Shambles Corner

by Edward Toman

  Canon Tom eyed the five-pound notes. ‘There’ll be plenty for us all,’ he said. He turned to Frank and the boy jumped to his feet. ‘Run in and tell the girl to throw a couple more rashers on the pan.’

  ‘Saving your presence, Father,’ Joe intervened, ‘but the lad has a wee problem there. Isn’t that why we’re here in the first place? Great hopes of a cure, I can tell you.’

  ‘Run in yourself, Mister Moran,’ ordered the Canon. ‘Can’t you see the pair of us are famished?’

  ‘An Ulster fry would be the very man all right,’ Joe agreed. He squeezed a couple of the notes into Cornelius’s hand. ‘And maybe while we’re waiting you’d like to join me in a drop of something warming, Father? That is if it isn’t too early in the day for yourself?’

  ‘What harm could there be in a drop of whiskey at any time of the day?’ the Canon asked. He was warming to the stranger. ‘Come inside out of that cold.’ He led the way into the parlour where the fire was burning fitfully. ‘Did you notice that ignoramus Moran hadn’t the decency to introduce you properly?’

  ‘Joseph Feely, Father,’ said Joe, shaking him by the hand.

  ‘Canon,’ corrected Canon Tom.

  Joe took a step backwards in feigned astonishment. ‘Canon! You don’t tell me! Well, I declare, that’s a great honour.’

  ‘What’s keeping that girl with the glasses,’ the Canon grumbled. ‘I swear the only way to get anything done round here is to do it yourself!’

  The greasy plates were stacked on the hearth and the second bottle was dead. The Canon had let them eat their bacon and potato bread in peace, and the inquisition was about to begin. But a shout from Noreen brought him to the window. A car had appeared on the road, gingerly negotiating the ruts. It was full to the doors with Sharkey’s relations, and old Tobias himself was at the wheel. He stopped outside the factory and rolled down the window, and everyone inside laboriously read the notices. Country people are naturally suspicious, nor have they any great need of the services of the catering trade. The car pulled in at the church and the occupants climbed out stiffly. They foraged round the graveyard for a while, blessing themselves and reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, stopping occasionally to bad-mouth the dead. Then they climbed back into the car and slowly set off once more over the mountain.

  ‘Bloody country bumpkins,’ shouted the Canon. ‘That’s a Donegal man’s idea of a big day out!’

  ‘Some of them wouldn’t spend sixpence,’ agreed Cornelius.

  ‘Sharkey’s crowd were always a nosy lot. They’d be afraid not to check it out, in case they were missing something for nothing.’

  ‘I’m surprised he risked the old motor with the road in the state it’s in!’

  ‘You’ll not grow rich on what Mister Sharkey throws your way,’ said Joe, judging it a diplomatic moment to enter the conversation. ‘Mind you, what do you expect from a pig but a grunt?’ He indicated to Cornelius that the Canon could do with another dram after his disappointment, and that he would have another himself while he was at it.

  ‘I’ll get Noreen to warm that tea up for the pair of you,’ said Cornelius, uncorking another bottle. Something about the whole venture was beginning to worry him.

  At three o’clock a dusty minibus came struggling over the hill in low gear. ‘Action stations!’ shouted the Canon. ‘Punters, by God; a whole busload of them!’ He leapt from his seat like a man twenty years younger and ran into the yard. The minibus laboured towards him. He waved it into the yard imperiously, directing the driver to park under the sign that said ‘Coach Parties Only’.

  ‘You’ll be wanting tea,’ he told them, ‘and maybe something a bit stronger for the menfolk after your journey. Well, you’ve come to the right place.’ But even as the first of the pilgrims began to alight his heart sank. Small, dwarfish creatures, with pinched features and bandy legs, the men wan and sour, with a permanent gurn of resentment, the women short, garrulous and stumpy. Derry ones!! He didn’t need to ask! He didn’t need to inquire if they’d come far. He didn’t need to scratch the mud from the side of the van and read the hand-painted sign announcing Doherty’s Religious Rides. He needed Derry ones like he needed a hole in the head! Derry ones were tight-fisted and tight-arsed, the type that would bring their own sandwiches to a funeral. He ushered them into the parlour and roared for Noreen to get a move on and not stand there gawping, keeping their customers waiting. But he knew it was useless. They hadn’t come all that way to drink tea.

