The Women of the Copper Country: A Novel

Prologue

Turn tears to fires

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The dream is always simple. The memory never is.

It’s an echo from 1903 when she was almost sixteen. A rare family outing down to the county fair in Houghton, Michigan.

Her father probably expected the excursion to cheer her up. There were horse races and ox pulls, all day long. A merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. Games of chance. Vendors calling their wares. Quilts, pies, and jams vying for blue ribbons. The promise of fireworks after dark. But there were crowds as well. Strangers. People who’d never before seen the girl called Big Annie up in Calumet.

At twenty-five, Anna Klobuchar Clements would be known around the world as America’s Joan of Arc. Ten thousand miners would march behind her in a wildcat strike against the richest, most powerful copper company on earth. But that day at the Houghton fair? She was just a big, gawky girl—tired to tears of being pointed at, remarked upon, ridiculed.

Being tall didn’t bother her when she was five. She liked being the biggest in her kindergarten class. She liked school. She didn’t mind at all when the teachers started calling her Big Annie. It never occurred to anyone that she might be embarrassed by the nickname. It was simply meant to distinguish her from another—much smaller—Annie in her class.

The tall American daughter of tall Slovenian parents, Anna Klobuchar had topped six feet at fifteen. In a mining town increasingly populated by underfed, undersized immigrants fresh off the boat, she could never escape the goggle-eyed notice. The endless, stupid teasing of boys her own age was the worst. As she got taller, they began to feel diminished by her. Intimidated. Irritated by the existence of a girl who was bigger and stronger than they were.

Her younger sister, Maritza, was already engaged. She was barely fourteen but she would marry in a month, long before she reached her full height and got bigger than her husband. And Annie was supposed to be happy about it.

So. That awful county fair in 1903. Which was supposed to cheer her up.

Everybody stared. Grown men came to a stop and demanded, "Jeez, how tall are you anyways?" as though her height were both a marvel and an affront. Women and girls shook their heads and gave silent thanks that they themselves were dainty little things, or at least appeared so when compared to that poor girl. Boys laughed and pointed, calling out familiar taunts, along with new ones that were more hateful. Freak. Giant. Monster. Holy cripes! Look at the size of her! Oughta be in the sideshow with that bearded lady . . .

She stood it as long as she could. Finally, a couple of hours before dusk, she fled toward the cornfields and cherry orchards and pastures beyond the fair. Her sight was still blurred with tears when she heard her father’s voice, just behind her. Anna, don’t—

She shattered into frustrated, embarrassed, angry weeping. When the storm passed, she sucked in snot and wiped her nose on the back of her hand and waved toward the crowds. I’m taller than every boy in Calumet. I’m probably taller than every boy in Michigan! Nobody will ever marry me. Why do I have to be so tall?

Your mother’s tall, he said. She got me.

Which didn’t help.

It was a relief to the pair of them when they were startled by the hushed roar of a gas-fired burner behind them, just over a little hill. They turned, and looked up, and saw a huge balloon rising. Red, white, and blue silk, billowing.

Let’s go for a ride, he suggested. Just us. Me and you.

Years later, she would ask herself, Where did he find the wisdom? But that day in Houghton, she wondered where he’d found the cash. Tickets were a day’s pay—each—for a copper miner. She tried to talk him out of it. They both knew her mother would be infuriated by an indulgence like that; nevertheless her father told the balloonist, Two, and handed him the money. Together they clambered up and over the edge of a big wicker basket and waited for the other passengers to do the same. The balloon would be tethered— So you won’t drift out over the lake! When the basket was full of paying customers, the pilot released the moorings. There were little shrieks of excitement and fear when the basket rocked off the ground. Everyone ducked and laughed nervously when the pilot opened the burner for a fresh blast of heat. And then . . . no sound except for their own breathing as the huge balloon lifted them higher and higher, its colors aglow in the slanting sunlight.

Below them, the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel seemed like wind-up toys made of tin, and people on the fairgrounds looked like tiny flowers on a vast colorful tablecloth laid out for a picnic.

Summer evenings in Upper Michigan are often brilliant with orange and purple and golden clouds. That spectacle can become ordinary to those who live in the far north. What surprised Big Annie was how pretty the land itself was when you could see it from above: greened by the scrubby brush that grew around countless tree stumps, laced by white waves edging the stony shoreline of the Keweenaw Peninsula, surrounded by Lake Superior’s blue depths.

