Ivan Doig - Work Song

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.”

The C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home admitted just enough daylight through leaded windows to let a few sunbeams wander among the casket display as if shopping from heaven. Otherwise, everything in the building was somber as a dead bouquet, and that included Peterson.

“Hmm.” His back turned to me, he was leafing through a black-bound ledger that, with professional interest, I tried to peek at. All I could glimpse past his out-thrust elbows were column headings such as Place of Death, Next of Kin, and Payment Due. “Yes, yes, here they are, Griffith and Hooper, the both of them fully paid up on a ‘Miner’s Farewell’ burial contract, our nicest. Candles and all.” He clapped the ledger shut and turned around in creaky fashion. “Sound men, sound judgment. Generally.” This last was accompanied by a lidded look that took me in from hat to shoetop.

“I give equal weight to their vouching for you as a possible employer, Mr. Peterson. Your establishment is very, ah, businesslike.”

He seemed to brood on that. “Mr. Gorman-”

“Morgan.”

“-what would you say recommends you to this line of work?” He swept a hand around the casket display.

You can’t just say, A strong stomach. I glanced past him to the darkly furnished room that served as the funeral home’s chapel, with its waiting bier and an antiquated organ that I could almost tell by looking would wail out notes fit for a Viking pyre. A thought struck me. “My funerary experience is not vast,” I admitted, “yet I have been fortunate enough to be an observer at some historically solemn occasions. I happened to witness the funeral procession of Edvard Grieg, to name one.”

“In Oslo?” He straightened up like a stork on the alert.

“There under the Scandinavian sky of heroes, with his own music resounding like the heartbeat of the fjords.”

“What did they lay him away in?” he whispered.

“Rosewood,” came to mind.

“The diamond of woods,” Peterson uttered with reverence. “My golly, that casket must have been something pretty to see.”

“Unforgettable.”

“Hmm.” He moved to his desk at such an unctuous pace that I saw where the nickname “Creeping Pete” came from. Picking up a list there, he read off: “Dempsey, O’Connor, Harrigan-and that’s just this week’s deceased. You’re hired.”

We dickered over the wage and, as we both knew we would, met in the middle. There was a further matter: my attire. Displaying a jacket sleeve nearly worn through at the elbow, I told him my tale of the missing trunk as if it were the loss of a royal wardrobe. “Surely if I am to uphold the name of this establishment, I should be better clothed than circumstances have left me, wouldn’t you say?”

Not so much as a hmm met that; Peterson apparently took it as a matter of principle that anyone representing the funeral home should be at least as well-dressed as the corpse. He scrawled something on a pad and handed it to me. “Take this over to Gruber the tailor. He’ll fix you up.”

Tucking the note in my pocket, I turned to go, the vision of a new suit warming me inwardly. “Mr. Morgan,” the sepulchral tone stopped me in the doorway. “You have been to Irish wakes before, haven’t you?”

I was intimately acquainted with mourning; how many variations could there be? “Uncountable times.”

“You start tonight.”

“YOU’RE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED? That’s not bad for a start.” Standing on a chair, Grace took time from feather-dusting the chandelier to nod at me in general approval. “Even if it is when things go ‘boo’ in the night.”