When they reached the church, he thought to hang back. Any time the archbishop had taken him into the gloom of Hartford and made him kneel before the altar, Robert had almost thrown up. Now he slipped into a pew at the rear and watched the landlady. To a brass bank of flickering cigarette-sized candles she added three, lighting them from the little yellow spears of other candles. Robert looked at her and felt nothing, not even curiosity.
She came back and whispered, “One for me, Father, one for Danny, and one for yourself.”
Outside a neighbor said, “Hallo, Mrs. Halpin,” but the landlady avoided introducing Robert.
“She's a busybody. I'll show you our bridge.”
They walked through the town and Robert again saw his river. Mrs. Halpin said, “This is a new bridge. D'you know what happened to the old one?”
Robert shook his head.
“Well, we had a siege here, a while ago. The English were trying to get across the Shannon, so we blew up the bridge. The English started building a new one. They just laid down boards. And there was a man in our army, a man called Sergeant Custume, and he ran forward and ripped up the English planks.”
Robert looked at the tarred modern surface.
“He was shot dead, of course, and the English laid down more planks. But ten men came forward now, and they tore up the new planks and they were shot. And then another ten men came on, and another ten, and another ten. And after a long time of this, the English gave up. There's great bravery here, Father.”
Robert stroked the Victorian cut-stone parapet. “When did the siege—what year?”
“I think”—she thought—”yes, ‘twas sixteen ninety-one.”
A less disturbed Robert would himself have been the first to grasp the metaphor; even now he sensed that an idea lay in there somehow, but again the connection wouldn't click shut. But he did smile at the notion of 1691 being “a while ago.”
The town of Athlone rests below the southernmost waters of Lough Ree, the middle of the Shannon's three biggest lakes. Robert walked north along the shore, consulting his map. By now he'd come to consider the lakes as no more than the Shannon grown wide; as long as he saw water he also saw his river.
The weather blessed him: a perfect morning. After some miles of excellent walking, his arms swinging free, his mind easy again, a memory came back, from an aroma. Something from home, the fall, leaves; what is it?
Just as he identified the smell as wood smoke, two children ran out on the road ahead, two grimy children in poor clothing. A boy of about ten and a girl perhaps five years younger, they ran up to Robert and stopped in front of him.
“Give us a copper, sir.” The small girl held out her hand for a coin.
“Have you any oul’ pots to mend?” said the boy. By now they stood so closely together in front of him that Robert couldn't easily get by.
“What's your name?” he asked them.
“Connors.”
The boy jigged; his little sister bent down and fingered Robert's shoes.
“O'Connor?” Robert said.
“No, Connors. That's my father over there.”
A man stood at the roadside, looking at the conversation between his children and the tall stranger. Robert began to walk toward him. The man turned away and strolled into the woods. Robert hesitated, and the children ran ahead.
In the trees, perhaps a hundred yards from the pathway, a fire burned. A pony grazed, head low, its rope drifting loose. Behind the fire and the pony sat a caravan, its shafts resting on a pile of logs. An old woman sat on an old chair, attending to an old piece of cloth. The place looked like every picture of a Gypsy halt that Robert had ever seen. And there was a time when, from his boyhood books, he knew the name of every tinker tribe in Ireland.
They had painted every square inch of the caravan's surface in red. On this general color sprawled painted yellow flowers, big and blowsy as a barmaid. Near them, the good-enough artist had painted sleek horses’ heads, black champions all. Alongside, the artist had then painted detailed and glamorous harness pieces in brass, or did he mean to pretend it was gold? A real horseshoe hung above the door, surrounded by a voluptuous painted floral spray. Down either side of the door traveled heavily painted tendrils of honeysuckle, which then wound all along the base of each side.
The shafts were colored a deeper red than the rest of the trailer and ended in stubs of shiny black paint. From the rims of the red wheels, the spokes radiated in yellow. Out of the green canvas roof stuck a small chimney pipe of copper, from which climbed a thread of blue smoke. It all looked like a scene from a postcard.
