mood, and lore. Ahead of him lay a journey that would unfold to him three fine gifts: hope, story, and reward. The hope, dimly in place as a glimmer from childhood, came from his belonging to such a great natural force.

  After all, his river could be called the mightiest in the world— if measured in proportion to the nation that it serves.

  And, this being Ireland, the story element lay ahead in abundance— rich story, both narrated and experienced; the story in the word history; the story that comes up out of the very ground, out of ancient earth, all light and color and fire, and no shortage of voices to tell and embellish it.

  As for reward, he faced an unusual experience, often sought by travelers and diminishingly available today. He could actually capture, in great part, the sense, the moral style, and the tempo of the same country his forebears had left a couple of centuries earlier. This nineteen-twenties voyager across Ireland traveled in old times— and, his journey now at last begun in earnest, he could look around him with livelier eyes.

  His map gave him no idea of what textures lay ahead; he had only the road in red ink. But the place-names called to him like bells: Glin, Limerick, Castleconnell, Killaloe, Portumna, Athlone. He felt steadier; he was excited. For a moment that morning—just one moment—he had been a little rocky. When he lost sight of the O'Sullivans, the familiar stricture of fear reached his throat. He swallowed hard, as Dr. Greenberg had instructed, and it worked. By now the urge to claw at his mouth was no more than a faint memory of a distasteful reflex. He no longer put his fingers down his throat until he retched.

  Molly had packed sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and instructed him not to eat them all at once. Nevertheless he opened the packet and savored the welter of tastes. He argued to himself that he didn't know when he'd eat that day. The O'Sullivans had never queried him as to where he might next come to rest— and Robert never observed that they felt no need to ask.

  When they talked about him that night, as they did almost every day for a month after he'd gone, they again mentioned his eyes. Robert knew about them himself from his proud mother; Julia said that he'd inherited their color from her own grandfather, a man who'd owned whaling ships out of New Bedford and whose eyes had the faded blue of distant seas. Now those eyes viewed the road and the river ahead.

  When the Irish Project was finally mapped out, the archbishop sat Robert down. He had arranged the room's two leather armchairs face-to-face, a few feet apart.

  “I have to look at you, Robert, into your face, into your eyes, as I tell you this.”

  In his farmer's walk he lumbered down the room and locked the door. When he came back, Robert sat upright, waiting.

  Once in his chair, Anthony Sevovicz sent a massive hand over his large face. As usual, he used twenty words where one would have done.

  “If I have judged your vital matters accurately, Robert, if I have measured the progress of your spirit in the way that best tells me how you are feeling—and shows me the point to where your recovery has progressed— I believe you are indeed ready to undertake this Irish journey.”

  Then, as he did with everything, he made himself the most important person in the exchange.

  “I myself am familiar with adventures. I too have walked a great journey. It is important to you that I tell you about it. In the month before my ordination to the priesthood, I suffered deep qualms of faith and vocation. Did I truly wish to serve God in this exclusive manner, or was I merely attempting to dress myself in good cloth—and, of course, please my parents? A son who is a priest carries his parents to God. Ordination would also make me the most important member of my large family. Poland is like that; in Poland, the priest is the prince of the family. I would become such a prince, and I would also become a prince of the Church.”

  The archbishop had hands as big as garden spades, with chewed fingernails. His incapacity to speak briefly stemmed from his love of authority. Robert, even though emotionally less than complete, had learned how to nip in when the big man paused for breath.

  “I understand, Your Grace.”

  “Therefore, when I was about to be ordained, I took advantage of the seminary's offer of time for contemplation before final vows. I decided to go to Warsaw, to the big city. This was not, as you might immediately think, an essay to test myself against the pleasures of a brighter life. I sought the journey more than I needed the destination. So I walked. I walked and I walked. A long journey: many days, many hours, many nights and mornings. That is, in part, why I believe that you should undertake this travel to Ireland. I, in my peregrination, had but a month. You shall have as long as you need.”

  A sharper Robert might have found a delicate way to bring the archbishop to the point
, but as it was he merely listened.

  “In my walking I contemplated— as I had intended— my vocation. And in my walking I met and examined people, ordinary people of Poland— good people. I looked at them closely; I observed what they did. More important, I tried to measure”—he paused—”measure. To measure. Music is measured. Yes, measure. I tried to measure how they did what they did. Did I know what I was seeking from them? Looking for? In them? Yes, I think so. I was seeking to measure commitment. Vocation, if you like. Yes, vocation. Calling.”

