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 gaze 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?”
“These are not spiritualists, although now that you mention it, spirit is of interest to them.”
“Don’t let me die of suspense-what’s the name of this pack?”
“I believe it is the, um, Lyre Club.”
“Liars?” His shoulders shook as he laughed long and loud. “You slay me, Morgan. The majority of Butte is already a liars’ club.”
“No, no, you misconstrue. The meaning in this instance is the stringed instrument that accompanied the words of bards. When Homer smote his lyre, he heard men sing by land and sea, remember?” I drew a breath. “To launch this group, I have been asked to be the guest speaker for a series of sessions.”
“You’re the main attraction? They must be hard up. What are you going to yatter to them about?”
“Versification,” I said, honest enough as far as it went.
“Aren’t there enough bad poets in the world already?”
“You never know where the next bard will derive from, Sandy.”
“If you want to spend your nights making up nursery rhymes, I guess I can’t bring you to your senses.” He looked around at me as though I had lately lost more than my mustache. “If you ask me, you’re going about things all wrong. Why don’t you spend your nights sparking Miss Rellis like a red-blooded human being, instead of preaching verse to some bunch of sissies?”
“Actually, she will be on hand at these meetings.”
“Oho. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Morgan. Make the most of your Homeric opportunity.” Chortling into his beard, he turned back to fondling his latest bound-and-engraved prize.
Rab was lingering near the office doorway when I came out. “Is he going to let you?”
“We have his blessing,” I said moodily.
“I knew you’d make things click. Jared will get word to the others and we’re in business, presto!”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, my mood not at all improved.
“AHA! THERE YOU ARE.”
Dora Sandison made it sound as if I had been hiding from her, when in point of fact she was the one lurking like a lioness at a watering hole as I emerged from the lavatory later that morning.
“Everyone is somewhere, nature’s way of housekeeping,” I responded, skipping back a bit from her overpowering height. “I expect you’re in search of your husband, and I believe I just saw him disappear into the mezzanine stacks. May I escort you to-”
“Not at all,” she crushed that with a smile. “My evening group has a wee problem that is beneath Sandy’s notice.”
“I see. How wee would that be, Mrs. Sandison?”
“Simply a book we are in desperate need of,” she said airily. Her enunciation of the title lacked only a drum roll: The Gilbert and Sullivan Musical Treasury, Complete and Illustrated.
“You’re in luck!” I exulted, really meaning that I was. “If I am not mistaken, such a volume already exists at the reference desk.”
“That is precisely the point,” she said, that sly note coming into her voice. “The book can’t leave the Reading Room. But our meetings are held not there but in the auditorium.” She fixed me with the look I had come to dread. “A downstairs copy of our own is absolutely essential when major questions arise, such as what costumes the three little girls from school wore in the original Shaftesbury production of The Mikado.” Confident that even I could see the justice of that argument, she added, generously: “Storing it would be no problem whatsoever for you. It could fit with the music stands, could it not?”
My mind was whirring with the cost of a fat reference book of that sort, the kind of duplicate expenditure that would send Sandison through the roof. Fortunately, though, there were a lot of Gilberts in the world, and if I slipped merely the author’s last name and a reference like costumery in foreign lands into the general book budget, chances were our mutual bugaboo wouldn’t pay any attention to it.
“Mrs. Sandison, I think I can accommodate you.”
“Good. You haven’t disappointed me yet.” She pursed the smile of one weaned on a pickle, and turned to go.
“Now I have a favor to ask of you,” I halted her.
A pause. “And what would that be?”
“A dual favor, actually. I need to squeeze a new group into the meetings calendar. So, I would like your group to change its meeting night for the next several weeks, and to amalgamate with another group during that period.”
Dora Sandison looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
“Preposterous,” she snorted when she had regained enough breath for it. “We could not possibly-”
“The other group,” I sped on, “is the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle. Your husband rather scoffs at them as junior aesthetes, but just between us, Mrs. Sandison, they would make ideal new adherents to Gilbert and Sullivan. Think of it: maidens and swains, already listening hard for the music that makes a heart go pit-a-pat. You’d be doing them a favor, really.”
The sniff of conspiracy had its effect on her. I swear, her nostrils widened a tiny bit with anticipation as she eyed me. “This might work to everyone’s benefit, am I to understand? Yours included?”
“Your understanding is pitch-perfect.”
She gave me the queen of smiles, as lofty as it was crafty. “You still have not disappointed me.” With that, she swept out of the library.
