Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  By the time the church had been built the last of the people had left. They promised that one day they would return, but the exile never comes back. The area was forgotten. The Silent Madonna was forgotten. The churchyard lay derelict, visited only by the gulls and the wind and the ghosts of the dead. Until the day Sharkey’s donkey and cart came clattering over the Yellow Meal Road, carrying the bedraggled figures of Cornelius Moran, the spoiled priest, and Maud Gonne McGuffin, his pregnant bride.

  ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ he told her, ‘that where you find a single malt and an open fire, there you’ll find a parish priest, sipping the one in front of the other.’ But though Cornelius kept the turf well stacked on the open hearth winter and summer, and though the bottle was always handy on the dresser, no members of the clergy ever darkened his door. Nor anyone else. In the window a flyblown notice advertised ‘Bia agus Leapa’ – bed and breakfast – but no passing traveller had ever ventured along the road and asked for the service. The mountains were high and treacherous, the road was impassable for most of the year, but he knew that these were not the only reasons for his isolation. What mountain or road had ever hindered a curate anxious for a céilí? In the good bedroom, the sheets were crisp and aired, at the disposal of any man of the cloth (and his travelling companion for that matter) who might happen to be passing, on a golfing holiday or to do a bit of fishing, or to visit dying relatives in the vicinity. ‘It’s a godforsaken place all right,’ he agreed, ‘but its day will come. Mark my words.’

  Maud Gonne knew that if good times were to come, they would come long after she had gone. Every waking minute of the day she pined for the Falls Road of her dreams, ignorant of the changes that Schnozzle had wrought in the aftermath of her treachery. She dreamed of soft pan bread and yellow marge, the predictable badinage of Patrick Pearse, her brother, over the kitchen table, the gridiron of little streets and their homely odours of coal and sausages, the familiar accents of the women, the timeless pattern of their lives together in the ghetto, now gone forever. Here they were at the mercy of Sharkey and his sons for all their provisions. She watched Cornelius, in a matter of months, grow grey and haggard trying to wrestle a living from the peat bog behind the house and the potato patch at the side. She knew she would never live to enjoy the child and when death came she embraced it as a release. Sharkey buried her without formality in the graveyard at the back of the chapel, facing the sea, the last of the graves to be opened there, mourned and missed only by Cornelius in whose memory she would live forever, and by Noreen, the infant she had left behind.

  Cornelius knew that with her gone he could never survive the winter unless he made some money. His upbringing and training had ill equipped him for his present life, for it’s not every line of business that’s open to the spoiled priest. He knew nothing about farming except that the evidence of its futility lay all around him. There would be no fishing either, for the sea was merciless on the rocks below with no hint of a harbour or haven. He tried turning his hand to writing, for the nights without Maud Gonne were long and lonely, with only the child for company. He completed the story of the place, the deserted hamlet at the end of the Yellow Meal Road. Surely such a saga would strike a chord in the Celtic heart, for we are all the children of the dispossessed. He went in search of those few who remained anywhere in the townland, wringing from them reluctant memories of what it had once been like. And though they shunned him and hid from him, afraid of the bad luck he might bring to their cabins, he persisted till he had pieced together the story of the road that had cost so many lives, the great hunger that had depopulated the countryside and the black statue that had appeared about that time. When it was written he gave it a title, An Áit Gan Ainm – The Place with No Name, and waited for Sharkey. It was to go to Letterkenny, he pleaded, and he would pay him well for his pains. The weeks passed. Every day he kept vigil at the parish boundary, his eyes never off the road, watching for Sharkey or one of the dour sons. He pictured it in his head, a slim booklet, little more than a pamphlet, typeset by the archaic presses of the Donegal Democrat. But it would give his existence some meaning. Already he was planning another, an apologia for his life and the decisions he had made. He would tell the terrible secrets of his waning vocation and the beginnings of his illicit love. He would dedicate it to Father Schnozzle, pleading for his understanding and compassion.

  Six weeks later, Sharkey and the cart once more ventured over the mountains. There was no sign of the book, and he knew better than to tax him with questions. Another six weeks passed and there was still no word. It was the end of that dream.

