“But if you're born by that river, that's a different case entirely. You don't just look at the river, you feel the river. I can tell when I wake up in the morning, before I look out the window— I can tell what mood the river is in. My bones know it. And my very veins know it.
“If my body is ninety percent water, eighty-nine percent of that ninety percent is the Shannon. And therefore I'm delighted to meet a man who is named after that river. I never before met a man with the name of Shannon— but I can tell you now, it's going to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.
“So I understand very clearly why you want to know the origin of your name and the name of our great river. The origin of your name I can stab a guess: that your family was thrown off their land in the Plantations that went on from the late fifteen hundreds to the year eighteen hundred and after.
“And that your family took to the roads and that they found a pleasant spot of commonage somewhere along the banks of the river, a place they wouldn't be thrown off of, because nobody wanted land that poor. But it was a strong enough place for them to build a mud cabin and get in out of the wind and the rain. And you'll probably never find that mud cabin, because it had no foundation. There won't even be a mark on the ground.
“So, Father Shannon, you're following the journeys of your ancestors in a deeper way than you know, because they too wandered along the banks of the river. And where they came to rest and built their mud cabin, the local people didn't know them and so they called them ‘the Shannons’—that is to say, the people, those strangers, who're living over by the river.
“At least that's how I'd guess it happened. And I'd say I'm not far wrong. As to the origins of the river's own name and how she came to be called Shannon? Ah, that's a thing of magic that comes from the past, from back in the days when you'd look up to the hills and you'd see a god looking down at you and you'd hope he'd be smiling. And now I'll tell you the story of how the Shannon got her name.
“All over Ireland, where a river forms a quiet pool or a little oxbow pond, there you'll find growing a stand of hazel trees. The countryside around here is alive with hazel trees, and in September the children go out with bags and baskets and gather thousands of the nuts.
“The hazelnut has a hard shell, but when you crack it open it has a kernel that gave rise to the saying As sweet as a nut— because it has a perfect little body and tastes delightful, especially if you flick a little tang of salt onto it.
“Now over there in the chalky flinty mountains where the Shannon rises, there grew nine hazel trees, by the pool of the Shannon's fount, the Shannon Pot. This was called Connla's Well in ancient times, after the man who owned the land where flowed the pool.
“By the way, this pool was so famous that to this very day you'll find people arguing over where it was. ‘Twas known too as the Pool of Knowledge, and there's people so keen to lay claim to this place and its nine hazels that they'll say it was on their own land, be that farm a hundred miles and more from here. The people of Ormond down in Munster, they're very keen to insist that it was their well on their territory. Not at all. This is where it is, up in them stony hills, and this is where it always was, ever since a god put his finger down on the ground and made a hole for water to come up.
“Ancient Ireland was governed by gods; there was whole families of them. One of our most famous gods was Lir, or Lear, on whom it is said William Shakespeare the Englishman modeled his crazy old fellow. But our man was a different fellow altogether.
“Now he had a son called Mannanan MacLir, and this son was a god in his own right. He lived in the middle of the Irish Sea, on the island we call to this day the Isle of Man, after Mannanan the son of Lir. Sometimes he lived above the waves on the land, sometimes he lived in the kingdom under the sea. He had three legs, a curious physical property, which enabled him to leap across the mountains like a goat or swim through the waves like a magic sea creature.
“Now Mannanan MacLir had a beautiful granddaughter called Sionnan. It can be pronounced See-o-nan or Shunnan, and she was a very clever girl. Sitting beside her grandfather's throne one day, she heard him tell some visitors all about the Pool of Knowledge. He described for them how the water that bubbled out of the ground was as good as a medicine for all ills.
“And he told of how the water changed color into a healing purple when the hazelnuts from the nine trees overhanging the pool fell into the water as they ripened in September. Then he told them of the faculties of the Nine Hazels; these were the most important trees in his world.
“One was the Hazel of Science, one was the Hazel of Philosophy, one was the Hazel of Color, one was the Hazel of Poetry, one was the Hazel of Dancing, one was the Hazel of Carving, and so on; these trees were known as the Many-Melodied Hazels of Knowledge. And he told his listeners that when the nuts from these trees fell into the pool, the salmon swimming there took them, cracked them in their teeth, and ate them, thus acquiring all the knowledge in the world.
“This, as you can imagine, made the pool a place that every druid in Ireland wanted to visit. They all went there, secretly or on pilgrimages, but none of them ever caught a salmon, and therefore none of them ever imbibed all the knowledge of the world. Only one man ever did— that was much later— and he was the great warrior god Finn MacCool. But that's a story for another time and another day.
“Well, the princess Sionnan's ears flapped when she heard this tale, and without saying a word to anybody she decided that she would be the one to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. When the palace was asleep, she went up onto the battlements and gathered her cloak around her.
“The cloak was a present from her grandfather for her twenty-first birthday, and it had a magic property. When she gathered it around her, it made her capable of flying; all she had to do was nod in the direction she wanted to go and she flew there, high above the trees. The tightness of the cloak kept her warm.
