Читать книгу Shambles Corner - Edward Toman - Страница 9
ОглавлениеFrank Feely’s mother had done the Nine Fridays when she was a girl, and though she had fulfilled all the regulations to the letter and now had a cast-iron guarantee of her place in heaven, she remained suspicious of the world, the way people born and bred in South Armagh tend to be. The framed pledge by the Sacred Heart, in fading gilt copperplate, was displayed above the mantelpiece, where the red candle glowed day and night before His picture. It became Frank’s first reading lesson, his father lifting him on his shoulders and helping him decipher the tortuous logic of the contract. Confession and Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, and the Sacred Heart would reserve for you a heavenly crown. In an uncertain world where sinful temptations could lurk at every turning, even in the hills of Armagh, it was as good as money in the bank.
‘It’s an offer no one could refuse,’ Joe Feely would extol. ‘Who could turn down a bargain like that?’ He said it with some feeling, for like many another before him, he was jinxed when it came to the Nine First Fridays. Somehow he never seemed to fill the run himself. Each winter he’d be going great guns, seven maybe eight months without a hiccup, but always something would intervene to invalidate the contract. Like the other mysteries of life, he accepted it with stoicism and just a hint of relief.
‘Let me tell you this,’ he confided to the infant. ‘The Sacred Heart is not one to go fooling around with unless you’re serious.’
Along with the Sacred Heart Messenger, which she read to him at night, his mother brought home The African Missions from the chapel gates. Frank sat on the floor and stared at page after page of blurred photographs, the white-robed priests flanked by smiling groups of black children. Yet when he heard his mother screaming about McCoy, calling him as black as the ace of spades, he knew this wasn’t what she meant. He had seen photographs of McCoy in the Irish News that his father brought home from the Shambles across the hill. Before he was a year old he could recognize McCoy, the bull neck bulging under the dog collar, the protruding eyes, the fixed stare of the fanatic. His father cut them out carefully and hung them on the nail in the privy behind the house, announcing to the neighbours his imminent intention of wiping his arse on the Orange hoor. ‘Black bastard,’ Frank said, speaking his first words.
There’s a boy won’t be long till he’s putting us all in our place,’ laughed his father, tucking into a fry the better to get his bowels working. And his mother, breaking the habit of a lifetime, allowed herself a smile at his infant precocity.
There were other paradoxes too in the tales his father brought home from the Shambles, paradoxes that puzzled his infant imagination and left him with the uneasy feeling that the world beyond the half door was a treacherous place. Schnozzle Durante was an American he sometimes heard his mother croon to when the wireless was working. But he knew that the Schnozzle Durante they argued about in the evenings was a darker force closer to home at whose every mention his mother crossed herself.
‘You’ll land yourself in the soup, talk like that!’ she insisted. His father would laugh at her when she did that.
‘What harm is there in a bit of a joke? If we can’t take a joke we must be in a bad way.’
‘We’ll see who’s laughing if the clergy hear you making fun of him, God bless the mark!’
‘The clergy never dare up this way. We have our hands full with the Christian Brothers as it is.’
‘Say what you like, but where would we be without them?’
He remembered too the sudden curfews, when the siren atop the Brothers’ would start to wail, sending the women scurrying in from the fields. His father would be fretting indoors for the duration, pacing the floor, unwilling to risk the trip in to the Patriot Bar.
‘The Brothers have lost another one!’ he would repeat.
‘Keep your frigging voice down! And stand away from that window! Do you want us all in trouble?’
‘They’ve no interest in us. It’s the runaway they’re after.’
‘They’ll get him before dark,’ she repeated with tight-lipped satisfaction. ‘He deserves everything that’s coming to him, a young pup that would lift his hand to the Brothers.’
‘He’ll not be lifting much for a while,’ his father added darkly. Through a crack in the doorjamb, Frank could make out another posse of thick-set postulants, their soutanes tucked into Wellington boots, making their way up to the high ground.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ laughed his father, ‘would you look at the cut of the dog they’re taking up with them?’
‘What’s wrong with the dog?’ she snapped. In her book, criticism of even the lesser clergy extended to their dogs.
‘A fucking old Kerry Blue. It couldn’t catch vermin!’
‘The same boy would have the hand off you quick enough,’ she said later, still defending the dog.
Before too long he was reading the deaths and condolences in the Irish News when he visited the lavatory, poring over the long lists of volunteers and victims who were dying daily in the national cause. And when he started to take an equal interest in the dogs and horses on the back pages his father knew that he had taught him all he could and that it was time to hand him over to the Brothers. But Teresa, his mother, was strangely reluctant.
‘He’s company for me at home,’ she said, ‘and you off gallivanting. Besides, the Brothers …’
‘Great men. Where would we be without them?’
‘There’s enough misery in the world without him going looking for it,’ she sighed. ‘Trouble will find him soon enough.’
On his fourth birthday his mother put away the things of childhood, gave his face a lick and marched him over the hill to Brother Murphy.
