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 fingers, 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.”
He hunched forward as if about to rake in a poker pot. “That’s where you come in. I want to remind that pack of meddling fools which side their bread is buttered on.” He looked at me craftily. “I’ve never signed my book collection over to the library,” there was a sly note in his voice I had not detected before, “it’s here on loan, like museums have with paintings of people with their clothes off.” That explained much: for Butte to house the finest collection west of Chicago, the obsessive keeper of the books came along with it.
“Told you there’s something I have for you to do,” he was saying, as though I were looking for a way to fill my time. “Draw up an inventory of what’s mine out there on the shelves,” he waved in the direction of the prized books on the mezzanine. “That’ll bring the trustees to their senses,” the grandee of the library finished, sitting back and cracking his knuckles in satisfaction.
“I shall need a helper.”
That caught him by surprise, and before he could cloud up enough to tell me I was out of my mind, I said, “Fortunately, Sandy, the staffing has been a little light for some time, hasn’t it.” I flipped to the ledger page that listed library positions and wages, his piggybank for those Miscellaneous expenditures when irresistible books showed up in dealers’ catalogues. He eyed me as my finger singled out positions budgeted for but chronically unfilled. “Very wise of you,” I drove the point home with a final finger tap, “to leave leeway for an occasion just such as this.”
Sandison coughed. “Let’s be reasonable about this. We can’t be cluttering up the place with some moron we don’t absolutely need, just because-”
“No, no,” I headed off that objection, “summer help will do. A teacher, perhaps, with free time now that school is out. In fact, I think I know of one.”
“Don’t waste time talking about it, then.” He heaved himself around in his seat as if compelling business awaited on his desk. “Hire this summer wonder you have your eye on, and get going on the inventory. You have to make decisions in this life, Morgan.”
“THIS IS EXCITING, working for Sam Sandison. It’s like being on a pirate ship.”
“Rab, contain your imagination. This is a library.”
“You know what I mean,” she whispered back secretively, there on the mezzanine. “Everyone in Butte has an opinion about him. What’s yours, Mr. Morgan?”
“It’s too deep to go into. Pull down Pride and Prejudice and see if it has the bookplate.”
She took a peek inside the tanned leather cover and giggled. “It does. Just like on a heifer.” Volume by volume, our library lord’s collection bore the bookplate lettered in bold SSS, with the smaller, uncompromising line below, Property of Samuel S. Sandison. I hadn’t put this together until Rab’s remark, but now my first conversation with the man came back to mind, when he berated me for not knowing that the most famous cattle herd in Montana history had borne the Triple S brand. Leave it to him to put a brandabetical stamp on the world’s literature.
Rabrab-or Miss Rellis, as I had to make myself call her in front of other staff members-was a diligent worker, as we were both going to need to be. Already we each had a heaping armful of exquisite books, and this was only Adams, Arnold, and Austen. As we tottered off to the sorting room, where Sandison had let us set up shop for the inventorying, she marveled: “Say what they will about him, he really does have a soft spot for books, doesn’t he.”
And Ivan the Terrible perhaps loved his staghounds. My private opinion of Sandison, inconstant in the best of times, varied almost hourly during those first busy weeks of summer. He was as demanding as ever in the office chores he foisted onto me, the Earl of Hell with a list in his head, and between those I would dash back to the sorting room to work with Rab on the inventory. Sometimes we would look up and see the snowy beard and cowlick pass by as he came stalking out of his office to stand there on the mezzanine and contemplate the ranks of books on the shelves. When he loomed there in one of these trances, white as a sacred elephant, Rab and I simply detoured around him in our task. I was certain as anything that bibliomania did not mean a maniac loose in a library, but there were times Sandison made me wonder whether the definition needed adjusting. Yet, fume at him and his high-handed ways as I so often did, there were the immortal books, which would not have graced the Constantinople of the Rockies but for him. In life’s list of complications, this one seemed to carry an acceptable price.
