Shannon (23 page)

Inside, he strolled here and there. He had no system and no defined purpose. If he was looking for something, he didn't know what it was. He found stillness. His legs swished against the long grass. A bird skimmed low over the river. The shadows of the ruins, the shapes of the two great
crosses, the peak of the old monastery wall, the long low mounds of the graves and their dignified headstones— all spoke the word
sacred,
a word absent from his vocabulary since Belleau Wood.

He leaned against one of the towers. The Mullens had told him that stone had replaced the original wooden buildings. Robert stayed until the tower grew cold and uncomfortable against his back. For the first time in some weeks he reached consciously for the archbishop's words, the two sentences:
Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.
By these, by the prominence of one over the other, he would be able to judge— the archbishop had said— which direction his spirit wanted to take:
Here, this afternoon, it's “Find your soul and you'll live.”

But other than that no prayer came, no presence of the God he'd once thought he knew. Nor, as the archbishop wanted him to do, did he reach for theology, for the learning he had so avidly embraced in seminary. He had no interest in reaching for it. And yet— and yet:
This is a holy place. I know this is a holy place. I can sense it, I can see it, but I can't feel it. I wonder if they had a monk here by the name of Shannon?

Back at the house, still silent and empty, Robert went in by the separate door to the wing with the extra bedrooms— and found his life in peril. As he climbed the stairs and reached his room, another door opened. Two young men stood there. They looked at Robert and one said, “Who are you?”

Robert said nothing.

“Are you staying here too?” asked the nearer young man.

“Yes.”

The young men walked across the landing and followed Robert into his room. They closed the door.

“Whose man are you?”

Robert looked puzzled.

Without warning the second young man pounced forward and took Robert by the throat.

“This is him, this is him, Jimmy. I know this is him.”

Jimmy drew a handgun and put it hard under Robert's nose, hurting fiercely. He drew back the safety.

“You bastard. You double-crossing bastard. Who told you?”

Had a star exploded? Robert's body took over; he began to wet himself. All speech failed. He tried to shake his head but the gun pressed harder.

“Take away the gun. I'll do it with my hands,” said the first young man, elbowing Jimmy and the gun aside. He moved squarely in front of Robert, slammed him up against the wall, and tightened his hands on Robert's neck. His thumbs pressed on the windpipe. He spat in Robert's face and tightened his grip further. Robert felt the hard fingertips and began to see color bursts. The grip cut deeper.

Jimmy came in again with the gun. He pressed it hard into the middle of Robert's forehead.

“This is the way to do it,” said Jimmy.

“Too much noise,” said the strangler, panting at his own effort. Robert scarcely moved.

“Then finish it, for Jayzes’ sake,” said Jimmy, and the grip tightened again. Robert's vision began to dance— and fade. His eyelids began to droop. His nose stung from trying to breathe.

Footsteps, on the staircase! A voice called, a young voice: “Father, we're all at the hay. Are you coming out?”

Raymond had been sent to find him.

Robert began to sink. The strangler had a hard time keeping his tall victim upright.

“Father?” whispered Jimmy. “What the Jayzes is that about?”

“D'you want to come and look, Father?” called Raymond again. “There's tea in the meadow.”

Said the strangler. “God! Is he a priest?” To Robert he hissed, “Are you? Hey?”

“Ease up,” said Jimmy. “Ease up. Ask him again.”

Outside the door Raymond called again and knocked. “Father, are you in there?”

“Aw, Jayzes,” said Jimmy. They both backed off, wrenched open the door, and raced down the stairs past Raymond. Robert fell to the floor; Raymond saw him. From below came the sound of the motorbike roaring away.

The Mullens ran from the hayfield and explained. Laurence held anti-Treaty views, not shared by Lena. Though not an activist, he allowed Irregulars to meet in the house. These two young men had first arrived on the same night as Robert. In some agitation they had told Laurence that a spy had been put on their trail and they'd need a place to hide.

Robert lay rigid on his bed, his preferred retreat. Laurence peered at him from across the room.

“You're all right, Father, aren't you? I mean— you don't need a doctor?”

The angry red ring of the gun muzzle marked the center of Robert's forehead. Purple bruises began to bloom on his throat. Lena, desperate to apologize, said that little activity had taken place near them.

“ ‘Tis Dublin and Limerick that are stirring things up.”

As this information reached him, Robert moved to his next level of safety. He lay so low that he seemed to pass out.

For the next half hour all went wild. The Mullen adults lost composure. Nothing would rouse Robert; to hear his breathing required a stillness and silence not present in the house that afternoon; his pulse all but disappeared.

In fact, no danger threatened; shell-shock victims often flee to the refuge of apparent coma.

The two older children, Raymond and Nuala, took over and ran the day. As the parents barked at each other, the youngsters moved in. They took off Robert's shoes and loosened his belt. While he lay flat they brought cold water and bathed his face. At this, he allowed himself to “wake” again, spoke one or two calm words to assure them that he was “fine, just fine,” and fell asleep.

Laurence, close to ranting, whirled on his feet.

“If this gets out! If people hear this!”

Lena left the room.

Raymond stayed around Robert all evening; Nuala brought food. Laurence and Lena Mullen never reappeared, and Robert never saw them again. Next morning, after a restless night of rising and settling back down and then pacing his room to test his strength, he fled the household at dawn. With no more than a tenuous grip on himself, he walked down through the grass-grown monastery and found his river again.

Had his carers and mentors been following Robert, observing and not intervening, they would have been transfixed.
How will he retrieve himself from this? Can he recover?

Seeing him head so urgently for the water might have shaken their nerves. Would he walk, calm as a cloud, down that riverbank and into
the middle of his beloved Shannon, longing for the current to flow placidly over his head?

