Shannon

  Commerce throve too, from large department stores serving the farmers to tough public houses for the port. And politics raged; the race memory of sieges bred defiance, mistrust, and an independent heart. If ever a twentieth-century city might have walled itself in, Limerick would have been the one— and never more so than when Robert Shannon arrived. Unknown to him, Dublin had just erupted— but Limerick looked potentially worse. Both sides had occupied key positions, and each believed they faced a bloodbath.

  After breakfast, Sheila Neary and Robert left the house. As they walked away, Sheila Neary said, “Now, Father Robert, we mustn't forget your relations. I know of only one Shannon family here— well, not so much a family as a bachelor. He's a butcher up on Mulgrave Street. They call him the Chopper.”

  Their steps were lively and crisp; their faces were warmed by the sun. Across the square they walked, two people with simple intent. They turned their first corner— and were rudely stopped. Twenty or thirty gunmen blocked the width of the street; a few sat propped against the walls; ahead, many more formed up. Some of these men wore ad hoc uniforms; the majority dressed like the guerrillas whom Robert had met in the fields: rough clothes, belts of ammunition. The Irregulars had come to town.

  A man pointed a gun at Robert and stepped forward, aiming it at Robert's head. Robert closed his eyes and didn't move.

  Sheila Neary reddened with rage. “Put that thing down,” she said. “You young pig.”

  Robert opened his eyes— and saw the rifle bolt hauled back.

  “What did you call me?” The youngster's voice held ice.

  “I said you're a young pig. How dare you?”

  The gunman walked forward and stood at Robert's side.

  “Who's this fella here?”

  “None of your bloody business,” said Sheila Neary, and Robert winced like a maiden.

  Another, older, man walked up. “What's going on here?” He had greater authority and didn't need to take out his handgun. Instead he asked Sheila Neary, “Who's he? And who are you?”

  She answered sharply “He's a visiting American priest, and I'll thank you to let us pass.”

  The man sized them both up. To Robert he said, “Over here.”

  He grabbed Robert's shoulder and forced him to face a wall. Sheila Neary moved up— and the “pig” with the gun barred her way. The senior fellow spread Robert to search him, kicking his legs apart.

  “Has he any proof of who he is?” he called.

  “I have plenty,” she said. “You're some men. This is Irish hospitality, all right.”

  In moments the searcher found the Sevovicz letter. Both guerrillas read it— and visibly changed.

  “Sorry, Father,” they said, and handed back the letter.

  “You ignorant pigs,” said Sheila Neary. As they stood aside she asked, “Are we going to have to go through this farce at every corner? I want to be able to walk around my own city in peace.”

  “Tony go with them,” said the senior man, embarrassed now, and the boy with the rifle walked them down the street. On the way Sheila Neary bombarded him with words that Robert scarcely heard. The youngster blushed and tried to state his aims.

  “Get a bloody job,” she said. “That's how you help your country.”

  Powerless to retaliate, the youngster walked ahead.

  “Let these two through,” he said at the next barrier. Several men stood guard.

  Led by an Irregular in his bandolier, Robert and Sheila walked across the street to the next corner. In the distance down to his left, Robert could see the Shannon; the river looked timid this morning, a sign of no showers upstream.

  The guerrilla at the barrier stepped aside. “There's different soldiers over there.” He nodded in the direction ahead of them. “Be careful, Father,” he told Robert. “They'll think you're one of us. And they're the real dangerous ones.”

  Ahead they could see no sign of human life. Their footsteps echoed.

  “What would you call this atmosphere?” said Sheila Neary, half to herself.

  “It's certainly very quiet,” said Robert.

  “Eerie,” she said.

  They reached the end of the small street and turned another corner. A voice shouted, “Stop there!”

  To their left a row of rifles faced them— spikes across piles of sandbags. The voice yelled again, “Walk over here! No, not you, ma'am. Him.”

  Sheila went too, in a fury. She yelled, “Put down those bloody guns.”

  “Shut up, ma'am.”

  She erupted and strode to the sandbags. “Who are you, you little brat? Where is your commanding officer?”

