Work Song Page 14
“Are you expecting a hailstorm?” I asked with a straight face.
Hoop proudly tapped his headpiece. “The Hill tried to knock my brains out any number of times, but nothing ever got past this lid. Anymore we only wear it the one day a year, don’t we, Griff.”
Telling me they had to form up early with the other marchers or spend the entire parade looking at hundreds of behinds, the pair hustled out while I waited for Grace to come down from her room. With the Hill not operating due to the holiday, a stillness had settled over the city, and the boardinghouse was in rare quiet. A silent room that is not your own tends to breed long thoughts. Around me now, the boardinghouse’s furnishings seemed to sit in arrested attitude, as if arranged in a villa in Pompeii. The mood of timeless deliberation drew me in and I became more aware than ever of the wedding photograph on the sideboard, where Arthur Faraday stared levelly at me. Something in that everlasting straight gaze reminded me of Casper, likewise gone too early from life and a bride who idolized him. Introspection is a rude visitor. An unsparing look into myself went to the heart, in more ways than one. I know myself fairly well: I am solo by nature. Incurably so, on the evidence thus far. But what a hard-eyed trick of fate—perhaps reflected in Arthur’s stare?—if I was destined, around women, always to be a stand-in for better men.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I heard Grace behind me, her footsteps quick on the stairs. “I had about forgotten how to dress up.”
I turned to look at her, and looked again. She had gone some, in Griff’s phrase for it. Her hair was done up in a crown braid, and atop that sat a broad-brimmed summer hat with a nice little swoop to it and a sprig of red ribbon. Her dress, attractively tailored to her compact form, was of a sea green with a shimmer to it. Even her complexion had a new glow, assisted by just enough rouge to give her cheeks a hint of blush.
“Very nice,” I fumbled out.
“You, too,” she managed.
With Arthur in the room, we stood there, shying away from further compliments, until she remembered to check the clock. “We should get a move on,” landlady back in her voice, “everyone turns out for the parade. I hope we can still find a place to see.”
“Spare yourself that worry,” I rallied. “I know just the spot.”
MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD, the populace of Butte lined the downtown streets a dozen thick. I shouldered a way for us, Grace with a grip on the tail of my coat, to the block by the library. She looked dubious as I led her past people picnicking on the steps to the big arched doorway. “Isn’t the library closed for today?”
“Except to the privileged.” I displayed the key.
We slipped in, the ornate front door sweeping closed behind us. Inside the thick walls, the din of the outside world was shut out. The foyer, its Tuscan paneling and dark timbered beams as royal as ever, stood staidly empty. I glanced up to see whether Shakespeare winked at us as we passed through the Reading Room doorway, and he may have. Grace gazed around the elegant quiescent chamber with a trace of awe, and then at me. “Sam Sandison must trust you.”
“Mmm, I suspect he simply doesn’t want me to have any excuse day or night for not being in here doing all the things he piles on me to do.”
As we passed through the Reading Room, I could not help but stop for a minute and run my eyes over the mezzanine’s ranks of books, silent but eloquent. I was smitten every time by the finest collection west of Chicago, and to have its literary riches almost to myself this way seemed like a scene in a dream. Housed in their volumes, the souls of writers waited in this great room to come out into the light of day. I would not have been surprised right then if Joseph Conrad materialized at the railing like a stalwart first mate on the deck watch, or Emily Dickinson came tiptoeing out of the shelves to peer down to the unattainable life below.
“My. It’s so different in here without anyone around, isn’t it.”
“Grace, you needn’t whisper.”
“Oh, right.” She trilled a laugh in relief. “If you promise not to shush me.”
A last lingering moment, I gazed at the varicolored bindings as a person would cast a final glance at the jeweled colors of a cathedral window. Then I motioned Grace to the stairway, but she stayed as she was, studying me. “This is the love of your life, isn’t it. What’s in these books.”
“I suppose it is,” I conceded. “As the phrase goes, for better and for worse.”