Seven is the age at which the philosophers deem a child to have reached the use of reason. Thereafter he lives in constant danger of mortal sin and its corollary, hellfire. Brother Murphy took the Fathers of the Church at their word. If Frank was to be saved from eternal damnation he had only three years to knock him into shape.
‘I’ve taught him his prayers, Brother,’ she said defensively.
Brother Murphy picked Frank up by the ears and brought the boy’s face close to his own. ‘Name the First Commandment, boy,’ he ordered. Frank tried to wriggle around, to catch his mother’s eye, but she knew better than to interfere. ‘Well, boy, are you going to answer, or are you a complete amadán?’ Frank began to cry. The Brother dropped him and reached for his hand. He held it out, palm upwards before him. From his pocket he produced the leather strap that all Christian Brothers carry, and gave him three slaps. Then he turned to the boy’s mother. ‘He can stay if he pulls his socks up,’ he growled, dismissing her.
‘Thank you, Brother,’ she said.
Brother Murphy cast a baleful eye round the hushed classroom, slowly choosing the morning’s victim. Up and down each row of desks he gazed, pausing for a few seconds to stare at each boy in turn. ‘We have a new boy with us this morning,’ he announced. ‘Francis Xavier Pacelli Feely! That’s a name and a half for a bucko from the backside of the hills!’ His mother had added the ‘Pacelli’ at the font, the maiden name of old Saint Pius, in the forlorn hope that some of the late pontiff’s good fortune would rub off on him.
Brother Murphy let the syllables roll round his mouth before he spat the name out. ‘Pacelli… Pacelli,’ he mused. Encouraged by the nervous tittering of the class he repeated it. ‘There’s a boy here who calls himself Pacelli.’ He waited for them to snigger dutifully. ‘I suppose an honest-to-God Irish name wasn’t good enough for his parents: Patrick or Michael or Seamus. I suppose we haven’t enough Irish saints! We have to go running after Italian ones!’ The boys began to laugh. Heavy-handed irony was Brother Murphy’s stock in trade and they knew better than to scorn his efforts. With any luck Frank would be up on the podium all morning and they would be off the hook.
‘Let’s hear our Italian friend here say the Ár nAthair,’ demanded Brother Murphy. ‘The words our Saviour taught us, in the language of the Gael.’ The rest of the class began to breathe more easily. Once a week, with much dumb show of disbelief, the Brother discovered a boy who didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer. They might sit up half the night, rehearsing it with their mothers till they were word perfect, but under the third degree not one of them could be relied on to get beyond ‘go dtaga Do ríocht’ without corpsing. And once a week, do chum glóir Dé agus onóra na hEirinn, Brother Murphy would take the sacrificial victim through it syllable by syllable.
‘Here’s a corner boy who doesn’t know his prayers!’ proclaimed the Brother by way of an introit. ‘Hold out your hand, corner boy, and we’ll soon see if our friend here’ – he waved the strap aloft - ‘can’t refresh your memory.’ The strap came down with a crash, the force of the blow almost lifting him off his feet. Frank’s face was contorted with pain and terror, but he tried to hold back the hot tears that the blow forced into his eyes. To cry would be fatal. It would invite further ridicule, further humiliation.
‘Ár nAthair atá ar neamh,’ intoned Brother Murphy, ‘go naofar Do ainm; go dtaga Do ríocht; go ndéantar Do thoil ar an talamh mar a níthear ar neamh. Now let’s see if this young lout can tell us the next bit. Well, Feely, we’re all waiting.’
The class could see Frank’s brow furrowed in fruitless concentration as he searched the confused spaces in his head for the next verse. ‘Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniú,’ give us this day our daily bread. The words deserted him now.
There was silence in the school save for the ominous swishing of the taws against the side of the Brother’s soutane. ‘Well, Mister Feely, we’re still waiting,’ he said after a while. His voice was quiet, almost reasonable. He was in no hurry. What better way was there to spend a morning than teaching the lads the Lord’s Prayer?
‘I don’t know,’ stuttered Frank after another pause.
‘I don’t know what?’ corrected the Brother gently.
‘I don’t know, sir!’
‘That’s better,’ he said, lifting the boy’s hand and giving him three, the statutory punishment for lapses in etiquette. ‘Now what don’t you know, Mister Feely?’
‘What comes next.’
Again Brother Murphy took his hand and tenderly, almost lovingly, stretched out the curled palm till it was straight and flat and ready, and then slowly and methodically began to beat him, punctuating each blow with a verse of the prayer. ‘Now, boy, let’s see if we can remember what comes next.’ He was looking flushed from his exertions, like a man who needed to sit down, but there would be no resting from his labours till the job was done. Word by word the inquisition continued. Together they asked that their trespasses be forgiven (as we forgive those that trespass against us) and begged not to be led into temptation. At every halting, stuttering utterance the slaps rang out. They were winding up the oration with a plea for deliverance from evil when Brother Murphy, by way of climax, threw down the strap, seized from the wall a wooden blackboard compass, and administered a two-handed crack to Frank’s skull that sent him careering across the classroom with bells ringing ‘Papa Piccolino’ in his ears.
