Work Song (17 page)

“I’m busy, can’t you see?” the boy called back importantly.

“Then how about you, Mustachio? Come on up and we’ll cure what ails you.”

“I’m busy keeping up with him,” I tipped my hat, “thank you very much anyway.”

Block after block, we wound our way past buildings that put all their respectability out front, their back ends grimy with the detritus of coal chutes and the leavings of garbage. Around every other corner a view of the Hill was framed between brick walls, the tower over a mineshaft like a spiked ornament on the roof of the city. I could hear the throb of ore lifts and other machinery, so pronounced after the silence left behind when the morning shift walked off; Jared and his tactic of work actions was turning the Hill off and on like a master switch. If, that is, the Anaconda Company didn’t find a way to break his hold on the matter. Or already had. I wondered again why Rab was summoning me.

Suddenly my hotfooted escort was talkative. “How come you work at the library ’stead of the schoolhouse? I was just telling Miss Rellis she’s the best teacher in the whole world and she said not as long as you’re on two legs.”

That touched me deeply. Yet it also mandated an answer. “Life likes to surprise us, Wladislaw, and so—”

“I hate getting called that,” he muttered, squirming as if to dodge the name. “It sounds too much like
coleslaw
.”

“Russian Famine, then—”

“Don’t like that no better. I ain’t any kind of a Russian. My unk says if we’re anything, it’s Glishians.” I tried to remember if Galicia was central to what the Europeans from time immemorial called the Polish Problem, and whether that part of Poland was another jigsaw piece on the table in front of Wilson and Clemenceau and Lloyd George as they sought to remake the world with the peace treaty. In any case, the Old Country was forever off the map of a peddler whose only ware was the sharpening of knives, and a skin-and-bones street tough nephew, wasn’t it. The thought clutched at me: the fostering places that we are exiled from, in the irreversible twists of life.

Back to the question at hand, though. “Young citizen of the world, we are running out of possibilities—what would you like to be called?”

He thought for the next some steps, slowing his pace to mine. “Famine ain’t too bad. It’d be one of those nicked names, huh?”

Gravely I took off my hat and in due ceremony tapped him on a narrow shoulder with it. “By whatever authority is vested in me, I dub thee Famine.” He bounced a little higher his next couple of steps. “Now, then, Famine, as I was saying. Sometimes a person finds himself doing the unexpected. And so you give each job everything you have, but stay on your toes for what comes next. Isn’t it that way with you at school?”

A shrug. “I guess. Miss Rellis’s flame says it’s the same in the army—now you’re peeling spuds and next thing you’re shooting back at somebody.”

“Jared is at the Purity with her?”

“Uh-huh.” The boy flopped his hair out of his eyes and looked around at me hopefully. “That sure was good about blood. Are you gonna do story hour some more?”

“We’ll see,” I said, smiling. “That’s up to the man who runs the library.”

“With all the whiskers? The one they call the Earl of Hell?”

That stopped me in my tracks.

“Where did you hear that?”

Famine slowed himself to wait for me by walking backwards. “Down around the stockyards. Those cowboys riding the fence are always yakking about something.”

I felt relieved. I could easily believe Samuel Sandison had been high-handed in his ranch days and gained that name in the Triple S bunkhouse. That had me thinking about the doggedness of reputation, fair or not, when Famine, curiosity on as much of his face as there was, wanted to know:

“What’s a earl?”

“Someone who owns everything but a good name, usually. That other word, I’d advise you not to use around Miss Rellis.”

