The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  CHAPTER 33

  San Francisco, Eight Years Later.

  At the crossroads, a young man is preaching. He is lean and hollow-cheeked with deep-set eyes, long black hair, and a ragged beard streaked here and there with premature strands of silver-gray. The sun is high up in the sky. It is the hour before noon, and, as he speaks, dampness glistens on his pulsing throat and drips down from his brow. He preaches death and the end-time and God’s promised salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ Our Lord. Some people passing by pause a minute from their daily business to listen. Others, the greater number, scowl or laugh at him or look away. His voice is high and impassioned. He holds a sweat-stained Bible in his right hand, and when he quotes from Scripture he raises it above his head and beats it like a tambourine.

  “Hear my story and heed it well,” he cries. “For once I was lost as you are. My spirit was sunken in darkness and shriveled by ignorance and I was on the very brink of despair, but God lifted me up. I was born in Pennsylvania into poverty and backwardness. At the age of ten, I was sent to toil in a mine where every day I was beaten and mocked. A man named O’Connor saved me. He became my guardian and we lived together. O’Connor had an enemy somewhere nearby, a man named Doyle, who had injured him grievously in the past. Wanting revenge, O’Connor looked out for him every day, but he never did find him. Then, one day, a day of reckoning, the two of us were walking alone in the farm country, when Doyle appeared to us suddenly and without any warning. He was riding on a gray horse and holding a pistol. Only the moment before we had been singing and laughing together and now death was upon us. Let that be a lesson to all poor sinners. My guardian had no time to escape or defend himself. Before he could even draw his own gun, he was shot through the head.

  “He lay dying at my feet, but I had to abandon him and to flee into the woods to save my own life. I ran just as far as I could and then I hid, shaking with fear, until night fell. When morning came, I tried to find my way back to the road, but whichever way I walked I only returned to the beginning. I was going around in a great circle—it was as if I was under some strange spell and there was no way to break from it. As it is said in the Psalms: They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.

  “I was tired and thirsty, and the pain of O’Connor’s death was a fire scorching my heart. I was beginning to give up hope when I heard a noise, like a whistle or a hum, off in the far distance. The harder I listened, the more strange and curious the noise became. I determined to find its source. I started to walk and soon I arrived at a clearing. In the center of the clearing was a tent, and from the tent came the sound of singing. When I went inside, the people there turned to look. I thought they would scold me, but instead they greeted me with warmth. It was just as Christ teaches us: In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you there.

  “When the hymn was finished, the priest called me up to the altar. He asked me to say my name and then he laid his hand on my forehead and gave me a blessing. At that moment, as I stood there, weak and desperate and laid low with grief, the Holy Spirit filled me and all the fear and anguish fell away. For it is truly written: God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying. That day was the first day of my second lifetime. My guardian was dead, but I had found a truer comforter and protector in the Lord Jesus.

  “I became the priest’s attendant and served him loyally. He taught me to read and write and I ministered to his needs. After several years in his household, I experienced a great vision. I was lying in my bed one evening, sweating with an ague, when I saw an angel hovering above me. The angel told me that Christ would come again in the west and that, on his return, the New Jerusalem would be raised there also. As soon as I was well enough to walk, I packed my bag to leave. The journey here was long and frightful, and my faith was tested many times, but I knew that Christ was watching over me, so I endured the pains of it for his sake.

  “When I reached the great city of San Francisco, the angel came down to me again. He told me it was my task to prepare the people here for what was surely coming. He revealed to me that very soon this place will burn with furious flames, that the ground beneath it will shake, and that the Lord will avenge himself upon the wicked and all those who have aided their wickedness. Soon, sooner than you think possible, the seven angels will descend from heaven and the whoremongers and idolaters will be cast into a lake of fire. That is the true prophecy and I am its humble messenger. That is the word of the Lord. Repent and scrub yourselves clean of your sin or you will be cast into hell for a thousand years or more. Ignore or insult me at your own peril, for Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate.”

