Shannon (40 page)

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.”

In 1922 not many people— certainly not in Ireland— warned of the health dangers of drink. Men drank too much and they died, end of story. Michael the Lion's intake, half a bottle of liquor a day, might not have seemed untypical among the 40 percent of the male population who drank. Being a sweet and gentle creature, and never too agitated, he stood in little danger from his consumption of alcohol. The greatest excitement in his life came from his wife's baking or from the occasional stimulation of a Yank asking to climb the branches of the family tree. He had never been struck a blow in his life. And he had never known great physical exertion, not even as a schoolboy when he had sauntered as others ran.

When he looked into Mr. Vincent's eyes and listened to the soft words spoken with more menace than the hiss of a snake, Michael the Lion's heart seized.

“Okay,” said Mr. Vincent to the man turned chalk-white and sweating and convulsing in the chair, “you're not much help.”

And Michael the Lion died.

Outside, Squirt couldn't be seen. Mr. Vincent looked into the pub, found him, tiptoed in, and overheard Squirt saying to the assembled drinkers, “He's following another Yank that came through. Plenty of dough. You should see the roll.”

When he felt the spiky tap on the back of his head Squirt downed his drink. Outside, he pushed back the strong and angry words.

“But you're up to something, aren'tcha?” he said, with an air of cunning.

Squirt's senses had been slightly blunted by the two fast whiskeys, and therefore he didn't pick up on the warning signs. Indeed, he pressed on.

“Lookit. If you're after some trick or something and there's money in it, I'm yer man.”

Mr. Vincent said, “Squirt, lean your bicycle against the wall. Stand over here.”

He motioned to the square yard of ground just in front of him. Squirt stood as bidden, and the big man caught Squirt's hair viciously with one
hand and with the other drew a pointed fingernail down the length of Squirt's exceptionally long nose.

“No talking about my business,” said Mr. Vincent. “To anybody. Ever.”

At the last moment he increased the pressure, split the skin to blood, and then pinched the extremely sensitive tip of the nose at the point where the nostrils met. Squirt yelped with pain.

C
ontrary to what he had said, Robert did not stop writing. A few sentences some mornings, a few pages other mornings; words continued to pour out of him, bringing fatigue by every nightfall. But a notable change had begun to take place in him, a steadiness in mood and a sharpness.

Ellie observed it but took care not to comment.

As a result, she had a new concern— that he might go too far and destabilize himself again. She fashioned a ploy; she planned a long day away from the house. It was time for a journey that Robert had already tried to make, to the Shannon's source.

She called him at six in the morning and he rose immediately. The weather seemed to have settled beautifully. With much wisecracking from her, and uninterrupted normality from Robert, they prepared a picnic and set off. Ellie handled her car with immense skill, far superior to Maeve MacNulty's wild swinging across the roads.