“Uh-huh, she’s death on cussing.” Restless as a hummingbird, Famine now was talking to the top of my head. I had frowned him off clambering on fire escapes along our backstreet route, but he couldn’t resist hopping up onto the loading docks at rear entries to stores. He teetered along the planked edge of this latest one, his sense of balance making a mockery of gravity. I watched with the envy of those of us who have outgrown the blind bravery of a twelve-year-old. Perhaps it was the pale sharp cheeks or the flatly factual eyes beneath the toss of uncombed yellow hair, but he looked oddly pristine up there, more like a trainee in an acrobats’ academy than a schoolboy. I thought back to the blood enthusiasts among his classmates, and to the black eyes, bent noses, scabs, and bruises that my Marias Coulee pupils accumulated in the average mayhem of the schoolyard. Skinny and milk-skinned as he was, my young friend seemingly would be a bullies’ delight, yet there was not a mark on him. “Famine, I’m not trying to be nosy, but the bigger boys don’t give you trouble?”

“Would if they could catch me.”

“You’re quite the runner, then. Don’t they ever catch you?”

“Huh-uh.” He continued along the outmost inch of the loading platform with the aplomb of a tightrope walker. “I run until they drop.”

 

 

AFTER DEPOSITING ME at the entrance to the Purity Cafeteria, Famine vanished at a high lope. The owner, a scarlet bow tie blazing under his set of chins, met me with a glad cry. “I knew you’d be back,” the gust of welcome nearly parted my hair. “Your appetite wouldn’t let you stay away! Help yourself, this is the spot to fill that hollow leg!” I slipped in line behind a broad-beamed couple who obviously had partaken of the menu many times before. First things first, as ever; I peeked from behind the glassware breakfront to make sure the Typhoon goon was not on the premises, then gathered a meal for myself and joined Rab and Jared at their corner table.

Fatigue showed on Jared, but so did something like the sheen of a winning streak; Rab’s pride in him stuck out all over her. He had not backed down after the dynamiting of the Flying Dutchman pay office, simply skipped aside from any blame with the kind of remark Butte loved—even the
Daily Post
could not resist quoting him—to the effect that anybody who worked for Anaconda maybe should have his head examined, but no miner was dumb enough to blow up the place his wages came from. In boxing parlance, I knew, he and the union were winning the early rounds on points, with the shift stoppages he was invoking about some faulty working condition or another in the mineshafts; the danger was whether the company would be provoked into unloading a haymaker, such as a lockout or a show of force, brutal and bloody, by its goons. Well, he was the tactician and I wasn’t. I simply remarked, “On behalf of the library, I should thank you for our unprecedented number of users, lately.”

“Always glad to encourage the cause of learning,” Jared responded, wearing that droll expression somewhere between pious and piratical. “I hear you’re quite the expert on blood.” He eyed me as if curious to find any evidence to back that up.

“In a pedagogical sense,” I said, between bites of my food. “All in all, though, that is likely the wisest approach to the substance. For instance, Shakespeare invoked the word some seven hundred times in his works, but there is no evidence he ever actually experienced the shedding of blood. Christopher Marlowe, now, sadly did undergo—”

“My pupils want you back next week to talk about skulls and skeletons,” Rab sought to pin me down.

“While you’re handing out favors,” Jared was quick on the heels of that, “I could use one, too. Rab tells me you’re a whiz with figures.”

With a modest gesture I admitted to something of the sort. “Good. Anaconda has us bamboozled on the production figures.” As if scouting a battlefield, he scanned the entirety of the restaurant to make sure we were not being observed. “Show him, Rab.”

Covertly she cracked open her sizable purse to give me a peek at a vivid sheaf of papers. “Those are the pink sheets the mine managers hand in at the end of each week,” Jared went on in a low voice. “The janitor at the Hennessy Building is supposed to burn them, but he has a nephew working in the Neversweat shafts, so he slips the batch to us.” Rapidly he explained that the famously fought-over wage was tied to the Hill’s production total and subsequent price of copper, but the union was suspicious of the company’s numbers in the negotiations. “They’re playing it cute on us, we’re pretty sure. It seems like the bulk tons that come out of the mine”—he indicated Rab’s trove of pink sheets—“ought to add up to more processed tons at the smelter than the company tells us. But the differential is the problem. No two mines assay out at the same percent of copper in the ore, and there are three dozen Anaconda mines on the Hill.” Jared tugged ruefully at his lopped ear. “It’s driving us batty trying to come up with a complete figure to argue against theirs.”

