You’re the cryer,” simpered the woman, her own eyes red from weeping, who opened the door to me that evening. “I can tell by the cut of your clothes.” Truly, I did feel quite distinguished in the olive-brown herringbone worsted suit, vest included, that the tailor had outfitted me with. The boardinghouse trio had assured me I looked freshly spit-shined.
“Ma’am,” I began, having learned my lesson in Butte manners of address that first time with Grace, “at this sad time, I wish to convey the deepest sympathy for the loss of your husband, on behalf of the-”
“Ma!” she brayed over her shoulder. “It’s the funeral-home fellow, dressed to the gills, come to pay his respects.” She all but swept me into the house and steered me toward a tiny elderly woman, attired in the dignity of black and settled in a wicker armchair beside the open casket. “It’s my rogue of a father, Lord save his soul, at rest there in the coffin,” my escort instructed into my ear as she led me over. “Ma has been expecting you ever so much. Father O’Rourke sent word he can’t come tonight, there’s a fellow hurt bad at the Neversweat may be needing last rites. So we’re awful glad to have a cryer to do the soothing.”
This had me blinking. If I was expected to stand in for a priest, I hadn’t negotiated wages with Creeping Pete nearly hard enough.
Approaching the shriveled woman perched there on the wicker, I carefully held my hat over the vicinity of my heart and started my recital over. I had made sure with Peterson: I was not expected to actually cry, but a mournful mien, complete with murmurs and respectful remarks toward the deceased, was the order of the night.
“-and you may be assured I speak for Mr. Peterson in offering fullest condolences, Mrs. Dempsey,” I concluded the set piece I had memorized.
The widow gazed up at me in her crinkled way, nodded an inch, and broke into a crescendo of sobs.
“There, there, Ma,” the daughter consoled but made no other move, “you just cry it out, that’s the girl.” To me, frozen there as if I had set off a burglar alarm, she hissed: “You’ll want to circulate yourself, people will be coming for the next some while.”
Shaken by the storm of wailing behind me, I headed for the refuge of the long table where angel food cakes and sliced bread and bologna and a plethora of pickles and preserves and a carnival-glass bowl of tame punch sat. There, I figured, the crowd as it gathered would find its way to me. The thought was the deed. In no time a strapping black-haired man of middle years detached himself from a hushed group that I took to be other Dempsey daughters and their uncomfortable husbands. He came at me like a wind around a corner. “Pat Quinlan,” he provided, ready with a handshake. “That’s what I like to see, someone with the good sense to wrap himself around the food.”
In turn, I told him who I was as he fastened a keen gaze on me. He had the thrust of head I’d noticed in the miners at the change of shift, as if stooping under a mine timber. Facially, he showed the olive skin and conquistador cheekbones that affirmed the tale of Spanish Armada survivors washing up onto the coast of Ireland and contributing to the population.
“Morgan is your handle, is it,” he seemed to taste my name. “Creeping Pete is maybe getting the knack. Last time he sent a scissorbill called George King. How much more English does it get, I ask you? ”
“If he had dispatched King George to the occasion, perhaps.”
“Sharp as a tack, are we. I like that.” With a glint of his own, Quinlan asked, “What brings you to Butte?” His chin came up an inch in the enunciation of that last word, the local habit.
“Reputation.” I began to invoke the Richest Hill on Earth, but he cut in with an all-too-knowing grin: “Yours or Butte’s? Ah, well, this isn’t the time or place to go into that.” The widow’s wail had settled into a kind of teary drone that still had me flinching, but Quinlan showed no sign it registered on him. Rocking restlessly on his heels, he critically observed the slow traffic of grievers across the room, the men bending a quick knee at the low coffin bench for a muttered Our Father, the women kneeling in earnest to recite Hail Mary. I felt like a heathen, or at least distinctly un-Irish, but my companion at the table clapped me conspiratorially on the shoulder. “Standing around without something that fits the hand, what kind of a wake is this?” Quinlan plucked two glasses from the table. “Here, hold these while I do the needful.” Reaching into a pocket of his suitcoat evidently tailored for such an occasion, he brought out a whiskey bottle and began to pour, back and forth, with a heavy hand.
Hastily I asked, “Didn’t I read that Montana voted itself dry?”
“ ‘Dry’ doesn’t mean ‘parched to imbecility.’ You could look it up.”
“Mr. Quinlan-”
“Quin,” he insisted, still pouring.