That had been the most-feared risk attaching to this Irish journey: a fragmenting unto death, self-inflicted or provoked. One way or another the possibility had guided much of the care— as Dr. Greenberg had diligently explained.

During the four years of the Great War, more than eighty thousand men, all from active service, had manifested shell shock. The symptoms had a wide scale. At the mild end, the doctors saw extreme fatigue, loss of balance leading to dizziness with a proneness to falling down, and severe failure to concentrate.

After the Armistice of 1918, the studies continued, because in many cases the grave suffering didn't reduce. Victims still felt helpless. Intense fear gripped them for no reason. If reminded of what had shocked them they still became unbearably distressed.

As the researches continued down the decades, the name of the ailment would change to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. In expanded studies, observers uncovered the symptom that became known as flashbacks—vivid images, either in dreams or daydreams, of the original traumatizing events.

The effects remained more or less the same. At the lowest level of suffering the victims kept aloof, unable to form attachments. At the extreme end, their failure to feel loving or affectionate toward anybody, coupled with a capacity for astounding rage, could turn them into sociopaths. They could kill, be killed— or kill themselves.

Robert knew nothing of these risks; he didn't even know how he had come under Sevovicz's wing. As far as he could recall, one day in the nameless hospital a large man appeared in that tall, narrow white room. Judging from the man's clothes, he certainly belonged to the clergy. He confirmed it with his first remark: “I'm an archbishop.”

Robert rose from the chair in which he sat all day, every day, and dropped to one knee. As all Catholics must, he sought to kiss the archbishop's ring.

Sevovicz had had no idea what to expect— a lunatic or a killer, an idiot or a weakling. He took Robert's hand and raised him to his feet. “I do not wear my episcopal ring. Not in this country.”

With their faces level, he looked into Robert's eyes. He saw nothing but dullness and pain.

“My name is Anthony Sevovicz.” He repeated it slowly. “Anthony Sev-oh-vitz. I come from Poland. I am the Archbishop of the See of Elk, previously the Coadjutor Bishop of Lublin. You will address me as Your Grace, and from now until your full return to your parish I will be responsible for every part of your life. Sit in your chair.”

Sevovicz sat on the bed and looked at Robert as a doctor looks at a comatose patient— as though Robert were not present. He noted the good looks beneath the ragged expression; he noted the attempts at cleanliness and physical care— but he also noted the many razor nicks, with their red flecks of blood as numerous as measles; the untied shoe; and the grievous scar on the back of the hand, a scar like a red gully across the knuckles, a scar that had been picked at again and again. On Robert's lip, saliva had dried like a miniature frost.

“Tomorrow,” said Sevovicz, “I will confer with your doctors again. I have come here today to measure whether you are capable yet of living in a house, and it seems to me that you are not. That is what I will work for first— to remove you from this institution and bring you back to health.”

Whether Robert understood, Sevovicz couldn't say, because the young priest showed no reaction. At that moment, and for quite some time after his discharge, Robert Shannon had no inner dialogue. He heard only screaming voices or mutterings, he had no capacity for internal discourse, no means of private emotional debate, and no intellectual function of sequential thoughts.

When students of the condition settled down after the war, it would soon became clear to them that such disorder might arise not from war alone; parental abuse could cause it too. But that proved more difficult to track because, unlike battlefield shock, the domestic variety went underground. Happily, in the case of Father Shannon, Dr. Greenberg had been able to rule out any such intimate cause.

He believed that Robert would recover in full. The young priest had a powerful secret weapon: intellect. Observers in the field had received the impression that the more educated officer class had been less affected than the enlisted men. Data proved difficult to obtain— nobody had done a study as to whether the disparity had to do with education or numbers; there were, after all, many more men than officers.

Nevertheless, Dr. Greenberg had been watching for the day when Robert's intellect kicked back in. “When the mind begins to help the heart,” he said, “that will be a good day.”

It hadn't, not yet, not fully. But in Ireland something important had been working— because not for an instant, not even for the half step of a hesitation, did Robert, patient and protégé, contemplate succumbing to the Shannon's embrace.

F
rom Clonmacnoise, the Shannon winds through fields sometimes rich, sometimes marshy. Bogland stretches to the east (one tenth of the surface of Ireland produces peat); some of Europe's loveliest skies stretch to the west.

The fields soon yield pathways. From here you can walk to Athlone, the town at the heart of the country. Originally a ford, Athlone guards the river crossing into the west. One way and another, the Shannon has been bridged here for a thousand years, and no bridge in Ireland has more fame.

Robert probably walked the fastest to Athlone of any man in history. He tore along the eastern bank in a crazy half-thrusting and half-loping gait. Anybody who saw him that morning, with his head rigid and eyes fixed straight ahead, might have muttered the word
weird.

Part of his speed owed to fear:
They might come back. I might meet them again.

He didn't think this through. The two Irregulars already knew their mistake and were gone, hiding in the boglands.

Another part of his racing gait owed to hunger. He had no food.
I
won't eat until I'm safe. I have money in my pocket. I'll wait until I'm in some sort of place where there are many people.

Looking like a man pursued by a demon, he raced thus to Athlone and entered the town from the south in the middle of the morning. Fishermen on the bridge, a woman with a basket of washing, two teenage children— all looked at him curiously as he loped on in a mad head-thrust-forward way.

For a moment he hesitated on the bridge but soon abandoned the Sevovicz idea of never crossing the river. Within minutes, down a side street, he found a handwritten
BED & BREAKFAST
sign on a house that said
RIVER VIEW.
Rapping on the open door brought no answer; he rapped louder. A man put his head out from a door somewhere inside the hallway; he had an opaque eye. He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the house and Robert entered.