  They still hadn't seen a human face, nothing but soldier's caps above the sandbags and the black round holes of rifle muzzles. From the side, a short wiry man in uniform and with a holstered revolver appeared.

  “We observed you talking to them.”

  “You eejit,” she said. “Of course we were talking to them. We had to get through.”

  “What were you talking to them about?”

  “I was telling them what would happen to them if they harmed or offended a visiting American priest, that's what I was telling them. Now put down those guns at once and don't point them at us again.” Fury had made her voluble. “Where do you think the money comes from to buy those guns? Who do you think is paying for this new government? Who's paying your wages, who's buying your uniforms? Do you want Father Shannon here going back and telling the Americans not to support the thugs who are running the new Ireland?”

  At that moment they heard a distant crack, a high whine, and a breaking sound. Plaster fell, a few snowflakes. Everybody ducked and thereafter nobody moved.

  “Where was it?” asked a voice.

  “High up,” said another.

  “Same old caper,” said a third.

  Said a fourth, “They've more ammo than us.”

  “Are they opening fire?” asked another voice.

  “Naw. They haven't the guts,” said someone else.

  Robert put his hands to his face and staggered into the street. The officer waved a hand, and the guns nearby went down. Sheila Neary stepped deeper into the shelter of the walls. Robert lurched here and there; she looked at him anxiously but didn't know what to do.

  “Are you all right, Father Robert?”

  He didn't answer her. The officer glanced from her to Robert. He walked over and touched Robert's arm.

  “Come in here,” he said quietly, so that only Robert could hear. “Step back out of the way.” Robert allowed himself to be led to a nook in the high sandbags. “Take your time,” said the officer. “I suppose you were in France?”

  Robert didn't reply. The two men stood side by side for some moments. Everybody watched from a little distance.

  “Wait till he tells them this in America,” Sheila Neary said to the soldiers behind the sandbags.

  A red-haired soldier popped up, cocky and bright-eyed as a squirrel. “Father, I've a sister in Philadelphia: Janie Kelly. D'ya know her at all?”

  The nonsense, the ludicrousness of the question, broke the spell. Minutes later, Robert and Mrs. Neary walked on.

  Away from the barricades they found calm among old streets and rough cobbles. Robert had a running commentary from the tireless woman at his side.

  “God Almighty, that was terrible. Firing loose shots like that. Who do these bloody people think they are?” Past the jail: “Most of the people in there will never get out. And they shouldn't.” Next: “That's the asylum, so we'll always have a place we can call home.” She pointed out the Markets Field up ahead. “When my father was a boy there was a scaffold up there; they were always hanging people. We could do with it now.”

  When they reached the butcher's shop, Sheila Neary pointed out the name SHANNON over the door. Robert stood, admired, and almost smiled. The sight of his name did much to bring back some balance.

  The butcher looked like a medieval villain: big raddled nose, black wavy hair, pockmarked skin. He said, “Yeh,
Shannon. Well, it'd be a name around here, like, if ‘twas anywhere.”

  Robert said, “Do you know anything about the family?”

  “My own father was a Galway man.”

  “And are there Shannons in Galway?”

  “Well, there might be, and again there mightn't.” Robert looked perplexed, and the butcher continued. “The thing is, Galway is the City of the Tribes. But you can never tell which tribe you're dealing with. And most of ‘em is lunatics.”

  He wore an apron with more blood on it than a massacre; he kept sticking the point of his knife into the surface of his block and drawing it back out like a little Excalibur.

  “I'll tell you now. There's a woman over in Parteen, a Mrs. O'Meara, her husband is a Cork man; they're always ordering pork chops, they eat nearly a pig a year. And before she married him, she was courting a fella, and I'd swear his name was Shannon. Miles Shannon. He was from Claregalway” He looked to Sheila. “Mrs. Neary you'd know her.”

  Sheila Neary made an irritated cluck. “No-no. His name was Fallon, Miles Fallon, I knew him; he married a girl from Knocklong.”

  “Was she Dalton herself?”

  “Who, the O'Meara woman?”

