Part Thirty of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: The Runaway Tractor Came Over the Hill…

This time, we make the trip south-westwards across the Irish Sea again to Tipperary. To find two brothers of the McMullen family sharing a crisis. The younger, less able one – Policeman Pat – was standing by the side of a minor road next to his wrecked but brand new Garda patrol car and shouting at his older, much bigger brother Cormack – to absolutely no avail.

The electric police car had run out of charge. In trying to correct it, Policeman Pat had inadvertently caused another type of charging altogether to happen: his huge brother Cormack and his Juggernaut of a John Deere tractor and the four fully-grown Hogs who were occupying the cattle trailer attached to it were now charging (yes, there’s that word again) – out-of-control towards the little town of Arracrowe. There, the biggest and most lavish funeral the Republic of Ireland had ever seen was taking place. Uninvited guests were definitely not invited – hence Pat’s attempt to block the approach road.

The huge farmer was unconscious as he lolled in the seat of his enormous John Deere tractor as it constantly picked-up speed and headed down a steep hill that led towards a little Tipperary town nobody had heard of, dragging a large cattle truck filled by four huge Boars along with it.

Cormack McMullen came-round from his electricity-induced catatonic state when the front wheels of his beloved green monster of a machine hit the side of the grass banking by the side of the road and literally shook him back to life. Now – totally un-bidden and with its fully-laden trailer bumping along behind it – the John Deere was on the run. It was charging with rapidly increasing speed down the steep hill which led towards the Main Street of Arracrowe as a funeral cortege in full swing was heading in the opposite direction, albeit maybe a couple of miles away.

“Stop it, Madonna!” he muttered as he groggily regained consciousness.

This remark wasn’t aimed at the Holy Virgin he was supposed to adore – as he had told sceptical wife Bridget on more than one occasion when he had woken-up in the middle of the night previously having uttered these precise words. It was inspired by the well-known American pop sensation of a much earlier time.

He knew from past experience, though, that these passing fancies were precisely that: fancies. They would pass. Just count to ten and everything would be all right.

But as he reached five, he realised that everything was far from being all right.

His Pride and Joy was living up to its name by taking him on a Joyride. Unbidden, it had reached almost forty miles an hour as it bumped and bashed its way through ruts and between grassy banks by the side of the road as it constantly picked-up speed.

The air was blue in the tractor’s cab as Cormack tried to correct the head-long dash to oblivion which his own Jolly Green Giant seemed to be taking him towards.

He put his foot firmly on the brake pedal. It responded briefly as – unseen – red hydraulic fluid spurted all over the underside of the machine and sprayed all over the road. He pumped harder – and then harder still. The pedal suddenly went slack and then did nothing at all as several tons of massive American Engineering and a couple more formidable tons of Irish flesh and blood – some with four legs attached – plunged ever faster and almost completely out of control towards the main street of Arracrowe.

All Cormack McMullen could do was hang onto the steering wheel for dear life or grim death and pray to all he held holy that disaster wasn’t waiting for his run-away train at the bottom of the hill…

—

Not very far away, in the main thoroughfare of the little town, a procession of high-performance cars (many of them with English number-plates, strangely or otherwise) were beginning to clog it up in the wake of the funeral procession of the Dear Departed Joseph “Joe-Boy” Aleksandrovitch Kelly.

Leading the procession to the church of Christ the King was Joe-Boy’s younger sister, Siobhán Aleksandovna Kelly herself.

She sat alongside a chauffeur dressed in a green uniform with a matching peaked cap in a two-seater car. This was a Rolls Royce model which should surely have been dubbed The Black Rose in these post-Brexit days as a statement of English nationalism. 

But – for whatever reason – it was called La Rose Noir instead.

