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