When I got back to the inventorying, Rabrab looked at me curiously and asked where I had been.
“Reinventing the calendar,” I said, mopping my brow.
“GOOD EVENING, FELLOW LYRISTS.”
Among the upturned faces as I took center stage in the auditorium only a faithful few showed any appreciation of my greeting. Rab sent back a warm conniving smile, and Jared grinned gamely. In the front row Hoop and Griff looked eager for whatever mischief the night might bring; Quinlan’s expression was similarly keen, but with a sardonic edge. Most of the others, union stalwarts coaxed by Jared and his council to represent their neighborhoods, showed curiosity at best, and at worst a variety of misgivings. These hardened miners had sifted into the library basement one by one or in pairs; several had brought their wives, weathered women in dark-dyed dresses usually worn to weddings, wakes, and funerals. Life on the Hill was written in the creased faces staring up at me in my blue serge, and I needed to tap into whatever inspiration I could find, without delay.
“Why the lyre, you may be wondering, as a fitting symbol for our musical quest?” I whirled to the blackboard I had rigged up on Miss Runyon’s story-hour tripod and sketched the flowing curves of the instrument, then chalked in the strings. “Poets and singers of ancient Greece took up the lyre to accompany their recitations, wisely enough. It is a civilized instrument that honors a song’s words without drowning the intonations out.”
“You draw a pretty picture,” Quinlan called out, “but come right down to it, Morgan my man, the thing is only a midget harp. How’s that going to compete with anything in the Little Red Songbook”-in back of him Jared pained up at those words-“where all you have to do is oil your tonsils a little and bawl out the verse?”
“Just the question I was hoping for, Quin. What the lyre gives us is the word we must strive toward.”
There was a waiting silence, which I could tell would not last beyond one more fidget from the audience.
“Lyrical,” I pronounced, and drove the matter home. “The lyrics of the work song for the union cause must sing to the heart as well as the mind.”
A miner with a bristling mustache objected. “What’d be wrong with a song that just out and out gives Anaconda hell?”
“I believe that already exists.” I warbled the first few lines of “The Old Copper Collar” in illustration. “As apt as that may be, it seems to have had no measurable effect on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, do we agree?” Griff looked hurt.
The audience absorbed my performance uncertainly until the Cornish miner from the Muckaroo called out. “Thee speak a good spoke. But what’s the first bite of the bun to get this done?”
“Aha! You have just put your tongue to it.” I spun to the blackboard and wrote bun and done. “Rhyme is the mother of song.”
THAT WAS THE OVERTURE, musically speaking, in the quest for a battle hymn for the miners of the Hill.
With the union contingent now regularly showing up, a martial set to their jaws and unpredictable stirrings in their throats, I had to enlist Hoop and Griff to direct traffic in and out of the library; it would not do for top-hatted downtowners to come face-to-face with restive Dublin Gulch and Finntown, for example. (I could just imagine Quinlan at close quarters with a library trustee.) No, at all costs I needed to keep the so-called Lyre Club from being brought to Sandison’s attention by any complainers. Only too well I remembered how he fumed against “taking sides” when the idled miners sought shelter in the library during the work actions. If he ever divined that the crowd of us in the basement were, shall we say, less than legally assembled to generate a rallying song for the union, all he had to do to be rid of us was to summon the authorities. What other choice would he have?
Jail was only one worry. Authoritative in their own way and answering to their own shadowy purposes, there were always the goons.
BUT WHERE WERE THEY?
Jared reported that the pair of them had vanished from the mine gate, replaced by uniformed guards not so apt to be taunted as scabs and bombarded with rocks in the night. Accordingly, I watched the shadows more sharply on my way home from the library in the dark, but the inky shapes at alley mouths and lightless doorways never once materialized into Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver. Which did not put to rest my sense of apprehension. In broad daylight, I was carrying a beautiful matched set of Shakespeare plays to the antiquarian shop for appraisal when I rounded a corner and nearly bumped into a hulking figure with an upraised club. I jumped back, shielding myself and the works of the Bard against a blow from Typhoon, but it was merely a hod carrier transporting bricks into the building. So, maybe the goons were nowhere to be seen, but to my mind that didn’t mean they were not, as the one called Roland had said of me, up to something.
My imagination kept asking: Up to what?
“DO ME A FAVOR, please, Rab,” I felt compelled to ask, when I was sure we would not be overheard in the book stacks as we tackled Tennyson, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. “Just as a hypothetical exercise, mind you, find out from Jared how much granite it takes to withstand dynamite.”
