The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  Garnett, the agent, explains all this to O’Connor on the first morning after the squire has left. He shows him the harness, the dead piles, and the best way to loosen the catch on the tubs to empty them. He tells the boy that O’Connor will take over the tramming in for this week and when the boy asks why, he tells him to mind his business and get back to his work. Garnett is a narrow man with sharp eyes and a stern expression. He wears a gray mustache and dirty green deerstalker cap. When the boy is gone, he tells O’Connor that he will treat him just the same as the other men, neither better nor worse, except if he tries to slacken off or run away, in which case he will come down hard. O’Connor asks if the squire has sent men here before for poaching, and Garnett says yes he has, although not always for poaching, sometimes for debt or trespass or other, lesser, crimes.

  It is an hour’s work to tram a full load of bouse from the vein to the mine entrance. The harness cuts into O’Connor’s shoulders and strains his back, and his wet feet ache from the cold. Once the noise of the stoping fades, there is no sound in the tunnel but the rasp of his own breath and the soft rush of wheels through the constant runoff. Darkness ahead and darkness behind. He counts his steps and when he gets to a thousand, he stops to rest. Shadows flicker at the edge of his vision; black water drips down from the tunnel roof; the air is cold and there is a soft smell of calcite and turned soil. Every load is the same as the one before. For light, he carries a tallow candle in a tin candleholder hooked to the edge of the tub. If the candle blows out, the blackness is so strong and complete that his body dissolves into it and all that is left for that moment is his paltry soul, shriveled and white as a maggot.

  After work is over, the miners eat cabbage fried in pork fat and argue about how much money they have made and who has worked the hardest that day. Mostly they ignore O’Connor, but sometimes, without warning, one of them will ask him a question: How many pigs do you own? Who is the king of Ireland? and when he gives his answer they snigger and shake their heads as if he has said something foolish. They all come from the same township; they have the same mouth and nose, and the same hunched-over walk. Because the boy is from a different township, a mile to the west of theirs, they enjoy making fun of him. They invent cruel nicknames, and if he tries to speak, they pretend they cannot understand what he is saying. The miners sleep together on bunk beds in the upstairs room, and O’Connor sleeps below in what used to be the stable before the pony died. Garnett locks him in at night and lets him out again in the morning.

  Late in the afternoon of the third day, O’Connor watches Garnett beating the boy with a leather belt. Garnett is standing by the hotching tubs, and the boy is crouched over on the ground with his arms across his head. He shudders as each blow strikes but makes no attempt to escape or resist. When Garnett has finished, he steps back and gestures to the boy to get up and go back to work. The boy picks up his cap from the floor and wipes blood from his mouth. Garnett watches him for a moment, then puts the belt back around his waist and walks back to the office without looking around. O’Connor pulls the wagon along to the hopper and tips it out as normal. The boy picks up the wheelbarrow and walks across to him. He has fresh bruises on one side of his face and his lip is still bleeding.

  “You should run away from here,” O’Connor tells him.

  “If I run away, they will only catch me and bring me back.”

  “Not if you run quick and far enough.”

  The boy picks up the shovel and starts filling the barrow with the bouse. He moves slowly as if dazed or half-asleep. The fresh blood on his lip looks almost black against his pale skin.

  “Where would I run to?” he asks.

  “There are other places, better than this.”

  “How would I live when I got there?”

  “You could make your own way.”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “I can’t run away,” he says again. “If I run away, they will only catch me and bring me back.”

  The miners play rummy after dinner. They hunch over the upturned tea chest like a gang of mud-stained necromancers, hissing and muttering prophecies as each card is discarded or retrieved. Garnett doesn’t join them and O’Connor isn’t invited. He sits by the window instead and looks out at the shifting darkness of the hills.

  Later, before Garnett locks him into the stable, O’Connor asks about the boy.

  “That boy’s only job is to sort the rock and he does it poorly,” Garnett says. “He’s slow and stupid. He mixes up the ore and the deads. We lose money every day by his laziness.”

  “Where are his family?”

  “His father is gone away and his mother is too poor to keep him, so he belongs to the squire. He’s apprenticed here until he comes of age.”

  “Let me work beside him tomorrow. Have one of the other men do the tramming instead of me. I can watch him. Make sure he doesn’t slacken off.”

  “It’s my business to watch him, not yours.”

  “Why do you whip him?”

  “To improve him.”

  “And do you find he improves much?”

  “Not yet, but he shall.”

  “Let me help him. Why won’t you?”

  “You should help yourself, O’Connor. Forget about the boy.”

  There is no fire or stove in the stable, but he has a wool blanket and a pile of straw to lie on. When he dreams of Rose Flanagan now, he doesn’t see her face, just an arm or a hand or the shape of her back as she is walking away. He knows it is her, but when he calls her name she doesn’t look around or answer.

