The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

Later, someone starts up with a fiddle and Willy Devine dances a clumsy, shuffling kind of jig in the middle of the room, while the others clap and stamp and egg him on. When Devine is finished with his nonsense, another man, named Boyce, gets to his feet and sings “The Croppy Boy” in a steady, pleasing baritone. After that, Peter Rice, who is drunk but still capable of holding a tune, sings “As I Roved Out.” When they ask Sullivan to give them a song, he tries to refuse, but they won’t allow it, so he sings “The Rose of Tralee” with one hand gripping the edge of the bar and his eyes half-closed in concentration. His voice wavers at the start, but then in the middle verses it finds its strength and sureness, and by the end he thinks he has done well enough, or at least not shown himself up too badly. He remembers his grandmother teaching him that song when they lived in the house on Ash Street, and the memory feels like a dark weight around his heart, and he wishes for a moment he was somewhere else without the threat of awful murder hanging over him.

  Jack Riley is leaning on the bar, with a bright tot of whiskey in his hand, surveying his demesne and looking ducal. When Sullivan thanks him and tells him he’ll be on his way now, he straightens up and gives him a scolding look.

  “Oh no, you can’t be going to your bed just yet,” he says. “The night’s only just getting started. You sit yourself down on that stool and I’ll pour ye out a drop of this good stuff here.”

  Sullivan sits and drinks the whiskey and when he finishes it, Riley pours him another one. He is already six or seven pints of porter to the good, and the spirits on top is like a sudden blow to the head. Riley is talking about politics now, about the grave hypocrisies of the Irish priesthood and the cowardice of the reformers in Westminster. Sullivan drifts away and then remembers himself. “That’s right,” he says, “I know what you mean. Good god almighty, that’s the fucking truth.” They finish the bottle, but Riley has more down in the cellar. While he goes to fetch one, Sullivan shambles out into the backyard, unbuttons his britches, and pisses untidily against a wall. The gray steam rises all around him, warm and fragrant like the heat of a deep bath. He looks up at the dangling silver moon and thinks to himself that this is the very same moon they are looking at in New York and Paris and Dublin, and the strange thought of this brings a tear to his eye and makes him wonder at the beauty and vastness of the world.

  When he gets back to the bar, Riley has passed a bottle around to the others and is calling out a toast for the recently departed.

  “May them three brave souls that were hanged at Salford rest in peace, and may their sacrifice not be forgotten while any of us here have a snatch of breath left in our puny bodies,” he shouts. “And God save Ireland!”

  “God save Ireland!”

  They holler it back at him, then raise up their freshened glasses and drink the whiskey down in one. Then Riley starts up with “A Nation Once Again” and they all of them join in the rackety chorus, putting their heads back and bellowing the words upward into the smoke-fugged air, so the room is rattling with raw noise and Sullivan, who is watching on silently, feels down in his stomach something hot and fierce that may be terror but may just as easily be love, but he is not sure, he cannot tell.

  The night stretches on, and one by one the others weaken and drift away home, until it is just Riley and Sullivan sitting there with a near-empty whiskey bottle on the table between them and a layer of old pipe smoke, bruise-colored and as thick as a mattress above their heads. Riley is still talking, although his voice is not as clear or steady as it was before, and sometimes he loses the drift and has to circle around or ask Sullivan to remind him what it was he was saying.

  “It was something about the fellows that were hanged,” Sullivan says. He is dazed and numb from the drinking. He is not asleep, but he is not awake either. His mouth is lolled open, and he has to squint to see.

  “That’s right,” Riley says. “They were good men them three, I’ll tell you, brave and proud. And they were murthered just like fucken animals, just like fucken beasts in a slaughterhouse. Do ye understand me, Michael Sullivan? Do ye?”

  He gives Sullivan a wild, twitching glare. His mouth is fringed with whitened spittle and his bulldog eyes are pink and weepy. He is panting like he has just run a mile.

  “I understand,” Sullivan says. “Course I do.”

  Riley reaches across the cluttered table with his right hand and gives Sullivan’s arm a fierce squeeze.

