Shannon (27 page)

Robert walked across to her door and said, “Good morning.”

“Are you after your breakfast?”

“No. I haven't had breakfast yet.”

She nodded. “That's what I was asking. Come on in.”

He sat down as directed at the end of a long kitchen table, in a narrow room that seemed to stretch for hundreds of yards. She placed in front of him a mug and a wide plate.

“We usually get cattlemen here. Now, tell me, aren't you an American priest? My brother's a priest like yourself, Father. You must meet him, he's Father Dillon, up along the Shannon, in a place called Drumsna. He's a very nice man altogether; the bishop loves him.”

A commotion arose at the door and a voice called in, “Miss Dillon, how are ya?”

She sighed. “Them go-the-roads.”

Robert turned to look at the noise, and in came three young men who seemed familiar:
Ah, yes, the three musicians from the circus.

“That oul’ hoor, we got enough offa him for the breakfast, you'll have to give us enough grub to last us three days, missus, we'll have no more money till then.”

Robert got a clear look at them. They proved younger than he had thought and less rough, more well-spoken and well-disposed.

“Hah! You're the fella was with oul’ Mulligan,” said one.

“He told us,” said the second, “that a famous writer had come over from America to write about the circus. Is that you?”

Robert shook his head, and Miss Dillon said, “You should be more respectful to a priest.”

They gave Robert their names—”Christian names only, till you get to know us, Father”—Enda, Jarlath, and PaulTom, who explained his name by saying, “They christened me Paul Thomas and they were always arguing; my mother wanted to call me Paul and my father wanted to call me Tom.”

Each musician had joined the circus during summer vacation from university. Enda played a banjo, Jarlath had a flute, and PaulTom the concertina, three young men as merry as mirth, with not a care in the world except for food and music. Their questions cascaded down upon Robert.

“There's great music in Boston.”

“Did you ever go to Nova Scotia? A lot of good fiddlers there.”

“Father, what are you doing here at all, walking in the open air? I thought all Yanks had motorcars.”

When he explained his quest they lit up.

“I know only one Shannon, and she's a river,” said Enda, laughing.

Jarlath said, “There's Shannons in Leitrim, I don't know them myself but my cousin does.”

And PaulTom said, “If I'm not mistaken, there's Shannons in Roosky Are you going to Roosky, Father?”

“How far?” asked Robert.

“From here?” They debated. “I'd say—what, Miss Dillon— twenty miles?”

They concurred that, along the river, it would probably be twenty-five miles with all the twists and turns. “But you'd easily walk it in a day, and a lovely walk too, Father.”

For a while they plied him with questions as to whom he knew and where. They seemed disappointed that he didn't know some cousin in Arkansas or friend in Seattle. And then the musicians wouldn't let him pay for breakfast.

“If we did, Father, our mothers would throw us out.”

They waved him off and Robert wondered,
When have I met men as cheerful?

Miss Dillon followed him into the hall. She handed him two envelopes and a packet of food.

“One envelope's for yourself, Father; it has my brother's name and address in it. The other— give it to him.”

Robert placed both letters in his rucksack. He clarified directions as to how to get himself onto a path by the river and set off. But he didn't walk far or for long. A surprising flat of sand opened, where a stream flowed into the river. There he hunkered— and lingered for hours.

He watched the sedges bend in the lapping stream; watched the river's many muted colors, from silver to brown; watched the dirty cream spittle at the water's edge and the tiny creatures, quick as silver or slow as sloth, near the bank.

Many multicolored butterflies flitted around; he would have been intrigued by the local belief that butterflies are human souls. In the fields behind him, larks rose from the long grass and soared to sing at the feet of the sun. Two long-legged small birds pattered like busy waiters. In the water a few feet down, Robert could see the faint waving fan of a fish tail, perhaps three inches in span. Then a hawk flew over and scared everything.

The creek behind their house in Sharon dried up in the summer, when the weather might have encouraged poking about. And in winter it flowed too fast and too high or was too full of ice. And the Housatonic was too much of a river, his mother said, to explore on his own. Now, looking into the Shannon's face again, he stared and stared, enthralled by the holy patterns of light and dancing shadow on rock, sand, and mud.

