The Road to McCarthy (40 page)

After a couple of hours we landed at Bozeman, which confirmed my suspicion that it must be a place. Nineteen people got off, which left me, Harry Dean and five other ghouls. I found a map in the in-flight magazine and saw that Bozeman was eighty miles east of Butte. This meant I’d already passed my destination twice today, once going in each direction, which is a very psychologically disturbing way to get somewhere. It makes you feel like some kind of airborne sheepdog, cutting down your destination’s options before closing in on it. “We need three-mile visibility to land, but right now they only have two,” announced the pilot, “so we’re gonna head on over to Butte, see what happens.” Great. What happened was, we locked into a holding pattern, going round and round in the middle of the turbulence waiting for the weather to break, just the seven of us, bumping and rattling and lit by the flashing light on the wing like characters in a melodrama, the atheists and agnostics all praying just as hard as the Christians. From where I was sitting you couldn’t see three inches, never mind three miles, but suddenly we were down, bouncing twice before skidding along enough runway snow to have Gatwick closed till July. Ten past one in the morning, said the clock. I could have got to Auckland quicker. There’d have been no point, though, because Larry McCarthy, the head of the North American Clan McCarthy Association, wouldn’t have been in New Zealand.

Turned out he wasn’t in Butte either. He’d been taken ill, and was at home 200 miles away. So had my journey been wasted? Not at all, said the Irish-American welcome committee who’d heroically waited half the night in his place. You’ll have a grand time. Father Sarsfield is expecting you for lunch tomorrow. And with that they brought me through the deserted, blizzard-lashed streets to my hotel. “Will you be going out again tonight, sir, or will I lock the door?” asked the guy on the desk as I checked in at ten to two. Resisting the lure of the nightlife, or the temptation to take a walk to Bozeman, I headed for my room, poured a nightcap and watched another old episode of
Cheers
. It wasn’t the episode I’d watched in Montserrat, which was the best piece of luck I’d had all day.

And now it’s daylight, or at least as light as it will get today, and I’m expected for lunch in a little over two hours. I’d better go and have some breakfast first.

I wipe off the last flecks of shaving foam and take a look in the mirror. Not bad, considering. Like a cross between Keith Richards and Mother Theresa. Little bit of moisturizer and I’ll be fine.

Butte began life
in 1864 as a gold-rush town, but huge deposits of copper were soon discovered on what came to be known as “the richest hill on earth.” Situated more than 5,000 feet above sea level, and riddled with shafts and tunnels, the city boasted that it was a mile deep as well as a mile high. The story goes that in the heyday of Irish immigration, Gaelic-speakers who had no English would arrive in Boston or New York wearing a label that said: “Send me to Butte, Montana.” The census of 1900 shows Butte to have been the most predominantly Irish city in the United States, Boston included. Thousands of Cornishmen also came as the tin mines of Cornwall went into decline, along with Welsh and Scots, Italians, Scandinavians, Chinese, Germans, Poles, Native Americans, Serbs and Croats, many of whom are said to have learned English with an Irish accent. The rich ethnic mix, pioneering spirit and high wage levels made for a lively town. Saloon doors were manufactured without locks, because the bars—among them Dublin Dan’s Hobo Retreat, the Bucket of Blood and the Cesspool—never closed.

The town worked and played twenty-four hours a day. Whiskeys called “Coming Off Shift Special,” “All Day Special,” “Good Night Special” and “Morning After Special” were for sale. Like the ones marked “Wakes, Weddings, Births and Holidays,” the bottles all contained the same stuff. The mules in the mines learned to chew tobacco, the ice-cream maker got his ice from the mortuary and two professional boxers once stopped fighting so they could watch the brawls in the crowd. Mining devastated the landscape, and Butte won a reputation as one of the ugliest towns in America, albeit with a heart of gold.

Walking along Broadway to Main Street this morning, though, it strikes
me as a pretty good-looking place. The last mines closed in 2001, but they had been in decline for decades, so that Butte—like Cobh, where many emigrants bound for Montana boarded ship—could never afford a modern makeover. The few downtown blocks consist mostly of imposing nineteenth-century brick buildings that bring to mind the older and more atmospheric parts of New York and San Francisco, only without traffic or people. My hotel, the Finlen, is a gem. Built in 1923, it offers authentic Prohibition-era ambience for virtually no money. JFK and Nixon both stayed here, and there are photos in the lobby to prove it. An antique brochure by the door of the bar promotes the hotel as a “crossroads for the wise of the earth. Men gather in the lobby or lounge in the bar, telling tall tales to men who think of taller tales of their own. Music from the lounge, faint as a valley wind, beckons youths and sweeter maidens. Young salesmen dabble in their dreams ….”