  There were other fantasies too, every bit as futile. He dreamed of turning the place into a Gaeltacht. ‘We’ll keep open house,’ he told the baby. ‘I’ll be the best-known fear a’ tí in the whole of Donegal. Aren’t we as good as sitting on a goldmine here? What else is this place but the last redoubt of the Gael? Mark my words, a Noreen deas, if we play our cards right, we’ll be in great demand.’ All winter long he nursed his chilblains at the fitful fire and dreamed his dreams. There’d be paying guests, sons of the better-off classes, maybe in time some young priests, happy to rough it for a season for the sake of the purity of the Gaelic. Boys in bawneen jumpers and corduroys, manly beards hiding boyish faces; himself at the fireside every night dispensing drinks and folk wisdom. He’d get his hands on a fiddler or two, better still a squeeze-box player, who would satisfy their thirst for the national culture. It was true Sharkey spoke no Irish, his family having discarded the old language overnight when the grants were cut, tossing aside a millennium of collected folk wisdom as casually as they might a clapped-out motor, but maybe he could rope him in somehow as a seanchaí. Sharkey was a man of few enough words, perfect recommendation for a storyteller. ‘We’ll let the word spread slowly. Let them believe that they’ll find the purest language in this place, and music that will satisfy the most fastidious, and scenery unchanged since the arrival of the fir bolg.’ He pictured himself the cynosure of the smart set, a bit of a character, some of them would say, holding court in his house. ‘We’ll have no school children round the place,’ he told Noreen firmly one evening. ‘To hell with the grants, young ones are more trouble than they’re worth, courting behind rocks, getting themselves drowned in the loughs, nothing but a headache from morning till night. We’ll be a cut above the other places; we’ll establish a civilized, adult atmosphere. Mark my words, this could be the beginning of a new renaissance in the old culture.’ He spoke to the child as if she could understand what he was talking about, telling her his secret hopes and plans, talking to her as if she were her dead mother.

  The spring came; a few old men straggled back to poke ineffectually at the overgrown fields. A few old women appeared back from their winter quarters to set fires in their cabins. But there was no sign of the younger generation. Anxiously Cornelius made his way up the hillside to inquire among the native speakers, but his queries drew only looks of blank incomprehension. Later in the year a few men from Queen’s and Trinity managed to struggle over the mountains, searching for the golden valley where only the purest Irish might still be heard. They took a long look at the last of the inhabitants and at Cornelius living among them, and left without comment.

  The idea for the bottling plant came later. It stood to reason, he confided in Noreen one morning, that they were in the ideal place for a poteen still, for there were no police or Water Rats for fifty miles. Poteen would be his salvation. A business-like approach was what was needed. Briefly his heart lightened. He had a vision of a production line, bottling and marketing the local brew; he saw his portrait on the label, offering assurance as to the liquor’s provenance. He pictured bottles exported to every corner of the globe, creating a worldwide demand, and himself stepping up local output to try and meet it.

  He spent a month sampling what the locality had to offer, and his heart sank with every foul drop that passed his lips. His experience of the wine and spirits business was limited, fo
r back in Belfast he and his mother had been Pioneers, but he knew as he choked and spluttered on the rancid liquid he found in the hills that marketing it would be an uphill struggle. No amount of fancy labels, Celtic lettering or slick advertising was going to fob this stuff off on the public as the nectar of the Gael. As an alternative to battery acid it might just pass muster, but he foresaw little hope of breaking into the sophisticated, after-dinner market with his product.

  But beggars can’t be choosers. He would have to go ahead with it or starve, for the black-baby money was almost finished. It took six months to get the paperwork done. Sharkey had to be bribed every step of the way. There were bilingual forms to fill out, in triplicate. He had to declare the place a bona fide Gaeltacht, and show how his new business would increase employment prospects for the rural areas. He gave guarantees of improved housing for his employees, guarantees that only purebred native speakers would be hired, guarantees that only Irish machinery would be installed and that only Irish raw materials would be used. There was much more in this vein, and he spent night after night on it. The forms went to Annagary, and then to Letterkenny, and eventually made their way to Dublin. They travelled leisurely round a hundred desks in a score of offices in a dozen departments, picking up pencilled comments and illegible rubber stamps, while Cornelius gave up any lingering hopes he still clung on to.

