Work Song Read online

  “Digging, you mean?”

  “Nope. Mucking.”

  I waited, but that seemed to be the entire explanation.

  “Griff, really, not only aren’t we anywhere in the same pew on any of this, we’re not even in the same church. The best thing I can see for us to do is to go back and get on that elevator and—”

  “Don’t worry none, you’ll get the hang of mucking in no time.”

  That turned out to be true if a person had brains enough to operate a shovel. The loose ore strewn on the floor of the ledge had to be scooped—“mucked out,” in Griff’s terminology—into those ore cars waiting in the tunnel.

  “We might as well get at it. The sooner done, the sooner finished,” he philosophized unarguably.

  We commenced shoveling. Copper ore proved to be the peacock of rocks, mottled blue and green showing off the mineral wealth within. I was up to my shoetops in the wealth of the Richest Hill on the planet, but in raw lump form. As the task heated up, with Griff tossing two shovelfuls to my every one, he remarked sympathetically:

  “It’s kind of tough on the muscles at first. Some people can’t stay with it.”

  “I can sweat with the best of them.”

  “Sweating isn’t necessarily the same as hard work, in my experience.”

  That pricked my pride. “I’ll have you know, I am not a total stranger to manual labor.”

  He eyed me. “Lately?”

  There he had a point. As time wore on, I wore down. I thought our amount of copper-bearing rock flung into the ore cars was heroic, but Griff was not inspired by it. He shook his head reminiscently. “Hoop and me could fill an ore car while other guys was standing there thinking about it.”

  “I’m not the second coming of Hoop,” I panted.

  Just then a baby-faced flunky stuck his head above the edge of the ledge. “Jared says to tell you,” he piped in a high voice, “the shifter is coming through.”

  The youngster vanished while that was still sinking in on me. “Quick!” Griff rubbed dust on my face, even though I already felt grimy as a coal stoker. “Keep those lily hands of yours out of sight.”

  We heard the crunch of heavy footsteps, and then the shift foreman came climbing the ladder to us. Our helmet lights dimly lit the chamber as he stepped in. Long-faced and gray-mustached, he had the same miner’s stoop as Griffith; they leaned toward each other like apostrophes. “Griff, you old poot. I heard you were on the extra gang—can’t stay away, eh?”

  “You know how it is, Smitty. It gets in your blood.”

  I was standing back as far as I could in the shadows. It didn’t help. The shift boss cocked an unblinking look in my direction. “Who’s this? ”

  “Hoop’s kid,” Griff said blandly. “He’s trying his hand as a fill-in. Been down on his luck, haven’t you, Junior.” He confided as if I weren’t there: “A little too much of the booze.”

  The shift boss shook his head. “The company let us know it doesn’t want stew bums down here anymore. These aren’t the old days, Griff.”

  Trying to backtrack from his mistake, Griff scuffed at the mine floor. “Aw, Smitty. What am I gonna tell Hoop, that our old buddy from when we was all working in the Neversweat tied a can to his kid? Hardly seems fair, after Hoop told me: ‘Make sure to get Junior in at the thirty-hundred level, I don’t want him on anybody’s shift but Smitty’s. Smitty’ll understand, he’s had a few under his belt himself, like the time you and me and him were celebrating payday in the Bucket of Blood and—’ ”

  “Don’t pour it on,” the shift boss managed to stem the tide. He sucked at his mustache as if straining the dubious impression of me through it. “So, Junior, how do you like mining so far?”

  “It’s a sobering experience.”

  He grunted, still studying me skeptically. Walking over to the brink of the ledge, he peered down at our loaded ore cars. I held my breath and could see Griff doing the same. With a last doubtful look at us, the shift chief backed around and started descending the ladder. “Keep the rock flying, you two.”

  We more or less did, although even Griff eased off somewhat now that we had survived inspection. Still, I was sweating so much I felt like a sponge, and every muscle on me was protesting. I was nearly done in by the time a bell signaled somewhere in the distant tunnels.

