The Road to McCarthy (42 page)

In June 1867 Meagher made an exhausting six-day ride in sweltering heat to Fort Benton on the Missouri River in central Montana. On arrival he went to the back room of Baker’s Store for a few stiff drinks, as would anyone with any sense after riding for six days, before adjourning for the night to a boat called the
G. A. Thompson
that was moored on the river. People who were there said he drank heavily and went to bed rowdy, ranting that some of those present were plotting to kill him. In the night there were cries of “Man overboard,” and Meagher was discovered to be missing. No body was ever recovered.

The official story was that he must have fallen overboard, a drunken victim of his “unfortunate habit,” but Montana was rife with rumors. A witness claimed that he cried out, “They’re after me!” as he fell; others alleged that he had been murdered, and his body buried southwest of Fort Benton in an unmarked grave. Nothing was ever proven, and it makes a strangely unsatisfactory—or wonderfully mysterious—demise for one of Ireland’s great emigrant heroes; albeit with a strange postscript.

In 1899 the body of a “petrified man” with a bullet hole in his forehead was found, supposedly on the banks of the Missouri near Fort Benton. It was carted around the country in a pine box to be viewed at twenty-five cents a pop. Well-attended gigs included Yellowstone Park and the Spokane Fruit Fair. A report in the
Bozeman Chronicle
said “the latest fake story about the petrified man is that the rocky remains …. were once the mortal part of General Thomas Francis Meagher,” and there’s no doubt this story was being used to attract paying customers. There were, however, other claimants. A Montana cowboy called Liver Eating Johnson paid his twenty-five cents, then asserted that the exhibit was his old partner Antelope Charlie—or No-Liver Charlie, as I like to think of him—who he claimed had been killed by Indians twenty years earlier. Others alleged it was neither Meagher nor Antelope, but George Washington. It was due to be examined by the Smithsonian Institution, but never arrived, and instead was transported to Australia—a neat touch—where it ended up doing the rounds of agricultural shows.

Six years later, in 1906, thousands of people turned out for the unveiling of an equestrian statue of Meagher, in front of the Montana state capital in Helena.

And in a few minutes, I should be standing right next to it.

I was supposed to be
heading northwest when I left Butte, but after pursuing the Young Irelanders from Cobh to Tasmania I felt I couldn’t come this close without popping in to pay my respects to Meagher. The journey northeast from Butte has taken less than two hours, the drive through ravishing snow-capped mountains marred only by Herman’s Hermits singing “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” on the radio, and by occasional jarring reminders, even in country as wild as this, of the national obsession with very large quantities of food. all you can eat drive thru buffet, said a sign outside one remote eatery. How does that work then? Surely you’d be in danger of mowing down all the folks standing round the trestle tables piling their plates with barbecue ribs and pasta salad and waffles. The signs multiply as I reach the outskirts of Helena. ladies’
NIGHT. FREE SLICE OF PIE WITH
her
dinner, says the one outside the Andrea Dworkin Diner—no, sorry, my mistake, I read the sign wrong, it’s the Red Garter Restaurant. ALL YOU CAN EAT SCALLOPS THURSDAY, says another; then it’s the wok and roll sushi bar, and now I’m driving through the forest of non-food- and beverage-related announcements that greets you on the outskirts of every God-fearing American town.

As well as being warmer than Butte, Helena looks much more prosperous. According to people in Moloney’s last night, the rest of the state is rather enjoying Butte’s fall from economic grace after decades of dominating the state. Mind you, I did detect a few chips on shoulders. One woman told me that when she went away to college she wore a sweatshirt that said
I’M FROM BUTTE—I CAN’T READ OR WRITE, BUT I’LL FIGHT ANY FIVE PEOPLE
who can. It’s a good joke, because it comes from a dark place. Helena seems somehow lighter. Sun is streaming down from a blue sky as I pull up near the Capitol building and park the tiny rental car that’s been foisted on me as some kind of practical joke. It’s so small I could park it in that Dublin hotel room and still have room for a couple of bikes and a freezer. I squeeze myself through the door using escapology skills I picked up at a community arts workshop in the 1980s, and take a few moments to luxuriate in the sweet sensation of my knees no longer touching my chin. A hundred yards away, across the lawns that surround the Capitol, I can see the statue. I’m about to walk across to it when I remember something. I open the door, take a banana from the car, then continue on my way.

