Work Song

by Ivan Doig

  Out into the night he and Rab went, with me brooding behind, when the bow-tied impresario at the cash register called after me: “Hey, you with the pie in you, don’t run off!”

  Just the ending the evening needed, I thought to myself balefully, Jared sticking me with the bill.

  That proved not to be the case, however. Hopping down from his stool and coming up close to me, the Purity proprietor dropped his usual repartee. “Haven’t I seen you with that messenger kid who goes around like his pants are on fire? What is he, your nephew?”

  “Second cousin,” I answered negotiably; Russian Famine barely had a shirttail, let alone a shirttail relative, but imaginary kinship might be better than none. “Why?”

  “I need someone to run errands and so on,” he said as if that ought to be perfectly obvious. “Tell the kid he’s got a job after school if he wants it. I’ll give him a fair wage.”

  “He needs more than that,” I interjected. “His is the, um, lean side of the family line. He very nearly lives hand to mouth.”

  The cafeteria owner swayed back from me, frowning. “What are you, his union?” Observing the rules of the game, he hemmed and hawed for a minute before grandly offering: “Oh, all right, I’ll throw in his meals, how’s that?”

  “Allow me.” I squared his bow tie for him; tonight’s was royal purple. “All he can eat, I trust that means?”

  “Sure. How much can that be, a runt like him?”

  IN THE BOOK OF LIFE we are chapters in one another’s stories, and with Russian Famine given a place at the feast, so to speak, I felt like an author drawing a scene to a successful close. That was only the first episode to be resolved, however, while more than I wanted to count waited in line.

  A crisp expectancy was in the air of Butte those next days and nights. The season turned as if October was a signpost for the weather: the first snow, dazzling and spotless, appeared in the mountain heights above Columbia Gardens, while downtown blocks at midday echoed with the loudspeaker version of anklet baseball—“Flash! The Redlegs win again, they lead the White Sox in the Series three games to two!”—and in the dusk, fresh war cries whooped from the Hill as boys played football on barren patches between mine heaps. The change in climate could be measured any number of ways. More than once I noticed women and daughters trooping past the boardinghouse with gunnysacks, and I asked Grace about it. “Coal,” she said simply. The thought of it pulled the skin tight around her eyes. “They go down to the tracks and pick up what’s spilled from the trains. I did it myself when I was a girl and a strike was coming. Anything to get ready for the worst.”

  I knew the feeling. As a precautionary measure, I resumed my habit of keeping watch into the shadows for the darker presence of goons; Eel Eyes and Typhoon now had no reason to pack me off to Chicago, but if it ever entered their thick heads that I had turned the library into a choir loft of the miners’ union, they were bound to be renewed trouble. Nor were they the only concern. In the back of my mind the Welsh minister kept preaching his “unlawful assembly” sermon (“Butte’s finest, to call them that, will pick you off like ripe apples”). And there was always Sandison. The man had wrung out his soul for me to see, there beneath the hanging tree, but he still was impossible to predict. Which was I going to encounter at the crucial time, the merely gruff city librarian or the Earl of Hell?

  When I at last told him, as I had to, that the Lyre Club would be honoring an old bardic tradition by holding an eisteddfod and braced for a volley from him about the library turning into a madhouse, he merely grunted and said, “What’s your next field of knowledge, Morgan, druidic chants?”

  All the while, Hoop and Griff assured me at every meal that there was nothing to worry about.

  READY OR NOT, the night of nights arrived to us.

  “Remember, Professor, when you step out there, this isn’t some lilies-of-the-valley crowd. These men have been through everything Anaconda could do to them and they’re about to be on strike for hell knows how long. They’re not here to fool around. Don’t get carried away, just run the songs through and have them vote, savvy?”

  “I am not aware that I ever get carried—”

  “Oh, don’t forget the hat, Mr. Morgan. I stirred the slips of paper around, so when they draw it’ll be perfectly fair. Just don’t drop it or spill it or—”

  “Actually, Rab, I have handled a hat before, thank you very—”

  “Another thing. Don’t let Quinlan hog the stage when he gets up to sing whatever his bunch has come up with. This is serious business, not some Irish wake, got that?”

