Work Song Page 12

  “Mr. Morgan, what a treat,” her velvet murmur greeted me as we stepped aside to confer. “My pupils don’t know how lucky they are.”

  “I can see that. I was hoping for a second-grade choir of angels.”

  Rab wrinkled her nose at her squirming tribe. “They’re somewhat worked up today.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “The Hill is a little excitable this morning,” she hedged, “but Jared is only doing what he thinks is necessary.”

  “Maybe so. The question is, what am I to do with this mob of yours, Rab?”

  “Anything you like, as long as it teaches first aid,” she said contradictorily. “That’s a must—we don’t want the school board on our necks.” She thought to add: “Nor, I imagine, Sam Sandison.”

  I had forgotten the medical aspect. Seeing my blank look, Rab prompted: “Your Miss Runyon starts off with Florence Nightingale as a nurse in, oh, say the Crimean War, with shot and and shell whizzing everywhere, and somehow jumps from there to strapping one of the pupils up in bandages. Then, next story hour it is Florence Nightingale happening upon some awful accident in London, and—”

  “I get the picture.”

  There was nothing to be done but square myself up and advance to the stage of the auditorium. Restive in the seats below, the class eyed me like cub lions in the arena waiting for a Christian meal. So be it; I took off my suitcoat and tossed it to a surprised Rab, then rolled up my sleeves as if for a fight.

  “Blood,” I said in a tone practically dripping with it.

  The word did its work, for the moment at least. Two dozen sulky faces showed flickers of interest.

  “Blood is red as fire, and thicker than rain,” I did not let up. “Blood percolates secretly all through us, from finger to toe. It outlines our family, whom we speak of as our own flesh and blood. When we are afraid, we feel our blood run cold, and when we are angry, we are hot-blooded. No other substance carries the magic of life so tirelessly.” As I talked on, I pressed a set of fingers to my wrist. “The heart beats in its mysterious way, day and night, so blood never sleeps.” I finished taking my pulse. “While I have been speaking, my heart has pumped blood sixty times. If it had stopped doing so, back there when I rolled up my sleeves to test it, by now I would stand before you dead.”

  Several more heartbeats went by as my audience caught up with that. A litany of gasps, a lesser peal of nervous laughs. One girl crossed herself.

  Before such attention wore off, I swept my listeners through the Greek suppositions of Hippocrates and Galen—that blood simply sloshed in us like water in a jug—to William Harvey’s discovery that the substance in fact goes around and around. “The circulatory system, as it is called, sends this miraculous fluid circling through us.” There is a glaze that comes over a class if too much of a topic is pressed on them at one time, and I could tell from a first few restless feet and territorial elbows that I was reaching that limit.

  Folding my arms on my chest in thinking mode, I paced the stage. “Roll up your sleeves, everyone.” This was a gamble. Hardboiled boys and pouty girls among the group showed no inclination to do so. But Rab got on the job, patroling mercilessly, and soon enough I had a forest of naked arms in front of me.

  “There is a superstition that your life can be read in the palm of your hand,” I began, “but really, it is written there on the underside of your wrist.” I bustled them through taking their own pulse, emphasizing that the underskin rhythm was actually the contractions of arteries as blood was pushed through by the pumping of the heart. As intended, even the most heedless twelve-year-old could not ignore the message of existence there just beneath a surface barely thicker than paper. “And,” I rounded off the arm lesson, “the blood that keeps us going has to find its way back to the heart to be pumped again. See the blue tracings between your wrist and elbow? Each of those is a vein. A word you have heard at home, am I right? Your fathers and perhaps your brothers descend into the body of the earth to find those streaks of ore. If you think about it, copper is the blood of Butte.”

