by Edward Toman
The B Specials brought him home at two o’clock. He had been picked up in Armagh with a crowd as bad as himself. Standing in the middle of the Shambles, the sergeant said, testifying with menaces. He quoted dispassionately from his notes till Lily shut him up. He was apologetic but firm. Seeing it was the religion that had gone to his head, they’d say no more about it, but two-fingered gestures from prod or taig constituted a breach of the peace. If Mister Magee found he was still saved in the morning maybe he’d do them all a favour and keep it to himself.
He got the sharp end of her tongue for the next month but he suffered in silence. He knew he had made a fool of her, showing her up in front of the neighbours. The joy of the night had been shortlived, and he had woken the next morning with a sore head and an empty heart. Whatever service Brother Billy had provided the previous night it hadn’t taken. Life was as empty and as treacherous as it had always been. In his moment of darkness, he began to doubt the Lord and turn away from his Holy Word.
But Lily was a kindly woman in her own way, and she hated seeing him in the state he was in. So when she spotted the advertisement in the Protestant Telegraph for a new Gold Star service from the Reverend Doctor McCoy (‘YOU’VE TRIED THE REST – NOW TRY THE BEST! Full money back guarantee if not completely satisfied’) she clipped out the coupon at once and began to put some of the housekeeping money aside.
It was a cold autumn evening when McCoy strode up to the door. He was dressed from head to toe in black. He wore a woolly Russian hat against the chill wind and a greatcoat that hung almost to his ankles. ‘Where’s himself?’ he demanded. She indicated upstairs. The whole street had turned out in the expectation of more crack, but he silenced them with a single stare. ‘Tell all these people to move away,’ he boomed from the doorway. ‘This isn’t a peepshow. This is the work of the Lord.’
The two men were closeted together for the next hour. Then she heard the footsteps of the preacher heavy on the stairs. She rushed to offer tea but he refused. She slipped the money into his hand and he pocketed it without acknowledgement. ‘You’ll have no more trouble with your man, missus,’ was all he said. ‘The Lord is powerful!’ Without another word he turned on his heel, leaving a faint smell of whiskey lingering in the small kitchen.
But McCoy had been as good as his word. From that day onward Magee lived a life of righteousness and his household with him. They prayed together daily, before and after meals, and testified on the street corner every Saturday. He donned his suit every Sunday and cycled over to Armagh where he assisted McCoy as he laboured in the tin chapel bringing others home to Jesus. He never again visited the Legion or was tempted by the thought of liquor, never again smoked his pipe or laughed at what he read in the paper. And the sound of the Orange flute was heard no more in the house.
No one would willingly befriend a Portadown man, even one that is saved and walks in the way of the Lord. But even the most vocal critic of the place will admit that the Portadown man, though singularly lacking in the social graces, has a rare head for business. And while McCoy had never liked the place, knowing its inhabitants to be parsimonious even when their eternal future was at stake, he wasn’t long in recognizing Magee’s potential as a financial consultant. The Martyrs Memorial, never at the best of times the goldmine its detractors across the square claimed it to be, was now on its uppers. Seven lean years had left the coffers empty. McCoy took the butcher aside one Sunday morning and tried to tap him for a loan. But the Portadown man’s wallet stays buttoned, even to those who have been the agent of his salvation. Magee, instead, volunteered his services at twenty-five per cent, spent the afternoon going over the books, such as they were, drew up an inventory of the goods and chattels, put his finger on some of the more obvious problems and made a few marketing suggestions that were soon put into practice.
‘If you want to get anywhere you’ll have to change that name of yours. Your father did you no favour calling you Oliver,’ stated Magee in his blunt Portadown way.
‘Oliver Cromwell was a Protestant hero; he put the papists in their place once and for all. I’m proud to bear his name!’
‘Oliver’s a Fenian name. It’s been a Fenian name ever since that saint of theirs got the chop.’ It was true of course. Every second one of them seemed to be called Oliver, after Oliver Plunkett whose gruesome, severed head grinned out from the altar in Drogheda.
