“Norwegians don’t die enough for him to make a living,” Hoop imparted. “The Irish, they’re another matter.”
3
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?”