  Derry ones don’t believe in standing on ceremony. The leader of the group, a wrinkled little creature with legs like a sparrow, took Noreen in her claw-like grip and began to examine her carefully. ‘Is this the wee girl seen Our Lady?’ she asked. The Canon ignored her, and Noreen began to shake with terror. The woman tightened her grip on the girl. ‘Go on and tell us,’ she demanded. ‘What was She wearing?’

  ‘Did She give you a letter or anything like that?’ asked Doherty, the driver. ‘If there was a letter you might make a go of this place if youse fixed the road.’

  A woman near the kitchen door blocked Noreen’s escape and pulled her into the centre of the room. They passed her from hand to hand. One wizened crone was rummaging in a plastic carrier bag; she produced a pair of scissors and began methodically to snip at her hair, while another did the same with her clothes. Noreen was crying now. They reached up to her cheeks and, rubbing their fingers in her tears, blessed themselves.

  Canon Tom charged through the room and pulled Noreen from their clutches. ‘Leave the girl alone,’ he bellowed. ‘Have you no respect? Get your hands off her!’

  ‘Just a few wee relics for the people back in the Bogside,’ said Doherty. The women pressed the snippets of cloth to their lips and to their affected parts, crossing themselves repeatedly. Then they reverentially secreted the relics in their bags, rummaged around in them some more, and produced their sandwiches.

  Noreen fled upstairs weeping. The Canon ran into the kitchen, where Joe had tactfully retreated, and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Come out here, man!’ he ordered. ‘It’s all hands on deck.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Derry ones, that’s what’s going on!’

  Joe winced.

  ‘The place is overrun with them! Get over to the church and get the statue inside. Lock it in. And lock yourself in too!’ He reached under his cassock and handed Joe the massive, rusty key. ‘Hurry up for the love of God. If this crowd of hoors get their hands on the Madonna they won’t leave as much as a matchstick of her. I’ll stall them for as long as I can!’

  In the parlour the smell of egg sandwiches was overpowering, driving before it even the smell of the seaweed that lingered from the days of the prophylactics. Bakelite flasks of strong tea stood on every table, and the floor was littered with discarded grease-proof paper. The Canon began to scream at them. ‘You can’t sit there eating your own! There’s a cover charge! Where do you think this is?’ But the Derry ones paid him no heed. They were used to priests who shouted at them; they expected it from their pastors. It was what they expected from life in general, for in the strange, walled city they had come from everyone shouted at everyone else all the time and took no offence from it. They would have taken him for a queer priest indeed if he had not given them a bollocking. They continued with the sandwiches, glad of the bite to eat after the long journey and aware that they wouldn’t get another till they hit the Creggan at God knows what time the next night. In the meantime they relied on Paddy Doherty, a veteran of many such expeditions, to sort out any problems with the priest.

  ‘I’m telling you once more there’s a cover charge,’ shouted the Canon above the noise. ‘It’ll be a pound a head. I’m coming round now to collect it.’

  Doherty looked up at him and winked. ‘I don’t see no notice to that effect,’ he said. ‘If there’s no notice, there’s no cover charge.’

  ‘A pound a head,’ said the Canon, but he was a defeated man.

  ‘This place might make a g
o of it,’ Doherty said, rising and taking the Canon confidentially by the arm. ‘You might be on to a second Knock here if you play your cards right. I’ll just take a wee look around. Let you have the opinion of an expert. It’ll cost you nothing.’ The Canon removed his hand roughly and glared at him.

  ‘You’ll keep your meddling snout out of this place!’ he snarled. ‘There’s nothing here for the likes of you. Don’t think I don’t know your sort, Doherty. You move in and it’s all torchlight processions for a month and then you move on when you’ve cleaned up. But this place isn’t like that. This is the real thing. Do you hear me! The real thing! This place has some class. It’s not for you or your people, so get on your bus and get the hell out of my parish before I throw you out myself!’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Father,’ said Doherty, unruffled. ‘It was only a suggestion. Anyway, if you want my honest opinion, it’ll never amount to much. Have you seen the state of the road?’

  ‘Will the pair of you quit your gassing there,’ said the sparrow-legged woman, rising from the table, ‘and let’s get across to the chapel. We want to say a wee prayer in front of the statue the lassie seen dancing.’