‘And as for calling yourself Doctor Oliver, it makes you sound like a papist GP. And who do you think you’re fooling with the “Doctor” anyway? Everyone knows you got it for a fiver from the Harvey Wallbanger University of Kentucky! We’ll start calling you Reverend O.C. McCoy. It has a bit of a military ring about it.’ McCoy liked the sound of it and agreed. ‘Next we’ll organize a few Ulster Hall meetings, to get your message through to the people of the Shankill. That’s where the money is. Maybe we’ll fit you up with some transport while we’re at it! And something else. It’s about time you started getting some support from the boys that really matter.’ McCoy knew he meant the groups of hooded men who lurked round the Protestant periphery, demanding protection money. He would leave that end of things to the butcher, for who better than a Portadown man to negotiate such a deal?
The second problem Magee isolated was more fundamental. It had to do with McCoy’s grasp of the sacred texts. McCoy didn’t know his scripture the way a preaching man should. He imagined he had learned enough from listening to the old man, or from his mother when she had taken penny Sunday school, but in later life he had difficulty getting some of the more complicated passages quite right. Worse still, he had difficulty getting any sense out of them. The years he had spent propping up the crew bar on the Stranraer ferry with a variety of companions, some of them very unscriptural indeed, had embedded in his brain a number of quotations and catchphrases of dubious origin. In moments of stress, the Reverend McCoy would attribute these to the Ancients.
‘“The mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley sheep arc fatter,” ‘he would proclaim to the startled citizens of Ballymoney. ‘“We therefore thought it meeter for to carry off the latter.” Proverbs, Chapter two, Verse two.’
‘“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”’ was another favourite. He firmly believed in its inspired origins, and not even Magee’s firmest denials could persuade him to drop it from his repertoire. And while it was undoubtedly good enough for Ballymoney, it cut no ice with the new classes of born-again youngsters that the times were producing. Young smart-arses reared on free school milk, who were hearing the call to their Saviour in their teens and earlier, and who had taken to frequenting the scripture halls and Bible tents, swapping chapter and verse with their elders.
There had been an embarrassing scene one night in the Shambles. McCoy was standing at the serving window of the van, warm as toast from the gas ring at his backside, preaching to a huddled gathering who had braved the elements to hear the Lord’s Word. A smooth-faced young pup had stepped forward, Bible in hand, to accuse him of heresy, shouting to the people to beware, the words they were hearing were not those of Holy Writ but of that papist pomographer and stooge of Rome, William Shakespeare. Magee had been on to him in seconds, and a deft kick in the groin had silenced his warbling. A few of the other men had joined in, dragging him off towards Scotch Street for further attention. But though McCoy had tried to make a joke of it, calling the youth a papist infiltrator from the other side of the Shambles, the incident rattled Magee. He returned to Portadown and the butcher’s shop, swearing he would not return till McCoy had dropped all Hamlet’s soliloquies from his act.
Then he heard of the Mexicans for the first time.
Frank had to wait another month before he heard the end of the story, for the topic of Señora McCoy was banned in the Feely household. But when confession night came round again, Joe took him with him to the Shambles, his mother putting up only token resistance. And though the topic was banned in the bar too, when they were all in the snug, out of the Patriot’s earshot, the
conversation edged round to the seductress who lived across the square.
‘It was a bad business and no mistake,’ the Tyrone man said.
‘I don’t like to talk about it yet at home,’ Joe agreed. ‘She took it very badly.’
‘If he’d brought the pair of them round our way the Tyrone people would never have put up with it.’
‘You’d have done shite all, the same as the rest of us!’ Joe assured him, refusing to rise to the bait.
They set out home at midnight. It was a long walk but the night was mild, with only the faintest drizzle. The fresh air will do us both a power of good,’ Joe claimed, ‘and I’ll explain to you what that eejit was on about on the way. To tell you the truth it’s not something you’d want to talk about to anyone and everyone. A lot of people are still up in arms about that stunt. That was taboo behaviour and McCoy knows it.’