Volume by plated volume, Rab and I kept compiling and adding up the Sandison library-within-the-library. If the edition in hand matched a listing in a rare books catalogue, it was no problem to assign a value. Any we could find no listing for, one or the other of us would take, several at a time, for appraisal by old Adamson, the coldblooded antiquarian book dealer across town. As you might guess, there is a secret satisfaction in going through the streets with your arms around the Artful Dodger and Natty Bumppo and Emma Bovary, no one knowing you are hugging a monetary fortune as well as a literary one.
So, its hectic moments aside, the inventorying was the most pleasant kind of work, engaging the mind, and no unduly heavy lifting involved. Rab was sparkling company, as I had counted on. She showed up each morning bright-eyed for whatever the day might bring, and in plucking the SSS books from the shelves, she whisked in and out of the mezzanine stacks as if on jeweled skates. From the number of upturned male heads among the Reading Room patrons as she winged past overhead, I was not the only one appreciative of her presence.
I suppose I should not have been surprised when Sandison called me in to his office, and there, like one of the frowning Easter Island stone heads, was Miss Runyon.
“It seems there is a distraction in our otherwise flawless service to the reading public,” Sandison addressed me pontifically from behind his desk. “State your case, Miss Runyon.”
She drew herself up as if to huff and puff and blow me away. “It’s that helper of yours. She wears those little dresses, you can see everything she has.”
“You can? I mean, I had not noticed.”
“Then you are the only man breathing who hasn’t,” she declared.
I looked from her to Sandison and back again, both of them dressed twenty years behind the times. “Perhaps it is natural that the younger people take a different view of wardrobe than, ah, we do.”
Rousing himself, Sandison abandoned his chair and clomped out from behind the desk. “Your concern for propriety is notable, Miss Runyon,” he said soothingly as he escorted her to the door, “and I’m sure Morgan can deal with the issue.”
When she was gone, he rounded on me. “The next couple of days, you be the one to prance out there on the mezzanine and fetch the books,” he directed, “just on the chance that people may not be quite as interested in seeing everything you have.” His frosty eyebrows were hoisted high as he studied me. “You’re a sharper operator than I thought, Morgan.” He laughed bawdily. “Make the most of your time with Miss Rellis.”
I LOOK BACK on that midsummer stretch of weeks as a season of life that went up and down with the regularity of a carousel. Each day divided itself according to the female company of the time. At the boardinghouse, Grace and I stayed as self-consciously civil as schoolchildren who had been told to mind their manners or else; her hives had gone away, but her allergy to being taken up with me had not. Then I would go off to the library and the short-hemmed zephyr that was Rabrab Rellis.
With her keenness for being in on things, Rab was as intrigued with the inventory books as I was, both of us beaming like babies at the chance to handle lovely volumes that even the most omnivorous reader would miss out on in a lifetime. On nice days we carried the mood outside, joking to one another, and ate lunch on the library steps. Butte sunned itself those noon hours, as if storing up for rougher weather ahead. Gangs of boys swarmed down from the Hill neighborhoods, heading for the swampy attractions along Silver Bow Creek. On the next street, the Post building had put up a baseball scoreboard on its front, and the amplified voice of the sports telegraphist relaying diamond drama as it took place in Cincinnati and Washington and other major-league outposts carried to us like opera arias: “Flash! It’s a home run! The Redlegs lead one to nothing!” Sometimes Russian Famine, scrubbed and neatened, would stop by on his errands as a Hennessy Building runner, and one of us would share a sandwich with him before he sprang to his duty again.
“Mr. Morgan, there’s something I’ve been puzzling about,” Rab broached during one of those pleasant noontimes when we were alone. “I noticed it all the way back at Henry Adams and his Education. That was published only last year.” She had her old look of a schoolgirl circling what might be a trick question. “Aren’t the Sandison books supposed to be what he collected when he was on the ranch, ages ago?”
That had tickled my interest, too. By now we were at Kafka, Keats, and Kipling. The romantic poet was sadly gone, but the other two were up and writing and I had just catalogued recent contributions to literature by both that also carried the SSS bookplate.
