The Miracle Man (7 page)

“God, this sounds like a tinker’s cart,” Nancy said, between gasps.

“How’s that, Nancy? Okay?”

“Oh, that’s – fine, Dermot, just – fine.”

“Good. There’s something you could do for me.”

“Oh God – yes – anything.”

He suddenly stopped moving.

“Sell me that field. I’ll give you a good price for it.”

“Dermot, don’t stop.” She pulled him tightly against her. “I’ll think about it. I promise you. Only – don’t stop now.”

With the movement of the vehicle the dead lamb on the seat began to rock back and forth, one outstretched leg slowly moving towards Nancy. After a few seconds she said in a timid voice,

“Dermot. There’s something – tapping against my head.”

“Ah, come on now, Nancy,” he said with a chuckle, “I’m not that well endowed.”

“What? I said there’s something touching my head.” Awkwardly, she stretched an arm behind her and slowly her fingers closed around the cloven hoof. Her voice was a high-pitched whine. “Jeeesus! It’s the devil! He’s come for us!”

“What now? What, for feck’s sake? This is like sleeping with a banshee.”

“There’s – something – in this car! Jesus, Mary and Joseph make it go away, Dermot! Make it go away, pleeease!”

“God Almighty would you stop leaping about, woman. You’ll have it wrenched off me.” He reached up and thrust the leg away. “Dammit, it’s only a lamb – and it’s dead.”

“Dead? You told me it was a sheepskin rug!”

“Well it is nearly. Now come on for God’s sake. Where were we?”

“I’m not doing anything with a sheep watching me.”

“Jasus wept! It’s dead!”

“I’ll still know it’s there. Those big eyes. You’ll need to get rid of it.”

“Give me patience. All right, all right, I’ll get rid of it. Mind your knee there, for God’s sake!”

Nancy moved to allow Dermot clear passage to the driver’s seat, and then she said, “What’s that?” She reached down with her hand to feel what was resting against her knee and then gave a little giggle.

“What?” Dermot almost shouted. “What the hell now?”

“It’s – “ Nancy broke into laughter, “ – it reminds me – the other day in the butcher’s – there was a sausage on the floor – “ she gave a shriek of laughter, “ – and somebody had trod on it!”

“Is it any bloody wonder, with all your shrieking? Let go of me.”

“And this woman says to her husband – “ Nancy gasped, “thinking I couldn’t hear – ‘I see,’ she says,’somebody’s stood on that sausage. What’s your excuse?’” As Nancy shook with laughter Dermot angrily flung himself towards the driver’s seat, catching a blow from the gear stick that temporarily put all notion of sex out of his head and banging his back on the steering wheel. Throwing open the door he hauled the dead lamb after him. Then standing with his trousers round his ankles, with Nancy hanging out the door pointing and laughing, he held the lamb by the leg, whirled it once round his head and flung it away into the darkness. When he got back into the car, she said to him through her giggles,

“Oh God, you should’ve seen yourself!”

“Very bloody funny, I’m sure,” he said.”

“I couldn’t help laughing, Dermot. You were such a sight. But darling – you know I love you, don’t you?”

“Oh yeah? I sometimes wonder.”

“Oh but of course I do. Don’t you know I’d do anything for
my big hunk?” Nancy gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Including sell you that piece of land.”

Dermot sat upright in his seat.

“You would? Really? Ah, you don’t know how much that means to me, Nancy.” He leant over and gave her a hug. “Thank you. I won’t forget this.”

“Mind you,” she said, “there is a drawback.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You’ll have John McGhee as a tenant and him hardly paying a penny in rent. You know the old rogue actually came round yesterday looking for a rent reduction? I couldn’t believe it.”

“Never misses a trick. So what did you say?”

Nancy laughed. “I told him some people would pay big bucks to live so near a holy place like the Mass Rock and in fact I should be putting his rent up, not down.”

“I’m sure that made a big impression on that old heathen.”

“You’re right. He said it hadn’t done him any good and him a cripple all his life.” Nancy slowly began to run her hand up Dermot’s leg. “So I told him he’d just have to keep praying for a miracle. You know what he said? ‘The only miracle’ll be the day a Quinn parts wi’ money.’ The cheek of him.”

But Dermot hadn’t heard the last part of what Nancy had said. He was staring out of the windscreen and through the trees to where the village lights glowed in the valley below, as an idea, a wonderful idea, slowly formed in his mind.