Magee was serving in the shop when he first got wind of Ramirez and wife doing the rounds in Scotland. A cousin of Lily’s, an exiled son of the town home for a funeral, had been sent to buy chops and was whiling away a dull afternoon regaling Magee’s customers with tales from the other side. And though he pretended to show no interest one way or the other when the cousin began to describe the priest and the great show he could put on, the butcher was all ears. ‘It would be a sure-fire money-spinner for the likes of Reverend McCoy,’ the exile confided. Magee said nothing, but he had heard enough to know that he had hit the nail on the head. He closed the shop early, told Lily brusquely to mind her own affairs when she started on him, and headed for Armagh.
McCoy heard him out in silence and then told him to fuck off. ‘Do you want to see me crucified? Is that it? Pull a stunt like that in a town like this and there’s no telling where it will end!’
‘You’re afraid of the papists?’
‘McCoy fears no man! But this is a fifty-fifty town. The likes of you, from Portadown, have no conception of what that means.’
‘It means you put the popeheads in their place every chance you get, and with this bucko on the payroll you’ll never get a better chance.’
On that note Magee took his leave. He knew the preacher well enough to know that he would warm to it before long.
But though McCoy hated popery and papists with a righteousness second to none, there was one part of him that still shrank back from this particular venture. Would it not be going too far? he wondered. Would it unleash a backlash from the Fenians, one that would plumb new depths of fury? Armagh, after all, was a city where gratuitous savagery was never far from the surface.
A week later Magee was back, lugging a carrier bag behind him. ‘Say nothing till you see this!’ he ordered, pulling McCoy with him into the box room. He upended the bag and a jumble of gaudy vestments, altar vessels and sacristy bells fell clanging to the floor. Magee pulled an alb clumsily over his head and struggled with the chasuble.
McCoy began to laugh. ‘You’ve been raiding a chapel by the look of things. I hope you remembered the poor box while you were at it.’
‘Look at these fucking things,’ Magee said. ‘The country prods will be going apeshit when the show gets on the road.’
‘I’m still thinking about it,’ McCoy said, but it was clear that it was all systems go. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you slip over to the Boyne Bar the way you are and give the fellas a laugh!’
‘Fuck off!’ Magee said, putting his foot to the door and struggling out of the vestments. ‘Do you want to get the pair of us killed?’
Next morning he wrote to the cousin in Tillicoultry, enclosing a postal order and a contract for the Mexican and his señora. He hung around the docks at Larne studying the passengers till he spotted his man stumbling down the gangplank. Magee took the bewildered Mexican firmly by the arm leaving the señora to struggle with the baggage as best she could. ‘Welcome to Ulster, hombre!’ he said, marching him towards the Armagh bus.
Before the end of the month they were heading for the hills with Schnozzle in full pursuit.
McCoy, it was agreed, had once again come up with the perfect formula for inflaming the Fenians while simultaneously entertaining the Protestants. Padre José Ramirez was a one-time Catholic priest and now apostate and scourge of Romanism. After a lifetime spent in the service of the harlot of the Tiber, Padre Ramirez had seen the light, heard the call of the living Christ, accepted the same into his heart, forsworn his former blasphemous ways and married a nun. All in the space of a week. He had been drummed out of Latin America, since when he had made a precarious living warning Protestants, wherever they might be found, about the dangers of Romanism. With the help of his new wife he had cobbled together a show and taken it on the road, billing himself as The man who’s heard ten thousand confessions!’ His compañera, the escaped nun, promised to spill the beans on convent life. The couple had enjoyed limited success in the American Midwest and the more remote regions of the Low Countries; thereafter their fortunes began to fade, and their tour of the Scottish borders was heading for bankruptcy. El padre had been on the point of calling it a day and heading back to the pampas when he got the call from Ulster. Reverend McCoy explained to them that the people of the noble province deserved something special. The butcher Magee would act as bodyguard and factotum, and, under McCoy’s tutelage, the show would become a work of art.
