The Miracle Man

by James Skivington

  “Well – I – it’s not usually our policy to – ”

  “Ah now, policies are no good to me, young Fergus. I can’t spend a policy. What a man in my position needs is hard cash. For the necessities of life. Otherwise one of these winter nights – without so much as a fire in the grate – I’ll be found in the morning, stiff as a board. And all for the want of a few pounds for my – entirely exclusive – miracle story. A bargain, young Fergus, at – five hundred quid.”

  “Five – hundred?” Was that a lot of money for this kind of story? It didn’t matter. If he told his editor that he’d paid that kind of cash, Harry Martyn would make it sound like a king’s ransom. But surely part of an ace reporter’s job was to make decisions – whether or not to follow up a story, how to get his copy back in difficult circumstances, where to get receipts so that he didn’t lose out on expenses. He was out in the field and operating on his own. It was all up to him. Decision time.

  “Done!” he heard himself saying. “Five hundred pounds.” And then reluctantly he put out his hand to shake the grubby one of Limpy’s that had shot out to meet his.

  “Good man, Fergus!” Limpy said. “I knew we could do business.”

  Without removing an article of clothing, Limpy got into his bed and pulled the old blankets over him. With less enthusiasm than if it had been a coffin, Fergus stood looking down at the resting place that had been prepared for him. But then, something like this was all in a day’s work for the man who was going to get the story of the year for the Northern Reporter. What would he do if he ever had to live rough with a tribe on the plains of Africa in the furtherance of his journalistic career? Brushing aside the thought that a pride of lions would smell sweeter and a mud hut be less noxious than the McGhee redoubt, he boldly threw back the covers, lay down on the wooden seat and wrapped himself in the blankets, being careful not to let them touch his face. Death would smell fresher.

  “I can see you and I are going to hit it off just fine, young Fergus. Ye’re a man after my own heart. What for would you be wanting to spend fancy money on sheets, when all they do is make washing,” Limpy said, and then blew out the lamp to throw the room into total darkness.

  Fergus lay uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench, his face contorted by a swarm of imaginary agonies, from cholera to swine fever, and by the very real ones of Limpy McGhee’s snores and muffled farts from the other side of the fireplace. At least, Fergus consoled himself, he had the man’s agreement for an exclusive story, and cheap at five hundred pounds, he hoped. No doubt when the other papers read it in the Northern Reporter – he managed a little smile – they would be round the old man like vultures in no time. But he, Fergus Keane, had beaten them all to it. After a few more of these happy thoughts, the excitement of the day and the effects of the drink began again to crowd in on him, and despite his unpalatable surroundings, the ace reporter slowly drifted into sleep.

  Fergus was reaching out to accept the Pulitzer prize for journalism when he felt the hand on his back. Before the admiring audience, his smile became a little strained, and he wondered what Limpy McGhee was doing up there on the stage and touching him. The smiling presenter seemed to fade before him as the upturned faces of the spectators became blurred and he couldn’t hear their clapping any more. The hand at his back slowly moved downwards. Casually, he attempted to move away but it was still there, down near his waist now. With difficulty he kept smiling, fearful that the presenter would not give him the prize if he created a scene. And after he had worked so hard to get it. Then he felt the warm breath on the back of his neck, the body moving closer to him, and heard the gasp of the crowd as they realised what was happening. Suddenly there was total darkness as everything disappeared – the stage, the presenter, the audience and the bright lights – everything, that is except the warm breath in his ear and the hand on his backside. No longer was he in the wide auditorium but huddled on the hard wooden bed with the musty blankets over him. For a moment he lay rigid and awake, checking his senses to be sure of what they were telling him. Then he was scrambling to his knees and lashing out in the darkness.

  “Get off, you filthy old bugger! No wonder you offered me a bed!”

  Fergus retreated against the wall. There was the sound of a match being struck, then a curse from Limpy, followed by another scrape before the guttering match was applied to the lamp wick. Fergus had two surprises. A bleary-eyed McGhee looked out from his bed on the far side of the room and said,

  “What’s the matter, son?”

