Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  He knew the importance of picking his moment carefully. Though Immaculata favoured summary action, he felt uneasy about the reaction it might cause. The last thing he wanted was a martyr on his hands. Better to nail Canon Tom on a technicality, preferably something unconnected to faith or morals. That left only money.

  Had he but known it, his prayers were about to be answered.

  Ever since his student days, when Schnozzle had been his reluctant runner, Canon Tom had played the horses. With connections like his it was no wonder, and his tips were usually sound. But over recent months he had been following with fascination the career of one thoroughbred in particular, a grey three-year-old gelding by the name of Cannonball. It had run at Naas one Saturday and he had seen it romp home by a clear three lengths at five to one, amply justifying his modest wager. It had triumphed at the Curragh a fortnight later, though at shorter odds and by little more than half a length. This time it had been carrying the entire proceeds from the Sunday collection at Adam and Eve’s on its sweat-flecked back. Honest Eddie O’Toole (‘Eddie Never Owes!’) had paid out with a smile and a joke at his own expense.

  The rule book states, in black and white, that playing fast and loose with the parish funds is a major disciplinary offence. But it was the sort of charge that would have been laughed out of court, for since when did anyone bat an eyelid at a little creative accounting? But what every curate knows is that you don’t dip into the Peter’s Pence. Not ever.

  The Peter’s Pence is collected once a year, the proceeds going straight to the Vatican itself. It is levied on the faithful under pain of mortal sin, a membership tax that every parishioner, rich or poor, is obliged to pay. Every year the Papal Nuncio’s cousins arrive to supervise its safe passage to the Eternal City, large men with Sicilian antecedents unlikely to be amused by any lese-majesty with regard to the cash. The collection is taken up simultaneously in each church in the country on Easter Sunday, brought under escort by the Christian Brothers to the Palace in Armagh within twenty-four hours and counted under the gimlet eye of the Cardinal as the Sicilians restlessly pace the carpet, cracking their knuckles and adjusting their sunglasses. Easter is always a time of tension, and there will be outbreaks of trouble when the Peter’s Pence falls due. In the poorer areas of the two cities, there will be sporadic outbursts of protest, rioting and hooliganism, quickly quelled by the authorities. The people grumble but they pay.

  But in Adam and Eve’s, contributing to the upkeep of Christ’s vicar was not seen as a duty, it was regarded as a privilege. A pile of notes covered the vestry table when the last Mass was over. Cannonball was running in the three o’clock. Canon Tom wavered. He knew his duty: get into the car and take the money straight to Armagh. Still he wavered. The voice of the Holy Ghost in his head warned him of the dire consequences if he ballsed this one up. But Cannonball had never let him down. The voice of the Holy Spirit told him he should at least hedge his bets, go for a yankee or an accumulator. But, like anyone about to commit a terrible act, Canon Tom knew from the word go what he was going to do; the temptation was too great. One win, he told himself, one win was all he needed. He would be a millionaire! He would be independent of the Love Children forever. On the pig’s back for the rest of his life. At two o’clock he headed for Fairyhouse with the lot in two carrier bags.

  Honest Eddie took him by the arm. ‘You’re a terrible man, Father, sure you’ll have me in the poorhouse. But just for yourself, I’ll give you a special price. Even money, Father. I don’t know why I’m doing it.’ The Canon parted with the carrier bags and retreated to the bar.

  Three o’clock came. The bar cleared for the big race, but he stayed where he was. He ordered himself another double brandy and reached into his pocket for his beads.

  The radio, high on the shelf in the Patriot’s, was permanently tuned to Athlone. At three o’clock Eugene turned it on and called for hush. Above the interference, the voice of the commentator could be heard, a crescendo of mounting hysteria right from the off. The name Cannonball came barking through the static.

  ‘By Jesus we could be on to a winner at last!’ Joe shouted.

  ‘Shut up for fuck’s sake!’ Eugene ordered. ‘I’m trying to listen.’