His mother took the matter up cautiously with the Brother a week later. Would Brother Murphy maybe like to try beating back into the boy’s head some of the sense he had so successfully beaten out of it? Brother Murphy would have none of it.
‘Take your lad home with you, Missus Feely,’ he boomed. ‘We’ve done all we can for him here.’
‘Would there be no point in keeping him on a bit longer, Brother? Sure what good is he to me at home?’
‘And have him hold the rest of the class back? Have a bit of wit, woman dear!’
‘If you put it like that, Brother, I suppose you’re right.’
‘Of course I’m right. The boy will never make a scholar, Missus Feely. The sooner he gets working with those pigs of your husband’s the better. Fatten him up a bit. Give him plenty of fresh air.’ He squeezed Frank’s puny forearm. That’s what boys need. That and plenty of the strap.’
‘Thank you, Brother,’ she said, retreating. She knew better than to argue the toss with the cloth.
It wasn’t laziness or bad luck alone that kept Joe from completing the Nine Fridays. When it came to the delicate matter of Absolution he had a very real problem. Smuggling was a precarious vocation, liable at any moment to bring the wrath of the civil or clerical authorities down round your ears. A man in his line of trade couldn’t just walk into a confession box bold as brass and expect to conclude his business without the risk of a row. He had to pick his man and his moment with extreme care. The mendicant confessors who came round the doors in the depth of the winter, offering to hear confession in exchange for a free feed and a cup of tea, he avoided like the plague; those were the boys who would give you the third degree over as much as stealing an apple, thick buckoes from the south who knew the people expected a hard time to feel they were getting their money’s worth. He knew too the cathedral priests to avoid, having suffered humiliation at their hands when he first took up the business. But matters weren’t completely hopeless. Joe pinned his faith on the older men who by eleven o’clock at night were falling asleep on their feet. After a hard day, hearing nothing but Armagh people recalling their sins, they could think of only two things: the ball of malt and the warm bed. There were one or two who were half deaf into the bargain, and with luck you could mumble the details of your business as if it was the most natural thing in the world and they wouldn’t turn a hair. After a while Joe had it down to a fine art, slipping into the dark cathedral before closing, choosing his man carefully from the look of the waiting queue.
A year before he had found himself on a roll. A persistent voice in his conscience told him it was all too good to last, but with each passing month his spirits rose. Could he dare hope that the Nine Fridays could be his at last? Six months, seven months, eight months came and went, with the same old curate nodding off in the box, his hand raised, even before Joe started whispering, in an automatic gesture of absolution.
But the Sacred Heart is nobody’s fool. The gilt-edged guarantee of heaven is not earned through trickery. The ninth month came round and Joe cycled into Armagh in a state of heady anticipation. One more confession and he was home and dry! He had a drink and then another to steady his nerves. He crept into the darkened cathedral as the sexton was closing the door. Only a few penitents were left. He slipped in at the end of the queue, prepared himself as he had been taught, and shuffled forward in the line till it was his turn to enter the box. The shutter slid across. But instead of the dozing figure he had been anticipating, Cardinal Mac himself stared out at him from behind the grille, alert as a whippet. Joe had returned home that night with the Cardinal’s interrogation ringing in his ears. He knew now that if ever he got to heaven, it would be by the hard road.
Though they never discussed anything so intimate, Teresa half guessed his guilty secret and the shame it was bringing on the house. She didn’t give him a minute’s peace till he promised he would try again. Driven out every Saturday night by her tongue, he would be seen parking his bike outside the Patriot Bar and popping in for a relaxer before the rigours of the sacrament. One would lead to another, and he would wobble home at midnight, querulous and unshriven.
‘You never went, you louse!’ she would shout.
‘What call have I to run telling my private affairs to a bunch of gobshites?’ he would call back, emboldened by the drink. Frank, feigning sleep in the settle bed by the fire, would hear them at it intermittently till dawn.
At Mass, too, he was always among the latecorners, standing in the porch out of the rain or in the graveyard if the weather was fair, technically present as it was Church property, but fooling nobody, least of all the Man Above. With his cronies from the adjacent townland he would slouch there, rolling cigarettes and guffawing about the price of pigfeed. They smoked and joked and argued and commented on the women’s legs with the practised eyes of farmers judging livestock. They didn’t need telling when the congregation indoors rose to its feet for the Last Gospel and the rush for the back doors began. Before the crowd inside had straightened their rheumatic knees, dusted down their trousers and adjusted their caps, Joe and company were already across the Shambles. Positioned strategically outside the Patriot’s, they would comment on the emerging churchgoers as they rubbed their backsides against the window, rapping occasionally on the glass and requesting Eugene to open up for the love of fuck before they all died of thirst.
‘You’ve no respect,’ she would tell him when she got him home. ‘You haven’t heard Mass properly this year. Mark my words I’m not the only one talking about you. Didn’t Cardinal Maguire himself say as much from the altar last Sunday? Not that one of you lot would have heard him. Is it Christians or heathens the lot of you are? If the Brothers were half the men they used to be they’d soon wipe that smirk off your face and no mistake.’ Joe let her go on. He knew she was right to take an interest in his spiritual welfare. He saw it as essential women’s work, a ritualized nagging that, like all rituals, had its place in the complicated scheme of things.