  Both of them saw the elderly man by Fergus’s bed at the same time. He was tall and slim, with a long, pale face that showed more surprise than either of theirs. His hands he held up before him as though he had just snatched them from the jaws of a trap.

  “Jasus. Mr Pointerly,” Limpy said softly.

  “Ah – Mr McPhee. There you are.” Mr Pointerly was finding it hard to keep his eyes off Fergus. “I was – passing, and – I thought why don’t I call in and see my friend Mr McPhee. But – “ he nodded towards Fergus and winked at Limpy, “ – I can see you’re – entertaining. So I’ll bid you a good night. No doubt we can meet soon and – have a little confidential chat.”

  The tall figure gave a little bow. Considering the debris on which he had to tread, Mr Pointerly made rather an elegant retreat through the door and pulled it shut behind him. As Limpy and Fergus turned to look at each other in surprise, there was the sound of growling from outside and Mr Pointerly’s raised voice, which rapidly grew fainter.

  “Jasus, he’s a bugger that dog. If he doesn’t get ye coming in he’ll get ye going out. I knew by the look in his eye that his teeth would be in somebody’s arse this night.”

  After the light had been blown out again and both of them had settled down, Fergus said,

  “Mr McGhee, did you mean what you said about that exclusive interview?”

  “Well of course I did, son. Of course I did. There’s one thing about a McGhee you can count on. His word is his bond, every time.”

  “Thank you, Mr McGhee,” Fergus said, smiling in the dark and snuggling down on his wooden bed which, now padded with good prospects for its occupant, seemed surprisingly comfortable.

  chapter nine

  In the following days, news of Mary McCartney’s vision spread fast around the village and into the surrounding countryside, the story gradually growing in the telling, so that by the evening there was a version that had Wee Mary offering the Blessed Virgin one of her sweets and the Virgin eating the whole bagful. In the Inisbreen Stores and the post office, around the bars of O’Neill’s and the Glens Hotel, and from behind cupped hands in the chapel pews, the word was spread that the woman in white had once more been seen floating above the Mass Rock, as a consequence of which something miraculous would surely happen soon to Mary McCartney, like her husband giving up betting on three-legged horses. Old Mrs Gallaher, a daily communicant and normally a woman of the most moderate language, shocked her neighbour by saying that that McGhee one had always been a cocky little bastard and it would’ve suited him better to have stopped drinking rather than limping. “Now that would’ve been a miracle, and no mistake,” the neighbour had replied.

  Mrs McKay commented on the news which had been conveyed to her early in the morning by the milkman, with the usual snort of disapproval that she reserved for any sign of religious fervour amongst the local population, like when the chapel was crowded every night in Mission Week. She had said that most of the congregation only came because they felt so much better in the pub afterwards. “You tell those Redemptorists, Canon,” she had once said, “to give it to them hot and strong – and not to finish till after the pubs are closed. It’s only the contrast they’re after.” And now she noted with a weary countenance and a sinking heart how Father Burke’s eyes lit up when he heard about Mary McCartney and Wee Mary and said triumphantly,

  “Well now, Mrs McKay, perhaps there’s more to this miracle business than meets the eye after all, hm?”

&nb
sp; “Piece of nonsense if you ask me, Father,” she said as she served him his breakfast of porridge and black tea. If she had had a tendency to irritableness before, the plainness of the diet of what Father Burke called “good basic food” made her much more so, and as she scraped at carrots or hacked the bad bits out of big, woody turnips she often longed for coq au vin or some mussels in garlic and a white wine sauce to lift the gloom of a dark evening. But that was all gone now, and rather than being a pleasure to eat, every meal was like a kind of purgatory to her.