And that is what her dream always feels like. Like floating into the silence, leaving mockery and fear and anger far below. Like soaring upward without the slightest effort and seeing an unexpectedly beautiful world stretched out in all directions . . .

In the next decade, she would more commonly awaken with her heart pounding from a different kind of dream, one in which she runs toward some urgent task, increasingly frantic because she is late and there is always an obstacle of some kind. A train blocking the road. A locked door. Knots of men standing in her way. But now and then, that dream of silent floating would come to her, like a father’s blessing. And she would remember, when she woke, what her father told her that day as they floated far above the Copper Country.

Stand up straight, Anna. Hold your head high, he told her. That’s your strength. You are tall for a reason. When your head is high, you can see farther than anyone else.

June 1913

1

Two households, both alike in dignity

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The birds disappeared when the forests went underground. There is no dawn chorus, no melodious robin-song, no cheerful cardinal-chant to greet the brightening sky. It is the first pink flush of light that rouses James MacNaughton.

The windows are open, covered only by fly screens and gauzy curtains. Rolling onto his back, stretching, he fills his chest with cool, fresh air. When he breathes out, he is awake.

Sunrise. Early summer.

Best time of the day, he thinks. Best time of the year.

His family is at their summer house on the Lake Superior shore, but James MacNaughton is a man of iron habits; even alone, he eases out of bed as though his wife were sleeping next to him and might be disturbed if he is not careful. Drawing on a dressing gown, he slides bare feet into carpet slippers and pads noiselessly down the hallway, stopping for a moment at each child’s door. The girls’ beds are made and their rooms have been neatened; still, he pictures the pillowed faces and tousled hair of his two absent daughters and smiles inwardly as he continues toward the bathing room.

His morning rituals never vary. Nearing fifty, he is determined to remain fit and limber. Ten minutes of vigorous calisthenics start every working day. To accommodate this healthful habit, two small rooms formerly used by servants have been combined to create a large bathing and exercise space. The servants have been moved to a new wing at the back of the property; this change has achieved a more decorous division between family and staff, well worth the disruption endured as the house was remodeled.

Tiled in gleaming white ceramic, the bathing room is equipped with porcelain fixtures and a modern chrome-piped shower stall that was his own particular requirement. There is a clock on the wall but, like the bathtub, only the ladies of the house use it. Years of time-and-motion studies have given James MacNaughton an uncanny sense of the exact duration of any interval between a single second and a full hour.

When he reaches the ninth minute of exercise, he pauses to turn the sink tap, bringing heated water up from the boiler in the cellar. Sixty seconds later, he begins his shave, having determined that buying blades for a Gillette safety razor is more efficient and economical than wasting time and money at a public barbershop. He showers next, methodically soaping his body: center, left, right. A rotation of 360 degrees to rinse away the suds, front and back, and then he allows himself exactly one additional minute to appreciate the sensation of hot water sluicing over his shoulders.

James MacNaughton is a great believer in showers. It pleases him to have provided this sensible element of twentieth-century sanitation to those employed by the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company. Ladies like his wife and daughters might well indulge in a long soak; for hardworking men, showering away daily sweat and grime is more hygienic than sitting in murky water once a week. Accordingly, the company bathhouse has been fitted with large communal shower rooms. At the end of their shift, workers exit the mine shafts, strip off their heavy canvas work clothes, scrub with company soap, and rinse off under hot company water. Afterward, they will pass through to the lockers where their street clothes are stored, returning to company homes refreshed.

Twenty-two minutes after leaving his bed, James MacNaughton turns off the water and steps onto the bath mat. In the kitchen one flight below, coffee is percolating, its aroma rising to meet him as he rubs his skin briskly with a Turkish towel. In the adjacent dressing room, his butler is laying out clothing in the order in which it will be donned. Undergarments. Stockings and garters. A white shirt, starched and pressed. A fresh collar. Trousers, vest, suit coat, each well brushed. Shoes, buffed to a high gloss.

In the cellar, his maid has been ironing creases from newspapers: the Boston Globe, the Detroit News, and the Chicago Tribune, evening editions of which are delivered overnight on the Calumet & Hecla express train, arriving at the MacNaughton home by six A.M., along with the morning edition of the Daily Mining Gazette and the Calumet News. Having stacked all five papers neatly, the maid will lay them on the dining table to the left of Mr. MacNaughton’s place setting. His spectacles, gently polished, will be positioned above the Globe’s headline. This done, the maid will ascend the service stairway at the back of the house and make Mr. MacNaughton’s bed, finishing that task just in time to clean the bathroom only moments after her employer has moved to the dressing room, thus forestalling the development of mold or mildew.

