“He has asked me, Eminence, that he might make his confession. You know that we have not permitted him to make a confession while he has been recovering. But we are ready to take down his words.”
“Um. Not yet, I think. And then perhaps I should make myself available to hear his confession— let him feel my blessing.”
Bishop Nilan said, “Very generous of you, Eminence, very generous.”
Cardinal O'Connell asked again, “And he's not making wild delusional statements anymore?”
“I make sure, Eminence,” said Sevovicz, “that he spends all his waking hours in my company— and only in my company.”
Codes lay thick on the ground. The cardinal had called on Sevovicz to check up. This young priest, who had once worked in the archdiocesan chancery, might still be shouting things.
After the earlier incidents, nobody had had the courage to repeat Father Shannon's exact words, but everything the young priest had been ranting meant discredit and outright shame. Every allegation suggested impropriety— on many and varied levels. Sevovicz had not heard any of this in person; by the time he took Robert in his care the young man had withdrawn. Prompting would make him worse— but if he recovered he might tell the truth.
Several months later, when Robert had begun to get a firm hold on life, Sevovicz received a directive: Bring Father Shannon to Boston. Their reception had a formal and distant tone, and O'Connell never appeared. After an hour the monsignor told them, “His Eminence will hear Father Shannon's confession now.”
Sevovicz waited and grew anxious. This confession should have taken no more than minutes; the priest could hardly have been expected to recall his sins before his traumatization. When Robert emerged, he seemed to have regressed by several months. The zombie walk had returned, as had the old chalk pallor, and he had been weeping.
“His Eminence will write to you,” the monsignor said to Sevovicz.
“Are you all right, Robert?” Sevovicz asked, outside the door.
The priest shook his head, and his collar worked loose. Closely, side by side, almost as though clinging to each other, both men walked away from the gate. That night, back in Hartford, Sevovicz sat by Robert's bed until dawn, soothing his distress.
The river pathway had broken in places, damaged in winter floods. Robert saw no other walker—not a fisherman, not a traveler— just a lone boatman in a small flat-bottomed craft who seemed to be navigating downriver by sitting as lightly as possible on the bouncing waters. He held only one oar and, with it, pushed himself off this rock and then that one and then another. The falls captivated Robert; he was beginning to realize that fountains gave him peace, as did tumbling waters of any kind.
And then, after several minutes of looking and enjoying, a sudden excitement hit him: Are these the Falls of Doonass? The mind labored, the heart lent its help, the memory, the picture, almost arrived.
A cloud across the sun changed the mood. Robert walked upstream toward the crumbling ruin of a castle. That also looks familiar.
He stared and stared— and finally walked on.
In 1813, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was born a child named Nathaniel Currier. In 1824, in New York City, was born a child named James Merritt Ives. Currier trained as a printer in Boston and Ives as a bookkeeper; when they became brothers-in-law they joined forces and made their fortunes.
With widespread literacy so new, much of America had not yet received its own literature of itself. Currier and Ives set up teams of illustrators who painted “American scenes”: Autumn in the Adirondacks; The Old Mill in Summer; Winter on the Hudson.
In the eventual industry— they produced more than eight thousand original titles— nothing was ruled out: battles of the Civil War, Mississippi paddle steamers, Washington at Princeton. Great stories from the news also made it into color within days of their breaking: shipwrecks, train crashes, prizefights.
But it was Christmas that nailed the market— calendars showed the way. This was a public that wanted to feel things; nostalgia rang bells at the till; the fledgling nation needed its past.
In this New World, the immigrant races were thriving one by one; few of these emergent Americans had such sentimental luggage as the Irish. Forced to leave, they wanted home. They knew they couldn't have it, so they settled for the intimations. Currier and Ives, sniffing the wind, sent a team to the Old Country. They came back with The Falls of Doonass plus hundreds more; their Irish catalog made a mint. And sank a root; henceforth the love of the land that was lost would prove balm to the souls of millions. In due course, some of them, the new Irish-American rich, set off in search of their roots and asked along the way. It became— and remained— a tourist industry for the Irish at home.
