Shambles Corner. Edward Toman
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