“As dawn broke she landed gently and safely on the little slope that you've seen below the Pot, where the river bubbles up from beneath the ground. She waited for a little while for the sun to rise fully over the mountain, and when she had enough light she went forward to the pool and knelt down.
“At first she saw her own reflection in the waters. And then, when she looked closer and a helpful sunbeam lit the pool, she saw a wonderful salmon. He was as silver as a ring and as pink as a baby and he looked so intelligent that she knew he must be the Salmon of Knowledge. (In truth, she didn't need to catch that one fish; any salmon from that pool— if caught, cooked, and eaten— would have delivered the same load of learning.)
“Sionnan kept very still. She watched and she waited and she waited and she watched. Now what she didn't know was that women were expressly forbidden even to look at the Nine Hazels— Nurse Kennedy loves this part of the story, don't you, Nurse? And here was she, a young woman, looking up at these wonderful trees and their abundant branches, and about to feast, she believed, on Art and Music and Science and Thought and Dancing, especially Dancing, and all the other wonders of which she had ever dreamed.
“Keeping very cool, she lowered her hands into the water. The beautiful salmon saw the lovely hands and swam toward their enticement. But the minute the salmon touched the girl's hands a mighty rush of sound was heard. A wave, big as an ocean's billow, rose up in that little pool and sucked the lovely princess right off the bank and into the water. The pool boiled like a kettle, took her down three times, and drowned the girl.
“And then what happened? A hundred yards along from the pool, the Pot expelled her and she came out of the ground with the water and flowed down the stream, her body in its white gown, rigid and straight on the surface. Down the stream she flowed, jostled a little here and there, until the stream connected to the wider stream farther down, the stream called the Owenmore, which means big river, and from there into Lake Allen.
“But Lough Allen didn't want this renegade princess, and the stream had to leave that lake and flow on down. An
d on down it flowed, on down and down, through all the other lakes: Ree, the lake of kings, and Derg, the red lake. None of them would keep the dead Princess Sionnan in her long white gown— until eventually all the streams and tributaries took pity on her and decided to take her body back to the sea that was governed by her grandfather.
“And so they took the Princess Sionnan down the length of Ireland and out into the ocean, where her bereft grandfather, Mannanan MacLir, the great god with the three legs, met the corpse and took it with him down to his palace on the seabed, where he mourned her for three hundred days and three hundred nights.
“Then he gave the grand order that the stream now flowing down through Ireland— the stream that the waters themselves formed to carry the dead Princess Sionnan— that it now had the status of a river and must henceforth be known as the river of Sionnan. And that's how the Shannon got its name.
“Now I've heard tell of different origins for the name. I've been told that the word Shannon comes from a cranky old monk called Senan who lived down in the river estuary and didn't like women.
“And I've been told too that the word Shannon is made up of two words— sean or shan, meaning old, and abhann or owann, meaning river—but that's such a dull idea you'd have to ask what good it is to anyone.”
When they left Dominic's house, Robert seemed animated, much more like the man Ellie had known in France. He made no reference to the picnic or what had taken place between them. On his return, he helped swiftly and coordinatedly with preparations for an evening meal. He dropped nothing on the floor. And he did not, this evening, crash into the furniture.
But Ellie had difficulty with her own control. She felt knocked off balance, not as much by the actions between them as by the unspoken questions— and their possible answers. Over and over she had asked herself, These are the key questions. Is he, does he consider himself, still a priest? Is this turning into something?
She had watched Robert's every move, had observed him more closely than anybody had ever done, and her report would have fascinated Dr. Greenberg. In the first days after Robert's arrival, she would have described his progress as two steps forward, two steps back. For every hour he spent in “normal” mode, he spent an equal hour in a fazed state. By that she meant that she found him out of tune with himself and the world, much too prone to falling heavily asleep.
Deliberately, if by instinct, she had fed Robert copiously. After a meal he enjoyed, she thought him more loquacious and less frayed. Seeing such a result, she planned three meals and three snacks a day. When he kept to her schedule of the day, he ate breakfast, a midmorning snack, lunch, a midafternoon snack, an evening meal, and a bedtime sandwich. Sometimes he missed breakfast, sometimes he missed dinner. After a week or two she woke him from any sleeps that would have obliterated a mealtime.
He gained no weight; he had a greyhound's frame. Nonetheless, she walked him for exercise every day, wet or fine. And always by the river; the water, she saw, calmed him and stimulated his curiosity.
At no time in those weeks did Robert show any amorous interest. Although his shyness fell away within hours of his arrival, she attributed that to the powerful shared experience of the war. Thereafter, in normal moods, he moved through the house like an absentminded husband; when she reflected upon it, she marveled at the immediate and complete ease between them.
Now she wanted the relationship to develop but had no idea how it could. Priests, she had always known, constituted the most forbidden fruit of all, more off-limits even than cousins or other women's husbands. Yet here in her home dwelt this man who had touched her spirit from the first moment she saw him— in very different circumstances. And now he lived with her as though that was intended, sharing everything except her bed. What's to be done? Is he priest first and man second? Or the other way around?