  “Oh ye of little faith,” he chided her, in one of his rare attempts at humour. “I have a feeling about this, Mrs McKay. A feeling deep down in my bones.” The bones to which he referred were primarily his knees, given the hours he had spent on them praying for guidance, for some clear signal on the matter from the Almighty. And now here it was. Not conclusive, of course, but was anything ever in life, or – he shied away from the thought but it assailed his consciousness nevertheless – in faith? But this errant thought only served to make him fight back the stronger. Was it not typical of the low tactics of the Devil that he should seek to undermine this simple priest at the very moment of his triumph of faith? And faith he had in abundance, dinned into him firstly by his mother, with love, and later by the Christian Brothers, with determination and ruthlessness. Thus they had passed on a precious gift to him and he would cherish and protect it – his soul the Ark of the Covenant – and hand it on to others, and that faith would be with him all the days of his life, sustaining him in the grind of daily life, bearing him up in times of particular trial, like the present.

  “Indeed, I’m going this very afternoon to discuss it with the Bishop,” he said to his housekeeper. “As I told you, he wasn’t all that receptive when I first broached the subject, but this time when I ‘phoned him he seemed, well, quite amenable. Ah, the Lord works in mysterious ways, Mrs McKay,” he said, “and of course, a little prayer now and then doesn’t go amiss.”

  Mrs McKay stabbed at a lump of porridge with her spoon, more out of spite than necessity.

  “Are you sure the Bishop knows what you’re going for, Father? You know, he’s quite often away in a wee world of his own, God love him. The Canon used to say he was already halfway to heaven. But then, the Canon is a particular friend of Bishop Tooley. They were always very close.”

  “Mrs McKay,” Father Burke said with a patience worthy of a holy martyr, “I am perfectly capable of making my intentions clear, even to an elderly man who is, shall we say, slightly hard of hearing,” but her question had rekindled the tiny doubt that had been lurking in his mind ever since he had made the telephone call.

  When Mrs McKay sat down to her afternoon cup of tea and cast an eye over the front page of the Northern reporter, she saw in the bottom left-hand corner the headline which said, “Glensman Claims Miracle Cure”. Slowly raising her eyes to heaven she said,

  “God Almighty save us,” and then began to read the small article underneath the headline.

  ‘In the Glens of Antrim village of Inisbreen, John Henry McGhee, a single man in his sixties’ – “That’s a lie for a start,” she interjected – ‘has claimed that he has undergone a miraculous cure to a severe and lifelong disability – a “devastated leg”. The cure happened, Mr McGhee said, at the site of an ancient Mass Rock about a mile outside the village, where Roman Catholics used to worship in secret during the days of the Penal Laws of the eighteenth century. Mr McGhee claims that a woman in white, possibly the Virgin Mary herself, appeared to him at the time and said that people should lead good lives and look after each other. Since the incident last week, a small stream has appeared at the base of the rock, which some local people are declaring is a miraculous stream of holy water. Local parish priest Father Ignatius Loyola Burke, 36, one of the youngest parish priests in Ireland, a member of the prestigious Burkes of Mountjoy family, and a graduate of Dublin University who trained for the priesthood at Maynooth’ – “Well, I wonder who gave them that information” – ‘said yesterday, “It is of course too early to make a final judgement on this, but there can be little doubt that it is not simply the fevered imaginings of religious people. I believe that in our little village something very significant has happened that may grow to have world-wide importance. There is every likelihood that the Good Lord has now rewarded this corner of Ireland for all the love and devotion it has shown to Him over so many centuries.” The Bishop of Down and Connor, Bishop Desmond Tooley, was not available for comment, and neither was the local physician, Doctor Walsh, who has given Mr McGhee a clean bill of health after the incident.’

  Mrs McKay let the newspaper fall to her knees and said aloud,

  “Did ever you hear the likes of it? That drunken wee skitter McGhee has done it now. Played right into the hands of this fella here,” she said, nodding towards the empty study across the hall where Father Burke’s rough sketches for a shrine, a car park and a two-lane highway to the Mass Rock lay spread out on his desk.

  Walking a little stiffly because of the arthritis gnawing at his knees and hips, Bishop Tooley came into his sitting-room, where he saw Father Burke reading a breviary and sitting in his chair, no less. The young parish priest continued to read for a few seconds before looking up. Piety, the Bishop thought, or just a hint of arrogance? On the other side of the fireplace he slowly lowered himself onto the hard, straight-backed chair which should have been taken by his much younger visitor. Father Burke got to his feet and they shook hands.

