Robert Shannon, of impeccable education and elegant vocabulary, had just sailed into the harbor of this flexible, versatile word. He raised an eyebrow at the Lion and almost looked up and down to see whether by some amazing social accident a twilight woman had just appeared on this empty country road.
At a steady and good-humored pace, Robert reached sight of Killaloe in some hours; this was his longest, most sustained walk yet. A cart or two passed him, going in the opposite direction. Dogs barked from behind gates. Cows in the fields swung their heads and looked at him. Two horses galloped to a wall by the road and hoped for apples.
Limerick had offered plenty of advice: Ancient town, Killaloe; ask for Mrs. Horgan's— she has the best breakfast; her husband has great stories—stay overnight. On the bridge he stood and watched a man fishing—the long looping swings of the line arching through the air like a lazy letter S and then the fly settling on the calmer plates of the water— and he realized that if he stayed in Killaloe he would have to cross the Shannon. The archbishop had said, “Be consistent. Go up one side of the river, come down the other side. A constructed journey, Robert. Do not cross the river.”
Notwithstanding that he had now come to a legendary place, he walked on; he had some hours to go before nightfall. As he walked he looked across the river at the town. They said it had once been the most important place in Ireland. And they said that all the Church's power was once concentrated there. To Robert, though, if he hadn't found his roots, Killaloe was a last chance to be picked up on his return journey. He walked on.
“Don't forget to ask about the banquets,” they said in Limerick, and they told him how the great king Brian Ború fed his soldiers in their fort from his kitchens at his castle, and a line of a hundred servants had passed the food down along the riverbank at Killaloe.
He ate as he walked, the last of Sheila Neary's lamb-and-onion sandwiches; he drank the milk she had given him and stood the bottle gently by a roadside tree.
After an hour he began to tire. No building carried a BED AND BREAKFAST sign, nor had he yet seen a house in which he might have liked to stay. Tiredness, he knew, brought its problems; exhaustion concerned them all.
“Avoid fatigue,” said Dr. Greenberg.
“Six hours a day,” said the archbishop, “and no more.”
He had walked five.
Ahead, a man in the uniform of a postman worked at a gate. Robert approached him; the man wrestled with a broken catch. When Robert said, “Excuse me,” the man jumped.
“Yeh. God, you gave me a fright. This catch has me scuttered.” Then he looked at Robert and lifted his shiny-peaked cap. “Sorry, Father. And amn't I right calling you Father?”
“This is Lough Derg?” said Robert anxiously.
“Yep,” said he. “The red lake.”
Robert looked carefully at the surface of the water.
“I know what you're thinking,” said the man. “It don't look red.”
“No,” said Robert.
“Ah, but you see it was,” said the postman. “A long time ago. And it can be still. You're a Yank yourself, aren't you?”
Robert nodded.
“Good, good.” The postman paused and leaned on his gate; he had an audience.
“Here's the way I heard it,” he said. “And it goes back a long time. Smoke, Father?”
Robert declined the packet and the postman lit a cigarette, keeping his audience waiting.
“In the old days, before we had any pianos, the man who entertained everybody was the bard. He was a man who could sing a song and tell a story. The songs he sang he mostly made up, and the poems he recited he mostly made up. And he was a man you had to stay on the right side of, for his wrong side could be as black as the hob of Hell. If he made up a poem that mocked you, and he went off and told it the length and breadth of the country, your name was mud. Anybody would feel they could attack you and rustle your animals, or cheat you at cards, or beat down your price if you were selling them your barley. So you had to be nice to them bards.
“Well, there was one notorious scut of a bard called Sheehy. ‘Tis a Kerry name. He wasn't from Kerry, I don't think, but wherever he was from, he was a rotten so-and-so. But he was a great bard too; he was very entertaining, usually at the expense of the household that had just recently hosted him, and he traveled Ireland mocking people like a mockingbird.
“So everybody was very frightened of him and with good reason, because he had the gift of humor. He could make up a poem or a song and have you in stitches laughing, and ‘twas only afterward that you realized what he was saying was vicious. A bit like a sharp woman.”