  He leaned forward. Robert returned his gaze with, as ever, the trust of a child.

  “I see that you understand me, Robert. This is wonderful.”

  Sevovicz had always wept easily, and now he shed a tear.

  “Go on your journey, Robert. Go to Ireland. Go to your holy river. Think of vocation. Big letters.” He raised his voice a little, but carefully, given Robert's antipathy to noise. “V-O-C-A-T-I-O-N, Robert. Vocation. And measure your vocation against those whom you meet. Observe the ordinary people in their ordinary callings. I did; they taught me. You will see what I mean. They will teach you.”

  Robert Shannon had always possessed a good stride. In the army it improved when he marched all day. Since then he had gained further strength, which could keep him going for miles. The archbishop had trained him in this. Those long walks they took, many miles at random and then regular afternoons, building up pace first, to establish confidence, and then distance, to establish stamina— Anthony Sevovicz put major faith in the powers of walking and its rhythms.

  It helped that he and Robert had similarly long legs. And it helped that Sevovicz had been a considerable track athlete, his seminary's middle-distance champion. Sevovicz had a naive psychology of walking. “Walking takes us forward, Robert. We cannot slip back while we are moving forward.”

  After Tarbert, then, Robert strode onward in a northeasterly direction, up toward the heart of Ireland. He had no cultural sense of where he was going. He knew nothing of the textures waiting ahead. He would only— for the moment— tick off place-names on a map.

  In the first quarter hour he ate all the food that Molly had packed for him. Rarely did he take his eyes off the river. He walked and he looked and he looked and he walked. A traveler to his rear, observing him from a few yards’ distance, would have seen this tall thin walker's impressive stride and would have strained to keep up with him.

  Carried by that stride, Robert reached a long natural archway of trees, whose cathedral shade he relished. As he cleared the arches he saw, just ahead on his right, an elaborate miniature castle. It turned out to be a gateway with a pair of towers and a crust of battlements along the top. Through this structure he saw its parent, a full-blown castle with a façade as stretched as a parade that ended in a tall citadel. White, with battlements, it looked like an iced cake, with each corner rounded and windowed. Robert stopped at the gateway, intrigued by this echo of France: a château in an Irish field.

  A tiny girl in a cream lace dress popped out from under the gateway tower. She looked at Robert with suspicion— and then beckoned to him and turned away. He stopped and looked after her; she turned and beckoned again, so Robert followed her across the grass margin of the road. She walked several yards farther, deep into the property, but Robert hesitated. Then, from behind him, he heard grunts of effort and looked over his shoulder. A man dripping wet, in a one-piece black bathing suit, climbed over the wall from the direction of the river. He stepped into the roadway and nodded to Robert.

  “I rather like the water as cold as this. Good to be braced, eh? Oh, that's my daughter, Miranda.” One strap of the bathing suit had slipped off his shoulder. His skin glowed a gentle mauve, and some green weed decorated his bald patch. He held out a dripping hand and smiled; Robert shook the clammy fingers.

  The wet man padded barefoot through the arched gateway and hobbled up the graveled driveway toward the castle, overtaking his small daughter, who had stopped. Miranda waited for Robert to catch up, and when he did she set off again.

  Ahead of them, near the longer part of the building, the man who said he was her father stopped and peeled off his sodden bathing suit, threw it onto the grass, and walked naked into the house, his lank, sickly white buttocks swallowed by a closing door.

  Miranda led Robert around the corner of the castle into a wide lawned garden with evergreen topiary. A row of cone-shaped shrubs stood on the grass like green servants; gravel paths stretched between them. Miranda spun left; Robert felt the rucksack swing across his shoulders as he turned sharply to follow her.

  They passed from the castle's immediate vicinity and into wilder gardens. In the distance, Jersey cows, their tan-colored hides peacefully wrinkled, browsed in an open field.

  The child climbed a stile in a stone wall, and when Robert followed he found himself on a farm lane rutted with tracks. They followed this for fifty yards or so, until they came to a fork. One branch of the lane led off toward sheds and farm buildings, and the other, now taken by Robert and Miranda, led into darkness at noon. The shade was caused by a garden of huge plants, greater and taller than anything Robert had ever before seen. These enormous gunneras— and the palm trees in the next field— received their license to grow wild from the balmy climate of the North Atlantic drift, the Gulf Stream licking Ireland's shores.

