Shambles Corner

‘Like the proverbial drowned rat,’ remarked Joe, ‘but keep an eye on her a minute till you see the leaps of her.’ And right on cue she began to hop. She started whooping and yelling, arching her body back as if trying to immerse herself once more. McCoy and the boy had a strong grip on her, but it took them all their time to hold her. She struggled and kicked, shouting the praises of the Lord. Hands reached out from the bank for her; someone dried her face with a towel, but still she whooped and jumped and pulled away from them. ‘It certainly seems to do the trick,’ Joe admitted grudgingly. ‘You can’t tell me they’re all play-acting.’

McCoy was back in midstream now, arms raised in praise and thanksgiving. The purple youth, his wet shirt clinging to his nipples, was preparing to lead another catechumen to the water, while the dark-skinned girl, little more than a toddler, tried to play ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ on the bulky accordion.

‘Would you look at what he has the lassie doing!’ said Joe. ‘And her hardly fit to lift the squeeze-box. He wasn’t long putting her to work. And there’s her ladyship as well!’ Señora McCoy was struggling out of the brackish water, tossing her head and wringing the water from her long, black hair. Her thin dress clung to the contours of her body, showing sturdy thighs and voluptuous breasts. Joe studied her carefully. ‘It’s as well I didn’t waste my time looking for confession last night,’ he whispered. ‘One look at that and you’re right back to square one.’

He surveyed the rest of the scene with growing distaste. He disliked the sight of Protestants having a good time any day of the week, but particularly on a Sunday. Sunday was the day his own people played Gaelic football and pitch and toss, threw bullets on the long country roads, or drank illicitly in the back rooms of licensed premises. The Protestant Sunday should be spent indoors, in silent sobriety. He turned to Frank. ‘I’ll leave you to keep dick while I nip back to the tractor. There’s no sign of the butcher boy, Magee; the pair of them must be still fallen out. The rest of them are nothing but a few old women and a couple of old fellows. The boy with the purple face looks like a right animal, but he’ll be slow. And look at the state of McCoy, he’s so full of water he can hardly move. Keep your eye on the girl from Ipanema and don’t let them see you. I don’t need to tell you McCoy’s a dangerous bastard!’

He was back in five minutes with a jerry can and a length of hosepipe. ‘I’d give a pound to see the hoor’s face when he tries to make a getaway! I’ll not leave him a drop.’ He unscrewed the petrol cap, rammed the hosepipe into the tank and began to suck till he was red in the face. There was a gurgle from the innards of the van and the black diesel spurted out on to the road. ‘It’s nothing but shite!’ he spat, filling the can. ‘But with God’s help it’ll get us home in time for Mass.’

He settled Frank into the trailer and they made their way home through the maze of unapproved roads that crossed and recrossed the old border. Joe was still laughing, and he fancied he saw a flicker of interest in the dull eyes of his son. He had made a start, he had introduced him to the world of men’s affairs. If God spared him, there would be other forays into the city, and in due course he would tell the boy the full story of McCoy’s chequered career. He would tell him about the conversion of Sammy Magee, and how the pair of them had got hold of the Mexican priest and paraded him, like a monkey on a rope, round the townlands of South Armagh, bringing a curse on the land. When he was old enough to hear of such things, he would tell him the tale of Señora McCoy and how she came to the Shambles.

But, by way of introduction, where better to start than with the story of the ice-cream van itself?

Three

It had once been a real ice-cream van, selling wafers and slides and pokes, back before McCoy had liberated it for the service of the Lord. The prayer meeting in the Ulster Hall had been a great success, the auditorium so packed that Magee had to rig up loudspeakers halfway round Donegall Square for the crowd who couldn’t get in. At the time the province had been on the crest of a great revivalist wave, and the spirit of the Lord was to be felt everywhere. He took as his text: ‘Come ye therefore out from among them and be ye separate.’ It was a text he loved, for he could tease from it a thousand anti-papist nuances. He allowed himself a fulsome elaboration of the text, exploring every syllable of it. Before their eyes he built up a gruesome picture of the great Antichrist. Carefully he proved, with ample quotations, how the Church of Rome was the great beast of the last days and Old Red Socks her bridegroom. Everywhere the hand of the great whore was to be seen. He delved into Revelations for a list of prophecies coming true in the modern world. Everywhere the Kingdom of the Beast was being established. Only one people stood undefiled. Those people were the Protestants of Ulster. Between them and the rule of darkness stood only a frail border, and even now the enemy was within the gates.

It was a familiar message, and they bayed their approval when he vowed that the people of Ulster would never bow the knee to the harlot of the Tiber. Then he turned on them:

‘You call yourselves Protestants?’ They were voluble in assent.

‘You renounce the Pope of Rome?’ At the mention of him they hissed with palpable hatred.