  But one morning he heard a commotion on the road, the braying of an ass and cries and curses in English and Irish. Coming up the rutted road were Sharkey and his sons, armed with spades and shovels, whipping the donkey towards the house. Behind them clattered another two carts. The first sagged under the weight of an ancient cement mixer and a load of breeze blocks. Coming into view in the last cart were a pair of bedraggled creatures, huddled together. Native speakers, thought Cornelius, the real thing all right by the looks of them, and as useless a pair as you could meet. Where Sharkey had got hold of them he didn’t know, but he hadn’t laid out much. Sharkey was reading his thought. ‘I’ve brought you a couple of native speakers,’ he shouted over the wailing of the men who were now cowering on the floor of the cart. ‘I’ll grant you they don’t look like much, but if you feed them up they’ll pass muster. We wouldn’t want an inspector from the Department to pay you a surprise visit and no one to greet him in the tongue of his fathers.’

  ‘Where in God’s name did you drag them up?’ Cornelius asked.

  ‘You’ve no idea the trouble I had getting them,’ said Sharkey. ‘I’ll have to charge you extra when we come to settle up.’

  And with the conversation now closed he turned to his eldest son John Joe and began to give him his orders. John Joe shared his father’s caution about government money; it was best to strike when the iron was hot, for you never knew when it might be withdrawn. The sons were sullen, thick-set youths, who eyed the mountains suspiciously, obviously keen to get the job done as fast as they could and get back to Annagary. They set the mixer working with much grumbling and cursing and in three days they were finished. The house had now acquired a staircase – the only stairs west of the Rosses – leading to a couple of bedrooms in the loft. At the side of the house they had cleared an area of rocks and constructed a lean-to of cement blocks which they whitewashed. One of the sons, handy with electrics, had rigged up a generator at the back fuelled by sods of turf, and a snake of wires carried the wavering current into the shed to feed the machine.

  ‘You’ve got all your orders now,’ Sharkey announced when the bottler spluttered into uncertain action. ‘We’ll bother you no further. Perhaps yourself would be kind enough to stick your name on the back of this cheque and we’ll be on our way.’ Cornelius did as he was ordered. Sharkey scrutinized the signature before pocketing it. ‘Take a firm line with the native boyos,’ he counselled over his shoulder as he mounted the cart. ‘Take no nonsense from them and they’ll soon learn the ropes.’

  The native speakers settled into one of the deserted cabins near the upper lough, coming in at intervals to crank the machine and filch the poteen. From their cabin he could hear the sound of raucous laughter, or insistent argument, but they kept to themselves and rarely looked him in the eye or addressed him. Once a month or so, if the road was open, Sharkey would arrive and take away what they had produced, grumbling about how hard it was to get rid of the stuff, and how it was hardly worth his while to go on the way he was going. He would bring pan bread and thick jam, maybe a side of boiling bacon or a bag of oatmeal from his shop. Only when Cornelius pleaded with him did he bring a few bottles of whiskey.

  Night after night Cornelius sat in the kitchen listening to the wind, mourning the past, dreading the future. He thought of Chililabombwe, where he could have been, and the mission house he had seen in snapshots. A few words of chiBemba came back to him, but he could no longer remember what they meant. Noreen gurgled to herself in the room above. What sort of a life would it be all the same, growing up motherless in a place like this? From the distance, if the wind was blowing from over the mountain, there drifted the sound of a fiddle, or the noise of an argument from the cabin by the lough. He had once tried to persuade Sharkey to bring him a radio, but he laughed at him. ‘There’s a mile of solid granite between you and Athlone.’ A newspaper, then? ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Sharkey said, ‘though things are very tight. Sure I can hardly give that stuff of yours away.’ Once in a while he would throw him a soggy cabbage wrapped in a few pages of the Donegal Democrat, or an outdated copy of the Sacred Heart Messenger. And once, oh joy of joys!, a year-old edition of the Irish News. Cornelius read every word over and over, trying in vain to reconstruct from its pages the terrible events that were unfolding in the world he had left behind. The great wheel of life was slowly turning, throwing up old fates in new guises. But of these developments the outpost at the end of the Yellow Meal Road remained in ignorance.

  Nine

  ‘All things considered,’ Joe said, ‘it was a fair turnout.’

