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By Root 661 0

going over customary territory while I took advantage of the food on the table. Conversation and alcohol flowed along in that way until another of those cloudy moments descended on Quin. Gesturing toward the Dublin Gulch neighbors trooping from one black-draped member of the Dempsey female clan to the next with long faces brought out for the occasion, he said in a commanding manner: “This is way too sad, you could cut the air in here like crepe.” He reached in another pocket and came out with a small red book. It was about the size of a breviary, but if my eyes and the rye weren’t misleading me, musical bars filled its pages. Yet it had none of the binding of a hymnal and I wondered aloud, “What manner of book is that?”

“What’s it look like, boyo. It’s the Little Red Songbook. Someone slipped it in my lunch bucket the other day, the scoundrels.” Quin wetted a thumb and started turning pages. “They know their music, you have to hand them that.”

McGlashan snickered. “Evans will think you’re a Wob at heart.” By then I could glimpse on the crimson cover a drawing of a muscular band of men, sleeves of their work shirts rolled up and arms linked in a chain of solidarity, and the words Industrial Workers of the World. The boardinghouse roundelay about Buttes’s factions of miners returned to me, and I appraised Quin with fresh interest.

“It wouldn’t hurt Jared to look over his shoulder now and then”—he turned aside McGlashan’s remark and kept on thumbing through the little book—“but he’s stubborn even for a Taffy.” I had thought I was the only trace of Welsh amid the wall-to-wall Irish, but now I spotted across the room the soldierly figure whom Hooper and Griffith had called out to on the Hill. “Besides, he’s only here with the union tribute.” As I watched, the youthful but authoritative miner approached the widow, hat off, and bestowed on her an envelope which from the bulge of it contained a goodly amount of cash. “Are you going to stand there slandering me,” Quin was chiding McGlashan now, “or sing? Tim there in the wooden overcoat would appreciate a tune about now, I bet. Ah, here’s a nice one,” he asserted, crimping open the crimson book to it. “Get Pooch Lampkin over here, he has a voice on him. And Micky O’Fallon, while you’re at it.”

I ducked away while the musical troops were organizing themselves, not sure my initial night as cryer should be spent in song. Peering over Quinlan’s shoulder at the small songbook, the impromptu ensemble squared up and let loose:

Oh Lord of all, of fowl and fish,

Of feast of life, of ev’ry dish;

Observe me on my bended legs,

I’m asking You for ham and eggs.

“They’re at it again!” a woman shrieked. “And Father O’Rourke not here to give them what for! Quick, the true music of the faith!” Hastily the opposition vocal force formed up, a number of women in their darkest funereal best and a few older men pinched at the elbow by their wives and conscripted into the choir. Rigid as if they had been called to their feet in church, the bunch of them chorused out:

O’er the sod of God,

O’er the bogs of peat,

Everlasting choirs

Raise a concert sweet!

Undeterred, Quinlan and McGlashan and colleagues soared into their next verse.

And if thou havest custard pies

I’d like, dear Lord, the largest size.

Across the room the choir of the righteous responded in a roar:

Heathendom shall go down,

Though it be everywhere!

God the Father’s kingdom

Fills heaven and earth and air!

Sweetly as boys, the Quinlan quartet warbled a last verse:

Oh, hear my cry, almighty Host,

I quite forgot the quail on toast.

Let your kindly heart be stirred

And stuff some oysters in that bird.

“Shame!” cried a particularly broad woman in black, charging across the room. “My poor uncle, Heaven forgive him, gone on beyond there in the plush box and you singing one of those Red songs. Pat Quinlan, you banshee. May God make your tongue fall out.” Over by the door, I saw the young union man cast a rueful look at it all, put his hat on, and slip away from the proceedings.

Quinlan chortled. “Betty, you’d