  The next day, at dusk, when the miners come back up from the stoping, they find the dressing floor deserted and the last wagonload of bouse still standing by the hopper untipped. They assume, at first, that Garnett must have sent the boy off on an errand to the smelting plant or up into the woods to check the sluice gates, but when they go into the lodging shop, they realize that Garnett is missing also, and there is no sign of the thieving Irishman O’Connor either. Garnett’s office is unlocked, so they step inside and peer about. They take the books and papers off the shelves and sit in his chair and pretend to give each other orders. They dip his pen into the inkpot and write their names on the blotter for the fun of it. They feel happier and freer without Garnett about, but they miss having the boy to make merry with. After dinner, they play rummy for an hour, then go to sleep as usual. In the morning, they draw straws to decide who will walk across the moors to the squire’s house to tell him what has happened. The one with the short straw leaves after breakfast, and the others walk up the hill to the powder hut to get more gunpowder for blasting. As they approach the hut, they hear a voice calling from inside, high and furious, and when they unlock the door they see Garnett kneeling there between the stacked barrels, bound hand and foot with twine, with one eye closed and blackened and one ear torn and caked with blood.

  CHAPTER 31

  When Doyle reaches the farmhouse, there is only Anna inside. The boy Patrick is still at school and Fergus is up in the woods cutting fenceposts with George Nichols the hired man. For a moment she doesn’t recognize him, then, when she does, she gasps and puts her hands up to her mouth. She looks older, he thinks, but not by very much.

  “Why are you crying?” he says.

  She shakes her head, impatiently, then dabs her eyes on her apron and tells him to take off his coat and sit down at the kitchen table. She puts a pot of coffee on the stove to boil and sits down beside him. Her face is eager and alert and her eyes are bright, as if just the sight of him is a pleasure.

  “Tell me where you’ve been,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

  “I can’t remember everything. I’ve been too long away.”

  “Then tell me all that you do remember.”

  He tells her about the war, and then about Ireland. He doesn’t mention Manchester or what happened there, but, even so, she looks s
hocked by what she hears.

  “Too much fighting,” she says. “You might have been killed.”

  “It’s all over now. I won’t go back.”

  “What will you do instead? Where will you go next?”

  “I don’t know that yet.”

  She asks him if he still holds any grudge against Fergus, and he shakes his head as if the question doesn’t matter anymore.

  “He told me what happened that night,” she says. “He said that you were watching me while I slept and it made him angry to see it.”

  “I was taking a scoop of water, that’s all. It was too hot to stay in the barn.”

  “He said you were watching me for a long time, but I told him even if you were, it didn’t matter, you were only a boy then.”

  “When did you marry him?”

  “Not long after you left. He’d made me promises before, but he hadn’t kept any of them. After you went away, I told him that was the end of it for me, either we were married or I’d look for a place elsewhere.”

  “I was fifteen,” he says.

  “That’s right. You were just fifteen when you left us.”

  She looks up at him again and smiles, and he feels for a moment just as he felt ten years before: prideful and awkward, his clenched body drowning in the turbid confluence of half a dozen nameless urges.

  When Patrick gets back from school, Anna gives him a piece of cornbread and a cup of buttermilk, and he sits at the table staring at Doyle, speechless and amazed. Doyle asks him questions, and he nods or shakes his head to answer, but he won’t talk unless Anna makes him. He has thick black curls like a ram’s fleece and jutting-out ears; he resembles his father much more than his mother. After he has finished off the bread and milk, Anna makes him do his arithmetic out loud and recite some verses of poetry, then tells him he is a clever boy and will grow up to be a great man one day. Doyle gives him a nickel and shakes his hand.

  “You’re lucky to have such a fine mother,” he says. “Don’t you see how much she cares about you?”

  Patrick nods and smiles back at him, but Doyle can see that the boy doesn’t understand what he is saying, that he thinks all mothers are the same, more or less, and that his life on the farm is no better or worse than it should be. Anna kisses him on the top of the head and tells him to run up into the woods and let his father know they have an unexpected guest for supper.

  * * *

  —

  In the daytime, Doyle works alongside George Nichols, plowing the fields for oats or mending fences, and in the evenings, after they have eaten, he talks to Anna and plays games with Patrick in the kitchen, or goes out to the barn to help him with his chores. After a week, Fergus jokes that if this carries on much longer, they will have to start paying him a wage, but as soon as he says it, Anna purses her lips in disapproval and tells Doyle that he is family and is welcome to stay just as long as he likes.

  The next day, as they are walking from the house up to the fields, Doyle tells George Nichols that if he’s smart and knows what’s good for him, he will leave the farm and go to Philadelphia or New York, where there are other Negroes just like him, and well-paid work is easy to find. You’d be happier there, he says, you’d have a better life. He tells him that Fergus can’t be trusted, that he will cheat him when he gets the chance. When I was a boy, he beat me so hard he almost killed me, he says. Me, his own nephew, think of that. Nichols is a tall man, quiet and slow-moving. He listens carefully without interrupting; then, when Doyle is finished, he tells him he is content where he is. He has worked outside in the fields all his life, he says, and would not thrive in the city.

