Work Song (2 page)

Intrigued, I headed directly to the blue-painted front door.

My knock was answered by a woman a good deal younger than I expected a boardinghouse mistress to be. She was compact, in the manner of a dressmaker’s form, shapely but with no excess. A substantial braid the color of flax tugged the upper lines of her pleasant face toward quizzical, as though she were being reined by some hand unseen. Whatever proportion of the world had knocked on this door, she seemed freshly inquisitive about a caller such as myself, well-dressed but not well-heeled. Her violet eyes met mine in mutual appraisal. “Madam,” I began with a lift of my hat, “I feel the need—”

“I’ve heard that one before from half the men in Butte. I’m not a madam,” she said, cool as custard, “and this is not a house of ill repute. For your information, that’s on the next block over.” The door began to shut in my face.

“Let me start again,” I amended rapidly. “With night overtaking me in a city where I don’t know a soul, I feel the need of warm quarters and a solid meal. Your sign appears to offer those.”

“Ah, Griff’s latest masterpiece. It caught your eye, did it.” She peeped around the doorframe to consider the freshly painted words, a lilt coming into her voice. “He’d turn this into Cardiff West if he could. Step on in, please, Mr.—?”

“Morgan. Morris Morgan.”

“Griff will approve, you sound as Welsh as a daffodil.” She extended a slender but work-firmed hand, and I noted the less-than-gleaming wedding band on her other one. “Grace Faraday, myself.” Appraising the newspaper under my arm and the satchel I was gripping, she paused. “Are those all of your belongings?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, as if that explained everything.

The upstairs room she showed me was neat and clean, with subdued wallpaper. On the bed was a coverlet of an old style with an embroidered dragon rampant; it would be like sleeping under a flag of Camelot. I can be picky, but I liked everything I had met up with under this roof so far.

As I toggled the switch to make sure the overhead electric bulb worked—another innovation—my landlady-to-be similarly checked me over. “Drummer, are you?”

It took me a moment to recall that the term meant a traveling salesman, one who drums up business. “No, life has given me other rhythms to march to, Mrs. Faraday. My family originally was in the glove trade, until circumstances did that in. I now do books.”

“Poetry?” she asked narrowly.

“Ledgers.”

“Then you’ll appreciate my own bookkeeping, which starts with a week’s rent in advance.”

“Very wise,” I said with composure, although coming up with the sum took nearly every bit I had. Now I really had to hope opportunity of some sort presented itself without delay.

“Welcome to Butte, Mr. Morgan,” my new landlady said with a winning smile, complete with dimple, as she pocketed my cash. “Supper’s at dark this time of year.”

 

 

THE DINING TABLE WAS LAID for four when I came down a few minutes early to scout the premises. There was no wax fruit nor fussy display of doilies on the sideboard, a good sign. Instead, under the blaze of the modest but efficient electrical chandelier, a wedding photograph was propped in the spot of honor. Grace Faraday, even more fresh-faced than now, smiled out as capriciously as if the white of her bridal gown were a field of ermine, while beside her in a suit of approximate fit stood a foursquare fellow I took to be the prominently mentioned Griff. He at least had good taste in women and mustaches, as he wore a full-lipped Rudyard Kipling version not unlike my own.

Just then my hostess popped out of the kitchen with a bowl of boiled potatoes and nodded to where I was to sit, saying, “Make yourself to home, the other pair will be right along. Griff had to stoke the furnace and I told him to go wash up or eat in the street—ah, here’s the thundering herd.”

Through the doorway limped two scrawny half-bald figures that made me think I was seeing double. Both wore work overalls that showed no evidence of work, both held out knobby hands for a shake, and both were grinning at me like leprechauns, or whatever the Welsh equivalent might be.

The nearer one croaked out: “I’m Griff. Welcome to the best diggings in Butte.”

“Same here,” echoed the other. “I’m Hoop.”

Was it humanly possible? I wondered, doing my best not to glance in the direction of the wedding photo during the handshake exchange with the wizened Griff. What manner of marriage could deplete a man from that to this?

With a twinkle, the lady of the house rescued me from my confusion. “These specimens are Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper, when no one is looking. They’ve been part of the furniture here since my husband passed on and I’ve had to take in boarders.” As the duo took their places like old Vikings at a feast, she delivered the sufficient benediction: “We all three could be worse, I suppose.”

“I’ll try to fit in, Mrs. Faraday.”

“Start by saving words and call me Grace, even though this pair of old Galahads refuses to.”

“Wouldn’t be right, Mrs. Faraday,” Griff or Hoop said.

“Manners is manners,” said Hoop or Griff.

“I go by Morrie.” I dealt myself in, and formalities fell away in favor of knives and forks.

“Didn’t I tell you, Hoop?” Griff said as he sawed at his meat.

“That new sign works like a charm. What part of Wales do your people hail from, Morrie?”

“Chicago.”

“Before they crossed the pond,” he persisted.

“Griff, I am sorry to say, the exact family origins are lost in the mists of ”—I searched the gazeteer of my mind—“Aberystwyth and Llangollen.”

“The grand old names,” he proclaimed, adding a spatter of unintelligible syllables that could only have been Welsh. “ ’Tis the language of heaven.”

“Why nobody talks it on earth,” Hoop explained.

By then I was on about my third bite of the meat and ready to ask. “Venison?”

“Close,” Grace allowed guardedly. “Antelope.”

“Ah.” I looked down at the delicate portion. “What a treat to be served cutlets.” I emphasized the plural. “Are there seconds?”

She mulled that. “Tonight there are.” Off she went to the kitchen stove.