Every day of the year, the atmosphere on the Shannon changes noticeably in the late afternoon. When the evening begins to arrive, the waters
and their creatures, above and below, prepare for sundown and the night. Insects buzz louder; they've survived another day. Birds call with merry insistence, like office girls making plans for the night. The land exhales, and because it has breathed so much all day it now wants to rest.

North of Lanesborough, a small river flowed into the Shannon. On its far banks a dense wood began. Robert crossed the little plank bridge to stay on the path for Drumsna— and stopped dead. Ahead of him, he saw a man wearing a tweed cap; he leaned against a tree at the fringe of the wood and smoked a pipe, though it was nothing like Francis Car-berry's grand one. This was a small-bowled cheap affair, made of white clay.

When he saw Robert, the man grew edgy and began to walk away. He looked back, stopped, took the pipe out of his mouth, and called, “Don't come near me.”

Robert stopped and held out his hands peacefully and wide.

The man ahead said, “Don't. I mean— just don't.” He cocked his head to one side, listening hard.

Robert listened too but heard nothing except the breeze in the trees and the slither of the little river.

With a rush, the man said, “You see? You see?” and began to walk quickly away. As Robert looked in confusion at the departing back, the man turned around abruptly and said, “They're looking for two fellas together.”

He disappeared.

At that moment Robert heard what had halted the man— the beginnings of a noise, a truck's engine. Robert ran headlong into the woods and headed for the nearest cover, a loose part of a thick high briar hedge, close to the road; nothing else seemed as dense. Outside on the little road the noise grew ever louder. Robert forced himself through the outer reaches of the briar hedge and half hunkered, half crawled into its depths.

The truck neared, and now its engine growled as the gears changed down. Robert couldn't see through the briar, and in any case he was too busy trying to settle in the thickest concealment. The dense hawthorn finally accepted him under its low branches, and he squatted there, trembling. On the road outside, twenty yards from the briar, the truck stopped and the engine cut.

He heard many voices; one rose above all others: “Didja see them, lads?”

A mixed chorus said, “No. Nothing.”

Then came silence, with an occasional low cough.

A voice at the back of the unseen group asked, “Shouldn't we be firing a few shots anyway? Loosen ‘em up, like?”

“Yeh,” said another. “Flush ‘em out.”

“No,” said a leaderly voice. “We'll sit tight.”

The impasse lasted twenty minutes. Robert scarcely breathed. Occasionally he heard a jingle and a jostle on the other side of the hedge. A footfall clunked on the road right beside him. One man must have checked the breech of his gun because the metallic
clung!
echoed. In his fright, Robert ran his tongue repeatedly along his top teeth.

At last, somebody grunted an order. Three, four, five, ten shots rang out. Twenty yards from Robert's briar, the leaves made ripping noises; the air whistled. The line of fire came closer; birds squawked away, terrified. Something small near Robert's feet raced desperately into deeper undergrowth, bumping into Robert's ankle as it ran.

Ten yards away the leaves now began to tear; they spat little shards of green. Five yards away the bullets thudded into a mound of earth. Robert's eyes stared, his ears roared, his mouth grew dry, his hands gripped each other. Then the firing stopped and his nostrils picked up again the dreadful smell of cordite; it had hung over Normandy like the odor of plague.

From the road he heard murmurs, a laugh, clinks and rattles. The engine of the truck
wowrled!,
then started. Somebody said, “Did we bring enough ammo at all, lads?” and a general laugh followed. The truck moved away.

Down the road, it stopped again. Once more the engine cut; once again voices chatted and laughed; once again silence fell and hung. And once more a fusillade rang out: lengthy, random, and terrifying.

At last, at long last, the engine revved back into life and the truck rolled away. The hedge provided such good acoustics that Robert reckoned he heard the truck for three or four minutes. Even when it faded he didn't go out to the road again.

By then the sun had left the woodland. He stayed in the briar for close
to an hour. Around him, shadows fell longer and darker. Nothing moved, no small animal, no bird. Now and then he heard a sound from a tree or a bush: a branch resettling, water dripping from leaves.