“Mr. Morgan, since when are you such a scaredy-cat?” she scolded. She clucked as if I were one of her more dismaying schoolboys. “Besides, I already checked. The walls of the basement auditorium are three feet thick.”
“RHYTHM.” I turned to the next session of miners and wives sitting immobile as birds on a wire while I paced the stage. “The ebb and rise of sounds, the heartbeat that gives life to the alphabet.”
I paused, which never hurts in building up drama.
“In other words, the vital pattern within each line of a verse. Art imitates nature in this, for we live amid natural rhythms, don’t we? For instance, the pit-pat, pit-pat of rain,” I clapped gently in time with that.
Climatology evidently did not stir this audience. Not even Hoop and Griff in the front row responded with more than stifled yawns.
“Or,” I resorted to, “let us take the example of oceanic sound, the anticipatory swish of the tide coming in”-I illustrated with my elbows out and my hands sweeping grandly to my chest-“and the conclusive hiss of it going out,” my arms spreading wide to imaginary watery horizons.
High tide did not seem to register in Butte. Clearing my throat as though the problem of communication might be there in the windpipe, I tried once more:
“In strictly musical terms, a song can attain a distinctive rhythm with repetition of certain syllables or sets of sounds. An example, please, anyone?”
I had not encountered that many mute faces since trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem in the Marias Coulee schoolroom.
Walking a circle on the stage as if surrounding the problem, I thought out loud for the benefit of the passive gathering:
“I assume many of you have children at home? A show of hands, please.”
A good proportion of the audience admitted to parenthood.
“And all of us here are former children, am I correct?”
An unsettled chuckle went around the room.
“Therefore, let us approach this matter from that younger time. We are fortunate to have with us someone who, I happen to know, excelled in schoolyard serenade. Miss Rellis? Would you come up, please, and demonstrate?”
Rab colored prettily. Beside her, Jared tried to look as though he was not present during this. “You’re too kind, Mr. Morgan,” she made a show of demurring, “I’m badly out of practice.”
“One never forgets one’s specialty. Recess was never complete without it, I have reason to believe.”
“Ooh, that. Do you really want me to?”
“Desperately.”
“You asked for it, then.”
Rab sprang from her seat and paraded up onto the stage. As I had counted on, she showed the admirable zeal of a schoolgirl, but of more interest to this mostly male audience, also the chest and legs of a Ziegfeld chorine. She proceeded to deliver the playground song in a voice as pretty as she was, her hands instinctively hoisting the hem of her dress a trifle at just the right words:
Two little lovebirds sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
First comes love!
Then comes marriage!
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage!
That’s not all! That’s not it!
Now there’s another before they quit!
That’s not it! That’s not all!
Now comes twins, Peter and Paul!
I had no more trouble explaining the vital nature of rhythm.
HECTIC NIGHTS OR NOT, the library went about its daytime business at its own whirligig pace. Rab and I were kept hopping to finish the inventory before she went back to teaching in a few weeks, and on top of that was my never-ending round of chores devised by Sandison. Reaching the end of a typically crammed week, I was somewhat behind in tabulating the most popular books of the past seven days and typing up the list for the Daily Post, and still was slaving away at the checkout slips when I heard footsteps approaching the office at a near trot. Why, just once in his life, couldn’t the courier be less than prompt? Glancing up to say something of the sort, I discovered the speed demon coming in the door was not Skinner, but an even skinnier messenger.
“He’s busy running bets on some fight,” Russian Famine explained nonchalantly. “Said it don’t take any brains to do this kind of thing.”
“Nice to see you, Famine. Make yourself comfortable,” I pointed him to a chair, “I’ll be a little while yet at this.”
Making himself comfortable was the opposite of sitting still, as I should have known. After a bit of trying to put up with his fidgets, I suggested he work off that energy on the back staircase and I’d meet him there. Bouncing up to go, he spun into the doorway and collided with Sandison’s belly. The boy gawked up the slope of body, gasped out a strangled “ ’Scuse me,” and darted into the hallway.
Sandison stared after him. “What the hell now, do you have us taking in orphans?”
“You have just met our current messenger to the Daily Post, Sandy. Butte’s version of winged Mercury.”
“If he was any scrawnier, he’d be transparent. Where’s he off to?”
“Oh, just out among the books. Fam-Wladislaw is interested in higher learning.”