Certain self-styled English Nationalists – whose principles strangely do not stretch to marrying foreigners and accepting million pounds of `gifts’ from others apparently – would be ashamed of the Rolls-Royce Board who sanctioned this. Unless they cut him in on the deal presumably…

Whatever, Siobhán had chosen it precisely because it was black . Not just the exterior but the inside as well; fashioned as it was out of no less than 1600 pieces of black sycamore veneer.

(“Veneer? – I sneer!“ said Jim Proudfoot dismissively when I inadvertently mentioned this to him later – “Isn’t that just one step-up from Formica? At those prices, wouldn’t you actually expect at least the real thing?”)

I frankly don’t know but I’m absolutely certain that Black is the perfect colour for an Irish funeral. Appropriately, the leader of the Kelly Gang was herself immaculately dressed in the most expensive Italian and Paris haute couture in this very solemn hue, topped-off with a black fascinator complete with stylish veil which alone cost over a thousand Euros.

(Matalan do one for about twenty quid in case you’re interested…)

But the cost of an accessory hardly worth mentioning paled into total insignificance when compared to the car itself. One of only a handful ever made, Joseph Kelly had personally paid over twenty-six million Euros for it. Cash. Yes: twenty-six million Euros and very definitely cash.  

Nobody was going to upstage that, were they?

They’d better not – with other Irish Crime Gangs looking on from afar and potentially laughing at them, the Kellys had to get this funeral absolutely spot-on.

But signs that the greatest burial the Republic of Ireland had ever witnessed weren’t going quite as smoothly as Siobhán would have liked started to rear their ugly heads right from the start.

Soon after the main cortege – the horse-drawn hearse; Siobhán in her extraordinarily expensive `Roller’ and the other Selected Few left the Big House on the Hill – things started to unravel.

Everything moved at the same pace as the Russian Orthodox Church’s Metropolitan Nikolas, who was leading the procession on foot. That is to say – slowly.  

High-performance cars are not really designed to be run in first gear for too long. But walking-pace is too slow for second gear and as billions of gallons of high-octane fuel were going up in smoke behind him, Nikolas continued to lead his congregation at a snail’s pace. 

The second in line behind Siobhán Kelly could be found the longest and what I believe Dubliners call the `Baddest’ stretch Limousine to be found this side of Detroit. It started to suffer first. The car was stuffed full of Kellys: adult relations of Joseph; their spouses and as many offspring – grandkids and cousins included – who wanted their seniority in the Swing of Things to be appreciated by everyone else by being inside the car in the first place.

The huge vehicle was basically overloaded and was actually sagging in the middle. The original automobile was a Duesenberg Model SSJ which initially rolled off of a bespoke US production line in 1935. It had been spliced with a far more modern American chassis and a luxury interior befitting of a car which cost more than the most exclusive commercial aeroplanes would have done at the time. Its original engine had been upgraded and super-charged but it was still underpowered to carry the mass of humanity stuffed into its extended interior today. As it crawled along behind Metropolitan Nikolas and Father Finbar O’Fooligan in his diminished role as a glorified Altar Boy alongside him, the temperature gauge began to rise steadily.

It wasn’t alone. If the noise of massively powerful engines straining at the leash wasn’t already deafening enough, the sound of scores of fans engaging at the same time along an ever-increasing line of cars was beginning to compete with the clamour with overheated sounds of their own.

At the front of the funeral cortege, the perfectly behaved horses barely swished a tail as they steadily pulled the hearse forward. It was as if they were actually aware of the solemnity of the occasion.

Sadly, certain very badly behaved children (`Brats’ as the lovely Siobhán would later dub them) didn’t have the same respect. They were sick of waiting. They wanted their I-Pads. Or at least a YouTube ­movie to watch.Why should they be quiet?

Frustrated parents gave them what they wanted, as ever. Electronic devices; earphones; Virtual Reality head-sets; you name it. Washed-down with fizzy drinks. And loads and loads of sweet, E-Number laden sweets.

