Ellie said, “There's no need to write any more if you don't want to.”
She wanted to ask him, How has it left you feeling? What has it done to your emotions? But she found that he answered the question without being asked.
“I thought I would be drained,” he said. “And in a way I am. But I have also been filled by it.”
When admitting a patient for the first time, if no doctor were present, she had been taught to ask, What do you think this pain is? She believed that, as did many of her contemporaries in medicine: The patient always knows.
Now she asked, “What do you think caused the damage to you in France?”
He said nothing for three, maybe four minutes. By now she had learned to wait, sitting out the lurch of fear that she might have asked a question too far. When eventually he did reply, he said, “I know what caused the first damage.”
“The first?” She knew nothing as yet of his relapse.
“Belleau.”
Carefully she asked, “Does anything stand out above anything else?”
He wanted to talk; he became energized, if a little disjointed, in his speech.
“It was the moment when I began to understand that I could never in my life again see something I couldn't immediately identify— and— and not start to believe it was a human body. You know what I mean? If I walked down that road out there tomorrow, and I saw what looked like a small pile of garbage, I would ask myself, Is it a corpse?”
He sat up, his face screwing into different expressions as though he mustered force to find the right words and then push them out.
“Now, think of it. I'm ordained as a priest to revere life. I'm ordained to believe that each and every one of us is a miracle of creation. Then— to find this creation has been reduced to garbage? To find that a wonderful, strong, handsome boy has been reduced to a pile of flapping offal? And to get up on my knees and look across a field of wheat and see hundreds of these heaps—”
He stopped and took her hand as an adult would take a child's hand.
“The moment of destruction, the point at which my soul left my body— and I do believe it did— came when I returned to our lines one day and saw you.”
“Me?” She almost started back from him but disciplined herself; she did not wish to disturb him now with an excess of response. “What did I have to do with it?”
“I was helping a boy who was wounded. You saw me, didn't you? You saw me at the same time?”
“Yes,” she said. “You helped get him to where we were. In the tents. You were always doing that.”
“Did I seem normal, Ellie?”
“Yes. Like always.”
“And then what happened?”
“You went— well, you went wild. We had to hold you down. Do you remember that?”
He said, “Vaguely. I think I remember it.”
“Yes,” she said, “and then you started running around, almost in a circle.”
“Did I say anything?”
“No. A kind of senseless yelling, that was all. Do you remember that?”
He said, “You were the last thing I remember. I saw you when I came into the tent with the wounded boy. You know that all the officers thought you lovely. When I came in, I looked across and saw you— in dreadful surroundings, pressed and clean in your uniform, busy and composed and organized, the picture of what a woman should look like. I reckon the contrast with what I had just come from— it must have been too much for me. I had come from seeing Death to seeing Life. That's what I remember thinking. Probably the last thought I had.”
“Robert, I haven't the words for this. I'm only a nurse.”
“Do you feel that what I'm saying— do you think it's truthful?” he said.
“I was there. That's what I know is truthful. I'm not talking about the facts of the battle, the day, the guns, the transports, all that. I'm talking about— I don't know. I suppose the being there, just— the being there.”
“Why should any human being ever have had to go through that?” he said. “I don't want to be trite— but what kind of God could allow that? They were boys, Ellie. They were boys. Yes: keen, fierce, trained. But you saw them. With their bad jokes. Flirting with you. Or awkward. Shy. All that pride. You saw them: boys.”
At the little stone jetty where Captain Aaronson had put Robert ashore in Ireland, two men on bicycles looked at the same green weeds that Robert had seen. One was dressed exquisitely for a country day: tweed knickerbockers, striped tie, Norfolk jacket. Big and hefty, he had hands that had once ripped the jaw off a grown man. The other was a small, nippy little crook and looked it.
No old black freighter appeared on the river that morning, nothing but cormorants and wheeling gulls. The two bicyclists turned away and, as Robert had done, ascended the slope into the village of Tarbert.
In a village shop they were told that, yes, other Americans often came through looking for their family roots, and indeed a Yank had been staying around here, but he was gone. Willingly the woman in the shop identified the house where, she was certain, he had stayed for two or three weeks.
The big man and his squirty sidekick rode their bicycles along the same little road that Robert had taken from the village. Past the same big beech tree they went, and at the gate to the small house they dismounted. The big man smiled to himself; he enjoyed the art of persuasion— or in his hands was it a science?
Shep, the mutt, the mongrel, saw the pair clamber down from their bicycles, but he didn't dash out. The big man held up a hand directing Squirt to stay out on the road. Shep kept back, pacing anxiously; a growl would have formed in his throat had he not been such a show-off sissy of a dog.
Through her window, Molly O'Sullivan had seen the two men but hadn't allowed them to see her. At the second knock she trembled at the force with which the door shook— and at the third she emerged. Mr. Vincent stepped right into her kitchen, uninvited. He took off his cap, as a gentleman should. For this particular inquiry he had decided on a change of strategy. He would abandon the general “roots” line and home in tighter.
“Pardon me, ma'am, I've come from Boston in the United States, and I'm trying to find my poor cousin. He may have been through here some weeks ago.”