‘You say you want no truck with the scarlet woman riding on the back of the beast?’ They stamped their feet. McCoy lowered his voice, lowered it to a whisper, lowered it so that the crowd in the street fell silent and inside the hall they scarcely dared to breathe. Then how is it,’ he began slowly, ‘how is it possible?’ and he began to fumble in a back pocket … ‘How is it possible?’ He had a piece of paper now and was holding it up for their inspection. He had thrown back his head in anger and his voice was echoing from the galleries of the hall … ‘How is it in the name of the crucified Christ that half of you can be seen any night of the week sucking ice-cream pokes in a shop owned by Roman papists, papists from the Vatican City itself? I was handed this paper by a Christian man from the Shankill Road tonight. He doesn’t want me to mention him by name for fear of reprisals. On it is written the address of these Eyetie popeheads. They are living openly in a house in Dover Street, a house that used to be a Protestant home! The Protestant people of the Shankill are being driven out by the invading papists. And not just content to steal our land from under us, they are now plotting to poison us with their tutti-fruttis and God knows what else, while the Protestant people stand idly by and let it happen …’ The boys at the back of the hall had burst through the doors and were heading down Royal Avenue before he had finished speaking.

They brought the van back from the smouldering ruins of Cafolla’s Café an hour later, the RUC escorting them through the cheering streets. McCoy had it repainted. Where previously it had tempted the passersby with pokes at one and six, it now exhorted them to ‘Flee the Wrath to Come’. The big Bakelite cone which adorned the roof he had resprayed in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Magee spent a Saturday frittering with the chimes, rearranging the spiked metal teeth on the revolving drum that struck the notes, and for a while ‘Papa Piccolino’ was transposed into ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ until they slipped back to their old settings, and Papa Piccolino from sunny Italy re-asserted himself. The redundant fridge was pulled out and a fold-away bed rigged up in its place. The small sink was left where it was. With the addition of a gas ring and a few curtains, McCoy had all his orders.

McCoy came from a long line of preaching men that could be traced back to the plantation. He could dimly recall, as a baby, being brought to the deathbed of his grandfather, ‘Hallelujah’ McCoy, and the old man rising from the pillow to curse the great whore of Babylon with his dying breath. For the first fourteen years of his life he had known only the itinerant life, for his father had worked the northern circuit; throughout the year they would meander from Ballymena through Cullybackey, Irvinestown, Sion Mills, Fivemiletown and Clougher, returning to Ballymena in the spring to start the new season. It was a good life. The marquee was snug on cold nights and if the summer evenings were ever warm they would sleep out in the open. The people were friendly in their God-fearing way. Sometimes there were trips to Scotland, to preach hellfire to the holidaymakers of Ardrossan who would cluster into the tent on the windswept promenade, forsaking the dubious attractions of Mammon outside for the peace which McCoy Senior promised within. For many of them the highlight of the holiday was this annual wash in the blood of the Lamb. Even as a baby, Oliver Cromwell had played his part in the family vocation, appearing with his mother to lisp his Bible passages and later to go round with the collection box. Beside the camp fire at night the talk was constantly of Protestant martyrs and the number of the beast; Bible prophecy was mother’s milk to him. In time he graduated to preaching, his father carefully teaching him the arts of the evangelist. He had learned the tricks of the trade well, first as a boy when his father was still on the road, later when ‘Thumper’ had settled the family in Armagh and was building the Martyrs Memorial Assembly Hall (and Tea Rooms).

But the devil stalketh the world, seeking those whom he may devour, and nowhere is safe from his wiles. As a youth, McCoy had fallen briefly from the grace of the Lord and walked the path of unrighteousness. As the hart panteth after water, so also did Oliver Cromwell McCoy pant after the cream of the barley. He ran away from the Shambles and took a job as short order cook on the Stranraer boat, crossing twice a day to what he liked to call the mainland. For a while he had been barman in a Sandy Row pub, till an acrimonious dispute, never fully explained but involving organizations of a paramilitary nature, caused him to skip the area. He had even done time in the Crumlin Road. The nature of the charge was never clear; the ungodly hinted at young boys and common criminality, though his followers claimed a political and patriotic motive.

Not that any of this was a bar to advancement in his calling. On the contrary, such a misspent youth qualified him uniquely for the role of the prodigal son returned. Word reached him that his father lay dying. He heard the call of the Lord and returned in haste to Armagh. There was a tearful and much publicized deathbed reunion. He inherited from his father the chapel on the Shambles, the marquee, the travelling museum of papist horrors with rights in perpetuity to the Antrim circuit, and enough goodwill to get him started. His early sermons were full of remorse for his wasted days and nights of profligacy. He would ask the congregation to share with him their own experiences of skid row. He spoke openly about his darkest hour in His Majesty’s prison, when boredom and the DTs had driven him to open the Bible, the only reading matter provided by a thoughtful governor. He re-created, in graphic detail, the horror of his days on the booze, dwelling on the dreadful effects it had on his spiritual and physical fibre. Indeed sometimes he dwelt on these flashbacks so long and so lovingly that he would later adjourn, dog collar turned back to front, to the papist side of the square for a whiskey or two to steady his nerves.

