Work Song Read online

  There is hardly any story more deeply engraved in human experience than a search for the Promised Land, a New Jerusalem where life can flourish and dreams run free. What a saga it was, then, that the barren rise of earth the three of us were standing atop had become such a place, to those unafraid to go into its depths. From what Hoop and Griff had told me the night before, I knew that the Hill’s copper diggings, in the course of time and union persistence, had brought forth wages that workingmen anywhere else could only imagine. Four and a half dollars a day! my informants chorused with pride, at that time probably equaled only by Henry Ford’s assembly line in Detroit. And no man who called himself a miner wanted to bolt fenders onto flivvers for a living. So, dust devils and dump heaps and discolored soil and everything else, the startling land I was gazing at was worshipped by hard-rock miners for its holy wage; in the pits and shafts of the world, the saying was, “Don’t even stop in America, just go to Butte.”

  Griff, silent until now, had been watching the loaded ore cars trundle into view one after another at the Neversweat, a colossus of a mine with seven smokestacks rising from its buildings like a row of stark totems. “Got to hand it to Anaconda,” he said grudgingly, “the buggers know how to get the ore out. Looky there, Hoop, they’ve busted up through the south shaft of the ’Sweat.” An obviously fresh fence, its posts unweathered, enclosed a crater so gaping that it looked as if a meteor had struck and blazed on through to the core of the earth. Or at least so deep that anyone who fell in would go to glory, so to speak.

  Brows all of a sudden furrowed with thought, my companions exchanged glances. “Morrie,” said Hoop, “you maybe ought to know something—”

  “—about the boardinghouse,” said Griff, and then and there, they chorused the likelihood that in time to come Anaconda would have its greedy eye on Grace’s property.

  “Don’t blab that to Mrs. Faraday,” they anxiously cautioned me. “There’s no sense worrying her head off beforehand.”

  “I won’t be the bringer of that news,” I pledged.

  MY TOUR, to hear my guides tell it, now was about to really begin. For there, amid the gray polar wastes of that Richest Hill, were scattered the pockets of populace that I had glimpsed from the train station.

  “Here’s where the work of the world comes from,” Griff pronounced, and Hoop bobbed agreement. Between them, they pointed out each neighborhood. Finntown, straggling below the colossal Neversweat. The Italians, it was stressed to me, occupied Meaderville, not be confused with Centerville, where the Cornish congregated. Griff proudly singled out the smallish Welsh area of St. David’s, christened for its church, near our boardinghouse; beyond that, the Serbians had their several blocks, elsewhere the Scandinavians had theirs, and below, at the edge of downtown, lay Chinatown, self-explanatory. My head was beginning to spin, and we had not even come to the sprawl of streets dead ahead, the Irish avalanche of small frame houses and overloaded clotheslines that constituted Dublin Gulch and beyond.

  Wisely, Hoop hailed a mailman, and in a brogue that justified his assignment to the route, the postal carrier told me with great elaboration how to find the house of that night’s wake.

  That job done, Griff proclaimed: “You’re all set, Morrie. The only thing to watch out for tonight is—”

  Commotion blasted the last of his words away, so sudden and sharp my eardrums winced. The Hill had turned into a calliope, whistles shrieking at every mineshaft. “Change of shifts!” one or the other of my companions yipped as if school had let out.

  Those next minutes will never leave me. Down from the mine mouths into the sloping streets cascaded hundreds of workworn men, turning into thousands as we stood watching. The Hill was black with this exodus. Here, on foot, the neighborhoods sluiced together as the miners trudged past, accented English of several kinds mingling with tongues my ear could not readily identify. It was as if Europe had been lifted by, say, the boot heel of Italy and shaken, every toiler from the hard-rock depths tumbling out here. Old habits had followed them across the ocean, husky Finns clustered with other Finns, the Cornishmen not mingling with the Italians, on across the map until each of the nations of Butte came to its own home street.

  By now Griff and Hoop were wistfully calling out to fellow Welshmen going by. “Keep fighting for that lost dollar, boys! We’re with you all the way, Jared!” This last, I could tell, was addressed to a lean, dark-featured individual at the front of the group, not nearly as far along in years as most of the other miners but plainly a leader. Striding along with a measured tread I identified as military, the younger man grinned through his grime and sent my companions a half wave, half salute.

  “What, is there a wage dispute?” I asked in surprise, having heard the hosannas about the riches of the World’s Richest Hill.

  “There usually is,” Griff grumped, Hoop nodding, “but this one’s bad. The damn company just told the union it’s lopping a whole dollar off the daily wage, can you imagine?” The calculating part of my brain certainly could; a twenty-two percent cut, a severe reversal of the Hill’s holy standing. “That’s a poke in the eye if there ever was one,” Griff was fulminating further. “Jared there and his council are working on how to turn it around, you can bet.”

  “A strike?” I knew from their earlier recital of labor’s struggles that the last time the union leadership called one, the strike had failed when Anaconda’s hired thugs broke the spirit of the mineworkers.

  “Nobody said that,” Griff intoned secretively.

  The last of the miners filed past, the next shift went deep underground into the catacombs of copper ore, and we three turned back down the hill toward the brick canyons of streets below. By contrast, the neighborhood I would be coming back to tonight looked made of matchboxes. More than ever I felt like a foreign traveler in the Constantinople of the Rockies. One particular question of the many crowding my mind made its way out first.

  “Hoop, Griff, help me to understand something. Why does Peterson, as Scandinavian as they come, pattern his business so strongly here to Dublin Gulch? Hiring me to stand in for him at wakes, for instance.”

  “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 memorize
d.

  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 an
d 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.