The postman warmed to his story; he straightened his shoulders’ hump.
“Well, he came one night to a house up there. D'you see that hill?” He pointed and Robert looked— at a bare green hill, some bushes, and a high sky.
“That place was owned by a decent man. I don't know what his name was; we're talking about a long time ago, maybe three or four hundred years before Christ was born.”
The postman stopped and dragged on his cigarette, thinking heavily.
“Now, what was his name? What was his name? I'll remember it in a minute.” He paused. Robert looked again at the hill, trying to imagine a man of any name living there more than two thousand years earlier.
“Anyway,” continued the postman, “this poor man found himself one night consternated by a visit from Sheehy the Bad-tongued Bard. He'd rather get a visit from his mother-in-law. And, Father, you're the lucky man you don't have a mother-in-law, oh, Jesus Christ”—and then realizing that he had sworn in the company of a priest, the postman turned it into a prayer—”and His Blessed Mother and all the Saints in Heaven and God Himself, you're the lucky man.”
Robert smiled.
“Well, the whole house was in a state of fear in case Sheehy would make up something bad about them when he was gone; they knew they had to please him, and you never saw such a dance of attendance. They all praised the verses he spoke that night, and the songs he sang; they did their almighty best to please this man with the bad mouth. And they had good reason to worry, because the poor man who lived here had only one eye— he lost the other in a battle over the rights to the river's ford—and that kind of deformity was exactly the sort of thing that Sheehy loved to mock.
“So the next morning, as the bard was leaving, the man of the house praised him for his great entertainment the night before and said to him, ‘Now, Mister Sheehy, you're due a fine gift from me and all you have to do is name it and I'll give it to you.’ And he meant it. But Sheehy, that bad-minded bastard”—and the postman interrupted himself again. “Father, by that I mean he was known to have been born out of wedlock, the wrong side of the blanket like, and the word, which might seem rough to your ears, is actually a legal matter around here.”
Robert smiled again.
“Anyway, Sheehy the bard said, ‘There's one gift I'd like,’ says he. ‘I'd like your eye.’ And the poor man, what did he do? He plucked out the one eye, he did—that's a fact—and he wrapped it in a clean cloth and handed it over to Sheehy, who went off with it.
“The poor man was bleeding like a stuck pig, and he couldn't find his way because now wasn't he blind? And his servants led him down— see that bush over there?—they led him down there to bathe the eye socket in the waters of the lake. And d'you know what happened? The whole lake— and ‘tis a big lake— turned red in sympathy with that poor decent man. And that's how Lough Derg got its name— a lough is a lake and derg means red. Now, isn't that a sad story, Father?”
“Yes.” Robert smiled. “Tragic. Now, how far to the nearest place where I could stay?”
The postman, with glasses thick as bottles, sniffed.
“Well, there's a convent in Portroe, but you'll never walk it before dark.” He stopped and thought. “Tell you what, Father. I've my bicycle here; take it into Portroe. I've to go there tomorrow with the donkey and cart, so I can pick it up. Anyone'll tell you wh
ere the convent is.”
Robert said, “Could I stay in your house for the night?”
The man looked embarrassed. “Ah, Father, you wouldn't want to stay in my house, sure I haven't a clean cup in the place. Here's the bike. Leave it against the wall of the convent.”
And so it was that Robert cycled into Portroe that evening, arriving an hour before twilight. On the road, he heard a powerful engine, so he wheeled into the gate of a quiet farm. As he sat on the bicycle, hidden behind a shed, a truckload of guns-at-the-ready soldiers clattered by. The fear hung for a moment and then melted into the sky.
At the cream-colored walls of the convent, he parked the bicycle as bidden. The long knob of the doorbell yielded a faraway tumbling jangle. In the dim brown hallway with its bleached smell he produced the archbishop's letter.
Minutes later, a nun had installed him in a large and stainless room. When he went back downstairs, other nuns twittered around him like happy black-and-white birds, delighted to do too much for him, if that were possible.
