Work Song Read online

  “Why not on a picket line, showing solidarity?”

  He arched an eyebrow, amused or the opposite. “Tsk, Morgan, for a sighted man you’re deep in the dark, aren’t you. There’s no picket line. No negotiating session. No anything whatsoever. Jared Evans just made some kind of safety excuse and pulled us out at the start of morning shift like that”—he snapped his fingers—“and is letting Anaconda stew about it.” He hardened as I watched. “Whether it gets us our fair wage or we need to try stronger persuasion—” The shoulders of his coat lifted, and I was aware that the Little Red Songbook, in some pocket or other, could find an adherent in more than musical ways. “We’ll see if the lop-eared Taffy knows what he’s doing.” Quinlan’s expression suggested it would not be easy to prove to Dublin Gulch.

  AT THE END OF the day, I had to resort again to the higher powers to uncloud the bafflements of Butte for me.

  Hooper was several rungs up, against the weather side of the house, industriously slapping on paint while Griffith held the ladder. “Everything still standing, downtown?” Griff called out upon sight of me.

  “Every brick in place, when I left. Why weren’t the pair of you in the middle of things today?”

  Hoop dipped his brush and stroked a comet of paint onto the siding. “Told not to.”

  “Saving us for when we’re really needed, Jared says,” Griff reported. He wagged his head in general acknowledgment. “Caught Anaconda with its pants down today, he sure did. Put a Welshman in charge and you start to get somewhere. Look at Lloyd George.” He gestured as if the prime minister of Great Britain might materialize to set things straight in Butte.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Your turn,” Hoop called down.

  I waited while the two of them traded places, like two aged sailors scrambling in the rigging. “But why this so-called work action instead of a genuine strike?”

  “No strike, no strikebreakers.” Holding the ladder with both gnarled hands, Hoop looked around at me as if deciding how much more tutoring I was worth. “Besides catching that other gang—”

  “—with its pants down,” Griff contributed, along with an emphatic swipe of his paintbrush.

  I must have looked blank. Top and bottom of the ladder, both of them eyed me. The silence grew until at last Hoop spelled out:

  “The Wobblies. They’d cut in on a strike, try to take it over if they knew it was coming.”

  “Send in infiltrators.” To hear Griff echo Typhoon Tolliver was an unnerving experience. I drew myself up.

  “As a mere bystander”—it was hard to tell if that registered on those walnut faces—“it appears to me the union council won the day, as you say. But what happens tomorrow?”

  The last word was Hoop’s. “Things go back to their normal confusion.”

  TRUDGING UPSTAIRS to my room to wash up before supper, I reflected again on that zigzag pattern of life. There I was, simply a hopeful empty-pocketed climber of the Richest Hill on the planet, and suspected of something more by nearly everyone except Rabrab, who usually saw connivance behind every mustache. At least, I told myself with a grim smile, tonight I could look forward to a meal not garnished with a goon.

  But when I opened the door, my room looked as if it had been visited by a typhoon.

  The bedding lay in a heap on the floor, the pillows flung onto the dresser top. The truly alarming thing, though, was the mattress, standing on its side and teetering toward me like a falling wall, while someone grunted in exertion behind it.

  “You thugs!” I cried, wildly fishing in my pockets for the brass knuckles, expecting the pointy-faced Anaconda man to burst from the closet while the bigger one mashed me with the mattress. “Get out of here or I’ll—”

  The mattress stopped its waggle. Around an edge, Grace’s face came into view. “Morrie!” She appeared as startled as I was. “Is it that time of day already?”

  “Room devastation time, you mean?” The brass knuckles swiftly pocketed out of her sight, I stepped toward the disarranged bed.

  “I’m glad you’re here, you can help me turn this mattress,” she said reasonably. “I do this every so often, so you don’t have to sleep on lumps.” I took an end and we flopped the mattress into place. As she unfolded fresh sheets she looked across at me curiously. “You came in sounding like you were declaring war. What were you so worked up about?”

  “Oh, that. Everything upset as it was, I thought I’d caught Hoop and Griff playing a prank on me,” I alibied. “Tossing the room—all boys do it, and aren’t they that at heart?”