Only barely assuaged, Sandison steamed on into the room, took charge of his chair, and wheeled it around to face me. Lately he seemed even more testy than usual. “Something’s not quite right around here, and for once I don’t just mean the library. You’ve got ears like a donkey when it comes to what’s going on in this town. Catch me up.”
I hesitated. Saying anything about the rising resolve of the miners’ union might brush too close to the fact of the sessions in the basement. I chose to concentrate on the Wobblies and recited the gossip about the arrival of phantom operatives to poach membership from the miners’ union.
“Outsiders,” Sandison pronounced flatly. “They’re always trouble.” With that, he heaved himself out of the chair and marched over to the stained-glass window to broodily peer out as if watching for trouble to come.
RUSSIAN FAMINE WAS FLYING UP the top steps when I went to the back staircase with the book list for him to deliver to the newspaper office. For a minute I stood watching, not daring to interrupt the dizzying ballet on the stairs. As before, the scissor-thin legs flashed up the steps three and almost four at a time, then straddled the banister and rode gravity zip-zip-zip to the bottom. Reluctantly I called to him after one of these precipitous rides, and, shaking his thatch of hair as if coming awake, he trotted over to me.
“Has anyone ever told you, my young friend, you give new meaning to the word restless?”
“Huh-uh. You’re the only one who talks that way.”
I thought it best to walk him out of the building, lest he run into Sandison again. While we made our way through the standing ranks of books Rab and I had tallied, the turn of season was on my mind, with her impending departure back to the classroom, and, as adults always foolishly do, I asked Famine if he was ready for school to start.
The boy put on a long face. “Flunked is what I shoulda done. Hung on in Miss Rellis’s class. Now I’ll get some old biddy for a teacher.” He sent me a sideward look, his eyes as quick as the rest of him. “I maybe won’t be going to school too much longer anyway. Skinner says I’m in luck, the Hennessy bunch has its eye on me when they do any more hiring.”
That knifed through me. So much for my bright idea of having posted him to the almighty top floor, just for the summer, to watch for any message of a certain sort dispatched by the goons; true to its nature, Anaconda was ready to swallow him up.
“What does your uncle think?” I asked, afraid I knew the answer.
“He says it’s up to me.” Famine scuffed along, head down. “I don’t much want to, but a kid has got to eat.”
SO, things flew at me like that during those days; and the hours after work the fledgling lyricists of the Lyre Club were steadily ready to consume. “You’re quite a night owl again,” Grace waylaid me as I was about to hustle back to the library one of these times.
My spirits instantly shot upward. How good to have her popping out of the kitchen to trade small talk as she used to. “These evenings, though,” I responded in relief, “everyone involved is healthy enough not to require a casket.”
“That’s not bad-”
“-for a start, yes, yes, you needn’t remind me.” That drew nothing more from Grace; she just hovered in the hallway. The recent distance between us had shrunk to within reach. I chanced hopefully: “If you’re feeling daring, would you like to come with me tonight?”
She shook her head, but still made no move to let me by.
“Hoop and Griff, bless their incurably Welsh souls, have taken practically a proprietary interest in the song sessions,” I gabbed to break the silence.
Grace pinched her lip, restricting her response to a careful “Mmhmm.” I waited, willing her to find whatever words she needed to put us back on the good terms of Miners Day.
Finally she wound her hands in her apron and said:
“Rent day was three days ago, Morrie.”
Deflated, I paid up and exited into the night.
AT MY SECOND HOME, the library, once more the miners and wives and Rab and Jared and Hoop and Griff and I filed into the basement without the whole passel of us being hauled off for unlawful assembly. It was a critical night: by dint of my tugging and hauling, we had reached melody, in the steps of song construction. However, I was making scant progress by standing on the stage and humming famous melodies as illustration, and in frustration I bemoaned the auditorium’s lack of any means of musical accompaniment.
To my surprise, that put life in my audience. For once, there was unanimity in the knowing grins of everyone but me, even Jared and Rab.
It was left to the Cornishman to ask:
“Has thee not heard of the Butte Stradivarius?”
“I confess I have not.”
“Thee shall have that remedied.”
THE CONCERTINA, rapidly fetched and in Cornish hands, could produce any melody I could think of, and plenty more. The wheezebox, as I came to think of it, made my point that a good tune was essential to a good song.
“That completes the three parts of musical invention,” I announced exultantly as the last wheezy strains of “Camptown Races” wafted away into the plaster foliage atop the auditorium walls.