The convent dining room had small windows in dark walls— anaglypta paper painted dark chocolate brown. Dark mahogany boards gave a sliding underfoot. The long mahogany table wore a great cream linen cloth, and the room, if painted, would call for chiaroscuro— the chiaro from the cloth and the evening light, and the obscure from the dark wood that seemed to melt into the dark walls.
And the painter would have seen a tall man in a gray windcheater, with a floppy lock of hair, seated at the head of the table, the light reflected from its cream tablecloth to his face.
He was flanked by two nuns as he ate. They leaned toward him and asked him abundant questions about his journey so far. And they praised his careful timing; in Limerick there were “corpses in the streets.”
None among them knew anyone by the name of Shannon. They looked at one another, they sent emissaries to other parts of the convent. Embarrassed by their failure, they wrote a letter of introduction to a farmer and his wife at Clonmacnoise, some distance ahead on the river. He thanked them, they were so shining-eyed and insistent.
“Father, this is the point,” said one of the nuns, the intelligent Sister Rosario. “When you go there, you'll understand why we are of the Church. This is where priests like you and nuns like us— this is where we began, in monasteries like Clonmacnoise, great places where hundreds of voices were raised in worship.”
The other nun at the table added, “And wait till you see how the land and the river and the scenery affirms your vocation, Father.”
Of course nothing affirmed Robert's vocation anymore, nor had it for a long time. However, at the mention of the word he recalled the archbishop's exhortation to find the people of the day in their vocations, study them, and learn from them what commitment looked like.
“You said,” he asked Sister Rosario, “that the convent makes its own butter?”
She glanced at the clock. “Sister Luke is doing it now.”
Their black robes swirling, their faces sweetly shaped by the tight white wimples, the nuns at table— joined by others— led him downstairs and out to the dairy across the yard.
Inside this long room of whitened walls and scrubbed stone floors, a woman in a brown gown stood by a tall wooden churn that narrowed near the top to a tight wooden lid. From a hole in this lid a handle protruded.
The woman in brown plunged this handle up and down. Her strokes had care in them. Shabby as a sack, she maintained a constant pressure. The brown cassock indicated an inferior class within the convent; she had never taken vows. Lay sisters came from families who were too poor to be reckoned with or were considered too unintelligent to be educated. They did the menial tasks and, though perceived as nuns with a convent life, remained laity in the eyes of the Church, free to leave at any time and never elevated to the status of bride of Christ.
Robert stood and watched the lay sister standing against the whitewashed wall. The plunger rammed up and down.
“Harder than it looks, Father,” said Sister Rosario. “Talk to Sister Luke about it. The butter's her pride and joy.”
Robert had once given a sermon that began, “The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.” Sister Luke undoubtedly had a simple and wonderful spirit, and she also had hair like paintbrushes on her chin. When Sister Rosario said, “This is our distinguished guest from America, Father Shannon, and he is very interested in how you churn butter,” Sister Luke, in her fifties, blushed red as puberty.
For all her grindingly hard work she had a pair of alabaster hands with tapering fingers. She put her face down to avoid being seen and plunged the churning pole up and down fiercely.
“Um, Sister Luke,” Sister Rosario tried again. “Would you like to tell Father Shannon how you make butter? And I think he probably will be able to hear you better if you rest for a moment.”
With the reluctance of a schoolboy, Sister Luke stopped and looked at Robert. In her diffidence her eyes seemed to roll up into their sockets as high as her frontal lobes.
“We makes butter every week, yeh, Father,” she said. “Our three cows gives us milk twice a day. I skims that milk. Into this bowl. With this.”
She showed Robert a large conical bowl of white porcelain with a blue rim around the top edge, and then she showed him a tool like a flattish wooden spoon with small holes.
“The milk slips out through the holes but the cream is too thick and it stays on the wand, ah, yeh.”
In her rising enthusiasm, Sister Luke had begun to forget her shyness.