So as not to heat up Rab’s instinct for intrigue, which never needed encouragement, I shrugged past the matter of newly minted books among the old: “An occasional stray may have wandered into his literary herd, large as it is. Isn’t there a ranching word for that?”
“Maverick, you mean? An unbranded cow that someone slaps their own brand on?” Rab wrinkled her nose as if sniffing something spicy. “Oh, that’s so funny.”
It was more so than she knew. Possibly Sandison, from long habit, was simply buying valuable books out of his own pocket and folding them into his collection, as he had every right to do. But the more tantalizing possibility, I sensed, was that those Miscellaneous purchases drawn from the library’s payroll budget were being cunningly mingled into his earlier holdings. If I knew anything about Samuel S. Sandison by now, it was that he never saw a thing of worth that didn’t look better to him with SSS on it.
Brushing away lunch crumbs as though that took care of the topic, I told Rab, “We had better get back at it, there’s a shelf of Longfellow ahead.”
“HOW’S THAT INVENTORY COMING?” Sandison rumbled when I passed by the office that afternoon.
“Sandy, you are to be commended for your buying eye,” I stuck to what I could honestly say. “The books you have gathered amount to a financial fortune as well as a literary one.”
“They damn well ought to,” he said as he hunched over an antiquarian catalogue and some notations to himself which, I was quite sure, added up to more books for the Sandison collection.
“Oh, by the way,” the issue of expenditure reminded me, “a cyclopedia salesman this morning left us a sample of his newest.” I stepped to my desk for the brochure as Sandison groaned at the distraction. “Here you go, the sales pitch for Prominent Figures of Montana, Past and Present. He assured me no self-respecting library should be without such a volume. As an added inducement, he told me you will find yourself prominently in it, Sandy.” I passed the brochure to him for inspection.
He took one look, informed me it was nothing more than the usual attempt by some robber to steal names and sell them back to flattered fools, and tossed it aside. “Bury it in Section 37,” I thought I heard him mutter as he turned back to what he had been doing.
“Excuse me, please”-by then I thought I knew every corner of the library-“but you’ll have to tell me where that section is.”
“Eh?” His head jerked up and around as if I had been eavesdropping. Catching up with himself, he waved me off the subject. “Never mind. Get back to the inventory and making eyes at Miss Rellis, why don’t you.”
NOT LONG AFTER, I was met at the breakfast table by two long faces. Griff asked mournfully, “You heard what they’re doing to us now?”
“I am barely out of bed, Griff, how could I?”
“They’re cracking down,” said Hoop, equally doleful.
I waited, but both informants were too overcome to provide anything more. Mystified, I had to look to Grace for an explanation.
“The police have heard from a higher power,” she said with a frown. From the look on her, I translated that to mean the top floor of the Hennessy Building, home of the copper collar. “They’re arresting characters who hang out downtown without any business for being there.” For a change, she spoke to me in the old dulcet way, I supposed to make two sets of deaf ears perk up and listen in. “A couple of those come to mind at this table, don’t they.”
“Spitting on the sidewalk, the cops call it,” Hoop said with disgust.
“Vagrancy is another way of putting it,” Grace provided for my benefit.
Griff burst out, “It’s that ‘unlawful assembly’ crap”-Grace did not rebuke him-“whatever name the buzzards put on it.”
Still behind, I asked around the table: “What put the authorities on this rampage?”
“The Wobblies,” Hoop and Griff answered together, while Grace’s expression said she had heard all this too many times, and she went off to the kitchen. The IWW wanted to cut in and take the lead in the miners’ struggle with Anaconda-it just wasn’t right, my tablemates stated. From what they heard, the specter of operatives filtering into town to mold discontented workers of the Hill into a radical legion had thrown Butte’s powers that be into a tizzy. Hence, jail awaited anyone deemed a “vagrant.”
When the law is bent that way, a detour around it is sometimes needed. That morning I went to the library by the back-alley route shown me by Russian Famine, just to be on the safe side.
