Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  Up till now the Holy Ghost had always been the least assertive partner in the Trinity. The curled leaf of the shamrock, Canon Tom was fond of calling Him. (Or Her, or It. The Love Children were very hot on non-sexist language.) But while He, She or It was what the doctor ordered at the beginning, the Canon was beginning to worry if things weren’t getting more than a bit out of control. Unlike the austere strictures of the Father, or the high moral tone adopted by the Son, the Holy Ghost gave them a free rein. Overnight they had thrown out the scholastic hairsplitting that had nurtured a millennium of clerics. They had overcome at a stroke the restrictive ‘thou-shalt-nots’. They had sidestepped the insistence on allegiance to Canon Law. They had thrown out guilt and found love. It was all becoming a great love-feast. Love was the only commandment, the only law. Love for family and friends, strangers and neighbours, self love, love for the opposite sex, love (he blanched slightly) for our own sex. The Holy Ghost opened up a new conduit to the top. Before too long, if things went the way they were going, the priests of the country would be redundant.

  He was well equipped for the day’s vigil. A full packet of Sweet Afton (‘the smoke most PPs prefer’) and a half bottle of Jameson had been previously secreted in the folds of an old carpet. He had a copy of the Racing Press and the Form Book. The sooner they set off for Lough Derg the happier he would be. There were a few business deals on the back burner that he needed to give more attention to, and lately the shenanigans of the Children of Love were taking up too much of his time. He flinched as he heard the sound of breaking glass above the babel of tongues. He eased himself further down between the carpets and took another shot of the Jameson. He knew he was in for a long wait. Somewhere in the distance, along the quay, a bell was tolling mournfully. Evening Mass, old style, in the city. There was something to be said for its unchanging certainties. He lit another cigarette. Was there any way he could stop them picking up their banners and heading for the streets when they got to fever pitch? If he could keep it in the parish he might just survive, but if they persisted in invading other territories, demanding changes and threatening the PPs, there would be official complaints. He watched the thin column of smoke curl upwards towards the ceiling. The Cardinal’s words came into his head and nagged at his brain. Any cock-ups, and you will carry the can.

  In the privacy of his drawing room Cardinal Maguire, in defiance of his doctor’s orders, lit a small cheroot, kicked off his satin slippers and turned once more to the sheaf of papers before him. The quarterly reports from Saint Matthew’s had just been delivered, and Canon Tom had faxed his through from Adam and Eve’s during the night. It was time to examine the fluctuating fortunes of the two parishes.

  At first glance they had nothing in common. But Big Mac Maguire had been in the business long enough to know that appearance and substance were not the same thing. The two polarities, the broad boulevards of Adam and Eve’s and the squalid back alleys of Saint Matthew’s, could hold the key to the moral future of the island. The two cities were restless and unreliable places, potentially explosive, even when you least expected it.

  But if a man of leadership were to emerge it would be from the big cities. He had thought that man might be Canon Tom. Maybe he had been fooling himself? Was Tom really the man to step into his shoes when his Maker called him home? Could he die happy knowing that Canon Tom was in charge?

  Despite his personal distaste for the idea, he had to acknowledge that Schnozzle Durante had staked his claim to be taken seriously.

  There was no denying that Saint Matthew’s, long considered a lost cause, was at last beginning to show a profit. More than that, it had become a positive success, and model for others. Father Schnozzle had delivered the goods. With the help of the Sisters he had put the parish on the map. Immaculata McGillicuddy was a rough diamond, but her methods were effective; backsliding in the ghetto was a thing of the past. The Sisters were on the streets every Sunday, shepherding the faithful into the churches. He had heard they made house calls on those who failed to make it to the chapel. The old man smiled. Crude but effective, and good enough for the buckoes in Belfast. The Sisters, he heard, were everywhere; at the back of the churches, rooting out the whisperers and the dozers. They were in the bookies, ensuring that the parochial house got the divvy it was entitled to on each bet. They were in the classrooms, checking that the biology books contained no references to contraception or other practices that might thwart the natural law; they patrolled the shebeens in the parish, censoring lewd music and unpatriotic sentiments; they haunted the disused gasworks and the derelict railway lines, formerly great occasions of sin, rooting out lechery and debauchery. The parish was turning into a model of decorum. They weren’t afraid to leave the ghetto either; every weekend they were at the Bank Buildings, ready to crack Protestant heads for the greater glory of the Church.

