Work Song - Ivan Doig [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY IVAN DOIG
FICTION
The Sea Runners
English Creek
Dancing at the Rascal Fair Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Bucking the Sun Mountain Time Prairie Nocturne
The Whistling Season
The Eleventh Man
NONFICTION
This House of Sky
Winter Brothers
Heart Earth
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2010 by Ivan Doig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan.
Work song / Ivan Doig. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18833-0
1. Single men—Fiction. 2. Miners—Fiction. 3. Butte (Mont.)—Fiction. 4. Mine rescue work—Fiction. 5. Montana—History—20th century—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3604.O415W
813’.6—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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To Carol Doig, for all the harmony
1
Morgan, did you say your name is? Funny things, names.” The depot agent, an individual so slow I thought I might have to draw a line on the floor to see him move, was gradually commencing to hunt through the baggage room for my trunk, shipped ahead. “Any relation to old J.P., Mister Moneybags himself?”
I sighed as usual over that. His remark could hardly have been farther from the mark. Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist dishing back some of the same.
“Cousins, thrice removed. Can’t you tell by looking?”
The railway man laughed more than was necessary. “That’s about as removed as it gets, I’d say.” Poking into one last cluttered corner, he shook his head. “Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Third Cousin, that trunk of yours took a mind of its own somewhere between there and here. You could put in a claim, if you want.”
So much for a storybook Welcome back! to the Treasure State, as Montana liked to call itself. While waiting for some sign of life in the agent, I already had been puzzling over the supposed treasure spot in plain view out the depot window—the dominant rise of land, scarred and heaped and gray as grit, which was referred to in everything that I had read as the Richest Hill on Earth, always