  “Chow time! Here we go.” Griff bounded down the ladder and scuttled off, and I followed as best I could.

  The route he led me on was as twisty and unpredictable as the wildest of the streets of Butte somewhere over us. Here, however, the thoroughfares were a mere few yards wide, and all the way there was the encroaching roof of solid rock or splintery timbering barely overhead. People speak of the ends of the earth, places beyond all normal geography: the South Pole, the Amazon, the Sahara. The deep mine was that extreme to me; even though I knew the Hill was as pierced as the catacombs of Rome, the unending tunnels we were trekking through made me feel trapped in a maze. That feeling redoubled when we came to a place where borehole pathways diverged left and right and Griff abruptly halted. “Let me just kind of sort this out a little.”

  I waited, twitching, while he studied the two choices, fidgeting considerably himself. At last he swayed into motion in one direction, declaring, “The left one’s the right one.” Was I imagining, or did I hear him mutter to himself, “I think”?

  This passage showed no signs of recent mining; the dead air of abandonment was unpleasant to breathe. Except when our boots met rocks on the uneven footing, the silence was absolute. And the going became increasingly narrow; I did not have to put out either arm very far to touch a side of the tunnel. This was what the circle of Hell for claustrophobics must be like. Long minutes passed, and as far as I could tell, we were not getting anywhere except deeper into a labyrinth.

  “Griff, are you sure this is the way?”

  “Pretty sure. Watch your head on that overhang.”

  You wonder sometimes where your common sense disappeared to, just when you most needed it. Over and over I asked myself that as I followed Griff toward nowhere. I could not stop remembering the Miners Day drilling contest when his hand had so miserably failed him. My only hope was that the part of his brain which held the instinct of a badger wasn’t similarly cramping up.

  The tunnel, though, seemed to have no end, and I was frantically wondering whether we had left the Hill behind and were doomed to roam some crevice of the earth where no other human existed. Finally I could contain my doubts no longer.

  “I really and truly think we ought to turn back and—”

  “Shh. Don’t talk so much, Morrie. Let’s just have a listen.”

  We did. Water dripped somewhere. Our own breathing was loud. But faintly, some immeasurable distance ahead, there were voices.

  In the beam of my helmet lamp, my guide gave me a silent frog-mouth grin. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell whether he was as relieved as I was or just being the essential Griff.

  WE EMERGED into a musty chamber which had been mucked out and abandoned. A few glowing helmet lamps hanging from spikes driven into the rock walls illuminated this cavern, showing a scene of open lunch buckets and grimy faces as darkened as my own, as though the bunch of us were in vaudeville. Naturally Griff seemed acquainted with everyone in sight. There were a dozen or so of these miners of various persuasions and nationalities, Jared in their middle. The only other one I recognized was Quinlan, who grinned a wolfish welcome. I couldn’t care about manners, I was famished. Collapsing onto a convenient rock, I grappled open my lunch bucket and tore into a turkey sandwich Grace had fixed. Jared cleared his throat and announced: “Here’s the gent I was telling you about.”

  After a silence broken only by my munching, someone in the jury-like assembly posed the question prevailing in them all: “He’s the brains?”

  Quinlan chortled. “They’re running out his ears. He has to stick corks in at bedtime, don’t you, Morgan.”

  Swallowing a major bite of sandwich, I managed to respond
: “Mental miracles are in short supply with me at the moment. Music lore, I perhaps can provide as Jared has requested.”

  A man built like a small haystack stirred from where he was squatting against the inmost side of the cavern. “Why should we fiddle around with music,” he demanded of Jared in the declarative accent of Cornwall, “when there’s every kind of thing to fight Anaconda about?”

  “Tell it to the Wobblies, Jack. I can’t get to sleep at night without hearing about pie in the sky. Can you?”

  “Thee be right, it’s somewhat like a bug in the ear,” the Cornishman acknowledged, “but a ditty is just a ditty.”

