Ivan Doig - Work Song

“Where did this notion come from that you and I are going to dig copper in this crypt?” I burst out. “My understanding was, I came down here to meet with the men from the other mines.”

“Well, yeah, sure,” Griff said, patience and reason combined.

“When meal break rolls around, Jared is gonna see to that. I bet he’s got it worked out slick, don’t worry. But we need to make some kind of showing until then. We get caught loafing around”-the beam of his helmet lamp shined past me as if in search of assailants following us through the tunnel-“and Anaconda will make it rough for us. I don’t know how you feel about it, but getting turned over to their goons doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Lead on,” I said with resignation.

Like tramps on a railroad track, we trudged along the narrow set of rails deeper and deeper into the reaches of the mine. It was hellishly hot; I would not have been surprised to see lava oozing out at us. Every so often, small rocks dribbled down disconcertingly beside us. At last a covey of ore cars, squarish troughs on wheels, showed up in our lamp beams. Here we were, Griff declared with a flourish, at the ledge of ore. Above us the tunnel wall opened into an arched excavation, and he skimmed up the ladder to it, with me gulping and following.

What awaited at the top was a large cave; blasting had hollowed out the far wall of the ledge and left a litter of ore. I clambered in behind Griff, barking my shin in the dark as I did so. “Whoopsiedaisy,” he advised absently, “watch your footing.” As I stepped over to a rock where I could sit and rub the sore spot, he cautioned: “Let’s just sort of hang back and look things over before-”

At that instant I felt a familiar tremble. Not my own, but the kind of glory-hole tremor that shook the boardinghouse every so often; somewhere in the catacombs of copper, dynamite had been routinely set off. I had just started to say to Griff, more than a little nervously, that I supposed I’d better get used to that down here, when half the cavern ceiling caved in, with an avalanche roar and a blinding boil of dust.

Choking on dust and my ears ringing, I staggered a few steps this way and that in the murky cavern. My headlamp barely penetrated the filth, thick as smoke. Desperately I tried to fan away the cloud and find Griff, or what was left of him.

In the gloom, something darker yet appeared, also disturbing the dust. It stopped and I stopped. Through a swirl of murk, Griff and I became visible to each other by the whites of our eyes.

Wiping off a mask of dirt, he said, “That’s why it’s not a good idea to rush into this kind of place.” He squinted around as the dust settled. “Lucky thing is, it was the ceiling toward the back that came down.” Turning to say something more to me, he stopped, and very slowly raised a pointing finger. “Morrie,” he said quietly, “don’t be passing the time of day under a Creeping Pete like that.” I looked up, to where he was indicating. Overhanging me was a wicked-looking slab of rock, which, if it dropped on a person, definitely would necessitate the services of the undertaker.

Hurriedly I backed away from beneath it as Griff explained that blasting throughout the mine loosened overhead rock in unpredictable places. Studying this cracked mass, he concluded: “Nasty. We’re gonna have to bar it down.”

He went over to the tool stash in the corner and fished out what looked like a very long, skinny crowbar. Armed with that, he began to pry at the slab. After many thrusts and grunts, he succeeded in breaking it loose. When it hit the floor of the mine with a deafening crash, he grinned at me. “There’s one that won’t come down on our heads.”

Griff moved on to the next overhang, eyes peeled to find the right crack to insert his bar. I stood back as far as I could, spitting out dust, and watched him jab away at the rock until I noticed he was favoring a hand. Remembering the cramp that had done him in during the drilling contest, I took a deep breath and shuffled over to relieve him of the rod. “Here, let me give it a try.”

Poking and prodding as if I were using a lance to find chinks in a dragon’s hide, eventually I was rewarded with the fall of a chunk about the size of a gravestone. “See there, we’ll make a miner out of you yet,” Griff commended from the far corner where he was sitting in apparent contentment.

“Not if I can help it.” I fanned away more dust and scanned the ominously uneven surface overhead. Trading back and forth, we pried more chunks down until Griff at last called a halt. “Let’s have a listen.” He took the bar from me and struck the rock ceiling with it. The timbre was surprisingly musical, a high lingering note that resounded rather sweetly. “There, hear that nice clean sound? It ought to be safe now.” He tossed the bar aside with satisfaction. “Now we better get to work.”

“Digging, you mean?”

“Nope. Mucking.”

I waited, but that seemed to be the entire explanation.

“Griff, really, not only aren’t we anywhere in the same pew on any of this, we’re not even in the same church. The best thing I can see for us to do is to go back and get on that elevator and-”

“Don’t worry none, you’ll get the hang of mucking in no time.”

That turned out to be true if a person had brains enough to operate a shovel. The loose ore strewn on the floor of the ledge had to be scooped-“mucked out,” in Griff’s terminology-into those ore cars waiting in the tunnel.

“We might as well get at it. The sooner done, the sooner finished,” he philosophized unarguably.

We commenced shoveling. Copper ore proved to be the peacock of rocks, mottled blue and green showing off the mineral wealth within. I was up to my shoetops in the wealth of the Richest Hill on the planet, but in raw lump form. As the task heated up, with Griff tossing two shovelfuls to my every one, he remarked sympathetically:

“It’s kind of tough on the muscles at first. Some people can’t stay with it.”

“I can sweat with the best of them.”

“Sweating isn’t necessarily the same as hard work, in my experience.”

That pricked my pride. “I’ll have you know, I am not a total stranger to manual labor.”

He eyed me. “Lately?”

There he had a point. As time wore on, I wore down. I thought our amount of copper-bearing rock flung into the ore cars was heroic, but Griff was not inspired by it. He shook his head reminiscently. “Hoop and me could fill an ore car while other guys was standing there thinking about it.”

“I’m not the second coming of Hoop,” I panted.

Just then a baby-faced flunky stuck his head above the edge of the ledge. “Jared says to tell you,” he piped in a high voice, “the shifter is coming through.”

The youngster vanished while that was still sinking in on me. “Quick!” Griff rubbed dust on my face, even though I already felt grimy as a coal stoker. “Keep those lily hands of yours out of sight.”

We heard the crunch of heavy footsteps, and then the shift foreman came climbing the ladder to us. Our helmet lights dimly lit the chamber as he stepped in. Long-faced and gray-mustached, he had the same miner’s stoop as Griffith; they leaned toward each other like apostrophes. “Griff, you old poot. I heard you were on the extra gang-can’t stay away, eh?”

“You know how it is, Smitty. It gets in your blood.”

I was standing back as far as I could in the shadows. It didn’t help. The shift boss cocked an unblinking look in my direction. “Who’s this? ”

“Hoop’s kid,” Griff said blandly. “He’s trying his hand as a fill-in. Been down on his luck, haven’t you, Junior.” He confided as if I weren’t there: “A little too much of the booze.”