Shannon (7 page)

And so, at breakfast, they played to his raised spirits. They wanted to take him on a “last trip,” they called it. To get his travels “started in earnest,” they said. The excursion would take him to the point where the Shannon met the ocean.

“And when your journey's over, you can say you know your river from the source to the sea,” said Joe.

“We have to go to a funeral out that way,” said Molly.

“And Robert,” said Joe, “you'll never in all your life see a funeral like this.”

They spun their wheels. Along the little farm roads they rode, by gorse and heather moors they rode, bursts of yellow and mauve, God's colors for poor land. Through the tiny villages they rode—Ballylongford, Ballinaskreena, Ballyduff—and everybody they saw, every man, every shawled woman, and every child, waved a hand.

Joe, like a teacher, said, “Robert,
Bally
means
town.”

Molly, sparkling in the sun, called, “Look below, Robert, look below!”

And far down to his right, over the tumbling moorland, a long long way beneath the road, Robert's river shone in its widest, mightiest levels as it reached the sea. Ahead, the blue sky gleamed ever brighter as they drew closer to the ocean.

At a few minutes past noon they swooped down a rutted, sandy track into the seafront village of Ballyheigue. The funeral had already begun. Six thoughtful men carried the coffin from a house on the long, lone street. The church bell rang, a single toll at a time, the lonely sound that every village dreads. All the people followed together, their children trotting alongside.

Little in this scene had changed in hundreds of years. Perhaps the men's jackets had shortened, and perhaps the women's skirts. But the
pale faces were the same in this long-lived breed. These tribes had seen Viking longboats and Spanish galleons and England's horsemen colonists. These people had red hair with green eyes or black hair with dark eyes. Since the Stone Age, nobody here had been richer than anybody else; they ate the same food, scrabbled for the same life, shed the same tears.

Not all the cortege could fit in the church. While Molly went in, Joe and Robert stayed outside. Consequently, they heard no prayers, sang no hymns. Joe greeted many of the men who stood around the churchyard gate; among friends, he murmured and smoked.

An hour or more later, the cassocked priest emerged in his sash and black stole, followed by the pallbearers with their shiny load; in slow time a red-eyed widow appeared. The procession traveled back the way it had come, a long dark unhurried serpent filling the length and width of the street.

There came the traditional moment when the bearers halted outside the dead man's house. After a minute of silence they moved off again, and to Robert's surprise the pallbearers didn't walk up to the obvious graveyard on the hill; they turned left and went down toward the sea, while the crowd kept climbing upward, though not into the graveyard.

“Watch,” Joe said to Robert, and the three of them halted at a high place with a clear view of the cliffs below. All around and behind them the mourners had gathered, the widow taking the frontmost place.

“This depends on the tide,” Joe whispered.

Molly added her piece: “And the tide is out at the minute, so you'll see it all happening.”

Far below them, the pallbearers had now become as insects, slow black creatures who wrestled the coffin respectfully into a boat. A boatman tautened a rope and all six men embarked; they stood two by two, their hands on the polished bier. A few feet away from Robert, the priest raised his hand to bless. The boatman cast off and the hillside gazed down at the homespun funeral barge. Everybody could see, and now everybody began to speak to the prayers called up by the priest. The hum of the responses rose and fell, chanted speech, as the timeless rite escalated, filling the very air with a rough divinity.

By now the boatman had headed toward a ledge on the cliffs. Waves hissed and spat but they never bit because the morning remained benign.

The cliff had no mooring rings so the boatman drew close alongside. By skill he kept matters steady while the bearers balanced like dancers. When at last the boat snuggled up to the base of the towering black heights, the six men lifted the coffin and slid it onto the ledge.

Back in the rocking boat, all seven men stood and bowed their heads. High above them on the hill, the priest's chanted prayers floated up to the sky. The boatman at last drew away, hauling back to the sandy shore. On the cliff's ledge the sun set fire to the coffin's bright brass plate.

Before Robert could ask a question, Molly spoke.