  The Canon tried to bar their exit but they brushed him aside and scurried across the rocks towards the chapel.

  Joe heard them scouring the graveyard looking for Her. They discovered the niche She had occupied, and from which he had so recently and with such difficulty removed Her. He heard them chipping away at the concrete base and pocketing the chunks of cement that had anchored Her. Then they started on the church. He listened to them hammering on the door, heard their pleas and threats and curses. Doherty pushed his cards through a crack, offering a partnership; the women started a decade of the rosary while the few men they had brought with them tried to force the hinges. But the door held. Eventually he heard the voices retreat and then the sound of the minibus. He waited till the spluttering engine had faded into the mountains before he reckoned it was safe to emerge.

  The Canon was in a sombre mood and the barrel nearly finished when he joined him. ‘You’ve seen what they did to the church?’ he asked. Joe nodded. ‘At least you managed to keep Herself out of the firing line, we’ve that to be grateful for. But how long can we hold out, that’s the question?’ There were tears of self-pity in his eyes. In a few short hours he had seen his dream of freedom crumble.

  Joe drew himself a jug and put his hand on the Canon’s shoulder. ‘Nil desperandum, Father,’ he said.

  ‘You can afford to be cheerful,’ said the Canon, ‘you’ve nothing at stake here.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’re forgetting the boy.’

  ‘You’re right, I had forgotten his affliction. Where have you left him?’

  ‘Where else but in the chapel, in the best company he could be keeping. Meanwhile, I think, if you’ll forgive me for being so bold as to suggest it, that what you need here is the services of a good manager.’

  ‘Have a titter of wit, man. Where in the name of all that’s holy am I to find a business manager in this place?’

  Joe said nothing. The Canon looked at him hard for a few minutes till the penny dropped.

  ‘Won’t you be missed at home?’

  ‘We’re in no rush. The change of scenery will do the young lad good, and we can explain it all to herself in our own good time.’

  Canon Tom rose to his feet and shouted for Cornelius. ‘This calls for a toast,’ he announced.

  Negotiations proceeded smoothly throughout the night. Noreen was set to work clearing out the box room in the loft and finding a bed from somewhere for the guests. Joe and Frank were to move in and get the place organized. Joe stressed the importance of the preliminaries. ‘Get the groundwork done before you open,’ he insisted. ‘Tie up all the loose ends. That way there’ll be no comeback on you.’ The others bowed to his superior knowledge in these matters. There was no doubt but that he was a connoisseur, a veteran of the best and the worst shrines in Ireland. He quoted case histories to prove every point he made. Moving statues marketed before they had even bought the car park tickets. Tales of the Little Sisters invited prematurely into a parish to verify a spate of cures, and how they had uncovered more than they were meant to. Tales of priests who made a packet, and priests who had ended their days in the workhouse. He could tell stories of bona fide cures and others that were the work of conmen – seventh sons of seventh sons, faith healers and charlatans. He knew where you could buy Lourdes water at half the price they were selling it for only a mile away. They listened to his tales from the four provinces, marvelling at the greed and short-sightedness of their compatriots, and at how badly these things were organized.

  But not all his stories told of failure. He had seen Knock when it was nothing more than a one-ass town in the bogs of County Mayo, and look at it now, he said. The Canon nodded nervously. Knock was all right, he thought, but what he had in mind was something a bit more dignified.

  ‘And how right you are there,’ Joe agreed with him. ‘A place with a bit of class is what the country is crying out for. Sure any hole in the wall will attract the gobshite element. But for how long? Answer me that. What we need here is something a bit more exclusive, something that will appeal to the more discerning pilgrim.’

  ‘No fairy lights?’

  ‘Devil the one. Tasteful floodlights on the old church, and maybe a single spotlight playing round the lovely face of the Madonna.’

  ‘No holy water dispensers?’ Cornelius asked.

  ‘Not a drop.’

  ‘No Lourdes music boxes?’

  ‘No Fatima peepshows either.’

  ‘Will you have Noreen signing autographs?’

  ‘Am I not after explaining that it’s going to be a classy sort of place! The girl will be kept in the background. No posing for photographs for a few bob with all and sundry. She need only be produced on the big occasions, anniversaries and Holy Days.’

  ‘The more I hear the more I like the sound of it,’ agreed Cornelius.