As Robert approached, the old woman looked up, saw him, and ceased working. Up closer she seemed not ancient at all; with a start he guessed that she was less than thirty years old. She beckoned and he walked forward.
“You're a foreign gentleman?”
Robert nodded.
“If you cross my palm with silver, I'll tell you your fortune. Show me your hand.”
The man emerged from behind the caravan, the children jostling behind him, and saw Robert's puzzlement.
He said, “You've to put money in her hand so she'll tell you what lies ahead.” He wore a cap so battered that it couldn't possibly exist without his skull.
Robert took a ten-shilling note from his pocket and held out the palm of his hand.
“No,” said the man. “It has to be a silver coin, but she'll take that too.”
Before Robert could grope in his pocket for change, the man plucked the note from his fingers and handed it to the woman. She handed it straight back to Robert.
“Wha’?” asked the man, looking injured.
“Taking money from a priest,” the woman said. “D'you want forty years of bad luck? Sorry, Father.”
The man swept off his cap; how could he ever reassemble it to put it back on again?
“Sorry, Father, pray for us.”
Husband, wife, and children dropped to their knees in front of Robert.
“Bless us now, Father,” said the man. “Bless Jerry Connors and his wife and childer.”
They all closed their eyes. For a moment Robert— the struggling side of Robert— didn't know what to do. Then the instinctive side took over and he laid his hands on the woman's head.
“If ever a woman deserved a blessing,” he said, “it is you.” He said the same to her husband—”If ever a man deserved a blessing … “ and to her son—”If ever a strong boy …,” and to her small daughter—”If ever a lovely girl … “
For a long moment nothing moved in that woodland clearing. For a long moment in the summer of 1922, an injured young American hero, trying to heal himself, offered others his own version of healing, and with bowed heads they knelt before him as though he were God. For a long moment, somewhere in the middle of Ireland, old and new religions met and were at ease with each other. Then the horse let out a wild snuffling hurrup! and rattled the harness, and such spells as had been cast went quietly to work and the world revolved again.
The Connors family told Robert their story. They had been traveling as long as they could remember. Jerry had been born on the road, “In that van there, Father.” His wife, Mary, “a Sheridan myself, Father,” had been born in Ballinasloe Hospital, but only because her mother had a fever.
Every day the children begged for a living. Jerry bought and sold “ponies, donkeys, mules, horses” and fixed pots.
“We don't like being called tinkers, Father, we're tinsmiths,” Jerry said. He showed a saucepan on which he had fixed the handle; Robert could find no trace of a repair. Mary Connors sold lucky charms to people; she made some of them. “From the branches, Father. Hawthorn is lucky. And if I find something, I'll hold on to it till I meet the person ‘tis for.”
Being under a roof of any kind except the caravan made them uncomfortable. Jerry made a speech. “Nobody could live without the sky over them, could they, Father? You can't see anythin’ from under a roof. We see everythin’, going along the road. We can see
the sun, and we can see the stars in the night, and we can see the fields where we stop up for a while, like this wood here. I'm coming to this wood now with years, since I was a child.”
Robert wondered whether people behaved kindly to them.
“They do and they don't, Father,” said Mary Connors. “They say we steal. But what harm is taking bread off a windowsill if ‘tis out to cool; can't the woman bake another one?”
Neither could read or write, nor had their children been schooled.
“They're able to count, Father, isn't that all they need? C'mere, Patsy.” The boy came forward. “Count for Father.”
The boy rattled off one to ten and then went to twenty, forty, up to a hundred, then counted, “A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty.”
His father asked, “What's two times twenty?”
Patsy said, “Forty.”
And his father said, “Take off the luck penny,” to which the boy replied, “Thirty-six,” showing Robert that Patsy had been taught transaction arithmetic— to include the buyer's discount when selling ponies.