“Rhyme, rhythm,” I smacked my fist into my hand with each word, “and melody. Keep those in mind and the Hill and its union shall sing a work song to rival that of the angels in their airy labors.” (Or, in my mind and Jared’s, to challenge that infernally mocking ballad of pie in the sky.)
This was a proud moment, and the craggy miners who had manfully sat through nights of musical instruction now slapped their knees and batted their neighbors on the shoulders and shouted out, “Good job, Professor!”
I took a modest bow. “I have done my utmost, and now it is up to you. Appropriately enough, creating the right song will take work, don’t think it won’t,” I exhorted further. “Inspiration most often follows perspiration. Now, then,” I advanced to the lip of the stage and made a beckoning gesture to the group, “what ideas do I hear for that song?”
Discord ensued.
The Finns wanted something grand and sonorous, in the manner of a saga.
The Cornish wanted something brisk.
The Irish wanted something rollicking that would tear the hide off Anaconda.
The Welsh, who legitimately had music in their blood, were outnumbered and outshouted by the others, as usual in history.
The Serbs wanted something that dripped blood.
What the Italians wanted was not clear, but it was nowhere close to what the other nationalities had in mind.
Standing up there trying to referee the musical wrangle, I wondered what it took to get committed to a mental institution in Montana.
At last Jared dutifully climbed onto the stage beside me and in his best top-sergeant manner managed to institute some order.
“This is a start,” he took command of the chaos in an unarguable style Napoleon might have admired. “There are a few differences of opinion, but talk those over with each other, with your shift partners and anybody who can carry a tune, all right? We’ll sort out what’s promising and what isn’t, next time. After that, we’ll get the union delegates from each shift at every mine together, and settle on the best song.” Without breaking his cadence of being in charge he asked over his shoulder: “How many people does this place hold, Professor?”
“Hmm? Perhaps two hundred. But you can’t-”
“It’ll be the damnedest thing they ever heard on the top floor of the Hennessy Building,” Jared vowed with a fist, “our song when we get it. Folks will sing it in this town as long as there’s a chunk of copper left in the Hill.” He clapped his hands, once, sharply. “Now let’s go home and get to working on the work song, everybody.”
As the group dispersed, I stood by numbly, still jolted by Jared’s fervent promise to assemble two hundred miners here in a library space where they were not supposed to assemble at all. Knowing perfectly well that if I asked him, “How?” the reply was going to be, “Professor, I leave that to you.”
Quinlan passed by me with a troublesome grin, humming to himself. That tune at least was unmistakable. “Same song, second verse. / Could get better, but it’s gonna get worse.”
WHEN I CLOSED UP THE LIBRARY, Rab and Jared were waiting for me down on the steps. “Come with us to the Purity for pie,” he invited, direct even when he was being pleasant. “I’ll even buy.”
I joined them, and the sound of our footsteps was our only company on the lamplit streets. Of course Rab had a dozen enthusiasms about what the sought-after song should be like, and Jared winnowed those in his wry fashion. I contributed what I could, although my head was a swirl. A crowd of a couple hundred, to get past the police, the goons, and, perhaps most consequential, Samuel Sandison, without attracting attention? My mind went back and forth over this, which simply dug the problem in deeper. My mood was not helped when we passed the Daily Post building and I saw that even the so-called autumn classic, the World Series, was jinxed this wayward year; the scoreboard being set up for the forthcoming games announced the Chicago White Sox-Skinner would crow to me unmercifully-versus the Cincinnati Red Stockings, as purists knew the team that sports pages habitually shrunk to the Redlegs or Reds. The Anklet Series, I thought of it with disgust. Where were the teams with good sound contentious names, Cubs, Tigers, Pirates? When even baseball starts to go downhill, I grieved, there’s no telling what will follow.
My brooding spell was broken by Jared as we neared the cafeteria. He tugged at his short ear as he did when thinking hard, and Rab attentively shut up. Looking around to make sure we couldn’t be overheard, he said in a voice low but firm:
“Just so you know, Professor. The Hill might have to go on strike, maybe pretty damn quick.”
I hoped his wording was a slip of the tongue. “Another work action, you mean.”
“That’s the farthest thing from what he means, Mr. Morgan,” said Rab.