On the surface he appeared to have everything going for him. He was tall and sturdy, with neck muscles like a prize bullock, which was the way the women of Ulster liked their preachers; he was boorish and ignorant (‘as thick as poundies’ he would claim proudly), which the menfolk liked. He had a voice like a foghorn, and he could shout at them for hours without repeating himself. And yet it wasn’t all plain sailing. Salvation is a fickle business. There were fat years and there were lean years, following each other in biblical succession. The mission on the Shambles had its ups and downs. There were even times when McCoy took to his bed with the Book of Job and wondered if he would ever work again.

Things didn’t begin to look up till the day he had gone to Portadown and helped the butcher Magee open up his soul to the Lord.

By the time Joe had got round to Magee they were home and he had Teresa to face.

‘You kept him out all night!’ she said. ‘Did you want him to get his death?’

‘He was grand and warm the whole time. We’d have been home hours ago if the tractor hadn’t run out of fuel. It’s no joke trying to get served on a Sunday.’ And he winked at Frank to indicate that least said was soonest mended.

Joe didn’t return to the subject of Magee until a week later when some reference in the paper to a random slaying reminded him of the butcher. So that night, instead of the story of Cinderella or Cuchulainn, he told him the story of the night Magee found the Lord.

For years Sammy Magee had sought a personal relationship with his Saviour, and for years his Saviour had eluded him. Every time Sammy went calling on Him, the Lord was out to lunch. As the years went by, he became more and more worried about his prospects for salvation. Though it left him free to enjoy drinking, playing the flute, kicking Catholics when they ventured too far out of their territory and such other pleasures of the flesh as Portadown offered, Sammy was aware that he had not been put on the earth simply for this. He was willing to exchange his lifestyle for the austerity demanded by the Elect if and when the call came. For it seemed a fair enough bargain, to forswear the good life here and now in exchange for guaranteed eternal happiness in the hereafter. A hereafter that would be peopled by folk like himself and in which the papists would be few and far between.

As his fortieth birthday came and went, Magee grew desperate. What if he had an accident, and was called to the Judgment Throne in the state he was in? Night after night he flung himself on his knees calling on the Lord. Nothing happened. He couldn’t fool himself. He had heard Lily’s brother-in-law testify often enough to know he was nowhere near the experience. There were no blinding lights nor voices in his head welcoming him into the exclusive club, no uncontrollable desire to run into the street and start witnessing. Some are born to be saved and sit forever at the right hand of God. But so too are many destined to damnation in the outer darkness, a fate ordained for them since the beginning of time. But Magee, damn it all, was no popehead or pagan Hindu for whom this fate was good enough. He was an Ulsterman, a Protestant, an Orangeman, an Apprentice Boy and leader of the Temperance Memorial Flute Band. For the Lord to continue to ignore his prayers was decidedly worrying.

Though taciturn and inhospitable by nature – character traits not uncommon in his native town – his door was always open to those who could bring him the Good News, and every day there would be a string of visitors: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Elim Pentecostal Brethren, Plymouth Brethren, Select Brethren, Presbyterians, Free Presbyterians, Wee Free Presbyterians, Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Anabaptists, Moravians, Holy Rollers, Quakers and Shakers and many more, all eager to save Sammy’s soul and claim the credit. The boys would be ordered in from their game of marbles in the gutter and made to kneel with Lily on the flagstones in the kitchen, while Magee and the preaching man sweated away upstairs.

Sometimes it almost worked. He would feel the Spirit move within him. He would begin to shout and praise the Lord, and the visiting preacher would punctuate his shouts with loud hallelujahs; the neighbours would come running to their doors at the commotion. Word would pass down the street that Mister Magee had really got it this time. The kitchen would fill with wellwishers. The boys would rub their knees, red and bruised from the cold floor, thanking Christ the whole thing was over at last. There would be ragged hymn-singing for a while after, though music was never Portadown’s strong point. But Magee would wake the next morning knowing that the security he had experienced the previous evening had faded away and the old uncertainty had returned.

*

One evening coming up to the twelfth, a wee man from the Primitive Brethren called into the shop on spec and had been ushered into the back room where Magee was wrestling with his soul among the strings of sausages. Together they knelt and prayed. Brother Billy could feel, he said, that Brother Samuel was on the verge. What was holding him back? he demanded. Was it pride? Was it covetousness? Or was it lust? He flung open the Good Book at random and began to pore over it, praying that the Lord would guide his hand to a text to fill the bill. Sammy opened the door to the house and ordered his family to kneel with him and pray that he might overcome the sins of pride and lust.

An hour later he was still wavering. The Lord was felt to be hovering somewhere, Brother Billy was sure of it, waiting to be invited into his soul. But these things can’t be forced. He was on the point of calling it a day through exhaustion when Magee began to shiver and then to shake and then to holler in strange tongues. Brother Billy had never known anything like this. The Lord is powerful,’ 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.