Robert said goodbye to the Connors family. From the pathway he could see a dinghy out on the lake, its little sail like a triangle of light. The boat kept pace with him for ten minutes or so, then it turned and began to tack back to Athlone.
The Connors wood smoke followed his nostrils for hundreds of yards. Presently a different and even more exciting aroma replaced it: tobacco. A face descended from the sky and hung like a medallion up ahead of him: his grandfather, a silent man who'd smiled every time he'd looked at the little boy.
Robert began to sing, something he hadn't done since France. If asked, he couldn't have given the song's name, but he stumbled through some of the words: “It's the land of the shillelagh/And my heart goes back there daily.” Behind him came a swishing noise, and a voice said, “Welcome to Athlone.”
He turned to look as a man dismounted from a bicycle and took a huge pipe from his mouth.
“Were they telling you all about him?” The man stuck out a hand. “Francis Carberry from up the road. Talking in riddles; is that what you're thinking?”
Robert smiled. “I guess so.”
“The song you were singing,” said Francis Carberry. “Didn't you hear the boasting?”
Robert held out his hands like a baffled man.
Francis Carberry said, “John McCormack? Right? Athlone never shuts up about him.”
Robert laughed. “Of course.”
He introduced himself, and Francis Carberry laughed out loud.
“Well, that settles the mixture,” he said. “You being called Shannon. Do you know anything about the name, eh?”
“Almost nothing. But I want to find out.”
To which Francis Carberry replied, “Well, you had the bad luck to meet a teacher, eh?”
Robert's grandfather had had a pipe like Francis Carberry's; as a child Robert called it “a pipe with a hill.” A broad silver band connected the plunging curve to the stem, and that morning its wonderful blue clouds rose on the air.
Francis Carberry lived alone. For the next three days Robert stayed in his house and enjoyed the company of an expansive and well-read— and deeply grieving— man. Almost every room of his impeccable if modest house had bookshelves floor to ceiling. A teacher, now on a long summer vacation, he spoke nonstop, like a man who had been desperate for company. His conversation, much of it in monologue form, never proved invasive. If he stopped to ask a question, he proved sensitive and alert.
Within moments of their meeting, as people do, he told Robert his own story— or at least the part of it that occupied his every waking thought.
“I was born not far from here. I live in the house provided by the school. We get ten days off at Easter, six weeks in the summer, and two weeks at Christmas. Mine is a two-teacher school, I met my wife when she came to work here. She's not with me now.”
Robert, neither uncomfortable nor shy, walked at the fast pace of the man beside him. As he waited for an explanation he relished the tobacco smoke and the sun on the waters of the lake.
“We married in our Christmas holidays in nineteen sixteen,” Francis Carberry said, “the twenty-eighth of December. It was a Thursday. The marriage was a kind of bargain. She wanted to give some service in the war in France, I didn't want her to, but I gave in and she agreed to get married if she could then go off and drive an ambulance. The weather turned very bad and I persuaded her to wait until summer. I was hoping the war would end, but when school closed for the summer, off she went.”
He stopped to relight his pipe and perhaps to keep control of his emotions.
“I went with her to the North Wall—that's the port of Dublin—and I waved her off. She went to Ypres— the soldiers called it Wipers because they couldn't pronounce it— and she was killed the third day after she got there. A bomb hit her ambulance. I had a letter from her after she died—she wrote it on the boat—and you never read a more joyful piece of writing: thanking me for being so understanding and all about the life we'd have when she got back. That letter has seen me through many a dark day.”
Robert stood still, forcing Francis Carberry to stop too. But Robert said nothing; he simply rested his hand on the other man's shoulder. After a moment they walked on.
They reached Francis Carberry's house, and he said, “I assume you're not in a hurry, eh? I mean, can you stay?”