TO MY SURPRISE, that lunchtime, Rab was mum about this newest tussle over who would contol the Hill. I don’t know what I expected to be in sight when we settled at the top of the library steps as usual-the Hennessy Building being stormed like the Bastille by maddened Wobblies, perhaps-but the streets were placid, only punctuated here and there by strolling policemen who looked vaguely embarrassed. Rab was chattering on about Melville and whether anyone who wasn’t vitally interested in blubber actually ever read every page of Moby-Dick, but there was something bubbling under that which should have alerted me. Nonetheless, I was caught by surprise when a lean figure, brisk and businesslike in a somber suit but with his hat pulled low, peeled away from the concourse of patrons in and out of the library and dropped onto the steps beside us. “See what I mean about the Wobs spelling trouble, Professor?”
“I suppose I do, Jared,” I answered him as equably as I could. “There seem to be a lot of ways to spell that in Butte.” I watched with envy as he nestled in next to Rab and was rewarded with a kiss and a sandwich. Curious as to why he was dressed up, I asked: “What’s the occasion? ”
“None in particular,” Jared provided between bites. “I just don’t want to look like somebody who might spit on the sidewalk.” A policeman went by on leadfooted patrol, giving us hardly a glance. “You can almost feel sorry for the dumb cops,” he mused. “Almost.”
The police on puppet strings were not the only ones entitled to sympathy in the situation, I could tell; the crackdown plainly hindered the activities of the miners’ union, and I charitably said something of the sort to Jared.
“An opportunity for a strategic withdrawal, we called it in the army,” came the dry response.
“Extra syllables aside, I believe that means ‘retreat’?” I made sure.
“You might say that,” he granted. “But going a different direction, even backwards,” he munched on the matter along with his sandwich, “gives a chance to gain some ground somewhere else, doesn’t it?”
Rab, eyes alight, had been flicking glances back and forth between us. “You’d better ask him, love,” she prompted. “Mr. Morgan and I have to get back to whaling all too soon.”
The ancients who invented storytelling knew to the instant when drama must put on a human mask. The soaring ambition of Icarus to consort with the sun, before the first feather melted from his wings and wafted down and down to the waiting Aegean Sea. The echo of the knight’s heartbeat within his armor before he slays the dragon. Some such flutter in the curtain of fate, now that I look back on everything that was about to happen, came with Jared Evans that noontime.
“You brought this on yourself, Professor,” he said as though I didn’t know any better. His dark eyes held a glimmer as he went on: “Remember when you were telling me why ‘pie in the sky’ gets in a person’s head and won’t leave? The ‘nimo gizmo’ side of things, you called it?”
“The mnemonic aspect,” I was glad to clarify. “It derives from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and-”
“That’s what I’m saying, the union needs that kind of brain food.” Past the brim of his hat I could see Rab glistening with interest. Jared scanned around as if scouting enemy terrain and lowered his voice. “I got to thinking about what you’d said and it hit me-why shouldn’t the union have a song like that?” He made a fist. “Something that shows our spirit. There on Miners Day, when the band played ‘Men of Harlech,’ I damn near bawled and I wasn’t the only one. That kind of thing. I mean, hell, up against Anaconda, we’re in a fight just as much as any army.” I practically had to shield my eyes in the face of his fiery determination. It took only one look at Jared to know he was purposeful as a harpoon, and another at Rab to remind me that the whiff of anything venturesome was catnip to her. I had to admit, the two of them were made for Butte.
“Professor?” He spoke now as if taking me deep into his confidence. “You see where I’m going with this?”
“Vaguely. You have in mind musical phraseology that will rally-”
He didn’t wait for me to finish. “A song of our own that will make the Wobblies sound like sick cats. And that’s where you come in.”