  As I said so, a part of my mind filled with visions of what lay ahead of these youngsters in this veined city. By all odds, at least one among the fresh-faced boys who would follow the family path into the mines would die underground in that relentless toll of a death a week. A greater number of their classmates in pigtails and curls, women-to-be, would experience perilous childbirth and the innumerable ills of the Hill. Yet others sitting here today would go on uneventfully to what passed for average life in Butte. Those flashes of precognition were hypnotic; I could see as if it were written in me the circlings of fate which would single these young lives out, as always happens in the human story, within the rushing bloodstream of time.

  “Mr. Morgan?” Rab prompted me out of my trance. “You were saying . . . ?”

  “Ah.” I scrambled for new ground. “Blood provides life to our language, too, doesn’t it. Shakespeare could scarcely write a page without bloodshed ahead or behind. Poets would have nothing to rhyme perfectly with flood.Who can tell me some everyday ways we use this essential word?”

  “Bloody murder!” blurted a freckled scamp who seemed to relish the thought.

  “Red-blooded,” a bossy girl overrode that, impatient at not having been first.

  “The blood of our Lord,” said a cauliflower-ear tough who nonetheless must have been an altar boy.

  “Bloodshot eyes!” rang out from one end of the increasingly enthusiastic audience, and from the other, “Blood poisoning!”

  Amid the hubbub came a muted utterance from the back row. Everyone looked around. I encouraged: “A little louder, please?”

  Russian Famine wriggled in his seat, scratched behind his ear, gazed over our heads as though that would make us go away, and finally muttered:

  “No getting blood out of a turnip.”

  “A well-known saying, thank you very much,” I honored that. Before I could get another word out, a hand was up and waving strenuously. Its owner was the impish enthusiast for bloody murder. “I perceive you have a question.”

  “Sure do. Back there a ways when you had us taking our pulse, how come we couldn’t do it on our veins just as good as on those archeries? ”

  “Clean out your ears, dummy,” the girl next to him jumped on that. “It’s not archeries. That’s bows and arrows. It’s arthries, like arthritis. Isn’t that right, Mr. Teacher?”

  “You are both nearly correct.” But not near enough. While explaining that the returning blood in veins was too dispersed to register a pulse, I despaired of ever making my words stick in minds as flighty as these. Then an idea hatched.

  “Miss Rellis?” Rabrab was startled to hear me call her that for the first time since she was the age of these students. “Do your young scholars ever sing?”

  “They most certainly do. Why?”

  “Can they sing this one?” I whistled a snatch of it.

  Confidently, Rab swept to the front to lead the command performance. “Class, serenade Mr. Morgan such as he has never heard.”

  Whether it was the song’s mischievous endorsement of betting on bobtail nags or the familiar sassy tune or simply the chance to bawl at the top of their adolescent voices, the sixth-graders attacked the old favorite with gusto, making the auditorium ring with the final galloping chorus:

  Camptown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah! Camptown racetrack’s five miles long, oh the doo dah day!

  “Unforgettable,” I said with a congratulatory bow to the class when the last high-pitched note had pierced the rafters. “And would you believe, the exact things we have been talking about go nicely with that same tune. Hum it for me and I’ll show you.” With the room practically vibrating to Stephen Foster’s jingle-jangle rhythm that practically anything can be fitted to, I improvised:

  Arteries and veins and pulse, heartbeat, heartbeat! They all deliver life to us, that’s the job of blood!

  “Ready to try it?” I challenged. They couldn’t be held bac
k. Rab looked radiant as the young voices romped through my version a number of times.

  “One last thing.” I rolled my sleeves down at the conclusion of the songfest. “At next week’s story hour, I am sure Miss Runyon will be happy to show you the knack of the tourniquet.”

  “I HOPE YOU DIDN’T do too much damage to the minds of the youngsters.”

  Sandison was back to prowling the mezzanine when I came upstairs. “Just imagine”—he swept a hand over the scene of the miners tucked in every conceivable sitting place in the Reading Room below—“if we had this kind of patronage on a usual day. The trustees would think we’re geniuses.” He looked resentfully at the Roman-numeraled clock high on the wall. “And at one minute past noon, ninety out of a hundred of our involuntary scholars will hightail it out of here to the nearest speakeasy. The poor fools.”