  “Ah, but it is much more than that,” I was roused in defense of melody and lyric. “A song says something to us that we can’t hear in any other way. There is a kind of magic to it. Music does not simply soothe the savage breast, it reaches to our better nature, wouldn’t we all agree?”

  Not a word nor nod from this uncooperative audience.

  “A tune keeps us company,” I refined that, “when we need a bit of cheer. We don’t whistle just to let air out of ourselves, do we?”

  Whistlers in their spare time or not, the entire bunch sat there with lips firmly clamped.

  “Or,” I tried a different tack, “sing in the church choir merely to show off the starch in our shirts?”

  Even Griff was looking stony now, in the frieze of unmoved faces.

  Frustration giving way to desperation, I burst out: “How else was the Erie Canal dug but to the chant of workmen who had come from the world over ‘to see what they could see / on the Ee-rye-ee’? Nor would railroads such as the Union Pacific have conquered the continent without the chorus of Irish tracklayers”—a hopeful glance toward Quinlan here—“swinging their sledgehammers to the rhythm of ‘No leshure in your day, / no sugar in your tay, / working for the U Pay Railway. ’ ” By then I was onto my feet. “And I would bet any amount some of you lately marched in the service of your country to the memorable strains of ‘You might forget the gas and shell, parlee voo! / You might forget the gas and shell, / but you’ll never forget the Mademoiselle, / hinky dinky parlee voo! ’ ” Head up, chest out, I tramped in place to make the point. Jared’s expression said he remembered that anthem of soldiery all too well.

  In the dim and shadowed light, expression among my other listeners was mostly limited to brows and eyeballs, and I could see some widened gazes by the time I registered a final ringing parlee voo!

  After that died away, one of the most grizzled miners spoke up. “All them songs you been reaming our ears out with are for bunch-work, while we’re scattered just a few at a time in every mine on the Hill. So what kind of thing are you talking about that would ever fit us?”

  “Mmm.” Inspiration is hard to produce on demand. “A work song does have to fit the job and its circumstances, you could not be more right,” I stalled. “In our instance here, now don’t hold me to this as a finished product, but perhaps something along the lines of—” Insidious as ever, the catchy rhythm of “Camptown Races” crept to mind, and in what I like to think of as a passable tenor voice, I improvised:

  I’m a miner through and through; you too, you too!

  We dig all day and nighttime too, in the Muckaroo!

  Utter stillness met the finish of my performance. Eyebrows came down like dropping curtains, and I saw a wince on Griff. “That was merely one of many possible examples,” I offered up feebly. Shaking their heads, the miners began gathering themselves, lunchboxes were snapping shut—Jared looked as defeated as I felt. Any hope for a song for the union cause was walking out with these men.

  “Wait!” The requisite bar for breaking treacherous slabs loose lay in a corner. Grabbing it up, I stepped front and center in the cavern and struck the ceiling as hard as I could.

  The same high sweet tone that Griff had produced in our work-spot filled the cavern. Its clarion call halted everyone in mid-motion.

  “There, hear that?” I hurried to capitalize on the frozen moment: “That sound—let us call it a musical note, because it has such a ring—is one you would know anywhere, any time of day or night, am I correct?” I noticed both Quinlan and the Cornishman now looking sharply interested, and other faces attentive as well. “The point is, the right kind of song stays in the mind that same way. It’s a melodic message that never wears out, in there. And that’s what I was endeavoring to tell you about the magic of a work song.”

  “A work song for us against Anaconda,” Quinlan said slowly, the rest of the miners letting him speak for them. “I like that.” Off to one side, Griff rocked on his heels as if he knew all along it would come out this way.

  Jared jumped in. “We’ve got Morgan here for brains, we’ve got over ten thousand voices on this Hill if we just had the right song for them. It’s worth a shot, everybody agree?” One by one around the disparate circle of men, heads nodded and yes, yup, and aye were heard.