The Capitol is a huge domed building set back from the road, built in granite with Ionic—or are they Doric?—columns. I never did understand the distinction, but Brother Alexander used to go a bit psycho if you asked him questions, so we tended not to bother. Beyond the lawns are neat rows of American Dream houses. Between the legislature and the voters’ homes
sits Meagher astride a horse, sword in hand, facing north towards Canada. american soldier and statesman, reads a plaque. Alongside it is a quote from Meagher himself.

The words were spoken in Montana in 1866. He is addressing America, but harking back to Ireland to evoke his deepest emotions. His prose may be more purple than the average immigrant’s—he was a precursor of the “this great nation of ours” tears-to-a-glass-eye oratory for which later generations of American politicians have become renowned—but Meagher, in his grand way, is an archetype of the Irish in the New World. A reluctant exile, he nevertheless threw himself with vigor into building a new society; took on responsibilities and powers denied him in his homeland; yet could never forget the land of his birth. In those last moments, Fort Benton must have seemed a very long way from Waterford and Clonmel.

I’m just thinking how touching it is to stand here and read his words and remember the grave of the child he never saw in that churchyard in Tasmania, when I realize that this could start to get very maudlin. Irish-American sentimentality has a quicksand quality to it, and you wouldn’t want to venture in too far. Better to remember Meagher, I think, for the wittiest idea he ever had: the pub meals on that bridge thousands of miles away in Tunbridge. I still owe him a lunch for that, because the pie ruined the moment. That’s why I’ve brought a banana. You can’t go wrong with fruit.

I take it out, peel it in his honor and raise it skyward in salute, in imitation of his sword. “Cheers, Thomas Francis.”

“Get your butt back over here before I spank it,” says a woman’s voice, rather alarmingly. I lower the banana and turn round to see a three-year-old girl staring at me. She can stare all she likes. She’s not having the banana.
It’s a political symbol, and would be wasted on a toddler. Her mother drags her away, and I head straight back to the car. If she calls the cops I’ll need a head start, and it could take a while to squeeze back into my seat.

Montana is
the fourth largest state in the Union after Alaska, Texas, and California, 750 miles from side to side, with landscape of lyrical grandeur. This is truly big sky country, the road and the railway following river valleys through the mountains, constantly evoking the imagery of nineteenth-century paintings of the West. For a first-time visitor like me, your best expectation of what you might get is exactly what you do get: horses, log cabins, cattle and space seemingly into infinity. Its impact can take you by surprise, especially if you’re a man of a certain vintage who grew up on westerns. You internalized this stuff at an impressionable age, and its emotional charge is just waiting to be reactivated. And if you ever tire of the scenery, there are always the signs, which just keep coming at you and have a poetry all of their own.

For a while I listen to the radio. “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits comes on, which has never been a favorite, but which carries a new charge since meeting Danny—“Johnny” in the song—in Montserrat. When the road becomes too remote to pick up a station I put the Yank’s CD on, taking care not to feed it into any rogue orifice in the body of the rental car. As it starts to play, I pass a huge Winnebago with a Ford Escort strapped to the back for sightseeing
when they get wherever they’re going. Inside the trunk of the Escort, I expect, will be a Fiat Uno, and inside that a Honda 50 with a skateboard strapped to it. Once they get a removal truck to carry the Winnebago round in, they’ll be all set.