One evening about two weeks after Dermot McAllister at last acquired the piece of land near the chapel from Nancy Quinn, Limpy was sitting in the small crowded bar of O’Neill’s public house in the village of Inisbreen. Behind the counter Mrs O’Neill presided over the proceedings from her high wooden stool beside the cash drawer, her wrinkled hands plucking coins and notes from hand and counter and dropping them into the till with the speed and skill of a conjurer. While her son Danny pulled pints, wrenched the caps off stout bottles and measured out whiskey and rum for the thirsty customers – and all at a trot – “the Mother”, as he called her, sat serenely in the corner surveying the bar, her eyes and ears missing nothing. Her hawk-like features and formidable bulk had made many a customer give second thoughts to challenging her ruling on standards of language and behaviour in her establishment. Arbitrarily, using no known logic or published code of conduct, and with the plaintiff having resource to no court of appeal, least of all his peers, she would eject customers without explanation as to reason or length of sentence. “You! Out!” was her declaration, accompanied by the pointing of a long and unsavoury finger at the miscreant who, unless he was very
swift, found himself in the village street with his unfinished drink still on the bar. She kept it to sell to other customers, they said, but not within her hearing. Humour was not a strong point with Mrs O’Neill, any more than was conversation. Many years before, when Danny was still at “the wee school”, Mr O’Neill had run off with one of the barmaids, young enough to be his daughter, as Mrs O’Neill would have it, a black-haired temptress with scarlet lips, low-cut tops and skirts so short you could clearly see her intentions. Years passed before word began to drift back to the village that Mr O’Neill and his seductress were running a pub in Birmingham and had three children. There was renewed speculation as to how Mr O’Neill had managed to have even one child with Mrs O’Neill, or indeed had succumbed to marriage at all, as it was generally agreed that he should have legged it in the opposite direction the moment she hove into view. It was also an established fact that, ever since, she had been taking it out on Danny and her customers.

On a stool at the counter, Limpy sat hunched over his Guinness and Bushmills whiskey, an unlit roll-up cigarette dangling from his brown-rimmed lips. His brown hands and face with its deep-cut lines were evidence of the time he had spent outdoors, “watching people working”, some said. But there was always money for a few drinks, they noticed. Maybe he had found a crock of gold. He was certainly small enough for a leprechaun. And if nine o’clock in the evening passed and Limpy was not leaning against the bar counter, there would be talk in O’Neill’s of sending out a search party. He would have done no less for any of them. Kings and queens could come and go, empires crumble, but Arthur Guinness and Old Bushmills remained the cornerstones of their social life. They were, as someone had once said, members of the legal profession who had been called to the bar at an early age.

“Listen,” he was saying to one of the young Moore boys, the one that had left for Scotland with a teacher’s wife and returned home with someone else’s, “what the hell has Europe ever done for the farming people round here? Eh? Tell me that. They don’t know a damn thing about this land. Sitting over there in – wherever the hell it is – telling us – “ he prodded his chest with a forefinger, “ – bloody telling us how to run our own places.” He pushed back his greasy cap to reveal a startlingly white expanse of skin and swayed gently on his stool. To young Moore’s disparaging look he said, “Listen, boy. There’s been McGhees in this glen for – thousands of years – ”

“Aye, and you’re one of the originals,” somebody said from the back. Limpy smacked the counter to dispel the laughter.

“Thousands of bloody years, boy. And they’re telling us how to farm this land?”

Johnny Spade, so-called because his father had once made his living by hiring himself out as an agricultural labourer, turned to the other patrons who were craning forward at the promise of a lively argument and said,

“Jasus, would you listen to him. He never did a decent day’s farming in his life. He wouldn’t know the difference between a yow and a cow.”

“What? I wouldn’t what?” Limpy was on his feet, his face thrust forward pugnaciously. He stuck up two dirty hands. “You see these here hands? They’ve done more work on this land – more work than any other living man, so they have.” The crowd gave a groan. “And by God, I could still match myself against any man, even I am over sixty – and with a bad leg.” He dipped down on one side to show just how bad it was. John Breen, a big, raw-boned hill farmer from the top end of the glen looked straight ahead and said in his slow drawl,

“Bad legs ran in your family, didn’t they, McGhee?” “There was never nobody ran in his family unless it was away from
work,” someone else chipped in, to added laughter. Limpy was off the stool and hopping up and down on his good leg.