There are few sights on earth more captivating than young salesmen dabbling in their dreams, but unfortunately the Finlen, despite its many admirable qualities, does not serve food. Consequently I’ve come out in the snow looking for breakfast to stabilize my system before it’s time to go for lunch. A street-level art deco façade on a nineteenth-century building catches my eye.
m
&
m
, says the sign. I step inside and find myself in American lowlife heaven. To my right is a long breakfast counter; to my left, a very long and well-stocked bar; ahead of me, half a dozen card tables and a handful of poker machines. There are more customers eating breakfast than drinking liquor or gambling, but only just. They are the people you’ve seen sitting at diner counters in every blue-collar movie you’ve ever watched: hunting jackets, baseball caps, plaid shirts, heavy boots, visible weapons. The men look pretty tough as well.

I take a seat and do my best to look as if I live in a trailer park married to my cousin and like to shoot mountain lions for fun. “Coffee,” I growl, in the most bronchial miner’s rumble I can muster.

“Are you the guy from Ireland?” asks the waitress, effortlessly picking up on my shrill European warble. “I hear you’re having lunch with Father Sarsfield today.”

News travels fast in a small town, and it’s clear I’ve as much chance of
being inconspicuous here as if I were wearing a cheetah-print Versace halter-top with wet-look culottes and platform soles full of goldfish. And I’m a little concerned that she’s called me “the guy from Ireland.” I am, of course, the guy from England with an Irish mum, which takes a bit longer to explain. Irish Americans have a reputation for unwavering hatred of anything emanating from Cromwell’s fair land, and I couldn’t help noticing when I arrived last night and mentioned my flight from London that one guy’s face dropped. “You don’t want to be going near that place,” he said. No doubt his feelings were politically motivated, though it’s possible he once stumped up a couple of grand to see the Changing of the Guard and Sherlock Holmes’s house and go to a medieval banquet at a Beefeater steak-house near Heathrow, and may still be scarred by the experience.

It’s that classic American breakfast again: eggs over easy, home fries, wholewheat toast, piss-poor coffee. Despite what you’d imagine from watching the coffee fetishism of
Friends
and
Frasier
, stewed sludge in a Cona jug is still standard in the heartlands. I feel bad for even noticing, because the waitress, a formidable woman of confident charm, is delightful, bringing iced water and chatting away to make me feel at home, and I do. American service as spontaneous as this has no equal, and those who dispense it should be decorated by their government, or win holidays in Hawaii. She tells me the M & M was named after Martin and Mosby, the two guys who started it in the 1890s as a saloon, eatery and gambling parlor for the miners, a trade it has been plying uninterrupted ever since. I’ve always loved this kind of timeless Americana. Butte’s ancient history may be very recent, but that’s part of its appeal. In a room like this you can almost reach out and touch it.

The cook working at the griddle is a star. With a ponytail poking through his baseball cap, sunken cheeks and pallid, cadaverous skin, he looks like Iggy Pop when he was scary but not yet really terrifying. His sinewy arms look powerful, not showy gym muscle but lean and taut, strength that he uses every day. He moves with speed and grace along the range, cooking six or seven orders at once, beating eggs with half a dozen flicks of his left hand as he shapes sizzling grated potato into hash browns with his right, breaking away to flip two eggs over in a pan with the barest
suspicion of a wrist movement, then throws an omelette, turns a steak and spins on the spot to retrieve bacon from an enormous glass-fronted fridge. It’s like watching a class variety act: You’re waiting for the spinning plates to fall, the house of cards to tumble, but they never do. These days some gourmet chefs in big cities will let you pay a premium to dine at a table in the kitchen so you can watch them in action. Go to Butte instead, and see this guy for free.

