From 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.
A woman sat in the kitchen reading a newspaper. She looked up, saw the rucksack, the dishevelment, the evidence of recent travel and effort, and said, “I have a big room or a small one. They’re the same price.”
Robert took the big one and asked, “The river view?”
The woman said, “Ah, how could we have a view of the river down here in this narrow little street?” She peered at Robert. “Did you get any breakfast?”
He shook his head.
“Come on downstairs when you’re ready. The bathroom’s across from your door.”
Robert took fresh clothes from his rucksack. On one wall, amid vast flowers of wallpaper, stood a large crucifix. As he began to undress, he stood and looked at it— no more than that, merely gazed.
He washed, changed, and went down. The woman heard him and directed him to a door. A long table with linen and crockery occupied most of an empty room. She brought food and left him alone. He ate like a savage; he almost whimpered as he ate.
The woman returned with the teapot twice. After she cleared away his plate, he sat with his teacup, calmed by the food. The woman came back into the room; she sat down opposite Robert, one hand clenched tight.
“See this?”
He looked; she held out a medal with a ribbon.
“Danny’s medal,” she said. “A place by the name of Passion-dale.”
It was a place of which Robert had heard. Who, in that war, had not heard of the Battle of Passchendaele, where men drowned in the head-high trenches? Even the U.S. Marines cursed at the name. He took the bronze-colored medal and turned it over in his hand.
“They gave out millions of these,” she said. “My own son.”
Robert handed back the plaque, and as she took it she kept her hand on his; she looked like a perfect grandmother, white hair in a bun.
She said, “You don’t look like you were out there yourself. What was it, were you a coward or something? Danny wasn’t a coward.”
Robert hesitated for a moment, then drew from his pocket the Sevovicz letter, which he now kept on his person at all times. She read it, stood up, and stepped back.
“Oh, Father, I didn’t mean to put my troubles onto you.” She paused, blushing. “The Yanks won the war for us, Father, we all know that.”
He gestured that she should sit down.
“Danny?” he said.
“He was thirty-five, Father. I had him late; we had only the one. My husband died when Danny was nine and Danny was the man of the house after that.”
She didn’t weep; she didn’t flinch, she sat and looked directly into Robert’s eyes.
“Yes,” she said, as though affirming her remark. “Lost, that’s what I am without him.” After a pause she said, “And did you lose much yourself, Father? I mean, not a limb or an eye, thank God, I can see that.”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” said Robert. “I don’t know what I lost.”
He went upstairs and lay on the bed.
When the afternoon sun awakened him he couldn’t gauge how long he’d been asleep. Now he ached, from the coiled tension in which he had held his body since the strangling assault and the fierce rush of his earlier hike. He began to shiver— and he remembered what to do; he rose, crossed the corridor to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face. The red, gun-barrel circle on his forehead had begun to fade.
His shivering abated, he took the next step: warm water. “The cold is for the shock and the warm water is for the comfort,” the archbishop had explained: And it works. I feel better. I’m not hungry. I’m— all right.
He went back to his room and lay on the bed again, replaying the events of Clonmacnoise: Assault in a sacred place. A threat to life— in a place dedicated to faith in life.
But he couldn’t close the gap, he couldn’t find the links between Clonmacnoise and France and Danny’s medal and himself, although he sensed that connections cried out to be made. But he had learned enough in the weeks since he had boarded the ship in Boston to know when recovery— no matter how mild or slight— kicked in. And he knew not to push matters too hard— for when he did, they slipped away.
He didn’t yet, however, know how long a full recovery would take. Nor did he know what steps were needed to achieve it. Nor could he turn the moments of hope into hours of reality. All he largely knew was that he now had some say in the condition of his life.
“Live in the moment, Robert,” the archbishop had said. “Live in the moment— and all the moments will begin to join into hours, and then days, and then weeks, and then months.”
Robert rose from the bed and went to the window. Nobody, not even the intellectually fittest, would ever recall that view; he saw a roof, a cracked chimney made of concrete, a sliver of sky. He breathed on the glass and in the fog drew a face— a circle, two eyes, a nose triangle. Before he could decide whether the mouth should smile or frown, somebody knocked on his door. When he answered, the landlady stood there, in her coat and hat.