By the early 1920s, although the searchers had their Currier and Ives illustrations, their own songs, and soon their own movies, they did not yet have formal genealogists. To fill the gap, some amateurs— teachers or lawyers in small towns, men with an interest in their own country anyway—helped by providing a sort of service. In Limerick they had told Robert Shannon that if there was one man who could dig up anyone's family roots, it would be Michael “the Lion” Tierney in Castleconnell.
On the edge of the village, not far from the Falls of Doonass, a stone lion sat sideways on a gatepost. Neither grand nor imposing, it looked Robert in the eye and he patted its little head. Since another lion's head soon appeared, in the form of a door knocker, Robert assumed that he had found the right house. And he assumed, also reasonably, that this leonine fondness gave the man his sobriquet.
Not at all. When the door opened the man who stood there had a mane of sandy hair and a deep fringe of dense whiskers all around his face. This, without any possible shadow of doubt, was Michael the Lion— a kindly beast too—who said, “Are you looking for long-lost cousins?”
Robert's surprised expression brought forth an explanation.
“You're a Yank, unless I'm greatly mistaken.” And when Robert nodded the Lion continued. “Ah, I get a lot of Yanks. Folk in Limerick tell them I know everything, and these poor people come here and find I only know half of everything. Will you have a drop of something? Herself isn't here, but she'll be back in a minute and she'll make you a cup of tea. Come in, come in.”
Impossible to tell his age— forty, fifty, sixty— in a shattered tweed suit, the pockets bulging like pelicans’ beaks. He wore six pens at his breast like a general wears decorations, and all of them had leaked ink down the tweed.
“Sit, sit, what's the name itself?”
“Robert Shannon.”
“Well, you're not a butcher, I can tell that straightaway. I s'pose you met the Chopper?”
Robert nodded.
The Lion laughed. He had unexpectedly perfect teeth, as neat as a trimmed white hedge. Robert almost felt disappointed that the Lion showed no fangs.
“That fella, that butcher, now he's three hundred percent illiterate. My sister tried to teach him at school, and he resisted all who approached his mind. He can't read or write or make his mark, as they say. And he'll tell you to your face, ‘I won't read and I don't write,’ that's his way of covering it up. But at Limerick Agricultural Show every year for the past ten years, he's the man who wins the Guess the Bull's Weight competition, and he's always accurate to two pounds. We all have to be good at something. You're a priest, am I right, Father?”
Robert said, “Yes.”
The Lion looked at him as the Chopper Shannon must have looked at a Guess-the-Weight bull. “D'you know a Father Donegan at all in America?”
Robert shook his head, and the Lion said, “Fair enough, I was only asking. I s'pose you're wondering how I knew you were a priest?”
Robert smiled and said, “I'm getting used to it.”
“Ah, it's easy enough to understand,” said the Lion. “Priests have a steady cut to their jib.” He stroked his whiskers. “What happened your hand, if you don't mind my asking?”
Instinctively Robert hid the scarred knuckles.
&n
bsp; “You weren't a chaplain, were you?” said the Lion. “My brother came back minus a leg. And d'you know, I can never remember which leg.” The Lion shook his head; light flashed from his mane. “What can I do for you at all, Father? Name it. Name it.”
Robert began to ease. “The Shannon family?”
“Well, I'll tell you now,” said the Lion in his practiced speech, “If you asked me about Hallorans or Hoolihans or Hannigans or Hartigans, if you asked me about Dooleys or Dolans or Dalys or Donnellys, I'd have the answer pat for you. But the Shannons I was never asked about— for the very good reason that I know nothing about them. Apart from the river herself, the Chopper is the only Shannon I ever came across until you walked in here. What do you know about them yourself?”
Robert said, “They lived somewhere on the banks of the river. They were evicted.”
“Any idea when? Or what county?”
“Early in the seventeen hundreds, but I don't know the county.”
“And so you're traveling the river. The right thing to do. They were Catholics, were they?”
Robert jerked in surprise. “Might they not have been?”
