Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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he shouted. ‘Praise His name!’ He removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his brow. By now Magee was on the floor in the sawdust, howling like a dog. The Primitive Brother looked down on him with a look of righteous pride.
In no time at all the word had spread. Lily made tea in relays, both pleased and embarrassed to be the cynosure of so many eyes. How would she manage now, one of them asked slyly, and her married to a man who was saved? Someone made a joke about a mixed marriage, for it was acknowledged that she was not ‘as yet’ called to Jesus. She blushed and apologized for the lack of cake in the house. ‘I haven’t a thing to put down,’ she repeated, till the boys were despatched to the corner shop with a note for a sponge sandwich and a packet of fancy biscuits.
Magee moved into the parlour to hold court. He repeated for each newcorner the details of his conversion experience. He stood with his back to the fire, his face flushed, his speech animated with the joy of certain salvation. With each new visitor he fell dramatically to his knees and groaned and thanked the Lord for his deliverance, and the company muttered their praises and jangled their teacups and tried to get a hymn going. Brother Billy, the instrument of God’s goodness, stood beaming beside his prodigy’, calculating the rich harvest of souls that awaited him in the vicinity.
By dark, word had spread across the town, and the Temperance Memorial Band, holding an impromptu rehearsal, made their way to the butcher’s shop to the strains of ‘The Wondrous Cross’. They stood in the rain outside the house and the people began to sing, and Magee came to the door and began to bellow more loudly and more fervently than the rest put together:
‘My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.’
A Land Rover, its windscreen encased in wire mesh and skirted like a hovercraft, crept round the corner with its lights out. There was no law against street parties of a Protestant religious nature, the occupants agreed. Like many who live with the possibility of meeting their Maker at any moment, the RUC men aboard hoped they were saved. They drove quietly away, humming the hymn to themselves.
But old habits die hard. As ten o’clock approached, above the hubbub of the crowd and the noise of the band, Magee’s voice could be heard declaring that what was needed now, to put the tin hat on his great good fortune, was a drink. The thought was father to the deed. The protestations of Brother Billy, the look of horror from the teetotallers with the teacups, even Lily’s urgent attempts to mark his card with regard to the role of alcoholic beverages in his new calling were all lost in the general enthusiasm to celebrate the occasion with a few bottles in the Legion Bar.
The man of the moment was handed out from the hearth to the pavement over the heads of the crowd and hoisted on to the shoulders of the bandsmen. Lily followed him out, elbowing her way through the throng, grabbing him by the trouser leg, trying to unseat him. She was screaming now with rage and embarrassment, past caring what the neighbours thought or how they were enjoying the spectacle.
‘Get down out of that, Sammy Magee!’ she ordered him. ‘Are you trying to make a complete fucking eejit out of me?’ They pretended not to be listening, but they were storing it up, word by word for later recall.
‘“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine,”’ shouted Brother Billy in desperation, sensing that he too had been made an eejit of. ‘“It causeth all men to err who drink it.”’ But his pleas fell on stony ground, for the band had struck up a secular tune they could march to, and Magee, still holding Brother Billy’s Bible aloft and testifying to the mysterious ways of the Lord, was led off down the street.
The B Specials brought him home at two o’clock. He had been picked up in Armagh with a crowd as bad as himself. Standing in the middle of the Shambles, the sergeant said, testifying with menaces. He quoted dispassionately from his notes till Lily shut him up. He was apologetic but firm. Seeing it was the religion that had gone to his head, they’d say no more about it, but two-fingered gestures from prod or taig constituted a breach of the peace. If Mister Magee found he was still saved in the morning maybe he’d do them all a favour and keep it to himself.
He got the sharp end of her tongue for the next month but he suffered in silence. He knew he had made a fool of her, showing her up in front of the neighbours. The joy of the night had been shortlived, and he had woken the next morning with a sore head and an empty heart. Whatever service Brother Billy had provided the previous night it hadn’t taken. Life was as empty and as treacherous as it had always been. In his moment of darkness, he began to doubt the Lord and turn away from his Holy Word.
But Lily was a kindly woman in her own way, and she hated seeing him in the state he was in. So when she spotted the advertisement in the Protestant Telegraph for a new Gold Star service from the Reverend Doctor McCoy (‘YOU’VE TRIED THE REST – NOW TRY THE BEST! Full money back guarantee if not completely satisfied’) she clipped out the coupon at once and began to put some of the housekeeping money aside.
It was a cold autumn evening when McCoy strode up to the door. He was dressed from head to toe in black. He wore a woolly Russian hat against the chill wind and a greatcoat that hung almost to his ankles. ‘Where’s himself?’ he demanded. She indicated upstairs. The whole street had turned out in the expectation of more crack, but he silenced them with a single stare. ‘Tell all these people to move away,’ he boomed from the doorway. ‘This isn’t a peepshow. This is the work of the Lord.’
The two men were closeted together for the next hour. Then she heard the footsteps of the preacher heavy on the stairs. She rushed to offer tea but he refused. She slipped the money into his hand and he pocketed it without acknowledgement. ‘You’ll have no more trouble with your man, missus,’ was all he said. ‘The Lord is powerful!’ Without another word he turned on his heel, leaving a faint smell of whiskey lingering in the small kitchen.
But McCoy had been as good as his word. From that day onward Magee lived a life of righteousness and his household with him. They prayed together daily, before and after meals, and testified on the street corner every Saturday. He donned his suit every Sunday and cycled over to Armagh where he assisted McCoy as he laboured in the tin chapel bringing others home to Jesus. He never again visited the Legion or was tempted by the thought of liquor, never again smoked his pipe or laughed at what he read in the paper. And the sound of the Orange flute was heard no more in the house.
No one would willingly befriend a Portadown man, even one that is saved and walks in the way of the Lord. But even the most vocal critic of the place will admit that the Portadown man, though singularly lacking in the social graces, has a rare head for business. And while McCoy had never liked the place, knowing its inhabitants to be parsimonious even when their eternal future was at stake, he wasn’t long in recognizing Magee’s potential as a financial consultant. The Martyrs Memorial, never at the best of times the goldmine its detractors across the square claimed it to be, was now on its uppers. Seven lean years had left the coffers empty. McCoy took the butcher aside one Sunday morning and tried to tap him for a loan. But the Portadown man’s wallet stays buttoned, even to those who have been the agent of his salvation. Magee, instead, volunteered his services at twenty-five per cent, spent the afternoon going over the books, such as they were, drew up an inventory of the goods and chattels, put his finger on some of the more obvious problems and made a few marketing suggestions that were soon put into practice.
‘If you want to get anywhere you’ll have to change that name of yours. Your father did you no favour calling you Oliver,’ stated Magee in his blunt Portadown way.
‘Oliver Cromwell was a Protestant hero; he put the papists in their place once and for all. I’m proud to bear his name!’
‘Oliver’s a Fenian name. It’s been a Fenian name ever since that saint of theirs got the chop.’ It was true of course. Every second one of them seemed to be called Oliver, after Oliver Plunkett whose gruesome, severed head grinned out from the altar in Drogheda.
‘And as for calling yourself Doctor Oliver, it makes you sound like a papist GP. And who do you think you’re fooling with the “Doctor”