  Down at Fairyhouse Canon Tom was trying not to listen. Trying not to hear the roars from the grandstand as the field came galloping round the bend with Cannonball well placed on the inside. He didn’t dare turn to look, but he could read the race by the excitement of the crowd; the gelding lying a comfortable third as they passed the halfway mark, coming up on the rails with two furlongs to go, wee Jim D’Arcy the jockey giving him a hint with the whip to put him into the lead a hundred yards from home and still going sweetly.

  ‘Give him the stick,’ Joe was shouting above the apoplexy of the commentator and the bellowing of the crowd at the counter. ‘Pull the bastard clear of the field!’

  Canon Tom held the rosary beads tighter and closed his eyes. A few more seconds and he would be home and dry.

  But there was a sudden, sickening gasp from the Easter Monday crowd. His blood ran cold. There was shouting and cursing. The favourite was down! He didn’t need to see what had happened, the sudden stumble, the buckling at the knees, wee Jim impaled on the rails and Cannonball struggling on the turf. He headed for the car park, tearing up the betting slip even before the stewards’ inquiry had given the all clear.

  ‘Money down the drain!’ Joe said. ‘It’s the mercy of God I hadn’t more on it.’

  ‘A mug’s game,’ Eugene growled, his humour for the day gone.

  The Canon had more pressing problems.

  Should he make a run for it? Try and skip the country before they were on to him? But where in God’s name would he be safe? Should he go to Cardinal Mac and make a clean breast of it? Would he find any understanding in that quarter? Not over the Peter’s Pence, he told himself. Should he kill himself and be done with it? He beat the dark thought back. Somehow he had to get a grip on things, not let it slip away from him. If only he had more time he could organize a whip round from the more affluent members of his flock. He could call in a few investments, or run a special fund-raiser. But he hadn’t the time. The tight-lipped Italian brothers expected their money before the end of the day.

  Somehow he had to keep the lid on it till he could get something organized. Above all, he kept telling himself, he must keep it from the Cardinal’s ears.

  A foolish dream, of course, to imagine that he could keep such a secret from Ara Coeli. Even now the cat was out of the bag. Honest Eddie had a Cellphone in the BMW and His Eminence had already been dialled.

  The Little Sisters picked him up before the boat sailed. They stripped him of his ludicrous disguise and marched him in ignominy down the gangplank to the silent approval of the emigrants. His trial was swift and clean, and no appeal would be considered. Honest Eddie restored the money without any fuss after a personal visit from Immaculata. At no time was the Canon handled roughly or threatened with violence, for it is a great evil to raise your hand against the Lord’s anointed. But the terms of his banishment were spelled out to him, and there was no room for debate. There would be no reprieve. The world that had until so recently seemed his oyster now shrank to a few hundred square miles of bog and mountain and lough along the Road of Yellow Meal.

  The Sisters escorted him as far as Annagary where they handed him over to Sharkey and his fate. He made the last leg of the journey in the back of the donkey cart, feeling with eveny jolt and lurch the hopelessness of his predicament. They travelled through the night, stopping only to water the beast at a boghole. A pale dawn broke over the mountains, Slieve League to the south, its dark backside forming a vast, ocean cliff; the white volcanic cone of Errigal to the north, the bleak Blue Stacks behind them. It had grown dark again and cold before Sharkey had whipped the animal to its destination in front of the desolate church.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ he said, tossing the Canon’s bag out of the cart and turning the ass’s head tow
ards home, ‘and welcome to it.’

  ‘Whose house is that?’ demanded the Canon, pointing across the rocks at the bottling shed. Sharkey spat before he answered.

  ‘Cornelius Moran, Esquire, spoiled priest and purveyor of fine spirits to the gentry.’

  ‘Is there no one else living in these parts?’ demanded the Canon with rising panic in his voice.

  ‘Barring a few native speakers, devil the one! Who in his right mind would be caught dead in a place like this?’ With these words of encouragement he exhausted his store of conversation.