On your first day in a new place there are so many options that it can be difficult to know where to begin. By the time I’ve finished breakfast it’s only half an hour till lunch, so there’s that one taken care of. It’s stopped snowing and visibility has improved, and I can see huge mountains at the end of the street. Somewhere up there on the edge of town is the continental divide, the point at which water stops flowing west to the Pacific and instead runs east to the Atlantic. Bozeman, I realized this morning when I looked at the map, is on the other side of the divide. I’m glad I hadn’t imagined such a fearsome landscape when I was careering around just above it in the dark last night.

harrington surgical supply 1890, says the lettering above a warehouse and shopfront across the street from the Finlen, where I’m waiting for my lift to lunch. It confirms the very specific nature of Butte’s Irish antecedents. Harrington is a West Cork name from the Beara Peninsula, the sliver of land that protrudes into the Atlantic beyond Bantry and Glengar-riff and below the Ring of Kerry. As in Montserrat, a glance at the phone book confirms the historical connections. Sullivans and O’Sullivans, Mur-phys, Crowleys, Lynches and McCarthys, all of them near-ubiquitous in County Cork, proliferate among the surnames. This is largely the result of a very specific link between Butte and Cork, and in particular the Beara Peninsula town of Castletownbere—the home of McCarthy’s Bar and Grocery, possibly the best pub in the world—and the outlying parishes of Eyeries and Allihies.

The Atlantic-pounded clifftops of Allihies were home in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the richest copper mines in Europe. When they went into decline in the late 1800s, the miners headed west. Many of the Irish emigrating to America were unskilled laborers from agricultural backgrounds,
but the Beara miners had specialized skills that were much in demand in the mining camps of the west. Butte rapidly became the biggest camp of them all. According to Professor David Emmons, author of the definitive study of the history of the Irish in the town, 90 percent of the mineworkers in turn-of-the-century Butte were from Ireland. So strong are the connections that even today it’s hard to find a family in Beara that does not have relatives in Montana, though they may have no one in more obvious places such as New York, Boston or even Dublin.

It’s strange to think that the Irish capital would have seemed a more remote place to those emigrants than a hill in Montana where friends and family were waiting. They would also have felt at ease with the Cornish miners who worked alongside them, despite differences of language, religion and political allegiance, because “the Cornish were more Celtic than the average Dubliner.” This, at any rate, is Father Sarsfield O’Sullivan’s take on things. He’s a genial, articulate man in his late seventies, the unofficial curator of the oral history of Butte. The blizzard was blowing again as I pulled up outside, but that wasn’t going to prevent his sister Vernie from running the Irish tricolor and the stars and stripes up the two poles on their veranda, as she does every day.

We’ve just dined on split pea and ham soup, which was fine once I’d persuaded myself it was another breakfast course, rather than my second meal in an hour. We’re in a drawing room full of antiques, oil paintings and ecclesiastical memorabilia, waiting for the arrival of the cake and coffee that may blast me asunder before Father Sarsfield can administer the last rites. He’s been telling me about a priest from San Francisco—“a great man, helped Cesar Chavez start the farmworkers’ union”—who had a smattering of Gaelic from his parents. On a visit to County Kerry he addressed a large lunch gathering, concluding with the traditional Gaelic toast that translates to English as “The goat is on the spit.” Unfortunately his accent wasn’t quite up to it. “The Gaelic for ‘goat’ is only a hair’s-breadth removed from the word for the male organs,” says Father Sarsfield. “You can imagine how shocked the good ladies of the parish were to hear this American priest proclaiming, ‘My balls are on fire.’ ‘I’ll be dead for years,’ he said, ‘and that’s all they’ll remember me for in Ballyferriter.’”

Sarsfield is one of the last of a generation that links us with the old west. “My father was born in 1882,” he says. “Geronimo was killed in 1884.” He says their father’s grandfather built the first house on the tiny island of Inishfernard, off the coast of Beara, in 1823; his grandparents and the other remaining inhabitants were brought off the island in 1923, the year before he was born in Butte. His father had a ranch just outside town, and as a kid he remembers him giving work to Irishmen who were on the run from the latest round of the Troubles.

His Irish-American brogue reminds me of Chris Byrne and his rebel hip-hop thousands of miles away in New York. Listening to these men helps deconstruct the American accent. In Massachusetts and Vermont you can still hear a burr of West Country England that arrived with the pilgrims; with these guys you hear a heightened version of the Irish tones and rhythms that are now an integral part of the mainstream American dialect. As I listen to him talk, I remember as a kid hearing Jimmy Cagney saying “youse guys,” and wondering where it came from. Well, now I know, because I’ve followed the trail and heard it with my own ears.