OFF THE CORRIDOR to Sandison’s office was a small balcony, like a flex in the stonework over the main entrance’s keystone arch, and the parade coming down Broadway would pass practically beneath us. Grace went straight to the balustrade and took a full look around, adjusting the swoop of her hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. Smiling her best, she plucked at the cuff of my suitcoat. “This is such a treat, you devil.”
The rising roar from the street announced that things were under way. The copper capital of the known world knew how to stage a spectacle. Everything in shoes walked in the parade. The lodges—Masons, Elks, Templars, Odd Fellows, you name it—all of them sashed, some plumed. The firemen, prideful of their new hook-and-ladder Ford. The suffragists, resolute with their signs championing the correction to the Constitution that would give women the vote. The trade unions, and in Butte that was every trade; bakers, tailors, cooks, carpenters, even blacksmiths went by with their banners in the breeze. Most groups were led by a drum, the boom of march step resounding off the buildings. Then behind those marchers came the big horses, the brass of their harnesses gleaming, pulling delivery vans of every sort, and other horse-drawn conveyances polished up for the occasion. A traveling carnival, calliope and all, rolled past in gold-spoked wagons; a stiltwalker ambulated by nearly at eye level with us. The next group on wheels were putt-putting automobiles with dignitaries trying to maintain dignity in the herkyjerky progress.
Eventually, more pedestrianly, came contingents of schoolchildren. Rab, gaily dressed, went by in charge of a flock of beribboned girls representing her school. She spotted me, waved, and blew me a kiss. Grace looked at me with a slightly raised eyebrow. “She must have been quite something as a girl.”
By now the Miners Day processional had gone on for a considerable time, and I leaned out to see how much more there could possibly be. “Good heavens!” was all I could say.
Bearing down on us was what looked like an army of toy soldiers magnified to heroic size. Each marching man wore a uniform of emerald green with gold-thread embossing across the chest and down the sleeves, and their cap visors were set identically low to their brows. The mix of gaudy uniforms and shiny musical instruments suggested an orchestra conscripted onto the stage of an operetta. As the marching mass neared the library, its leader spun in his tracks and, walking backward, lifted his arms. Instantly instruments sprang to lips, and at his signal, a Sousa march roared to life. Sun glinted off a tuba, the extensions of trombones, the squadron of cornets. The bass drums produced a beat that could be felt on the body.
“The Miners’ Band,” Grace managed to make herself heard into my ear. “They’re nationally known. Not for lullabies, as you might guess.”
And in the wake of the powerful music, here came the miners in their hundreds and hundreds, beneath a forest of banners with the union council proudly at the front. Leading them with his level stride was Jared Evans, in suit and tie and a snappy hat that might as well have been a crown. With his triumph in the wage battle, he was the hero of the day; Caesar coming home to Rome after victory could have received no greater tribute from the crowd. Grace and I added our cheers. The banners dipped and rose and swirled in back of Jared and the other council members, where the ranks of men who worked in the mineshafts stretched for blocks, each national group distinct to itself as I had seen them that first day on the Hill, but now scrubbed and tidied and in their best clothing. We strained to see, and tucked in between the Finns and the Serbs were the retired miners, with Griffith and Hooper and dozens of stooped replicas all in their vintage helmets.
By now
the band had wheeled about and strutted back, facing the mineworkers. The resplendent bandleader lifted his arms and everything halted. He bowed from the waist toward the council, and a great cheer went up for the union and the restored wage. The other council members pushed Jared, grinning and not objecting too much, out for recognition by himself. The bandleader spun, up went the arms, and in tribute the band thundered into the mighty Welsh anthem “Men of Harlech.”
Men of Harlech, march to glory!
Victory is hov’ring o’er ye!
Bright-eyed freedom stands before ye—
Hear ye not her call?
“I’ve never been within five thousand miles of Wales,” Grace was sniffling when it was over, “and that old thing always makes me want to bawl.”