“This family has permission to bury its dead like this. When the tide comes in, it'll lift the coffin off that ledge.”

Joe took up the story. “The coffin'll go out on the next tide. And out there, a quarter of a mile or so, there's a churchyard beneath the waves. It used to be on the land but the sea took it. When the coffin is over that spot, it'll sink straight down.”

Molly ended the tale. “Tomorrow, the mourners will go out in boats and they'll see the coffin gleaming up at them from the seabed through the clear water.”

Robert Shannon had known since a boy that if he ever went to look for his forebears he'd find treasure. And indeed the O'Sullivans had one more supernatural gift for him. They led him now across the hill and down to a low-lying farm.

In a sty, a meeting of pigs wallowed like grimy pink drunks. Chickens bobbed in the yard, red-combed and tough. Nobody appeared to halt or greet them; the farmers had gone to the funeral.

The trio stepped into a long milking shed. Slivers of sunlight leaked through gaps in the old stone walls. In single file they daintied their way through deep cow dung to the far end. Here, a large package swaddled in newspapers sat on a deep wide sill. Joe picked it up. Together he and Molly unwrapped and unwrapped; it began to look like that old joke, a matchbox disguised as a huge gift.

As they neared the end they grew timorous. Gingerly they peeled off layer after layer. The newspaper wrappings grew wetter and wetter, and at last Joe put his hand inside and said, “Here we are.”

From the swaddles he produced a stone, dripping wet, and handed it to Robert.

“Take a good look. They call it an amulet.”

Gray with blue veins, the size of an ostrich egg, it oozed water. Robert's hands grew damp; he tried to mop the amulet on his jacket, on his sleeve— but the stone would not be dried. Shuddering, he handed it back.

Molly said, “The only time that stone dries out is when a member of this family dies.”

Joe added, “And not just the family living here— but when anyone of this name dies anywhere in the world.”

Molly rounded off the miracle. “And at the moment of death a blue light appears in the air, over the shed outside and in here, straight above where the stone sits. To mark that death.”

All three stood for a moment, considering this mystery.

Back in Tarbert that night the O'Sullivans anticipated the next day. What time would Robert leave? Would he be safe? Deep in their bed, they began to enumerate the various improvements they had detected. He had more or less stopped the alarming headshaking. Nor did he tremble for no reason; in the early days he would twitch fantastically, a wild dance of his arms and legs. And, Molly said, “That jumping-to-attention thing” had now ceased. They felt calm as to their own powers; they had done their best.

One matter plagued them: They had no means of handing him on, no contacts. Their local priest had said he himself wouldn't drop by until their visitor had gone. His avoidance must be part of the planned care— they had been told Robert must not know of this network. All they could do was send him onward with a smile and leave the rest to the mysteries of the Church.

The Catholic priesthood in Ireland came from ancient roots. First there were druids, powerful and aloof; they moved thunder through the clouds and read kingship in the runes. Then came Saint Patrick with his crozier from Rome, instructing monks to build abbeys. For a time this monastic Celtic Church had a life of its own, a kind of homespun orthodoxy— but it had to hew closer to Rome when the seventh-century popes cracked the whip.

Since then, the Irish clergy had swung in a turbulent arc, from artists of genius bejeweling their monasteries to pariahs of the countryside hiding
in the woods— because a different romance prevailed during the 1600s, when priests were outlawed.

England wanted Protestant subjects for a Protestant crown, and therefore they banned Catholicism. For two centuries, priests became fugitives with bounties on their heads. Then, in 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act made priests into heroes again. Penny collections built huge local churches. The parish became the effective unit— and the Vatican loved it.

By the turn of the century, the priests of Ireland had climbed to new heights. The respect they received was intense and remarkable, especially out in the fields.

Knowing this power of the Irish Church, especially in the countryside, Anthony Isidore Sevovicz, a shrewd church politician and a country boy himself, had had the brilliant idea of the Shannon network.

