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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