“Mammy – I need the toilet!”; “Dada – when are we going to McDonald’s?” became the least of their demands as the tension in the cars on frequently chemically over-stimulated parents with more brawn than brain clashed with the different sort of chemically-induced hyperactivity of stupid, bored children.

The people in the cars leading the cortege – those closest to the hearse – were becoming increasingly impatient as the procession moved literally at walking pace from the Golf Club to the environs of the parish church. And then stopped altogether as the hearse and the leading Funeral Car took up all the space outside the main entrance, trapping the millions of Euros’ worth of engineering following them with nowhere to go.

And – once the hearse finally ground to a halt, things did not go as well as the perfectly choreographed scene which had played over and over again in the heads of its instigator – Siobhán Aleksandovna Kelly – or its conductor, Metropolitan Nikolas had hoped they might…

The horses and the largely floral-laden burden they had been guiding through the little town of Arracrowe had finally stopped outside the main entrance to the church. Siobhán and her green-uniformed chauffeur drew-up at a right-angle to it. Then the leading funeral car – the converted American classic stretch-limousine in black which had cost a King’s ransom – stopped. And not a minute too soon – little puffs of super-heated steam were already escaping from the overwhelmed radiator and puffing from under the bonnet – sorry – the hood. In it were the bored, badly-behaved kids we have already mentioned; a couple of stoned cousins of the Dear Departed plus the oldest members of the Kelly Clan. These were exclusively women, most of whose husbands had already left this Vale of Tears due to cirrhosis of the liver; cancer – or gunshot wounds.

Great Aunt Nuala was the oldest of the dynasty at reputedly over a hundred years of age: but nobody really knew for sure. But everybody did know – as she sat and scowled in her wheelchair – that a regular and constant supply of gin would at least keep her quiet – as long as her catheter remained in place.

Her oldest daughter – Auntie Niamh – was more of a problem. She was cantankerous and unpredictable at the best of times – and she had always hated Joseph Aleksandrovitch Kelly with a vengeance into the bargain.

“Musha – dat little Bollox will never come to any good!” she had said even when the tiny lad had been thrust into her less than welcoming arms when her sister – Joe’s Mother Mary – had died young. Without even a word of consultation to see what she thought about it, the infant orphan was farmed out to her in her tiny croft in the wilds just east of Castlebar in County Mayo. Joe-Boy’s father had rewarded her handsomely for this but that wasn’t the point. In her head, the spoilt brat always got the attention she would have preferred to have showered on children of her own. But she never had any. How could she? – being a surrogate mother to the Russian half-breed brat had ensured that the joy of her own children had been denied to her. And a husband along with it.

This tragic situation for a woman whose hopes for a life and career of her own as a doctor were always irrelevant in male-dominated Catholic Ireland – understandably – made her really angry. Angry with her overbearing father; even angrier with her Mother – another downtrodden woman – for conspiring with him. Coming to a funeral of a creature she had always hated in the first place simply increased this fury. But the gin she had been plied with before and during the journey to the church made her mood even worse.

Her sister – Gráinne (`Grawn-ya’ to you and me) was even more difficult to deal with. As a retired nun, she abhorred alcohol – and thus her Mother and sister as well. She didn’t share Niamh’s thwarted hopes for a husband and a family, though. She hated men – dirty; lascivious devils that they all were – and she detested children even more.

She hated all children – but the little horrors who she had shared space within the limousine ever since they left The Big House on the Hill were particularly obnoxious in her opinion.

The loathsome little Teallaires were allowed to do precisely what they wanted; had no respect for their elders – or anyone else, come to think of it – and even fewer manners. On top of this, the feral brats used foul and often actually blasphemous language as their parents did nothing to put them right.

Gráinne would never have been allowed to behave like that when she was young – and in her opinion, these stupid, spoilt droch-iseans could all do with what she would have received if she had ever dared to do so: a good slap. And they were all in danger of getting one – imminently – because they were driving her absolutely mad.