But when it came to the folklore of the faith, Joe Feely’s enthusiasm was second to none. His acquaintance with the holy places of Ireland was legendary. He knew who had the cure for a plethora of ailments both human and animal. As a travelling man, with a range of goods and services that skated round the edge of the civil and canon law, his business had given him occasion to visit most of the shrines in the country. His was a deep if unconventional spirituality. He knew that when the wheel of our fortunes turned at last and the great change came, when the dark times came to an end, when a new leader emerged to redeem the people of Ireland, it would be through the old places that we would first learn of it. The rituals of the established Church he bore with equanimity, reserving his soul for the fringes where older, more magical forces sometimes stirred. ‘You’ll hardly get up off your arse to go to Holy Mass,’ Teresa would accuse him, ‘but you’ll run the length of the land after some statue or other.’ To Joe it was no more than the truth.
So when it became clear as the years went by that the boy was making no progress, that his schooling days were over, and that the rosaries were getting them nowhere, his father decided that something stronger was called for. They tried a novena to the Sacred Heart and another to Saint Jude, but there was no appreciable change in his condition, and he still stared at the world through mute, impassive eyes.
‘The lad can knock around with me till he’s fit to fend for himself,’ Joe volunteered. ‘I’ll take him to the Shambles market tomorrow.’
‘He’ll get a real education and no mistake on the Shambles Corner,’ Teresa answered sharply. ‘Sitting all day in the Patriot Bar with eejits every bit as bad as yourself!’
‘He’s never too young to learn the ropes.’
‘You’ll fill his head with your foolish stories till he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going!’
‘Those are the stories he’ll need to know if he’s going to survive around these parts,’ Joe argued.
‘He’ll learn nothing but bigotry; that and dirty language. I swear if Jesus Christ himself walked across the Shambles tomorrow they’d tear him apart.’
‘I’ve the pigs to sell. He’ll be able to give me a hand.’
‘Do you want him to get his death? Have you no wit?’
‘He’ll be as right as rain. We could maybe say a wee prayer in the cathedral when we’re at it.’
‘You’ll say more than your prayers, I don’t doubt. Take him with you if you want. Maybe he’ll be able to get you home when they throw you out of the Patriot’s.’
The pigs had been smuggled across the border half a dozen times in the previous month but they looked none the worse for their travels. They snuffled contentedly in the mud outside the house while Teresa eyed them suspiciously. She was used to the necessary merchandise of the smuggler – the butter and the cigarettes, the petrol and the contraceptives, the rifles and the Christmas turkeys – but the regular re-appearance of the pigs was beginning to wear her patience down.
‘See those French letters –’ she began.
‘The real article,’ he assured her.
‘More than can be said for these pigs,’ she added sourly. She stretched over the sow and rubbed its fat rump with distaste. ‘Boot polish!’
‘Of course it’s boot polish. Don’t they change colour every time they’re carted over the border?’
‘Anyway, I’m not having them another day round the house, subsidies or no. They have my stomach turned, the smell of them.’
‘What harm is there in the smell of a pig? Any road they’ll not be under your feet for much longer. These lads’ travelling days are nearly over. This time tomorrow they’ll be rasher sandwiches.’
Frank’s first sight of the holy city was from the Navan Fort. His father was shaking him awake from a cold and fitful sleep. The tractor engine was idling and the pigs were lying quietly in the trailer. He rubbed his eyes and shivered in the morning light. They were off the road, in the middle of a circle of low, grassy mounds, the contours of the ancient earthworks barely discernible. ‘If only this place could speak,’ Joe said, ‘it could tell a tale or two. The seat of the High Kings of Ireland or so they tell me. You wouldn’t think it to look at the state of it now, but in its time this place was fairly humming with royalty of one class or another. King Conor Mac Neasa, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Finn MacCool and his mate Cuchulainn and that whole crowd. Before Saint Patrick came along and converted the country. I can’t rightly remember the details of the lot of them, but I’ll say this for the Christian Brothers, they teach you your Irish history and they give you a pride in it. Robert Emmet and Patrick Sarsfield and young Setanta and the whole shooting match of them, all great men who gave their lives for Ireland. Maybe some day when you’re recovered, we’ll get ourselves a book and we’ll study it in more detail.’ And despite the early hour he began to sing quietly to the boy:
‘Let Erin remember the days of old
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.
When Malachai wore the collar of gold
Which he won from her proud invader.
‘Saint Malachy! Another Armagh man, born on the Shambles a thousand years ago.
‘When kings with their standards of green unfurled
Led the Red Branch knights into danger
Ere the emerald gem of the western world
Was set in the crown of a stranger.
