The Road to McCarthy (41 page)

“There was a Protestant man died in town, a lonely bachelor with no friends. The undertaker, a guy called Larry Duggan, went out looking for mourners, and found some of the Catholic guys on the corner. ‘Come on, Dennie,’ says he, ‘help see the poor soul on his way.’

“‘Our shift starts in an hour,’ says Dennie.

“‘Ah, it’s just a short service,’ says Duggan. So they carry the coffin into the chapel, and the minister starts up and says, ‘Dear Lord, we commend this soul to you as he makes the journey across the great divide.’

“‘C’mon, boys, let’s get out of here,’ says Dennie. ‘They’re burying the bastard in Bozeman.’”

The cake’s been and gone and I’m worried a party-sized platter of sandwiches might be next. If I don’t eat myself to death I could be listening to this man’s tales for days. In a town divided by religion, he says, the first true acts of Christian unity came about because of Prohibition. “The best bootlegger in town was an Irish Protestant called Mike McKeown. Mike was no bigot. Each time he made a batch, he’d send a gallon to every priest in town. And the priests would send some on to the German Lutheran pastor. The
pastor returned the favor, so when the Lutherans made booze, the priests would have a party.”

“He had very strict quality control,” says Vernie, a tiny, bird-like woman with bohemian clothes and a beautiful smile. “If he wasn’t sure about a batch, he’d use it as antifreeze. I have a vivid memory of our father’s car, a 1929 Ford, that in winter always smelled like brandy.”

We talk for another hour, then Sarsfield tells me someone else is expecting me. “An older guy,” he says with a smile. Before I leave he tells me about his trip to a mission station in the Arizona desert in 1939 to see how the priest did things out there. When he arrived the Native Americans, or Indians as they still were back then, put on a display of dancing. “I felt uplifted, because the church stands accused of destroying indigenous cultures all over the world,” he says. “At last, I thought, a place where local rituals have been respected. So I congratulated the priest on what he had achieved, and he said, ‘Well, thank you, but it’s really nothing to do with me, and anyway, all is not what it appears.’ And he told me that in the 1860s a priest went out there—he asked me not to give his name, so we’ll call him Father Sweeney—to work with the Indians. And he was surprised, and a bit disappointed, because the ones he met didn’t have any dances. He’d been expecting great things, but these people didn’t dance at all. So Father Sweeney decided he’d teach them himself. ‘I can dance a few steps,’ said Sweeney, ‘but when you think about it, how many ways are there to put one foot in front of the other?’ So he taught the Indians to dance. And when Hollywood came out to Arizona to make the westerns, where do you think they came to learn the authentic Indian dances? To these guys, who’d learned them from an Irishman.”

John “The Yank” Harrington
is one hundred years old next birthday. He made his first solo CD when he was ninety-six, and still plays live dates around Butte with the Dublin Gulch Band. I’m sitting in his snug ground-floor apartment. There’s a tricolor on the wall, copies of the
Irish Echo
on the floor, and I can see snow fluttering down through the venetian blinds as he laughs and chats and plays his button accordion. He can remember
how all the tunes go, but can’t remember all the ones he knows, so it helps if you suggest titles. So far we’ve had “Skibbereen” and “Dear Old Donegal,” and now it’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.”

John is American, a Butte man, so it’s a reasonable first reaction to be puzzled that he’s known throughout the city as the Yank. Curiouser still is the fact that the Yank speaks American with a pronounced west-of-Ireland accent. His father, John, was a nineteenth-century emigrant from Allihies who married another Harrington, Katie, a neighbor from Beara, and raised a family in Butte. When John died of a miner’s lung condition, quickly followed by Katie, of influenza, John was adopted by his Uncle Dan. In 1919 the two of them emigrated back to Beara, where the teenage John acquired his nickname. In the 1920s he worked at the last copper mine in Allihies, and by night fished for mackerel using the local seine nets. “I learned to repair the nets, because some of them there were too lazy to do it themselves. We’d watch for the mackerel in the moonlight. You wouldn’t want to cast the net unless you could see 300 fish,” he tells me, as I listen to his life unfold like an epic saga of twentieth-century migration and dislocation. He stayed eight years in Beara, learned the Irish language and music, then reemigrated to New York, where he was a laborer on the construction of the Eighth Avenue subway. Back in Butte he worked as a porter at the Finlen, and was reunited with his four sisters, who all lived into their nineties as well. Perhaps there’s longevity in the genes, or the mackerel.

While he’s been playing we’ve been joined by Terry, a recent arrival from Castletownbere who teaches Irish language classes here and in Helena, the state capital. Their conversation flits between English and Gaelic as they discuss families they both know back in Beara, even though the Yank left for New York in 1926. “You know Sullivan there, from the back of Eyeries?” asks John. “Well, a friend of mine is courting his granddaughter.” The Yank puts the ancient squeeze-box back in its case, and goes through to his bedroom. He comes back with a CD for me. “Will you come back next year?” he asks. “I have a big birthday. A week before St. Patrick’s Day. There’ll be a party.” I imagine there will. I think I might.

I’m reading an edition
of the local paper, the
Butte Miner
, from 1914. The drugstore’s advert is a neat snapshot of how things were in a town where clandestine anti-alcohol remedies were on sale, but the bars had no locks on the doors.

