Ivan Doig - Work Song

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’?”

“The word comes from thuggee, Hindu for someone who sneaks around and, ah, does mischief to you.”

She shook her head, making her braid dance. “I always learn something around you.”

I made no answer. A fresh apprehension was coursing through me. Over in the corner of the disheveled room, my satchel was missing.

Busily fluffing a pillow, Grace took a few moments to catch up to my alarmed gaze. “Oh. I had to move your bag out of the way. It’s in the closet.”

Undisturbed or gone through? I nearly asked. Suspicion was the contagion of Butte; now I was the one catching it. For once I was glad my trunk was not there, to disclose any of its secrets.

My landlady, dimpled with either innocence or guile, by now was done with the freshened bedding, the room miraculously back in order, and she announced she had better see to supper. “Grace?” I halted her before she could swish out the door. “You’ve been through the war of nerves between the men and the mining company before. What’s your sense of this one?”

She bundled her hands in her apron as she considered my question. “My Arthur,” she invoked somberly, “used to say taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope its muzzle doesn’t come off.”

THE SPEED OF SOUND is slightly less than that of a shock wave, and so the tremor in the dark of that night shook my bed, and every other in the city, a few instants before the noise of the blast arrived.

Even foggy with sleep, I knew this was no usual detonation, no dynamiting at the depth of a glory hole. I stumbled to the hallway. Half-dressed, Hooper struggled from his room, yanking into the remainder of his clothes, while Griffith already was putting on coat and hat. At the head of the hall, Grace clutched her bedgown around her throat as she witnessed the exodus, then sent me an agonized look.

She did not even have to deliver my marching orders aloud. I dressed hastily and set off with the limping pair of old boarders to the Hill.