  “Jared, I promise I shall muzzle Quin if necessary. Now do you suppose the two of you could possibly give me a minute to get myself ready for this?”

  Not that there was any proven way of doing that, given what awaited me out beyond the stage curtain. The buzzing auditorium was filled with men hardened by the copper in their blood, and beside them, doubtful wives brought along for protective coloration. A couple at a time, they had filtered past Hoop and Griff and other Welsh-speaking venerables out there in front of the library acting as doormen beneath the drooping banner that read, like a much magnified eye chart, EISTEDDFOD! Passersby and other curious types asking about it were answered with such a spate of baffling syllables that they went away as if fleeing from banshees. Thus, only the mine families whom Jared counted on to be the heart of the union during the strike made up this gathering. Unanimity stopped at that, however. The neighborhoods were mapped in this restless audience as they were on the Hill: the Finns in sturdy rows, the Irish in a looser, louder group centered on Quinlan, the Cornish in chapel-like conclave, the Serbs and Italians across an aisle from each other as though the Adriatic lapped between them. Perched on tables at the back of the hall, Griff and Hoop and the Welsh cronies were like a rebel tribe grinning madly at the edge of the plantation.

  My mind raced, but in a circle. As thronged as the place was, I kept feeling the absence of Grace. When I had gingerly asked if she might be on hand to lend moral support to the three of us from the boardinghouse, she just looked at me as if I had taken leave of common sense. “Morrie, I very nearly broke out in hives when you went off with Sandison, and I can’t risk it again. Besides, somebody should be on the outside if the lot of you get locked up, or worse.” Wise woman. I took one last peek past the curtain and drew the deepest breath I could. It was time to face the music, in every sense of that saying.

  Stepping out to the front of the stage with a music stand in one hand and the hat held upside down in the other, I cleared my throat and spoke into the general hubbub.

  “Good evening. Welcome to an evening of magic.”

  Naturally that brought hoots to pull a rabbit out of that hat. Down in the front row I saw Jared cover his face with his hand, while Rab mouthed something like The songs, get to the songs!

  “Ah, but there are more kinds of magic than the furry sort that a stage conjuror plucks up by the ears,” I said, carefully setting the hat aside so as not to spill the slips of paper. “The more lasting sort is not really visible. And that is the variety we hope to produce tonight. Something that will sing on and on in us like a fondest memory.”

  “It better be a doozy, mister,” a skeptic in the middle of the crowd yelled out, “to beat what the Wobs have got.”

  “I take it you refer to that celestial pastry, ‘pie in the sky,’ ” I replied, more cordially than I felt. “You are quite right, that is indeed a clever musical couplet. Yet it is not on the same footing with the classic musical compositions your fellow miners are striving to emulate here.”

  “Like what?” came back like a shot.

  That snared me. A couple of hundred unconvinced faces were waiting for my response, which had better not be a stuttering one.

  The lesson of the old tale-tellers whispered itself again: sometimes you must set sail on the wind of chance. I whipped off my suitcoat and tossed it over the music stand. Rabrab nudged Jared forcefully, recognizing the signs in me. I steppe
d to the lip of the stage, snapping my sleeve garters like a sideshow barker. “You leave me no choice,” I announced, “this is the kind of thing I mean.” In music-hall style, I shuffled some soft-shoe and twanged out at the top of my voice:

  In a cavern, in a canyon,

  Excavating for a mine,

  Dwelt a miner, a Forty-niner,

  And his daughter Clementine.

  As catchy as any song ever written, that ditty caught up this audience to the fullest extent, a roomful of voices lustily joining in with me by the end. After raucous applause and my brief bow, I slipped into my suitcoat again and stepped back in favor of the song contestants. “Just as darling Clementine is unforgettable to us all,” I told the readied crowd, “now we shall choose the song that works a similar wonder for the union.” Or not. I hoped with everything in me that the efforts of the neighborhoods had improved spectacularly since the last Lyre Club session. There was one way to find out. “The representatives will now come up to draw for order of presentation, please.”

