Work Song (14 page)

“There’ll be another time, punk.”

“Until then, I’d be careful if I were you,” I responded in a concerned tone. “You see the union bug there?” I inclined my head toward the small but significant Federation of Labor emblem in the bottom corner of the wall-hung certificate attesting that the establishment proudly employed members of the Cooks and Dishwashers Brotherhood. “I hear that if the crew in the kitchen knows you wear the copper collar, they slip ground glass in the onions.”

I left him staring down at his plate.

“What, did the calf have to be butchered first?” Rab bantered when I returned to the table with my cutlet.

“Something like that.” No sooner had I sat down than Jared leaned my way and spoke in a low tone. “Morrie,” he tried the name out, “I maybe jumped on you a little too hard there at first, about union matters. Rab worked me over and says you can be trusted.” His face said,
We’ll see.
“Keep this under your hat, but there might be a work action, sometime soon. I’ll make sure Hoop and Griff stay out of it. I’m telling you now so you don’t have to worry about the old devils, all right?”

“I’ll try not to. From what they’ve told me, though, doesn’t Butte turn into a hornets’ nest during a strike?”

“I didn’t say ‘strike,’ did I?”

“We went through enough of that, last time,” Rab said as if instructing both of us. “Anaconda’s squads of bullies in our streets. You’d think we weren’t Americans.”

“That smarted,” Jared admitted, his brow creased. He looked over at me. “A year ago I was getting shot at in a trench in France, and I come home to the mines, and next thing I know, a bunch of muscle-heads who never even got overseas are ambushing me on the picket line. We’re going to try to get around that this time.”

Rab traced a chevron on his shoulder. “My sergeant.”

Covering Rab’s hand with his own, he made a wry face, again in my direction. “You tell me, is it a promotion or a demotion to head up the union council when Anaconda is trying to make us eat dirt?” The question lingered in those agate-dark eyes. “When the company goons broke the strike last time, the men kicked out the council leaders.” He spoke the next very levelly, as if sharing it between Rab and me. “The same way they’ll kick me out if I don’t deliver the lost dollar.”

“Can’t not, as Russian Famine would say,” Rab said confidently. “You have to budge Anaconda somehow, so you will. I’ll bet on it.”

For their sake and Butte’s, I hoped she was right. Jared got up, saying he had to get to his meeting, and Rab moaned that there was a school board session she had to attend, while I had to make sure there were enough chairs for the Shakespeare Society’s Merry Wives’ Night back at the library; and I imagined Typhoon and Eel Eyes would be flexing their shoeleather and muscles somewhere in the night, too.

7

S
ometime soon, in the vocabulary of Jared Evans, turned out to mean the very next morning. As I rounded the corner to the library, I saw that the usual line of staff and a few patrons at the door had grown mightily and fanned out like a peacock’s tail, the entire street filled with new faces. For a moment my soul lifted at this surge of literary interest from the citizenry of Butte. Then it dawned on me that the atmosphere of the city had changed overnight. The Hill’s normal throb of labor was not to be heard: no ore trains were running, the seven smokestacks of the Neversweat were empty pipes in the air, the headframes stood as stark and still as gallows. And the mass of fidgeting men here in the light of day ordinarily would have been at work in the everlasting night of the mines. Whatever Jared’s definition of a “work action” was, it closely resembled a wildcat strike.

A crowd is a temperamental thing. I could tell at once that as watchfully quiet as this one was, it would not take much to make it growl.

The minute I arrived, Sandison—grim as thunder—beckoned me up. The library staff nervously held its place at the closed door as he and I stepped to one side and conferred.

“What are these lunkheads doing here, Morgan, instead of out on a picket line somewhere?”

“Sandy, I know no more about this gathering than you do.”

“Some help you are. What are we supposed to do about all this mob?”

“Put out more chairs? There are stacks downstairs from when the Shakespeareans—”

He cut me off with a look. “Let them in and make them at home, are you telling me? Hell, man, the Butte Public Library isn’t supposed to take sides in some damn dogfight of this kind.” Then the oddest thing. There on the topmost step, Sandison turned and gazed out at that sea of workingmen’s faces, much the way a pharaoh might have looked down from a pyramid. In that suspended moment, he seemed to draw something known only to himself from those so many eyes. Then he gave a laugh that made his belly heave.

Shaking his head, he climbed onto the base of one of the doorway pillars. I feared he might fall, but he clambered up as if he did this all the time. The sight of him perched there, with the white aureole of his beard and cowlick against the grave Gothic stone of the building, made the crowd fall silent; once more, I could feel that strange mixed mood of apprehension and fascination that followed Samuel Sandison like the shadow at his heels.

“It looks as if the library has some new visitors today,” his voice rang off the building across the street, “and I have one thing to say to all of you. It pertains to behavior that will not be tolerated in this public institution.” Throughout the crowd I saw faces darken, the phalanx of idled miners readying for yet another warning against “unlawful assembly” even here. “You maybe do it out of habit up there on the Hill or down in the shafts,” Sandison blazed, hands on his hips, “but this is not the place for that kind of thing, understand? I am only telling you once.” He glowered down at some of the hardest men in Butte as if they were schoolboys playing hooky. “No spitting.”

With that, although I would not have thought it possible, his voice rose to another level. “Let us in, Morgan.”