“She’s right as usual,” Jared acknowledged, giving her a wink. He was all seriousness as he turned to me again. “We’ve negotiated until we’re blue in the face, and Anaconda still won’t meet us halfway on anything that counts. Worse than that, those of us on the council have a hunch the company is getting ready to cut the dollar off the wage again. If that happens,” his tone became even more resolved, “we won’t have any choice. The union will either have to curl up and die or call a strike.” In the streetlight there outside the cafeteria, I saw Jared square his shoulders as he looked up at the lights of the Hill and listened for a moment to the drivewheel sound of the mines at work. In another battle, of another sort, he must have sized up Dead Man’s Hill similarly before the attack up the slope. Now he shifted his gaze to the slumbering city around us. “It’s always tough on the town, to shut everything down,” he said solemnly. “But Butte has been through strikes before. They’re part of life here. Everybody understands it’s our only way to fight back against Anaconda.”
“Jared, I must know,” another apprehension creeping up on me, “how quick is pretty damn quick?”
“After the next payday, more than likely. Doesn’t leave you any too much time, does it.”
I blanched. That soon? To come up with the union song necessary to rally his forces? From an aggregate of miners who didn’t agree on anything musically except the sublime charm of the concertina?
Jared nodded as if reading my mind. “I know it’ll take some doing. But we’ll need all the ammunition we can get when the strike comes.” He touched my shoulder. “The song counts for a lot, Professor. I want it in the head of every miner on the Hill, to hold us together.”
“Inspiration follows perspiration, you did say, Mr. Morgan,” Rab contributed all too helpfully.
At least one thing stayed the same in the Butte night: the owner of the Purity with a glad cry ushered us in to serve ourselves.
THUS, there was everything but library business on my mind during business hours at the library the following day. Which may explain the next thing to happen. My thoughts elsewhere, I was on my way between one chore and another in a rear hallway when a shadow not my own loomed on the wall beside me. In a fit of panic, I whirled and put my back against the wall, digging with both hands for my brass defenders.
“Famine!” I exhaled with relief. “You surprised me a little.”
“Didn’t mean to spook you.” He handed me an envelope. “Told me you wanted to see anything with Shycago on it.”
I glanced at the Chicago postmark and the kind of chill that supposedly occurs when some creature of the night treads across one’s gravesite came over me.
“Have yourself some ice cream,” I rewarded my trustworthy messenger with enough money for a vat of it, “and then come back.” He vanished in leaps and bounds, and I trotted downstairs to the auditorium. The Theosophists’ electric tea kettle steamed the envelope open quite nicely.
Two pieces of paper shook out, dire as loaded dice.
“There’s goods to be got on anybody, sucker.” Eel Eyes’ parting shot resounded in me like a cannonade as I examined the sheets one by one. You should never underestimate even the most thick-headed adversary. The goons had been a lot more determined to get something on me than I imagined. Who knew how many underworlds they’d had to try, but they hit pay dirt in a certain den of high rollers beside Lake Michigan. What I was holding was a print of the photograph from Miners Day, Grace and myself frozen-faced as missionaries with the splendor of Columbia Gardens around us. My head was circled in red crayon like a target.
The letter that came with was even worse.
“Photo you sent is positive identification: real name Morgan Llewellyn. Capture him and deliver him to us. We have an old score to settle.”
There was more, but that told the story. The Chicago gambling mob did not forgive; it never even forgot. Like hounds stirred from sleep by an old hunting scent, the betting sharpies were roused all over again about Casper’s last fight and our winnings, and I had to act fast.
Reflex and logic agreed on the same piece of advice: take the next train out of town. Put all possible distance between the contents of the envelope and myself. But that left Grace, literally in the picture next to me, and in for nasty interrogation by Eel Eyes and Typhoon if I wasn’t available. Besides, if I fled now I would be leaving other loose ends flapping in this Butte chapter of life, and that would bother me for the rest of my days.
With the troublesome pieces of paper tucked inside my suitcoat, I made my way upstairs to the mezzanine, thinking as hard as it is possible to think. Rab had gone out with an armload of books for appraisal by the antiquarian dealer; that helped. And further luck: Sandison was down there in the Reading Room, trying to deal with Miss Runyon, highly indignant over something, and would have his hands full for a while. My path was clear, and indicatively it led through an aisle of fiction. Passing through the ranks of Twain and Defoe and the others as I slipped into the office, I was in the company of those who best knew that a greater truth can sometimes be told by making things up. And those wise old heads did not even have my magic kit to work with, the typewriter and fountain pen.
I had two envelopes waiting for Famine to deliver when he scampered back. In the one from Chicago, the goons now were informed in nice fresh typing with a copied signature that, alas, this was a case of mistaken identity, no one back there had ever laid eyes on the nobodies in the photo. In the one to go into the mail to Chicago, the gambling mob was notified that, regrettably, its message had arrived too late, the miscreant Morgan Llewellyn had vanished from Butte.