I was somewhat misty myself. “A very wise man once said mankind’s two great magics are words and music.”
Meanwhile Jared had doffed his hat to the band and the crowd, and the marchers were starting to shuffle into motion again.
Then it happened.
From somewhere, perhaps an alley or a rooftop, came a lone singing voice, just short of a yodel but with a devilish lilt to it. The refrain sliced through the parade mood:
Wear the copper collar,
Swallow dirt for your dollar.
You’ll get pie in the sky
When you die.
Jared looked up as if the mocking ditty had hit him like an arrow. A squad of policemen at the intersection, whom I had assumed were on hand to hold back the crowd, jumped into action toward where the derisive singing seemed to come from. Before they made much headway, the invisible songster was at it again.
Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie in the sky
When you die.
Now a couple of the council members shouted to the bandleader, a march tune was struck up, and the parade slowly snaked into motion once again. Looking back from now, what strikes me in the whole episode was that although I had never heard the pie-in-the-sky stanza before, I knew its origin almost from the first few insidiously catchy notes. So did Jared, according to his reaction. That kind of serenade rose straight from the Little Red Songbook.
“That’s Butte for you.” Grace had been waiting as patiently as she could for me to return to myself. “The top of the world one minute, the glory hole the next.”
NOW IT WAS her turn to surprise. With the parade over, I assumed we would follow the crowd to the next attraction, down at the depot. Butte was a regular stop for political speakers traveling through, in that ritual of a suspender-bursting oration from the rear platform of a train. Today’s portable statesman was the imported variety, Eamon de Valera, a leader in Ireland’s struggle against British rule, and judging by the sprigs of green in lapels and bonnets of everyone rushing by us, Dublin Gulch was avalanching off the Hill to hear him. Grace, though, firmly headed us the other direction. She would not tell me our destination—“You know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?”—as we bundled onto a trolley. All I saw ahead as the trolley tracks continued past the outskirts of the city were mine dumps and the wall of mountains that topped out at the Continental Divide. Yet Grace and the other holiday-goers packed in with us were as merry as if we were bound for paradise.
The last stop on the line, in the tuck of a valley at the foot of the mountains, may not have been my notion of paradise, but it was somebody’s idea of a fantasy land. We stepped off into an enormous amusement park, with COLUMBIA GARDENS spelled out in floral design against an entire hillside. Everything but the flowers seemed to be in excited motion. As I tried to take it all in, a roller coaster galloped through the treetops, and beyond, a Ferris wheel spun against the sky. Across acres and acres of the only green grass I had seen since coming to Butte, there were picnic groves; a playground featuring a brilliantly striped maypole and high-flying swings and a labyrinth of monkey bars; a merry-go-round; a zoo; a baseball diamond; a boxing ring; a trout pond; flower gardens; on and on. And the populace of the city had arrived in force to absorb the pleasures, it looked like. There is an unforgettable painting by Bruegel of swarms of children, serious about their fun, each bunch engaged in a different game and oblivious to the larger world. This panorama was like that.
Directly ahead from where Grace and I stood was a huge central pavilion, vaguely Italianate, surrounded by a soda parlor and other refreshment stands. “Pinch me,” I told her, “I seem to have been whisked off to Coney Island. Who runs this?” She only gave me a certain kind of look.
“Don’t tell me,” I groaned. “The Anaconda Company.”
“You’re getting better at the facts of life,” she awarded me.
The extravaganza surrounding us, then, was the other side of the copper coin, at least for this one day. Shaking my head at the turnabout of Anaconda’s conduct, I asked Grace what she would like to do first. “Stroll the gardens,” she chose without hesitation. “I haven’t had an outing like this since—it’s been a few years.”
