Work Song Page 16

  “Switch!” cried the judge again, and like the flash team Hoop had told me they were, he and Griff switched jobs for the last stint of the quarter-hour contest.

  “If only they don’t kill themselves,” Grace breathed. My concern, too, with money thrown in. As the contest drew down, Hoop was red with effort. I ached in some of my parts just from watching his exertion. Yet the beat of his hammer stayed steady. By the time the judge shouted that they were coming to the final minute, I could see no measurable difference in the extent of the drills into the blocks of stone.

  Then, like a broken note between the rhythm of the hammers, came an anguished cry from Griff. His hand had cramped, freezing onto the drill and pulling him, bent by the pain, toward the path of the sledgehammer. Grace gasped and started to her feet and I vaulted toward the scene along with several other men. Hoop with miraculous presence of mind buckled his back leg at the last second, driving the hammer head into the dirt instead of Griff. The two of them stayed hunched that way, gulping for air, to the sounds of the Finnish team driving its drill the last inch to victory.

  IN THE AFTERMATH, Grace and I consoled Hoop. Griff was avoiding everyone, staring at the hand that had betrayed him. I saw him wipe his eyes with his shirttail. “We’ll see you at breakfast,” Hoop told us wearily as we watched Griff disappear, shoulders bowed, into the holidaying crowd. “He’s gonna need some liquid refreshment to get over this. Me, too.”

  “I’M SPENT,” Grace sighed, sounding already wistful when we ended our stay after a silent last tour of the gardens.

  “Wait, we have to see how we’re immortalized.” I plucked the photographer’s result out of the envelope I’d picked up at the amusement park exit and she pressed close to me. At the sight, we both burst out laughing and teasing. She claimed I looked like a scared preacher, and I expressed amazement that Queen Marie of Romania had got into the picture with me.

  “Such a day, Morrie,” Grace wound down as the trolley back to town toddled along the tracks to us. Her violet eyes sought mine. “I feel as if I’ve been on that roller coaster with our star runner.”

  With a pensive smile to match hers, I provided my arm to help her up the step as the trolley rattled to a halt. “I know the feeling.”

  9

  Now we can get back to business,” Sandison met me with as the staff reluctantly queued up on the library steps to be let in, the morning after. “I never have understood the meaning of holiday. Didn’t have time for loafing of that sort on the ranch. Cows never took time off from eating.”

  “The nomenclature, Sandy, I think you’ll find goes back to Middle English—the term recognizably became ‘holy day,’ and subsequent centuries of quickening pronunciation have given us—”

  “Damn it, Morgan, did I ask for the history of the universe? Didn’t think so.” His shaggy gray eyebrows knitted, he contemplated me in either amazement or extreme irritation, it was always hard to tell which. “You have the damnedest brainbox ever created, I swear. Anyhow, get yourself caught up on the usual chores”—a near impossibility the way he kept adding to them—“the next couple of days. I have something I want you to do. Tell you when the time comes.”

  GRACE HAD BEEN QUIET as a mouse at breakfast, as had I, out of respect for the kingsize hangovers Hoop and Griff brought to the table. I was unprepared, then, when I came home from the library and heard the urgent stage-whisper from the kitchen: “Hsst. In here, Morrie.”

  Expecting to perform an act of rescue on whatever was cooking for supper, I stepped in and found Grace miserably seated at the kitchen table, her face a smeared mask of white. A bottle of calamine lotion was standing ready for more application. Wrapped around her forehead was a rag soaked, according to its eye-stinging odor, in vinegar. Not that I needed any further evidence, but the red welts on any inch of her skin not yet daubed with calamine told me I was seeing a prime case of hives.

  “What on earth—?” I sat down quickly and reached over to hold her hand, trying madly to think what to do beyond that. If the goons had shown up here on a glory hole mission despite my warning, I was going to have to find some way to make them regret it; I did not look forward to that. She continued to gaze at me with a forlorn expression, her eyes smarting from the acrid vinegar cloth, which, truth to tell, did not seem to be cooling her troubled brow appreciably. “Grace, you have to put it into words. What’s the matter?”