“I’m going out to say my prayers,” she said. “I thought you might like a bit of fresh air, Father.”
He found his jacket and walked with her. The picture on the windowpane dissolved.
On the way to the church she pointed out the numerous houses where friends and neighbors had lost men to the war. To Robert she might as well have daubed each doorway with blood; every name rattled him. She showed him a nondescript house. “That’s where John McCormack was born; we’re very proud of him.” Robert nodded but couldn’t recall why the name jolted him; like so many other memories, it hung around and then flew away.
When they reached the church, he thought to hang back. Any time the archbishop had taken him into the gloom of Hartford and made him kneel before the altar, Robert had almost thrown up. Now he slipped into a pew at the rear and watched the landlady. To a brass bank of flickering cigarette-sized candles she added three, lighting them from the little yellow spears of other candles. Robert looked at her and felt nothing, not even curiosity.
She came back and whispered, “One for me, Father, one for Danny, and one for yourself.”
Outside a neighbor said, “Hallo, Mrs. Halpin,” but the landlady avoided introducing Robert.
“She’s a busybody. I’ll show you our bridge.”
They walked through the town and Robert again saw his river. Mrs. Halpin said, “This is a new bridge. D’you know what happened to the old one?”
Robert shook his head.
“Well, we had a siege here, a while ago. The English were trying to get across the Shannon, so we blew up the bridge. The English started building a new one. They just laid down boards. And there was a man in our army, a man called Sergeant Custume, and he ran forward and ripped up the English planks.”
Robert looked at the tarred modern surface.
“He was shot dead, of course, and the English laid down more planks. But ten men came forward now, and they tore up the new planks and they were shot. And then another ten men came on, and another ten, and another ten. And after a long time of this, the English gave up. There’s great bravery here, Father.”
Robert stroked the Victorian cut-stone parapet. “When did the siege—what year?”
“I think”—she thought—”yes, ‘twas sixteen ninety-one.”
A less disturbed Robert would himself have been the first to grasp the metaphor; even now he sensed that an idea lay in there somehow, but again the connection wouldn’t click shut. But he did smile at the notion of 1691 being “a while ago.”
The town of Athlone rests below the southernmost waters of Lough Ree, the middle of the Shannon’s three biggest lakes. Robert walked north along the shore, consulting his map. By now he’d come to consider the lakes as no more than the Shannon grown wide; as long as he saw water he also saw his river.
The weather blessed him: a perfect morning. After some miles of excellent walking, his arms swinging free, his mind easy again, a memory came back, from an aroma. Something from home, the fall, leaves; what is it?
Just as he identified the smell as wood smoke, two children ran out on the road ahead, two grimy children in poor clothing. A boy of about ten and a girl perhaps five years younger, they ran up to Robert and stopped in front of him.
“Give us a copper, sir.” The small girl held out her hand for a coin.
“Have you any oul’ pots to mend?” said the boy. By now they stood so closely together in front of him that Robert couldn’t easily get by.
“What’s your name?” he asked them.
“Connors.”
The boy jigged; his little sister bent down and fingered Robert’s shoes.
“O’Connor?” Robert said.
“No, Connors. That’s my father over there.”
A man stood at the roadside, looking at the conversation between his children and the tall stranger. Robert began to walk toward him. The man turned away and strolled into the woods. Robert hesitated, and the children ran ahead.
In the trees, perhaps a hundred yards from the pathway, a fire burned. A pony grazed, head low, its rope drifting loose. Behind the fire and the pony sat a caravan, its shafts resting on a pile of logs. An old woman sat on an old chair, attending to an old piece of cloth. The place looked like every picture of a Gypsy halt that Robert had ever seen. And there was a time when, from his boyhood books, he knew the name of every tinker tribe in Ireland.
They had painted every square inch of the caravan’s surface in red. On this general color sprawled painted yellow flowers, big and blowsy as a barmaid. Near them, the good-enough artist had painted sleek horses’ heads, black champions all. Alongside, the artist had then painted detailed and glamorous harness pieces in brass, or did he mean to pretend it was gold? A real horseshoe hung above the door, surrounded by a voluptuous painted floral spray. Down either side of the door traveled heavily painted tendrils of honeysuckle, which then wound all along the base of each side.
