Dancing in Limbo - Edward Toman

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threw it into the field and with a prayer to the Sacred Heart for protection, started to make his way on foot over the treacherous fields towards home.

      In the darkened interior of the car, Father Alphonsus also said a prayer to the Sacred Heart, his protector and benefactor. Dear Heart of Jesus, don’t let this prize, so unexpectedly bestowed, be plucked away from me at the eleventh hour! The driver was gunning the limousine like a maniac, tearing through the countryside in the dark, trying to keep up with the bodyguards in front. Dear Jesus don’t let him crash! Don’t let him put us over the side of the ditch, where we’ll be easy pickings for the loyalist gangs who are everywhere this night!

      Alphonsus couldn’t believe his luck. Five years earlier, when Schnozzle had recalled him from the sunshine in California to the horrors of the ghetto, he had thought his days in the sun were over for ever. And here was a second chance! Twenty-four hours ago he was dying on hunger strike, sunk in despair of ever escaping. And now, like a man in a dream, he was hurtling through South Armagh, dressed in civvies by command of the boss, a wad of dollar bills in his pocket, guarded by a dozen armed Sisters of the True Faith, with a pair of one-way tickets in his hand and Chastity McCoy sobbing beside him. He crossed himself and shouted out His praise, shouted it loud above the screaming of the engine on the mountain road. Alphonsus McLoughlin would never doubt the goodness of God again! He tried to calm himself, to recall what they had told him. All arrangements had been taken care of. Inspector O’Malley of the Garda Síochána would meet him as soon as he cleared the border and escort him to the plane. Fidelma Sharkey, the Taoiseach’s wife, would be waiting on the tarmac to see them off. The red carpet would be laid on; there would be no hitches. The authorities on the other side had been squared too. There would be no trouble with entry visas or residence requirements. Alphonsus started another decade of the rosary, and the girl, through her sobs, joined in. If only he could survive the next hour he would be home and dry. Magee and his lot would never follow them beyond the borderlands. If he were spared he would carry out his orders. He would deliver Chastity to the land of her ancestors, back to the Indians in the mountains of the new world. See her safely ensconced in the convent where she would spend the rest of her days.

      And then what? Return to Armagh? Report back to Schnozzle that the mission was accomplished? Return to the grim despair of the ghetto, to live day after day among the unwashed?

      The car was still climbing, up through the foothills and into the mountains that separated Ulster from the rest of the country. Alphonsus gingerly opened the window a crack and sniffed the mountain air. He lit a cigarette and started to relax. Chastity was crying now, openly weeping as she left the land of her birth. He put his hand on her knee and squeezed conspiratorially. All the same, he didn’t put the beads away completely, nor reach for the Jameson, till they had crossed the Black Pig’s Dyke and had started to descend again, down into the great dark central plain, and he was sure that the province of Ulster was firmly, and he hoped irrevocably, behind them.

      The Irish News, with its blurred pictures of His Grace, all nose and teeth, posing with the cruet poised over Chastity’s forehead, wasn’t long in reaching the four corners of the province. No one doubted that serious trouble could be far behind. The shopkeepers boarded up their windows, the farmers locked their barns, the women ordered their broods of children in from the streets. Before the day was done the vengeance squads would be scouring the roads for random victims. But in one corner of Fermanagh, that strangest of counties, the news that Schnozzle had set the cat among the pigeons was greeted not with foreboding, but with unalloyed joy.

      For the villagers of Derrygonnelly, any opportunity for mayhem was a God-sent opportunity not to be missed.

      The people of Derrygonelly were the last remnant of the Summer of Love, that brief season a decade before, when Canon Tom had unwittingly opened the floodgates of unorthodoxy. The Canon had been searching for the elusive gnomic formula that would reconcile the modernist aspirations of his flock with the traditional teaching of the Church. For a fleeting moment he thought he had found it, the philosopher’s stone that would square the circle. But the movement that Canon Tom had unleashed in his folie de grandeur on Adam and Eve’s, the top people’s parish nestling in the hills above Dublin, was to spread rapidly out of control. Sects and heresies had mushroomed. Charismatics and New Age followers, Moonies, Loonies, Hippies and Screamers, Revisionists and Freethinkers, babbling in a thousand strange tongues, demanding the freedom to be themselves, to judge for themselves, interpret the world for themselves, threatening with their antics the very authority of the hierarchy. And of all the sects that had flourished at that time, none was more esoteric than the Derrygonnelly Donatists.

      The Summer of Love was a thing of the past, a fading folk memory of headier times. There were very few now who dared mention it openly, for the walls had ears and in Ireland you never know who you can trust. Its brief promise had been strangled at birth. The Sisters had girded their loins and waded into battle to rescue the country for the True Church. Canon Tom was long in exile, a non-person, banished beyond the mountains where he could do no further harm. The Charismatics had been crushed. Adam and Eve’s was under permanent occupation. The unswerving attention of Schnozzle had seen to it that things never got out of hand again. And yet … ! Despite the most stringent efforts to maintain orthodoxy, there were still outbreaks of strange behaviour from time to time that caused the Guards to intervene. And in Fermanagh, a wild and watery fastness where even Immaculata thought twice about venturing, one stubborn pocket remained.

      The Donatists of Derrygonnelly were a self-destructive but self-perpetuating cult that not even the combined efforts of the Sisters and the Christian Brothers could totally eradicate. They enjoyed widespread popularity on the remoter islands and round the lakeshore village from which they took their name. Not for them the agapes and lovefeasts of the early church once favoured by Canon Tom; their road back to the catacombs took a different direction. They modelled themselves on a fundamentalist sect of the first century whose sole aim was to reach their eternal reward as quickly as possible. With a determination that characterizes the people of the lakeland, they set about things in the most direct fashion. The founder of the group had been a wizened little man called Donat Maguire, famed in the area as a dancer, raconteur and wit. For sixty and more years Donat’s peculiar name had never bothered him; all his contemporaries had odd names of one sort or another, as was the local custom, to distinguish one Maguire from another. Donat Maguire believed himself to be called after a baseball player in the States, for his grandfather had once been Stateside, in the days after the famine, and returned with talcs of oddly dressed men with odd names playing a strange ballgame. Quite what unhinged Donat’s mind during the Summer of Love was never clear; sceptics in the townland put it down to years of soft shoe shuffle finally affecting the cerebral cortex. But his followers told a more edifying tale. Retiring to his bed one night after a particularly hectic session, Donat was visited by his eponymous patron saint who ordered him to stop farting around and expeditiously claim his eternal reward. He awoke a new man.

      There was a snag with the new philosophy. Though convinced of their own righteousness, convinced enough to put it to the test, it was hardly de rigueur to top yourself and turn up at the Judgement Seat as bold as brass, demanding special status. While accidental death might do at a pinch, the only sure-fire method was slaughter at the hands of an unbeliever. Luckily Fermanagh offered considerable scope in both areas.

      Donat was still struggling with this conundrum when his grateful followers decided to surprise him. He hadn’t been long in gathering round him a group of disciples, for even in less troubled times Fermanagh didn’t lack for eejits. A treat was arranged. The top room above Maguire’s Licensed Premises was packed to the doors for a session. At the fear a’ tí’s command the floor was cleared and Donat had the lino to himself. As he shuffled round and round, dancing in his inimitable fashion the ancient slithering two-step peculiar to the region, they accompanied him with seannós keening, the gentle, nasal music much esteemed in those parts. He was on his third round when, with an apocalyptic groan, the floorboards gave way. Donat Maguire dropped through the rubble to the bar below, impaling himself on the porter pump. Ecstatic at the success of their handiwork

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