The first word of the so-called Irish Project came from Cardinal O'Connell's office in Boston— and it came out of the blue. Robert's parents gasped; they thought such a journey would kill their beloved son. Sevovicz, who had had no advance warning of the plan, felt the same horror. As it became obvious that O'Connell himself was behind it and his directives granted no latitude, the Shannon parents grieved.

Moved by their anguish, Archbishop Sevovicz railed against His Eminence. He believed he had been given exclusive care of Father Shannon; why was he not consulted? But, ultimately, the Irish Project was foisted on him too; like Robert's parents, he couldn't fight back. In essence, the cardinal's plan to banish his troublesome priest had sprung from Robert's own wishes. He had evidently once told the cardinal how much he wanted to find the Shannon family roots.

Sevovicz had then hoped that Robert's medical team would veto the project, but to his disappointment they more or less hailed it. Father Shannon had been more stable than they'd expected. Yes, he was a long way from full renewal, but he had risen to a tolerable plateau of self-control.

“Surely,” said Sevovicz, “he now needs to rebuild himself. Especially as he seems firmer with each passing day?”

“Of course,” said Dr. Greenberg. “And that's what an independent trip will help to do.”

But could he make it? the archbishop wondered. Indeed he could, the doctor believed. The young man needed peace, and he needed to follow this boyhood dream.

Was he fit to travel? Dr. Greenberg conceded that he had some concerns. The young man seemed to have lost his belief center. There was still a notable and noticeable fragility of spirit. Who knew what triggered his sudden rages?

But the archbishop had to agree that, yes, unquestionably if bizarrely Robert's capacity for steadiness seemed to improve after each fracas. Was he somehow burning the shock from his heart? Cauterizing his soul's wounds with the heat of his rages? Every consultation that Sevovicz had with Dr. Greenberg ran at least twice its allotted length as the big, bony archbishop asked more and more questions.

Desperate for some means of protecting the young priest, he said he might accompany Father Shannon to Ireland. What good would that do? Dr. Greenberg had asked. The point was to let the recovering young man find his feet in a place he wanted to visit. “Otherwise,” said Dr. Greenberg, “the two of you might as well walk the coast of Massachusetts.”

Failing in this quarter, Sevovicz went back again to O'Connell's office and tried to bargain: no good. He railed again: to no effect. Father Shannon, he was told, had expressed to the cardinal a desire to find his ancestral origins in Ireland; the archdiocese would pay for his journey. Was the cardinal, Sevovicz asked himself, taking advantage? Of course he was.

He tried another tack. “His father wishes to travel with him.”

Not a good idea. His Eminence wants Father Shannon to have every opportunity of rediscovering his vocation.

After that, nobody bothered to reply; the cardinal wanted his young cleric out of the way— and soon. The trip was finally couched as a homily, freighted with words like
pilgrimage
and
healing.
But such language was the wrapping on the package that makes the bomb look like a gift.

Defeated by superior forces, Sevovicz went back to his own roots. He knew how the Church worked at the parish level and how the Church worked for bishops. And he also knew that his dear young protégé was about to walk across a land where every cleric had clout.

The Archdiocese of Boston sang with Irish names, and the Vatican, Sevovicz's own most recent station, was pulled by many Irish strings.

Once he had taken the temperature, he'd reckoned that yes, the Irish clergy and their Catholic flock would vigorously relish helping an American priest. In his mind he saw the handing-on process clearly, and selecting the dioceses where bishops and priests could and would help became a matter of mere geography. He wrote his letters.

Each Irish bishop replied. Each Irish bishop understood. Each Irish bishop offered help in any form, in every way. They grasped and applauded the principle of the journey. And they saw and appreciated the care implicit in the idea of the network. Each prelate undertook to write to his appropriate local clergy; they supplied Sevovicz with the names, addresses, and even thumbnail profiles of the relevant priests.

Thus the Irish Project got under way, buttressed by the security of these watchful men, and Sevovicz felt somewhat easier in his mind.