  ‘Half a dozen boy scouts and a handful of old comrades!’ Eugene said scathingly. ‘The people of Armagh are a disgrace to the ideal of the Republic.’

  The lad acquitted himself with honour all the same,’ said Joe. ‘He carried that tricolour as to the manner born.’

  Frank, still flushed with pride, was sitting at the bar with the rest of the colour party, while the Patriot himself, all done up like a dog’s dinner in honour of the day, was dispensing free drinks. Joe tapped his glass discreetly to indicate that a re-fill, on the house, might be in order. The march to the cemetery and the Patriot’s panegyric over our fallen dead had given him a fierce thirst. But Eugene was engrossed in the pages of the Irish News.

  ‘A big day’s racing in the Free State,’ he said. ‘Easter Monday.’

  ‘Sure that’s all it is to them now,’ Joe said, pursuing the patriotic theme, ‘an excuse for racing! Wasn’t it the same in 1916? The lads out trying to die for Ireland and the Dublin ones beating them back to get to the Phoenix Park!’

  ‘Is there anything there you fancy?’ said Peadar, who had closed up the vegetable stall in honour of the national holiday and was moonlighting as a bookie’s runner for the Shambles area.

  ‘Cannonball! There’s a name with a military ring to it,’ said Eugene, looking down the list of runners. ‘Maybe I’ll chance a pound or two on that.’

  ‘And yourself, Mister Feely? Is there anything there you fancy, or has the Peter’s Pence cleaned you out entirely?’

  ‘I’ll go with Cannonball too,’ Joe said, ‘seeing the day it is. Me and Eugene can be millionaires together!’

  The Cardinal scanned the ecclesiastical map of Ireland hanging on the study wall and his eye lit on far-off Donegal. The time had come for him to take action. Canon Tom had failed him. The blue-eyed boy had screwed up despite his breeding and his background. Adam and Eve’s, which should have been the jewel in his crown, had now gone completely to the dogs. The whole parish was seriously out of control, and the Children of Love were threatening to corrupt the rest
of the city with their Charismatic carry-on. Every day the reports from the front were more and more bizarre. Adam and Eve’s needed to be contained, and speedily. Already the contagion was spreading; they had been heard speaking in voices in Ballymun. Ballymun! Where they could hardly remember the number of kids they had, or recite the Our Father without a kick or two in the pants to remind them! Speaking in voices! Next they would be telling the priests how to do their jobs. It was nothing less than heresy, a dangerous Protestantism, a populism that could undermine fifteen hundred years of hard work. It’s like a cancer, he thought, spreading insidiously; if it wasn’t cut out at once, before long the whole country would be playing guitars at Mass and dancing in the aisles, and he might as well hang up his red hat and get down on all fours with the rest of them from the Shambles below.

  On the table top behind him lay the letter from the Vatican. It was what he had dreaded. Shenanigans like that don’t go for long unnoticed. Canon Tom may have provided the Church with a touch of class, but when the chips were down, he was expendable. The time had come for decisive action or he’d have Rome on his tail till his dying day.

  He looked closer at the map. The Rosses, deserted Gola, lonely Tory, Rannafast, Annagary, Loughanure, Gweedore. The names rolled off his tongue. He had visited them all as a boy, going with parties of his fellow pupils from Saint Patrick’s to spend the summer in damp cottages learning Irish. He remembered the bleak landscape of the region, the rocks and the damp heather and the constant cold wind and the hunger and the smell of turf and piss. The futile classes in draughty, leaking school halls, alcoholic masters trying to instil into surly boys some interest in the dying language. He remembered the priests in the ditches at night, patrolling with their torches in the hope of finding any of the students out of doors, or better still a courting couple to spy on. But there was another parish, even further west, so forgotten that it was nameless. The map showed a vacancy for a curate. It was an old map but it was a fair bet that the vacancy was still unfilled. Loughanure and Mcenacladdy would be like the metropolis compared to it. He hobbled over to the filing cabinet and searched through the records. At the back was a fading envelope that contained the crumbling parish records. It sounded perfect. By all accounts it had survived without a priest since the last incumbent drank himself to death twenty years ago. Canon Tom would go there, out of harm’s way. He could assure Immaculata that there would be scant demand for sitars or tambourines in his new posting.