“Here,” he said, after a few minutes, “give him that, Father.”
He held the base of the bottle so that the calf could continue to drink, and Robert, a little unsteadily, took over the feeding. The calf's brown eyes shone like lamps on Robert's face, and the sucking proved so strong it almost dragged the bottle from his hands.
“His mother died at birth. That's only the third cow I ever lost at calving in my whole and entire life.”
Mr. Reddan sat down in his chair opposite Robert and fell asleep. In a moment the only sounds in the room came from the slurping of the calf and the slurred snoring of Mr. Reddan. The calf soon emptied the milk bottle and Robert had to pull it away hard; the calf then caught Robert's sleeve in its mouth and went on sucking. When Robert tried to ease the sleeve away with his hand, the calf found his fingers and began to suck them, a clammy and warm tongue.
Mr. Reddan didn't wake up, nor did it seem likely that he would. Robert slowly relinquished the calf, who put his head down and closed his eyes too.
In search of food, Robert found milk, a cold chicken, and some sort of sweet cake, all hidden in a cupboard behind rows of unopened whiskey bottles. He ate on the bench outside the front door, watching the sun go down.
A man passing by said, “Don't eat it all yourself.”
Robert asked, “Where is the River Shannon?”
The man pointed west. “You can't miss it.”
“And where do the French live? Is there a French quarter?”
The man looked mystified. “There's no French here. And I dunno what a French quarter is. Is it bread? Like a quarter of a loaf or something? A French quarter?” The man stroked his chin. “The French quarter? Well, a quarter is half of a half. And French is from France itself, so what we're looking for is half of a half from France.” He stroked his chin some more and hitched his breeches. “Would it be like, say, a drink maybe, that'd be it. Yeh. Like a half-whiskey? Yeh.” He brightened. “A brandy, like; the French have great brandy. That could be it.” The man brightened further. “God, the French quarter. Very good for the heart. Any pub'll tell you.” And he walked on.
Robert went indoors, saw that Mr. Reddan continued to sleep deeply, and climbed the stairs. As he turned left on the first landing he came to an abrupt halt. A boy sat there on the staircase, in striped pajamas, a blond boy aged about nine.
“He has a disease,” said the boy pointing downward.
“Oh,” said Robert. “That's not good.”
“Sleeping sickness. He doesn't know he has it.”
“I have a sickness too,” said Robert, an announcement that would have startled his caregivers back home.
“You don't look sick either,” said the boy.
“My name is Robert. And yours?”
“Fergus. I'm called after a river in Clare.”
“And I'm Robert Shannon— same name as that river out there.”
He sat down beside Fergus, who turned to stare at him and then spoke.
“Are you staying a few days?”
“Perhaps,” said Robert. “How will your parents feel if I stay?”
“My father loves company. My mother lives in the town. She comes over to us every day.” Fergus saw Robert's raised eyebrow and continued. “My mother says she won't live with my father until he gives up drinking.” He saw Robert's question and pressed on, “I stay here so that I can run and tell my mother the day he stops.”
“How long have you—”
“Four years.”
At that moment somebody knocked on the door— hard, loud. Robert looked at Fergus. “Somebody has a sick animal?”
Fergus rose, in no hurry. Robert watched as he walked downstairs. He opened the door a fraction— and then a hand reached in and snatched him. The door slammed shut. Robert sat, wondering what had happened. Then he heard Fergus's voice: “No! I didn't! No!”
Robert rose, thought to go down, sat again— the will had not yet caused the effort. He heard another cry, and this time he went down and opened the door.
Outside, two men held Fergus by the arms; a third tugged the boy's hair and asked, “Where? Where did you take them?”
“I didn't! I didn't!”
Robert said, “Excuse me.”
The men turned to look at him. “Who are you?” said one.
“He's a priest,” said Fergus. “He's visiting us.”
Robert made a dismissing gesture— and the man let go Fergus's hair. The others released Fergus's arms and the boy stepped back inside the house.
