The Miracle Man Read online

  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.

  He began his tortured progress once again, rising and falling with the action of his bad leg, exacerbated by the uneven ground. A few ragged notes from some half-remembered air escaped his lips as he made his way through the thorny whin bushes on the strand, drawing his jacket collar tighter around his neck. Then abruptly he stopped walking and stared ou
t at the water again, screwing up his eyes to improve his vision. Had he seen something out there, some object bobbing between the dark waves? He leant forward and peered at the spot, confused by the jumble of waves and troughs and wind-patterned water. A branch of a tree, was it, or a beach ball? Could be a seal, but he didn’t remember having seen one of those at night. He concentrated even harder on the spot. Was . . . was a mermaid possible? He already half believed in the Little People, had heard too much evidence to deny their existence. Maybe this mermaid had come for him, to lead him slowly into the breaking waves to a watery paradise. Well, he wouldn’t be found wanting when it came to it, old and all as he was. He’d picked up a thing or two about women in his time, and enough never to have married one of them. That one in Portrush whose father had been a butcher. He had been doing all right there until he found out she had been flogging her own mutton at the back door to any man that would slap a tenner in her hand. Limpy looked out again at the water and blinked. He could no longer see the object, and as he set off again on his way homeward, he reassured himself that it was probably a seal. And what use would a mermaid have been to him anyway? Didn’t everybody know they were fish from the waist down.

  Underneath the tall sycamores of the chapel road Limpy hobbled, zigzagging back and forth across the road, knowing, as someone had said “all the soft places in the hedge to bounce off”. He stopped once, where the road ran close to the river, and stood for a moment listening to the water chuckling over the stones. “I’ll have a salmon or two out of there soon,” he said, perhaps confusing past achievements with future possibilities. Years before, he would have been down there with his little net after dark, wading waist-deep in the brown water and throwing two or three of the great silver fish onto the grassy bank. There was always a hotel would buy them at the back door. Those were the days.

  He started forward in a sudden, headlong rush at a pace hardly sustainable by his mismatched legs, as though wanting to leave those memories behind him by the river. Further along the road he passed the graveyard and the chapel, dark against the last vestiges of light in the sky. With difficulty he climbed the gate on the other side of the road, paused swaying on the top as his bad leg scrabbled for a foothold, then plunged down the other side, barely able to remain upright on the steep ground. In the top corner of the field stood his house, a two-roomed, tumbledown affair with tiny windows that Canon O’Connor said had raised neglect to an art form. The pigs that had been its former inhabitants were long since gone, although it would have been difficult for the untrained eye to know of their departure. At the upper side of the field, the trees of an ancient plantation ended in a rocky outcrop and in this, partly shielded by overhanging branches, was set a crude stone carving of a crucifix some three feet high and surrounded by other Christian symbols. This was the Mass Rock, brought there, some said, at the time of the Penal Laws and for many years used in secret worship. On certain holy days a little procession would come to it from the chapel and now and then a tourist or two who had read the footnotes in the guidebooks. Apart from that, it lay quiet and undisturbed in its wooded seclusion, its former religious significance lost on the agnostic Limpy, whose sole observation on the subject had been, “You wouldn’t know what the hell it was supposed to be. The boy that carved that must’ve been straight out of O’Neill’s bar.”

  Slowly, Limpy began to climb his way up the slope, three steps forward and one back, so that at times he teetered on his heels and threatened to fall and roll down to the road again. The trees blocked out most of the remaining light from the western sky, making the rock itself invisible and causing pools of darkness on the uneven land. How often had he crossed this field in the dark – more than once on his hands and knees – with only his homing instinct to guide him to his front door? The door that had no lock on it and led straight into a kitchen which also served as a bedroom. Had there been any sheets on the bed, they would have been torn to ribbons by the boots he wore, but he had long given up using sheets for the sound reason that it saved undressing at night and dressing again in the morning, as well as a deal of washing of both himself and the sheets.