  “No, the Knocklong woman.”

  Robert looked from one to the other in this bewildering tennis match. Then he asked mildly, “Where was your grandfather born?”

  Before the Chopper could answer, the cashier poked her head out of the tall glass booth, where she sat among her ledgers.

  “He wasn't born. I mean, not here. He was from Ballymurray up in Roscommon.”

  “Nancy knows everything,” said the Chopper.

  “But his name wasn't Shannon,” said a woman customer, who was waiting patiently for the Chopper to begin cutting a roast of beef for her.

  Nancy called out, “That's why I said he wasn't born.”

  “This is Father Shannon from America,” said Sheila Neary.

  “No, that isn't his name,” said Nancy. “He was named Moylan himself, and he came down here as an apprentice to the man who owned this place, a bachelor called Tom Shannon, and Tom Shannon left the shop to Tony's grandfather here, on condition that he changed his name to the same name as there was over the door.”

  “Who was this man Tom Shannon? Where was he born?” Robert asked.

  “Ah, sure, nobody knows that,” said Nancy. “There was bad times in them days. People didn't want you to know they was born at all.”

  The trail grown cold, Robert stood by. He listened to beef being discussed, followed by a long conversation with Sheila Neary about who had the best pigs in the county for pork.

  The Chopper asked her, “D'you want anything for yourself and Father here?”

  “I can't afford you,” she said.

  Archbishop Sevovicz received one final instruction from Cardinal O'Connell: “Get there just before dinner,” said His Eminence with a smile.

  “There” proved, to begin with, cold and unwelcoming— the house of John J. Nilan, Bishop of Hartford, Connecticut, in the Archdiocese of Boston. Sevovicz had left much of his own clerical garb behind in Rome (his departure had been hasty), and he looked no more than an ordinary priest. With no flicker of archbishop's purple, no hint of his senior place in the Church, he was left waiting in the dim hall.

  For half an hour he sat. No maid returned, no voice called, no leather shoe creaked across the floor. Eventually he went looking. He pushed open a door and saw a man at a dining table, eating and reading. Sevovicz knocked on the open door.

  “No, thank you, Gabriela, not yet.”

  Sevovicz waited a moment and said, “Regrettably, I am not Gabriela.”

  He knew that he looked disheveled, but he also knew that his voice and his accent and his perfect if old-fashioned English would at least make Nilan look up.

  “God, who are you?” Bishop Nilan twisted in his chair.

  “That is— or should be— our central inquiry,” said Sevovicz with some gaiety. “God, who are You? I am not God, I am Anthony Sevovicz, your new coadjutor.”

  “I have a new coadjutor, I have Father Murray coming in.” Bishop Nilan turned away.

  Sevovicz said, as he always did, and proudly, “I am Polish. I come from Elk.”

  Ever afterward, Nilan referred to him as “the Elk,” not least because of the Pole's long-shaped head and big nostrils. For the moment Nilan continued reading.

  Sevovicz stepped into the room and stood like a soldier. “Has His Eminence not called?”

  Sevovicz guessed that Nilan had enough common sense not to shoot the messenger. So he waited, while Nilan still read— a good trick; churchmen are permitted to go on reading their Holy Office until a suitable break comes in the text.

  At last Nilan put down the breviary and said, “His Eminence? Well, that's a powerful name to speak. But how do I know you're not any old panhandler looking for a handout?”

  “Do you have a telephone? Have you received a letter?”

  Nilan yielded, the men held out handshakes, and their little crisis passed.

  Gabriela brought food; Nilan offered wine; Sevovicz chose beer.

  “If you're a full coadjutor,” Nilan said, “Rome must know about you.”

  “I come from the Vatican.”

  “And how're they all over there?” said Nilan.

  “My task is to assist. I'm here to help.”

  “I don't need any help. I have help galloping around the yard, coming in the back door, climbing up the stairs. Why would I need help?”

  “I think I'm probably more of a resident in your house. I'm here principally to help His Eminence.”

  “We're a long way down from Boston,” said Nilan.

