by Edward Toman
His legacy to the ghetto remained. At the bottom of the Falls, a part of town that no separated brother with any wit would ever venture near, there stood a mouldering parochial hall attached to a mouldering parochial house. This was the nerve centre of the project. Previous incumbents, since Big Mac’s time, had been content to keep their heads down, recognizing that their careers were over. Every Saturday they would gather a crowd from the Legion of Mary and distribute their literature outside the Bank Buildings in the centre of the town. Every Sunday night they held a Holy Hour and prayed that the Sacred Heart might open the eyes and hearts of the Orangemen before it was too late. As a strategy for the conversion of the Protestant hordes that occupied the neighbouring Shankill and its tributaries it was fairly low key, for the truth was that no one expected any miracles in this direction any more, even from the Sacred Heart.
Sometimes a stranger, braving the hazards of the Falls would wander into the mission and announce himself a lost sheep come home to the one and only fold. Experience had taught those who laboured in this particular vineyard not to get too excited. It could be guaranteed that by nightfall your man would have discovered that he was the Risen Christ Himself, come to save the world, and it would be time to ring the Mater Hospital for the men in white coats.
Father Schnozzle’s first task, on taking over his new duties, was to scrutinize the books; it came as no great surprise to him that there hadn’t been one true conversion since the records began. Further research uncovered a depressing picture. The parish map revealed great swathes of backstreets where never a penny was contributed for the upkeep of their pastor. He knew his rights. He should start paying house calls, hammering on doors and demanding the dues, as the rule book states. But Father Schnozzle knew that even an ordained priest would be taking his life in his hands venturing down these backstreets. He offered up a prayer to the Infant of Prague for inspiration and waited, knowing that sooner or later something would turn up.
So when ring-master McCoy brought the Ramirez circus to town, Father Schnozzle wasn’t slow to see it as a heaven-sent opportunity to make a name for himself.
Every morning Cardinal Mac had scanned the headlines, following McCoy’s progress through the mountain villages and Schnozzle’s tenacious pursuit of him. He read the blasphemous details of the nightly performances, or at least those that the Irish News could bring itself to print. The man had to be stopped! But it was a sordid business through and through, and not one that he wanted to get caught up in. ‘McCoy is trailing his coat,’ he told those who gathered round him, urging action. ‘Nothing would please him better than to have us enter into a slanging match with him. He’d have us then where he wanted us, on all fours with himself! But the Catholic Church doesn’t trade insults with the likes of McCoy! We’ll let Father Schnozzle handle it in the meantime. It’s dirty work, but he’s a man with nothing to lose.’
Dirty work it was too, running round the countryside after McCoy, braving nightly the wrath of the Loyalists and the batons of the RUC. Marches and vigils and rosary crusades, sermons and statements to the paper every day, his face suddenly as familiar as the thick-necked features of his tormentor and the butt of as much ribaldry. But Father Schnozzle had not flinched from embarrassment or personal danger. ‘Fair play to him,’ Cardinal Mac had remarked. ‘I’d say he has McCoy and Company rattled. It takes one Shambles man to handle another.’
But as suddenly as it had started it was all over. One week Saint Matthew’s was ablaze with candlelit processions and Mass vigils, by the next it was already slipping back into its former obscurity. With Ramirez dead the excitement disappeared, leaving only residual resentment to bum on a slow fuse. Schnozzle’s name disappeared from the papers. An impersonal note from the Palace arrived after a time, grudgingly acknowledging the work he had done. Schnozzle read it twice and threw it in the fire. As he watched the flame he offered a silent prayer to Our Lady, Protector of the Afflicted, for a sign, a small sign, that he had not been deserted completely.
His prayer was answered a year later. A small ray of hope suddenly brightened his life, one small chance of future advancement. It came in the unlikely shape of Cornelius Moran, the first homegrown vocation to the priesthood from the parish in living memory.