  “They’re supposed to be painting the bad side of the house.”

  “I must have come around the other way.”

  Grace cocked an eyebrow. “‘Thugs’?”

  “The word comes from thuggee, Hindu for someone who sneaks around and, ah, does mischief to you.”

  She shook her head, making her braid dance. “I always learn something around you.”

  I made no answer. A fresh apprehension was coursing through me. Over in the corner of the disheveled room, my satchel was missing.

  Busily fluffing a pillow, Grace took a few moments to catch up to my alarmed gaze. “Oh. I had to move your bag out of the way. It’s in the closet.”

  Undisturbed or gone through? I nearly asked. Suspicion was the contagion of Butte; now I was the one catching it. For once I was glad my trunk was not there, to disclose any of its secrets.

  My landlady, dimpled with either innocence or guile, by now was done with the freshened bedding, the room miraculously back in order, and she announced she had better see to supper. “Grace?” I halted her before she could swish out the door. “You’ve been through the war of nerves between the men and the mining company before. What’s your sense of this one?”

  She bundled her hands in her apron as she considered my question. “My Arthur,” she invoked somberly, “used to say taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope its muzzle doesn’t come off.”

  THE SPEED OF SOUND is slightly less than that of a shock wave, and so the tremor in the dark of that night shook my bed, and every other in the city, a few instants before the noise of the blast arrived.

  Even foggy with sleep, I knew this was no usual detonation, no dynamiting at the depth of a glory hole. I stumbled to the hallway. Half-dressed, Hooper struggled from his room, yanking into the remainder of his clothes, while Griffith already was putting on coat and hat. At the head of the hall, Grace clutched her bedgown around her throat as she witnessed the exodus, then sent me an agonized look.

  She did not even have to deliver my marching orders aloud. I dressed hastily and set off with the limping pair of old boarders to the Hill.

  UP THERE, in the ghostly light of the headframes, a murmuring crowd was clustered around a mineshaft called the Flying Dutchman. When people gather from the nooks of a mining town to the surface of a disaster, they bring every degree of dread, and as the three of us edged through the throng I could feel the mood of apprehension, the air was sticky with it. Each arriving set of eyes, mine included, expected the sight of bodies laid out on the hard ground. But Griff and Hoop, pointing and muttering, saw at once this was no mineshaft accident, no explosion and flash of deadly flame deep in a tunnel. Instead, over near the machine house, beneath a now askew sign reading PROPERTY OF THE ANACONDA COPPER MINING COMPANY, the mine’s pay office stood open to the night, its front wall blown out.

  Blue-uniformed policemen were chiding the crowd to stay back, while burly civilian types who could only have been plainclothesmen prowled the blast site. Reporters were clamoring out questions and receiving no answers. Flash powder kept going off, the hollowed-out pay office in rinses of light that would put it on front pages all across the state.

  My companions were not impressed. “Mighty poor job of setting the dynamite,” either Hooper or Griffith appraised there in the deep shadows of the Hill.

  “Could’ve done that much with firecrackers, couldn’t we?” said the other.
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  To me, the building looked devastated enough, the huge ragged hole in its front displaying broken bricks like snaggled teeth. I moved closer to the skeptical experts. “Do I hear that this blast wasn’t up to your standards?”

  “The stupid pay office is still standing, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That’s no kind of a result, if you’re gonna blow something up.”

  “Waste of a good fuse and a match.”

  “But,” I wasn’t able to budge from the evidence of my eyes, “the front of the building is by and large gone.”

  “So what? They’ll get bricklayers in here in the morning and have it fixed back up before you can say boo.”

  “Spell this out for me, then,” I gave in. “How would someone who was an old hand at blowing things up have done it?”

  “All it would have taken,” Hoop explained patiently, “was to set the dynamite at the corner of the building.”

  “It’d slump over like a dropped cake,” Griff mused, practically smacking his lips as he envisioned it.

  By now the cloud of reporters and chain lightning of photography flashes were concentrated around one small circle of men next to the Flying Dutchman’s headframe. Even though I had expected something of the sort, my heart sank. As flash powder flared again, I saw in the glare the strong but strained features of Jared Evans in the midst of his beleaguered union officials. Although I had nothing to lend but moral support, I headed over.

