Shambles Corner

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.’

Two

Magee stood in the drizzle gently prodding the sow with a hazel switch, gauging the depth of the fat on her haunches, but careful not to bruise the flesh so soon before slaughter. The animal pivoted her bristled snout away from him, but he prodded her firmly on the other flank till she turned back to him.

From the door of Hughes’s Joe watched him, saying nothing. He reached into his pocket and produced a battered pouch. Carefully he rolled a thin cigarette. He cupped his hands around the match, his back hunched against the wind from the lower end of the town. His full attention seemed to be devoted to English Street where knots of pedlars were eyeing one another suspiciously before the serious business of the day began. He turned his attention down the town, to the bleak curve of Irish Street. There was only one shop on the street, Peadar’s Fruit’n’Veg, whose proprietor had positioned a few crates on the pavement as a concession to market day. Peadar himself hovered uneasily at the door, keeping an eye on the muddy potatoes and long-leafed carrots. Joe nodded to him.

Meanwhile Magee had turned his back on the pigs and was facing up the town. They nonchalantly surveyed their respective quarters for a few minutes more, then turned slowly to check on developments across the Shambles. Magee cleared his throat and spat a ball of gleaming mucus into the gutter. The pigs jostled forward, investigating it with their dripping snouts. He held his nose between forefinger and thumb and blew it, hard and long, snapping the snot from his fingers over the backs of the beasts. Joe cocked his leg and farted loudly. Then, their toilettes completed, each of them settled their caps on the backs of their heads to indicate that they were ready for business, and turned to face the other for the first time.

‘How much are you looking for them?’ demanded Magee.

‘I’m looking plenty. You’ll not find better animals in Armagh today.’

Magee grunted. The preliminaries were over; the ritual of selling could begin in earnest. Both men knew their parts and how they would be expected to play them. They spat on their hands. They offered to shake on it. They turned their backs on derisory offers, took umbrage, swore they’d not take a penny less nor offer a penny more. Then they would grab each other round the neck and whisper loudly into the other’s ear, the meanwhile squeezing the forearm vigorously to convey some hidden nuance. They assured each other they were decent men, and hurled abuse in the next breath. But finally, as both of them knew from the beginning, the deal was struck. There was spitting and the bargain was sealed with a knucklecrushing handshake and a vigorous slap on the back as the wad of notes changed hands.

‘You’ll take a drink with me now,’ demanded Joe, indicating the Patriot’s.

‘I will not,’ said Magee.

‘You’re a God-fearing man, sir, I can see that,’ Joe said with a smirk. ‘Sure something tells me you dig with the other foot. But we’ll not hold that against you.’ They both laughed sparingly. ‘Are you sure now you won’t join me in a pint? You’re not going to stand there and tell me that all you fellows are teetotallers?’

‘You’ll not take offence if I decline,’ Magee grunted.

‘I respect you for that now, sir. If there were more like you, decent men, on both sides, the country wouldn’t be in the state it’s in. Tell me, am I right on that one?’

‘You are,’ Magee said without much conviction. He extricated himself from Joe’s clutches and drove the squealing animals before him across the Shambles to the corner of Scotch Street, without looking back.

When he was out of earshot, his father turned to Frank and laughed uneasily. ‘Did you ever see the beat of that Magee? But hadn’t I got him well taped?’

Peadar the greengrocer, who had been lurking behind the soup vegetables during the negotiations, emerged on to the footpath and allowed himself to agree with Joe that he had the measure of your man and no mistake.

‘Magee’s a hoor all right,’ he volunteered. ‘As black as the ace of spades! If it wasn’t for him, McCoy would have been out of business long ago. A Portadown man, I need hardly add!’

‘Did you see the bastard trying to do me out of the price of the sow at the last minute? Did you note that?’

‘Mind you, he’s smart enough not to venture indoors at any rate. Eugene and the Patriot would eat him alive.’

The post-mortem on the sale was a necessary ritual. All round the Shambles there were men, happy for the price of a pint to listen to every detail of the dispute of the pig-keepers, to slap you on the back and assure you that you got the best of the bargain. The vegetable man was inching closer to the door of the bar, his body language expressing a desire to continue the conversation inside.

‘It’s time I introduced you properly to the proprietor,’ Joe declared, taking Frank by the hand. Then, pausing only to wink at Peadar, he spat loudly and lunged once more at the swinging door.

The Sabbath is taken seriously around Caledon. The houses remain shuttered, no one walks the roads and even the cattle in the fields by the sullen Blackwater seem to adopt a sombre expression. But it is a pretty place despite its people, and it had been Joe’s idea, when he woke the boy at first light and the pair of them slipped out of the side door of the Patriot Bar, that they should take the long way home, seeing a bit of the countryside as they went. Their pleasure trip had come to a sudden halt a mile outside the village, however, when the tractor had died on them. Joe searched out the garage, and threw pebbles at the upstairs window till he raised the owner who grudgingly agreed to serve him. But the voice of his wife ordered him back inside and the diesel pump stayed righteously locked. Father and son made their way back to the abandoned tractor, taking the low road by the river. Despite their predicament, the pale sun, the quietness of the countryside, the afterglow of the feed of drink from the night before, and the few pounds still in his pocket from the sale of the pigs had Joe in high spirits. He drew Frank’s attention to the beauties of the river, for at this point it is wide and sluggish, meandering between shallow banks. And then, turning a corner in the lane, they spotted the ice-cream van.

Joe stopped in his tracks and gripped the boy tightly by the shoulder. He put his finger to his lips in a gesture of caution. They listened. From the flood plain there came the spasmodic sound of singing and shouting. He took Frank by the hand and steered him towards the ditch; then keeping low they made for the safety of a clump of trees which gave a view of the wide river beyond. A small crowd had gathered on the bank and were singing hymns to the beat of a tambourine and the uncertain accompaniment of a piano accordion. They were dressed in their Sunday best, the women in white dresses, the men in suits and bowler hats. In the middle of the river stood a large, red-faced man. His hands were held high in supplication, his eyes closed in concentration. He was dressed in a three-piece suit that had seen better days. The brown water flowed round his bulging midriff and his wet hair straggled down over his ears.

‘It’s McCoy!’ said Joe. ‘I knew it was the old reprobate when I saw the ice-cream van. The Reverend Oliver Cromwell McCoy. Would you look at the stunt he’s pulling!’

As they watched, a couple from the bank detached themselves from the crowd and began to wade slowly out to midstream. One was a burly, purple-faced youth, the other a stout old woman, doing her best to overcome an obvious fear of the water. When they had reached the middle of the swirling river, McCoy clasped the woman firmly to him and, with the purple-faced boy backing him up, began to call down the spirit of the Lord. The woman began to thrash about. ‘Wait till you see the hops of her when he’s done the business,’ whispered Joe into Frank’s ear.

McCoy ducked her suddenly into the river. ‘In the name of God which is the Father,’ they could hear him roar, ‘and God the Son which is Jesus’ – he immersed her a second time – ‘and God the Holy Ghost,’ and down she went again, gasping for breath. But when she came up for the third time a great chorus of hallelujahs rose up from the bank and the tambourine started up again. They burst into song, led by a wee girl who was coaxing a few chords from the squeeze-box. The woman in the river stood stunned for a few seconds as the water drained from her ears, eyes and hair.