Work Song

by Ivan Doig

  As if he knew.

  MORGAN LLEWELLYN. That IS my rightful name. Yes, that famous breed of Llewellyn. I know I carry only a minor share of its renown in the world, but reflected glory is still glory of a sort. It was my brother, Casper, who reigned as lightweight boxing champion of the world, “Capper” Llewellyn in the inch-high headlines every time he won by another knockout. And I was his “genius” of a manager.

  Even yet he causes me to lie awake, when the mind tussles with itself before sleep comes, thinking of how life paired us so peculiarly. Casper was magical, if confidence and prowess count as magic. Even as a boy, he had the cocky outlook that nothing was out of the reach of a good left hook, and my role as older brother often amounted to fishing him out of trouble. Which perhaps made it inevitable, when he was matriculating as a boxer in Chicago’s West Side fight clubs and I was graduating from the university, that he insisted I become his manager. He did not possess my brains and I did not have his brawn, he pointed out all too accurately, so we had better join onto one another as if we were Siamese, in his words. Casper could be exasperating, but in the ring he was a thing of beauty, a Parthenon statue of a perfect athlete sprung to life, and I have to say, I felt somewhat wizardly in fashioning his boxing career for him. Carefully I chose opponents who would build his record, alternating his bouts between the easy fighters called “cousins” and the tougher ones we stropped Casper’s skills on. It became only a matter of time until the name Casper Llewellyn would be on the card of a title fight.

  Now the other tussle in the mind’s nightly shadows. Rose, delightful maddening Rose.

  Along the way, he and she met, a wink served its purpose, and they fell for each other like the proverbial ton of bricks. Brother-in-law was added to my responsibilities. At first I was wary of Rose as an adventuress—why don’t I just say it: a gold digger—but soon enough saw that she and my brother were a genuine matching of hearts. Pert and attractive, whimsical and ever whistling, she was a sunny addition to the Llewellyn name. Luck seemed to have found us, as Casper’s purses for winning grew and grew, and when he became the lightweight champion, we felt we had truly hit the jackpot. The three of us grew accustomed to high living. Somewhat too high. Rose never saw a satin dress and a saucy hat to go with it that did not appeal to her, while Casper threw money around as if it were going out of style. And I have to admit, money does not stick to me, either. That’s why a large supply seemed such a good idea.

  It was one of those situations you know you ought not to get into, but do: the pugilistic science, the fight game, the glove trade, boxing in all its guises was uncommonly good to us, yet income did not nearly keep up with outgo. So, it was Casper’s brainstorm to throw the fight with the challenger, Ned Wolger. Rose and I might not have listened to him but for the odds on his side—he was a three-to-one favorite to wallop Wolger. That walloping could simply be postponed, as he put it, until the inevitable rematch. In the meantime, all we had to do was put our money on Wolger, spreading those bets around out of town so as not to attract suspicion. Rose and I saw to that, and in the last round of the title match, Casper, shall we say, resigned from the fight. And we collected hand over fist. Too much so. The Chicago gambling mob turned murderous about the amount it had lost on an apparent sure thing.

  That part haunts me to this minute: Lake Michigan, blue as sword steel beside the city, and the gamblers seizing Casper and making an example of him, in the infamous fate called “a walk off the dock.”

  Before they could lay hands on us, Rose and I fled together. Not with the money, alas, which was consigned forever to a biscuit tin wherever Casper had stashed it; he never did trust banks. Left on our own, with the gambling mob ever on our mind if not on our trail, she and I took shelter in Minneapolis, where she had been in household service. Minneapolis was still too close to Chicago for comfort. Then a propitious ad we had placed in Montana newspapers brought Rose a job as housekeeper for a widower and his three sons, and like so many seekers of a new life, we boarded a train for the homestead country of the West. Events took their own willful course after that. We posed as brother and sister, but in the alone-ness of prairie lodgings the two of us became man and woman in the flesh, so to speak.

