The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I was the one that got him drunk.”

“Nobody gets the old man drunk, Zeno.”

We walked hurriedly across the wet, cold field to the main house. Mrs. Riordan and Buddy’s sister had come out on the front porch and were standing silently by the rail with the wind in their faces. I could see a bottle of whiskey on top of one of the cages.

Birds were everywhere, like chickens all over a roost when an egg-sucking dog gets inside: ruffed grouse, Canadian geese, greenhead mallards, ground owls, gulls, bobwhites, ring-necked pheasants, an eagle, egrets, pintails, blue herons, and two turkey buzzards. Most of them seemed as though they didn’t know what to do, but then a mallard hen took off, circled once overhead, and winnowed toward the river. Buddy started latching the doors on the birds that hadn’t yet jumped out after the seed.

“Frank, what in the hell are you doing?” Buddy said.

Mr. Riordan’s back was to us, his shoulders bent, as he sowed the seed from side to side like a farmer walking a fallow field.

“Don’t let any more of them out,” Buddy said. “It’ll take us a week to get them back.”

Mr. Riordan turned and saw us for the first time. The bill of his fur cap was pulled low over his eyes.

“Hello, boys. What are you doing here?” he said.

“Let’s go inside,” Buddy said, and slipped the heavy sack of feed off his father’s shoulder. The pupils in Mr. Riordan’s eyes had contracted until there was nothing left but a frosted grayness that seemed to look through us.

He walked with us toward the porch, then as an afterthought picked up the bottle of whiskey by the neck. I thought he was going to drink from it, but I should have known better. He was not the type of man who would be seen drinking straight out of a bottle, particularly when drunk, in front of his family.

“Put it away for today, Frank,” Buddy said.

“Go get us three cups and the coffeepot that’s on the stove,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s good,” Buddy said.

He looked at Buddy from under the bill of his cap. There was no command in his expression, not even a hint of older authority, just the gray flatness of those eyes and maybe somewhere behind them a question mark.

“All right,” Buddy said. “But those birds are going to be spread all over the Bitterroot by tonight.”

He went inside with his mother and sister and a moment later came back with three cups hooked on his fingers and the metal coffeepot with a napkin wrapped around the handle.

We sat on the steps and leaned against the wood railing, with the snow blowing under the eave into our faces, and drank coffee and whiskey for a half hour. Occasionally, I heard movement inside the house, and when I would turn, I would see the disappearing face of Mrs. Riordan or Pearl in the window. The snow was starting to fall more heavily now, with the wind blowing from behind us out of Idaho, and I watched the mountains on the far side of the valley gradually disappear in the white haze, then the stripped cottonwoods along the river, and finally our cabin across the field.

Mr. Riordan was talking about his grandfather, who had owned half of a mine and the camp that went with it at Confederate Gulch during the 1870s.

“He was a part-time preacher, and he woul

dn’t allow a saloon or a racetrack in town unless they contributed to his church,” he said. “He used to say there was nothing the devil hated worse than to have his own money used against him. Once, two of Henry Plummer’s old gang tried to hoorah the main street when they were drunk. He locked them in a stone powder house for two days and wouldn’t give them anything to drink but castor oil and busthead Indian whiskey. Then he made them wash in the creek, and took them home and fed them and gave them jobs in his mine.”

“It’s starting to come in heavy, Frank,” Buddy said. “We better get the birds back in and the tarps on.”

Mr. Riordan poured the whiskey and coffee out of his cup into the saucer to cool it.

“You should take Iry to a couple of the places around here,” he said. “There’s a whole city called Granite up eight thousand feet on the mountain outside of Philipsburg. Miners were making twelve-dollars-a-day wage, seven days a week, in the 1880s. They had an opry house, a union hall, a two-story hospital, one street filled with saloons and floozy houses, and the day the vein played out you couldn’t count ten people in that town. They left their food in plates right on the table.”

He was enjoying his recounting of Montana history to me, not so much for its quality of strangeness and fascination to an outsider, but because it was a very great part of the sequence that he still saw in time.

“I told you about where they hanged Whiskey Bill Graves,” he said, rolling a cigarette out of his string tobacco, “but before they got to him, they bounced Frank Parrish and four others off a beam in Virginia City. You can still see the rope burns on the rafter today. When they hoisted Parrish up on the ladder with the rope around his neck and asked him for his last words, he hollered out, ‘Hurray for Jefferson Davis! Let her rip, boys!’ and he jumped right into eternity.”

“I’m going to get the canvas gloves,” Buddy said.

“What?” Mr. Riordan said.

“Those damn birds.”