  That evening, as they sit down to eat supper, Fergus asks Doyle what he means by putting ideas into George Nichols’ head.

  “He says you told him he should leave me and go look for work in Philadelphia instead.”

  Doyle takes up a spoonful of the stew from his bowl and blows to cool it before answering.

  “He’d do a sight better in Philadelphia if you ask me. There are good opportunities for a Negro there.”

  “George doesn’t need any advice from you. He knows his own mind. He’s happy here and we treat him well.”

  Doyle glances at Anna and then looks back at Fergus.

  “Just two men talking to pass the time,” he says. “I don’t believe there’s any law against it.”

  Fergus scowls and clenches his hand into a fist. White steam rises up from the plates in front of them; the oil lamp suspended from a roof beam casts a steady yellow glow.

  “You told him that I can’t be trusted,” he says, “that I’m a liar and a cheat.”

  Doyle shakes his head.

  “I don’t remember saying that. Perhaps he heard it from someone else.”

  Patrick asks for bread, and Fergus saws off a slice and gives it to him. “Here,” he says sharply. Patrick folds the bread in two, dips it in the gravy, then bites off the corner. The boy doesn’t know what is going on, Doyle thinks, he’s too young to understand, but Anna sees it.

  “If you’re trying to make trouble for us here, then you should leave,” Fergus says.

  Doyle waits a minute before answering. He enjoys this feeling of being on the brink, this sense of something held precious about to crack and break apart. There is the sound of the clock ticking on the mantelpiece behind him and of Patrick’s pewter spoon tapping and scraping against the bottom of his plate.

  “It was your wife who invited me. I’ll leave when she wants me to.”

  “Is it true?” Anna asks him. “Did you really say those things?”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  “George Nichols swears to it,” Fergus says.

  “So who do you believe?” Doyle asks him. “A field-nigger off the Kentucky plantation, or your own flesh and blood?”

  “George Nichols is a good man, honest and loyal.”

  “So what does that make me by your reckoning?”

  They stare at each other across the tabletop. Fergus’ face is pale and bloodless with dark blotches of color on his temple and across the bridge of his nose.

  “You can stay here until Sunday,” he says, “but not a day longer.”

  Doyle puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. When he speaks again, his voice is closer to a whisper.

  “Are you angry with me now, Fergus?” he says. “Do you wish you could beat me bloody like you did before? We can try that thing over again if you’d like to.”

  “You two stop it now,” Anna says. “Stop it, please.”

  * * *

  —

  Early the following morning, before dawn, Fergus hitches the wagon and drives into Harrisburg to collect a new blade for the plow. When he gets back it is almost dark. Instead of stopping in front of the house to unload, he drives the wagon on past the oat fields to the clearing at the edge of the woods where Doyle is cutting up pole wood for cording. He ties up the horse and walks through the trees, guided by the hollow thud of the ax. When he sees Doyle, he calls out, and Doyle stops and turns to look. Fergus’ eyes are bright and he is almost smiling. The bitterness of the previous evening has been replaced by something else, something more like curiosity or pleasure. Doyle wonders what could have happened to cause the sudden alteration. He lodges the ax blade in a stump and swipes the wood chips off his pants leg.

  “When I was over in Harrisburg today, I had a talk with Walter Alger,” Fergus says, “the old man who owns the feed store on Water Street. He told me something you might want to hear.”

  “I don’t know any Walter Alger.”

  “He knows you. He says there’s a fellow by the name of James O’Connor, going around the town asking everyone he meets if they’ve heard of Stephen Doyle. He was in the feed store asking Walter the same question just the other day. Walter told him he didn’t know any Stephen Doyle, but th
en afterward he remembered that I once had a nephew by that name who lived with me. He was asking me whatever became of you.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Don’t you want to know why this O’Connor’s come looking for you? Aren’t you curious? Or perhaps you already know the reason?”

  Fergus raises his eyebrows and waits for the response, but Doyle doesn’t move or make an answer.

  “He says you murdered his nephew, killed him in cold blood. He’s come all the way from England to seek you out.”

  He waits again.

  “Aren’t you going to say something, Stephen? Aren’t you going to tell me now that you’ve never been to England? That you never heard of James O’Connor? That it’s all just fucking make-believe?”

  “Did you tell Alger I was here?”

  Fergus shakes his head.

  “I have my own good name to protect. I’ve earned myself a reputation in this county and I won’t let you steal it from me. I told him you’d left here ten years ago, and I hadn’t set eyes on you since.”

  “You think he believed you?”

  “So far as I could tell, he did.”

  “Where’s O’Connor staying in Harrisburg? Did Walter Alger tell you that?”

  Fergus stares at him a moment, then looks away again.

  “You should leave here now,” he says. “Walk away quick before I change my mind and drive right back there.”

  “I’ll leave you in the morning.”

  “You’ll leave me now,” he says more firmly. “I don’t want you going near my wife or son again.”

  “I’m a soldier. Whatever I did, I did it for the cause.”