  Only for a season, it turned out. I lost her, fair and square, to the widower, Oliver Milliron, a good man and friend. His eldest son, Paul, was astute in other matters besides Latin, and it was he who drew from me the pledge to mean it when I gave away Rose at the wedding and to never return to Marias Coulee, and the vicinity of temptation. It has not been easily kept. No day since have I not thought of Rose.

  “MORRIE? MORRIE, anyone home between your ears? I asked: How was your day at the library?”

  “Sorry, Grace. My thoughts were elsewhere.”

  “Miles away, I’d say. White meat or dark?” She was majestically carving off slice after slice of turkey, a surprise feast to the other three of us at the supper table. “I hope it’s not as hard on the nerves as standing over a corpse every night. Wakes would give me the willies.”

  “Oddly enough, the library is somewhat more solemn, in a way. May I ask what the occasion is, with this festive bird?”

  “The price is down, always to be celebrated.” Dishing out judicious servings of turkey, she returned to that other topic: “Just what is it you do all day there in Sandison’s stronghold, besides keep the books company?”

  An apt question, not easily answered. Day by day, besides my juggling act with the meetings schedule, it had been gruffly suggested to me that I organize the disorganized subscription list of magazines and newspapers, find someone to fix the drinking fountain, deal with Miss Runyon’s complaints about squeaky wheels on book carts passing through her sanctum, respond to a stack of letters from people with the kinds of questions only a library can answer—in short, I was tasked with anything Sandison did not want to do, which was very nearly everything.

  “This, that, and the other,” I replied to Grace honestly enough. “If the library can be thought of as the kitchen of knowledge, I seem to be the short-order cook.”

  Griff and Hoop were saying nothing. She gave them an exasperated look and sat down at her place. Almost immediately, Griff gasped and straightened up sharply. I had the impression Grace’s foot may have given his shin a tap. More than a tap. “I was about to say,” he rushed the words, “you getting along hunky-dory with Sandison?”

  “We are on”—first-name basis did not quite cover the situation—“what might be called familiar terms. I call him Sandy.”

  “Heard him called a lot, but never that.”

  This seemed to bring a sense of relief around the table. Hoop came to life. “Might have plenty of library customers pretty soon, Morrie. Mornings anyway. There’s strike talk. We was at the union meeting last night—”

  “I could tell,” Grace inserted. “I heard you come in.” As I unavoidably had, too.

  Griff stiffened again, apparently of his own accord this time. “Refreshments are in order after a business session,” he maintained, prim as if the pair of them hadn’t reeled in around midnight, bumping the furniture and misjudging the stairs.

  “Anyhow,” Hoop sped past the spree after the meeting, “there’s talk that the union might go out if the snakes won’t give on the lost dollar.” Even I knew that would be something like a declaration of war.

  “And bring in more goons and strikebreakers,” Grace underscored that, “like the last several times?”

  “Those yellow-bellied buggers got on everybody’s nerves a little too much the last time,” Griff said, wielding a fork as if fending off such invaders. “The other unions didn’t like the way we was treated, they might be next. Evans and his council have made the rounds, they’re not as hot in the head as the last fellows were, and they’ve got most everybody ready to side with us. Even the streetcar drivers. Shut down the whole town this time, we could, if the mine strike gets called.” He summed up magisterially, “Things could work out just fine, if them others don’t stic
k their noses in and make trouble.”

  Grace, I noticed, looked as if strike talk was the kind of thing that gave her hives. Trying to keep up with the nuances of Butte, I asked, “Those others are . . . ?”

  “The Wobblies,” said Hoop. “Who else?”

  “They’d just love to see a strike get out of hand,” Griff laid it out for me. “The more blood in the streets, the better they figure it is for them. The Wobs would turn this into Russia if they could.” All at once the crimson cover of the jolly Little Red Songbook made more sense to me.

  “They aren’t the only ones who can play it cute, though.” Griff still was wound up, his fork punctuating his words. “Thanks to them, Evans has got Anaconda looking at its hole card in the negotiations about getting the dollar back. It’d rather deal with him than the IWW any day.”