Cornelius was a shy, studious boy from the backstreets of the Lower Falls, who had been called from an early age to life in the mission fields. Every week Cornelius collected empty bottles from the back lanes with the other boys, but not a penny ever went on smokes. Each Monday he proudly rattled his earnings into the Black Baby box, knowing that every shilling could save a soul for Christ. As a teenager his sole reading had been The African Missions, his only hobby to sit in his bedroom, wrapped in a winter coat, with both bars of the electric fire blazing away. His mother had remonstrated at first: ‘You’re going to put us in the poor-house, either that or you’ll burn the house down round us,’ but she said it kindly for she knew that he had to acclimatize his body to the tropical conditions to which a higher authority than herself had called him. It was little wonder, then, that when he announced his vocation publicly, the street rallied round and decided to put him through college.
Life in a training college for the African mission fields is not as rigorous as Maynooth, which prepares lads for the home market. The demands of the heathen are less complicated, and the postulants needed only three years (two if they were bright and dedicated) to master the rudiments of their calling. When he set out for Kilkenny on that first morning, the whole street turned out to wish him Godspeed. A missionary priest is not like your local curate, with either money behind him or money in front of him. They had clubbed together to pay his fare south, and already they were organizing the monthly sweepstakes that would subsidize his trip to the tropics. His mother was a widow but the neighbours would see her right, for a priest from the street was like an insurance policy, a talisman that those living there had paid their dues. He was a modest investment in their future.
He returned a year later and they bedecked the street with bunting to welcome him home. He came back the following year to the same welcome, and they noticed the change in him, for he was now a real scholar, less shy among them, shaping up well for what the world had in store for him. He was off every morning after Mass, down to the school library, writing essays and reports and God knows what. They laughed as they saw him hurrying down the street, hardly able to carry the pile of books under his arm. There was no doubt about it, he’d make a great priest, one that would be a credit to them all.
After Mass one morning Cornelius Moran presented himself at the back door of the parochial house with a problem. It was held by his superiors, he told Schnozzle, that a working knowledge of ‘The Rakes of Mallow’ and ‘The Sixteen Hand Reel’ would stand him in good stead in Chililabombwe, as an antidote to the more explicit robust dancing of the Bemba people. ‘Teach those buckoes “The Siege of Ennis” and you’ll have converts by the bucketful,’ his spiritual adviser in Kilkenny, a man not noted for his subtlety, had assured him. But for a priest in training to go dancing he needed the nihil obstat of the parish priest. Schnozzle sucked for a while on the nagging socket of a decaying tooth as he pondered the risks. He knew himself the embarrassment of the céilí dancefloor, having suffered its indignities while studying in the Gaeltacht. But he knew how necessary it might be for a young priest, especially one preparing for foreign parts, to master the unerotic diversions of our ancestors.
‘What harm could there be in Irish dancing!’ he told the boy at last, closing the back door on him.
Cornelius took him at his word, enrolled in the beginners’ class in Saint Matthew’s Hall, and found himself, that first fateful night, partnering Maud Gonne McGuffin in ‘The Sweets of May’.
Since the unfortunate incident with the cactus some years before, Maud Gonne had sprouted into a woman, no longer in the first bloom, who frequented céilís in the parochial hall in the forlorn hope of finding romance. Eligible men were scarce enough on the Fall
s Road at the best of times, and being a McGuffin didn’t make things any easier. Cornelius Moran was the best thing that had come her way in a long time. But to turn a young man and him about to be ordained? It was unthinkable! As she steered Cornelius through the intricacies of the set dance she tried to put the thought of it out of her head. She held his sweaty palm in hers and tried to quell the riot of emotions that were welling up in her bosom.
Hers might not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but from the moment he clasped her elbow for the twirl, Cornelius Moran was smitten. He knew at once that he was in love and that his vocation, so publicly bought, had flown out the window. He moved off the dancefloor like a man in a trance. They shared a mineral and declared their illicit love. By the time the band had struck up The Soldier’s Song’ they were hatching impossible plans to elope from the ghetto and escape into the real world beyond.