  “You took the sacred oath tonight,” he says. “You’re one of us now, and when the order comes to fight, we’ll be standing side by side like brothers, won’t we?”

  Sullivan nods, then shakes his head. He tells himself to keep on pretending. Don’t waver or weaken, not now.

  “When will the order come?” he says.

  “It could come any time, any time at all,” Riley says. “We can’t know that. But I’ll tell you something…” He lets go of Sullivan’s arm and leans back in his chair. “There are plans moving even as we speak. Big fucken plans n’all.”

  “I heard that joke before.”

  “I’m not joking with you, though.”

  “So is it the Queen?” he says. “Or is it the Prince of Wales this time?”

  “It’s closer to home than that. Much closer.”

  “Like what, then?”

  Riley doesn’t answer straightaway. He wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve and takes a slow drink.

  “By rights I shouldn’t tell anyone,” he says.

  “I took the oath,” Sullivan reminds him.

  “I know you did.”

  Riley starts pushing his whiskey glass back and forth across the tabletop as if he is trying to trace out all the letters in a name.

  “If you don’t want to tell me, don’t trouble yourself,” Sullivan says.

  Riley shakes his head and tilts forward.

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” he says. “Fuck it. It’s the mayor. They’re going to kill the mayor of Manchester himself. He has a whore hidden away somewhere on Milk Street, and that’s how they’ll do it. They brought the guns up from Birmingham just the other day. It’s vengeance for the boys they hanged.”

  He pauses, and for a moment Sullivan can hear the sound of his own breath coming to him hard and shallow through the sweat-stained air.

  “The mayor himself,” Riley says again. “So what do you think of that, then?”

  “Can they really do it?”

  “Certainly they can. The spies are all dead now, and without the spies the police haven’t a clue, so who will stop them?”

  Sullivan knows it’s true by the way he tells it, by the pride and pleasure in his voice.

  “The mayor is a fucking prize, though,” Sullivan says.

  “Yes, he is. If you kill the mayor, you spread the terror. No one knows who’s next.”

  “So they’ll shoot him, will they?”

  “Through the heart.”

  Riley points his fingers and makes the noise.

  “Bang, bang,” he says with a grin. “Like that.”

  Sullivan winces, then leans forward against the table edge. His mouth is filling with spit, and there is a high-pitched ringing in one ear. He feels suddenly chilled.

  Riley tilts his head and looks at him.

  “Are you getting sick?” he says.

  “I well might be.”

  “Then you should take some air.”

  Sullivan stands up and walks unsteadily toward the door. Outside, the street is dark and empty. There are green globs of horse dung scattered across the cobbles, and the usual midden stench of wet ash and urine. He leans over, hands on knees, groans loudly twice, and then spatters the pavement with the mud-colored lees of his debauch. He is dripping sweat now, and his throat is burning. The buildings around him toss and tilt like boats in a storm and, up above, the night sky drifts and pivots. Everything is loose and liquid. He leans
against the alehouse wall and prays for firmness, but firmness does not appear. He waits for a gasping minute, then pukes again.

  Riley comes out to take a look at him.

  “By Christ,” he says. “But you’re in a state.”

  Sullivan spits and straightens himself.

  “I’ll be aright.”

  “You look like you’ve been buried somewhere and just dug up.”

  “I’ll be aright,” he says again.

  Riley offers him a mattress to sleep on, but Sullivan says the walk will clear his head. Riley hugs him—that boniness again, that smell—then they shake hands and say their adieus.

  When he gets as far as Angel Street, instead of turning right toward the Irk and the tannery, he tends left toward Shude Hill. One foot first and then the other one, anxious as a cat. He sways a tad but doesn’t stumble. The rebel songs are still spinning around in his head, and when he closes his eyes he sees green fields and hills, and the marching men of ’98 with cropped hair and flashing pikes. High Street, Fountain Street, Cooper. There is vomit on his boots and on the cuffs of his trousers. His throat is aching and the bright streetlamps pain his eyes. He must find Jimmy O’Connor this night or there will be hell to pay, he knows that, but which is the way to George Street from here? He looks around. Straight on, then left after the bridge? No, he thinks, far quicker to walk along the towpath. That will take him direct to Chorlton Mill.