  “Good afternoon, Bishop Tooley. I trust you are keeping well?”

  There was an eagerness about this young man, a kind of missionary zeal that the Bishop didn’t much care for. It almost always spelt some kind of trouble. Couldn’t they find any priests that were, well, ordinary? If it wasn’t rabid Republicans who wanted to convert all Protestants to Catholicism by force – like those Spaniards in South America did to the natives a few centuries back – and have the whole of Ireland speaking Gaelic within a decade, it was young sophisticates who openly advocated, Liberation Theology and married clergy and talked about “packing it in” – God forgive them – if they decided it wasn’t for them. And what was it this fellow had said he wanted anyway?

  “Good afternoon to you, Father. Don’t let me keep you from your breviary.”

  “Oh, not at all, Bishop, not at all.” He closed the book and patted it lovingly. “It’s very good for passing a spare moment. Always have it within easy reach,” he said and then added quickly, “as I’m sure you do yourself.”

  Bishop Tooley remembered the fellow now. Difficult to make out what he was saying sometimes, what with the hearing going a bit and his Dublin accent. If only there were more vocations to the priesthood from local young men. Look at that time in Ballymane when they had a priest from Clare. Nobody could understand a living word out of him. Nor could the priest make out a word of theirs in the confessional. Weren’t there some people coming out of confession not knowing whether they had been given absolution or not and others claiming to have gotten away with adultery at the price of just a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. One old woman had been in tears, convinced that she’d been told to say a hundred decades of the rosary by “that clown from County Clare”, as he had come to be called, simply for having put salt instead of sugar in her neighbour’s tea because of some minor slight. There were even parishioners who demanded that a tariff of each possible sin and its penance be pinned up on the church noticeboard so that each person could check if he or she had been sentenced in an equitable manner. What’s this his name had been? Father Finnerty? Finaghy? No, wasn’t that where the Orangemen held a parade every year?

  “Thank you for sparing me the time, Bishop”, the young priest broke into the bishop’s thoughts. “I know how very busy they keep you.”

  Busy, did he say? He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Yes, at this time he would normally have been busy – taking a nap.

  “What can I do for you, Father?” The name just escaped him for the moment, bu
t it would come, it would come.

  “You might recall, Bishop, that a few days ago I telephoned you to discuss a rather unusual occurrence in my parish – Inisbreen – where a man had apparently experienced an instantaneous cure to what had been a lifelong affliction.”

  Burke, that was the fellow. He’d once known a family by that name, from Galway, wasn’t it? Father was a headmaster. Lovely man. Obviously no relation to this man.

  “At the time, Bishop, I think you were – quite rightly, I’m sure – somewhat sceptical, although I must say I never had any serious doubts about it myself. Now, however,” in a burst of enthusiasm Father Burke sat forward and clasped his knees, “my suspicions have been totally vindicated. Yesterday evening, two independent witnesses saw the self-same thing at the precise spot where the previous incident occurred, what would appear to be a vision of the Blessed Virgin herself.” The young priest sat back with a smile of self-satisfaction, but the Bishop regarded Father Burke with some incomprehension. Of course people had to bear witness to the Blessed Virgin, had to have a vision of her, as Mother of the human race, as intermediary with the Lord. That went without saying. Surely the man hadn’t come all this way to tell him that. In the circumstances, though, it might be better to humour him. At least he hadn’t come to say he was “packing it in” or wanting to discuss Liberation Theology, thank the Good Lord.

  “I agree with you, Father. Yes, indeed I do.”

  “You do?” Father Burke looked surprised. “Well, I’m very glad to hear that, Bishop.” He smiled and nodded. “Very glad indeed. So, what do you think I should do about it? I was thinking of perhaps,” Father Burke held his hands apart, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “having a shrine built. Oh, nothing elaborate of course, and naturally it would be paid for by public subscription. I mean, it’s early days yet and confirmation is needed, but we really should plan ahead.”