Shannon by Frank Delaney Read Free Book Online

with a finger to his lips. His concentration elsewhere, he failed to register the aghast face beside him.
    After many minutes during which they lay facedown and utterly still, Joe rose and tiptoed up the slope. He surveyed left, he surveyed right, then turned and beckoned to Robert. The soldiers had gone downriver. Several hundred yards away they began to climb into a longboat, manned by two other men in uniform. One of these cast off, and the other began to row the boat into midstream. At that moment, as Joe watched, one of the soldiers fired three quixotic rounds into the mound of the riverbank, and the laughter of the others came upriver on the wind. Then the stream took their boat down toward Tarbert and no soldier looked back.
    Down the slope behind Joe, Robert had not moved, but at the sound of the gunfire he began to tremble and grunt. Joe walked back toward him, and as he drew near Robert stood up. He grabbed the shovel and attacked Joe— fierce, grim, sudden, and hard. Joe fended off a blow that would have split his temple; a glancing blow scraped his cheek; he retreated a few yards, covering his head. Robert, flummoxed, stopped; then, savage and red-faced, ran at Joe again, who, more composed now, grabbed the shovel's long handle. They wrestled like gladiators; Joe won the shovel from Robert and tossed it aside.
    Robert stood back— then raged forward again, his only sound a grunt that could have been pain. Soundless and wide-eyed, he scrabbled for Joe's face, neck, hair, arms, shirt. His grunting heavier, he kicked out. He tried to form words, but no sense came forth.
    When his scrabbling for a grip failed, he tried to land punches— serious blows. Joe stood his ground, never yielding an inch yet never fighting back, using all his strength to sap the blows, cushioning them with his forearms. He talked; he soothed; he calmed. “Easy now, Robert, ‘tis all right. Easy, easy.”
    Suddenly Robert began to weep, and the attack ended. He began to sink, a subsiding pillar. Joe took Robert's forearms and guided him to the ground, to his knees.
    “Easy now. Easy. Easy. Stay here a minute, Robert. Are you all right now?” He knelt beside him. “Stay here a minute.” Robert moaned; Joe stayed with him, patting his shoulder.
    In time Joe went back to fetch all their goods. He returned and squatted beside Robert, who still wept. Joe patted his shoulder.
    “You're all right now, Robert, you're all right.”

T o grasp the Ireland of 1922, think of Persia. Think of rural India. Think of old
National Geographic
magazines with their photographs of charming poverty. In Ireland too, the hopeful wary faces of the native folk looked winsomely up at the lens. Think also of those interested, well-meaning Tocqueville-esque travelers who for centuries had come, seen, and commented. The country that they reported had always been tense, depressed, and poor.
    Robert Shannon got to Ireland six months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed after a sapping war of independence which itself had caused division, as not everybody agreed with its aims or conduct. Now, as though to add incest to injury, a bitter civil war had begun. Scarring and dire, its bombs were undermining the new state's structure and delaying the pleasure of nationhood.
    And the ground was shaking in even greater ways. Irish Catholics, the previously underprivileged majority, had become the new rulers—the Risen People, they called themselves— and they were taking their country back from the king of England. In a policy ringing with emotion, this new government was buying up the great landlorded estates and redistributingthe land. Henceforth 85 percent of the people would again own 85 percent of the island and not the 15 percent, the few barren acres, that had been tossed to them like scraps long ago.
    The Anglo-Irish Protestants, who had long formed the ruling class, could see the writing on their demesne walls. Most disliked what they read and were deciding to