“Who said that?” he shouted, vainly trying to see past those who towered over him. “Who said that? Let him step out here and I’ll face him. Yous wouldn’t know what a day’s work was, the half of you. One day cutting turf on that mountain and you’d be carried home on a shutter, every damned one of yez!”

“Sure what would you know about cutting turf, McGhee? You only ever got it from somebody else’s stack.”

In frustration and anger, the little man stamped a foot on the floor.

“That’s it!” he said. “Bloody well that’s it. You bunch of back-stabbing gits. I’ll take no more drink here this night.” The fact that it was almost closing time and that he might be called upon to stand a round of drinks did not go unremarked by his fellow patrons. They knew well his mode of operation, and it seemed that a night was not complete until he had had at least one argument and come near to blows, although never actually engaging in violence, as it was, he said, against his pacifist principles. In quick succession he threw back his whiskey and the remainder of his stout, banging each glass on the counter, so that even Mrs O’Neill, who had been taking little interest in this nightly event, looked towards him and narrowed her eyes.

“Clear the road!” he said as he pushed his way through a throng of people to the door and threw an insult over his shoulder before stamping out of the bar. When the laughter had subsided, John Breen said with a smile,

“Maybe you were a bit hard on him, boys.”

“Ah, he’s always in here shooting his mouth off,” young Moore said. “What the wee bastard needs is a good kick up the arse.”

One by one the other voices in the bar fell silent as all eyes slowly turned towards Mrs O’Neill whose basilisk glare turned
on young Moore who grew suddenly pale and had difficulty in getting his words out.

“I’m – eh – sorry there, Mrs O’Neill.” This was accompanied by the gesture of a forefinger almost touching his brow. “Sorry about that.” A good piece of scandal was one thing, but calling a man’s parentage into question was another matter entirely in Mrs O‘Neill’s book. Breaths were held as they watched the face of she who was the final arbiter of taste and decorum, and then shoulders dropped in relief as she gave a little toss of her head and looked away.

“Last orders please, gentlemen! That’s the time now!” Danny O’Neill announced, revelling in the only moment of authority kindly allowed him by “the Mother”. Later, under the pretence of taking a walk to clear his head of smoke and drink fumes, he would meet Annie Curran in the Church of Ireland lane near the beach for a few fleeting kisses. But that relationship too had its problems, given that Annie embraced the principles of creative conjugality, that is, with no possibility of a ready-made man able to meet her exacting standards, she would need to create a bespoke one from the common clay that was the generality of men. And the first requirement was that Mrs O’Neill would play no part in their married life. Danny was still thinking about it.

In the wan light from a moon half hidden by cloud, Limpy McGhee started out on the walk home across the strand and then up the chapel road that ran alongside the river. “The oul’ feet know the way on their own,” he would say, and that was just as well, given the frequency with which they had to perform the function without aid from his reeling brain. His gait was like the movement of an eccentric wheel, made worse by the peculiar action of his limp, so that he proceeded by a series of gradually rising hops that, after four or five, subsided and began their ascent once more. In the late evening the wind
changed direction and freshened and now blew in from the sea, bringing with it the tang of the sea-weed strewn on the beach by the receding tide. Limpy stood on the grassy bank above the sand, his body swaying slightly from the combined effects of drink and the onshore wind, and he looked out over the bay towards the horizon, there being just enough light to see where the sea met the sky, almost in a uniformity of colour. There was something magical about the sea at night, the moon’s reflection riding on the waves that crashed and hissed their way up the beach, the wind whistling in his ears, the dark bulk of the land looming behind and on either side of him. There were plenty of people who wouldn’t go along the beach after dark, but it didn’t bother him. Been used to it all his life, he had. Go anywhere. Eyes like a cat. Oh, they liked to poke fun at him, they did, because of his bad leg, because he spoke his mind and would face any man in an argument. Like those boys in O’Neill’s, taking a hand out of him. They thought they knew him, thought he was just an ignorant old cripple. But that’s where they were wrong. He was smart, a lot smarter than most of them realised. Did some deep thinking at times, came up with tremendous thoughts on all sorts of things. There was that time that he’d come up with that great idea on . . . . Well, he couldn’t remember exactly what the subject had been but he definitely remembered it had been a great idea. Time would prove him right. If he could remember the idea.