  Gingerly, he navigates the steep stone steps down to the canal side. When Jimmy hears the news he will jump out of his skin, Sullivan thinks. Kill the mayor? And they would do it too. The wild, heedless, loony, ragged-edged Fenian bastards. He wishes now he hadn’t taken that oath. Not that he is much of a Catholic, but still, hand on the Bible and all, it doesn’t sit well. Perhaps there is some penance he can do? Or a prayer? He will ask a priest when he finds one. The towpath is narrow and roughly cobbled. The fly boats work all hours, but he doesn’t see any working now. It’s deathly quiet and the water is as smooth and black as asphalt. He is so tired, he could curl up and fall asleep right here on the towpath, if it weren’t so cold out and he didn’t have a job to do. Jimmy will jump out of his skin, he thinks again, he won’t believe what he’s hearing. He yawns and blinks and scratches his arse, and wonders for a moment whether he has gone the wrong way. He turns around to check, then carries on walking. Slow and unsteady, each step an effort, if he doesn’t concentrate hard he swerves.

  When he comes to the next lock, he decides to go across. That way he will be on the right side of the canal when he gets to Chorlton Mill. There is a wooden railing to grip onto so it will be no trouble at all. He takes hold of the railing and pulls himself up onto the top of the gates. Water is sluicing through the square holes below the beam, and he can hear the rush and see it foaming down into the chamber below. Standing there, with the cold air blowing all around, he feels stiff and exposed. He lifts up his right foot, dangles it a moment, then sets it down again where it was. He thinks about turning around, then tells himself to sharpen up. Four or five quick strides, he thinks, that’s all, then he will be at the other side, and the sooner he does it the better. The black canal water turns white as it pours over the gate. It rumbles lowly like a passing charabanc. Four or five strides, he thinks, that’s all. The first stride is a solid one, and the second too, but then, at the midpoint where the two lock gates join and there is a break in the railing, he hesitates a moment, and the hesitation is what does for him. He takes another stride forward, but instead of his foot coming down where he intends, it slips off the edge of the beam. He tries to reach around and grab hold of the railing to keep himself upright but misses. As he topples off the lock gate and into the dark waters of the Rochdale Canal, he shouts out—not a word but a fleeting wail of panic, like a frightened animal might make, or a child waking up from a nightmare.

  CHAPTER 14

  Next evening, just past ten o’clock. Neary and Doyle are seated in Skelly’s spavined hansom at the north end of Milk Street. It is bitter outside, and there is a vague brown mist hanging in the Manchester air, clammy and vegetal, like the exhalations of a bog. They have watched the mayor for long enough now, and they know his patterns well. It is always a Wednesday or a Thursday: He leaves the Town Hall around nine, always afoot, stays with the woman until midnight, then walks back to King Street with a smile on his face and takes the brougham home. They will shoot him on the way back, when he passes beneath the lamp on the corner of Marble Street, that’s the plan. Neary from the front, and Doyle from the rear, one shot each should be enough, but, if they need more, they have five others in the chamber. They will be away and gone into the shadows before any alarm is sounded.

  The pistols are single-trigger Tranters. Six-shooters, eighty-bore. Not new, but clean and serviceable. Doyle likes the Colt for accuracy at range, but he has heard cavalrymen argue for the Tranter or even the Beaumont-Adams as the better weapon overall, and they should know. He loaded both before they left, but now he cocks the hammers again and turns them with his thumb just to be sure. He hands one of the guns to Neary, and Neary takes it from him with a nod.

  “Now we wait,” Doyle says.

  Neary lays the pistol down on the seat beside him and shifts forward to peer through the half-fogged window glass.

  “We could have a wee pint over there in the Shakespeare,” he suggests, “while the mayor’s enjoying his final pleasures, I mean.”

  “We’ll stay where we are,” Doyle says again. “It wouldn’t do to be seen about.”

  “As you will,” Neary says.