It’s morning and I’m sitting at a huge window framing nineteenth-century rooftops, and beyond them the snowy mountains, in what used to be the firemen’s dormitory, but is now the local archive’s reading room. There are iron pillars, original radiators and no microfilm or computers. Instead the shelves are lined with bound originals of Butte’s newspapers, going back as far as the town itself. I’ve just had breakfast at M & M’s again, as I believe I would every morning of my life if I lived here. Mind you, I think it would change me. I’d be buying shotguns, drinking Wild Turkey and sleeping in a baseball cap within a few days. I had steak for breakfast this morning. I don’t know why I did that. I haven’t had steak in England for twenty years. I don’t eat steak. It was just there on the menu. “Steak and eggs,” it said, and I thought, “Yep, that’s me. Pioneer in a mining town, horse tethered outside, prospector’s pan on my saddle and I’m wearing a poncho. Better have some steak and eggs.” I expect a guy in a waistcoat will slide a bottle of whiskey along the bar towards me in a minute, and after that I might have a game of poker and shoot someone.

The lady on the next breakfast stool grew up in Butte, but has lived in San Francisco for thirty years. She comes back to visit, but is sick of motels and her sister’s sofa, so she’d just bought a two-bedroom miner’s cottage on the fringes of the old Irish district of Corktown for $7,000. Even by Tasmanian standards this seems something of a bargain.

“It’s a great town, Peter,” Terry the Gaelic teacher told me last night. “Would you ever think of living here?” I told him I think of living everywhere
I visit. We were in Moloney’s for a few beers after his class, where he explained his theory that the Young Irelander, Thomas Francis Meagher, while governor of Montana, had exaggerated the threat posed by the Indians so that he had an excuse for raising an army. His real intention was to seize Canada and trade it with the British for Irish independence. “He may have been an American hero, but at heart he was still an unrepentant Fenian bastard.”

Afterwards a few of us went to a Chinese restaurant up some stairs above a shop, where the seating was in wooden booths in two rows either side of a central aisle. The red-haired waitress hadn’t been within ten thousand miles of China in her life, another Irish tradition that has survived intact in Butte. The food, like the town, was rugged and idiosyncratic, and not a little baffling. Everything we ordered consisted primarily of celery, augmented by some pork or shrimp or noodle or whatever it was we thought we’d ordered, and was submerged in a viscous, dark-gray liquid that tasted like a single man’s laundry. Most Chinese food is cooked quickly, but these mysterious concoctions had been stewed for a very long time, possibly since before the onset of winter, by someone with a deep celery psychosis who should seek professional help. “Best Chinese food in town,” said the local Irish step-dancing teacher, clearing her plate. I tried to nod in agreement but it came out as an involuntary shudder, because I’d just chewed on a tough bit and was thinking it might be a Band-aid, or a toenail. If you’re ever in Butte, have the steak and eggs.

One of the women in the bar last night is curator of the city archive, which is why I’m here this morning. When I arrived I took a look at the pictures of all the ex-mayors displayed on the wall. “Jeremiah H. McCarthy,” said the caption under one. “Alderman, Fire Chief, and liquor dealer.” An election day cartoon also caught my eye. “I’m voting for the liar,” said one man to another. “He promises more.” Butte has a political stature that belies its size. The history of organized labor in America was kick-started by the town’s mining unions, who were operating effectively here earlier than anywhere in the country. Sometimes things got a little rough, as they did at the Miners’ Day parade of 1914, according to the report in the paper.

Leafing through the archives and their tales of riots, whorehouses, dog fights, music halls and opium dens, I’m struck by the rich and extreme history of the place. There should have been a sprawling historical novel by now, or a great juggernaut of a movie, a sprawling tearjerker going from Castletownbere to Cobh to Boston to Butte, a cross-generational saga of scattered families, political intrigue, mining disasters, drunken violence and plummeting mayors. I particularly like the stories of the Chinese waiter nicknamed “Spuds” who nearly died after eating nothing but potatoes for six months because an Irishman told him they were better for you than noodles; and of the wild Irish kids of Dublin Gulch who tied cows to front doors and released horses into church, leaped through the theater skylight onto the heads of the audience, and once tied one end of a rope to a prospector’s cabin and the other to a freight train. The prospector had gone four blocks before they dragged him out and took him to hospital.

I drive out of Butte determined to return. I like it here. As Highway 15 swings east, then north, I can see the whole town, the derelict pitheads standing gaunt but proud against the huge snow-capped peaks on the western horizon. Though the past has gone and they’re still waiting for the future to begin, I haven’t sensed the sadness I felt in Queenstown, Tasmania. It may not be pretty, but it has a stark beauty of its own. You could never imagine you were anywhere else. In a world where one town is rapidly becoming much like another, Butte is only like itself, and you can’t ask much more of a place than that.

And you could always tell them you were allergic to celery.

Having escaped
from Van Diemen’s Land, Thomas Francis Meagher arrived in New York City on May 26, 1852. He slipped in unnoticed, but within twenty-four hours a crowd of thousands accompanied by the Brooklyn Cornet Band had gathered to greet him, which made it difficult to maintain a low profile. The extraordinary flourishes of his life and career so far were to be eclipsed by the events of the next fifteen years. Within a decade he returned to New York to another rousing welcome, this time as commander of the Irish Brigade which, under a banner of a golden harp on green silk, had fought with great courage and tremendous losses on the side of the Union in the American Civil War. When the war ended, he accepted the post of territorial secretary, and subsequently acting governor, in the remote northwestern territory of Montana. “It may be the last time (God only knows) that you shall see me,” he wrote to a friend, “for I go to a fierce and frightful region of gorillas.” Robert G. Athearn, in his 1949 biography of Meagher, writes: “A rough and ready Irishman had found a community as tough as he—and a little bit more raw.” He was soon expressing fears for his life at the hands of local political opponents. The heavy drinking for which he had become notorious may have fueled his suspicions.