  ‘Where’s the parochial house?’ shouted Canon Tom at the retreating cart.

  Sharkey pointed with his whip to the annexe behind the chapel, a low bunker of a building, its walls weeping with green damp, its small windows shattered. Moss grew in clumps on the sagging roof.

  ‘In the name of God …’ he shouted after the cart. ‘You’ll never get home at this hour of the night.’ He was pleading now but he knew it was useless. Sharkey applied the whip to the donkey’s flanks and the protesting beast began to gallop. He would go as far as he could before the animal gave up or the weather closed in. He wanted away from this cursed place.

  The Canon stumbled over the rocks to the chapel. It was a squat building, its cement rendering broken to reveal the crude rubble walls beneath. He took a closer look at his quarters. It was out of the question. He could never live there. The place was not fit for farmyard beasts. Above the glen, in a crook in the mountain, huddled a pair of thatched cabins; he noticed thin turf smoke curling from one of them. Should he risk his neck across the rocks in the dark and demand shelter for the night? He could picture the dank interior, could smell its stench already in his nostrils. They would be native speakers, and in his present state he knew he would never get through to them. The words of the song came floating into his head, mocking him. ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls …’ He fought back the tears of pity welling up inside him.

  He had only one option left. The spoiled priest. A pariah, a man abandoned by his people, a man unfit to live in decent company. Could he bring himself to cross such a man’s door? Once more he contemplated the bleak panorama. Then, picking up his few remaining possessions, he staggered across the rocks towards the house.

  Ten

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ the man from Tyrone said. ‘You have my stomach turned!’

  ‘You’re nothing but a prude from up the country,’ Joe said.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Eugene said too. ‘Put them away. You must be pissed!’

  ‘Not to mention young Frank there, you’d think you’d have more sense in front of the boy.’

  ‘He’ll learn about these things soon enough,’ Joe answered. ‘I must be about my father’s business, isn’t that what it says in the Good Book.’ He blew up another one and burst it with a pop on the tilly lamp on the bar.

  ‘What are they anyhow?’ said the Tyrone man, clumsily pocketing a packet when he thought Joe wasn’t looking.

  ‘Canon Toms! A gross of them. An Irish solution to an Irish problem. The man will make a fortune!’

  ‘I can see that cunt Sharkey has taken you for a ride again.’

  ‘There’ll be less of that language,’ Eugene ordered. ‘Don’t have me tell you again! Now put those away before the Patriot gets down.’

  No man in Ireland could have sunk into such despair as Canon Tom Cronin did the night Sharkey dumped him at the end of the Yellow Meal Road and turned for home. And no man could have tried harder to nurse the Canon through his despair than Cornelius Moran. He heard the protestations of Sharkey’s donkey and ran to the door, hoping he had brought him supplies, or maybe the longed-for newspaper, or a letter even from the outside world; but he saw the ass and cart turn around at the church gable and head back for the mountains, leaving the man in black alone in the rain.

  He opened the door and stood aside to reveal the fire smouldering in the grate and the table laid for tea. The Canon hesitated on the threshold, but not for long. An icy blast, direct from the Arctic, whipped around his sodden clothes. Without a word he strode into the pantry and sat himself down in the one good chair. Cornelius poked the fire vigorously, poured a large Jameson for his guest and got the frying pan on.

  It continued like this for a month. Canon Tom made himself more at home as the nights went on, indicating his wishes by means of a gesture or a grunt, for he had not yet brought himself to speak to these people, or to take in the full implications of his banishment. If Noreen climbed on his knee he would push her roughly away. Yet the arrangement with his silent house guest suited Cornelius; he fussed discreetly around the Canon as night, noon and morning he sat slumped in the chair, bringing him a bit of a fry and seeing to it that the glass in his hand was never empty. Occasionally he caught a look in the Canon’s eye that seemed to thank him for his trouble; at other times he thought he detected a look of contempt or fear or anger or, worst of all, sheer despair. Cornelius knew the dangers of presumption; it was up to the man of the cloth to make the first move. And though he was starved for conversation he was prepared to wait till the Canon came out of shock. In the meantime it was clear that the man had more than his share of troubles, for his eyes would fill with tears as he stared into the fire, remembering things past.