Sister Gráinne had only the vaguest notion of how her once impoverished family could afford a ceremony as lavish as this one clearly was to celebrate the death of a nephew she had always despised. Not that she could actually see clearly what was going on – her eyes were not what they once were.

Knowing this, Siobhán tried to shove a set of Rosary Beads into Gráinne’s hands, hoping that habits of a lifetime would give her Aunt something to do and keep her quiet at the same time.

No chance – the place Sister Gráinne had suggested her niece should shove them and the four-letter term beginning with the letter `C’ she had called her at the same time left Siobhán not only speechless but completely in the dark. Where on Earth could a chaste and innocent woman from Holy Orders have possibly learnt lewd language like this which was surely totally out of place in the convents she had once inhabited?…

—

Meanwhile, scarily close and rapidly closing the distance between the less than blissfully happy or congenial funeral procession and itself, a run-away tractor and its load of Irish pork wasn’t slowing down at all. Cormack McMullen was almost overwhelmed just trying to keep the huge mass of metal on the road as all he could do to keep anything approaching control was to react to what he could see in the few yards racing up increasingly rapidly in front of him.

He’d finally stopped stamping on a brake pedal which could do with a ton of Viagra in his opinion, so soft and flaccid had it become. 

The huge farmer was constantly blaring on the John Deere’s klaxon in the vain hope that anyone unlucky enough to be coming the other way might be able to beam themselves into another dimension; levitate high enough above the ground for his huge green monster and its trailer to pass underneath – or just abandon ship before god alone knows how many tons of agricultural machinery crushed them – and any vehicle they might be trapped inside – as flat as a pancake into the ground as it ploughed ever onwards towards the bottom of the hill, as gravity at least dictated it must.

It never occurred to Cormack to switch the engine off; pull the handbrake on or even try to force the gear selector into reverse to experience the reality of a huge gearbox basically tearing itself apart in a vain attempt to change the overwhelming forward force into the opposite direction. All he was actually able to do was hang-on to the steering wheel for dear life as he implored an Almighty he had always fervently believed in to intervene positively.

Fortunately, though, fate – or the Good Lord above – dictated that nobody was going to be unlucky enough to block Cormack’s way. On the descent from on high at least. So the McMullen Missile hit nothing as it careered – faster and faster – towards the bottom of the hill and then blasted at full-speed towards the main street of the sleepy little town of Arracrowe.

The combination of tractor, farmer, pigs and cattle truck slowly began to lose a little momentum as it approached the outskirts of Arracrowe in a northward direction. Viewed from the John Deere’s cab, the road ahead curved slightly towards the left. Maybe a mile away, Cormack was aware of the spire of the church of Christ the King which it seemed to him was racing towards him at an impossible rate of knots. In the back of his mind, he thanked all that he held dear that today was a week-day and not Sunday. If it had been, God alone knew what sort of congestion he might be steering himself towards as the Faithful made their way to Mass.

But he was absolutely sure that the coast would be clear today of all days.

Cormack struggled by sheer unbridled strength alone to steer his runaway train around the final bend and finally was faced with a straight piece of road for the first time since his beast of a tractor had made a break for freedom. The speedometer was touching 60 as his burning biceps finally relaxed and he headed in a straight line at last.

The church was half a mile away now. Fifteen seconds later, it was just a quarter of a mile away. And Cormack could suddenly see – to his utter horror – a long line of vehicles stacked-up and blocking the road outside it.  He started to scream expletive-laden warnings to the drivers of these things to get out of the way rather urgently – and he was still screaming as, klaxon blaring; headlights flashing – the John Deere ploughed relentlessly towards them at god alone knows what speed.

It looks like it will need one of those miracles that the Catholic faithful Cormack is speeding towards believe in so vehemently to prevent an absolute disaster on the streets of little Arracrowe, doesn’t it?

Will one happen?

Keep reading The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga to find out!