  “Efficiency,” he would say, “is how man has learned to survive and prosper on this earth.” He plunged on through the clumps of grass and benweed, and then all at once he felt as if he had lost contact with the ground and was being borne aloft by some invisible force. Trees and bushes and the ground leapt and spun, against the black sky white light streaked into his vision. Then, as suddenly as he had been flying through the air he was falling in the pitch darkness, farther and farther, until he found himself lying on the ground, which seemed to be swaying and heaving beneath him. He lay there for a few moments, the grass cool against his unshaven cheek, his befuddled mind trying to place himself in the subsiding kaleidoscope of swirling grass and trees and glowering sky. With an effort, he hauled himself to his knees and peered about him.

  Dark shapes swam into vision and then out of it. High up somewhere – surely in the sky – there was something white, something moving, a person maybe, and a voice talking to him, saying words that he couldn’t quite understand. Or was it the old eyes? They weren’t so good these days, but he’d be damned if he’d ever wear glasses. He craned forward. It was somebody, surely. A woman, dressed in white and high above him, her two arms extended and a heavenly glow all around her. Again she might have spoken, but still the words weren’t clear. At the third attempt, he struggled to his feet, to take a few tentative steps towards her. His head ached where he had hit it on the ground and a sharp pain gnawed at his bad leg, but nothing a drink wouldn’t put right. Now the woman, if woman she had been, was nowhere to be seen, so after shaking his head to clear it, Limpy started again for his little house, the terrain easier now, more even and with fewer of the boulders strewn from a broken wall. With an unusual turn of speed he strode across the grass. Indeed, he fairly flew over it. Need to ask O’Neill what the hell he was putting in the drink. Best poteen, for sure. It’s the only thing that would do it. And then Limpy came to a dead stop, to stand rigid at the entrance to his front yard, his mouth wide open and a gentle swaying motion moving his entire body. First one foot went forward gingerly and then the other, as though he were treading with bare feet on hot coals. He considered this for a few seconds then tried another few steps, less cautious than the first ones. Then quicker they came, across the yard and back again with lengthening stride, wheeling at the top like a guardsman, faster and yet faster until his legs raced to pass one another in a frenzy of movement. And when he finally scrunched to a halt in the middle of the yard, his breath coming in short gasps, Limpy McGhee lifted his arms and eyes heavenward and in a voice soft with reverence said,

  “Jasus Christ Almighty – it’s gone. It’s bloody well gone!”

  Limpy stood outside the house of his neighbour, John Healy and once more battered on the door.

  “John! Would you get up to hell and open the door.” Taking a step backwards he looked down at his legs, shook his head and said softly, “Jasus, Mary and Joseph.” Above him came the squeak of a window being raised and before he could look up at it a boot hit him on the shoulder and Mrs Healy’s gruff voice shouted,

  “Get away out of that to your bed, you drunken, foulmouthed being, before I set the dog on you.” The window screeched then banged shut. Leaping back, Limpy shook his fist at the darkened window.

  “You oul’ witch, I’ll throttle your bloody dog!” He ran at the door and gave it a kick. “John Healy, are you going to let a woman run you? Would you open this door for God’s sake! I’m a dying man!” There was a short silence and then, “John! Would you let me die out here alone?”

  Again his boot thudded off the door. After a few moments the light in the upstairs room came on and there was a loud exchange of voices, quickly followed by a thundering of feet on the stairs, before the door was flung open to reveal the touslehaired Healy in his pyjamas.

  “Listen, ye wee bugger . . . ”

  Limpy fa
irly flung himself at Healy, shouting, “John, for Christ’s sake listen to me! It’s a miracle! I swear to God! I can walk, man! I can walk!”

  “At this time of night, it’s a miracle you can stand.”

  “No, no. Look.” The little man walked up and down in front of the house and there was no trace of his limp. “D’you see, John? My bad leg, it’s gone! Over there.” He jabbed his finger excitedly, “I was coming across and I saw this woman above me.” He held out his arms. “Like this. And she called me and – I fell down. And when I got up – Jasus God – the limp was gone. Look!” He gave another demonstration of his new-found ability, executing brisk steps and fancy turns with the skill of an Irish dancing champion.

  “John!” Mrs Healy’s voice came bellowing down the stairs, “would you get rid of that wee eejit and come up the stairs!” But her husband’s interest was thoroughly aroused.