‘I need hardly tell you who the stranger was; you were nearly long enough at the Brothers’ to work that one out for yourself.’ But the boy’s attention was elsewhere. For Frank had turned to the east where the sun was rising and there in the far distance on its seven hills stood the primatial city. The twin spires of the cathedral had appeared, floating on a pillow of cloud. Joe looked too. The limestone pillars were tinged with the pink of the new sun, and their gilded crosses sparkled in the pale sky.
He drove the tractor sedately through the narrow, thronged streets and parked it outside the Patriot’s. He climbed down and lifted Frank out of the cart. ‘Here we are, the city of Armagh. Built like Rome on seven hills. And this is the Shambles Corner, where we’ll conduct our business before the day is out.’ He gestured grandiosely as if he owned the place, encompassing with the sweep of his arm the low line of bars and shops that formed one side of the square, the cabins and houses on the far side, the caravans of the tinkers huddled in a laager in one corner, the rusty corrugated-iron chapel that dominated another corner, and the crowd that had already gathered round the edges of the area to buy and to sell.
The Shambles was neither corner nor square. It stood where the three main streets of the city nervously approached each other. Some distance before they reached the Shambles they seemed to give up, as if reluctant to confront one another directly. The result was a confusion of unaligned buildings and open space. From the foot of the town Irish Street approached haltingly, broadening into a shapeless delta of bars and butchers’ shops; Scotch Street ran arrogantly down from the Protestant quarter, only losing its nerve at the last moment when it passed the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Assembly Hall and Tea Rooms. English Street, cutting up from the Mall trailing relics of the town’s glorious past, expired in a tangle of barricades and hucksters’ stalls. Across the wide amorphous expanse of the square the communities sized each other up, coming forward at mutually acknowledged times to barter in the no-man’s-land between their territories. Above the Shambles rose two of the city’s hills. One hundred steps led up to the Catholic cathedral to the left, revealing itself now to Frank as a massive, ill-formed structure of grey limestone, its spires dark against the greying sky. Beside it on the hilltop, shielded from the gaze of those below by a screen of trees, stood the Cardinal’s Palace, Ara Coeli, the Altar of Heaven. Across the valley of the Shambles rose the ancient hill that had once been the heart of the town, its summit topped by the sandstone cathedral of the Protestants, a squat unyielding profile shunning the brash upstart challenging it from across the square. Around the Protestant building huddled the remnants of some ancient buildings, an old library and chapterhouse, the relics of a medieval stone cross destroyed in a burst of iconoclasm, and at the base of its tower, barely visible from where Frank and his father stood, the tomb of the last great king of Ireland, Brian Boru.
But there was one building in the town more important than the others, and Joe pointed it out first. Marooned in the middle of the Shambles, equidistant from the Patriot Bar on the lower side and the Martyrs Memorial on the far side stood the public lavatory. It had been built originally as a convenience for the slaughtermen, but the abattoir was long gone and now it served the community, welcoming both sides equally. ‘Do you know what I’m going to tell you,’ whispered Joe, taking the boy into his confidence, ‘if it’s trouble you’re after there’s plenty to be had around here. I’m the boy should know, for I’ve started enough of it in my day. But listen till I tell you this. Do you see that shitehouse? Any man, whatever his persuasion, can walk in there and attend to a call of nature without the necessity of always looking over his shoulder for fear of who might have followed him in. Isn’t it a wonderful thing all the same? Mind you,’ he added, fearing that his enthusiasm for the communal latrine might be carrying ecumenism a bit too far, ‘I’m talking now about the general run of things. I’m not saying it would be the same around the Twelfth when feelings are running a bit high, or when McCoy has their heads turned after a week of hellfire preaching. It might be a different matter then all right. It’s not a theory I’d care to put to the test if the Shambles was full of Orangemen in their sashes all bursting for a slash; but in the general run of things, that’s as safe a spot as you’ll find. And that goes for both sides of the house. I’ll tell you what we’ll do first thing,’ he said, taking Frank firmly by the hand, ‘we’ll go across and let you see for yourself.’
There are few places in this land where both sides of the house can meet on equal terms. They are born apart, live apart, worship apart, are schooled apart, drink apart, die apart and are buried apart. But sometimes, through a freak of demography, there will emerge an area where neither side holds complete sway. And there, protected by elaborate protocol, a limited commercial intercourse will evolve. The bogs on Shambles Corner was one such place. The graffiti on its walls testified to its shared ownership. Like an officers’ mess or gentleman’s club, all controversy was left outside, all talk of killing and ambushes, all Bible prophecy and general fighting talk. There would be arguments galore, the air thick with deals and bargains, the talk of livestock and spare parts and pigfeed and subsidies and taxes and yield per acre. But when a fight broke out you could rest assured that the cause was money or misunderstanding, and that the old problems of the city had been left at the door. It was a convention upheld by all. A man might be gunned down at his place of work, or beaten to pulp at his fireside; he could be maimed as he knelt in worship or kneecapped as he stood at the bar. But not here, never here. Here was sanctuary, mutually agreed. No hooded figure would ever enter the damp interior of the bogs to pump hot lead into some enemy sitting at stool.