  “You are.”

  This was worse than if she had said, “The goons were here, breathing fire.” My hand withdrew. Apprehensively, I asked, “How so?”

  “By being you, whoever, whatever—” She started to scratch her arms, thought better of it, and instead dug her elbows into the table and leaned practically flat across to confront me. “I tossed and turned all night trying to figure out who am I with when I’m with you. Take yesterday. One minute I’m on the arm of someone I enjoy thoroughly”—her reddened eyes blinked more rapidly at that emotion—“and the next, you’re gambling away money like you’re feeding the chickens.”

  “Russian Famine won by at least eleven yards,” I pointed out.

  “All right, then,” she said, no less miserable, “half the time when you’re busy getting rid of any wrinkled money, the wind blows a little back.”

  Still trying to catch up, I asked hoarsely: “What brought this on? Just a few bets I happened to place when the opportunity seemed ripe?”

  Wordlessly she gazed past me, through the kitchen doorway, to the wedding portrait on the sideboard, and my heart sank. The ghost of Arthur hovered in from the next room, and how could I ever compete with such a paragon of domestic virtue? Her whitened, rag-wrapped countenance as tragic as a mummy’s, Grace leaned farther toward me as if to deliver that verdict more fiercely. But what came out was practically a whisper.

  “Arthur was a betting man.”

  Silence followed this shocking news. Grace sat back as if exhausted, scratched under an arm, and with an angry swipe slathered on more calamine. I still was trying to imagine which competitions of skill so manly a miner would be enticed to wager on. “Boxing matches? Drilling contests?”

  “Dogs.”

  My jaw dropped. “Believe me, I never have and never shall put money on the velocity of a canine.”

  “Arthur was hopeless about it,” she half-whispered again, her voice carrying the strain of the memory. “He would be perfectly fine for a while, bringing his wages home, sweet as anything. Then would come a payday when he didn’t show up for supper and I knew he’d gone to the dogs again. The races, that is.” She folded her arms, wincing as she did so. “And there you were yesterday, one minute as perfect a companion as a woman could ask for, and the next, behaving as if you were trying to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Which one is the real you? I can’t tell from one moment to the next whether you’re the best creature that ever wore pants, or, or—I don’t know what.” Her tirade ran down. “How can a person ever hope to get a straight line on you, Morrie?”

  I nervously smoothed my mustache, dreading where this was leading. It had to be faced, it always does.

  “Grace”—I used her name as if patting it before putting it away for good—“I don’t know any cure for being myself. The lotion for that hasn’t been concocted yet.” The next had to be said past the lump in my throat. “Do you want me to pack my satchel and go?”

  No man is a hero to his butler, it is said; nor is any boarder a model of perfection to his landlady. Grace Faraday straightened up and scrutinized me, blinking harder. “If I had a lick of sense, I should push you out the door right now, shouldn’t I.” As I watched, her dubious self struggled with the proprietorial side of her. “But when you’re not a pile of trouble, you’re no trouble. You’re on time with the rent every week, although heaven knows how. You aren’t a steaming drunk, at least since you gave up wakes. You don’t throw a fit when dynamite goes off under the place. And Griff and Hoop don’t seem to drive you crazy. That counts.”

  Had she been ticking these off on her finge
rs, she now was out of fingers. Looking as doubtful as she sounded, she concluded:

  “For now, you may as well stay. One more thing, though. We need to be as clear as we can about each other. Yesterday was too, um, too forward of me, Morrie, and it wasn’t really fair to you.” Something more than an itch was making her chalky face twitch. “You shouldn’t get the wrong idea and feel . . .” There she faltered.

  “Taken up with,” I finished for her, and I was surprised at how sad it sounded.

  THIS WAS ONE of the nights of the week when I had to go back to the library and lock up after the evening groups, and I trudged off to do it with the old weight of disappointment on me.