“I told you Mr. Morgan would have a solution,” Rab snuggled nearer him with the scheming expression I remembered so well, “just wait and see.”

With the situation delineated to their satisfaction, the two of them, ravens of collusion, waited me out.

This, I realized with a churning in my stomach that caused me to lose interest in my meal, was another of those moments when choice was forced upon me. What was being asked of me was exactly what Sandison inveighed against, taking sides in the dogfight, as he not inaccurately characterized the Butte feud of labor and capital. Here was where a headful of learning was a burden. Intuition, instinct, some mental gremlin, whispered to me that the library’s extensive mineralogy section, complete with the annual mining reports of the state industrial board, with a bit of calculation might yield the set of ore differentials the union needed. But why should it be up to me to coax out that magic arithmetic? Unfortunately the answer kept coming back:
Who else?
Resist it as I tried, a certain line of reasoning insisted that the Anaconda Company had an army of bookkeepers on its side and the union deserved at least one.

Besides, around Jared Evans you felt you were made of stronger stuff than you previously imagined, and Rab’s guile was as infectious as ever.

“All right,” I sighed as she glowed in triumph, “let me see what I can do.” Jared watched keenly as she slipped me the pink sheets and I tucked them well out of sight inside my vest. “I may live to regret this, but I’ll help out in the name of the holy cause of the lost dollar.”

“Oh, we have the wage back up to where it was,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Now we need to fight to hang on to it.”

“You have the—Since when?”

“Since some Anaconda bigwig with a lick of sense looked at a calendar and realized Miners Day is almost here.” He grinned fully for the first time. “Just after the next payday.”

“It’s Butte’s biggest doings of the year,” Rab leapt in on that. “The whole town turns out for Miners Day. You’ll have to, too, Mr. Morgan.”

My brain felt weak. “Are you telling me the Anaconda Company gave in about the dollar because a holiday is coming?”

“Look at it from their side,” Jared instructed. “Every miner in Butte will be perfectly legally parading through town that day. If you were up there on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, would you rather have them happy or ready to tear things up?”

“Then this is a kind of truce,” I wanted to make sure of what I was hearing, “of the moment?”

“That’s not a bad way of putting it,” he commended in his best sergeant manner. “The one thing sure about dealing with Anaconda is that the war is never over.”

WHATEVER LUNAR POWER Miners Day possessed that the year’s other three hundred and sixty-four did not, things settled down ahead of it. Work actions ceased and the Hill pulsed day and night with the excavation of rich copper ore. The coveted dollar a day, as Jared had said, was added back in to the wages of ten thousand temporarily soothed union men. Without the morning tide of miners, library life quieted to its usual seashell tone of whispers. Miraculously, I nearly caught up with the chores Sandison pushed my way. He himself, of course, constituted a sizable task as often as not.

This day I came back into the office after some errand to find him pacing from his desk to the window and back, his bootsteps sharp as a march beat. Barely acknowledging me with a glance, he delivered: “That robber Gardiner in New York I deal with has a fine copy of
The Bride of Lammermoor.
What do you think?”

Quick as a fingersnap, I calculated what a transaction of that sort would do to the delicate balance I had achieved in the library’s ledger. “Sir Walter Scott himself regarded that as one of his lesser works,” I responded breezily. “Rather like
Ivanhoe
, but done with a trowel.”

He grunted. “All right, I’ll think it over.” The boots retraced their route as if following dance steps imprinted on the floor. I grew uneasy as he prowled the room, more often than not a signal that something was on his mind. I could only hope no one had blabbed to him that I was staying late after the Jabberwockians and other evening groups packed up and went home, and immersing myself suspiciously deep in the mineralogy section.