Predictable scenes ensued each night of the tour. The Orange halls were packed to the doors with the crowd overflowing outside, and the proceedings relayed to them over the crackling Tannoy. There would be a few rousing hymns to get everybody in the mood, and then McCoy would stride forward to introduce his guests. The lights would dim; every eye was focused on the priest’s wife as she stepped forward to deliver her well-rehearsed testimony. She spoke little English, but, blessed with the gift of tongues, McCoy was on hand to translate for the eager congregation the secret sins of the confessional and the truth of the depravity behind the cloister wall. The Ulster Presbyterian is uniquely preoccupied with the sex life of nuns. As the lady on the podium rattled out her memoirs, the draughty hall was filled instantly with images of dark-skinned nuns and novices, their habits carelessly discarded, in furious copulation; filled with the raw sexuality of Carnival, the winding streets of the barrio alive with carnal temptation; filled with the aftermath of the bacchanal, the leering priests squeezing each lustful detail from the penitents for their titillation.
It was all a long way from life in Portadown.
McCoy knew he was out of his depth. He thought of himself as well travelled, having been an itinerant in the service of the Lord all his days. He felt he knew more about the temptations of the flesh than his congregation. It is a well-known theological fact that the devil will put more of that sort of temptation in the way of a preaching man than he will any other. Nevertheless, as he ran the lady nightly through her reminiscences – bestiality among the celibate monks of the high sierras (something that the sheep farmers of the high ground of Antrim and Armagh could relate to); lesbianism and other unnatural practices among the nuns in Acapulco (relieved by occasional visitations from new chaplains) – McCoy sometimes found it hard to be as specific as he felt the señora demanded.
But it was enough for them. More than enough for these country boys and their womenfolk, half of whom had never been outside their own townland. They would be in a high state of arousal by the time he came to introduce his second guest, the fallen priest himself.
McCoy’s coup de grâce had been to dress Ramirez up in his full canonicals – biretta, surplice and alb – and have him re-enact the ritual of the Mass, that blasphemous parody that stood at the heart of Romanism. Ramirez was a wizened little man, but, dressed up in the full rig-out, he cut an awesome figure as he stood before the Protestant farmers and their wives and began intoning the unfamiliar words: ‘Introibo ad altare Deo; ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum.’ He consecrated the wafer and held it before them for their ridicule: ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’
McCoy, microphone in hand, kept up a running
exegesis on the proceedings. ‘The wee pancake has just had the magic words said over it. The Romanists would have us believe that it is now Our Saviour. If they had their way they would have us bend our knees to that pancake. Bow our heads to it, like the darkies in Africa before their pagan idols. Well, I’ve got news for them tonight. Mister Magee here is a Portydown man, and he doesn’t like to waste anything, so I can assure you that after the show’s over, he’ll be feeding those wee pancakes to his pigs. Waste not, want not!’
Ramirez moved on to the chalice, pouring a good measure of the altar wine into it and slowly enunciating the words of consecration over it. Then, as his wife rang the bell, he held the golden chalice aloft, triumphantly, like a sportsman with a trophy, holding it there for them to admire, to praise, to worship. They rose to their feet in a paroxysm of hatred and fear and righteousness.
‘People of Ulster,’ bellowed McCoy, ‘this is what the priests of Rome want you to believe. That this mockery should take over from the Bible, the only true word of God. This is what the Romanists in our midst do every Sunday, chewing the wee wafer and slurping wine from the same cup, spreading their filth among themselves. And if it wasn’t for the eternal vigilance of the Ulster people and their pastors, this is what they would force us to do too.’ Father Ramirez meanwhile was concentrating on the Communion. When he had seen the light he had given up the cactus juice, but McCoy noticed him lingering longingly over the chalice, like a man in two minds, and hurried him along to wind up the proceedings. The show was almost over, and already Magee was moving among them, bucket in hand. They would be generous. They had had their money’s worth. Nobody, they told themselves, could put on a show to match the Reverend McCoy. For nothing (but nothing) can match the orgiastic frisson that runs through the born-again Presbyterian at the paradox of an ordained priest of Rome (albeit a defrocked one who has come home to Jesus) celebrating the Roman Catholic Mass on the platform of his local Orange hall. It was unanimously agreed that it was a stunt only McCoy could have pulled.