Read Work Song for Free Online Page B

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