It’s late afternoon and I’ve just passed hundreds of identical cows, pure black with a single white band round their middles, as if they’re wearing rugby jerseys. I’m following a broad, glistening river through dimpled hills on Route 135, about 150 miles north of Butte, when a large fish flies straight past my windshield. Strange, I’m thinking, for a split-second, until I realize it’s being held in the claws of a huge bird of prey; and then it’s gone. The bird was flying left to right across the front of the car, from the mountains to the river, which seems a bit arse-about-face. Perhaps it’s just found the fish and is trying to save its life; or maybe it’s just restocking the river. Either way, it’s always a comfort to find such altruism in nature, which sometimes gets very bad press.

I arrive in Paradise—you could wait your whole life to say that and never get the chance—which turns out to be a pretty little place straddling the railway line. There’s a bar called the Pair-a-Dice, and a mile marker that tells me I’ve less than ten miles to go. The next town is Plains, an abbreviation of Wild Horse Plains. Town is deserted in the soft early evening light. I pass a warning sign that says wat ch for fallen rock, and then I hit the rock. The impact jolts my knees against my chin and the top of my head against the car roof, but I’m so tightly packed in that the damage is only superficial. I carry on for a few hundred yards until I hear an ominous metallic ker-lunk-a-lunk-a-lunk. I’m next to mile marker 70, and my destination is half a mile past 68. Two and a half miles to go after driving nearly 300, and it sounds like I’ve got a flat front tire.

I get out and take a look. Yep, flat all right. Ah, sod it. It’s a rental car. It’s what they’re for, as the Channel 4 cameraman used to say before driving another brand-new family sedan along a stream, through a wood or across a quarry. I’ll just limp along at ten or fifteen until I get there. There’s no other traffic. I won’t be a hazard. It might knacker the wheel, but serves ’em right for adding the thirty-nine dollars a day insurance they hadn’t mentioned on the phone. Mind you, it’s a bit noisy. Quite alarming really. Still,
there’s no one to hear it. Except those four people up ahead, working in that lumber yard. They’ve stopped what they’re doing now so they can watch me approach. Must be quite a sight, I suppose, a tinny little grandma’s runabout rattling along on three tires on a road that was designed for the ballsiest pickup trucks on the planet. So—what to do now? They obviously think I’m barmy, and the fact that I look like a grown-up sitting in a toy car probably isn’t helping. Do I drive blithely past, klunk-a-klunk-a-klunk, and give them a little wave, like Coco the Clown driving into the ring before the wheels and doors fall off? Or do I stop and use my remedial mechanical skills to try and change the wretched wheel at the only point on the entire road where I’ll have an audience? The noise is dreadful now. I don’t mind wrecking the tire, but writing the axle off would be a different matter entirely. Better stop, eh? I’ll give ’em a big smile, a sort of “Oh, shucks, I guess this kind of thing happens to pioneering folk like you and me most every day,” to break the ice, and they’ll come running right over to help.

Nothing. They’re just staring. Standing in a row, giving me the evil eye. Behind them a couple of saber-toothed devil dogs are bouncing off a fence like balls in a squash court, in a desperate attempt to get out of the compound and rip my liver out. What a great spot to try and change a tire. “Howdy,” I shout, and wave. The one on the end says something, and the others laugh. I don’t like this. But I can’t just get back in and clunk off up the road. They might chase me, or release the dogs. Nothing else for it. I’m going to have to put the spare on. I wonder where it is? How do you get it out? Where’s the jack? How does it work? Why won’t they help?

They’ve decided to ignore me and are standing in a line throwing concrete blocks to each other, stacking them in a pile at the end. There are two men and two women, all in their twenties. The one who made the funny remark has a close-cropped skull, as if he’s just come from an audition for a teen killing-spree movie, although he could be the real thing. He’s throwing blocks to a good-looking blonde woman who is much tougher than I am. A less attractive couple with baseball caps and outsize bottoms complete the line. They’re probably just pretending to ignore me, and have noticed that it’s taken me fifteen minutes to locate the spare and get it out of the trunk. As I lie down and start looking under the car for a jack point I realize how
vulnerable I am.
The sign diverted my attention just long enough for me to hit the rock it was supposed to be warning me about
. They probably put it there themselves.