‘It’s never too early to learn how to pass yourself in mixed company,’ said Joe, steering Frank towards the narrow entrance. The boy hesitated. The stench from inside was overpowering. Joe laughed and lit a cigarette, fanning himself with the smoke. ‘I’ll not disagree with you, there’s a quare hogo. That’ll be your Tyrone men. As full of dung as a donkey. Have a few pulls of this,’ he said, offering the cigarette. Frank took it and drew on it hungrily.
It was a roofless building of grey pebbledash. The thin drizzle which had started up added to the dampness underfoot. Three of the walls served as urinals. In the middle of the floor was a hole which acted as a drain, already half blocked with the butts of cigarettes. ‘Wait till you see the state of the place in a few hours,’ Joe assured him, ‘they’ll be up to their knees in it.’ Under the fourth wall ran an open sewer, above which was fixed a thick wooden plank supported by bricks at both ends and with a dozen holes cut out of it. And although it was still early in the day most of the places on the plank were already taken by a line of grunting countrymen, their trousers round their ankles, reading the local papers and shitting noisily. The descendants of the dispossessed, down from the high ground to barter, sat side by side with the descendants of the planters, easing their engorged bowels together, all for the moment equal.
Father and son pissed at length against the wall, Joe whistling a non-sectarian tune. He discarded his cigarette into the drain with a flick of the wrist. ‘By jing, but I needed that,’ he remarked to the company at large as he buttoned his flies. No one answered, but the eyes of the Tyrone men never left him. ‘Come outside now,’ he instructed Frank, ‘and we’ll have a bottle of stout, just one, before we get rid of the pigs and see the sights. We’ll nip over to Hughes’s.’ As he spoke, the great carillon of the cathedral began its slow chime, tolling out the signal for the half hour. Frank looked round, startled, and his father laughed. ‘You heard that all right. Didn’t I tell your poor mother that a trip to Armagh would do you a power of good?’
The Shambles was filling up. The tinkers had emerged from their trailers and were setting up stalls on the waste ground. Joe and Frank sauntered across to the tractor, taking in the wonders of the city – the windmill on Windmill Hill, Laager Hill, where the army of King Billy had encamped on their way to the Boyne, the track of the old Keady railway which ran under the convent walls off to their left. Then they turned their attention to the bottom of Scotch Street where the Glorious Martyrs Memorial Chapel stood sentinel. ‘That’s McCoy’s place,’ Joe said. ‘A fucking eyesore and no mistake. Would you look at the state of it! Your mother was right. The bastard has had no luck since he pulled that stunt with the Mexicans. He went too far entirely that time.’
It was a low structure of corrugated iron, backing on to the square, its entrance among the withered flags of Scotch Street. It had once been painted with red-lead, but since the decline in McCoy’s fortunes, rust had eaten through the rivets and the crumbling girders were beginning to show like ribs where the stove chimney pierced the roof. The gable wall was covered with tattered posters, urging the passerby to repent of his sins and to flee the wrath to come. ‘Turn ye therefore unto Jesus, which is the Christ,’ exhorted a hand-painted sign on the roof. There were other reminders that the wages of sin are death and that man is saved only through faith, each carefully annotated with chapter and verse, and other announcements lay half buried underneath, notices advertising monster evangelical rallies, prayer meetings and healing ministries. Smiling young men with sleeked-back hair, their grins of fellowship distorted to grimaces by the corrugations of the walls, assured one and all of a warm welcome in Jesus. A neon sign, announcing that herein was preached only the Crucified Christ, had fallen askew, but still flickered intermittently across towards Irish Street.
‘I don’t see the ice-cream van at any rate,’ said Joe. ‘The hoor must be on the road again. Trying to drum up the price of a few pints.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you see that chapel. It was a goldmine in his father’s day. And look at it now. If it wasn’t for Magee he’d be in the workhouse long ago. Magee’s a bucko from Portadown I need hardly add. He might have been a bigot but he knew how to run a business. The pair of them fell out over that Mexican. Magee did a few months in the Crumlin after the body was washed up in Belfast Lough, but they never proved anything. Without him, McCoy’s nothing but a bollocks.’ Joe looked at his son, detecting a flicker of interest in what he was telling him. ‘Some time I must tell you the whole story of that pair of hoors, or at least as much of it as our side of the house will ever know. But now I must go and pay my respects to the Patriot.’
They checked on the pigs. ‘As right as rain,’ Joe declared, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. All the talking had put him in the humour for a drink. From the Patriot’s came the subdued murmur of early-morning supping. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, lifting the boy up into the tractor seat, ‘I’ll just pop in here for a moment to conduct a bit of business. Be a good man and keep an eye on the beasts. If anybody comes along showing an interest you’ll know where to find me. And don’t for the love of Jesus let any cowboy go prodding them.’ He swung open the doors of the Patriot Bar and disappeared into the noise. Frank was listening to the bells booming out the hour over the city when he became aware of another voice calling him from the pavement below: ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?’ The man was short and thick-set, with arms and shoulders overdeveloped for the rest of his short frame, and dark, suspicious eyes. ‘I’m asking are yiz selling these pigs?’ Frank looked down but made no answer. The man’s face reddened and he shouted angrily, ‘Where’s your da?’ For a moment Frank made no move. Then his head turned in the direction of the public house. The man stood back and looked carefully at the building. ‘Are you sure it’s in there he is?’ He reached up and roughly pulled the boy down from his perch and dropped him on to the ground. ‘Take a run in there and tell your father that Mister Magee is outside and taking an interest in these beasts.’