  Then there was Adam and Eve’s. He had been following events in the parish with mounting unease. The weekly spreadsheet showed Mass attendances up by ten per cent and still rising. The coffers had never been more full. There was no denying the fact that the Canon had delivered the goods as per contract. But his spies brought back strange stories from the hill, of new hymns sung to the tambourine and sitar, of mantras endlessly chanted, of smiling couples approaching the rails hand-in-hand, and of congregations standing all morning, their arms outstretched, pleading with the Holy Spirit to descend on them.

  Should he take decisive action, or should he let the hare sit? He looked again at the balance sheets. Maybe the Canon was on to something after all. But could he control it? Could he continue to satisfy the expectations of his people? Or would the whole thing end in chaos?

  He knew that sooner or later a choice would have to be made. Either the country went the way of Adam and Eve’s or it went the way of Saint Matt’s. He lit another cigar and offered up a silent prayer to the Sacred Heart for guidance. When he died there would be a struggle for the moral heartland of the nation. Between the traditional teaching and practices of Our Holy Mother the Church and the modernism that was threatening to engulf us from all sides. He knew where he stood! He stood foursquare with every primate since the time of Saint Patrick. There was no other choice. Canon Tom might have them dancing in the aisles, but it was the path of heresy, the road to modernism, the way to damnation.

  There would come a right time to intervene and remove this cancer in the body of Holy Ireland. Not now, when the movement was in its infancy and still under the glare of publicity. He would give it a few more months. Cracks and splits were sure to develop; he had never seen an Irish movement of any sort that hadn’t split within six months. Before long there would be a scandal of one sort or another. He would see to it that a cumann of the Little Sisters was sent to reconnoitre the parish and keep him informed of all developments. Canon Tom had opened a can of worms by raising the people’s expectations to a level that could not be met. When the time was ripe, he would step in and re-assert his authority, re-affirm the one, true orthodoxy. There would be no doctrinal scandal, no schism in the Church. He had the measure of Canon Tom; greed, he felt sure, would get the better of him before long.

  Eight

  ‘Bóthar na Mine Bhuí?’ the Patriot said, slowly deciphering the faded Celtic lettering on the bottle. ‘Bóthar na Mine Bhuí?’

  ‘Every drop distilled in the Gaeltacht. Bottled by native speakers,’ Joe assured him. ‘It would be a patriotic privilege to stock it.’

  ‘Where in the name of God did you get this?’ Eugene asked.

  ‘Taste a drop,’ Joe insisted. ‘Pure nectar!’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Eugene agreed reluctantly, ‘that a wee drop of it would do us any great harm.’ He knew there was a crate of the stuff, similarly labelled, sitting outside behind the tractor. He clamped the cork between his teeth and pulled. The saloon bar was filled with the acrid stench of rotting potatoes, driving before it the dank smells of the customers’ clothes and the aroma of pigshit from Joe’s shoes.

 
‘What in God’s name is it anyway?’ asked the Tyrone man, suddenly taking a great interest. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and spat drily. ‘Is it poteen or what?’

  ‘Do you want to try a drop?’ demanded Eugene.

  ‘Sure I’d try anything.’

  ‘It might be a bit strong, even for yourself.’

  ‘Devil the harm it’ll do me.’

  ‘This particular brew might have gone off a bit.’

  ‘It must be from Donegal; nothing from round here ever smelt that bad.’ He had noticed, stencilled faintly above the label, the name Sharkey, and the legend ‘Export and Import, Annagary.’

  ‘A drop of poteen is what the doctor ordered on a cold night like this,’ Joe said.