“YOU LOOK SUNNY THIS MORNING,” Grace observed.
As I sat down to breakfast that next day, it was all I could do not to reach over and pat her on the dimpled cheek in celebration of our mutual survival. “A sound night’s sleep does wonders,” I restricted myself to. She herself looked refreshed by something, taking time off from the kitchen to sit and sip coffee until Hoop and Griff appeared. I still was only a boarder and she still was the landlady, but when Grace wasn’t having to doctor herself against her own nerves, she also was a very attractive companion at the table. Right now, with her freshly braided hair a coil of gold, she resembled the sunshiny maiden on the lid of tinned shortbread. The sovereign maiden in charge of all such tinned goods, that is. While I was in the midst of such thoughts, she gave me, in the words of the poet, a brightening glance, and I smiled gamely back. Maybe this was only a mild degree of thaw between us, but it improved the climate. She watched me expectantly as I settled into eating. “Well, have you noticed?”
Whatever it was, it hadn’t caught my attention yet; certainly the cold toast was the same as ever.
“The house, Morrie,” she prompted, “the house!”
“Ah.” I scanned around. “New curtains?”
“All right, you,” she said in mock exasperation-at least I hoped it was mock. “There hasn’t been any dynamiting for days and days, has there?” She knocked on wood, but her smile was triumphant. “I was curious,” she continued in a confiding tone, “so I had Arthur’s old partner in the mines look into it for me. And guess what? The shaft under here is played out and Anaconda has had to seal it off. You can quit worrying about sleeping in a glory hole,” she teased.
Little did she know that the Chicago watery version had just passed me by. “Grace, that’s nice news,” I could say unreservedly. “Butte would not be the same without the Faraday Boarding House.”
Bouncing up when she heard Hoop and Griff on the stairs, she went off to fry their breakfast.
The two of them came in grinning, grinned at each other, then grinned at me some more as they sat at the table.
“We been thinking,” said Hoop as if it was something new.
“You’ve got yourself a lulu of a problem, slipping a couple hundred people into the library the night the song gets voted on,” Griff said as if that fact might have escaped me.
“Wouldn’t be the first time the cops broke up a meeting and arrested everybody in sight,” Hoop went on, tucking in his napkin.
“Righto,” Griff confirmed, spooning sugar into his coffee. “So we figure what you need, Morrie, is an eisteddfod.”
I did not want to say that something pronounced eye-steth-vod stumped me as much as if he had been speaking mumbo-jumbo. But it did.
“Perhaps you could elaborate on that just a bit, Griff.”
“Glad to. Like everybody knows, an eisteddfod is when the finest singers and the greatest bards in Wales gather from the hills and the valleys and every mine pit from Caernarvon to Caerphilly”-he swept a knobby hand around like an impresario-“and try to outdo one another.”
“Kind of a jollification,” Hoop put in. “Like Miners Day that just don’t stop.”
With that, my tablemates sat back and slurped coffee, magnanimously ready for all due praise.
“I see,” I coughed out. “Actually, I don’t. The Welsh miners are the only ones who would have any idea what an eye-eisteddfod is, and they’re just a handful among the song bunch. Everyone else-?” I spread my hands.
Griff squinted at me. “You’re a little slow on the uptake today, Morrie. Everyone else outside of the song bunch, after we clue those in.”
“Nobody is gonna go near the thing,” Hoop expanded on that, “who don’t know the lingo.”
Thinking back to the Welsh minister and the tongue-tying eternity of tragwyddoldeb, I couldn’t argue with that.
Somewhat against my better judgment, I tested the matter out loud.
“Such as the public at large and the police, you mean.” Both wrinkled heads bobbed at my response, gratified that I was catching up. My tablemates now took turns expanding on why an indecipherable event that would unobtrusively slip a couple of hundred people into the basement of the Butte Public Library was such a surefire idea.
Grace came from the kitchen with a plate in each hand, stopping short at Griff’s grand culmination:
“Hoop and me can handle the whole proceedings for you, don’t worry none.”
I had not really started to, until he said that.
IT WAS LIKE TRYING to rein in runaway horses, but I managed to make the pair promise to contain their eisteddfod enthusiasm until I could test the notion on Jared. Meanwhile, I was late and had to bolt for the library. People were out and about in unusual numbers, I couldn’t help but notice, all heading down toward the railroad tracks where a sizable crowd had already gathered. I presumed another political figure was arriving to make a speech off the back of a train; but President Wilson himself would not be a shield against Sandison’s displeasure if I weren’t in the head count of staff before he opened the library.