“Quin, then. I do not normally partake.”
“Nobody else does it normal at a wake either.”
He corked the bottle and it vanished to its nesting place. “Upsy daisy.” Quinlan drank as generously as he poured, while I took a small mouthful that left a sting all the way down. When my eyes cleared, I inquired into the source of the supposedly forbidden liquor. “Bootleg rye.” He gestured northerly. “What else is Canada for?”
“You were a close friend of the deceased, Quin?” I asked, to give the whiskey time to settle.
“Scarcely knew him. But a miner stands by another miner, to the last six feet of earth.” A moment of brooding came into his dark eyes. Catching me watching this, he resorted to the knowing grin again. “Drink up, Morgan my man.” He set the example. “One swallow is a lonesome bird.” As if remembering his manners, he hoisted his glass in salute toward the casket and its occupant. “Tim there knew what thirst is, he was healthy enough in that respect.”
“He wore a mighty name,” I mentioned, alluding to Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight boxing phenomenon.
“The name was the all. See for yourself-Tim was a shrimp. Add in the bouquets and he’s still a lightweight.”
“Featherweight, I’d say, the hundred-twenty-pound class.” That drew a look from Quinlan. Just then another man with the tilt of a miner came up to us. Like all the others in the room except me, he was in what must have been his church clothes, a tight-fitting suit no doubt worn for both marrying and burying. “Mike McGlashan, meet Morgan, the new cryer,” Quinlan did the honors with a flourish of his glass. “Join us in commemorating poor old Tim.”
“Never, Quin.” McGlashan wagged his head piously. “I’m on the wagon.”
Quinlan’s expression said he had heard that one before. He produced the bottle again, uncorking it like a magician. “Run that past your smeller and tell me if it’s not the scent of heaven.”
“Save me from myself, then,” McGlashan sighed, covering his eyes and holding out a glass.
During this, the fiery rye splashed into my own glass, and on into me, as Quin and McGlashan gabbed and drank. Inevitably they came around to the lost dollar of wage. With morose acceptance, McGlashan said he and the men on his shift in the Orphan Girl were resigned to waiting it out until the price of copper went back up. That was typical foolishness, Quin said; his shift at the Neversweat favored a strike if that’s what it took. The two argued in the manner of old friends going over customary territory while I took advantage of the food on the table. Conversation and alcohol flowed along in that way until another of those cloudy moments descended on Quin. Gesturing toward the Dublin Gulch neighbors trooping from one black-draped member of the Dempsey female clan to the next with long faces brought out for the occasion, he said in a commanding manner: “This is way too sad, you could cut the air in here like crepe.” He reached in another pocket and came out with a small red book. It was about the size of a breviary, but if my eyes and the rye weren’t misleading me, musical bars filled its pages. Yet it had none of the binding of a hymnal and I wondered aloud, “What manner of book is that?”
“What’s it look like, boyo. It’s the Little Red Songbook. Someone slipped it in my lunch bucket the other day, the scoundrels.” Quin wetted a thumb and started turning pages. “They know their music, you have to hand them that.”
McGlashan snickered. “Evans will think you’re a Wob at heart.” By then I could glimpse on the crimson cover a drawing of a muscular band of men, sleeves of their work shirts rolled up and arms linked in a chain of solidarity, and the words Industrial Workers of the World. The boardinghouse roundelay about Buttes’s factions of miners returned to me, and I appraised Quin with fresh interest.
“It wouldn’t hurt Jared to look over his shoulder now and then”-he turned aside McGlashan’s remark and kept on thumbing through the little book-“but he’s stubborn even for a Taffy.” I had thought I was the only trace of Welsh amid the wall-to-wall Irish, but now I spotted across the room the soldierly figure whom Hooper and Griffith had called out to on the Hill. “Besides, he’s only here with the union tribute.” As I watched, the youthful but authoritative miner approached the widow, hat off, and bestowed on her an envelope which from the bulge of it contained a goodly amount of cash. “Are you going to stand there slandering me,” Quin was chiding McGlashan now, “or sing? Tim there in the wooden overcoat would appreciate a tune about now, I bet. Ah, here’s a nice one,” he asserted, crimping open the crimson book to it. “Get Pooch Lampkin over here, he has a voice on him. And Micky O’Fallon, while you’re at it.”