  “His Eminence has interests everywhere in his archdiocese. Wherever his flock suffers and has need—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know that. That's not specific enough. What has he said to you about me?”

  “His Eminence said— he said we would like each other.”

  “Ah. Is that what His Eminence said?” And Nilan smiled.

  Sevovicz's food arrived and he now saw Nilan bring into play the skill that had made him a bishop; Nilan switched on the warmth.

  “I doubt you've enough food there on your plate, a big man like you. Let me ring for Gabriela or you'll think us cheapskates down here in Connecticut.”

  Gabriela duly did new honors, and Nilan said, “The room you'll be in tonight— that's just temporary. I have an outside house here, the house next door, and tomorrow we'll start fixing things.”

  Sevovicz not so much ate his food as assaulted it; he always worked a table as though he were a famine victim. He believed now that he had taken the measure of the occasion. This Nilan, he's saying to himself, “Why was he was sent here? What were the words he used, ‘needs and suffers— ah, yes! That shell-shocked young priest. I bet he's here to control him, to keep his mouth shut. “ Nilan's no fool. I want him on my side. But I have to keep in mind that he'll never be on anybody's side but his own.

  Had it not been for the civil war, Robert might have stayed a month. Limerick offered much to see, interesting places to search. But, conferring with friends, Sheila Neary said, “We'd better get him out of the city for his own safety.”

  She and her friends agreed that the higher up the Shannon he went, the cooler the flames of the fighting. They would not, though, let him go without a send-off party.

  To Robert she downplayed it. She told him, “There's a bit of a singsong.” He rested, then groomed and dressed. Sheila met him outside his door; in his hand he carried the Sevovicz letter.

  He said, “I never really introduced myself.”

  “But you don't need to.”

  Robert handed her the letter. She had been longing to read it ever since they met the men with the guns. She read— and read again. She turned away so he couldn't see the shine in her eyes.

  “My glasses are downstairs.”

  Halfway down the stairs, letter in hand, she called back, “Father Robert, why don
't you sit and rest until the guests arrive.”

  Robert didn't question her; he returned to his room and sat looking out on the square. The city had fallen quiet. A few children still played in the park, running ahead of the keeper, who was trying to lock the gates.

  From downstairs, over the next hour, he heard voices, some laughter, greetings. Then came a heavy fast tread on the stairs, a hard knock on his door, and Maeve MacNulty called, “Come on out, Handsome!”

  This evening she had dressed entirely in pink, from the skin out. Robert emerged in clothes of the deceased Mr. Neary.

  “They're all dying to meet you,” she said, and galloped back down.

  At the door of the drawing room, Sheila Neary waited; behind her he could see a dozen or more people. She had wanted Robert out of the way so that she could read the Sevovicz letter to her guests—which she did, when everybody had arrived. And in this town that has always loved soldiers, and that lost so many men in the Great War, she read it to a hushed room.

  Now she stood and beamed and held the door wide open. When Robert walked through, the room applauded.

  And then, for the rest of the evening, they sang and they sang. Around the piano they stood, mouths open like baby chicks, and they sang their hearts out. Sandwiches came—”Isn't an egg sandwich great with whiskey?” somebody said— and they sang again.

  Their repertoire came from their times: Victorian operettas, Gilbert and Sullivan, the music hall, the world. In Robert's honor, they offered an American medley: “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” and “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Camptown Races” and “My Darling Clementine” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Among the lace-edged cushions and the overstuffed chairs, people sang solos: a man with a nasal edge that produced an occasional whistle; a woman with huge teeth who had to be coaxed and who called herself a coloratura but was closer to falsetto; a husband and wife who sang a pretty duet, during which he kept patting his wife's behind.

  Sheila Neary and Maeve MacNulty sang “Three Little Maids from School Are We,” as they'd been doing since they appeared in their senior class Mikado production. Side by side they stood, “Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,” one round and pink and exuding, the other thin and green and withholding, “Filled to the brim with girlish glee”—and their enjoyment ran into every corner of the wallpaper's diagrams—”Three little ma-a-a-a-ids … from school!”