“Now what was his name, sir?” said Molly.
“Robert Shannon.”
“And what would he be doing here?”
“He hasn't been well, ma'am. His mind was injured in the war in Europe. I was there too, and I know how he suffered.”
“Oh.”
“I'm afraid, ma'am, that some foolish people thought a journey alone would be good for him. Did you by any chance see him?”
Molly said, “Would that be about the middle week in June?”
Mr. Vincent, eager and charming, said, “Yes, ma'am.”
Molly, with a thoughtful face, said, “I saw a youngish man, definitely a Yank, walking the road one day here.”
“Do you happen to know where he went?”
Molly pointed out the direction that Robert had eventually taken.
Mr. Vincent raised his cap again, such a gentleman, and said, “Thank you, ma'am.”
He stepped out of the house.
Memories attacked him— of a similar long narrow house that had only had a few rooms and didn't even have a stone floor. The old voices began to scream through the caves of his mind; when younger he had actually put his hands over his ears to shut them out. Behind him, Molly began to close the door, having ensured that Shep had come in.
But Mr. Vincent turned— no, he swiveled— and walked back to the door. He opened it rudely and strode in, slamming the door behind him. Molly pressed herself back against the picture of Joseph Sarto, Pope Pius X, good friend to Cardinal O'Connell— and Mr. Vincent, not raising his cap, said, “Ma'am?”
This time, he didn't have to explain himself. He reached out a huge hand and held it inches from her chin. The fingers curled in imitation of a strangler's grip and she knew he could have lifted her off the ground
. But he didn't touch her. No assault took place.
Molly, stricken with fear, said, “Go and ask my husband. He talked to him.” She thumbed east. “He's out there behind the house with my brothers. Joe!” she called.
Mr. Vincent, not wishing to engage at this stage with a group of men, left the house with swift grace. Molly, beautiful Molly with her high cheekbones, all but collapsed. When she looked out and saw that the two cyclists had traveled on, she ran through the back door and hurried a mile across the fields to the farm where Joe was working.
Mr. Vincent and Squirt rode away fast. Next they reached the iced-cake castle where, on summer days, Miranda lay in wait for passing strangers. When she heard approaching travelers, she would peer through a screen of trees and assess the oncomer. Then she would pounce— or not. Lately she had begun to fret regarding the unstoppability of motorcars and motorcycles; this morning the voices of the two cyclists alerted her.
Miranda went to her lookout post, narrowed her eyes, and stared. One of the men seemed a small dirty creature. The other frightened her. Miranda watched as they drew closer; they had travel bags tied to their bicycles.
She hid deep in the screen of trees and hoped they wouldn't come into the castle— but they stopped at the gate.
Miranda closed her eyes, as if the act of not seeing them could remove them.
The men stood for some time, saying nothing, leaning on their bicycles. She dared not look. Then one of the two grunted, and in a moment she heard the slight clank of metal and the swish of wheels as they rode away.
Those passionate words that Robert spoke about the battlefield amounted to his longest speech in three years. Not since his days in the chancery when he worked for His Eminence had he come out with so many words and feelings. He said little more, and Ellie looked for nothing further.
They sat in the garden for some hours. Now and then she rose, wandered over to the gravel path or the lawn, and tugged out a weed. Or he stretched and threw the ball to the dog— who was too hot and lazy to chase it. At about four o'clock she began to clear the remainder of the dishes. As she was training him to do, Robert began to help with the clearing and washing-up and the tidying of the kitchen.
After some time he took her hand again and held it— this time as a trusting child might, and not a parent or a lover. Then he patted it, left the kitchen abruptly, climbed the stairs, and went into his room.
She stood in the hallway and listened. Sometimes at night Robert snored a little or muttered in his sleep. This afternoon the house was as quiet as a vault.
With a very clear view of the possible risks involved, Ellie went upstairs and pushed open his unclosed door. Fast asleep in the shadows, he lay as he always did: on his side, out on the edge, leaving most of the bed wide empty, like a man who might need to escape. Fully dressed, Ellie climbed into the empty space behind him and lay down, facing his back. He wore a blue sport shirt of her father's and a pair of navy slacks; he was barefoot.
She thought about putting her arms around him, but did not quite see where she could reach. Instead, she rested her face softer than thistledown against his back, between his shoulder blades. He never moved; he continued to sleep. And she stayed there.
In time, she too dozed a little; he seemed in an especially deep sleep. She woke, he hadn't moved, so she lay still, her face feeling the rise and fall of his breathing and the fabric of his shirt, slightly damp now. If she listened hard she could hear the river's current in the fields outside.
The room grew bright again as the sun moved around the sky on its way into the west. She knew Robert was about to wake up; she felt his breathing change— and she did her best not to tense herself; she had a profound, desperate wish to seem as natural as possible.
But she didn't know whether this step she had taken might cause him an emotional regress of some kind. All she could do was hope that he would see this as she viewed it, a natural development.
Robert opened his eyes; she almost believed that she heard his eyelids flutter. Then she felt his body tighten when he realized that she lay beside him, her face near his shoulders. She reached around and put a hand on his bare forearm.
“You slept well.”