For a moment nobody moved. Each of the three men looked hard at Robert, who steadily returned each gaze. Then one jerked his head and they sloped off. Robert waited until they had gone out of sight.
Indoors Fergus, shaking a little, waited in the hall. When Robert had closed the door, Fergus rapidly shot the bolts. To Robert's inquiring look he said, “They think I'm bringing messages. They're in the army.”
Robert looked into Fergus's eyes and shook his head very slowly and very deliberately, as though to say, Don't.
Fergus climbed the stairs, went into a room, and closed and locked his door.
Next morning, Mr. Reddan was feeding the calf when Robert came downstairs.
“Ah, I fell asleep last night, Father,” said Mr. Reddan. “Were you all right? My brother'll eat me for my bad manners. But I'll make it up to you, I'll put you on the road to Clonmacnoise. There's a man up that way who has a boat, and if you tell him I sent you he'll take you the whole way.”
No sign, not a trace of Fergus. During the night Robert had heard a great deal of movement from the direction of Fergus's room; at one moment he even heard a faint song, but the boy never appeared.
For breakfast Mr. Reddan made tea, and Robert ate some more cake. Mr. Reddan took Robert to his motor truck and sat at the wheel as Robert cranked the handle. The engine turned slowly, with metallic growls, and the handle snapped back in its arc.
Mr. Reddan called out, “Be careful. That thing is like a swan's wing. It can break your arm.”
Robert persisted, and the engine started. He climbed in beside Mr. Reddan.
“My brother tells me,” he shouted above the noise, “that I shouldn't be allowed to drive anything— not even a bargain.”
The previous night, Robert had opened the envelope from Father Reddan and found a chunk of money.
“Your brother is very generous,” he shouted back.
Mr. Reddan yelled, “He makes a ton of money on the dogs. Them two are the best-earning hounds in the country.”
Powerful men know not only whom to thank, they also know how. If you served Cardinal William O'Connell, he glowed; his thank-you smile could be seen miles away; you remembered it forever. He went on showing you his tender side— and it increased his power. People wished to do things for him: favors, services, donations. Much wants more, and those who discovered the warmth of the cardinal's gratitude longed to do him ever more and deeper favors. Thus, many in the archdiocese took it upon themselves to render him services for which he had never asked.
In June 1922, a group of men met in a private house in South Boston, the most Irish enclave in the world outside of Ireland. Devout Catholics all, they convened to address a dilemmatic situation that had reached their attention through a concerned member of the archdiocesan clergy. One man, an accountant of some standing in the city, laid out the story like a balance sheet.
In the goodness of his heart, His Eminence had sent to Ireland a troubled priest. The man, not known to any of them as he was from Hartford, had been suffering from shell shock.
It was understood that the young priest had seen and heard at first hand about some difficulties that the archdiocese had been having. His Eminence had expressed private relief that the young man had gone away for some time, because apparently he had been talking— in fact, he had been talking wildly, and the things he had been saying disparaged His Eminence, and the clergy, and the Church. Disparaged them gravely.
Now, at His Eminence's prom
pting, the young man had gone on an Irish trip, a journey such as any one of them might have taken to trace family roots. His Eminence had reluctantly agreed with those doctors who suggested travel as part of the cure for these unfortunate war victims.
Not that His Eminence made any suggestions or expressed any wishes— but would it not be best for everybody were the young priest not to return?
It would certainly solve a problem.
Mr. Reddan had a farewell smile and a handshake.
“You'll enjoy Clonmacnoise, Father. It'll put sugar in your water.”
He said Au revoir with so many gutturals that it sounded like a stone rolling downhill. When the wonderful truck chugged away Robert stood on a wide path some miles north of Banagher. Mr. Reddan had directed him to stay on the bank until he came to a riverside house “out in the middle of the country. And mention my name.”
The Shannon that morning had a new color, almost a cobalt blue. Robert checked the skies and saw that, clear though they seemed, they darkened to the west. Since his time in France, thunder alarmed him, and the accompanying heavy rain seemed to sting him more nowadays than it had ever done in the past.