  First Rose, now Grace. Rejection as soon as someone personable and pretty took a good look into me, whatever it was they thought they saw.

  Women were the fairer sex? What was fair about their fingersnap judgments of me? Even Sandison, grumpy and flatfooted around women, had found someone to put up with him, the redoubtable Dora. While my best efforts caused them to dust their hands of me or break out in hives.

  I felt lonely as a castaway, and, what was worse, from present indications I had better get used to it.

  My acidic mood was at odds with the gentle summer dusk, spreading down from the Hill over the brick canyons of the city, casting the streets into picturesque shadow. That sank through to me, and a couple of times I whipped into a doorway and looked back. There was no sign of goons, at least. Brass knuckles seemed to get the job done, although I couldn’t see how to apply that to courtship.

  In the library basement when I arrived, the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle was still going strong. A balding young man with the look of a bank clerk was onstage, reciting in round tones: “. . . now when heaven holds starry night in its keep / and on moonlit Olympus, the Muses gently sleep.” Ordinarily I am all in favor of the Muses, but tonight I shooed the literature lovers mercilessly, and they filed out of the auditorium in shy pairings. The big room echoing with emptiness now, I was stacking away the chairs when I heard a single set of footsteps rapid on the stairs. The goons always traveled as a pair. Or did they? Just in case, I hefted a chair, ready to hurl.

  “What the devil,” Jared stopped short as he came through the doorway and saw me with the chair in my hands, “are you cutting the janitor out of his job?”

  “It’s his lodge night, so he’s excused early,” I said crossly. “My employer has a habit of bending the rules for this, that, and the other, except where I’m concerned.”

  “You need a union,” he joked, or not, lending a hand with the stray chairs. He looked at me curiously. “That poor thing who’s your landlady told me you’ve about taken up residence in the library.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I imagine. Anyway, I’m glad I could track you down.” He glanced around to every corner of the auditorium even though we were alone. “Any luck with you know what?”

  “Luck is the residue of endeavor, in some situations,” I responded, still not in my best mood. “Come on up to the office.”

  Our footsteps were magnified in the empty darkened building as we went upstairs, and I sensed Jared was jumpy in the unfamiliar surroundings. But if situations were reversed, I would not be particularly at ease in a mineshaft, would I. When I switched on a light in the office, he stayed by the door and took everything in. “So this is the lion’s den.” His gaze came to rest on me, with that flavoring of curiosity again. “I have to hand it to you, you’ve got guts, holed up in here with him all day long. I’ve heard about old Triple S since I was a kid.”

  “He hasn’t taken my head off my shoulders, so far,” I muttered, my attention on the contents of the hiding spot in the cabinet where the ledgers were kept, the one place I was sure Sandison would not go near now that he had shed the bookkeeping to me. I brought out the pink sheets and my pages of calculations of each mine’s differential between raw tons of ore and tally of processed copper. “Is this what you had in mind?”

  Not wasting a moment, Jared laid out my pages on the nearest desk—Sandison’s—and ran his finger down the figures. When he reached my totals, he pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and compared. His whoop startled me, and probably the pigeons on the library roof. “You’ve nailed it! Anaconda’s been feeding us low numbers on the finished copper. We’ll give them holy hell in the negotiations now and they won’t even know how we figured it out.” Exuberantly he batted my shoulder. “Rab thinks you’re the greatest thing going. I’m starting to see why, Professor, if I can call you that.”

  “I’m flattered, I suppose.”

  As the two of us headed downstairs, I could make out just enough of Jared in the library’s moonlit atmosphere to know he could hardly wait to turn the tables on Anaconda. Now I was curious. “You have the lost dollar back. What are you still negotiating about so urgently?”

  “You name it. Working conditions. Hiring and firing. Safety.” His voice turned hollow. “On first shift, just this morning, one of our men in the Muckaroo was killed when a tunnel roof fell in on him. Left a wife and six kids.” I recalled his delivering the union tribute—cash and consolation—to the widow at my first wake as a cryer; again and again, from the sound of it, he faced that duty.

