Dancing in Limbo - Edward Toman

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expired.

      Yet even in the moment of their triumph, doubts set in. Had they gone too far, pre-empting the Almighty’s prerogative? Had they sinned against the commandment forbidding killing, maybe robbing themselves of their rightful reward? Henceforth, it was agreed, a different route to Paradise would have to be found.

      Natural causes, farmyard accidents and the attentions of the Little Sisters saw off a few of their members over the next six months, but the rest remained firmly rooted to terra firma. There was only one thing for it. They would have to provoke their Protestant neighbours. Under normal circumstances this would have presented no problem. The Protestant neighbours would have been happy to rise to the occasion. But the times were not normal. Those Protestants who had not been burned out were suspicious. There is no such thing as a free lunch, they told themselves. A few old scores were paid off, of course, but on the whole they remained distinctly lukewarm about the whole project. Having run up against this unexpected obduracy, the Donatists had taken to wandering the countryside, far and wide, especially at weekends, seeking natural hazards or man-made ambushes that would provide them with the release they so desperately craved.

      Hardly surprising then that when news reached them of events in the city, and when they read in the paper of McCoy’s wrath, they should set out at the double for the Shambles hoping for a share of the action.

      Dawn was breaking by the time Frank reached the hill above the house. There was no smoke from the chimney and the hens were running in the yard unfed. He slithered down through the gorse bushes, fearing the worst. His mother was in the kitchen, talking to herself at the top of her voice. He rapped on the window; she turned to him with vacant eyes, turned away and continued her lonely obsession. He pushed open the back door and ran to her, trying to embrace her, but she remained unaware of his presence. He pulled her round to face him, forcing her to look at him, a cold stab of fear twisting in his heart with every unintelligible word she uttered. His eyes were filled with tears. ‘Don’t you recognize me!’ he pleaded. But he found only vacancy in her face and foolishness in her words.

      ‘Let me light a fire,’ he said, fighting back the tears. ‘You’re blue with the cold.’ She slumped into the rocking chair while he struggled with the range. He tried to clean up the kitchen, throwing the blue-moulded bread to the chickens at the door and searching for what would make a cup of tea. Anything to stop the full reality of his mother’s craziness sinking in.

      He was shocked at the change in her. Only a few years earlier she had been a hard and determined woman. But the death of his father had upended her world, left her with nowhere to turn for comfort. A madwoman going the roads was nothing new in Ulster. The troubles had unhinged the minds of many. Frank knew every Mad Meg between here and Armagh. And he knew too how they were treated. Shunned for fear of the evil eye and tricked by the gombeen man out of what little they had.

      He made her drink the tea and she calmed down a bit, sighing to herself from time to time. He sat with her, speaking soothing words, waiting anxiously for the first flicker of recognition in her empty eyes. The old dog had appeared at his return, drawn into the kitchen by the warmth of the fire. It lay farting at their feet. Suddenly it pricked its ears and uttered a low growl. Frank strained his ears. The dog growled again. Frank could hear nothing but the moaning of the wind in the trees. But his mother had heard what the dog had heard. She flung the teacup across the room, jumped to her feet and began to shout.

      She ran to the half door. The dog was barking now. ‘It’s only the wind you’re hearing,’ he pleaded. There’s no one on the road below!’ But she pushed him away from her roughly and ran to the mantelpiece above the range where the pledge to the Sacred Heart had hung since her wedding day. It was her personal pledge, her guarantee of a place in heaven. She reached up and tore it roughly from the nail. Then clutching it in one hand, and Frank in the other, and with the mongrel at their heels, she dragged him out through the door, leaving the house open to the four winds.

      Magee and his henchmen were cold, wet, hungry and lost. He had gathered them up at short notice, half a dozen members of the Temperance Lodge Band, and led them into the mountains above Armagh. It was an act of desperation, but Magee didn’t intend to be caught hanging round the town when the boys in the back room opened a post mortem into the débâcle. With each passing hour his frustration increased. Ignorant of the wild and treacherous terrain, they had clambered above the tree line round Slicve Gullion. The land was deserted, as lonely and alien as the back side of the moon. The very sheep seemed threatening. A mist had come down and they had lost their bearings; they had squelched through moorland, slithered among the crags, wandered deeper and deeper into the wilderness with each step. The trombone player had caught the side of his face on a rock and his cheek sagged bloodily open. He muttered mutiny and when Magee rested he kept the Stanley knife to hand. They had run out of food and whiskey, and the cigarettes were long since finished. Had they stumbled on a homestead they could have plundered it for victuals and drink and sat it out till the cloud lifted, when they could risk the descent. But there were no farms here, only the ruins of long-abandoned settlements. All night long they tramped in circles, Magee watching his companions growing gaunt and murderous. They would all die if they didn’t get back among their own people soon.

      A forced march over the jagged rocks of a dried river bed finally brought them below the clouds. They headed for the valley below, stumbling all night among the boulders, afraid to sleep lest the cloud come down again. As dawn broke they came upon some tracks, and an hour later, dispirited, empty-handed, but at least alive, they found themselves on the crag overlooking the Feely house.

      They saw that it had been hastily abandoned; its doors stood open, but a fire still smouldered in the hearth. The bass drummer kicked open the press in search of food; it yielded little but a few ends of hard bread and a scrape of margarine. Magee found a packet of Gold Leaf on the floor with half a cigarette still inside. He straightened it out and lit it from the fire. He had never set foot in a papist house before. He looked round the kitchen with fascination. A line of popish icons stood on a crude shelf, statues of the Virgin, the Child of Prague and John Bosco. There was a lithograph of the Holy Family with a prayer for peace in the home. But riveted as he was by these manifestations of idolatry, it was the framed photograph that caught his attention, a photograph of Frank’s first communion. Magee recognized the man in the picture, even with the hat pulled down over his eyes. The late Joe Feely! With one swipe he scattered the lot on the floor. The red nightlight before the Sacred Heart still glowed. He ripped it from the wall, unbuttoned his flies and pissed on the lot.

      His activities were interrupted by a sound in the distance. It was the sound of a crowd, a great crowd on the move. The sound of wailing and praying, and discordant music, and laughter and chanting. They were far away as yet, over the next hills, but they were approaching fast. His colleagues heard it too. All their bravado had been left behind on the mountains. They stood in the kitchen transfixed. They were in dangerous, unknown, unpredictable territory and the sooner they found their way out of it the better. The noise was growing louder by the minute. And then above the wails and entreaties of the Donatists they heard the bagpipes of a Hibernian band.

      It had been many a long year since the Hibs had dared put their snouts out in decent company, but with the birth of this strange new sect a handful of old survivors from the lakeshore had emerged blinking into the sunlight to don their green regalia, dust off their banners and take to the roads. To a true blue Loyal Son of William like Magee, the raucous sound of a Hib band was like a red rag to a bull. He crept to the door and looked up the road. And as the main body of the march came into view his heart started to pound with anticipation. He was beginning to appreciate the meaning of their incessant demand. What was more he was in a position and in the mood to do something about it.

      The serious Donatists were recognizable from their garb – an attempt at the sackcloth and ashes of the desert hermits of the early church – and from the weals on their bodies caused by the lashes of purification they rained down on their flesh. Their eyes were raised in supplication to heaven; there was no doubting their desire to join their heavenly master as

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