Robert slept rough that night, under the stars— the first time in his life. Not that he meant to; it seemed to happen almost by default. When he moved from his cover, he went deeper into the trees and found himself in a tangled old wood, with a thick ground blanket of ancient mulch, fallen branches, and some of last year's leaves.

Not much light penetrated here— although lightning had; a blasted tree stood in front of him, gaunt, charcoal-dark, and sere; in its top branches he saw the cluster of an old nest like a loose ball of black twine.

The heavy overhead canopy gave him what he needed, a reasonable shelter. Patting the ground in a dozen places, he found a spot whose dry-ness startled him, and with his boots he scraped a rectangle in the earth into which he calculated that he could fit his length. His rucksack made a pillow, and he lay down. He had no food, and he had no covering of any kind. Within moments he had fallen asleep; daylight would last for at least another three hours.

Nothing came by to trouble this babe in the woods, this untypical nature-man-for-a-night. With no bears in Ireland, no wolves, and no snakes, he had nothing to fear. If a fox found him, it would merely sniff the air nearby and move on; foxes do not like deep woods except as refuge. Nor would any badger cause him trouble; their shyness keeps them placid until attacked. Robert's only threat came from within.

Now, however, he stood a chance of warding off that too. Since landing in Ireland he had not yet suffered any new attacks of nature's images corrupted. If he looked at a tree, the leaves had no bloodstains, the branches had no naked limbs hanging there, no decapitated bodies.

Had he been in touch with Dr. Greenberg, he would have recorded other changes. In his images so far on this journey, his parents and superiors no longer came to assault him. They no longer stood accusing and distorted before his prone form. And he no longer saw himself alternately attacking them with knives and machetes and hurling himself weeping into their arms.

The brief roles of the safer Irish people he had encountered could almost
be defined as in loco parentis. Toward those upon whose decency and hospitality he looked back, he felt nothing but affection and warmth— even if he hadn't been able to find thoughts to shape the words to say so. Toward the rest, the Irregulars and the truckloads of soldiers, he felt the fear and aversion of the war in France.

He knew he hadn't yet begun to articulate many complete sentences or think anything profound. All he could say for certain was that the inner marauders who had plagued him for so long had largely stayed away from Ireland. They had been given every chance to attack, but he had beaten them off. He knew, he could tell, that he had recovered himself much faster from the fright of having been almost strangled, and of having had a gun put to his forehead, than he had done after the Edward Dargan incident.

Generally he felt as though a certain pleasantness had arrived— and it looked as though it might stay. His mind was slowly beginning once more to fill with thoughts of food, of baseball, of the horses in the fields near the white-painted walls of his parents’ home. Once or twice he even began to recall phrases about peace that he had used in sermons.

The moments of going into and waking up from sleep always posed the greatest threat, no matter how safe the premises, no matter how secure his feelings. That night, however, despite the cold, the damp, and the somewhat fearful surroundings, Robert settled down unalarmed and slept for several hours. No troubling dreams came to him. Aware of some discomfort, he tossed and turned a little on the hard ground, but he finally awoke serenely on his woodland bed at two o'clock in the morning.

Light never fully leaves the Irish sky in high summer. He came slowly to the realization of where he was; he came slowly to the memory of what had brought him there and kept him there. All around him, the wood's dark shapes began to materialize until they had the clarity of twilight.

He stood, stretched, and began to turn in a full, slow circle, peering as hard as he could into the gloom— not seeking to penetrate the shadows but wishing to make sense of them, even to make friends of them:
I have not been in a wood so deep since, since … Is there something— somebody— sprawled over there? No. This is a forest, not a battlefield. Listen. Listen hard.

Not a sound could he hear. No matter how still and secluded his hospital
room, there had always been noise: the faint traffic of the city, the clang of a distant utensil in a nursing corridor. Here, with his eyes accepting as friends the shapes of the night wood, with the mushroom smell of damp mulch reaching his nose, and with his hands gripping a slender tree, its bark raw as a rope to his touch, his ears heard nothing.