For as long as there are men and women, some things in life will best be done arm in arm, and strolling a flower garden is one. We exclaimed together at a hillside burst of blooms planted in the design of a giant lyre, as if a Gulliver had temporarily laid aside his music-making. Grace’s grip on my arm was an exclamation in itself as we happily competed in naming off blossoms while we walked. Under the spell of the aromatic surroundings, we soon were sharing more than just the pleasure of the day. Grace’s story was entirely rooted in Butte, I learned. “The mapmakers don’t get rich on some of us, Morrie.” To help support the family she had been a bucket girl, selling sandwich lunches from a pail as the men trooped to the mines on the Hill. There she caught the eye of a young miner on the same shift with her father; Arthur Faraday, as patient as he was gallant, had his reward when she reached marriageable age. The toils of Butte took her parents before their time—heart and lungs worked to death—leaving the young couple the gift of property. I listened raptly, the makings of a life always casting a spell on me. “We thought we had it made, Arthur and I, with the house in our name and his job in the Speculator.” Instead, the fire, the worst in American mining history, widowed her overnight. There had been no children. “Nature did not provide.” Left on her own, Grace used what resource she had—the house—and boarders such as present company were the result. “You and the matched pair are good about the rent,” she patted my arm, “but it’s still a hard go. The taxes and the upkeep and all. I get by, though. No sense in waiting for my ship to come in when there’s none in sight, I’ve decided.” She tilted her head in my direction, putting the question lightly enough. “What about yours, is the library it? You seem at home there.” I cocked the same kind of look to her. “Do I? I don’t always have the Butte Public Library all to myself, understand.”
We laughed, duly self-conscious about the day’s unexpected glimpses into each other. So much private time on the most public day of the year surely was too good to last. “Aren’t Hoop and Griff joining us?” I checked. “It’s not like them to miss this kind of spree.”
“They’re off to their own pursuits, they told me,” Grace reported in that tone of fond exasperation the pair customarily produced in her. All at once she clutched my arm hard enough to leave a mark. “Look, dear!”
Companionable as our promenade was, I was surprised silly by the sudden endearment. I had to wonder if I was keeping up with developments. Was this a forward side of Grace Faraday, hitherto hidden in the house rules of landlady and boarder? Then, thoroughly abashed, I saw the deer she meant, several does and fawns flitting through a stand of blue spruce in the near distance.
“Cutlets on the hoof,” I jested feebly and drew a swat on the arm, but also Grace’s teasing smile.
Something surprising seemed to be the constant at Columbia Gardens. Fresh riots of flora in exuberant designs kept showing up as we strolled. Around any curve of the path, we were apt to be met with flower-holding ceramic gnomes of the European sort. And down
at a pond off to our side, evincing great interest in the ducks, was Typhoon Tolliver.
There in broad daylight, the awful sensation of being stalked by shadows came over me. Luckily, Grace was distracted by the next riot of flowers. Taking a neck-stretching look around as if I could not get enough of admiring the grounds, I caught sight of Eel Eyes behind us, lurking around a corner of the soda fountain.
Apprehension rose in me like the mercury in a thermometer with a match under it. There is no law that goons have to take holidays like the rest of us, but why was this pair of dunces on my tail at all? The miners and the Anaconda Company were at peace, at least temporarily. Were Typhoon and his sidekick simply in the habit of following my every move? Whatever the notion in their thick heads, I didn’t like it.
I scanned around some more. Back toward the pavilion and its huddle of refreshment stands, a photographer with his hood and flash powder was busily taking pictures of posing couples. “Let’s,” I said, pointing. “What’s a day like this without a keepsake? My treat.”
Grace hesitated, no doubt hearing from the spirit of Arthur. Verve won out. She primped her extensive hat and provided me a practice smile. “I suppose we shouldn’t let all this gussying up go to waste.”
The waiting line to be photographed was considerable, as I was counting on. “You hold our place,” was my next proposal. “How about a root beer fizz?”
“Morrie, are you made of money all of a sudden?”
“I hope you’re not turning down a root beer fizz.”
“Of course not.”
Off I strode, nonchalantly enough, to the soda parlor and its line of customers. The instant the angle of the building concealed me from Eel Eyes, I darted around to the back.