 

 

ONCE INSIDE, I made straight for the cashbox Sandison kept in his desk, grabbed a fistful of money, and sent someone scurrying to the newsstand down the street to buy all available reading material. I would worry later about a ledger entry for
Miscellaneous diversionary matter
. Next, several of us lugged chairs from the auditorium to the Reading Room, the mezzanine, even the foyer. Meanwhile the miners circulated, speaking in hushed tones if at all, as they got the feel of the grand paneled rooms and the tiers of the world’s writings. With the arrival of the newsstand supplement of newspapers and such, so many men settled at tables and in corners with newsprint spread wide that the Reading Room took on the look of a schooner under sail. The library staff, originally taken aback as I had been, caught a fever of enthusiasm at having constant customers, cap in hand, requesting guidance; librarians do not ordinarily receive such worship. I detected a warm gleam of triumph even from Miss Runyon when a stooped miner asked in a thick Italian accent for
L’avventura di Cristoforo Colombo
and she was able to produce a pristine Florentine edition from the mezzanine treasure house.

One thing I particularly noticed: the display case in the far corner drew onlookers as though it were magnetized. Man after man crouched to contemplate the mine model, so complete from tip of headframe to deepest dungeon of tunnel, the compressed vision of the mines standing empty on the Hill this day. It was as if the glass of the case was a smudged crystal ball, with hints of what lay ahead if one could only make them out.

 

 

 

BUSY WITH EVERYTHING, I was hastening down the hallway and past the drinking fountain when a familiar voice caught up with me. “Just a suggestion, but the flavor of the water in this place would be improved by piping in some rye.”

“Quin!” The Irish conquistador face looked more solemn in this circumstance than it had at wakes. “I had no idea you were the library-going type.”

“Funny, boyo.” Quinlan winked and indicated toward the horde in the Reading Room. “A lot of us feel the call of culture today. In about a hundred percent of those cases, the wife told us to get out of the house.”

“Why not on a picket line, showing solidarity?”

He arched an eyebrow, amused or the opposite. “Tsk, Morgan, for a sighted man you’re deep in the dark, aren’t you. There’s no picket line. No negotiating session. No anything whatsoever. Jared Evans just made some kind of safety excuse and pulled us out at the start of morning shift like that”—he snapped his fingers—“and is letting Anaconda stew about it.” He hardened as I watched. “Whether it gets us our fair wage or we need to try stronger persuasion—” The shoulders of his coat lifted, and I was aware that the Little Red Songbook, in some pocket or other, could find an adherent in more than musical ways. “We’ll see if the lop-eared Taffy knows what he’s doing.” Quinlan’s expression suggested it would not be easy to prove to Dublin Gulch.

 

 

AT THE END OF the day, I had to resort again to the higher powers to uncloud the bafflements of Butte for me.

Hooper was several rungs up, against the weather side of the house, industriously slapping on paint while Griffith held the ladder. “Everything still standing, downtown?” Griff called out upon sight of me.

“Every brick in place, when I left. Why weren’t the pair of you in the middle of things today?”

Hoop dipped his brush and stroked a comet of paint onto the siding. “Told not to.”

“Saving us for when we’re really needed, Jared says,” Griff reported. He wagged his head in general acknowledgment. “Caught Anaconda with its pants down today, he sure did. Put a Welshman in charge and you start to get somewhere. Look at Lloyd George.” He gestured as if the prime minister of Great Britain might materialize to set things straight in Butte.

“Yes, but—”

“Your turn,” Hoop called down.

I waited while the two of them traded places, like two aged sailors scrambling in the rigging. “But why this so-called
work action
instead of a genuine strike?”

“No strike, no strikebreakers.” Holding the ladder with both gnarled hands, Hoop looked around at me as if deciding how much more tutoring I was worth. “Besides catching that other gang—”

“—with its pants down,” Griff contributed, along with an emphatic swipe of his paintbrush.

I must have looked blank. Top and bottom of the ladder, both of them eyed me. The silence grew until at last Hoop spelled out:

“The Wobblies. They’d cut in on a strike, try to take it over if they knew it was coming.”

“Send in infiltrators.” To hear Griff echo Typhoon Tolliver was an unnerving experience. I drew myself up.

“As a mere bystander”—it was hard to tell if that registered on those walnut faces—“it appears to me the union council won the day, as you say. But what happens tomorrow?”

The last word was Hoop’s. “Things go back to their normal confusion.”

 

 

TRUDGING UPSTAIRS to my room to wash up before supper, I reflected again on that zigzag pattern of life. There I was, simply a hopeful empty-pocketed climber of the Richest Hill on the planet, and suspected of something more by nearly everyone except Rabrab, who usually saw connivance behind every mustache. At least, I told myself with a grim smile, tonight I could look forward to a meal not garnished with a goon.

But when I opened the door, my room looked as if it had been visited by a typhoon.

The bedding lay in a heap on the floor, the pillows flung onto the dresser top. The truly alarming thing, though, was the mattress, standing on its side and teetering toward me like a falling wall, while someone grunted in exertion behind it.

“You thugs!” I cried, wildly fishing in my pockets for the brass knuckles, expecting the pointy-faced Anaconda man to burst from the closet while the bigger one mashed me with the mattress. “Get out of here or I’ll—”

The mattress stopped its waggle. Around an edge, Grace’s face came into view. “Morrie!” She appeared as startled as I was. “Is it that time of day already?”

“Room devastation time, you mean?” The brass knuckles swiftly pocketed out of her sight, I stepped toward the disarranged bed.

“I’m glad you’re here, you can help me turn this mattress,” she said reasonably. “I do this every so often, so you don’t have to sleep on lumps.” I took an end and we flopped the mattress into place. As she unfolded fresh sheets she looked across at me curiously. “You came in sounding like you were declaring war. What were you so worked up about?”

“Oh, that. Everything upset as it was, I thought I’d caught Hoop and Griff playing a prank on me,” I alibied. “Tossing the room—all boys do it, and aren’t they that at heart?”

“They’re supposed to be painting the bad side of the house.”

“I must have come around the other way.”

Grace cocked an eyebrow. “‘Thugs’?”