Too late. When I got there, everyone had gone in but Rab, who was practically dancing with impatience as I hastened up the steps.
“Mr. Morgan, you came from that direction,” she spoke so fast it was nearly all one word, “did you see it?”
This was not my day, linguistically. “Do you suppose, Rab, you could take a deep breath and define it for me?”
She was as disappointed in me as Hooper and Griffith had been. “Oh, here.” Whisking over to a stack of newly delivered Daily Posts beside the doorway, she handed me one with fresh ink practically oozing from the EXTRA! atop the front page.
Beneath that, the even larger headline:
OUTSIDE AGITATORS WARNED
And below that, a jolting photograph of the railroad overpass where the IWW organizer had been lynched a few years before. From the middle of the trestle girders dangled a hangman’s noose. Attached to the rope was a sign readable even in the grainy newsprint reproduction:
THE MONTANA NECKTIE
YOU ONLY WEAR IT ONCE
WOBS AND OTHER TROUBLEMAKERS-
LEAVE TOWN BEFORE THIS FITS YOU
Digesting this, I had mixed reactions. Plainly the goons, stymied about me after Chicago was no help, had broadened their approach to include any other strangers in the vicinity of the Hill; when you are a target, I have to say, you do appreciate having that kind of attention shared around. On the other hand, a noose just down the street from where you lay your head at night is still too close for comfort.
“Jared says the police are taking their sweet time about removing it,” Rab confided over my shoulder, again as fast as words could follow one another, “so Anaconda gets to scare everybody.”
“We have to let Jared handle that,” I stated, “while we have to get inside and handle books or face the wrath of our employer.”
Her mischievous laugh surprised me. “We wouldn’t want that, heaven knows.”
DISPATCHING RAB TO TAKE OUT her ardor on the book collection, I had to tend to a few office matters before joining her. If I was in luck, Sandison would be out on one of his prowls of the building. But, no. There he sat, stormy as thunder. Before I could utter any excuse for being late, he flapped the Post’s front page at me. “Did you see this damn thing?”
“By this hour of the day, I believe everyone in the city has seen either the newspaper or the actual piece of rope, Sandy.”
“This town,” he said in a tone that it hurt to hear. “It just can’t resist having dirty laundry out in the open. Hell, anyone knows outsiders are asking for it, that’s where rope law comes from.” Saying that, he took another furious look at the front page photograph, his gaze so hot I thought the paper might singe.
“The ‘Montana necktie,’ ” he ground out the words, “what’s the sense of dragging that up?” He started to say something more, but instead crushed the newspaper in the vise of his hands and thrust it into the wastebasket.
I stood there, gaping at the outburst, until his glare shifted to me. “Don’t you have anything to do but stand there with your face hanging out?”
I left in a hurry. The calm ranks of the books on the mezzanine were particularly welcome after that. Was there any way in this world to predict the actions of their combustible collector?
Hearing me come, Rab spun from the shelf where she had been flicking open covers to look for the SSS bookplates. “This is the day, you know.”
From my experience, that could be said about every twenty-four hours in Butte. But I did know what she meant.
“The sixth grade is about to meet its match,” I said with a smile. Tomorrow was the start of school and the teaching year of Miss Rellis, as she had to turn into. I was going to miss Rab’s company and the noble ranks of the inventory. Reaching to the shelf nearest her, I asked: “Ready?” She nodded. Into her waiting arms I stacked the plump volumes of Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Germinal, and on top the slim, elegant masterpiece J’accuse; Zola, the end of the inventory alphabet.
“The ones we’ve been looking for,” she joked a little sadly as we went to the sorting room to tally these treasures in with the rest.
“Maybe the full inventory will improve Sandison’s disposition,” I thought out loud. “The commotion about the noose seems to offend his civic sensibilities.”
The mischievous laugh again. “Quit being funny, Mr. Morgan.”
“Rab, really, you are not being fair to our employer.” For whatever reason, I felt tender toward Sandison in his upset mood. “I grant you he has a bit of a temper, but we shouldn’t judge him entirely on that. It is a truth as old as humankind that the presence of a shortcoming in a person does not preclude the existence of other worthier attributes in that same-Why are you looking at me like that?”
Rab had the magpie gleam of possessing the hidden morsel. “Don’t you know who Sam Sandison is? He’s the Strangler.”