  The burly half dozen of them crowded around me as I held out the hat with the numbered slips in it. Quin winked at me; the others were as serious as novitiates into some mystical ritual. At my signal, work-callused hands dipped into the hat crown and drew out.

  “It be we!” The man at my left happily brandished the slip with a big penciled “1” on it, while the other five studied their lesser positions.

  “The luck of the Cornish has prevailed,” I announced. “Our Centerville friends will sing first.” I retired to the side of the stage, the concertina made its pneumatic presence known, and the song competition was under way.

  It was a contest, I realized with a sinking feeling, in which the participants felt bound by no particular rules but their own.

  The miners from Cornwall in their practical manner sang from a standard recipe: a verse about the iniquities of the mine owners, then a verse about the travails of working in the mines, followed by a verse about the toll on miners’ families, capped by a verse about standing solidly together and defeating the villainous mining overlords.

  The Irish entry, as rendered by Quinlan, sounded suspiciously like a borrowing from a drinking song.

  The Welsh nomination was so grave and bass in register that only the Welsh could sing it.

  And so on down the line. By the time Finntown and the Italian contingent from Meaderville had been heard from, I had to generate a good deal more gusto in my remarks than I really felt. The plainly mandatory smile on Jared and Rab’s overenthusiastic clapping told me they had reached the same conclusion; even Hoop and Griff looked a little worried. One by one and all in all, the songs were at that level which causes a person to say, “Oh well, it could have been worse.” Which always implies that it could have been much better.

  The audience members were muttering among themselves, not a good sign, when I reclaimed center stage after the last song.

  “There we have it”—I swung my arms as if pumping enthusiasm into the room—“somewhere among those is the anthem that will carry the union to victory. Now, Jared, if you would come up and conduct the vote, and I’ll do the tallying.”

  As Jared was getting to his feet, I searched through my coat pockets for the tally sheet I had tucked away. When I looked up again, something like a shock wave from the audience met me. A roomwide gulp might be the closest description. Whatever had materialized in back of me, it had caused two hundred people to swallow their Adam’s apples and Jared to angle his arms out to protect Rab.

  With a sense of doom, I turned around expecting to be face-to-face with Eel Eyes, Typhoon, or some walrus-mustached policeman.

  It was worse than that. It was Sandison.

  An Aztec god could not have loomed any more ominously than that massive white-bearded figure. For a long, long moment, he just stood there, looking stonily around at the crowd as if counting up the total of trespassers to be dealt with. His sudden appearance from the back of the stage changed the equilibrium of the room, tilted the will in us all. There were men here who had done things beyond reckoning in the mineshaft or on the battlefield, but none with the reputation of having sent other men off the face of the earth with their bare hands.

  As for me, I wanted to dissolve into the floorboards.

  The crowd began to stir, with Quinlan and other hard-faced miners looking around for the best route to fight their way out through the police, the Anaconda goons, whatever phalanx of enforcement the lord of the library had brought with him.

  “Sit down, nitwits,” Sandison thundered at them.

  They sat.

  He caught sight of Rab in the front row and gave her a gaze that said what a pity it was she was associated with riffraff like us. Inevitable as fate, his attention shifted to me.

  “Stay where you are, Morgan, you’ve caused enough trouble.” Now he scowled at the silent audience. “Who’s the head fool here?”

  Jared drew himself up. “I happen to be president of the mineworkers’ union, and we’ve been having a social evening of musical—”

  “ ‘Social,’ my hind leg,” Sandison overrode him. “A person would have to be deaf not to know that you and your gussied-up inside accomplice”—that initial adjective I found unfair; I was merely wearing my blue serge suit with a dove-gray vest added—“are using the Butte Public Library for a purpose the powers that be say is against the law.”