I ducked away while the musical troops were organizing themselves, not sure my initial night as cryer should be spent in song. Peering over Quinlan’s shoulder at the small songbook, the impromptu ensemble squared up and let loose:
Oh Lord of all, of fowl and fish,
Of feast of life, of ev’ry dish;
Observe me on my bended legs,
I’m asking You for ham and eggs.
“They’re at it again!” a woman shrieked. “And Father O’Rourke not here to give them what for! Quick, the true music of the faith!” Hastily the opposition vocal force formed up, a number of women in their darkest funereal best and a few older men pinched at the elbow by their wives and conscripted into the choir. Rigid as if they had been called to their feet in church, the bunch of them chorused out:
O’er the sod of God,
O’er the bogs of peat,
Everlasting choirs
Raise a concert sweet!
Undeterred, Quinlan and McGlashan and colleagues soared into their next verse.
And if thou havest custard pies
I’d like, dear Lord, the largest size.
Across the room the choir of the righteous responded in a roar:
Heathendom shall go down,
Though it be everywhere!
God the Father’s kingdom
Fills heaven and earth and air!
Sweetly as boys, the Quinlan quartet warbled a last verse:
Oh, hear my cry, almighty Host,
I quite forgot the quail on toast.
Let your kindly heart be stirred
And stuff some oysters in that bird.
“Shame!” cried a particularly broad woman in black, charging across the room. “My poor uncle, Heaven forgive him, gone on beyond there in the plush box and you singing one of those Red songs. Pat Quinlan, you banshee. May God make your tongue fall out.” Over by the door, I saw the young union man cast a rueful look at it all, put his hat on, and slip away from the proceedings.
Quinlan chortled. “Betty, you’d sell tickets to that, wouldn’t you. Come have a glass with us, girl.”
“I’ll girl you, Quin.” Nonetheless a glass appeared in her hand. “A taste, if you insist.”
“Meet Morgan, the cryer,” Quinlan thought to officiate. “He’s new to Butte.”
“Another pilgrim to the Richest Hill on Earth, have we here?” Betty turned her ample face to me. “Join the long line, Morgan my man.” Luckily the bottle made its rounds just then, and while I hid into a gulp from my glass, I noticed that around the room the tone of the wake had lightened into loud conversation and laughter. Centered as I was in the commotion, I apprehensively looked over toward the casket, the item of business I supposedly was here to attend to. The widow seemed to be crying to herself in contentment.
I jumped slightly as Betty fingered the fabric of my lapel. “My, quite the glad rags Creeping Pete’s put you in.” With a critical cock of her head, she studied the rest of me. “You look awful learned to be among miners.”
“One can never get enough of the school of life,” I said with slightly slurred dignity. Tonight was certainly proving that. I had found out that Butte did not sprout shrinking violets.
As if I needed any more proof, Betty batted me on one shoulder and Quinlan on the other. “A man who knows his blarney,” Quin commended. “I like that.” He aimed his glass at me. “Morgan, a man as cultured as you can’t help but have a tune stick to him along the way. Favor us with something, why don’t you.” The entire crowd around the table loudly seconded that.
“I regret to say, from what I’ve heard here tonight I’m not equal to the task.”
Betty turned indignant. “You don’t mean to tell us Creeping Pete’s sent a man who can’t sing a lick?”
“Really, I-”
“EVERYBODY!” Quinlan let out a shout. “The cryer’s going to do us a number! Step on out, Morgan, and show us your tonsils.”
I had no choice, and someone gave me a push toward the center of the room besides. The houseful of people suddenly loomed around me like a crowd at a bullring. Even the widow was wiping her eyes and watching me. My glass half full in one hand, I braced back with the other for some support and found I had put it on the foot of the casket. Inches away, the highly polished toes of the shoes of poor departed Dempsey pointed in the air. Swallowing deeply, I stayed propped there against the coffin wood as if this were the natural spot for the representative of the Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home, and tried desperately to think of any appropriate snatch of music. What issued forth was as much a surprise to me as to the audience.
I cannot sing the old songs now.
It is not that I deem them low.
’Tis that I can’t remember how
They go.
In the silence that met that, I bowed and retreated behind the casket. After long seconds, someone tittered and that loosed a chuckle in someone else, and then the whole crowd gave a collective belly laugh and people pressed in on me, a dozen at once making conversation and clapping me on the back and testifying what an enjoyable wake this was.
