Ivan Doig - Work Song

Not that there was any proven way of doing that, given what awaited me out beyond the stage curtain. The buzzing auditorium was filled with men hardened by the copper in their blood, and beside them, doubtful wives brought along for protective coloration. A couple at a time, they had filtered past Hoop and Griff and other Welsh-speaking venerables out there in front of the library acting as doormen beneath the drooping banner that read, like a much magnified eye chart, EISTEDDFOD! Passersby and other curious types asking about it were answered with such a spate of baffling syllables that they went away as if fleeing from banshees. Thus, only the mine families whom Jared counted on to be the heart of the union during the strike made up this gathering. Unanimity stopped at that, however. The neighborhoods were mapped in this restless audience as they were on the Hill: the Finns in sturdy rows, the Irish in a looser, louder group centered on Quinlan, the Cornish in chapel-like conclave, the Serbs and Italians across an aisle from each other as though the Adriatic lapped between them. Perched on tables at the back of the hall, Griff and Hoop and the Welsh cronies were like a rebel tribe grinning madly at the edge of the plantation.

My mind raced, but in a circle. As thronged as the place was, I kept feeling the absence of Grace. When I had gingerly asked if she might be on hand to lend moral support to the three of us from the boardinghouse, she just looked at me as if I had taken leave of common sense. “Morrie, I very nearly broke out in hives when you went off with Sandison, and I can’t risk it again. Besides, somebody should be on the outside if the lot of you get locked up, or worse.” Wise woman. I took one last peek past the curtain and drew the deepest breath I could. It was time to face the music, in every sense of that saying.

Stepping out to the front of the stage with a music stand in one hand and the hat held upside down in the other, I cleared my throat and spoke into the general hubbub.

“Good evening. Welcome to an evening of magic.”

Naturally that brought hoots to pull a rabbit out of that hat. Down in the front row I saw Jared cover his face with his hand, while Rab mouthed something like The songs, get to the songs!

“Ah, but there are more kinds of magic than the furry sort that a stage conjuror plucks up by the ears,” I said, carefully setting the hat aside so as not to spill the slips of paper. “The more lasting sort is not really visible. And that is the variety we hope to produce tonight. Something that will sing on and on in us like a fondest memory.”

“It better be a doozy, mister,” a skeptic in the middle of the crowd yelled out, “to beat what the Wobs have got.”

“I take it you refer to that celestial pastry, ‘pie in the sky,’ ” I replied, more cordially than I felt. “You are quite right, that is indeed a clever musical couplet. Yet it is not on the same footing with the classic musical compositions your fellow miners are striving to emulate here.”

“Like what?” came back like a shot.

That snared me. A couple of hundred unconvinced faces were waiting for my response, which had better not be a stuttering one.

The lesson of the old tale-tellers whispered itself again: sometimes you must set sail on the wind of chance. I whipped off my suitcoat and tossed it over the music stand. Rabrab nudged Jared forcefully, recognizing the signs in me. I stepped to the lip of the stage, snapping my sleeve garters like a sideshow barker. “You leave me no choice,” I announced, “this is the kind of thing I mean.” In music-hall style, I shuffled some soft-shoe and twanged out at the top of my voice:

In a cavern, in a canyon,

Excavating for a mine,

Dwelt a miner, a Forty-niner,

And his daughter Clementine.

As catchy as any song ever written, that ditty caught up this audience to the fullest extent, a roomful of voices lustily joining in with me by the end. After raucous applause and my brief bow, I slipped into my suitcoat again and stepped back in favor of the song contestants. “Just as darling Clementine is unforgettable to us all,” I told the readied crowd, “now we shall choose the song that works a similar wonder for the union.” Or not. I hoped with everything in me that the efforts of the neighborhoods had improved spectacularly since the last Lyre Club session. There was one way to find out. “The representatives will now come up to draw for order of presentation, please.”

The burly half dozen of them crowded around me as I held out the hat with the numbered slips in it. Quin winked at me; the others were as serious as novitiates into some mystical ritual. At my signal, work-callused hands dipped into the hat crown and drew out.

“It be we!” The man at my left happily brandished the slip with a big penciled “1” on it, while the other five studied their lesser positions.

“The luck of the Cornish has prevailed,” I announced. “Our Centerville friends will sing first.” I retired to the side of the stage, the concertina made its pneumatic presence known, and the song competition was under way.

It was a contest, I realized with a sinking feeling, in which the participants felt bound by no particular rules but their own.

The miners from Cornwall in their practical manner sang from a standard recipe: a verse about the iniquities of the mine owners, then a verse about the travails of working in the mines, followed by a verse about the toll on miners’ families, capped by a verse about standing solidly together and defeating the villainous mining overlords.

The Irish entry, as rendered by Quinlan, sounded suspiciously like a borrowing from a drinking song.

The Welsh nomination was so grave and bass in register that only the Welsh could sing it.

And so on down the line. By the time Finntown and the Italian contingent from Meaderville had been heard from, I had to generate a good deal more gusto in my remarks than I really felt. The plainly mandatory smile on Jared and Rab’s overenthusiastic clapping told me they had reached the same conclusion; even Hoop and Griff looked a little worried. One by one and all in all, the songs were at that level which causes a person to say, “Oh well, it could have been worse.” Which always implies that it could have been much better.

The audience members were muttering among themselves, not a good sign, when I reclaimed center stage after the last song.

“There we have it”-I swung my arms as if pumping enthusiasm into the room-“somewhere among those is the anthem that will carry the union to victory. Now, Jared, if you would come up and conduct the vote, and I’ll do the tallying.”

As Jared was getting to his feet, I searched through my coat pockets for the tally sheet I had tucked away. When I looked up again, something like a shock wave from the audience met me. A roomwide gulp might be the closest description. Whatever had materialized in back of me, it had caused two hundred people to swallow their Adam’s apples and Jared to angle his arms out to protect Rab.

With a sense of doom, I turned around expecting to be face-to-face with Eel Eyes, Typhoon, or some walrus-mustached policeman.

It was worse than that. It was Sandison.

An Aztec god could not have loomed any more ominously than that massive white-bearded figure. For a long, long moment, he just stood there, looking stonily around at the crowd as if counting up the total of trespassers to be dealt with. His sudden appearance from the back of the stage changed the equilibrium of the room, tilted the will in us all. There were men here who had done things beyond reckoning in the mineshaft or on the battlefield, but none with the reputation of having sent other men off the face of the earth with their bare hands.