  * * *

  —

  It took him a year to complete the journey west from Pennsylvania, and many times he thought he would die before he reached the end. He was almost drowned crossing the Missouri River. Near Wichita, he was robbed and beaten and left for dead. In the high mountain passes he nearly froze, and in the deserts he was stung by serpents and burned black by the sun. Despite these privations, his faith never wavered, and when he reached San Francisco, lice-ridden and ragged, with his boots broken apart and his feet blistered and swollen to twice their size, he knew for certain that his long path had reached its promised conclusion, that he had entered Babylon at last. On every side and in every place, in the banks and offices, churches and temples, in the filth-strewn rancorous streets, the signs of sin and false prophecy were plain for him to see. Everywhere he looked, idolatry and avarice. Everywhere he looked, lechery, destitution, corruption, and greed.

  It is only a matter of time now, he knows, before God’s judgment is meted out. When he imagines the city being razed to the ground and the people being cast into the fire or struck down by a plague, he feels, beyond the pity and horror, a sense of clarity and great purpose. He has seen evil in his life, he has suffered and watched others suffer, but he understands now that all of that was needful. Every pain he has known and every confusion is a part of the same eternal and unalterable plan. Nothing can be left out of the plan, and there is nothing that lies beyond or outside it. What seems strange or past our understanding will all be explained by what comes at the end. What seems false or terrible will be shown in the final days to be what was required by the true and the good. In the last reckoning, there is not a single dollar or cent left uncounted. That is his faith and his surety. That is his satisfaction and his joy.

  When he speaks on the street corners and in the marketplace, he is jeered at or ignored, but he is not dismayed because he knows that when the Last Trumpet sounds the iniquitous will be cast down and the righteous will be raised up in glory. James O’Connor is dead and Stephen Doyle is still alive somewhere and at liberty, but when Christ returns their two souls will be weighed in the balance and the true and final verdicts will be rendered. The law of man is weak and corrupted, but the law of God is endless and undefiled.

  He is all alone in this place, without friends or trusted companions, because he has found no one whose heart is sufficiently pure or whose character is sufficiently strong to stand beside him. Every day, in every countenance he passes, he sees the marks of the beast writ large. It is only when he looks at himself in the glass that he sees on his own forehead, written in letters made of golden light, the blessed name of the Lord.

  At midnight, he goes down to Pacific Street and waits in the alleyway by the deadfall. Men come to him there. Some are still young, like him, but most are like the priest was: old and foul-smelling, with soft wet lips, round protruding bellies, and trembling finger-ends. He understands their desires and knows how to pacify them. Although he touches their flesh and lets himself be touched, although he takes them into his mouth sometimes and swallows their seed, he is never tainted. He takes their money but is n
ot corrupted by it. God is his shield and protection always. Although, at night, he sleeps in the lowest lodging houses, amid filth, beside drunkards and criminals, and in the daytime eats his broken victuals with gamblers and whores, his purity and holiness remain undiminished because he knows the angels are watching over him and guiding him forever. As he lies in his bed in the fetid darkness, he hears the rustling of their great wings in the stale air above his head and listens to the easeful hush of their enormous voices, sonorous, calm, and soothing, like beautiful music playing in a different room.

  To Abigail, Grace, and Eve

  And in memory of my mother, Joan McGuire (1925–2018)

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  This is a work of fiction rooted in historical fact. It is a fact that three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood—William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien (afterward known as the Manchester Martyrs)—were hanged outside the New Bailey Prison in Salford in November 1867 for the murder of Manchester police sergeant Charles Brett, but the events that follow on from that in this novel are all imagined. Although a small number of the characters are loosely based on actual people who were involved in encouraging or suppressing Irish revolutionary activity in England in the 1860s, the majority, including James O’Connor and Stephen Doyle, are my inventions.

  * * *

  —

  I am grateful to John McAuliffe, Judith Murray, Denise Shannon, Suzanne Baboneau, and Gillian Blake for all their assistance and support.

  ALSO BY IAN MCGUIRE

  Incredible Bodies

  The North Water

  About the Author

  IAN MCGUIRE is the author of The North Water and Incredible Bodies. He is a winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and Historical Writer’s Association Gold Crown Award. He lives in Manchester, England, where he teaches at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.

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