It was during this that I realized I was drunk as a gnat in a vat.
The rest of the evening became one long blur of relatives of the man who lay in state beside me and miners telling stories out of an endless supply and black-clad women wanting to know if they couldn’t fetch me just a bite more of angel cake, while I concentrated on not tipping over into the casket.
At last everyone wore down, and after a groggy round of farewells and a final whap on the back from Quin, I stepped out into the street and began to make my unsteady way out of Dublin Gulch. The chill air of the Butte night collided with the alcohol in me. The stars were out but, I scolded them, too far to be any help to me. All too soon, I had to skirt the Neversweat glory hole. With the single-mindedness of the inebriated, I crept cautiously past, as if the yawning pit, darker than dark, might empty itself upward over me in an eruption of shadow. Luckily, things were marginally less inky after that. Such splotches of illumination as existed shone from mines that were being worked around the clock, and nearer to downtown I met up with occasional streetlights, so that my route as I wove my way toward the boardinghouse alternated between lit and dim. It fit my condition.
Here is where the mystery begins. I had the eerie sensation that the shadows were following me home from the Hill.
You would think a long walk in shivery weather ought to clear the head of such a phenomenon. The mysterious does not work like that. The more I tottered along, the worse the shivers. Out of the dapple of light and dark behind me, the shadows took shapes as warped as in a bad dream, sometimes huge and foglike, sometimes small and flitting. Like a steady cold breath on the back of the neck, I could feel the darkness changing form. Some small sane part of my mind kept telling me these specters were the distilled and bottled sort, but the corner of my eye was convinced otherwise. A time or two when I suddenly looked back, the shadows nearly became human, then faded into the other patterns of the night. If anyone was there, they were as uncatchable as cats.
Telling myself woozily this was what came of an evening spent in the company of a casket and its contents, I clattered into the boardinghouse and bed.
THE MORNING AFTER, Grace left on the stove a pot of coffee of a stoutness that would have brought the Light Brigade back to life.
Numb above my shoulders, I sat at the kitchen table and worked cup after cup into myself. I had missed breakfast. The household was well into its day, Hooper in the garden hoeing weeds at a stately pace and Griffith going down the hall with a monkey wrench in hand. Catching sight of me, Griff backtracked and stuck his head in the room.
“How’s the crying game going?”
“I can still smell it on my breath.”
“Didn’t I tell you so?”
“Unfortunately, not quite.” How I wished for that moment back, when he was warning me of the one thing to be watched out for at a Dublin Gulch wake and every whistle went off.
Griff waved away silly concern as he limped off. “You’ll get used to the elbow-bending. It beats toadying for Anaconda.”
I was debating that with myself when Grace bustled in with her shopping basket, fresh from dickering a bargain meat out of the butcher, no doubt.
“Morning, Morrie,” she said pleasantly, “what’s left of it.”
“Short days and long nights are the career of a cryer, I foresee. The coffee was an act of mercy; thank you. Can I help you with those provisions?”
“You had better sit quiet and let your eyeballs heal, I’d say.” Putting groceries away, she looked over her shoulder at me curiously. “I’ve had the good luck never to go to a wake. What was it like?”
I recounted to her what I could remember of the muddled evening. Mostly, the clink of glasses and the clash of singing voices came to mind. At the mention of Quinlan, she bobbed her head. “Quin was a friend of my Arthur, although they didn’t see eye to eye on union matters.”
“Then there was a Dempsey niece, a rather stout woman named Betty-”
“Betty the bootlegger.” Grace had no trouble with the identification. “She knows the right people along the border. Prohibition is the making of her.”
I sat wordless, more than ever a novice in the ways of Butte, dumbly considering a mourning occasion fueled with moonlight liquor that redounded to the profit of someone in the family. The C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home maybe was in the wrong end of the business.
“Morrie?” Grace closed the cupboard and joined me at the table, settling lightly. Her inquisitive look became pronounced. “I’ve had a fair number of boarders, besides the palace guard”-Griff could be heard banging in the basement-“but none of them blew in from nowhere quite like you. What was your last place of address, if I may ask?”
“Oh, that. Down Under, as they say.”
“Under what?”
“I refer, Grace, to Australia.”
“I was teasing. I’m not surprised you have an ocean or so behind you. You have that look.”
“It’s the mustache.”
“My Arthur always said his was the brush hiding the picnic,” she reported drily. “Women don’t have that disguise.”