Well, who would not want to be the author of “ La Marseillaise ” or “Marching Through Georgia” or even “Yankee Doodle”? However, sometimes I know my limits. “Jared, that’s generous of you, but songwriting is actually not among my talents.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he sped right over that. “All I want you to do is to make the case to a few people for a hell of a good song for the Hill. Miners can be contrary. We have more factions than a henhouse.” He gazed up at the dark strutworks over the mineshafts and the spill of neighborhoods between. “The Finns would join up with the Wobblies lickety-split if the union gives them any least excuse. The Italians think the union is getting too radical. The Irish are itching to run things themselves, and the Cornish think they could do a better job than the Irish or any of the rest of us. So on down the line.” Abruptly he batted my shoulder, which was going to develop a callus if this kept on. “You’re just the right one to set the bunch of them thinking about a song that will pull everybody together instead of their own grumbles. Rab swears you’re a wonder when you get going.” Her smile ratified that.
“Ah.” Flattery is a quick worker. “I suppose I could lend whatever modicum of musical knowledge I have. If you’d like, the next time you hold a meeting, I could come by the union hall and-”
“That’s the rub,” Jared said quickly. “The bunch we want won’t come near the union hall, the way everyone is being watched like sin these days.”
The rogue had already calculated the next, I later realized, but he offered it as if the notion just then strolled up to him.
“Come to think of it, though, there’s one place in all of Butte where the cops and goons know better than to go. Down the shaft.”
No three words in the language could have been more unwelcome to me. I am not subterranean by nature. Quite the opposite; I tend to look up, not down, in life. The sky has held fascination for me since I was a boy sneaking out to the Lake Michigan shore on clearest nights, tracing out the constellations shimmering over the water. Above me in the hypnotic dark, Sagittarius the archer bent his everlasting bow while Pegasus flew on wings of light; those and all the other patterns etched in star-silver define heaven to me. I know of no mine pit in the sky. Now I was being asked to reverse my basic inclination and point myself into the blind paths under the ground. Down where a glory hole led to.
“Must we?”
Jared brushed aside my quavery question. “It’s our only shot at getting the right people in one place at the same time.” Rabrab watched him with adoration as he tackled tactics. “How are you at being somebody else?” he asked me and didn’t wait for an answer. “Your pals Griff and Hoop never took themselves off the extra gang list, it makes them feel like they’re still miners. We can sneak you onto the night shift on one of their work tickets.” He wrinkled his brow. “First we have to get you past that pair of apes at the gate.”
I groaned. “Big and bigger? One of them with eyes that belong on a sea creature?”
Jared showed surprise. “How’d you know? The company stuck them there to watch for Wobs.”
“It’s too long a story to go into.” I felt a guilty kind of relief as I explained that Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver would know me on sight; with them on lookout at the gate, it was impossible for me to enter the mine.
During this, Rabrab had been studying me.
“Your mustache, Mr. Morgan. If that were to come off, you’d look like a different you.”
MY UPPER LIP SMARTING, I trudged up the Hill in the company of Griff the next night. I felt undressed without the mustache, although I was in the same regalia as the hundreds of other miners around us: substantial trousers, a workman’s jumper, and an old hat.
Griff was practically hopping with anticipation. “You’re in luck,” he had me know as we trooped along. “The Muckaroo is as nice a digging as there is on the Hill.”
“Is it,” I responded without enthusiasm; doubtless there was a similarly prime spot in the salt mines of Siberia, too. To try to bolster myself for this, after the library closed I had gone down on my knees and examined the mine model in the glass case long and hard, but right now that seemed like no preparation whatsoever for the real thing. The screeching of pulleys and the throb of machinery sounded louder than in the daytime. Ahead of us, lit harshly, the headframe of the Muckaroo mineshaft towered into the darkness. The graveyard shift-how I wished it wasn’t called that-converged at the pinch of the mine gate and then spread out as men filed off to their eight hours of labor beneath the surface of the earth. Jared was a steady but discreet number of strides behind us, which was somewhat reassuring, but Griff hustling along next to me, madly eager to redeem himself after the Miners Day drilling contest, was not. I kept hearing Grace’s strained words when my conscience made me draw her aside after supper and confess what we were up to: “Think twice about this, Morrie, please? The Hill is the most dangerous place on earth, even for those who know what they’re doing.”