Robert said nothing. He caught her hand and without a change of breath pressed it to his heart.
They lay like that for at least half an hour. If she twitched, he pressed the hand tighter; her circulation on that arm and wrist went from numb to fire to numb several times. Eventually she spoke.
“You must be hungry.”
“Such peace,” he said.
She pressed her face against his back one more time, did not— against all temptation— make her lips form a kiss, and slowly drew her arm away.
“Come down when you feel ready,” she said.
They ate dinner out of doors, in silence. He seemed exhausted, his afternoon's sleep notwithstanding. Before dinner ended, he rose and went indoors. He had done this before and once or twice had reappeared. Not so tonight. This is a man who's fighting so hard. How can I help? What in God's name can I do?
When Ellie went to bed an hour or more later, she knew from the atmosphere on the landing outside his door that he had fallen asleep. She herself had no such luck. Tossing and turning, wrecking the bed again, writhing and then scolding herself, she achieved nothing but an imperfect night's sleep.
They arrested Mr. Vincent and Squirt in Limerick— two men traveling together, suspicious. In fact, they were arrested twice— first by the Irregulars and then by Collins's army. Both sides let them go, but not without some drinks and good chat that lasted many hours. The big American had that kind of personality, and each time he agreed strongly with their aims— whether with the guerrillas and their bandoliers or the army in their stiff new uniforms; he had, after all, been a soldier himself.
Limerick posed other problems for him. Where would a traveler— on foot and tired from walking such as the man he pursued— seek lodgings? And for how long? Whom would he seek? Obviously he would look for anybody with the name Shannon, to see whether they might be related.
Cruise's Hotel had no recollection of any such recent traveler— in fact, almost nobody had come to stay. “This blasted civil war. Thank God it's dying down, sir,” said the desk clerk. Trying to help with the name Shannon, he sent him to the butcher.
“Yeh?” said the Chopper, glancing through the window at the little fellow holding the bicycles outside. As he told his bookkeeper, Nancy, afterward, “I'd trust neither of them as far as I'd throw them.”
“Could you be my mother's cousin, Mr. Shannon?” asked Mr. Vincent, using his line of ancestral inquiry. “What terrific meat you have.”
“Yeh. What d'you want me to cut for you?”
Mr. Vincent laughed— and watched keenly as the Chopper played Excalibur with his boning knife on the butcher's block.
“I guess you get a lot of Americans through here looking for their ancestors.”
“Arrah, why would they come into a butcher's?”
“But if their names were the same as yours, sir?”
“Well, that's not my own name, like. My father took that name from the man who left him this place.”
Chok! pull, chok! pull, went the Chopper with his boning knife, whose blade had been worn to a long curved sliver by years of whetting, a blade that was now as sharp as any blade in the world at that time— as Mr. Vincent well knew when he looked at it; he understood knives.
Nancy put her head out of her bookkeeping coop and said, “Isn't it an odd thing that there's no Shannons living here near the Shannon?”
The Chopper said, “There's only me and the river. And ‘tisn't even my name, like.” He caressed the boning knife and stuck it back in.
It takes a killer to know a killer. Mr. Vincent raised his cap and said, “Thank you all. I wished I lived here— if only for the meat.”
It rained on the two men as they rode their bicycles out of Limerick City. It rained and it rained. Squirt said he was for turning
back (he had much enjoyed the comforts of Cruise's Hotel); Mr. Vincent didn't answer. They stopped under a tree but then rode down a short lane into a farm, where they stood in the barn and waited for the rain to pass.
The farmer appeared and invited them into the house for a cup of tea. Mr. Vincent accepted. Squirt declined (as he said later, farmers frightened him). Mr. Vincent sat by the fire and yarned with the farmer and his wife.
Skilled questioning elicited no trace of any wandering American passing through the place in the previous few weeks, but they gave him good advice. “There's a man in Castleconnell, he'd trace your family back to Adam and Eve for you.”
Michael Tierney Michael the Lion, welcomed the big man with more cordiality than a master of ceremonies. He showed off his proud ledger, and he talked of his great successes. However, he erred when he said, “Yes, there was another fella came through here a few weeks ago.”
Mr. Vincent, sitting down in the same chair that Robert had occupied, said, “Did he say where he was going?”
In answer, Michael the Lion made his fateful stumble. “Now, I don't know. I couldn't rightly say, I mean.”
There spiked the snag, a linguistic misunderstanding—”I couldn't rightly say.” Michael the Lion meant, in his colloquial way, I don't actually know, and it wouldn't be right of me to say and thereby possibly mislead you. But instead, Mr. Vincent believed that he had heard, It would not be right for me to tell you, because the man to whom you refer came here on private business and I do not wish to discuss my visitors.
Mr. Vincent drew his chair invasively close to Michael the Lion, who reached for the glass of whiskey on the floor beside him but knocked it over.
“Sir,” said Michael, and began to breathe a little heavily.
“Listen, you old fool,” said Mr. Vincent, “and look into my eyes as you listen. I can reach forward right now and hook my fingers into your mouth. I may dislodge some teeth as I do so; it happens with the force. But your jawbone will certainly break.”