  “With one understanding,” I made sure to have this generally known. “Your response to my first little ditty was indicative. The work song will have to come from you and the men themselves.”

  “How’s that supposed to happen?” a bearded miner demanded. “If any big bunch of us try to get together for it, the cops will be right on us for unlawful assembly.”

  Jared’s gaze of appeal was more than I could turn down. I said:

  “Leave that to me.”

  10

  You meet yourself in the mirror one morning and wonder if you know the revealed face in the glass. My reflection, after the night spent three thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth, seemed to mockingly remind me that the head on my shoulders is mostly bone, not brain. What had dropped away from me, due to Jared’s tricky scheme hatched down there in the Muckaroo, was the visage of self-confidence, the appearance of a sure-thinking person that had carried me largely unscathed through the world. Now as I blinked dumbly at myself in the light of day, I seemed to be missing the countenance I had always counted on. Although perhaps it was only the absence of my mustache.

  By the time I pulled myself together sufficiently, I was late to breakfast. Griffith and Hooper were done with theirs, but lingered at the table to greet me. Hoop hopped up from his chair and shook my hand as if operating a pump handle. “So you’re pitching in with the union, Griff says. We knew you came to Butte for some good reason.”

  “That remains to be seen,” I said woodenly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Griff, he and Hoop grinning their ears off. “We’ll help out on the work song business. You just tell us when and where.”

  Off they went to their day’s puttering, and Grace emerged from the kitchen with my warmed-over breakfast. Her arched eyebrows expressed all that was needed.

  “I know, I know,” I responded to what had not been said. “You told me the Hill is a dangerous place.”

  Shaking her head, she slipped into a chair and passed me the jam for my cold toast. “What an honor for the Faraday Boarding House to have the singing master for the union on the premises,” she said apprehensively.

  “I am not the—” I gave up and poked at my plate. “Butte has a way of making a person line up on one side or the other, you may have noticed.”

  “You like to place a bet now and then,” she observed, as though I might not have noticed this about myself. “You’ve just placed a big one.”

  “It is only a bit of music,” I tried to convince us both. “Who is going to be overly bothered by that?”

  “Other than the police, the Anaconda goons, and the Wobblies, do you mean?” She crimped a worried frown at me, scratching under an arm. I hoped she was not going to have to reach for the calamine. No, the affliction of the moment was entirely mine, her attitude made clear. “You really have taken on trouble, Morrie, with this. Just where do you think you’re going to hold these sing-alongs and no one will notice?”

  “Somewhere near the surface of the earth, definitely.” I stroked my upper lip nervously. My eyes met hers. That violet ga
ze cast its spell on me even when she was being severe. “Your honest opinion, please. Should I grow the mustache back or not?”

  Grace being Grace, she provided a deeper reckoning than I had asked for. She smiled the old bright way, or at least close to it. “Try life without it, why don’t you. Men are lucky, you can change your face overnight. That’s not bad for a start.”

  HERS WAS A MORE LENIENT view of me than Sandison’s opinion, which was that I looked like a skinned rabbit.

  With that, he dismissed my presence in the office and went back to opening the small bundle on his desk that had come in the day’s mail. With practiced fl icks of his jackknife, probably learned from skinning cows, he slit open the brown paper. There the treasure lay, the latest from a rare book dealer, swaddled in cotton wrap. Sandison lifted it out tenderly. I could see it was an exquisitely tanned edition of David Copperfield. “This does it!” Sandison congratulated himself. “The complete Dickens in leather and gold.” Deftly he opened the novel to the sumptuous first page. “ ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ Heh heh. The old scribbler knew his business, wouldn’t you say, Morgan?”

  He always was in his best mood at such moments, so this was my chance. Hovering at the bulwark of his back, I spoke with forced casualness. “Just so you are apprised, Sandy, there’s a new group that will be meeting in the basement.”

  “What is it now,” he drawled without turning around, “some weakkneed bunch that wants to hold seances?”