“Spoken like a high priestess of the plain truth, Rose-I mean Grace.”
Before my embarrassment could pool on the table, Grace gave my slip of the tongue the gentlest of treatment. “Whoever she was, was she as pretty as her name?”
“Every bit.”
“Maybe it was worth some Down Under, then,” she left me with, rising and reaching for her apron. “It’s nearly noon, I have a meal to fix or the three of you will have to go in the yard and graze.”
THOSE INITIAL WEEKS, the job of cryer was an introduction to Butte, definitely, although hardly the one I had sought. Life at the mortuary remained, well, creepy. First of all, there was usually someone dead on the premises, in one room or another. And the wage, while steady enough, was not one of the Hill’s swiftest paths to riches; Creeping Pete’s ledger was always going to be tipped in his favor, not mine.
What disquieted me more than either of those was that question of shadows. Was it a trick of the darkness and the bootleg rye? The occasional night when I managed to slip away from the conviviality of a Dublin Gulch coffin vigil long enough to dump my drink in the kitchen slop bucket, the shadows on the way home perhaps behaved less like lurking black furies; but they never quite vanished. Something quivers in a person at such times, like a tuning fork set off by phantom touch. You look back along a darkened street that is suddenly limitless and whatever is there keeps eyeing you hungrily. Watching over my shoulder as I zigzagged to the boardinghouse after each wake, I had to wonder whether an old loss was catching up with me. Every footfall, it seemed, brought the thought of my brother and the cold lake waters that took him.
Not all haunting is mere superstition. I’d noticed a certain look in Grace’s eyes whenever Griffith and Hooper got going on the evils of Anaconda and the Speculator fire and its perished miners; at such moments Arthur Faraday left his matrimonial picture frame and came to her side, I would have wagered.
One of those suppertimes, as Griff and Hoop hobbled off to their own pursuits, I spoke up as she somberly cleared away the dishes.
“May I be of help?”
She took so long to answer, I wondered if she considered the question hypothetical. But then she looked over with a flicker of interest and said, “You can dry, if you don’t have dropsy.”
Following her into the kitchen, I took up a dish towel. “As Marco Polo said, I know my way around china. I did dishes at the Palmer House between school terms.”
“It seems there is no end to your talents,” Grace said with exaggerated wonder, making room for me at the sink. It had been a long while since I settled in side by side with a woman to such a chore. With her braid tucked back and her sleeves rolled up, she was an aproned vision of efficiency at her dishpan task. Still, I could tell something troubled her. I asked, “Have the glory hole grabbers been giving you a bad time again?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s our anniversary. Arthur’s and mine.” Slowly washing a plate, she went on: “Seven years ago today we were married. I don’t know why this year bothers me so much.” She looked cross with herself. “I’m sorry, Morrie, I didn’t mean to mope.”
“Grief sometimes goes by numbers,” I suggested gently. “Seven, that’s the copper anniversary.”
“I might have known you’d have the answer, you schoolbook.” She flicked a few drops of dishwater at me. “I’ll simmer down, I promise.” By now I was well aware she could also simmer up faster than the law of heat transfer ever predicated, but I was learning to weather that. It seemed worth it for the glimpses of the woman behind the landlady veneer. When something serious was not on her mind, she had the best smile, bright and teasing. That came out again now as she glanced at me and the dimple did sly work. “Let’s fish around in you, for a change. Off on a toot again tonight, are you?”
“Grace, it is my job. I seem to recall you being all for it.”
“Anyone who runs a boardinghouse needs to be in favor of whatever a lodger does to come up with the rent.” That canny glance again. “Within reason.”
I smoothed my mustache while I thought that over. I had to admit, presenting myself at a wake most every night made me feel uncomfortably like one of those mechanical statuettes of Death that clank out of a guildhall clock tower at the appointed hour and chase the merrymakers around the cupola. Grace had a point about the reasonableness of that as a lasting occupation. “Life as cryer does have its drawbacks,” I conceded to her. “A main one is that I wake up each morning feeling as if my brain were being pickled, gray cell by gray cell.”
She prompted: “And while you still have a few to spare?”
“Tomorrow,” I said with sudden decision, “I shall find the public library and consult Polk.”
Grace paused in her sudsy grapple with the meat platter, puzzled. “Poke who?”
“The Polk city directory.” I smiled. “The treasure map to where ledgers are kept.”