“When this bowl here and its comrades is full of cream”—she pointed to a row of blue-rimmed bowls on the long wooden shelves—”I adds a bit of salt to each one.”
By now Robert could hear the archbishop's voice again: Talk to the ordinary people. Ask them about their skills. Listen to their passion. That's their vocation.
“So, Father, I'll have a pile of the cream skimmed off and it'll be sitting in the bowls and I'll go to each bowl and I'll skim off a bit of cream from each one and I'll taste it for sourness. And the buttermilk'll be all gone, ah, yeh.”
“We use the milk that has been skimmed for baking,” Sister Rosario interjected. “Nothing wasted, Father, nothing wasted.”
Sister Luke took back the limelight. “That's when I'll start to bring all the cream together into the churn here, a bowl at a time, Father, and the sourest on top; that's the way I does it. Other people does it different. We all have our own troubles, don't we? And when the churn is ready to be turned, I'll scoop up a wand of the mixture and taste it, and I might add a bit more salt if it's needed, and if I've too much salt in, and that can happen, I'll add a drop of honey.”
Sister Rosario beamed at Robert. “Our own bees, Father, our own bees. Honey's very good for you”—and Sister Luke elbowed her out of the limelight again.
“And then I clamps the lid tight on the churn and I starts the churning with the stick. That's all ‘tis. You've got to be careful. Don't hit too strong and don't hit too weak. You've to listen to the cream in the churn, listen close, like you'd listen to a small child whispering to you.”
She hushed a finger to her lips, took up the churning pole again, and everybody leaned forward slightly and listened as she plunged the pole up and down gently. Robert heard a sucking noise: slok-slok.
As they walked back from the dairy, Sister Rosario said, “Father, there's twelve of us here and we'll all be at Mass in the morning. Is seven o'clock all right? The vestments are out and ready.”
Robert froze inside. Since this was an order of nuns and not a parish, he would not need permission from the local bishop to exercise his priestly faculties here. And as the nuns also knew this protocol, he couldn't talk his way out of it.
Consequently he slept like a man lying on rocks, even though the bed proved excellent and the world was still. A dawn chorus stirred him at a quarter past five; in minutes he quit the front door. The nuns’ helpful, generous Clonmacnoise letter of introduction sat
heavy in his pocket, weighted by his self-critical thoughts: Sneaky not to explain to them. Dishonorable to leave like a thief. Shouldn't do this.
The previous night he had left the river behind; to find it again he must go west. At the edge of the village, just ahead of him, the way was blocked by a herd of cows, slipping and stumbling from a field to a farmyard. The boy patrolling this bovine rush hour had hair sticking up from his head in blond straws.
“Excuse me. The Shannon River?”
The boy pointed west. Robert watched the animals lumber and veer into the farm. He reached out and touched a passing roan flank.
It took him an hour to get down to the riverbank. Tired but not hungry, agitated but not dismayed, he found a tree to lean against and stood there for some long time, absorbing the river's calm.
He had three objectives: He wanted to get to Portumna by nightfall, he wanted to savor the lakeshore as much as he could, and he wanted to ask ancestor questions along the way.
On his map he calculated that he would most likely spend the next two days meandering up the side of Lough Derg to Portumna. Folded into the map he had the names of four lakeside bed-and-breakfast places that had been given to him in Limerick.
His friends in the Church often asked, why wasn't Robert Shannon a Jesuit? He always laughed and gave the same answer: “Parish work.” Jesuits tended to concentrate on the academic world, and Robert wanted to work with people. The question had a good foundation, though; not many pastors had well-to-do parents. His fellow ordinands came from working-class backgrounds, in some cases from severe poverty, and a posh boy like Robert stuck out.
When he announced that he wanted to be a priest, Robert's parents had voiced surprise but no contest. They attempted neither diversion nor dissuasion. His mother, Julia, had almost died giving birth to him, and thereafter the traditional lines of who did what, so clear for friends and others of their class, blurred. Mom knew every aspect of her husband's work; Dad had household sense.