  “The meek shall inherit, if they are clever enough about it,” I mused aloud.

  “That sounds like something that shook out of a library book.”

  “I was merely complimenting the union’s strategy at the table, Griff. I am not taking sides on the issue of a strike.”

  Grace was. She reached to the turkey platter and plucked up the wishbone. “See this, you pair of busybodies?” Snap, and she brandished the wish-fulfilling piece of the bone at the supposedly retired miners. “There, now, I’ve asked that you not get your old fool heads broken on a picket line.”

  “Aw, Mrs. Faraday, it maybe won’t come to that.” Griff sounded as if he was trying to convince himself along with her.

  Something Hoop had said stuck with me, and I turned to him. “If the men do go on strike, why would any of them frequent the library just mornings?”

  “Speakeasies don’t open until noon.”

  IN MYTHOLOGY, Atlas alone has the world on his shoulders, but in real life the globe of concerns rests on each of us at any given time. After that suppertime discussion, what weighed on me when I settled into bed as usual with a lovingly done book from the library—The Education of Henry Adams, in this instance—was the gravity of the times. The immeasurable shadow of the 1914-1918 war still lay over the affairs of nations; Europe’s old jealously held boundaries were being torn up and rewritten, for better or worse, at the Paris peace conference. Russia already had shaken the political firmament by doing away with the Czar and yielding to the new fist of the Bolsheviks. America’s habit of throwing a fit to ward off contagion was at high pitch; activists with a leftist tinge were being hounded by government agents, even jailed or deported. Alongside that, the laboring class started at a deep disadvantage whenever it challenged the masters of capital. Strikes were its only effective tool, the way things were, but the powers that be resisted those with force if necessary. It added up to a jittery period of history, did it not? I knew enough of life to understand that every era has a set of afflictions, yet 1919 seemed to be a double dose. The pages in front of me, stylishly written, did little to dispel such heavy thoughts. Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents and with as much blue blood in his veins as there is in America, confessed at length in his autobiographical Education to a life contradictorily adrift on oceans of ignorance. Adams had not lived to see the turbulent aftermath of the Great War, but even so he professed little hope of ever finding “a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.”

  I closed the book on that sentence. There was no point in reading about timid natures in Butte.

  THE EDUCATION OF MORRIS MORGAN had a new chapter waiting the next day. It began in the Reading Room, where I was poring over the subscription list with Smithers, the young librarian on the periodicals desk, to see how we might squeeze more magazines into the budget we had. I felt a tap on the shoulder and turned around to an angular woman dressed in old-fashioned style, gray and gaunt as a duchess in a Goya etching. “You are the person,” she enunciated to me so loudly and clearly that every head in the room snapped up from reading, “in charge of evening groups, I believe? I wish to speak with you.”

  I looked hopefully toward the mezzanine, but for once, Sandison was not on hand to roar “Quiet!” at the offender. Peculiar characters are drawn to a library like bees to a flower garden, so I turned to this one with the most authoritative air I could, and, indicating I was nearly finished with what I was at, murmured, “If you’ll wait in the foyer, ma’am, I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  “Hsst!” The warning hiss from Smithers came a little late. In an ingratiating tone, he was saying: “How are you today, Mrs. Sandison? ”

  “Ah. Actually, we can finish this later,” I told Smithers, and quickly ushered the visiting personage into the mineralogy section, the nearest room not in use.

  Now that we had privacy, Dora Sandison paused to study me, which did not take her long. Even her eyes were gray, and they were the sort that did not miss a trick. She was as tall as her husband, and acted taller. I had heard the library staff refer to the Sandisons as the grandee and the grandora, and could understand why. “I regret taking you away from your other task,” she said, her expression indicating nothing of the sort. “However, the evening group of which I am a member has a most pressing need.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I responded warily, trying to imagine which of the clubs that met in the basement auditorium would attract such a personality. The Theosophists, to unravel the mysteries of the Divinity? The League of Nations supporters, to correct the habits of governments?