Meanwhile, the cook will have prepared Mr. MacNaughton’s breakfast. She shares her employer’s Scottish heritage as well as his conviction that hot oatmeal is the only proper start to the day, even in midsummer. And none of your fripperies like molasses or raisins—just good, plain, hot oatmeal with a little salt and some fresh, cool cream. Unlike the rest of the staff, which is in constant flux, the cook has been with Mr. MacNaughton since 1901, when he became the general manager of Calumet & Hecla and took up residence in this home. The cook was initially puzzled and not a little resentful when her employer spent two full days analyzing her work habits. She herself has always been a methodical person and took pride in explaining why she did things in a particular manner, but she was intrigued to learn that Mr. MacNaughton was a pioneer in the field of scientific industrial management who intended to run his household just as he did the world’s largest copper mining company.

He adheres to a simple principle: minimize wasted time and motion to maximize efficiency and productivity. Everything is properly stored at the point of first use, he told her. Glassware, cutlery, and dishes were relocated to new corner cabinets, custom-built for their purpose, each forty-eight inches from the dining room table. With service items out of the kitchen, space was freed for a set of logical work stations: pantry, icebox, preparation counter, stove, sink. Every pot and pan, each mixing bowl, and all the cook’s tools are stored such that she need not take more than one step from station to station. She never wastes a moment looking for a rarely used item. Everything is where it ought to be.

It was the cook’s own idea to time the preparation of Mr. MacNaughton’s oatmeal so that it has reached the correct temperature just as he arrives at the table. He was pleased by her enthusiasm for his methods and raised her salary by a nickel a day when he noticed. It was a princely gesture and she was grateful. Twelve years ago.

*  *  *

Thirty-seven minutes after rising, James MacNaughton is dressed and on his way down to breakfast, but it is his custom to tarry on the broad staircase landing before descending to the dining room. Standing before the large window, he clasps his hands behind his back like a soldier at ease: shoulders straight and feet planted. He does not own the immense domain before him, but as general manager of Calumet & Hecla, he presides over it with viceregal authority.

The Copper Country, it’s called—written and spoken with capital letters. So remote, it is almost a nation unto itself. On maps, it is labeled the Keweenaw Peninsula, a blade of land thrusting north by northeast into the frigid waters of Lake Superior. Running lengthwise down the peninsula’s center, like the blood gutter of a bayonet, are the richest copper deposits on earth. Ancient Indians collected chunks of the red metal from streams and shallow pits: float copper so pure it hardly needed refining at all, so beautiful and malleable that it could be made into jewelry and vessels that were traded as far south as Arkansas.

The savages and the surface veins are gone now. It took Anglo-Saxons to make something useful out of the godforsaken wilderness, he thinks with pride.

With vigor and vision, men of his own kind cleared vast forests, turning pine into cordwood and maple into timber for buildings and tunnel supports. With shovels and explosives, they sank shafts and blasted out miles-long corridors and cross-cutting drifts. With hand tools and muscle, they carved out cavernous, ore-rich stopes deep within the earth. Breaking up the rock with sledgehammers, they hauled out conglomerate to be milled and smelted on the surface, where they built railways and shipyards to carry ton after ton after ton of copper ingots to factories around the globe. Copper for cooking pots and coins and buttons and candlesticks. Copper to roof buildings and sheathe the hulls of ships. Copper to alloy with tin for bronze hardware and great bronze statues; copper to alloy with zinc for brass band instruments, machinery bearings, ship fittings, and munitions. Copper for telegraph and telephone and electrical wiring, and for indoor plumbing. Copper to transform America from an agrarian backwater to a nation that will soon be more wealthy and powerful than any European empire.

Accomplishing all this in little more than half a century has been neither cheap nor easy. Mining is a lottery. How many mining companies have formed and failed since the Civil War? A hundred? Maybe more. The Keweenaw Peninsula is riddled with exploratory trenches and abandoned shafts, the landscape littered with collapsing buildings and rusting iron machinery. Today, only a dozen deep-shaft mines run in the black often enough to avoid bankruptcy; of that dozen, only three are consistently profitable. The Quincy is called Old Reliable for a reason: it has paid out every year since 1862. The Copper Range is new and benefits from modern methods and equipment. But Calumet & Hecla outshines them all, for C&H does not merely own the Keweenaw’s most productive deposits. It has the immense capital, the long experience, and the extraordinary leadership required to compete with the open-pit mines of Montana and Arizona.