  I must say, he summarized the situation beyond dispute. Standing nervously on one foot and then the other as he glowered around, I wished I was elsewhere, such as Tasmania. From the sound of it, the audience was witnessing more of a show than it had anticipated; someone now shouted out from the back in jittery defiance, “Are you going to string us up, or what?”

  Shaking his head and beard at Jared and me in turn, Sandison said, with final disgust, “Let’s get this over with.” He lumbered to the very edge of the stage and thrust a sheet of paper in Jared’s face.

  Handling it as if it were the warrant that would put the whole crowd of us away, Jared scanned the single page. Then studied it with more deliberation. He sent Sandison a measuring look. Strangely, he had that fixed gleam toward the next objective when he passed the sheet up to me. “Better do what the man wants, Professor. We’ll sit tight until you get done.”

  Apprehensively I read the piece of paper. I saw why Jared had done so twice. Once for the handprinted words, then for the dotted lines of musical notes.

  “I shall need help,” I announced at once; this was too important for me to flub alone. “Quin, would you come up, please?” Next I singled out the Cornish leader: “And Jack? And, mmm, Griff?”

  With no great willingness they joined me onstage and we huddled around the music sheet. The Cornishman’s eyebrows drew down in concentration, while Quinlan’s lifted as if liking what he saw. Griff ceremoniously cleared his throat. At my signal, the concertina wheezed a note for us. Somewhat ragged at first, our impromptu quartet gained harmony as we sang.

  Drill, drill, drill,

  That’s the music of the Hill.

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  We work for all it’s worth.

  Those who mine are all one race,

  Born and bred ’neath a tunnel brace;

  Down there deep we’re all one kind,

  All one blood, all of one mind.

  I back you and you back me.

  All one song in unity.

  Drill, drill, drill,

  That’s the music of the Hill . . .

  It was homely, it was distinctly old-fashioned, it was not particularly profound, but most of all, it was infectious. You could jig to it, march to it, swing a pick and chip out ore to it, hum it, whistle it, sing it in your sleep—it was as catchy as “Camptown Races,” what more can I say? The atmosphere in the auditorium changed for the better with every line we sang of that lucky combination of unifying words and bouncy tune, Sandison’s song working its magic like the proverbial charm. When we were done, the audience came out of its reverent
spell and jumped to its feet, clapping and cheering.

  Leaping to the stage, Jared seized the moment, raising his arms for attention. “Are we agreed? ‘The Song of the Hill,’ is it?” Unanimity answered him.

  AFTERWARD, as Hoop and Griff and the cronies craftily discharged people into the street in imitation of whatever an eisteddfod is like when it winds down, I tended to last things, such as chairs, with Jared helping. At the back of the auditorium Rab was in one-way conversation with Sandison, enthusing about the evening’s outcome while he stood there like a totem.

  “Well done, Professor.” Grinning keenly, Jared gave me credit I was not sure I entirely deserved. “It’s a dandy,” he was saying of the song. “It’ll help pull us through any strike. The Wobs can’t outsing us anymore. They can keep their pie in the sky, we’ve got hold of the Hill in one sweet damn tune. And the Anaconda bosses will hear it in their sleep before we’re done. They might bend us, but they can’t break us now,” he vowed. He stopped to whack my shoulder in appreciation.

  Buoyant with relief, I admitted: “Now I can tell you, I half-expected that pair of goons and forty others to burst in on us tonight.”

  He tugged his ear thoughtfully. “I guess you haven’t heard. Butte has seen the last of those two.”

  Stunned, I visualized the two of them meeting the fate that had been hinted at for me, at the bottom of a glory hole.

  I must have gasped, because Jared lifted his hands in clean denial. “None of it was our doing, and they’re still among the living. The word is”—I understood he was alluding to gossip on the Hill—“the Wobblies were pretty badly annoyed about that noose and decided to return the hint. So, when the goons went to turn in the other night, there was a dynamite fuse on each pillow and a note saying next time it would be the dynamite.” He grinned in admiration of a maneuver neatly done. “The last anyone saw, the pair of them were piling onto a train with their suitcases.”