Work Song Page 4

  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 t
easing. 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.”

  4

  There is an old story that any Londoners with a madman in the family would drop him off at the library of the British Museum for the day. I was given a searching look as if I might be the Butte version when I presented myself at the desk of the public library that next morning and requested both the R. L. Polk & Co. City Directory and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars in the original Latin.

  The stout woman I took to be the head librarian—she had eyeglasses enchained around her neck commandingly enough for it—scrutinized me some moments more, then marched off into the maze of shelves while I found a seat at a broad oaken table. Everything was substantial, the brass-banistered stairway up to the mezzanine of books in tall rows, the green-shaded electrical lights hanging down from the high ceiling like watch fobs of the gods. I have always felt at home among books, so when the woman from the desk plopped my requested two in front of me, they seemed like old friends dropping by.

  Aware that I should get down to business, I nonetheless drew the Gallic Wars to me first, unable to resist. I had ordered it up by habit, as a test. To me, a repository of books is not a library without that volume in the mother of languages, but merely a storehouse for worn copies of H. Rider Haggard’s jungle thrillers and the syrupy novels of Mrs. Mary V. Terhune. No, Caesar’s prose that reads like poetry—Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres—is essential in a collection of knowledge, a siren call from Roman words to ours. Handling the book fondly as I was, I became aware of its own touch: tanned leather, not the more common calfskin cover put on for show. I examined the binding: sewn rather than glued. On the pages, lovely to finger, the sentences practically rose from the paper in a strong clear Caslon typeface. What I was holding was an exceptionally fine copy, so much better than my own that had gone astray with my missing trunk that I momentarily found myself envious of the Butte Public Library.

  Just then a drove of schoolchildren came pattering through, herded toward the downstairs by their shushing teacher, evidently to a story hour. Second-graders, I judged, that unhushable age when whispering is as natural as breathing. I felt a pang as the class passed through like a murmur in church. The distance of ten years evaporated, and I swear, for some moments I was back at the Marias Coulee one-room school, my stairstep eight grades there in front of me as intricate and intriguing as a daily circus. And after school, the mental workout of Latin lessons with the keenest pupil a teacher ever had, Paul Milliron. Sitting there, watching this motherly teacher shoo her boys and girls along as they descended the library stairs a whisper at a time, I envied her the job but knew it was too late in the school year for me to even think of such an application. Besides, my credentials were not exactly the standard ones.

  Sighing, I patted Caesar and closed him away. Opening the city directory, I began to work my way through the idiom of Polk. There they
were as ever, the abbreviated citizens found throughout America, brklyr, carp, messr, repr, et cetera. The skills of bricklayers, carpenters, messengers, and repairers were not my own. Nor on subsequent pages could I see myself employed in feather dying, felt mattress manufacture, or fish salting. Dutifully I paged on through, searching for where ledgers that fit my talents might be found. Butte, I discerned, had a modest number of banks for a city of its size; a plenitude of funeral homes; an uninspiring variety of mercantile enterprises; and one Gibraltar of assets, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. I can’t deny, it was tantalizing, that financial colossus which surely needed bkprs—bookkeepers—of a certain talent to sluice the riches of the Hill into Anaconda coffers.

  Temptation had to vie with distraction, however. Something about the Gallic Wars at my elbow kept diverting me. Even when they are closed, some books do not shut up. Why was this beautifully sewn leather edition, a collector’s item if I had ever seen one, spending its existence on a public shelf in a none too fastidious mining town? Once more I peered at those tiers on the mezzanine, and if I was not severely mistaken, many other handsome volumes sat there, beckoning, in bindings of royal reds and greens and blues and buffs. Curiosity got the better of me. Up the stairwell I went.

  And found myself in a book lover’s paradise.

  As though some printerly version of Midas had browsed through the shelves, priceless editions of Flaubert and Keats and Tolstoy and Goethe and Melville and Longfellow and countless other luminaries mingled on the shelves with more standard library holdings. I could not resist running my fingers along the handsomely bound spines and tooled letters of the titles. What on earth was the matron at the desk thinking, in scattering these treasures out in the open? Yet the more I looked, the more I met up with the complete works of authors, surely deliberately collected and displayed. Mystified, I was stroking the rare vellum of a Jane Austen title when a loud voice made me jump.