What lies above the ground is equally impressive. Calumet is not a mining camp or a village or even a city, but a metropolis of forty thousand residents—an asset owned in its entirety by the company. Few things are so gratifying to James MacNaughton as showing Calumet to investors when they arrive in this remote outpost for the first time. Paris on Mars, he murmurs when jaws drop and eyes widen at the sight of the grand sandstone edifices that house professional offices, banks, elegant stores, restaurants, and hotels. A fine library provides uplifting reading material in nearly all of the thirty-some languages spoken by the miners and their families. The Civic Theater is Calumet’s crown jewel. Widely acknowledged to be the most beautiful lyceum west of New York City, it is more than worthy of the luminaries who’ve performed there: Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell, Enrico Caruso and John Philip Sousa, Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney.

The thriving business district is a neat grid of paved streets lined by telephone poles, illuminated by electric lamps, and served by streetcars that run around the clock. Farther out, there are orderly ranks and files of sturdy clapboard houses, built strongly enough to withstand a century or more of winter storms. These are rented to married miners for just two days’ pay per month. C&H sells the families coal, firewood, and gas at wholesale prices. Clean, clear Lake Superior water is piped into the homes for a small fee. Thus, Calumet & Hecla rewards marriage, for married men are steadier, more dependable. And James MacNaughton always draws visitors’ attention to the industriousness of his employees’ wives, as well. Nearly every small fenced yard boasts a vegetable garden and a fruit tree or two. Some have little smokehouses and coops for chickens and rabbits. The company charges no fee when employees’ families clear fields in the outlying scrub to set up pigsties and put in stands of corn.

The cityscape is punctuated by larger buildings. Bunkhouses for the unmarried men. Shaft houses, engine houses, boiler houses; towering mill stacks reaching more than a hundred feet into the sky. In large sandstone schools, employees’ daughters learn home economics. Their sons learn trades that prepare them for jobs with C&H, and no matter how benighted their immigrant origins, those boys will be able to read their contracts in English and sign them with well-formed signatures in full legal understanding of the risks they assume by accepting work underground.

It must be acknowledged: accidents are inevitable. Metal mining is a dangerous industry, but when a man is hurt at a C&H facility, he can be treated in a well-staffed hospital. Alone among American mining corporations, Calumet & Hecla matches employee contributions to the laborers’ medical fund, dollar for dollar.

In return for this largess, C&H expects an honest twelve-hour day, Monday through Saturday. Workers have Sundays off, along with Christmas and the Fourth of July. Some merely drink their leisure away, playing billiards and gambling. This is regrettable, especially since the company encourages healthier recreation by sponsoring athletic teams and offering trophies. Baseball is popular during the Copper Country’s short summers. Hockey is the sport of choice during the exceedingly long winters, and the company offers roller rinks and bowling alleys for indoor recreation when the Great Lakes bring blizzards and snowdrifts pile up past second-story windows.

Sunday mornings, of course, ought to be spent at worship, and many employees do attend services. Indeed, James MacNaughton was gratified when the 1910 census revealed that Calumet had more churches per capita than any other town in America. For fifty years, wave after wave of immigrants have come to the Copper Country, all of them eager to work for the world’s most productive and progressive mining company. Every group has its own religious traditions; each denomination has at least one church. C&H likes its workers to be schooled in morality; the company land beneath houses of worship is, therefore, rented to the congregations at a discount. Mr. MacNaughton himself has made a point of donating generously—and anonymously—to the building campaigns for each and every new church.

Even the Catholic ones.

He is silently proud of that unheralded generosity. James MacNaughton is a modest man in many ways. Private and reserved. On guard, always, against ostentation.

The prior general manager of Calumet & Hecla displayed his wealth shamelessly, throwing grand parties and balls in the immense mansion he built as a surprise for his wife. With thirteen thousand square feet to fill, Tom Hoatson missed no opportunity for display. Every room: stuffed with furniture. Every floor: layered with Persian and Turkish carpets. Every tabletop: cluttered with exotic curios from the family’s travels to Europe, Asia, and Africa. At the housewarming gala, Tom ushered his guests from place to place like a tour guide, insisting that they admire everything from the fifteen-foot motorized turntable in the carriage house to the silver-leafed ceiling in the music room. In the library, he made sure that they noticed that the books had all been custom-bound in ostrich leather with gilt titles. No doubt, their costly spines remain uncracked to this day; Tom was never much of a reader. In any case, the mansion is too dark for such a pastime, even with all its gaslights blazing. Dimly lit even at high noon on a sunny day, its enormous stained glass windows are half-obscured by heavy velvet drapery, its walls dark green, with fanciful murals depicting the long-gone forests that were clear-cut for the mines.