  An arm slipped authoritatively through mine, nearly scaring the life out of me. “I just knew you’d show up, Mr. Morgan,” Rab’s warm voice was next to my ear. In stylish scarf and jumper, she cut an unlikely figure there in the industrial spoils of the Hill. With perfect prepossession, she assessed the cordon of newspapermen surrounding Jared and the other union men. “Look at the mob of them. They’re like pecking birds.”

  As the two of us sorted our way there in the semidark, we could hear the volley of questioning. Peppered from all sides as he was, Jared raised a hand for quiet.

  “We’re told no one was hurt,” he chose what to deal with and what not to. “Given that someone is killed in the working conditions in these mines every week of the year, in this nasty incident only bricks suffered any harm, for a change.”

  “Anaconda says provocation like this will make it take ‘all necessary measures’ to deal with a strike,” called out a newspaperman in a better topcoat than the others, which marked him as working for the Daily Post, the mining company’s mouthpiece. “What’s the union think of that?”

  “There is no strike,” Jared deliberately raised his voice above the clanks and clatters of the night shift in the other mines around. “When the miners of this hill go out, there’s never any mistaking it—you can hear the grass grow, up here. That’s it, gentlemen, no more chitchat, thanks.” To his council members: “I’ll catch up with you at the union hall. We’re in for a late night.” Jared’s expression had lifted measurably when he spotted Rabrab, and she and I skirted the pack of reporters to join him. As we did so, Rab “accidentally” tripped the Post man, sending him stumbling into an oily puddle and cursing at the splatter on that spiffy coat.

  Smiling tiredly, Jared chucked his feisty fiancée under the chin. “You’ll get us a big headline.”

  “They’ll smear you no matter what,” Rab predicted, “in that waste of ink they call a newspaper.” Making a face at the mangled pay office, she went on: “So the sneaks resorted to this. I suppose they think they’re clever.”

  “They’re not far from it,” Jared let out a slow breath of judgment. “They’ve put us in a hole about the size of that, for now.”

  By then I felt reasonably sure that in the company of Jared and his union followers, I was not in with dynamiters—even inept dynamiters. To catch up with the conversation, I contributed in a confidential tone: “The Wobblies, you mean. It’s in their interest to stir up all the trouble they can, so they did it with a bang, hmm?”

  Jared and Rab looked at me as though I were speaking in tongues. He shook his head. “If the Wobs wanted into this, they’d more likely blow up a machine house. Something that would really cripple this mine.”

  I was back to bafflement. “Then who?”

  “Mr. Morgan, put your thinking cap on,” said Rab. “It’s so obvious.”

  Weary as he was, Jared took pity on me. “Anaconda. Their goons. To blame it on the union.”

  THERE ARE MOMENTS in a lifetime when you can taste history as it is happening. When the flavor of time, from one hour to the next, somehow is not quite the same as any day before. So it was, at the start of the intense summer of 1919, as the miners of Butte and the mining corporation cooked up strategies against each other. Dickens should have been living in this hour to tell the tale of the two cities, the one of the neighborhoods of the Hill, and the other of the tall offices downtown, in the double-numbered year.

  The morning after the bombing of the pay office, along with breakfast Grace delivered a firm suggestion. “This might be a good day for everybody to stay in.”

  “How come, Mrs. Faraday?” Griff could have taught innocence to a cherub. “Nice weather, it’d be a shame not to take a little walk downtown.”

  Hoop went to the point: “We wouldn’t want to miss anything.”

  “And I suppose you,” Grace turned to me in exasperation, “are going to say the library will curl up and wither away if you’re not there.”

  “Not at all,” I said from behind my coffee cup. “But my job might, if I don’t show up as usual.”

  Off the three of us went, into the tense center of things. There is an atmospheric condition known as earthquake weather, a blanket stillness that forecasts a shaking-up; this day was like that. Hoop and Griff and I hiked up the Hill to that vantage spot of my first day in town and waited. With the city braced, with squads of policemen at the ready, we held our breath as it came time for the morning shift of miners to appear. They did so in eerie silence, the long files of men spilling into the streets of Meaderville and Centerville and Finntown and Dublin Gulch as if forming a somber parade. They marched toward the police lines with barely a murmur. And then turned in at the gates of the mines and went to work as if all was normal.