While we awaited replenishment, the history of my tablemates came out. Now retired—“at least the tired part”—the pair had been miners, to hear them tell it, practically since the dawn of Butte. Which was to say, since copper became a gleam in the world’s eye. The Hill, as they called it, held the earth’s largest known deposit of the ore that wired everything electrical. Much of this I knew, but there was a tang to hearing them recite it with the names of mines such as Orphan Girl and Moonlight and Badger. The crisscross of their conversation about life deep underground was such that I sometimes had to remind myself which was Griffith and which was Hooper. Although they looked enough alike to be brothers, I figured out that they had simply worked together so long in the mineshafts that the stoop of their bodies and other inclinations had made them grow together in resemblance as some old married couples do.

“So, Morrie, you’ve latched on in life as a bookkeeper, Mrs. Faraday says,” Griff was holding forth as Grace appeared with the replenished meat platter, rosettes from the cookstove heat in her attractive cheeks. It was surprising how much more eye-catching she was as the Widow Faraday.

“Except when the books keep me.” Both men bobbed quizzically and Grace sent me a glance. Offhand as my comment was, it admitted to more than I probably should have. With rare exceptions, my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere. One boss said I spent more time in the clouds than the Wright brothers ever dreamt of. I had found, though, that I could work with sums while the remainder of my brain went and did what it wanted. “But, yes,” I came around to Griff’s remark about bookkeeping, “I have a way with numbers, and Butte by all accounts produces plentiful ones. First thing in the morning, I’ll offer my services at the office of the mining company, what is its name—Anaconda?”

Forks dropped to plates.

“You’re one of those,” Grace flamed. Yanking my rent money from her apron pocket, she hurled it to the table, very nearly into the gravy boat. “Leave this house at once, Whoever-You-Are Morgan. I’ll not have under my roof a man who wears the copper collar.”

“The—? ”

Hooper and Griffith glowered at me. “Anaconda is the right name for company men,” Griff growled. “They’re snakes.”

“But believe me, I—”

“Lowest form of life,” Hoop averred.

Enough was enough. Teetering back in my chair as far as I dared, I reached to the switch on the wall and shut off the chandelier, plunging the room into blackness and silence. After a few blank moments, I spoke into the void:

“We are all now in the dark. As I was, about this matter of the Anaconda Company. May we now talk in a manner which will shed some light on the situation?”

I put the chandelier back on, to the other three blinking like wakened owls.

Grace’s braid swung as she turned sharply to me. “How on earth, you, can you land into Butte as innocent as a newborn?”

“I have been elsewhere for a number of years,” I said patiently. “I knew nothing of this ogre you call Anaconda. To the contrary, I have only seen ‘The Richest Hill on Earth’ described in the kind of glowing terms the argonauts lavished on the California goldfields in 1849.”

Hooper built up a sputter. “That, that’s—”

“Hoop, house rules,” Grace warned.

“—baloney. The company hogs the whole works. They’ve turned this town into rich, poor, and poorer.”

Griffith furiously took his turn. “Anaconda men sit around up there in the Hennessy Building on their polished—”

“Griff, the rules,” came Grace’s warning again.

“—rumps, figuring out new ways to rob the workingman. They bust the union, and we build a new one. They bust that, and we try again. Accuse us of being Wobblies, and sic their goons on us.”

I looked around the table for the definition. “Wobblies?”

“You really have been off the face of the earth, haven’t you,” Griff resumed crossly. “The Industrial Workers of the World. They’re radical, see, and when they hit town, they tried to edge out our miners’ union. The Wobs had their good points, but they riled things up to where the company squashed them and us both.”

One chapter spilled over another as Hoop and Grace chorused in on Griff’s recital of Butte’s story. To hear them tell it, Anaconda was a devilish adversary. The company grudgingly paid good wages when unimaginable millions of dollars flowed in from its near-monopoly on copper, and slashed the miners’ pay the instant those profits dipped. Across the past ten years the Hill and the city, I was told, had witnessed a cat’s cradle of conflicts among the mineworkers’ union, the Wobblies (they were called that, I learned, due to certain members’ foreign accents that turned the
double u
sound of “IWW” into
wobble-u
), and the Wall Street-run company. There had been strikes and lockouts. Riots. Dynamitings. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company bringing in goon squads. A lynching, if I understood right, of a suspected IWW labor organizer. And even that was not the worst of the story.

“Then there was the fire.” Grace’s voice stumbled. “In the Speculator mine two years ago.” She drew a breath. “One hundred sixty-four men were killed. My Arthur”—all the eyes in the room, including mine, darted to the wedding picture—“among them.”

Griffith and Hooper moved uneasily in their chairs. “We was on the earlier shift,” Hoop murmured, “or we’d be pushing up daisies with the rest of them.”

In the pause that followed, I sat there before the jury of their faces.

There is something in me that attracts situations, I know there is. Here I was, faced by three people with whom I had spent only forkfuls of time, asked to make one of those choices in life that can dwarf any other. I had to pick a side, right now, or else hit the chandelier switch again and bolt into the night.

I looked around once more at my expectant tablemates. Mentally asking their pardon for what might be called situational loyalty, I made a show of making up my mind.

“The Anaconda Copper Mining Company,” I declared, “shall not have my services.”

“Now you’re talking!” Griff slapped the table resoundingly and Hoop nodded. Grace favored me with a dimple of approval.

“But what am I to do?” I turned out my hands, empty as they were. “I need work with decent pay to it. My funds have been delayed in the course of my journey.” If you substituted
trunk
for
funds
, that was perfectly true. Grace’s expression changed for the worse at this news.

Griffith looked the length of the table at Hooper.

“Creeping Pete,” said Hoop. “Needs a cryer.”

“Possible,” said Griff. “Too sober?”

“Not for long.”

“Righto. Got just the thing for you, Morrie.”

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