The Hoatson dining room was a special horror. A graceless baronial table shipped back from Scotland. French porcelain, English silver, Bohemian crystal . . . but just try to enjoy a meal when your host urges you take particular note of the wall-coverings: elaborate Celtic knot-work hand-painted on the tanned hides of baby elephants!

Mrs. MacNaughton refused to visit the Hoatson house again after that obligatory first dinner. Later, when she and James undertook the remodeling of their own home, Tom’s tasteless monstrosity was a benchmark as they made decision after decision. A little too Hoatson, Mary would murmur when a tradesman offered something rather too showy or pointlessly luxurious. James would always agree. An elegant sufficiency has always been their mutual aim.

The result of their collaboration is a comfortably large home furnished with tasteful restraint.

Thus, when James MacNaughton descends to the ground floor, thirty-eight minutes after rising, he enters a dining room conspicuously lacking in baby elephant skin. Its walls are covered in pale gray silk, its floors hushed with a rose du Barry carpet. Morning sunlight through its eastern windows is softened by fine linen curtains ornamented only with borders of embroidered vines. His oatmeal is served in plain white bone china, and he eats in silence with a simple silver spoon, polished to a soft shine.

He eats in blessed silence but allows his spoon to clink against the china when he is done: a signal to the maid, who appears promptly to remove his bowl with her left hand and to pour his coffee from the pot in her right. With the table cleared, he places his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, pulls the papers close, and scans the news of the day.

There has been a decisive battle in the Philippines. Black Jack Pershing has slaughtered two thousand Moros, along with their women and children. That should put an end to Moslem resistance to American rule, he thinks, and it’s about time.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ascension to the German throne. These have been twenty-five years of peace, the Kaiser is quoted as saying, and I hope there will be twenty-five more. MacNaughton grunts at that with soft cynicism. The Germans have just launched a powerful new battle cruiser. All of Europe is preparing for the next war, and so are industrialists around the world. MacNaughton himself is so sure of this, he has increased C&H production quotas. Every bullet fired and every artillery shell exploded must be encased in brass. Each ship sunk will take copper cladding and brass fittings down with her. He wants Calumet & Hecla ready to take orders as replacement armaments are manufactured.

The Tribune has an editorial about South Africa’s new Natives Land Act. The Parliament has now defined which territories can be owned by whites and which inhabited by blacks. There’s wisdom, MacNaughton thinks. Settle it with laws. Everyone will know his place. He approves of South Africa’s new Immigration Act as well. More sensible to prevent trouble than to cope with hordes of Indian migrants after they arrive. Would that America’s own Congress were so far-sighted!

James MacNaughton has become increasingly alarmed by the degradation of the workforce in the past thirty years. In the old days, C&H employed experienced men from Cornwall and Ulster, the inheritors of generations of mining skills. Those were fine men who took pride in the risks and hard work of their profession. Under the watchful eye of the company that employed them, they quietly and harmoniously developed into self-respecting American citizens. The new people are simply not of the same caliber.

For that distressing reality, James MacNaughton blames a long period of peace, which has permitted Europe’s poor to breed beyond that continent’s capacity to employ and feed them.

Swedes, Danes, Norwegians. Poles, Russians, Czechs—they’re all showing up in Calumet now. Swarms of Jews and Italians are arriving at America’s ports, taking over the cities. How much of the Old World’s excess population can America absorb?

Admittedly, those enterprising enough to make the long trek to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are probably the best of the lot. They work hard but they are unskilled. At best, they can put a sledgehammer to the loosened conglomerate, shovel it into tram cars, and push the loads to the collection points. And yet, they feel themselves hard done by, complaining about the conditions underground when they’re lucky to have any job at all.

The Finns are the worst. And the Slavs! Croats and Slovenians. Anarchists, half of them. Socialists. Europe is gleefully exporting its wretched refuse to America. How long, he wonders, before the entire American workforce is undermined and replaced by nihilists and hoodlums? There is bloodshed every time union agitators infiltrate an industry, and what does Congress do about it? Nothing! Congress is too busy destroying American corporations. Call something a monopoly, and you can break it to pieces and tell yourself it’s legal. Damned Marxists . . .