  ‘I don’t think your doctor ever ordered this stuff,’ Eugene laughed.

  ‘It’s never done me any harm. Wasn’t I as good as reared on it?’ said the Tyrone man.

  The Patriot lifted the bottle slowly. There was a hiss. A couple of drops of steaming, foul-coloured liquid trickled on to the floor where they spluttered and bubbled, burning their way down through the lino and into the boards below.

  ‘God but that’s powerful stuff,’ marvelled Joe. ‘I’d have to agree with you now that that particular brew might be just a bit off.’ They all laughed. ‘We’d be wise to give it a miss, I suppose. By the look of it, a glass or two of that particular boy would give you the shites.’

  ‘The shites?’ the Tyrone man shouted. ‘It would give you a damn sight more than the shites!! The fumes off it alone would send you blind. I’ll tell you, mister, what that stuff would do to you. One slug of that would burn your throat raw; it would eat your guts out, shrivel up your liver like a walnut, burst your kidneys and burn your arsehole alive. And that is only the start of it …’

  ‘You’ve done your research, I can see,’ Joe said, sensing the other’s enthusiasm.

  ‘One good pull of that stuff and the eyeballs in your head would burst and your brains begin to bubble.’

  ‘You sound like you’ve had a rough night or two in your time.’

  ‘Now, if it’s poteen you’re after, an uncle of the wife’s in the Sperrin Mountains …’

  But no one was listening to the Tyrone man. All eyes had returned to the floor where the drops of liquid were still eating down into the foundations.

  ‘It would make grand poison all the same,’ Joe said after a while, ‘if you had rats or that about the place.’

  The Patriot took the bottle, carefully re-sealed it and placed it on a high shelf.

  ‘It looks the part there all right,’ Joe said. Together they silently admired the label. Below the ornate lettering was a watercolour of a bleak western scene depicting mountains, bogs and cliffs. In the bottom corner of the picture stood a ruined chapel before which a lonely figure knelt in prayer. And in the top corner, staring out at them with enigmatic eyes, was a drawing of a statue of the Virgin identified only as An Mhuire Chiúin.

  ‘An Mhuire Chiúin!’ the Patriot declared after a pause.

  ‘I can see himself is taken with that part of it,’ said Joe. ‘Our Lady the Silent! A Gaelic Madonna. You could see how it would strike a chord all right.’

  ‘That picture gives me the creeps,’ the Tyrone man said. ‘The sister has one the same; the frigging eyes follow you around the room.’

  For once, and against their better judgement, they had to agree with him. There was something hypnotic about the picture. Something about that unflinching gaze that demanded your attention. And though Eugene had the stove burning in the corner, a chill had entered the Patriot Arms.

  ‘If that bottle could speak,’ said Joe after a while, ‘I imagine it could tell us a tale or two …’

  Bóthar na Mine Bhuí, or the Road of the Yellow Meal, ran, those who built it said bitterly, from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all. It had been constructed during one of the periodic famines that the area had suffered. In the houses of the poor (and who wasn’t poor in Donegal, that most desolate of counties?) the women and children lay dying, and the gaunt men haunted the roads searching for food. The road was begun as famine relief, for only the deserving poor would live. There was little need, then or since, for a road that climbed over the mountains and down to the crashing Atlantic, but rather than give the Indian meal away as charity, the English made them work for it. Back-breaking work it was too, shattering the rocks and fording the bogs, in return for a bag of yellow corn at the end of the month. The road snaked up into the mountains, climbing at times almost perpendicularly, then plunged precipitously down to the moors between the bleak, granite peaks. It climbed again and again, for these western mountains seem to go on and on forever, till at last you hear the sea pounding at the cliffs below and glimpse, if the day is clear, the pillars of Tory Island far out on the horizon.