  AT SUPPER, Griff and Hoop were downcast and Grace was not serving up sympathy. “No blood in the streets, how disappointing. Jared Evans must be more sane than some I could mention.”

  “He’d better have something up his sleeve,” Griff said.

  THREE MORNINGS LATER, I rounded the corner of the library into a teeming streetful of miners and Sandison frowning down at them.

  I worked my way through the crowd, dropping questions as I went. Sandison met me at the top of the steps, looking even more disgruntled than usual. He drew me aside behind a pillar, while the library staff and the miners gawked back and forth. “What do the knotheads say?” he pumped me without preliminary. “Have they quit fooling around and actually gone on strike this time?”

  “Not as such,” I reported. “It’s another work action—just the morning shift, they told me.”

  “How many more times is this going to happen?” he demanded, as if I were in charge of that.

  Knowing Jared Evans, I put up my hands helplessly. “Doubtless as many as it takes. Wouldn’t you say it’s a tactic that goes back to Roman history, Sandy? You will recall the great delayer, Fabius Cunctator, who outgeneraled his foes with skirmishes that put off the climactic battle time after time. It appears to me that the union similarly is using these stoppages to wear on Anaconda’s nerves and—”

  “They’re practicing on mine, I can tell you that much,” he disposed of my discourse. “Are we running a library or a union hall?” Scowling at his own question, he heaved himself around for another look at the packed street. I barely caught the words in his gust of exhalation: “Oh, hell, let them in, Morgan.”

  FULL AS A CHURCH on Christmas, the library brimmed with activity, much of it mine as I sped from task to task. Sandison c
ommanded from the mezzanine, on the lookout for anyone forgetful enough to spit on the sacred floor, and things seemed to be going well until midway through the morning, when he flagged me down with the news:

  “Miss Runyon has gone home in a nervous fit, the excitement has been too much for her. You’ll have to take over the story hour.”

  “Now? How? Whatever short notice is, this is less.”

  “The tykes are on their way,” he overrode my protest. “You wouldn’t want to break their young hearts, would you?” Did the man actually have a sense of humor? I would have had to part that beard of his like a curtain to be sure. “Get yourself down there,” he ordered.

  I raced to the basement, hoping against hope that the auditorium’s supply cabinet held some storybook that Miss Runyon had in reserve for emergencies such as this. Rummaging frantically, I came up with a dog-eared Mother Goose Tales. Well, it wasn’t Aesop, but it would have to do. I breathed easier; from my experience in the one-room school, even jaded fifth-graders eavesdropped keenly enough when those old nursery tales were read to the younger children.

  Then I heard the thumps and scuffles on the stairs.

  By the time the freckled heathens of the sixth grade spilled into the room, with Rab riding herd behind them in a harried way, I had given up on Mother Goose. More like a rough-dressed horde than a class, boys and girls alike threw themselves into chairs and looked me over. Who’s this gink? I heard the loud whispers. How come so much of him is mustache? Where’s Old Lady Bunion?

  “Everyone, shush, or else,” Rab recited as if by rote, meanwhile shooing the final straggler in from the hallway. Pale as a chalk figure, Russian Famine slouched past her, sending me a prisoner’s gaze as he took the farthest seat of the last row.

  His classmates ignored him but not one another, pinching, poking, prodding, and generally provoking disorder. How well I remembered it all. Grade six somehow transforms obedient schoolchildren into creatures with the bravado of bandits and the restlessness of overage Sunday schoolers. Rabrab herself had turned into a schoolyard Cleopatra at that time of life; the Marias Coulee sixth-grade boys went dizzy in her presence. Now I watched her brightly approaching me, while behind her a pugnosed boy and a redheaded girl swatted each other over the issue of elbow room. If Rab, with her battlefield experience, couldn’t command best behavior from this bunch, what chance did I have? The dismaying thought occurred to me that, in Butte, perhaps this was best behavior.