  ‘We’ll start to call Her the Weeping Madonna, for didn’t the girl say She was weeping for the sins of the world? Can you blame Her, the state things are in? Our Lady of the Afflicted, that’ll be Her official title. Aren’t we all afflicted in one way or another?’

  ‘We must have God’s blessing on us this day,’ mumbled the Canon. ‘I really thought my number was up when I saw that crowd of head-the-balls loose in the church grounds.’ He lowered his head on to the table and was soon snoring gently.

  ‘What we could do with now,’ said Cornelius quietly, ‘is a good, twenty-one-carat cure to get the enterprise off on the right foot.’

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when they heard Noreen’s voice shouting to them from the door of the chapel. And suddenly there was another voice, a boy’s voice, calling and laughing from over the rocks, a voice that Joe hadn’t heard since the lad’s last day at school, and that he sometimes doubted he would ever hear again. Both men ran to the door and looked out into the dark night. Soft lights were playing round the tower of the old church and the breeze from the sea seemed suddenly balmy and fragrant. There were tears in Joe’s eyes, and Cornelius gripped him by the hand, fighting back his own. ‘Are my ears deceiving me or what?’ he whispered.

  ‘They’re playing no tricks on you,’ Joe said. ‘God and His Blessed Mother be praised!’

  ‘I’ll wake the Canon,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Let the poor man sleep,’ Joe said. ‘The lad will still be cured in the morning.’ He stepped out into the darkness to greet his long-lost son.

  Fourteen

  Though he was eager for the off, the Canon took Joe’s advice; they would keep the miracle under their hats till the necessary paperwork had been done and a grand opening officially arranged. ‘It’ll be well into new year before we’re ready to go if the road is halfway passable. Saint Bridget’s Day might be a date to bear in mind. We’ll have an official opening with all the trimmings.’

  ‘But if
word gets out in the meantime?’ asked Cornelius.

  ‘Then it’s no comment all around. That’s the line. Say nothing to incriminate yourself.’

  ‘And what about the ones that will start coming, like that crowd from Derry, or yourself for that matter? If they hear there’s been cures there’ll be no stopping them.’

  ‘We block the road! Tumble a few of the bridges on the far side of the mountain. Cause a landside. Either way we turn them back,’ said Joe. ‘Every man jack of them. The district is closed to pilgrims and sightseers until we get the all-clear from the Sisters to open as a bona fide Marian shrine.’

  ‘You mean to tell me you’d turn away good money?’ protested the Canon.

  ‘Never fear, Father, they’ll be back. If you make it too easy for them they’ll have no respect for you or the village. But as soon as they hear there’s a problem they’ll go to any lengths to get to Ballychondom. Now first things first. That letter to Cardinal Mac, Father; could I suggest you make a start on it … ?’

  The next day Joe took a crowbar and set off back along the Yellow Meal Road. At the highest mountain pass, twenty miles back, he scrambled up the scree above the track and tumbled as many of the boulders as he could shift down on to the road. Where it crossed the high moors, he blocked the ditches with reeds and sods of turf. The rains wouldn’t be long in flooding it. He returned to Ballychondom the next evening, confident that he had bought them a breathing space; for the moment at least they were cut off from the rest of the world.

  But who can keep the lid on a story like that? They may have kept Sharkey at bay for a month or two, but the secret was out. Before too long it was being whispered round the Rosses, the story changing with every telling, that there were great cures and great revelations somewhere beyond the black mountains. The rumour was in Letterkenny a week later; a week later still it had leapt the border and got as far as Armagh. The Patriot, standing sentry over the bar, heard it. Muire na nGael, Our Lady of the Gaels, had appeared and delivered a message in Irish. Could a united Ireland be far behind? In Portadown, Magee heard a whisper; he passed it on grudgingly to McCoy who worked it into his next sermon. Frank’s mother got wind of it from a neighbour, and sighed fit to burst, somehow anticipating the worst. It filtered south, even into Adam and Eve’s, despite the roadblocks and the curfew. A few of the older parishioners heard it and, for the first time since their leader vanished, allowed themselves to hope. Guard O’Malley heard it from a suspect, though further inquiries with the aid of the cattle prod failed to elicit more details. (Even poor Patrick Pearse McGuffin got wind of it; and if anyone in Ireland was in need of miraculous intervention it was he.)