By now I’d had those second thoughts and many more, with no result but Griff to show for it. Allegiance to a cause is a prickly thing. Put your hand to it just right, and there is the matchless feeling of being part of something greater than yourself. Grab on to it the wrong way, though, and it draws blood. Back and forth this scheme of Jared’s wavered in me as our rough-dressed procession tromped out of the dark to the mine entrance.
The enemy was at the gate, the oversize pair of them scrutinizing every passing face, Eel Eyes with that sideways stare, Typhoon with doggish concentration. Griff braced up beside me as we neared that inspection. “Here we go, Mor-Hoop, that is.” He sneaked a look toward the weedy shadows along the high fence, muttering: “If that kid’s gonna do it, he better be doing it.”
“He will,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
Just then a rock clanged off the tin siding of the gatehouse behind the goons. “Scabs!” came the taunt. “Anaconda stinks and so do you! ”
As hoped, Tolliver reflexively bolted off after the stone thrower, although he had no chance in the world of catching up with Russian Famine. Eel Eyes angrily stayed sentry, but his gaze kept dodging toward the darkness or in search of the jeering laughs from the rank of passing miners, while Griff and I, prim as monks, flashed our work tickets and slouched past him.
Jared caught up to us in the mine yard.
“Nice work. When we get in the lamp room, stay at the back”-he was addressing me-“and keep your head down. Griff, you know what to do.”
The lamp room, jam-packed with men and equipment, was where we were to outfit ourselves with helmets with a small headlamp atop like a bright Cyclops eye. Finding one that more or less fit, I plopped it on, hoping it would help to hide me. No sooner was it down around my brow than the night supervisor stepped into the room, a list of names in his hand.
“Hooper and Griffith on the extra gang,” he sang out. “Oldtimers’ night, is this?”
“Don’t fret yourself, Delaney,” Griff bridled. “We can still turn out the work.”
“We’ll see about that.” The mine overseer peered to the right and left of Griffith. “Where’s Hoop?”
“Taking a leak against the office.”
“He would be.” Comparing the rest of the names on his list to the crowded roomful of faces, now the supervisor craned to see to the back, where I was keeping my head down. “Who else we got here, anybody I don’t know?”
Jared broke in on that. “Just so you have it in mind, Delaney-we voted not to go on the twenty-hundred level until more shoring gets put in.”
“Nobody’s asked you to yet,” the mine boss said sourly. “Don’t push it, Evans.”
“You call that pushing, when it’s our necks at risk?” Jared harped on the matter to create a distraction. “I’m just saying, that shoring better go in before any of us set foot onto that level or-” During this, Griff and I slipped out.
The open air of the mine yard chilled me. With the helmet weighing on me, I felt even more like a blockhead for agreeing to this scheme. Happy as if he had good sense, Griff gimped along ahead of me, carrying on about the old days on the Hill and this rare chance to have a look at the workings of the Muckaroo. “So, all we need to do,” he chatted over his shoulder as if we were out for a stroll, “is get ourselves down to the thirty-hundred level.”
That snatch of enthusiasm sounded reassuring. Wait, though; multiply those offhand numbers and the result is-
“Three thousand feet?” I jammed to a halt as if an abyss of that depth had cracked open beneath the toes of my shoes. “I just can’t. You’ll have to tell Jared.”
Without saying a word, Griff circled back and clamped a sinewy old hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the mineshaft.
The Muckaroo’s headframe stood over us, black metal casting blacker shadows in the glare of the night lights, as we approached. Griff headed us straight in under the girders toward a narrow plate-metal box hung from a steel cable. “Here we go, Morrie, I mean Hoop. Hop in the cage.”
