/ Nor iron bars a cage”, for he could see in his mind’s eye the snow settling in the woods and the ice forming on the River Wear which curled through Durham City. There was a purity and innocence in the world that could not be suppressed no matter how hard warders, bureaucrats, bible wallahs, policemen, politicians, poorhouse guardians, capitalists, gaffers, officers and NCOs tried to stamp it out. Every physical action in that tower of silence and suffering was remorselessly regulated but his mind, he exulted, was his own and they could not take it from him. Did not the wisdom of his ancestors teach that “Every man’s mind is his kingdom”!
Nevertheless, he admitted that since Minahan’s last visit he had been plagued with nightmares, often waking in the night soaked in sweat and, he feared, after calling out in his sleep. That, he worried, might result in him giving away something of his mind to the prison authorities, but then, they were not likely to understand the words, for he had been crying out in Irish. A screw would bash on the door and roar out for silence. One night, he dreamed he was back in Ballycoolish shaping a baulk of timber in Grimshaw’s yard. He swore he could smell the sharp, resinous smell of the fresh-sawn wood, feel the roughness of the grain, even hear the slap of the waves and feel the breath of the wind on his face. A lark, too, was climbing the heavens, far above the lough. Alas, when he awoke, he was suffocating in this great pile of bricks and iron, far from Ballycoolish on the Donegal shore.
“You say that your people, too, never wanted to leave Ireland,” he said to Minahan. “That they lived at Skibbereen, a place I have heard my friend James McDowell speak of with a shudder in his voice. They say it is the saddest place in Ireland on account of the horror of the famine years there.”
“One day, God willing, I shall go there,” Father Minahan sighed. “I must still have people there, uncles and aunts and cousins and the like; pray to God that they survived the famine. I have never been there, yet the evil knowledge of it has always crouched at the back of my mind.”
“Tell me, Father,” asked Michael, “how is it that you can believe in a just and true God when He allows such suffering? How can He allow little children to die with their stomachs crying out for food? How can He allow men to build prisons with the hypocrisy that’s in it, claiming that they are places of reform?”
“These things are sent to test our faith,” Minahan replied, primly orthodox. And yet, although he could not admit it to this man whose soul he was anxious to save, he too had asked the same questions. He was sorely troubled with doubts about transubstantiation and wondered at the doctrine of the Trinity – and even doubted the existence of God and wrestled with it just as John Donne did in his sonnets. Intellectually, it did not stack up. He had even taken a peek into Origin of Species, the book hidden where his nosy housekeeper could not find it and report him to the bishop. The argument of the First Cause he found deficient and Michael’s words about the sufferings of the poor hit home to his troubled heart.
Minahan had grown up a poor Irish working-class boy and although his father was one of the more skilled dock workers – a stevedore who rigged up tackle and was expert at stowing cargo in ships’ holds – his family had shared hard times with their neighbours in the teeming streets of Bootle. And had fled the horror of Skibbereen. One grim summer’s day, the father of his Protestant friend Charlie Wilson failed to come home from the docks. A sling had broken and a ton of mouldy Congo rubber had dropped on him where he stood in the bottom of a ship’s hold. His body had been flung aside into a corner until the end of the shift, the foreman threatening to sack anyone who tried to move him. The family was condemned to penury and eventually the workhouse. Indeed, if God were omniscient and omnipotent, how could He allow such things?
Minahan became aware that Michael was speaking again: “Ah Father, I envy you your faith. It makes sense of the world. My friend James McDowell was after telling me how he read in a German book that religion for the poor is ‘the sigh of an oppressed creature living in a heartless world’.”
“Again, all these are things sent to test us,” Minahan replied. “I wonder if you are familiar with the story of Job and how he was in the end rewarded for his faith?”
Michael did not know the Old Testament story, but in any case Minahan felt himself a wretched hypocrite for mentioning it. How could anyone be impressed with an ancient shepherd’s tale which considered it right and just that the lives of Job’s first ten children could be taken and exchanged for another twenty like items replaced after a burglary? And then there was his bishop who ranted against Home Rulers, Michael Davitt and the Land Leaguers, the New Unions and their Socialistic leaders and that infernal Marx woman – “an atheistic bluestocking and a Jewess to boot”! The man had even questioned how Cardinal Manning could have thrown his weight behind a negotiated settlement on the London docks when the dirty rabble should have been starved back to work and the Socialists gaoled for holding the country to ransom. The man even claimed the Irish Famine was God’s just punishment for our sins; an idea that, as a grandson of Skibbereen, Minahan could not stomach.
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