By instinct she had told nobody of the company in her house. Nobody ever came to the front door. Callers would assume she was away, that she had taken a vacation from the hospital— although she did take in the delivered milk can every morning. Sometimes she slipped out to do some essential shopping while Robert slept, but she always left a note on the kitchen table saying where she had gone and specifying her expected time of return; otherwise her garden gate, the access to the rear of the house, already secluded, now remained firmly locked. But by raising the level of privacy, she had intensified the sense of intimacy.
On the way home from the picnic, these feelings— of comfort, passion, and inquiry— melded in her, increasing until she felt ready to burst.
In this— self-generated— passion she had to know something, and she had to find a release, no matter how temporary, from the pressure.
They spoke little that night. Climbing the stairs a step behind Robert, Ellie said to herself that what was to come next would be ordained by powers she knew nothing about, and she would be carried where those powers took her.
On the landing, his door stood nearest and he opened it wide and walked in. She hesitated for a second and walked on to her own room, where she opened her door wide and left it open as he had done. This is getting comical.
Inside, she put her lighted candle on her night table and walked to her long mirror. Have I changed in any way? Oh, don't be ridiculous.
She stood there listening, trying to identify Robert's actions from his movements. In a few moments the dancing shadow thrown on the landing wall by his candle disappeared and she heard the click of his door as it shut. Returning to the life she had lived here when alone, she undressed completely before drawing on her nightdress, climbed into bed, blew out the candle, and— to her own surprise next morning— slept all night.
The next day turned unusually warm— hot, even. From time to time, great black thunderclouds came down the track of the river and they heard distant rumbles. No rain or lightning came. The sun shone un-blinkingly down.
They ate lunch indoors to stay cool. Ellie had made egg salad, roasted some chicken thighs, baked some hot soda bread, and had found some more strawberries in the garden. She poured rich cream into a yellow pitcher. When Robert came down to her call— she had not seen him since breakfast— she asked, “How are you?”
He said, “Just fine,” and sat down.
She filled his plate; she filled his glass with milk; she helped herself. Usually they talked all the time— or at least all the time that Robert felt capable of talking. If he didn't, she often chattered on, telling him tales from the hospital or of her parents’ lives or local neighbors; she had an inexhaustible and amusing fund of local comment.
Today she said nothing— and he likewise said not a word. They finished eating; both sat in their chairs, scarcely moving. By now the silence had grown so obvious it needed to be broken. And still neither person spoke. The dog slept on an armchair. Not a sound could be heard.
A sudden breeze slammed a door and Ellie rose to check. In the hallway, she understood the reason for Robert's withdrawal; a sheaf of pages sat on the hall table with, on top, a page with the single word FINISHED.
She picked them up and felt their weight. She stroked them but didn't attempt to scan their content. She put them down again and moved objects on the table to make room. She deployed an ivory ornament as a paperweight. She rearranged a framed photograph of her parents to stand near the papers, lending them authority, watching over them.
When she walked away and looked back, the manuscript's presence dominated the hall. Thin and orderly, the document looked as though it might be a short family history or a paper of academic thought. Ellie tapped the pages one more time for luck— and when she returned to the kitchen where Robert sat, she had the means of breaking the silence.
“You've written more than I thought. Have you read it all?”
Robert said, “No.”
“If you wish, I'll sit with you.”
Her attitude offered him no choice. They went into the hall and fetched the sheaf of papers, and she led the way to the most comfortable chairs in the house, in th
e drawing room, and handed the papers to Robert. Ashen-faced, he began to read his own account of one of warfare's most famous battles, written within, as he admitted later, his own narrow focus. After the second page he raised his head and asked, “Would you— read it at the same time?”
She took the two pages that he handed to her and began to read.
After crossing the ocean, we sat for many days in our uniforms in an anonymous building on the outskirts of a town, waiting for our orders and our transport. The men had nothing to do except smoke cigarettes or play cards, or hunt for the next cup of coffee. Other than at a ball game, I had never seen so many men in one place, except that these fellows became very bored. One or two soldiers talked to me a little, said their wives were frightened, and we wrote letters to their families.
The senior officers seemed exceptionally civil and, although they didn't have to, they included me in all their discussions and briefings. They reckoned— as they told me— that a man who can keep the secrets of the Confessional isn't a blabbermouth.
At last, on the first day of June, we were told that we were likely to “travel soon but not far. “ A “big opportunity” awaited no more than an hour or two away; they showed me the map. They said some troops had already been there for more than ten days, and others were drifting in.
No casualty reports had yet come through, because no real fighting had yet taken place. Both armies were no more than digging trenches and making shapes as yet, and our colonel said the marines would only go in “when the fur begins to fly. “ I spoke to many of the officers and asked whether they wished me to write letters home for them; they could surely be excused such duties, given their great burden of responsibility. These men, though trained like machines, were gentlemen; it was my privilege to move among them.
I was chafing, because I had no means of viewing the future. For me the greatest advantage of a priest's life was the sweetness of the road ahead, a known journey, though not without challenges, to eternal salvation in the sight of God.