Rust-spotted and dented, the thing looked like some torture chamber left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Rationally I knew it was simply an elevator, a way to travel to work the same way an accountant in a celluloid collar would step into wood-paneled circumstances downtown and pleasantly tell the operator, “Fourth floor, please.” Except that this express traveled more than half a mile between stops, straight down. With Griff’s firm aid I edged in and stood rigid against the back plating, as far away from the flimsy accordion gate across the doorway as possible. He shouldered in next to me as other miners packed in with us.
The hoistman peeked in, counting heads, then snicked the gate closed. He called out, “Everybody ready for China?”
“Let ’er drop,” the miner nearest the front called back.
No sooner were the words out than the cage plunged like a shot, for about a dozen feet. Then stopped with the kind of yank that comes at the end of a scaffold rope.
Everything dangled there, shuddering wildly; I include myself in that. The walls of the mineshaft had closed in around us and overhead there was a terrific clatter and continuing commotion. I believe I would have whimpered if the power of voice hadn’t been scared out of me.
“It’s okey-doke,” Griff tried to soothe me with a whisper. “They’re loading a couple more cages over us, is all.”
Oh, was that all. Merely piling people on top of our heads, to make sure of calamity if anything went wrong in the descent. Hearing Griff’s rushed words or perhaps my breathing, the other passengers glanced over their shoulders curiously at us.
“My partner here is a greenhorn, I’m breaking him in,” Griff confided to them. “He’s got a little case of heebie-jeebies.” That brought knowing laughs and a round of wisecracks about how lucky I’d be if I didn’t get anything worse than that from digging copper.
In a minute came another sickening jolt downward and one more shuddering wait. Then swish! The next thing I knew, the cage was dropping at top speed, so fast that I feared we had been cut loose and were free-falling to our doom. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see death coming. Then, though, I heard the steady whine of the cable, and I cautiously peeped past the darkened outline of Griff and the others. Down and down and down, the shaft walls flew past in a terrifying black blur. My ears popped. I was trying to work my jaw when everything stopped with a hard bounce. The cage yo-yoed for long seconds as the springiness of three thousand feet of cable settled down.
Someone outside flung open the cage gate and I was blinking into a harshly lighted concrete chamber. Hot air rushed into the elevator shaft as the other men clambered out ahead of Griff and myself. A staccato chorus, like invisible riveters, emanated from various tunnels where compressed-air drills were noisily cutting into walls of ore. “Here we are,” Griff announced as if it were a tourist destination, “as deep as it goes in the Muckaroo.”
As I gawked around, the next cage settled to a stop and Jared climbed out. Giving us a thumbs-up, he disappeared off into a timbered tunnel across the way. By now the underground traffic was thick, files of miners passing us by, their talk trailing away as they vanished into various tunnel portals. Griff had been orienting himself. “C’mon, we want to scoot off over here.”
He had picked out what looked to me like an abandoned tunnel, except that steel rails were aligned in the center of it. Our headlamps cast bobbing beams as we hiked deeper into the darkness. Every so often, the light caught a gleam where water dripped down a rock wall. The stammer of drilling followed us at first, gradually dropping to a distant murmur that was simply in the air, like the metallic smell that smarted in my nose. I kept waiting for where this burrow led to, some larger cavern, timbered and more secure, where actual mining was done. Then something occurred to me, from my session of studying the mine model in the library.
“Griff?” I sounded like I was in the bottom of a well. “I believe this is what is called a drift tunnel-”
“Righto. You know more about this than a person might think.”
“-and if I am not mistaken, the only purpose of a drift tunnel is the excavation of ore. It isn’t a passageway to any of the rest of the mine.”
“Right again. You are a whiz.”
“Then where’s the crew that’s supposed to be in here doing that digging? I don’t see or hear anyone.”
“That’s because we’re it.”
I stopped almost in mid-step.
Griff plowed along for a few more paces before noticing I was missing. Turning around, he examined me critically. “I don’t want to worry you, Morrie, but you look kind of milky.”
“Where did this notion come from that you and I are going to dig copper in this crypt?” I burst out. “My understanding was, I came down here to meet with the men from the other mines.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” Griff said, patience and reason combined.