The blue of the river intensified, and lights began to appear, dancing on the water, yellow and gold lights, as though the flames on a thousand candles had begun to glow beneath the surface.
He looked again at the sky. The deep heavy clouds seemed not to be coming straight over after all but to be veering south instead of traveling east, so perhaps the rain might stay away. Impossible to tell, and the far-off boilings of the high clouds still rolled up the sky, eager to lick the sun. The atmosphere had become as heavy as a bell jar. He took out a packet of cake from the house in Banagher and began to eat as he walked on. There's no doubt that I feel more placid. There's no doubt that I feel— better.
Ahead, in a field on the far bank, a man worked with a scythe, the farmers’ scimitar, trimming a headland. The mowers had long gone, and the hay had been taken from the field. Now the green aftergrass, the meadow's lovely inheritance, shone for its brief life. When the headlands had been trimmed and cleaned, the plowman would come in: I must be getting better. I must be improving. I'm beginning to see images of my own life in everything. And I'm getting gifts: I fed a calf I met an interesting boy; I have money in my pocket. Miranda stays in my mind. Silence has its reasons. But silence isn't always healthy.
An accumulation had begun to rise in him, of all the warm experiences he had so far known in Ireland. And Sheila— Sheila Neary She showed me her spirit. These people. All this kindness.
Robert finished eating his cake, went down to the water's edge, washed his hands in the river, and then cupped them to make a drink: Will I ever say Mass again? Ever hold out my hands to be washed after the Consecration, the Communion? Is my God too absent? He wasn't in France. He wasn't much to be seen in the Archdiocese of Boston, either.
In the changing light, the aftergrass had become as blue as Kentucky. He drew level with the man in the field on the far bank. The curved blade of the scythe gleamed and swung like a little comet.
Ahead, by a stand of beech trees, a small tall house sat on a height back from the water. A thin plume of smoke rose from the folk-tale chimney. Against the walls, high staves of curved wood leaned, like thin lounging men. The field behind the house had no fences, just wide-open green acreage, with a broad pathway narrowing into the distance. Here and there on the open land, limestone rocks raised their heads from the earth, giving warning glances with their eyes of white lichen.
The house seemed empty. Robert walked up the short path and stood in the open door. An old gentleman, as distinguished as a duke, whitemustached and ruddy-faced, half rose from his chair by the fire.
“Hallo, come in,” said the old man, extending his hand, which felt like leather gloved on wood, dry and gnarled and yet with a sheen.
“Are you the man who builds boats?”
“Oh, we've one nearly finished, and we'll do you a fair price an’ all. We often get Americans here.”
The old man led the way through an open door, into a monkish bedroom with whitewashed walls and a crucifix, and through another open door into a high-ceilinged shed. Robert's nose filled with the holy smell of woodworking decades: varnish, linseed, wax.
The rich skeleton of a long craft perched on struts. Some of the keel spars were already planked, working toward a high curving prow. Robert began to stroke the wood. The old man glanced at him and half nodded to himself.
“I make ‘em specially for the Shannon.” He patted it. “Seventeen feet trimmed.”
Then began one of those little relationships that occur in all good lives, as much silence as speech.
“We were always farmers too,” said the old man. He patted a sector of the boat toward the stern.
Then came a breath of silence.
“I like larch timber myself. And it don't swell.”
Silence.
“You can get a bit of swelling in freshwater.”
Silence.
Robert touched the boat all the time. The old man watched him.
“The river floods?” asked Robert, finally.
“It does. It does so. That's why we gave up the farming. Built the new house here, back high from the river this time. In case we were ever caught by a flood again. We were once.”
Silence.
Robert walked around the boat.
“I mean, I wasn't born when the bad flood came, the one that drownded my grandmother and the child she was holding on to. The water trapped them in the kitchen of the old house and came in over their heads. That's why my grandfather built boats.”
Silence.
Like a lover Robert drew both hands down the curved spine of the wood.