  Miranda had skin like cream enamel, red spots on her cheeks like a painted doll, and hair shiny black as a crow's wing. She led Robert under the great tall leaves to a fallen tree trunk that had been set with cracked old china cups, plates, a teapot with no lid, and discarded cutlery, most of which had no handles. As a tablecloth she had spread one of the giant leaves. Robert fingered its velvety surface as he stood and looked at the table with its settings and at the tremendous foliage above his head blocking the day. The light darkened further and it began to rain; he felt no more than a drop or two but heard the heavy raindrops plodding down on the thick vegetation. Miranda hadn't spoken a word.

  Robert had scant experience with small children. An only child with few— and older— cousins, he had no relations of his own age. And since he had spent most of his early life in boarding school, he had known little social time with anyone younger than himself. All he could do now was watch and be led.

  Miranda looked at him from under her bangs of black hair and picked up one of the teacups. Silently she grasped the teapot and poured a cup of invisible tea. She lurched toward Robert, handed him the cup, and began to pour into another cup. She drank and Robert did the same, tipping his cup back to the last drop, as did Miranda, and she nodded her approval.

  She took the empty cup from him and laid it on the table, put her thumb in her mouth, took his hand, and led him out of the greenery. The rain, sudden to start, had been sudden to stop. This time they walked in the opposite direction and soon emerged on a neater and more cultivated part of the estate.

  An old farm building with graceful ruined walls stood beneath some trees. Silently she took him inside the ruin and pointed to a bench with old blankets, then made an elaborate gesture which he took to mean that she sometimes rested there. She also showed him a small wooden chest with, inside, two dolls asleep in a little bed.

  Outside again, they walked on and reached the rear of the main building. Miranda, her bright hair gleaming beside Robert's elbow, opened a door. They stood on the large gray and black stone flags of the castle hallway. Sunlight polished the air, and Robert caught a seminary odor of beeswax. His eyes widened with delight. A mahogany table, dark and rich, stood against one wall. Carved swags of fruit dripped from beneath its edges; the top shoulder of each leg bore a confident sculpted face; each ball-and-claw foot dominated its sector of the floor. Sometime, somewhere, a god had feasted at this table.

  The walls of the hallway wore the color of mushroom; tall mirrors glittered on some, and on one wall hung the painting of a woman in an ornate yellow gown; she had chosen not to smile for the artist. In a corner stood a marble statue on a pedestal, a
draped lady, cool and reserved, wishing to be alone. On the floor by each of the six doors stood jade vases mad with dragons, and serene porcelain urns. Other pottery and china sat in random little sets around the hall, on tables and on windowsills.

  From where he stood, Robert could glimpse distant rooms. As alluring as jeweled caves, they had brilliant glass jars, long tapestries, chairs of velvet and chintz. He began to move in their direction, but Miranda commandeered his hand again. She led him firmly up a staircase and along a creaking passageway. Here the walls carried maps of riverside lands and boating charts; they might have been drawn by orderly spiders whose legs had been dipped in brown ink.

  Miranda pointed to a yellow door and then to herself and made the same sleep indication that he had seen in the ruined building outside: hands under her cheek, head to one side, eyes closed. Then she pointed to Robert and, still using the same gesture, showed him a green door, as much as to say, And you will sleep in here.

  She led Robert through the green door into a room of green walls, where curtains fell from the ceiling to the floor in great swags of green and yellow, partly obscuring the windows. Pointing to the bed, she walked backward to the door, waved her fingers, and disappeared, closing the door. Robert would not have been surprised to hear a bolt slam home.

  He hauled the rocky haversack off his back and sat in a deep armchair. Too tired for the moment to address the puzzle of this establishment, he looked all around the room and then gazed out on the river. The place had a draping peace— and yet the child had seemed disturbed. A clock somewhere chimed noon. He leaned back in the chair and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  Did he dream? Since being in France, Robert Shannon had dreamed almost every time he'd fallen asleep. When he had first come to the O'Sullivans’ house, he'd hoped in vain that the dreams might stop, to give him ease from their fractured sights. Over the days and nights, though, they grew somewhat lighter. True, he still saw the fangs of war, but he also had mornings when he awoke more calmly, throbbing to softer melodies.