“Oh, Father, they coulda been anything. They could have been outlandish things, like—I mean, Baptists or Methodists, any of that sort of crazy thing.”
“Would Protestants have been evicted?”
“A lot were,” said the Lion. “One of the big religious persecutions in Ireland was when the Anglicans— Episcopalians, you call them— tried to drive out the real Protestants, the Presbyterians and them folk.”
“The reform churches?” said Robert. He followed this line of information as though it led to safety— the safety of once again being able to take in and retain knowledge.
“Yeh, the very thing. That's it.”
“Could the Shannons have been reform church?”
“Ah, people could be anything back then, they could be Quakers or Zulus and what did it matter in the long run? There's a Heaven and there's a Hell, and that's the deal closed.”
The Lion stood, went to a closet, and took out a bottle.
“Father, what kind of a man am I that I didn't ask you if you have a mouth on you?”
Robert said, “I—um—don't drink.”
The Lion spun as though stung.
“What? Get away with that! You don't drink? How in the name of God are you going to get yourself up through Ireland with a dry mouth on you? Eh? Eh?”
Michael the Lion filled himself a tumbler of whiskey large enough to kick-start a shore leave.
From the rear of the house came a noise and a call. “Michael?”
“Oh,” said the Lion, hiding his whiskey glass on the floor beside his chair. “That's Herself.” He called back, “We've a visitor here, so mind your language.”
A woman taller than six feet came to the door of the living room; her sandy hair, in curls tight to her head, made Robert think of a mop. She hung back, in the manner of the dreadfully shy.
“Hello.”
“What is he?” said the Lion. “You've to guess what he is.”
“Would you like a cup of tea, Father?”
“Hah! Ya see? You can't beat Herself for guessing.”
Herself disappeared. The Lion winked at Robert, reached down for his tumbler, took a champion's swig, concealed the glass again, and rubbed his hands.
“Now. Here's the thing about ancestry. When a lot of the Yanks comes over here tracing their families, they already know what they're looking for. But they don't know that they know it. Do you follow me, Father?”
The Lion rose again and reached up to a bookshelf. He took down what looked like a countinghouse ledger, a tall thick book with red marbled covers and a burgundy spine. When he had spread the ledger open on the table, he invited Robert to look.
“See, Father. Here's a Hogan family from Philadelphia that I traced two years ago. And here's the first family that I ever traced, MacCombers in Canada. They came in here one day out of the blue, and they were dripping jewels; they own forests in New Brunswick.”
The ledger had charts, family trees in colored inks, dates and accounts of sea passages, myriad names— all executed in exquisite handwriting, neat as a monk's.
“And this is what the Yanks don't know. When they find out where they came from, they're lifted up by it. They make a connection— here, I'll show ya.”
He thumbed the great leaves of the ledger as reverently as a priest with an ancient vellum and found a page of grand arrangements. The family tree spread across the top and from it depended hosts of sons and daughters— names in neat lines.
“This is a family called O'Connor, living in Chicago. They came to me through the Bishop of Killaloe. I was able to go back to the last High King of Ireland, Rory O'Connor, and show how they were descended from him. It wasn't a direct line, but they wrote to me and said that what was important— and they never knew it would be— was that it gave them a good place in the past to go to, not just some emigrant ship. The past is often the best place.”
Robert stood back, to gain a better perspective on the two great pages.
“I've imagined,” Robert said, “a small house, high above the river.”
The Lion clapped his hands. “But if you saw that very ground? If you stood there? I mean to say, Father— it'd give your heart an armchair to sit down in, wouldn't it?”
As Robert struggled with that image, Herself came into the room with a tray. On it sat two book-sized wedges of fruitcake, glistening black with raisins and currants, and one cup and saucer.
Robert lifted the teacup and looked inquiringly from the Lion to Herself. She blushed and said, “I don't want any myself, Father, and he has his whiskey.”
Herself then disappeared, and Michael the Lion went for the hidden glass once more. He drank, burbled a little, set the glass down, and visibly gathered his senses.
“Father, I have— I have …” And he stopped.