  She surprised me with a conspiratorial smile. “We require music stands.”

  “Music—? ”

  “The Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group is not provided with music stands, if you can believe that.”

  “I see.” A sense of caution grew in me. “Surely this is the kind of request that your husband has dealt with, up until now?”

  “Oh, horsefeathers,” she brushed away my concern. “You know how Sandy is about such things.”

  Now I really did see. I could just about recite what Sandison’s response to a request solely on behalf of Gilbert and Sullivan aficionados would have been. “Don’t they have hands? Holding a piece of sheet music in front of their noses shouldn’t strain them too much.”

  “My husband, bless his soul,” she went on in a confiding tone, “sometimes carries matters too far. He takes the ridiculous view that answering the needs of a group I coincidentally am a member of would constitute preferential treatment, can you imagine?”

  I chuckled nervously. “There is the point, Mrs. Sandison, that no other group has seen the need for such, um, equipment.”

  She snorted, very much like Sandison himself. “That is their failing rather than ours, then,” she instructed me with a glint in her eye that wouldn’t be argued with. “We sorely lack such equipment, as you call it, to hold our libretto sheets when the member whose turn it is takes our group through the intricacies of the lyrics of the chosen operetta. For example, ‘Strike the concertina’s melancholy string! Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything! Let the piano’s martial blast rouse the echoes of the past! ’ ” During this demonstration she waved her arms in my face as vigorously as a semaphore flagger.

  She paused and caught her breath. “You can surely understand,” she said as if I’d better, “the presenter needs to be free to gesture, or the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan is lost.”

  Sometimes it is wise to bend before the gale. “I’ll see what can be done about music stands.”

  She smiled slyly again. “I’m so glad Sandy put a reasonable person in charge of such matters.”

  With that, Dora Sandison departed in as grand a fashion as she had arrived, and I was left with the equipment problem. I searched the building high and low, but the marvelous holdings of the Butte Public Library did not include music stands. Somehow a purchase would have to be made, and I groaned at what was ahead of me, knowing how tight Sandison was with a dollar when the purchase of anything other than a book was involved.

  “Sandy? If I could have a minute of your time?” Grumpily he lef
t off reading a rare books catalogue and creaked around in his desk chair to face me. “Spit it out, Morgan.”

  “We have a request from an evening group for some freestanding smallish reading racks to hold the sheets of paper they work from, and—”

  “Hah. You’ve been hearing from the Giblet and Mulligan Society about those damn music stands. My wife is in that group, and I’ve told her the same thing I’ll tell you: the library can’t show favoritism to any one bunch.”

  “Naturally not. But those rather modest implements would be of use to other groups as well.”

  “What for? Don’t they have—”

  “—they do have hands, but there are occasions when they would welcome some kind of device to hold certain items.” I groped for some sort of example. “The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle, for instance, when they wish to have photo displays to go with their discussion of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. The mystical castle in Edinburgh.” My fingers conjured that citadel in the air. “The sinister backstreets of London where Jekyll transmogrifies into Hyde.” I turned my hands into claws and made a grotesque face.

  Sandison watched my little performance incredulously. “That’s what goes on with that la-de-da bunch? Dry-goods clerks and young women afraid they’ll be old maids sit there and actually follow Stevenson’s stories from scene to scene?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” I said, true as far as it went.

  He smacked a hand to his desktop, a sound like a shot. “That’s genius for you. What a writer.” I was given the kind of look a cowboy probably received for coming late to the corral. “Why didn’t you tell me this before, Morgan? Go on over to Simonetti’s music store and buy the things.” He jerked open his bottom drawer, dug into the small strongbox that held petty cash, and handed me some money. I waited for him to jot down the sum or have me sign for it or however he handled a disbursement, but he simply waved me out of his sight and went back to pawing through the list of books he craved.