The Miracle Man by James Skivington

Limpy could only have been snatched from the jaws of death in a wet ditch, the priest showed the two men into the living room, ignoring the whispered protests of Mrs McKay, swaddled in a huge old dressing-gown, that the wee one was a drunkard and a crackpot that would need fumigating for a week before a living Christian would let him over the doorstep. Her insistence that he would be “lepping with fleas” fell on deaf ears. In the living-room there was a garbled explanation from both John Healy and the miracle man which only served further to confuse the priest. Then, with a broad grin, Limpy McGhee marched up and down like a toy soldier, leaving a trail of mud on the carpet. A silent snarl set itself on Mrs McKay’s lips.
    “God knows, Father, it’s a miracle right enough,” Healy told the priest as they observed the performance. “The wee man here’s had that disablement since ever I knew him. It would’ve pained you to watch him go.”
    “You say this happened at the Mass Rock, Mr McGhee?”
    “The very place, Father. I was going home, across the field thonder and suddenly – this figure appeared above me. Jasus Christ! It shook me, I can tell you.”
    The young priest look puzzled. “You’re saying that – Jesus Christ Himself appeared to you?”
    “Ah no, Father. T’was a woman. All in white, she was, with her arms out – like this – and floating above the rock. Well, I needn’t tell you, I fell over at the sight of it.” His eyes grew wide and he leant towards the priest. Mrs McKay was slowly shaking her head at such gullibility in a man of the cloth. “And then – she spoke to me.”
    The priest drew back at the acrid breath assailing his nostrils.
    “Spoke to you? And what did she say, Mr McGhee?”
    “She says – ‘John McGhee, you’ve had that there limp too long, and you never deserved it in the first place. So I’m going to do a miracle on you.’”
    “She said that?”
    “Them was her very words, Father. Or similar to.”
    “Disgraceful old liar,” the housekeeper said under her breath.
    “And did she say – who she was?” Father Burke inquired.
    “Who she was?” It was Limpy’s turn to look puzzled, but only for a moment. “Well – not exactly. But she didn’t need to. She had this gold thing shining round her head and she says to me, ‘I want people to say their prayers and lead good lives.’ Well, I knew straight off who she was.” And as he assumed that the priest, being a man of God, also knew, Limpy did not elaborate. Father Burke shook his head.
    “This is quite remarkable, to say the least, Mr McGhee. Very remarkable indeed. You are in effect claiming to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary.”
    “Another night it’ll be pink elephants,” Mrs McKay murmured.
    “Tell me, Mr McGhee. Was there by any chance a witness to this event, this – apparition that you saw?”
    Limpy leant forward, his face alight with religious intensity.
    “A witness, Father? Well, of course there was a witness.” The eyes of the other two men widened in anticipation, and even Mrs McKay leant forward to catch his words. “The Good Lord himself,” Limpy said, with a reverential glance heavenward. “Didn’t he see the whole thing.”

chapter five
    It was stuffy in Doctor Walsh’s small waiting room for the morning surgery. Fourteen people with various ailments or none sat staring at the wall to avoid each other’s eyes, conversing with their neighbours in hushed tones or flicking through ancient copies of Horse and Hound, The Field and Shooting Times. Mrs Maguire’s four-year-old darling James, having tired of scattering the magazines on the floor, crawled beneath a chair and popping his head out between both chair and human legs looked up the skirt of the woman above.
    “Don’t do that darling,” his mother told him, “you’ll get your clothes filthy.”
    Between a young pregnant woman and a fat woman with varicose veins in her legs, sat Dippy Burns, his thin frame