The shafts were colored a deeper red than the rest of the trailer and ended in stubs of shiny black paint. From the rims of the red wheels, the spokes radiated in yellow. Out of the green canvas roof stuck a small chimney pipe of copper, from which climbed a thread of blue smoke. It all looked like a scene from a postcard.
As Robert approached, the old woman looked up, saw him, and ceased working. Up closer she seemed not ancient at all; with a start he guessed that she was less than thirty years old. She beckoned and he walked forward.
“You’re a foreign gentleman?”
Robert nodded.
“If you cross my palm with silver, I’ll tell you your fortune. Show me your hand.”
The man emerged from behind the caravan, the children jostling behind him, and saw Robert’s puzzlement.
He said, “You’ve to put money in her hand so she’ll tell you what lies ahead.” He wore a cap so battered that it couldn’t possibly exist without his skull.
Robert took a ten-shilling note from his pocket and held out the palm of his hand.
“No,” said the man. “It has to be a silver coin, but she’ll take that too.”
Before Robert could grope in his pocket for change, the man plucked the note from his fingers and handed it to the woman. She handed it straight back to Robert.
“Wha’?” asked the man, looking injured.
“Taking money from a priest,” the woman said. “D’you want forty years of bad luck? Sorry, Father.”
The man swept off his cap; how could he ever reassemble it to put it back on again?
“Sorry, Father, pray for us.”
Husband, wife, and children dropped to their knees in front of Robert.
“Bless us now, Father,” said the man. “Bless Jerry Connors and his wife and childer.”
They all closed their eyes. For a moment Robert— the struggling side of Robert— didn’t know what to do. Then the instinctive side took over and he laid his hands on the woman’s head.
“If ever a woman deserved a blessing,” he said, “it is you.” He said the same to her husband—”If ever a man deserved a blessing … “ and to her son—”If ever a strong boy …,” and to her small daughter—”If ever a lovely girl … “
For a long moment nothing moved in that woodland clearing. For a long moment in the summer of 1922, an injured young American hero, trying to heal himself, offered others his own version of healing, and with bowed heads they knelt before him as though he were God. For a long moment, somewhere in the middle of Ireland, old and new religions met and were at ease with each other. Then the horse let out a wild snuffling hurrup! and rattled the harness, and such spells as had been cast went quietly to work and the world revolved again.
The Connors family told Robert their story. They had been traveling as long as they could remember. Jerry had been born on the road, “In that van there, Father.” His wife, Mary, “a Sheridan myself, Father,” had been born in Ballinasloe Hospital, but only because her mother had a fever.
Every day the children begged for a living. Jerry bought and sold “ponies, donkeys, mules, horses” and fixed pots.
“We don’t like being called tinkers, Father, we’re tinsmiths,” Jerry said. He showed a saucepan on which he had fixed the handle; Robert could find no trace of a repair. Mary Connors sold lucky charms to people; she made some of them. “From the branches, Father. Hawthorn is lucky. And if I find something, I’ll hold on to it till I meet the person ‘tis for.”
Being under a roof of any kind except the caravan made them uncomfortable. Jerry made a speech. “Nobody could live without the sky over them, could they, Father? You can’t see anythin’ from under a roof. We see everythin’, going along the road. We can see the sun, and we can see the stars in the night, and we can see the fields where we stop up for a while, like this wood here. I’m coming to this wood now with years, since I was a child.”
Robert wondered whether people behaved kindly to them.
“They do and they don’t, Father,” said Mary Connors. “They say we steal. But what harm is taking bread off a windowsill if ‘tis out to cool; can’t the woman bake another one?”
Neither could read or write, nor had their children been schooled.
“They’re able to count, Father, isn’t that all they need? C’mere, Patsy.” The boy came forward. “Count for Father.”
The boy rattled off one to ten and then went to twenty, forty, up to a hundred, then counted, “A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty.”
His father asked, “What’s two times twenty?”
Patsy said, “Forty.”
And his father said, “Take off the luck penny,” to which the boy replied, “Thirty-six,” showing Robert that Patsy had been taught transaction arithmetic— to include the buyer’s discount when selling ponies.