  “That’s an altogether gloomy view of humanity, isn’t it, Sandy?” I protested. “Surely a good many of the men apply their minds while they’re in here like this.”

  “Hah.” He rested his bulk against one of the grand bookcases, the gilt-edged works of George Eliot over one shoulder and Ralph Waldo Emerson over the other. “Let me tell you a story, Morgan.” A distant look came into those iceberg-blue eyes. “It was back when I was just starting out in the cattle business, before I could get things built up into the Triple S. I was wintering in by myself—Dora and I hadn’t been to a preacher yet. It was a bad winter, down around zero a lot of mornings when I’d have to pitch hay to the cows. Other than the feeding, I had all the time in the world on my hands, and the winter wasn’t half over before I’d memorized every damn word of all the reading material in the house.” He turned his hands up empty, still in the distance of remembering. “There wasn’t a library or bookstore in fifty miles in those days. The only neighbor was an old prospector, up a gulch a couple of miles away. I’d seen a beat-up copy of Robinson Crusoe in his cabin.” Sandison fixed his disturbing gaze on me. “You’re a bookworm, maybe you savvy: I had to have that book or go crazy. I saddled up to go get it. Snow was starting to come down heavy, but I didn’t give a damn, I wanted something to read. When I got there the old coot drove a hard bargain—I had to promise him a veal calf in the spring. Anyhow, he finally handed over the book and I wrapped it good in a piece of oilcloth and stuck it under my coat. Rode all the way home in a blizzard, and both ears were frostbitten, but I still thought it was worth it.” One more time he scowled down at the mineworkers, some of whom were starting to watch the clock. “See there? Do you think any of these would have gone through that for the sake of a book? Look at them, they’d rather educate their tonsils than their brains.”

  Maybe I thought he was scanting the capacities of the Quins and the Jareds and others from the Hill whose minds were as lively as could be asked for. Maybe I was still sailing on air after my session with Rab’s young minds. In any case, I indignantly invoked the bard of us all, presiding open-eyed as an owl above the entrance to the jam-packed Reading Room. “You leave me no choice but to bring down Shakespeare on you, Sandy. ‘The music of men’s lives’ is not so easy to call the tune of, we must remember.”

  At that, the expression under Sandison’s beard was unreadable, but the rest was plain enough. Shaking his head conclusively, he moved off toward his office, leaving these words over his shoulder: “You’re an optimist, Morgan. That’s always dangerous.”

  “YOU HAVE A CALLER.”

  Along with Grace’s knock on my door came the distinct note of curiosity in her tone. I was as inquisitive as she was. With my head still full from that day in the library, I could think of hardly anyone in the entire city who would be paying me a call here, with two shadowy exceptions. But Grace, of all people, would know an Anaconda goon when she saw one. Wouldn’t she? To be on the safe side, I made sure the brass knuckles were in my pockets before I went downstairs.

  The parlor was empty, as was the dining room; no caller, no Grace, anywhere.

  Just as panic was setting in on me, she called from the kitchen: “In here, Morrie. Your visitor is making me tired just looking at him.”

  At the first glimpse of my guest, I relaxed the grip on my weaponry. Dealing with a twelve-year-old may take a lot of one’s resources, but usually not brass knuckles.

  Skinny as the sticks of kindling in the woodbox behind him, in dusty patched pants and a hand-me-down shirt, Russian Famine was only barely occupying a chair, one leg jittering and then the other, ready to bolt. Grace, as usual in crisp apron and a dress so clean it practically squeaked, was looking at him as if one or the other of them was at the wrong costume party. So as not to confound her even further, I retrieved the boy’s given name with a smile: “Wladislaw, we meet again. What brings you?”

  Even his words were thin and fidgety. “Miss Rellis needs to see you. At that Poority place.”