McCoy’s Protestant Telegraph put it on the front page:
SCHNOZZLE DURANTE FURY AT TWINKLETOES ‘PRIEST’
DANCING ‘CLASSES’ EXCUSE FOR ORGY
GREAT WHITE HOPE FAILS TO MAKE WEIGH-IN
The boy’s mother was burned out of the street as soon as the news broke. Of the pair themselves there was only sporadic news. They had tried to make it over the border, heading no doubt for that haven of free love, Adam and Eve’s, but the Garda Síochána, alerted by the Belfast accents, hadn’t been long in giving them the bum’s rush. He had tried for a teaching job in Dungannon, but Tyrone men aren’t easily fooled. They had moved to Letterkenny, in far Donegal. There had been a riot – the first in the town’s history. A mob had surrounded the boarding house. Petrol bombs had been thrown. They had been lucky to escape with their lives. After that, the trail went cold.
But this was scant comfort for Schnozzle. The summons to Ara Coeli made clear that the Cardinal too had a subscription to McCoy’s broadsheet. With a sinking heart Schnozzle took the bus to Armagh, climbed the hundred steps to the Palace, rang the bell, blessed himself once more and prepared to face the music.
Though he hadn’t been off the hilltop since his stroke, Cardinal Maguire still knew to the letter what was going on throughout the country. Every hour of the day information poured into the Palace from the four provinces of Ireland, detailing the moral health of the nation. He took a personal interest in every parish in the land, obsessively scrutinizing the weekly returns for any sign of discrepancy; his informants in every corner of the country kept him abreast of the slightest deviation from Canon Law. It was said on the Shambles below that not a parish priest farted but Big Mac Maguire heard about it.
The stroke had done little for his humour, however. The doctors had ordered him to bed and obsequiously hinted at retirement, but he still rose with the lark, hobbling round the ground floor of the house with the aid of a frame and a stick, bawling orders to the scurrying postulants seconded in from the seminary.
Big Mac approached death fearing that his life’s true purpose remained unfulfilled. He had been given an order, that day on the train, and he had turned his back on it, preferring the vanities of earthly advancement. But the dream of his youth now returned to haunt him. When he lay down at night he heard the sweet strains of the ‘Panis Angelicus’ in the Phoenix Park and saw once more the faces of the Irish people upturned towards him, pleading for his help. He was too much of a realist to expect the separated brethren to convert wholesale. But in his nightmares he saw himself approach the Judgment Seat with one arm as long as the other and the prospect filled him with terror. It was a pitiful record. If only he had one genuine conversion to take with him into the void beyond. Just one! One soul plucked from the erroneous path of Calvin and Luther, prepared to seek the truth, whatever the cost.
And though he was now above earthly things, he had a secret ambition yet. Big Mac wanted, more than anything else, to be a saint. In his fitful dreams he saw himself interred with dignity in the graveyard on College Hill in the shade of Ara Coeli; imagined his coffin exhumed after a suitable period by public demand; pictured his body miraculously preserved; thereafter sealed in a glass casket set into the east wall of the nave with a lamp burning in perpetuity. He would be Ireland’s greatest saint since Saint Patrick.
But if Schnozzle Durante was going to screw up in Saint Matthew’s, at the very interface between truth and falsehood, Big Mac knew he could kiss his dream goodbye forever.
‘The bird has flown!’ he shouted, slapping down a copy of the Irish News on the mahogany table while Schnozzle stood awkwardly to attention, twisting his biretta in his fingers. ‘You had your chance! A chance to put Saint Matthew’s on the map at last. And what did you do? You cocked it up!’
‘With respect, Eminence …’
The old man cut him off. This was to be a short audience, and he would do all the talking. ‘You led that boy into an occasion of sin.’
‘The Legion of Mary were on duty …’ Schnozzle mumbled.
‘A crowd who couldn’t control a camogie match! In God’s name, man, what were you thinking of! A parish like that needs something more than the Legion of Mary if you’re ever going to knock the bastards into line! Where are the young people of today who are willing to put their backs into working for our Holy Mother the Church? Have we gone soft altogether? Is the whole nation turning into nothing but a crowd of nancy boys?’
