Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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He had been drummed out of Latin America, since when he had made a precarious living warning Protestants, wherever they might be found, about the dangers of Romanism. With the help of his new wife he had cobbled together a show and taken it on the road, billing himself as The man who’s heard ten thousand confessions!’ His compañera, the escaped nun, promised to spill the beans on convent life. The couple had enjoyed limited success in the American Midwest and the more remote regions of the Low Countries; thereafter their fortunes began to fade, and their tour of the Scottish borders was heading for bankruptcy. El padre had been on the point of calling it a day and heading back to the pampas when he got the call from Ulster. Reverend McCoy explained to them that the people of the noble province deserved something special. The butcher Magee would act as bodyguard and factotum, and, under McCoy’s tutelage, the show would become a work of art.
Predictable scenes ensued each night of the tour. The Orange halls were packed to the doors with the crowd overflowing outside, and the proceedings relayed to them over the crackling Tannoy. There would be a few rousing hymns to get everybody in the mood, and then McCoy would stride forward to introduce his guests. The lights would dim; every eye was focused on the priest’s wife as she stepped forward to deliver her well-rehearsed testimony. She spoke little English, but, blessed with the gift of tongues, McCoy was on hand to translate for the eager congregation the secret sins of the confessional and the truth of the depravity behind the cloister wall. The Ulster Presbyterian is uniquely preoccupied with the sex life of nuns. As the lady on the podium rattled out her memoirs, the draughty hall was filled instantly with images of dark-skinned nuns and novices, their habits carelessly discarded, in furious copulation; filled with the raw sexuality of Carnival, the winding streets of the barrio alive with carnal temptation; filled with the aftermath of the bacchanal, the leering priests squeezing each lustful detail from the penitents for their titillation.
It was all a long way from life in Portadown.
McCoy knew he was out of his depth. He thought of himself as well travelled, having been an itinerant in the service of the Lord all his days. He felt he knew more about the temptations of the flesh than his congregation. It is a well-known theological fact that the devil will put more of that sort of temptation in the way of a preaching man than he will any other. Nevertheless, as he ran the lady nightly through her reminiscences – bestiality among the celibate monks of the high sierras (something that the sheep farmers of the high ground of Antrim and Armagh could relate to); lesbianism and other unnatural practices among the nuns in Acapulco (relieved by occasional visitations from new chaplains) – McCoy sometimes found it hard to be as specific as he felt the señora demanded.
But it was enough for them. More than enough for these country boys and their womenfolk, half of whom had never been outside their own townland. They would be in a high state of arousal by the time he came to introduce his second guest, the fallen priest himself.
McCoy’s coup de grâce had been to dress Ramirez up in his full canonicals – biretta, surplice and alb – and have him re-enact the ritual of the Mass, that blasphemous parody that stood at the heart of Romanism. Ramirez was a wizened little man, but, dressed up in the full rig-out, he cut an awesome figure as he stood before the Protestant farmers and their wives and began intoning the unfamiliar words: ‘Introibo ad altare Deo; ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum.’ He consecrated the wafer and held it before them for their ridicule: ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’
McCoy, microphone in hand, kept up a running exegesis on the proceedings. ‘The wee pancake has just had the magic words said over it. The Romanists would have us believe that it is now Our Saviour. If they had their way they would have us bend our knees to that pancake. Bow our heads to it, like the darkies in Africa before their pagan idols. Well, I’ve got news for them tonight. Mister Magee here is a Portydown man, and he doesn’t like to waste anything, so I can assure you that after the show’s over, he’ll be feeding those wee pancakes to his pigs. Waste not, want not!’
Ramirez moved on to the chalice, pouring a good measure of the altar wine into it and slowly enunciating the words of consecration over it. Then, as his wife rang the bell, he held the golden chalice aloft, triumphantly, like a sportsman with a trophy, holding it there for them to admire, to praise, to worship. They rose to their feet in a paroxysm of hatred and fear and righteousness.
‘People of Ulster,’ bellowed McCoy, ‘this is what the priests of Rome want you to believe. That this mockery should take over from the Bible, the only true word of God. This is what the Romanists in our midst do every Sunday, chewing the wee wafer and slurping wine from the same cup, spreading their filth among themselves. And if it wasn’t for the eternal vigilance of the Ulster people and their pastors, this is what they would force us to do too.’ Father Ramirez meanwhile was concentrating on the Communion. When he had seen the light he had given up the cactus juice, but McCoy noticed him lingering longingly over the chalice, like a man in two minds, and hurried him along to wind up the proceedings. The show was almost over, and already Magee was moving among them, bucket in hand. They would be generous. They had had their money’s worth. Nobody, they told themselves, could put on a show to match the Reverend McCoy. For nothing (but nothing) can match the orgiastic frisson that runs through the born-again Presbyterian at the paradox of an ordained priest of Rome (albeit a defrocked one who has come home to Jesus) celebrating the Roman Catholic Mass on the platform of his local Orange hall. It was unanimously agreed that it was a stunt only McCoy could have pulled.
They had paraded the Mexican round for a week or two, pulling in the crowds wherever they went. As anticipated, they had drawn the ire of the papists, and Schnozzle Durante, the long-nosed cleric from the Falls Road, had whipped up a band of followers who pursued them through every townland. Magee loved the ructions. He loved the excitement of the confrontations, the massed ranks of B-men protecting his rights as a Loyalist to practise his religion. Secretly, too, he loved the drama of the thing, the fastidious way the Mexican dressed each evening in the purloined vestments, the incense and the bells and the golden chalice of red wine; he loved the smell of the crowds in the Orange halls and the cheering and baying of those outside. He loved to hear the police sirens and the bark of the loudhailers ordering Schnozzle and his rabble to disperse; he even loved the smell of teargas lingering in the van at the end of the evening. He loved all these things in a way that only a Portadown butcher, in whose veins flows the blood of the Peep O’ Day Boys but whose present existence is circumscribed by the narrow streets and narrow people of his home town, can love them. But more than anything else, he loved the money. McCoy had tried to put him on forty per cent when the project was first mooted, but he had laughed at him and turned his back, the way you would to a papist farmer trying it on over the price of a heifer. McCoy became abusive but Magee held his ground. ‘Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’ demanded the preacher, but Magee knew that there would be no show without himself to take care of the practical details. It would be fifty-fifty or nothing, and in the end he got his way. Every evening, as he elbowed through the crowds, buckets in hand, he knew that his decision to leave Lily and go on the road had been the right one.
But the project, so promisingly begun, had ended badly. Radix malorum est cupiditas. The Mexican’s grasp of the English language was increasing with every passing day. At the end of a fortnight he started to demand union rates and to mutter darkly about overtime. There is something in the Portadown soul that abhors the closed shop; Magee manhandled him round to the back of the van and put him right with a kick to the bollocks. But his performances thereafter grew erratic. He started fluffing his lines and missing his cues. Some nights he was so jarred, despite Magee’s attempts to keep him off the sauce, that he could barely stagger up the steps of the makeshift altar. There were complaints from the paying customers and the collections began to fall off. And when he discovered that McCoy was fooling with his wife it was the last straw.
One afternoon in Aughnacloy he awoke from a stupor to find the van rocking rhythmically, heard above the rusty protests of the suspension the moans of his señora and glimpsed through the serving hatch the preacher’s flaccid backside pumping away on the daybed. That night he refused point-blank to go on stage, and the show was over.
‘You couldn’t bridle your lechery till we’d broken even!’ Magee accused McCoy when he heard that Ramirez had taken to his heels and was trying to flee