Two years ago, the thing foremost in our minds was the effect the soon-to-be-started by-pass would have on the town and our own business in particular. Shirl, that’s the missus, Shirl and I had come home from Aussie the year before. The mines over there had paid good money even to canteen staff but what with the heat, the dust, and the bloody flies, they needed to. Walesby was home. We bought the coffee shop on the main street and most of our trade was from people passing through, the main street being part of the north-south highway. Now, a lot of the town’s business would disapppear if it could not attract visitors. It was a problem we gnawed on continually along with the rest of the town. On the surface, the town had little to attract visitors. It was just another small, ex-mining town. It’s better days remembered only by the few grandious buildings put up when the seams and prosperity were expected to last forever. History the town has in plenty but history is such small change in this country. In the States it’s big bucks. They have reproduction pilgrim-father towns with actors in period dress, and yearly re-enactments, on location, with casts of thousands, of the battles of the War of Independence and the Civil War. That’s a bit too over-the-top for us. They flock to western towns made famous by the fictionalised Old West of pulp magazine and films. Sixty seconds of gunfire at the O.K. Corral is turned to gold in Tombstone to this very day. When you come to think about it, the Old West is not really that old. Just the 1870’s and 80’s in most cases. Walesby can give Tombstone and most of the others ten years at least but finding something dramatic and different was difficult. As it happened, the problem was solved for us. Shirl and I take the Tribune, the morning paper, and our paper boy at the time was Jason, in his early teens and permanently hungry. He’d come in the back door and we’d give him something to keep him alive until breakfast time. Our good deed for the day except that we had a lot of fun at his expense. Cruel I know, but he was so blimmin’ gullible. We’d have him on with our Aussie adventures. Stories we’d cobble out of canteen talk that was already fiction when we heard it. Shirl waking to find a taipan in her sleeping
bag or Shirl casually shaking the red-backs out of her boots of a morning. Our confrontation with a Yowie, Queensland’s ‘bigfoot.’ The months we lived with a previously undiscovered Aboriginal tribe. He never caught on. Not once. But he rushes in this morning, two years back, as shaken as hell. As he told it, he had been taking the short-cut through Corkill Glen when a woman in a white robe had suddenly materialised in front of him. The Glen, by the way, is a rift behind the town centre which, being useless for building, has been made into a sort of park. It has a spring at its bottom which is probably the reason why the mist tends to lie there long after it has cleared elsewhere. According to Jason, the woman was wearing a white robe and had told him that he was standing on sacred ground. She had then disappeared. It was still only half-light and I imagine that she simply moved off in the mist. Jason, in the state he was in, was hardly a reliable witness. It was a safe bet that he’d met Aunty Jessie! We’d left her out-to-it, as we thought, but clearly she had been fooling us and not taking her medication again. It wasn’t the first time she’d wandered off. In her nightie too. Jessie is Shirl’s aunt on her mother’s side. She’s a bit erratic, has some funny ideas, but quite harmless otherwise. She gets shifted around the family and it was our turn. I was going to put Jason’s mind to rest but Shirl forestalled me by crossing herself reverently. She’s quicker on the uptake than I am. Shril isn’t a Catholic. Not anything that I know of. But now she was looking more devout than the most devoted. With a seeming eagerness she sought details of Jason’s vision. She was the first one to call it a vision. With a little guidance, Jason remembered that the woman wore a blue over-mantle, Jessie’s blue cardy, and had a sort of radiance around her head, “Yes, it was like a halo,” and she seemed to float on the air. What she had actually said was, “This place has become sacred to me,” and she had then faded away. Shirl murmured,”The Holy Mother! It must be!” But Jason had already arrived at this conclusion himself. Now that he came to think about it, she had looked exactly like the picture in the lounge at
home. I had caught up by then and, doing my best to look awestruck, I joined Shirl in insisting that he must speak immediately with Father Mahon. Not wait until he had finished his round. He had a divine commission and it was a wonderful blessing to be so chosen. I should have mentioned that Jason is an altar boy and well aquainted with Father Mahon. We more-or-less pushed him out the door. We could imagine what Father Mahon was going to say. He would guess immediately that it was Jessie. There had been an embarrassing confrontation between the two of them on her previous visit. Embarrassing for him and for Shirl who was with Jessie. In Jessie’s book the Church of Rome is ‘Babylon the Great’, the ‘Mother of Harlots and the Abominations of the Earth.’ Shirl went round later to apologise and mentioned the problems that Jessie caused. The wandering and so forth. And he knew that she was visiting again. He had seen her in the distance the day before and had smartly crossed to the other side of the street. We had not time to fall about laughting, Shirl had to find Jessie and left me to watch the shop. But the rest of the day, whenever our eyes met, we just cracked up. The customers must have thought we were mad. So imagine our surprise then at seeing Walesby on the evening news in the person of Father Mahon. The man was rather more cunning than I would have expected. He must know people in the right places. Although stressing that the Church was extremely cautious in giving credence to reports of visions, he managed to appear conviced himself while, at the same time, claiming to be completely open-minded. He brought up the fact that the pre-European name for Walesby was Punatapu or sacred spring and wondered aloud if this might have some significance. Jason he pictured as an other-worldly spiritual youth: a clear future candidate for sainthood. This hardly accorded with the Jason we knew who was only an altar boy because his mother insisted. The first miracle occurred just five days later. A man, a visitor to the town, whose hand had
been paralysed for many years had apparently dipped it in the spring and had had it immediately restored. There was no medical proof but it was claimed to have been witnessed by a large group of bystanders. Surely proof enough. It put the town into a feeding frenzy. There is no shortage of people who claim to have spoken to someone who was present when this miracle took place but somehow it has proved impossible to identify either the man concerned or one single witness. The miracle, of course, confirmed the sighting. ‘The Holy Virgin’ had blessed us with her presence. Without waiting for offical sanction, she became ‘Our Lady of Walesby.’ It is amazing what wishful thinking can achieve. There have been continuing reports of further miracles. Most of them as nebulous as the first although there have been a few that appear to be properly documented, difficult to disprove. The smug sceptics among us point out that placebos give a high percentage of cures too but they don’t seem too unhappy about the publicity the town has received Two year have seen many changes. We are not exactly Lourdes or Fatima, official recognition takes generations, but we have become increasingly a place of last resort and even first resort. Our young friend Jason has had more revelations and thrives on the attention. Father Mahon is his mentor. A massive increase in the attendance at Mass has created an urgent need for more priests and a religious order has moved in to provide accommodation for the sick and transport them to and from the spring. They upset locals by trying to assume control of the spring. Believers carry away little bottles of spring water for relatives too ill to come here and the town has its own tacky religious souvenirs. Business is booming. Our own not excepted. We’ve had to take on staff. But I am not happy. Shirl is not happy. We are part of the vicious con as is everyone else in this town. We are religious hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, leeches fattening on the misfortune and desperation of others. And Shirl and I are the most guilty. Well! Perhaps Father Mahon is too. Anyway, we are the ones who started it although others, for whatever motives, have carried it on. We should have
stopped it at the outset. It was just a private joke as we thought. If only we’d realised! We are planning on getting away as soon as we can find a buyer but the guilt is going to stay with us, there is obviously no way now that we can change what has happened and is still happening. We harbour a truth that nobody wants.