  Doyle leans his head back into the corner of the cab and closes his eyes to rest. He has no fears of what the night might bring. He learned in the war that the hoping and the worrying are beside the point, that there is a chaos at the heart of things—dark, unfathomable—and the best a man can do is give that chaos human form, match himself to it. In the heat of battle, he knows, the mind empties and you forget what you are. That’s the reason he still fights, the truest, deepest reason, not for the cause or the glory, but for those moments out of time, which could be minutes or hours, when the world beats its savage drum, and he—unthinking and heedless—steps to its measure.

  * * *

  —

  When he first arrived in America he was only thirteen years old, with his parents and three brothers already dead from the typhus. Stepping off the steamer in Philadelphia, he had two dollars in his coat pocket and a letter from his uncle Fergus with a hand-drawn map and a long list of commandments. Fergus had worked in the Pennsylvania coalfield for ten years and saved enough from his wages to buy a farm in the Lebanon Valley, twenty miles northwest of Harrisburg. The farm was not large, but the soil and the drainage were good. Sheep and cattle grazed in the lower fields, and in the upper they grew Indian corn, wheat, and rye. In lieu of a wife, he had a hired man, a Pole named Lazlo, and Anna, a thin, silent Dutch woman, who cooked and mended and slept on a cot by the stove. The house was built of logs—two rooms with a brick chimney and fireplace. There was a clapboard barn beside it, a chicken house, and a fenced-in pen for the hogs.

  A portion of the land was still covered by timber, tall stands of black gum and river birch, and it was Doyle’s allotted task to clear some of it for plowing. He went out each morning with an ax and a bucksaw and came back smeared with wood dust and soil and blank-eyed with weariness. In the evenings after supper, Fergus read aloud from the Harrisburg newspapers and Lazlo played the accordion and sang mournful songs in a language only he understood. Doyle was nervous and fearful at first because everything was different, but he quickly grew used to his new life and became more settled and surer of himself. Sometimes he would dream about Ireland and his family who had died, but he didn’t remember the dreams afterward and the feelings of loss or sadness they provoked never lingered on for long.

  When he was fifteen, he began to see Anna, the Dutch woman, in a different way. He would watch her
at her work and imagine the shape of her body beneath her clothes and the smell and taste of her bared skin. Whenever he had the chance, he would sit at the kitchen table and talk to her quietly. He would ask her questions about her life. She told him she had been married once and had a child, but the husband had left her and the child had died young. He realized she was old enough to be his mother, but the thought did not discourage him. He liked the pale tautness of the flesh on her neck and forearms, and the way, as she moved about the kitchen, the lines of sinew pushed through it like cords in a rope. He thought about her body every night as he lay in bed before sleeping. He imagined touching her and being touched in return. She told him he was too clever to stay on the farm and that he should go to Harrisburg or Philadelphia and look for work there instead. He could learn a trade, she said, become a cooper or a wheelwright. She told him his uncle Fergus was a great liar who would make promises he never kept, and that nothing he said should ever be believed. “If I were a man,” she said, “I would build a fine house with a high wall around it and live there alone. That is the best way to be.”

  One windless, stagnant night in August when it was too hot for him to stay asleep, he rose up from his bed in the barn and went into the kitchen looking for water. Anna was sleeping as usual on the cot by the stove. Her nightgown was hitched up around her thighs, and he could see the shape and color of her breasts under the sweat-dampened muslin. After he drank from the pail, he stood there watching her a long time. Her head was turned away from him; her arms and legs were spread wide apart. From the woods outside, he heard the roaring of cicadas and the sporadic shrieks of midnight birds. After another minute, he reached down and lifted up the hem of the gown so he could better see the fuzz of gray-black hair between her legs, then unbuttoned his pants and started tugging at himself. Anna mumbled, then turned onto her side and raised her knees up toward her chest. Doyle’s bare toes pressed hard into the dusty floorboards and his breath came out in hollow, grunting rasps. He wanted her to open her eyes, to watch and admire him, but she didn’t stir again and he dared not touch her or make any noise. When he was finished, he wiped himself on a rag, then turned to go back to the barn. The moon was silver-bright, and, as he crossed the yard, he saw Fergus standing on the lip of the porch, cut in two by the slanted shadows, watching him silently.