He cooked excellent food: steak, boiled parsnips, the unavoidable potatoes. And at dinner he read to Robert, “A local writer, one of our most famous. I'll take you through his countryside tomorrow: Oliver Goldsmith.”
Tomorrow it rained, however, too heavily to leave the house, so Francis Carberry, having served a breakfast of smoked fish with eggs and freshly baked brown soda bread— to whose early aroma Robert awoke at eight o'clock— began to trace the name Shannon.
He started with a warning. “Bear in mind that I, Francis, a humble schoolteacher, have no genealogical training. What I have is a passion for language, and all ancestry is traced though language. What else do we have but the words in our mouths and the thoughts in our heads, eh?”
Of an actual Shannon family he had no knowledge, but he had two major suggestions as to the roots of the name.
“I don't believe that the river is the only possible origin. Here are two others.” He hauled down books from left, right, and center in his house. “There's a good Irish word called seanchas”—he pronounced it shannacuss—“and it means legend or lore or story, and the man who tells it is a seanchai”—he repeated the word slowly— “Shanna-kee. I think that such a storied river could have got its name that way. Or maybe there was once a famous storyteller whose name got changed from Shanna-kee to Shannon; that's possible.”
Robert beamed in delight.
“And here's another thing.” Francis dragged down a book of ancient maps and pointed to the mouth of the river. “You say you came in here. Did a pilot come on board?”
Robert nodded. “I believe so.”
“And did the pilot get off on an island before you got to Tarbert?”
Robert nodded again.
“Well, I'd guess the pilot lives on that island. ‘Tis called Scattery and it's the far side of the estuary from where you stayed. Scattery Island is famous for the monastery of Saint Senan. A cranky man, but holy by all accounts. There's an old theory that the river took its name from Senan; he was there around the year five hundred Anno Domini. You should make sure to track him down on the way back. Senan: Shannon. You can hear the connection, can't you?”
Robert almost yelled in glee. He heard a ching! as the links in the chain joined up.
He said, “Senan was the saint whom Kieran of Clonmacnoise visited.”
“My goodness, you're well informed,” said Francis Carberry
The rain teemed down. No place so far, not even the gentle O'Sullivan home or the opulence of Sheila Neary's town house, had felt as comfortable. On the second night Robert offered hi
s Sevovicz letter to Francis, who read it and then shook Robert's hand as though meeting him for the first time.
“Were you afraid in the war?” he asked.
Robert said, his voice close to a murmur, “I— I don't know.”
Francis Carberry said, “My hunch is that we don't know the half of what we do. And we spend the rest of our lives getting over what we've done.”
Over dinner of vegetable soup, followed by pork chops in apple sauce, he regaled Robert with the life of Oliver Goldsmith, the writer from nearby “whose very name,” he said, “brings a smile to so many lips.”
Robert had never heard of Goldsmith.
“He wrote one famous novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, and one famous play, She Stoops to Conquer. The third famous piece is a long poem, The Deserted Village.” Francis began to quote:
“How often have I paused on every charm, The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm, The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topped the neighboring hill, The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade. “
For a moment his eyes almost misted.
“You're right beside it here, the village of Auburn. ‘Twas a real place. And there was a local story of a man who stopped at a private house, went in and asked for a bed for the night, and proceeded to order food and drink; he thought he was at an inn. That's the plot of She Stoops to Conquer”
Robert sat as though mesmerized, his chin resting on his folded hands as he listened to this natural-born teacher delivering, in essence, a lesson in Irish literature and speaking as though he would never have anything so important to do again.
“What intrigues me about Goldsmith is how such an awkward man came to be so loved. Nobody would marry him. He looked like a monkey, big bald head and a shambling crouch of a walk. The children used to throw stones at him because he was such a figure of fun. But everybody who knew him loved him.”
Francis Carberry broke off. “Am I very peculiar? I mean, here you are in this stranger's house, a man who cooks his own meals— there aren't two men in the county who do that. And a man who talks at you without stopping.”