The second problem Magee isolated was more fundamental. It had to do with McCoy’s grasp of the sacred texts. McCoy didn’t know his scripture the way a preaching man should. He imagined he had learned enough from listening to the old man, or from his mother when she had taken penny Sunday school, but in later life he had difficulty getting some of the more complicated passages quite right. Worse still, he had difficulty getting any sense out of them. The years he had spent propping up the crew bar on the Stranraer ferry with a variety of companions, some of them very unscriptural indeed, had embedded in his brain a number of quotations and catchphrases of dubious origin. In moments of stress, the Reverend McCoy would attribute these to the Ancients.
‘“The mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley sheep arc fatter,” ‘he would proclaim to the startled citizens of Ballymoney. ‘“We therefore thought it meeter for to carry off the latter.” Proverbs, Chapter two, Verse two.’
‘“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”’ was another favourite. He firmly believed in its inspired origins, and not even Magee’s firmest denials could persuade him to drop it from his repertoire. And while it was undoubtedly good enough for Ballymoney, it cut no ice with the new classes of born-again youngsters that the times were producing. Young smart-arses reared on free school milk, who were hearing the call to their Saviour in their teens and earlier, and who had taken to frequenting the scripture halls and Bible tents, swapping chapter and verse with their elders.
There had been an embarrassing scene one night in the Shambles. McCoy was standing at the serving window of the van, warm as toast from the gas ring at his backside, preaching to a huddled gathering who had braved the elements to hear the Lord’s Word. A smooth-faced young pup had stepped forward, Bible in hand, to accuse him of heresy, shouting to the people to beware, the words they were hearing were not those of Holy Writ but of that papist pomographer and stooge of Rome, William Shakespeare. Magee had been on to him in seconds, and a deft kick in the groin had silenced his warbling. A few of the other men had joined in, dragging him off towards Scotch Street for further attention. But though McCoy had tried to make a joke of it, calling the youth a papist infiltrator from the other side of the Shambles, the incident rattled Magee. He returned to Portadown and the butcher’s shop, swearing he would not return till McCoy had dropped all Hamlet’s soliloquies from his act.
Then he heard of the Mexicans for the first time.
Frank had to wait another month before he heard the end of the story, for the topic of Señora McCoy was banned in the Feely household. But when confession night came round again, Joe took him with him to the Shambles, his mother putting up only token resistance. And though the topic was banned in the bar too, when they were all in the snug, out of the Patriot’s earshot, the conversation edged round to the seductress who lived across the square.
‘It was a bad business and no mistake,’ the Tyrone man said.
‘I don’t like to talk about it yet at home,’ Joe agreed. ‘She took it very badly.’
‘If he’d brought the pair of them round our way the Tyrone people would never have put up with it.’
‘You’d have done shite all, the same as the rest of us!’ Joe assured him, refusing to rise to the bait.
They set out home at midnight. It was a long walk but the night was mild, with only the faintest drizzle. The fresh air will do us both a power of good,’ Joe claimed, ‘and I’ll explain to you what that eejit was on about on the way. To tell you the truth it’s not something you’d want to talk about to anyone and everyone. A lot of people are still up in arms about that stunt. That was taboo behaviour and McCoy knows it.’
Magee was serving in the shop when he first got wind of Ramirez and wife doing the rounds in Scotland. A cousin of Lily’s, an exiled son of the town home for a funeral, had been sent to buy chops and was whiling away a dull afternoon regaling Magee’s customers with tales from the other side. And though he pretended to show no interest one way or the other when the cousin began to describe the priest and the great show he could put on, the butcher was all ears. ‘It would be a sure-fire money-spinner for the likes of Reverend McCoy,’ the exile confided. Magee said nothing, but he had heard enough to know that he had hit the nail on the head. He closed the shop early, told Lily brusquely to mind her own affairs when she started on him, and headed for Armagh.
McCoy heard him out in silence and then told him to fuck off. ‘Do you want to see me crucified? Is that it? Pull a stunt like that in a town like this and there’s no telling where it will end!’
‘You’re afraid of the papists?’
‘McCoy fears no man! But this is a fifty-fifty town. The likes of you, from Portadown, have no conception of what that means.’
‘It means you put the popeheads in their place every chance you get, and with this bucko on the payroll you’ll never get a better chance.’
On that note Magee took his leave. He knew the preacher well enough to know that he would warm to it before long.
But though McCoy hated popery and papists with a righteousness second to none, there was one part of him that still shrank back from this particular venture. Would it not be going too far? he wondered. Would it unleash a backlash from the Fenians, one that would plumb new depths of fury? Armagh, after all, was a city where gratuitous savagery was never far from the surface.
A week later Magee was back, lugging a carrier bag behind him. ‘Say nothing till you see this!’ he ordered, pulling McCoy with him into the box room. He upended the bag and a jumble of gaudy vestments, altar vessels and sacristy bells fell clanging to the floor. Magee pulled an alb clumsily over his head and struggled with the chasuble.
McCoy began to laugh. ‘You’ve been raiding a chapel by the look of things. I hope you remembered the poor box while you were at it.’
‘Look at these fucking things,’ Magee said. ‘The country prods will be going apeshit when the show gets on the road.’
‘I’m still thinking about it,’ McCoy said, but it was clear that it was all systems go. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you slip over to the Boyne Bar the way you are and give the fellas a laugh!’
‘Fuck off!’ Magee said, putting his foot to the door and struggling out of the vestments. ‘Do you want to get the pair of us killed?’
Next morning he wrote to the cousin in Tillicoultry, enclosing a postal order and a contract for the Mexican and his señora. He hung around the docks at Larne studying the passengers till he spotted his man stumbling down the gangplank. Magee took the bewildered Mexican firmly by the arm leaving the señora to struggle with the baggage as best she could. ‘Welcome to Ulster, hombre!’ he said, marching him towards the Armagh bus.
Before the end of the month they were heading for the hills with Schnozzle in full pursuit.
McCoy, it was agreed, had once again come up with the perfect formula for inflaming the Fenians while simultaneously entertaining the Protestants. Padre José Ramirez was a one-time Catholic priest and now apostate and scourge of Romanism. After a lifetime spent in the service of the harlot of the Tiber, Padre Ramirez had seen the light, heard the call of the living Christ, accepted the same into his heart, forsworn