“But I seen a bad flood here myself. Up to the lip of the door. And the mud: wide, wide streels of it. Like you'd spread it with a flat knife. Dirty black and brown.”
Silence.
“We cut branches off the trees, threw them down on the mud, and covered them with straw for the horse to stand on.”
Silence.
“And I said to myself that day, How can anybody keep a family safe if they don't have a boat to keep them up out of the flood? And I told myself I'd build the best boats ever seen, and so I'd best that river. That river is one vicious bitch, that's a fact. But she'll never beat a boat of mine.”
The old man straightened his shoulders and turned to look out the door. Robert looked too and saw only a calm stream today, with branches dipping on the far bank. He stood for a long time, stroking the wood, looking at the river …
In the afternoon the old boatman put food on the table: boiled eggs, soda bread, and tea.
“D'you want to get up to Clonmacnoise?”
“Mr. Reddan, he said—”
The old man interrupted. “Ah, isn't he the sad fellow all the same? The best vet in the county and he sad as a wake. His heart and soul is in that wife of his.” He shook his head.
Robert helped the old man to carry the unexpectedly light boat down to the water. Within minutes they were under sail.
“There's nearly always a westerly wind here,” said the old man. “We get a full sail as regular as wages.”
They saw nobody, not on the river, not on the banks. No drama visited them, except for a little turbulence when they passed a tributary's entrance.
“That's the Blackwater,” said the old man, who, once on his boat, became as nimble as a monkey. “A fairly useless river.”
The sail rarely flapped. Its firmness surprised Robert, who had been a guest on yachts out of Long Island Sound, where the cracking and snapping of canvas added to the thrill of the ocean. This boat rode as light as a leaf.
“Does it take long,” said Robert, “to learn how to sail the Shannon?”
“About three hundred years,” said the old man, with no irony.
A flight of birds swooped across the sky ahead of them, a dipping, floating black smudge.
“Have you e
ver known anybody who was named Shannon?”
“No.” He pointed downward. “Only herself.”
They went under the beautiful arches of Shannonbridge as smoothly as a smile. Robert felt a scrape on the boat's keel and looked down; he could almost have touched the riverbed. The old man saw his alarm.
“If it hadn't rained last night, I'd have had to go through that arch over there.” He pointed. “They made it deeper there. But it has a throw to it that I don't like. ‘Tis all right when I'm coming back down.”
Robert counted the arches, as the old man watched.
“D'you know that it's different every time you count them? How many did you get?”
“Sixteen,” said Robert.
“Count them again.”
Robert counted. “Sixteen.”
“Ah,” said the old man, and looked disappointed.
The river widened.
“There's a ford up here,” said the old man. “You can nearly walk across.”
Robert had his map on his knee. “How far to—”
The old man pronounced it for him. “Clon … mac … noise. On the river, five miles.”
Between Shannonbridge and Clonmacnoise the water grew quieter than ever before. In places the land sat so low that Robert could look down upon the fields. The river took a wide bend to the west, and colors began to flash.
Stalks among the reeds glowed like tall thin matchsticks, vivid red at the tips. Petals from broken marsh flowers floated in bundles like yellow dolls. Purples and acid greens and startling whites shone through the beige legs of the sedges. Distant fields wore rugs of yellow-gold buttercups.
Robert's shoulders dropped in rest. The peace of this stretch seemed to descend on the old man too. For the first time he sat down, the tiller a cello in his hands, the river beneath them its music. The airflow lifted his white hair gently from his head, and he raised his face to the sky. Robert closed his own eyes too and felt the breeze.
Great shrines have their sacred time of day. To visit Delphi, where Greece's ancient soul still dwells, you must climb down from Mount Parnassus at dawn. Some pilgrims have followed Christ's Via Dolorosa from Jerusalem, on their knees, to arrive at Calvary by three o'clock in the afternoon, the moment of death. The ancient Celtic monastery of Clonmacnoise yields most when approached from the river and seen at sunset.