  After a month Cornelius knew he would have to act, for despite his ministrations the visitor was going downhill. He had the pallor of a dead man, his hand shook so uncontrollably that he spilled as much of his drink as he managed to put to his lips, and he had started to refuse, with a curt shake of the head, the bacon and fadge that Cornelius put down to him three times a day. Something had to be done and done fast. If Sharkey had been due he could perhaps have persuaded him to bring something in the line of medicine. But who could say when Sharkey might be back? And what medicine would cure the malaise he saw in the Canon’s eyes? He had seen that look before, that same yearning for release, in the eyes of his Maud before she died. If he didn’t do something he would lose the Canon too. He determined that he would fight for him.

  So that night, and every night that followed, he began to talk to him, telling him the story of the sad parish. He recounted every detail that he had gleaned; stories of the people who had once lived and died there, who had worked its fields and built its cabins, the women who had borne children and the men who had gone to sea. They were stories of hardship, of stillborn infants and wrecked boats, and evictions at the hands of uncaring absentee landlords and their agents, the Sharkeys. Sometimes there were stories of resistance, for even here they had fought the English and their gombeen-men, but the outcome was always the same. Above all they were stories of poverty and hardship, ignorance and superstition, the fate of the Irish people down the centuries. Through his telling of them, the forgotten and abandoned folk of the glen once more came to life. Though he had never known them, and though the accuracy of the tales he told was questionable, they flickered briefly into existence one last time: their names, their feuds, their births and their dying. He told about the building of the road, too late to stop the decline of the place but in time to let the last of them escape. Cornelius was an authority on his adopted home, the last of the seanchaís, the only one who knew or cared what had once happened here, and the last one who would ever know or care. He read to the Canon from the scraps of manuscript that he had kept. Then one night he told about the Silent Madonna, and her mysterious arrival in the parish. For the first time he saw a passing flicker of interest in the man’s face and felt that, with God’s help, he might save him.

  They waited until the first half-decent day before venturing out. The Canon was like an old man now, his eye sockets sunken, his hair greying. ‘A bit of fresh air will soon put the colour back into your cheeks,’ Cornelius assured him. ‘We’ll go over to the chapel and pay our respects to the Virgin if it’s not too strenuous for you.’

  It was a large church. The pews were still in place and the altar rails still corralled off the plain stone altar. Most of the wi
ndow’s were broken, and through a hole in the roof the rain dribbled on the filthy floor. The altar was besmirched with the mess of generations of seagulls which roosted in the rafters. ‘It’s gone to the dogs a bit, Father,’ Cornelius confided, ‘since the old priest died. That was before my time, mind you. God rest him all the same; they never found the body I’m told. But now that you’re here, sure we’ll have it cleaned up as good as new in no time at all. Get Sharkey’s lads to fix that hole in the roof. Give it a lick of paint ourselves if we get a few dry days. It will be a great comfort to everyone round here to have a priest back among us. Maybe we could fix up the parochial house while we’re at it …’ Did he imagine it, or did the Canon throw him a reproachful look? He added quickly: ‘Not that myself and the girl aren’t delighted to have you as long as you care to stay.’

  Outside again, he led him round the back of the church to the small cemetery. It had once been protected by dry-stone walls, as was the custom in those parts before the famine, but most of the boulders were tumbled and the graves overgrown. ‘I’ll just pay my respects,’ he said, leading the Canon towards Maud Gonne’s grave. He blessed himself and Noreen did the same, and the two of them knelt for a moment in silent prayer for the repose of the soul of the woman who lay below.