“When meal break rolls around, Jared is gonna see to that. I bet he’s got it worked out slick, don’t worry. But we need to make some kind of showing until then. We get caught loafing around”-the beam of his helmet lamp shined past me as if in search of assailants following us through the tunnel-“and Anaconda will make it rough for us. I don’t know how you feel about it, but getting turned over to their goons doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Lead on,” I said with resignation.
Like tramps on a railroad track, we trudged along the narrow set of rails deeper and deeper into the reaches of the mine. It was hellishly hot; I would not have been surprised to see lava oozing out at us. Every so often, small rocks dribbled down disconcertingly beside us. At last a covey of ore cars, squarish troughs on wheels, showed up in our lamp beams. Here we were, Griff declared with a flourish, at the ledge of ore. Above us the tunnel wall opened into an arched excavation, and he skimmed up the ladder to it, with me gulping and following.
What awaited at the top was a large cave; blasting had hollowed out the far wall of the ledge and left a litter of ore. I clambered in behind Griff, barking my shin in the dark as I did so. “Whoopsiedaisy,” he advised absently, “watch your footing.” As I stepped over to a rock where I could sit and rub the sore spot, he cautioned: “Let’s just sort of hang back and look things over before-”
At that instant I felt a familiar tremble. Not my own, but the kind of glory-hole tremor that shook the boardinghouse every so often; somewhere in the catacombs of copper, dynamite had been routinely set off. I had just started to say to Griff, more than a little nervously, that I supposed I’d better get used to that down here, when half the cavern ceiling caved in, with an avalanche roar and a blinding boil of dust.
Choking on dust and my ears ringing, I staggered a few steps this way and that in the murky cavern. My headlamp barely penetrated the filth, thick as smoke. Desperately I tried to fan away the cloud and find Griff, or what was left of him.
In the gloom, something darker yet appeared, also disturbing the dust. It stopped and I stopped. Through a swirl of murk, Griff and I became visible to each other by the whites of our eyes.
Wiping off a mask of dirt, he said, “That’s why it’s not a good idea to rush into this kind of place.” He squinted around as the dust settled. “Lucky thing is, it was the ceiling toward the back that came down.” Turning to say something more to me, he stopped, and very slowly raised a pointing finger. “Morrie,” he said quietly, “don’t be passing the time of day under a Creeping Pete like that.” I looked up, to where he was indicating. Overhanging me was a wicked-looking slab of rock, which, if it dropped on a person, definitely would necessitate the services of the undertaker.
Hurriedly I backed away from beneath it as Griff explained that blasting throughout the mine loosened overhead rock in unpredictable places. Studying this cracked mass, he concluded: “Nasty. We’re gonna have to bar it down.”
He went over to the tool stash in the corner and fished out what looked like a very long, skinny crowbar. Armed with that, he began to pry at the slab. After many thrusts and grunts, he succeeded in breaking it loose. When it hit the floor of the mine with a deafening crash, he grinned at me. “There’s one that won’t come down on our heads.”
Griff moved on to the next overhang, eyes peeled to find the right crack to insert his bar. I stood back as far as I could, spitting out dust, and watched him jab away at the rock until I noticed he was favoring a hand. Remembering the cramp that had done him in during the drilling contest, I took a deep breath and shuffled over to relieve him of the rod. “Here, let me give it a try.”
Poking and prodding as if I were using a lance to find chinks in a dragon’s hide, eventually I was rewarded with the fall of a chunk about the size of a gravestone. “See there, we’ll make a miner out of you yet,” Griff commended from the far corner where he was sitting in apparent contentment.
“Not if I can help it.” I fanned away more dust and scanned the ominously uneven surface overhead. Trading back and forth, we pried more chunks down until Griff at last called a halt. “Let’s have a listen.” He took the bar from me and struck the rock ceiling with it. The timbre was surprisingly musical, a high lingering note that resounded rather sweetly. “There, hear that nice clean sound? It ought to be safe now.” He tossed the bar aside with satisfaction. “Now we better get to work.”
“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.”