He lifted the telephone and bellowed into it, and seconds later a sweating flunky hurried in with an armful of papers.
‘It’s time, Father, we took a look at your books! Let’s just see what your contribution to our Holy Mother the Church has been since you took over at Saint Matthew’s.’
‘With respect, Your Eminence, I think you’ll agree that Saint Matt’s is a special case.’
‘Of course it’s a special case! The Belfast corner boy is the backbone of the Church! And what’s happening to them? Drifting into foreign ways without the Church as much as lifting a finger! Lying in bed instead of going to Holy Mass! Spending more time in the bookies than in the chapels. Some of them would hardly lift their hat to a bishop now and him walking down the Falls Road! Those lads need a kick up the pants! They need a real man to get them back to their religious obligations.’ He paused and looked at the grotesque figure of the man before him. When he spoke again there was a gentler, more fatherly note in his voice. ‘You’re no fool, Father. You showed what you could do when that bastard McCoy was up to his tricks. There was plenty of fighting talk, I can tell you, but when it came to the bit you were the only one prepared to take him on. But this is a bigger battle. Things are slipping, and if someone doesn’t make a stand soon we may as well all pack our bags. There’ll be no second chances! I want results! I don’t care how you do it, but get it done!’
‘Yes, Your Eminence.’
The old man lifted the spreadsheets and threw them in the wastepaper basket. ‘And get someone to keep an eye out for the bold Cornelius Moran and his lovely bride. There’s no point in molesting them at this stage, the damage is done, but we need to know where the bird has flown to. Joe Feely and his amadán son are never off the roads! You’ll not be long finding him on the Shambles.’
‘Yes, Your Eminence.’
‘And one last thing, Father. No more sixteen-hand reels!’
Father Schnozzle staggered out of the back door of the Palace and descended into the gloom of the Shambles, the old man’s valediction burning his ears. A lesser man would have thrown in the hat, accepted his fate and turned to the bottle for solace. But Schnozzle had other plans. With God’s help he would knock Saint Matthew’s into shape if it was the last thing he did. Meanwhile he would find Feely and give him his orders. There were lights burning in the Patriot Bar. He reckoned he wouldn’t have far to look.
Though the vegetable man swore he had seen him getting on the Belfast bus, Schnozzle’s visit had put a dampener on the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t the done thing for the clergy to be seen rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi. There were special premises, discreetly o
ut of town, which catered for their needs. If Schnozzle Durante was going to make a habit of chasing them into public bars, they were thinking, they might as well go on the wagon and be done with it.
Strangers never come singly, as the old people would tell you. And sure enough, just before closing, they heard a car draw up outside and the Patriot Bar had its second visitor of the night.
Eugene paused in mid-sentence as Canon Tom, cool as a cucumber, sauntered in and rested his hat on the counter. ‘We have the snug, Father,’ he said, indicating the dim annexe under the stairs, ‘or I’m sure the proprietor would be happy to put the upstairs parlour at your disposal …’
The Canon laughed. It was the easy laugh of a happy man. ‘Don’t put yourself out, like a good lad,’ he assured Eugene. ‘I’ll merely trouble you for a half bottle of five-star cognac, if your establishment runs to such a luxury. And forty Sweet Afton. I’ve a drive and a half ahead of me.’ He paused, looking nonchalantly round the silent faces in the bar. Frank was propped up on a stool in the far corner with a mineral and the Irish News for company. He put aside the paper and stared at the stranger in innocent amazement. Any priests he had come across were wiry unkempt men, forever asking troublesome questions; but the man at the bar was out of a different stable altogether, self-assured and confident, rotund and impeccably coiffed. Frank took in the details of the well-cut suit, the light-weight gaberdine thrown casually over the shoulders, the mellifluous accent of the Curragh, the pervasive smell of aftershave and aromatic tobacco. He had not realized that a man could be like this. All his father’s friends were rough and ready boys, perpetually on the point of thumping you when they weren’t taking the piss out of you. But here was someone from a new world, a world a thousand miles from the Shambles.