  “It’s another long story,” I fended off Grace’s quizzical look. Gesturing toward our surprise caller, I made a supping motion. “Perhaps . . . ?”

  “Good heavens, yes.” She cut a thick slice of bread, put it on a plate, and set it in front of the famished-looking youngster. Pouring from the syrup can, she said, “Say when.”

  “I like it sogged.”

  The syrup pooled on the plate before the boy nodded. As he tucked in to the food, Grace wordlessly cut another slab of bread for him. I excused myself to fetch my hat from upstairs. When I came back down, Grace’s guest reluctantly licked his fork and edged out of the chair to go with me. “I may be a while,” I told her. “Skip me at supper.”

  “The larder can stand a chance to recover,” she bade us off, still looking mystified.

  Another side of Butte showed itself in the route I was now led on. With a nonchalance you might not expect in a sixth-grader, my guide took an immediate shortcut through Venus Alley. Overhead in one of the red-curtained windows, the sash was flung up and a woman in a kimono leaned out. “Hey, kid! How about running over to Betty the bootlegger’s and getting us a bottle of her best?”

  “I’m busy, can’t you see?” the boy called back importantly.

  “Then how about you, Mustachio? Come on up and we’ll cure what ails you.”

  “I’m busy keeping up with him,” I tipped my hat, “thank you very much anyway.”

  Block after block, we wound our way past buildings that put all their respectability out front, their back ends grimy with the detritus of coal chutes and the leavings of garbage. Around every other corner a view of the Hill was framed between brick walls, the tower over a mineshaft like a spiked ornament on the roof of the city. I could hear the throb of ore lifts and other machinery, so pronounced after the silence left behind when the morning shift walked off; Jared and his tactic of work actions was turning the Hill off and on like a master switch. If, that is, the Anaconda Company didn’t find a way to break his hold on the matter. Or already had. I wondered again why Rab was summoning me.

  Suddenly my hotfooted escort was talkative. “How come you work at the library ’stead of the schoolhouse? I was just telling Miss Rellis she’s the best teacher in the whole world and she said not as long as you’re on two legs.”

  That touched me deeply. Yet it also mandated an answer. “Life likes to surprise us, Wladislaw, and so—”

  “I hate getting called that,” he muttered, squirming as if to dodge the name. “It sounds too much like coleslaw.”

  “Russian Famine, then—”

  “Don’t like that no better. I ain’t any kind of a Russian. My unk says if we’re anything, it’s Glishians.” I tried to remember if Galicia was central to what the Europeans from time immemorial called the Polish Problem, and whether that part of Poland was another jigsaw piece on the table in front of Wilson and Clemenceau and Lloyd George as they sought to remake the world with the peace treaty. In any case, the Old Country was forever off the map of a peddler whose only ware was the sharpening of knives, and a skin-and-bones street tough nephew, wasn’t it. The thought clutched at me: the fostering places that w
e are exiled from, in the irreversible twists of life.

  Back to the question at hand, though. “Young citizen of the world, we are running out of possibilities—what would you like to be called?”

  He thought for the next some steps, slowing his pace to mine. “Famine ain’t too bad. It’d be one of those nicked names, huh?”

  Gravely I took off my hat and in due ceremony tapped him on a narrow shoulder with it. “By whatever authority is vested in me, I dub thee Famine.” He bounced a little higher his next couple of steps. “Now, then, Famine, as I was saying. Sometimes a person finds himself doing the unexpected. And so you give each job everything you have, but stay on your toes for what comes next. Isn’t it that way with you at school?”

  A shrug. “I guess. Miss Rellis’s flame says it’s the same in the army—now you’re peeling spuds and next thing you’re shooting back at somebody.”

  “Jared is at the Purity with her?”

  “Uh-huh.” The boy flopped his hair out of his eyes and looked around at me hopefully. “That sure was good about blood. Are you gonna do story hour some more?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, smiling. “That’s up to the man who runs the library.”

  “With all the whiskers? The one they call the Earl of Hell?”