  Mustering himself now, Jared went on with what he had been saying. “All of it causes bad feelings in the union. There are those who say getting the wage back is what counted, let’s don’t beat our heads against the shed on these other matters until we get some pay-days behind us. And then there’s plenty who are ready to shut down the Hill again like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if the company doesn’t give us every last thing we want.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “Professor?” In the splendid acoustics—we were in the foyer by now—he sounded like a messenger of fate in a Greek drama as he laid matters out. “I wouldn’t guess you’re a military man at heart, but you maybe know what an accelerated march is. It covers ground a lot faster than parade cadence, but it’s not a run that makes your tongue hang out. That’s about what I’m trying for. We can’t let up much on Anaconda or things slip back. But we’re never going to turn copper mining into a picnic, no matter what we try. Either way, as I see it, those of us on the council have to keep things moving, just fast enough.” The next came out as if he were thinking to himself. “Particularly now.”

  When I halted short of the front door and gave him a questioning look, Jared hesitated. “All right,” he granted, “Rab will probably blab this to you if I don’t. Anaconda isn’t our only problem—we’re scrambling to stay ahead of the Wobblies. The word is, they’re going to make a big push to take away our members.” He tilted his head to one side as if trying to see the situation from a fresh angle. “Who knows, if things had been different, maybe I’d be on their side. But I was born a union man. The union stuck up for the workingman on the Butte Hill all those years, every day of my father’s life when he went down into the mine. The Wobs always say they would, too, and take over the mines and everything else besides.” He shook his head. “I don’t trust that, Professor. It would go to hell in no time, I think. Look at Russia. The Bolshies did away with the Czar, and now they’re knocking off anybody they don’t like the looks of.”

  I just listened, Jared needing to get the weight of fate off his chest; he had earned the right in the trenches that were the maw of the Great War.

  “I have to hand it to the IWW,” he was saying ruefully, “they’re a persistent damn bunch. The last time they sent a bigtime organizer in here, the goons hung him from the railroad trestle. Lynched him. The old remedy, the Montana necktie.” With a laugh that had no humor in it, he gazed around at the grandeur of the library as though wondering how it and a lynching site a dozen blocks away could exist in the same realm of time. “Maybe I have Wobs on the brain,” he mused. “That one at the parade yesterday, singing that damn thing?” Jared Evans startled me again by mimicking, quite presentably, the phantom voice that had mocked the parading
miners’ union with pie in the sky, when you die. He banged his head with the heel of his hand. “It gets in there and I can’t get it out.”

  “It’s called a mnemonic effect,” I informed him. “Something that prompts remembering, usually voluntary but not necessarily. A musical phrase is particularly suited. For instance, ‘Camptown—’ ”

  At the library door now, Jared put up his hands to hold off my discourse.

  “I appreciate the definition. But I’ll just call it trouble. Good night, Professor.”

  I WAS WARY in every direction I could think of, those next few days. But there was no sign of lurking goons, and on the home front, Grace—still a picture of misery, under the ghostly layer of lotion—did not come up with any further charges against my personality. She and I were painfully polite with one another, to the point where Hoop and Griff grew nervous around us. They talked a blue streak at meal-times to cover our silences, and while I learned a lot about assorted topics of interest to retired Welsh miners, it was a relief each morning to go off to work at the library.

  Until, that is, the pertinent day when Sandison spun around in his chair as soon as I stepped into the office and announced, “Morgan, it’s time we get some ammunition to use on the trustees.”

  I knew “we” meant me, so I simply cocked my head to listen.

  “You’ve done a good enough job of balancing the ledger, the board can’t find anything to kick about in there,” he went on. “Now they’re fretting about where the money is going to come from for new carpets, all the wear and tear we’ve had in here lately. I keep telling them any board of trustees worth its name would just pony it up, but they want to steal it out of the book budget, the damn thieves.”