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 his acolytes prayed with him as he stoically 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
