Shannon Read Online Free PDF Page A

need further elucidation, please write to me at the above address.
    Yours faithfully in Jesus Christ,
    Anthony I. Sevovicz
    Coadjutor of Hartford
    To Shannon, Molly said, “How do you pronounce that gentleman's name?”
    He said, “Sev-oh-vitz. Sevovicz. A Polish name.”
    “Sevovicz,” said Joe and Molly together.
    Shannon reached for his bag again and drew out his cherished map of Ireland. He unfolded it and pointed to the bright red mark at Tarbert. Archbishop Sevovicz, who could turn the words
Good morning
into a sermon, had said, “If we don't know where we are in this world, our fellow man tells us.” Shannon had looked so baffled that the archbishop had— most uncharacteristically— come directly to the point and said, “Ask. Ask. Ask.”
    “This?” asked Shannon now, showing the map. “Here?”
    Joe looked at Tarbert's red dot and nodded. “Can you stay with us a few days, Father?”
    Robert flapped his map and looked into Joe O'Sullivan's green eyes.
    “Porridge is terrible if it goes cold,” said Molly. “And you look like you'd sleep, Father.”
    Joe said, “If you've Molly's porridge inside you, you'll sleep.”
    Before they served the oatmeal, Molly added half a spoon of poteen, their local moonshine, and when the meal ended they prepared the old sofa.
    “We'll be quiet as mice,” said Molly, “and Joe'll go out now and getthat other business done, the poor young Dargan boy. So you can stop worrying about it.”
    As Shannon stood by watching, Molly and Joe dragged the couch across the floor toward the fire. She patted it and pounded its old cushions, then stood back.
    The young priest lay down and wrapped himself in the blanket that they gave him. What little glaze of personality he had built up in the solitude of the ocean had been abruptly and brutally rubbed off at the lean-to out in the fields. Lying on his side, he stared into the fire.
    Perhaps he would fall asleep before the reel of images began. Perhaps tonight he would be set free. He waited. Not yet did he see the visions that consoled him: the white clapboard houses of New England, the galloping horses and sweet rivers of Connecticut, the tree-lined streets and everyday neighbors of the town of Sharon. Good— because these awful images were usually pursued hard and driven away by huge field guns, bucking and roaring, by the bloodied faces of weeping men and the vast wounds that they bore, by the burial parties, with the bodies tumbled into the shallow mud of France: the black anatomy of war.
    Joe and Molly sat in their chairs, drinking tea. Shep climbed up on the old sofa, found a place in the lee of Shannon's bent legs, and curled there. Soon, man and dog fell into deep sleep. Outside, a shower off the ocean sprinkled the land and passed over. Inside, the house fell quiet as the hosts settled down to watch over their guest.
    And so, on his first afternoon in Ireland, Robert Shannon, formerly Captain Shannon, chaplain of U.S. Forces, and— in theory if not at heart— Father Robert Shannon of the Diocese of Hartford in the Archdiocese of Boston, slept like a wintering bear. In time, Molly O'Sullivan carefully put back the blanket that the sleeping American had kicked off himself when the dog had jumped up to follow Joe— who, with two other men, bumped through the fields on a neighbor's cart, bearing Edward Dargan's body, which they had covered with a tarpaulin.
    Molly O'Sullivan never left her kitchen that day. She darned socks, she fixed a buttonhole, but mostly she sat quietly in her chair, where Father Shannon could see her if he awoke suddenly and could thus be reassured in a strange house in a strange land.
    In his sleep, Shannon twitched and sometimes half spoke. He had refusedto take off his shoes or his jacket and, initially, had lain down with an arm over his eyes, watched by his hosts.
    Molly had never been wooed by any man but Joe. He had known her since she was fourteen; he was twenty-four then, and he had struck up a