Ivan Doig - Work Song

DISCORDANT AS IT WAS by nature, the song session the next night came as something of a relief after Section 37. At least, up there onstage I did not have to fear for my neck when one rough-hewn miner or another climbed up with me and sang off-key, although my ears were another matter.

The songwriting efforts unveiled at this tryout were all over the map, in more ways than one. The only thing the musical penchants of the neighborhoods of the Hill had in common was strenuous exercise of the vocal cords. As diplomatically as I could, I touched up rhyme and word rhythm here and there, and the concertina tuned things up a little, but in the end the attempted songs were pretty much the same rough creatures as at the start of the evening.

Well, no one in his right mind could expect to turn the basement auditorium of the Butte Public Library into Tin Pan Alley, I had to tell myself afterward. But Jared and Rab and I were a somber trio when we adjourned to the Purity.

“What do you think, Professor,” Jared asked directly over pie and coffee, “is the work song we want hiding in any of those?”

“You heard the same performances I did,” I sidestepped. “The groups still have almost a week to work on things, perhaps something”-I almost said miraculous-“unforgettable will find its way in.” We both looked to Rab for a boost in our spirits.

“I’ll stick with my sixth-graders,” she passed judgment ruthlessly now that she was back to teaching. “They only get into fistfights at recess.” At the height of the song session Jared had needed to jump in and separate a Finn and an Italian who came to blows over a question of tempo.

He conceded that was a case of somewhat too much enthusiasm, but maintained strong feelings of that sort could be a good sign. “The men are fired up against Anaconda, and the right song will catch that,” he insisted, as if insistence would do the job. I could see what was coming next as he looked over at me: in his checklist way he would want to know how I was going to handle the big night when two hundred people had to materialize in the library basement without anyone noticing. Omitting to say it was the brainstorm of Griff and Hoop, I brightly volunteered that our salvation was an eisteddfod.

Jared turned his unscathed ear toward me as if that would help with the word. “Run that by me again?”

I did so in as much detail as I could think up. The dubious expression on Jared kept growing until Rab, at her conspiratorial best, poked him insistently. “Mr. Morgan has the knack of doing what can’t be done,” she said, canny as an abbess. “You either have to let him or think up something better, sweetheart.”

That decided him. “Well, hell, if none of us can savvy it, maybe the cops and goons can’t either.” As we rose to go, though, he gave me the Butte salute, a whap on the shoulder, and warned, “Just remember, Professor, plenty of people are going to want your hide if this doesn’t work out right.”

Out into the night he and Rab went, with me brooding behind, when the bow-tied impresario at the cash register called after me: “Hey, you with the pie in you, don’t run off!”

Just the ending the evening needed, I thought to myself balefully, Jared sticking me with the bill.

That proved not to be the case, however. Hopping down from his stool and coming up close to me, the Purity proprietor dropped his usual repartee. “Haven’t I seen you with that messenger kid who goes around like his pants are on fire? What is he, your nephew?”

“Second cousin,” I answered negotiably; Russian Famine barely had a shirttail, let alone a shirttail relative, but imaginary kinship might be better than none. “Why?”

“I need someone to run errands and so on,” he said as if that ought to be perfectly obvious. “Tell the kid he’s got a job after school if he wants it. I’ll give him a fair wage.”

“He needs more than that,” I interjected. “His is the, um, lean side of the family line. He very nearly lives hand to mouth.”

The cafeteria owner swayed back from me, frowning. “What are you, his union?” Observing the rules of the game, he hemmed and hawed for a minute before grandly offering: “Oh, all right, I’ll throw in his meals, how’s that?”

“Allow me.” I squared his bow tie for him; tonight’s was royal purple. “All he can eat, I trust that means?”

“Sure. How much can that be, a runt like him?”

IN THE BOOK OF LIFE we are chapters in one another’s stories, and with Russian Famine given a place at the feast, so to speak, I felt like an author drawing a scene to a successful close. That was only the first episode to be resolved, however, while more than I wanted to count waited in line.

A crisp expectancy was in the air of Butte those next days and nights. The season turned as if October was a signpost for the weather: the first snow, dazzling and spotless, appeared in the mountain heights above Columbia Gardens, while downtown blocks at midday echoed with the loudspeaker version of anklet baseball-“Flash! The Redlegs win again, they lead the White Sox in the Series three games to two!”-and in the dusk, fresh war cries whooped from the Hill as boys played football on barren patches between mine heaps. The change in climate could be measured any number of ways. More than once I noticed women and daughters trooping past the boardinghouse with gunnysacks, and I asked Grace about it. “Coal,” she said simply. The thought of it pulled the skin tight around her eyes. “They go down to the tracks and pick up what’s spilled from the trains. I did it myself when I was a girl and a strike was coming. Anything to get ready for the worst.”

I knew the feeling. As a precautionary measure, I resumed my habit of keeping watch into the shadows for the darker presence of goons; Eel Eyes and Typhoon now had no reason to pack me off to Chicago, but if it ever entered their thick heads that I had turned the library into a choir loft of the miners’ union, they were bound to be renewed trouble. Nor were they the only concern. In the back of my mind the Welsh minister kept preaching his “unlawful assembly” sermon (“Butte’s finest, to call them that, will pick you off like ripe apples”). And there was always Sandison. The man had wrung out his soul for me to see, there beneath the hanging tree, but he still was impossible to predict. Which was I going to encounter at the crucial time, the merely gruff city librarian or the Earl of Hell?

When I at last told him, as I had to, that the Lyre Club would be honoring an old bardic tradition by holding an eisteddfod and braced for a volley from him about the library turning into a madhouse, he merely grunted and said, “What’s your next field of knowledge, Morgan, druidic chants?”

All the while, Hoop and Griff assured me at every meal that there was nothing to worry about.

READY OR NOT, the night of nights arrived to us.

“Remember, Professor, when you step out there, this isn’t some lilies-of-the-valley crowd. These men have been through everything Anaconda could do to them and they’re about to be on strike for hell knows how long. They’re not here to fool around. Don’t get carried away, just run the songs through and have them vote, savvy?”

“I am not aware that I ever get carried-”

“Oh, don’t forget the hat, Mr. Morgan. I stirred the slips of paper around, so when they draw it’ll be perfectly fair. Just don’t drop it or spill it or-”

“Actually, Rab, I have handled a hat before, thank you very-”

“Another thing. Don’t let Quinlan hog the stage when he gets up to sing whatever his bunch has come up with. This is serious business, not some Irish wake, got that?”

“Jared, I promise I shall muzzle Quin if necessary. Now do you suppose the two of you could possibly give me a minute to get myself ready for this?”