By the summer of 1983, Mum
decided that her sons could still get back from the Catholic church some of
Dad’s hard-earned money, and she asked Father McGarry if there was anything he
would like done in the grounds around the beautiful new church that he had
brought to the parish, all new and lovely and inspiring as it was. She had two
fit young men, ready and willing and able, she said, offering up our precious
free time, our Saturdays and Sundays, all for the glory of god. Father McGarry,
the Parish Priest, the PP, lived in the grand Parochial House beside the new
church. There was his gleaming new car in the driveway for all to see, a
monument to the good life being a holy man could afford those broken down and
pieced back together in the seminaries up and down Irish Catholic Ireland. He
was tall, broad, smoked a moderately priced cigarette, and he slicked his grey
hair back like an aged but perpetually handsome Brylcreem model. His was a look
that belied a youthful gorgeousness, a precociousness, some ethereal knowledge.
Looking calm and wise, said Dad, was the result of anyone being calm and wise
with the money the PP was making, “And doesn’t he go off to Florida to play
golf bloody well ten times a year, and sure that would make anyone calm and
wise, now wouldn’t it?”
Taking our money and
taking himself off to Florida left us with a gamble every Sunday. Would we get
Father O’Hagan or would we get Father Patton treading the boards in his place
those Sunday mornings? From Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen, came Father
O’Hagan, to us youth a grumpy old priest with a ruddy and unforgiving full
face, the merciless priest who threw Martina out of the confessional, at the
ripe age of nine years, for not being syllable perfect with her Act of
Contrition. Would we get another of his sermons that continued until members of
the congregation glanced furtively upon their watches, shanks of roast beef in
the oven at home getting a little drier with every admonishment? Father
O’Hagan’s ferocity imbued us with the sense that we would never be saved, that
we would burn in Hell fire for all eternity unless we changed our ways, and
even then the odds were against us, we incorrigible bloody sinners. Despite His
murderous and merciless record, what God was too timid to say and do in the
Bible he gave Father O’Hagan the breath in his body to take forward. In his
fleeting gentle demeanours he could make the parable of the lost sheep sound
more fiery, more violent, more destructive than ten Sodoms and ten Gomorrahs, atop
ten of the greatest earth-rending floods. We walked away those Sundays weaving
our ways past pillars of salt in the foyer, the heat of Hell’s fires burning
the soles of our feet as we crossed the foyer entrances.
And, ladies and
gentlemen, from Greenisland came Father Patton, or Father Gerry as he let
himself be called by those who liked others to think that they actually did
know him. Father Patton once was the curate at the nearby university, and he
was young and exciting and bushy-haired, a man who took great pleasure in a
pipe full of sweet-smelling tobacco and some good craic. He looked like good
craic, this busy-haired fellow. He was what the Elders referred to as “the new
breed,” and he would walk in the congregation like a pop star, asking questions
of the bleary-eyed Sunday morning faithful, questions they answered nervously
into the microphone he carried with him, the respondents preceding their every
answer with a “Well, yes Father, I think that what this means - what Our Lord
means - is...," accompanied by a brief clearing of a dry throat at least a
half-hour silent. The pious and the self-righteous fortune of cleaning ladies
with their dusters and Mr. Sheen failed to take to him and his new-fangled microphone-flaunting
ways, and they made sure to go to the good, the proper, the respectful eviscerations
conducted by Father O’Hagan, his masses with sermons that would light the
church in red and yellow and searing white as the mirage of Hell appeared to
and embraced warmly the huddled mass parched by the eating of the dry fruit
from the now stripped-bare Tree of Sin from which Eve had tempted Adam before
turning to God and with a cackle asking, “Tell me, O Lord, where is this place
called Carrickfergus?” The Catholic parish of Carrickfergus had eaten from the
tree and relished it, charged Father O’Hagan. We had come back for seconds, he
said. Then dessert. We took home a doggy bag of cold dead sin, hot lust,
bubbling greed, he said.
In the Old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower his fire
would make the Crayola air bubble and spit and scald. But the fortune of
cleaning ladies feared more that the beautifully gentle Father Gerry would
stick a microphone in their half-hairy faces and they would see the priestly spittle and
feel compelled to Mr. Sheen the microphone to a good and proper Catholic gleam
right there and then. Cleaning priestly spittle must surely have been like
getting the very key to Heaven itself. And they lived for that. They continued
to live for that. Damn them. Damn priestly spittle.