  After a third winter on the yellow meal half the workforce had died from dysentery and the other half had packed it in. Pestilence and famine still stalked the land, but the yellow porridge was dust in their mouths and sand in their bowels. At Whitsun the last of them departed, pushing their few belongings on hand carts before them. They headed for Derry, five days away to the east, and the boats on the Foyle that would take them to the New World. The road had never reached its destination, wherever it might have been. It came to a stop in a hollow under the mountains above the ocean. It was a place so desolate that they dared not name it.

  Thirty years later, after the famine had lifted, men returned to this lonely spot. It was a time of triumph; the Pope in far-off Rome had discovered his infallibility and a great synod of bishops had decreed that every parish in Ireland should have a church and that no man should be more than a day’s walk from the house of a priest. All over the country the chapels were going up. But by the time they reached the nameless glen in the mountains, fervour and money were on the wane. A church had been built, but there was something half finished both about it and the parochial house beside it. Its rectangular starkness reflected the austere style of the Established Church rather than the Church of Rome. It had none of the gothic intricacies that delighted congregations elsewhere; there was no stained glass, no carved stone, no spire or tower, only a low rectangle of rubble and pebbledash, weathering badly in an exposed setting.

  The parish was the largest in Ireland; it was the most westerly; it was by far the poorest. It dung by its fingertips to the crumbling Atlantic coastline. All around lay the ruins of previous attempts at habitation, until the cycle of famine and eviction had been too much for the people, and they had fled forever, leaving the place deserted. It was an area without history, or hope, or pride, or prospects.

  Except for one remarkable thing. An Mhuire Chiúin. The Silent Madonna.

  For nearly a century the statue had stood in a crude niche in the church wall, facing out to sea. Where she had come from no one was certain. Even when there had been people in the parish, no two stories of her discovery were ever the same. One side of the glen held that she had come from the sea, that she had been found by local children bobbing among the seals below the cliffs as they hunted for driftwood. It was said she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck on the cruel rocks beyond Tory, and that the men had risked life and limb venturing down the cliffs on ropes to rescue her. Her arrival was a sign from above that God had not completely forgotten the Irish people. The far side of the glen held to a different version of her arrival. Labourers on the Yellow Meal Road, they said, had dug her from the peat where she had lain since ancient times. For a while, till the clergy put a stop to it, there was a rash of even wilder rumours; some of the people pointed to her oval eyes, her full lips and flattened nose and hinted darkly that she had come from further afield than Tory Island. Her features were indeed very different from those on the ubiquitous chalk figurines; did they hint at an Oriental or African origin? Was she a refugee from some lost Aztec nation? The old men who believed she came from the bog had their own wild tales too. She had been buried there since before the arrival
of Saint Patrick, they whispered. With the precaution of many pious ejaculations they claimed that she was an icon of the old goddess Danaan, one-time leader of that shadowy race which had inhabited Ulster since the dawn of the world and which had melted away with the coming of the Celts.

  Superstitious talk that, and dangerous talk too! Such stories were nothing strange in the years following the famines, when God had deserted the people altogether, and when Satan himself was roaming the lanes of the west sniffing out the dead and the dying. But the hungry years passed. The clergy re-asserted themselves. The church was built on the spot where the last of the mass graves had been dug and the Silent Madonna crudely cemented into the back wall. In time the pishrogues were all but forgotten.

  Later, during the Marian Year, it had been decreed that all the statues in the land were to be given a lick of paint. Old man Sharkey had arrived from Annagary with two pots, one blue and one white, and for a short time thereafter the Madonna resembled the plaster virgins that adorned every Calvary and Lourdes grotto up and down the country. But before the Marian Year was out, aided by the sharp sea wind and the biting rain, she had shrugged off the pastel colours and reverted to her sombre livery.

  There was something slightly menacing about the stare with which she fixed any who passed through the graveyard. Her face had none of the simpering modesty of the modern Madonna. Its openness was disconcerting. Unlike the others she never smiled. They addressed her in Irish only, for it was widely believed that supplications in any other tongue would be taken as an insult. But even in the face of the purest Gaelic, she remained impassive, surveying her bleak domain with disdainful hauteur.