The door of the pub was stiff but Magee made no attempt to help him with it. Frank pushed it open and fell inside. It was warm and smoky, smelling of porter and whiskey and sweat. A pair of men near the door grabbed hold of him and began to fool about with him roughly, reaching for his balls and prodding him, but something told them they wouldn’t get much of a rise out of him the way they would with a proper half-wit who had wandered in off the street, or a woman in after her husband. He saw his father standing at the end of the bar and he broke away from their grasp and ran to him, tugging at his sleeve to get his attention. Joe reached down and picked him up and sat him on the bar and gave him a sip of his porter, all the while carrying on a one-sided conversation with a fat Tyrone man who was standing with his back to him. The fat man turned to look at the boy, tousled his hair roughly and asked what was the matter with him. ‘Need you ask?’ said Joe. ‘Or need I say any more than that he is a past pupil of our very own Christian Brothers?’
‘All the same,’ said his companion, ‘where would the country be without them? Tell me that.’
‘True,’ said Joe, buying the man another chaser. Frank tugged at his arm. He raised the glass to his mouth and drank slowly. ‘Sure whoever he is, can’t he wait?’ He lifted the whiskey glass and drank it in one swallow, following it with another swig of the black porter. ‘Now tell me this,’ he said to Frank, ‘why couldn’t he come in and fetch me out himself like a Christian? Why did he send the boy in?’ He addressed this last remark to his companion.
‘Never send a boy on a man’s errand,’ the other agreed.
‘There’s only one answer to that question,’ said Joe, once more turning to the boy on the bar. ‘I fear our friend outside digs with the other foot.’
‘There’s a lot of their side of the house that don’t take a drink at all,’ reasoned the Tyrone man.
‘There’s plenty on our own side you could say that about too. You’d see nothing but Pioneer pins round our way after the mission. But since when did that stop a man walking into a licensed premises and civilly conducting his business. Tell me that! What’s to stop him having a mineral?’
‘They give you fierce wind, minerals,’ said the other, easing his buttocks on the stool at the thought.
‘I’ll tell you what’s to stop him coming in here! The Patriot! Mine host here is a real deterrent. That’s a boy won’t be happy till he’s died for Ireland. And maybe taken a few others along with him for company.’
The Patriot was out of earshot, sitting impassively at the far end of the bar, but the Tyrone man wasn’t taking any chances. ‘Sure isn’t there good and bad in all of us,’ he said, easing himself down from the stool and beginning to edge towards the back of the bar, nervous of the political tone creeping into the conversation.
‘Where the fuck are you off to,’ demanded Joe, ‘when it’s your round?’
‘Why don’t you run outside like a decent man and conduct your bit of business, and I’ll set them up for you the minute you come back in?’
‘You’ll buy a drink now,’ said Joe, his voice rising. ‘Didn’t I tell you there’s no hurry on your man outside!’
‘I’ll not drink with you now, if that’s the tone you’re going to adopt,’ said the other, rising to the occasion.
‘A typical fucking Tyrone man! Armagh men aren’t good enough for you, I suppose!’ He left Frank on the bar and pursued the man across the floor. The other drinkers went suddenly quiet. It was early in the day for this diversion. Before closing, such scenes would be two a penny, hardly worth putting your pint down for; but at this hour of the morning it was a bonus. ‘You’re nothing but a cunt,’ said Joe.
‘Who are you calling a cunt?’
But here the ritual, so promisingly begun, was prematurely interrupted. Behind the bar the Patriot rose to his feet and the drinkers went back to their glasses. What had looked like a certain fixture had just been rained off. Nobody argued with the Patriot.
Packy Hughes, the name by which he was known to the Crown Authorities, or Peacai Mac Aoidh to give him the only title to which he would now answer, or the Patriot, the name by which he was best known to both sides of the house, was a giant of a man, over six foot tall and as broad as he was long. It was not for nothing that he was called the Patriot, for no living man had suffered more for his country. As a boy he had been interned on the ship in Belfast Lough, and as a young man he had seen the inside of every prison in the country. But where others had whiled away the long lonely nights dreaming of hot meals, comforting drinks and the pleasures of the flesh, the Patriot had kept his vision intact. On the rotting hulk he had taken a vow never to cut his hair till Ireland was free. It hung now to his waist, lank, grey and greasy. On formal occasions, as when he led the march out past the cathedral to the cemetery to honour the glorious dead, he would tie it into a ponytail held in place with a rubber band. Not many men in Armagh wore ponytails. But no corner boy jeered after the Patriot as he shuffled to the head of the colour party. When they were sure he was out of earshot, the people of Irish Street would say to each other that he was a right psycho and no mistake, and thank God with a chuckle that at least he was on their side. The people of Scotch Street would say, as his silhouette passed, that he was a right psycho, and, lowering their voices, question why something hadn’t been done. It wasn’t for want of trying. His limbs still bore the scars of a dozen attacks; his barrel chest still showed the wounds where they had taken the bullets out of him. Bullets fired at a range that would have killed a normal man. But the Patriot was no normal man. A month after they had left him for dead at the back of the Martyrs Memorial, he had been back behind the bar. He had been shot, stabbed, garrotted, blown up, drowned and half hanged, and every time the Patriot had pulled through. Martyrdom had eluded him down the years.