Robert waited, looking around the room. A maned stuffed toy with the—superfluous—label LION around its neck sat on the upright piano. Two great pictures of lions in black japanned frames hung on either side of the mirror above the fireplace. A small marble statue of a lion stood on a plinth that said KING OF THE JUNGLE.
Michael the Lion had more stains on his clothing than Robert had ever seen. And the more Robert stared, the more some of them began to look like lion's heads. Michael started to speak again.
“I have serious things to say about people tracing their family. The reason we want to discover our ancestors is a very strong thing. ‘Tis as strong, in certain ways, if you'll forgive me, Father, as prayer. Here's what I'm saying. If I said you're forty years of age, and all you know about yourself is that you were born, say, over the hill over there, in some old bit of a house, you've nothing to go on. You've, like, no bank account. I mean, what was there before you, your father and maybe your grandfather? If that's as far back as you can go, God help you, for you're a poor man.”
He had caught Robert's attention, as much with his passion as with his ideas. Robert leaned forward, trying as hard as he had ever done to concentrate and retain.
“A poor man?” he repeated.
“Yes, Father, a poor man. A very poor man.”
The Lion hit the arm of his chair with a thump— and Robert did not start in fright.
“A very poor man, because supposing you did know who you were in the long-term backwards— and suppose you knew that in the long-term backwards there was a wonderful sportsman or artist or a woman famous for her piano playing in your family—well, you'd go forward in a different mood, wouldn't you? And you'd want to know, were you any small bit like them, wouldn't you? And if you were— well, wouldn't that lift your spirits? Those are the benefits of the past.”
The Lion grabbed his glass and sat forward.
“Father, if we don't come from somebody, we're nobody. If we don't come from somewhere, we come from nowhere. And if we don't know where we come from, how do we know where to go??
??
The Lion delivered this last flash of rhetoric with the air of a man nailing a thesis to a cathedral door. Robert nodded, certain that he should embrace the Lion's belief— but, like many before him, not at all certain why or indeed how.
Michael the Lion had a clock on the mantel, a pretty white-faced clock with Roman numerals and lions with upraised paws on either side. Knowing that he had to make Killaloe before nightfall, Robert took his leave of the Lion at two o'clock. Herself appeared and pressed a newspaper-wrapped package into his hand— more of the fruitcake—and when he opened it a hundred yards farther on, it was delicious to the last crumb.
The Lion had said as a farewell, “Make sure you're on your own when you eat it, Father. Or you'll have some chancy hoor who'll want every bit of that cake.”
Obviously Father Robert Shannon had heard the word whore before; it had been in Shakespeare after all, at school, and the boys had debated its root. In his lexicon it meant, naturally, prostitute or, more generally, a term of female derogation: loose morals, unfastened behavior, lax attitudes. Not anymore. He had just heard it in “Irish,” as it were; the Lion had used it casually, to describe jokingly a grasping person, an individual so cheap he'd take another man's cake.
For the Irish, though, it multiplies in meaning like a cell divides, with many shades and tones.
Sympathy comes into it: poor hoor is a term of condolence, as in “The poor hoor put his shirt on a horse last Saturday.” Incompetence, too: “And d'you know what, that hoor of a horse is still running.” It can be admiring, as in clever hoor, meaning smart boy. Or it can be a term of general approbation, as in “them Murphys is hoors,” meaning, “a decent family when all is said and done.” Some use it with a nod to its general origins in bad behavior; a fouling sportsman will be a dirty hoor; a dangerous individual is a vicious hoor.
It connects to the emotion of surprise. Break good news to someone and they'll say, “Ah, you hoor!”—meaning amazing. Or it depicts someone being difficult: “He was a hoor about that.” Men use the word to agree stoutly on someone's excellence in a chosen field: “a hoor at the plowing” means a plowman who can carve the straightest of furrows. And, most comprehensive of all, “I never saw a bigger hoor” does not suggest that the speaker has just glimpsed an unusually large lady of the evening, it means anything from praise to contempt, from admiration to hate.