The roar of support that greeted these sentiments indicated that he had hit the nail on the head. The push began. On the floor of the van the diminutive Mexican rolled into the foetal position and sobbed softly to himself in creole as the rocks bounced off the flimsy roof of the van. He closed his eyes, and heard the thud of wood and leather and metal, on skull and bones and flesh, the screaming of the women, the curses of the men, the wailing of lost children. Then they were moving, the van lurching unevenly as the crowd inched forward and the Fenians and their priest fell back into the fields. McCoy turned on the chimes again and the van began to pick up speed. ‘Give her the wellie, Mister Magee,’ he shouted into the front, where the dour-faced driver was wrestling with the gears. ‘We mustn’t keep the punters waiting.’ He flung open the window and leaned out, giving the priest in the field the two fingers. Then he turned his attention to the Mexicans, prodding them firmly with the steel toecap of his boot. ‘You can get up now, brother and sister. The fun’s over for the moment. Tutti finito, comprende? Pull yourselves together and start getting into your canonicals. Curtain up in ten minutes.’
When Father Alphonsus was unpacking the next night, he remembered his souvenir and placed it carefully on the mantelpiece beside the statue of the Sacred Heart, admiring as he did so the symmetry it gave to the sparse decor of his room. The Sacred Heart had been a present from his aunt on his twenty-first birthday. Over the years her fierce devotion to the icon had paid off. She was convinced that it was the personal intercession of the Sacred Heart that had won him first prize in the lottery in his final year at Maynooth. A three-year secondment to sunny California with an option to renew! ‘Who ever heard of a Belfast boy winning anything, even the turkey in a Christmas raffle, unless they had someone’s prayers?’ she demanded to know, and he couldn’t disagree. She still wrote to him every day, the long letters of a lonely old woman, reminding him of his covenant with the Sacred Heart and keeping him up to date on every atrocity back home.
Only too mindful of his good fortune, Alphonsus had kept his part of the bargain. Every night since his arrival he had faithfully offered up a perpetual novena to the Sacred Heart. He prayed for three things. He prayed for guidance, for the world of the West Coast was still a mystery to him. He prayed for purity, for there were temptations at every turning, even for a man with the rigorous training of Maynooth behind him. But above all he prayed that he might never be recalled to damp Belfast and that he might see out his days in the sun. So far the Sacred Heart had seen him right on all three scores.
Next morning he was up for early Mass. He crossed himself and knelt by the bedside to say his prayers. Automatically he glanced up to the mantelpiece to catch the eye of his protector and dedicate this new day to Him. The Sacred Heart had gone! Where it should have been, in the centre of the shelf, stood the Indian carving, staring at him with cynical composure. The Sacred Heart statue was on the tiles of the hearth, smashed in a thousand fragments.
Father Alphonsus took the ferry across the bay, speeding towards the towered city of San Francisco. He pulled the figurine from his pocket, said an inward act of contrition, and surreptitiously threw it overboard into the choppy waters. The boat moved on. But until they’d passed the forbidding bulk of Alcatraz, he could still see it, bobbing unconcerned on the tide, slowly drifting towards the Golden Gate and the open ocean beyond.
With a pang of guilt he remembered the morning’s letter from his aunt, unopened in his pocket. It would be full as usual of dreadful news from home, snippets from the paper telling of death and mutilation on the Falls Road. He slit the air mail envelope with his nail and studied the front page of the Irish News she had sent him. It spoke of a terrible scandal blighting the countryside, a monstrosity so obscene that there were hardly words to describe it. McCoy was up to his dirty business again. He glanced at the photograph of the preacher, bellowing defiance in some Orange hall. But cowering behind him was a face that Alphonsus thought he recognized. A face like a wrinkled prune. A face like the one he had seen in Mexico, in the lost village in the mountains.
In spite of the sun, which was warm on his face, his blood ran cold. A cloud passed over his world. He knew now that some day the order would come, summoning him back to the unhappy land of his birth.
Frank Feely’s mother had done the Nine Fridays when she was a girl, and though she had fulfilled all the regulations to the letter and now had a cast-iron guarantee of her place in heaven, she remained suspicious of the world, the way people born and bred in South Armagh tend to be. The framed pledge by the Sacred Heart, in fading gilt copperplate, was displayed above the mantelpiece, where the red candle glowed day and night before His picture. It became Frank’s first reading lesson, his father lifting him on his shoulders and helping him decipher the tortuous logic of the contract. Confession and Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, and the Sacred Heart would reserve for you a heavenly crown. In an uncertain world where sinful temptations could lurk at every turning, even in the hills of Armagh, it was as good as money in the bank.
‘It’s an offer no one could refuse,’ Joe Feely would extol. ‘Who could turn down a bargain like that?’ He said it with some feeling, for like many another before him, he was jinxed when it came to the Nine First Fridays. Somehow he never seemed to fill the run himself. Each winter he’d be going great guns, seven maybe eight months without a hiccup, but always something would intervene to invalidate the contract. Like the other mysteries of life, he accepted it with stoicism and just a hint of relief.
‘Let me tell you this,’ he confided to the infant. ‘The Sacred Heart is not one to go fooling around with unless you’re serious.’
Along with the Sacred Heart Messenger, which she read to him at night, his mother brought home The African Missions from the chapel gates. Frank sat on the floor and stared at page after page of blurred photographs, the white-robed priests flanked by smiling groups of black children. Yet when he heard his mother screaming about McCoy, calling him as black as the ace of spades, he knew this wasn’t what she meant. He had seen photographs of McCoy in the Irish News that his father brought home from the Shambles across the hill. Before he was a year old he could recognize McCoy, the bull neck bulging under the dog collar, the protruding eyes, the fixed stare of the fanatic. His father cut them out carefully and hung them on the nail in the privy behind the house, announcing to the neighbours his imminent intention of wiping his arse on the Orange hoor. ‘Black bastard,’ Frank said, speaking his first words.
There’s a boy won’t be long till he’s putting us all in our place,’ laughed his father, tucking into a fry the better to get his bowels working. And his mother, breaking the habit of a lifetime, allowed herself a smile at his infant precocity.
There were other paradoxes too in the tales his father brought home from the Shambles, paradoxes that puzzled his infant imagination and left him with the uneasy feeling that the world beyond the half door was a treacherous place. Schnozzle Durante was an American he sometimes heard his mother croon to when the wireless was working. But he knew that the Schnozzle Durante they argued about in the evenings was a darker force closer to home at whose every mention his mother crossed herself.
‘You’ll land yourself in the soup, talk like that!’ she insisted. His father would laugh at her when she did that.
‘What harm is there in a bit of a joke? If we can’t take a joke we must be in a bad way.’
‘We’ll see who’s laughing if the clergy hear you making