He had taken a second great vow when he was in the Crumlin. He had enrolled in an Irish class on the wing; in the first flush of enthusiasm he foresaw Ireland Gaelic again and the forgotten sounds of the language echoing once more through the streets of her towns. The young teacher from the Falls Road would speak nothing but Irish, and after Lesson One, the Patriot took a vow that he would do the same. Sadly the classes hadn’t lasted very long. The Movement split when they were still on Lesson Five (the first declension) and the Falls Road teacher had taken a wrong ideological turning that ended in Milltown cemetery. But an oath is an oath, especially if taken by a soldier of the Republic. Armed with the Christian Brothers’ Grammar, the Patriot spent the next six years struggling with the intricacies of the subjunctive and the complex vocabulary of field and shoreline. His labours were only partially successful. By nature a solitary person, his habits had been reinforced by years on the blanket. But lack of language was no handicap. His truculence and dourness and his reluctance to be drawn too deeply into political debate were useful tools for survival; in due course his long silences and curt utterances gave him an air of authority, an authority reinforced by his stature and reputation as the man they couldn’t kill.
So when the Patriot got to his feet and addressed himself to the problem in hand, even Joe knew that the crack was over and that he might as well see to the pigs outside. The Patriot rose to his full height and ran his fingers through his lank locks. ‘Caidé tá cearr?’ he demanded in a quiet and reasonable voice. What is wrong?
‘Nothing wrong at all,’ answered Joe, likewise adopting a quiet and reasonable tone. ‘In fact I was just this minute hoping to attend to a small business matter that I fear can’t wait any longer.’
‘Time and tide wait for no man,’ agreed his erstwhile companion, edging his way to the door.
But the Patriot roused to speech was reluctant to let the matter drop. He had managed to form a sentence, albeit one that was grammatically suspect, and he didn’t feel like wasting it on one airing. ‘Dúirt me caidé tá cearr?’ he demanded. I said what is wrong? The grammar was even more suspect but the meaning was clear enough. A note of menace had entered his voice. If everyone else could treat his place like a rough-house, it seemed to imply, he was going to have some of the action. He thought for a moment but no new words came to express these thoughts. So he contented himself with a third rehearsal of the original sentence. This time the intonation had been modulated; it was no longer an interrogative or an assertion, it was a threat. A threat directed at the person of Joe Feely, pig farmer. It spoke of blood in the nostrils and ribs in need of splints, of lost front teeth and eyes that wouldn’t open, of pain and humiliation and the mockery of his peers. All this and more, the Patriot conveyed in the same few words. There was only one way out and Joe knew it; only one way to prevent the Patriot, his word store depleted, from vaulting the bar and getting stuck in. Joe summoned all his resources and addressed the giant in the language of his forefathers.
‘Tá muid all okay, ar seise, in fact tá muid’ – he faltered for a second – ‘ag dul abhaile.’ We are, he said, on our way and he indicated the door lest the Patriot have any difficulty with the pronunciation or mistake his intentions. But the effect was instantaneous. The Patriot’s face broke into a smile. He reached across the bar and grasped Joe’s hand in his own huge paddle. Words, not for the first time, failed him. But there was no mistaking the emotion of the moment. The English had come marauding to this ancient spot seven hundred years ago, planting it with their settlers; since then the only language the Shambles had known was rough Béarla, the tongue of the oppressor, unnatural in our mouths. The Patriot and his comrades, and ten thousand more before him, had all but driven the invaders out at last, but they had left their language as a mocking legacy. But when he heard the sweet sounds of spoken Gaelic in his house he felt that our day was at last coming.
Joe knew that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent. He stood silent now, content to have his hand roughly shaken by the Patriot, instead of his body broken by the same party. The fat man from Tyrone, meanwhile, managed to fill the silence. From the depths of his unconscious he dredged up what was left of his Brothers education. Only one sentence came to him but, as luck would have it, it was the one to do the trick. ‘Suigh síos,’ he said. Sit down. The Patriot subsided on to the stool at the bar, a happy man, while Joe and Frank made for the door, resisting the temptation to wink at the corner boys en route to show them he knew how to handle your man. ‘Let’s go outside and have a word with the mystery man,’ he whispered to the lad, ‘before there’s ructions.’