That egomaniac Roosevelt and his stooge Taft are gone now, and may trust-busting and corporate taxes go to hell with them! Wilson may not be much better. During the 1912 campaign, he was pleased to declare himself a fierce partisan of the Open Shop policy and of individual liberty, but his anti-union rhetoric began to shift as soon as he took office. Now the new president speaks of a heartless economic system in which a few men control the fate of all the rest. He talks of overthrowing the bosses and putting Wall Street in its place. There has been one strike after another since the inauguration, and Wilson has done precisely nothing to stem the tide of industrial strife. Every labor dispute is dealt with as though it were an isolated phenomenon. Nothing is learned from experience. There is no canon of industrial law, nothing to enshrine a property owner’s sacred right to protect his factory from violent strikers.

James, his wife would soothe if she were home. Don’t upset yourself, dear. Our miners know that they’re well treated. They know how lucky they are to be employed by a man like you.

With a deep breath, he sets the newspapers aside. Stands and tugs his waistcoat down. By an act of will, he is serene again. The Western Federation of Miners will gain no foothold in the Copper Country of Michigan, he tells himself. Miners here will be loyal to Calumet & Hecla, and to James MacNaughton himself.

The butler meets him at the door with his hat and an umbrella. A year ago, the man would have said, The weather service predicts rain, sir, but James MacNaughton put a stop to that. Unnecessary chatter annoys him almost to fury, especially in the morning. Obviously, he observed then, or you would not be handing me an umbrella. Now he simply accepts his hat and hooks the umbrella handle over his arm. His first words of the day are an acknowledgment of service properly rendered.

Thank you, he says.

He will not hear the collective sigh of relief that ends the tension inside his home when the front door closes behind him. Arms full of linens, the latest chambermaid watches Mr. MacNaughton stride down the long straight sidewalk toward his office, a few blocks away.

I bet he don’t even know your name, she tells the butler.

With an attitude like that, the butler thinks, you won’t last long in this household. It is our place to know his, he tells the girl.

*  *  *

Like James MacNaughton, Anna Klobuchar Clements awakens before dawn; unlike him, she has no memory of birdsong. The forests were gone long before she was born. She expects only silence in the summer morning.

Her spouse, too, is missing from her bed. Mary MacNaughton won’t return to Calumet until the end of the summer, but Joe Clements will be home after the night shift, and Annie has much to do before he walks in the door.

In half-darkness, she peers briefly into a small mirror, loosening the heavy braid that falls down her back, gathering the brown hair into a pile on top of her head, pinning it out of her way before washing her face in a white enamel basin. She dresses quickly: a secondhand cotton housedress, its cuffs and hemline lengthened with calico bands to accommodate her frame. Trying not to make any noise that will disturb the last minutes of rest for her three young boarders, she creeps down the creaky wooden stairs, ducks under the doorway, and slips out back to use the privy.

With the sun on the horizon, she picks dandelion greens, giving the tough outer leaves to the rabbits, collecting the tenderest in her apron pocket for Joe’s salad. She scatters feed for the chickens and robs their nests while they scratch in the dirt. With the eggs cushioned by the greens in her pocket, she collects an armful of small wood for the stove and goes back inside to bring up the fire.

She’s been making pasties for miners since she was six. Her hands need no attention. Flour, salt, lard, water, mixed and kneaded. Fist-sized chunks rolled out into disks. Finely minced smoked ham from last year’s hog. Diced potatoes, onion, carrots, and turnips. Stir it all together. Spoon some onto each circle of dough. Fold the crusts into half-moons, crimp the edges, slit the tops to let the steam out. With the baking sheets greased, it’s pasties into the oven, and while they bake, she starts the boarders’ breakfast. Fried potatoes and onions, eggs, buttered bread. Tea.

She does as many chores as she can before anyone else is stirring. Five adults share this small house. Even the little Irish housewives complain, Not enough room t’swing a cat when everyone’s t’home. And it’s worse for Big Annie, who takes up more space than any woman has a right to.

She admitted to six foot one when she finally married at eighteen. Joseph Clements was twelve years her senior and four inches taller, and the only man in Calumet who wasn’t intimidated by a girl that huge. He’s big enough to beat her when she needs it was the joke at their wedding party. Joe’s a Slovene, too. His family name used to be Clemenc, but like