Ivan Doig - Work Song

As for me, I wanted to dissolve into the floorboards.

The crowd began to stir, with Quinlan and other hard-faced miners looking around for the best route to fight their way out through the police, the Anaconda goons, whatever phalanx of enforcement the lord of the library had brought with him.

“Sit down, nitwits,” Sandison thundered at them.

They sat.

He caught sight of Rab in the front row and gave her a gaze that said what a pity it was she was associated with riffraff like us. Inevitable as fate, his attention shifted to me.

“Stay where you are, Morgan, you’ve caused enough trouble.” Now he scowled at the silent audience. “Who’s the head fool here?”

Jared drew himself up. “I happen to be president of the mineworkers’ union, and we’ve been having a social evening of musical-”

“ ‘Social,’ my hind leg,” Sandison overrode him. “A person would have to be deaf not to know that you and your gussied-up inside accomplice”-that initial adjective I found unfair; I was merely wearing my blue serge suit with a dove-gray vest added-“are using the Butte Public Library for a purpose the powers that be say is against the law.”

I must say, he summarized the situation beyond dispute. Standing nervously on one foot and then the other as he glowered around, I wished I was elsewhere, such as Tasmania. From the sound of it, the audience was witnessing more of a show than it had anticipated; someone now shouted out from the back in jittery defiance, “Are you going to string us up, or what?”

Shaking his head and beard at Jared and me in turn, Sandison said, with final disgust, “Let’s get this over with.” He lumbered to the very edge of the stage and thrust a sheet of paper in Jared’s face.

Handling it as if it were the warrant that would put the whole crowd of us away, Jared scanned the single page. Then studied it with more deliberation. He sent Sandison a measuring look. Strangely, he had that fixed gleam toward the next objective when he passed the sheet up to me. “Better do what the man wants, Professor. We’ll sit tight until you get done.”

Apprehensively I read the piece of paper. I saw why Jared had done so twice. Once for the handprinted words, then for the dotted lines of musical notes.

“I shall need help,” I announced at once; this was too important for me to flub alone. “Quin, would you come up, please?” Next I singled out the Cornish leader: “And Jack? And, mmm, Griff?”

With no great willingness they joined me onstage and we huddled around the music sheet. The Cornishman’s eyebrows drew down in concentration, while Quinlan’s lifted as if liking what he saw. Griff ceremoniously cleared his throat. At my signal, the concertina wheezed a note for us. Somewhat ragged at first, our impromptu quartet gained harmony as we sang.

Drill, drill, drill,

That’s the music of the Hill.

The Richest Hill on Earth

We work for all it’s worth.

Those who mine are all one race,

Born and bred ’neath a tunnel brace;

Down there deep we’re all one kind,

All one blood, all of one mind.

I back you and you back me.

All one song in unity.

Drill, drill, drill,

That’s the music of the Hill…

It was homely, it was distinctly old-fashioned, it was not particularly profound, but most of all, it was infectious. You could jig to it, march to it, swing a pick and chip out ore to it, hum it, whistle it, sing it in your sleep-it was as catchy as “Camptown Races,” what more can I say? The atmosphere in the auditorium changed for the better with every line we sang of that lucky combination of unifying words and bouncy tune, Sandison’s song working its magic like the proverbial charm. When we were done, the audience came out of its reverent spell and jumped to its feet, clapping and cheering.

Leaping to the stage, Jared seized the moment, raising his arms for attention. “Are we agreed? ‘The Song of the Hill,’ is it?” Unanimity answered him.

AFTERWARD, as Hoop and Griff and the cronies craftily discharged people into the street in imitation of whatever an eisteddfod is like when it winds down, I tended to last things, such as chairs, with Jared helping. At the back of the auditorium Rab was in one-way conversation with Sandison, enthusing about the evening’s outcome while he stood there like a totem.

“Well done, Professor.” Grinning keenly, Jared gave me credit I was not sure I entirely deserved. “It’s a dandy,” he was saying of the song. “It’ll help pull us through any strike. The Wobs can’t outsing us anymore. They can keep their pie in the sky, we’ve got hold of the Hill in one sweet damn tune. And the Anaconda bosses will hear it in their sleep before we’re done. They might bend us, but they can’t break us now,” he vowed. He stopped to whack my shoulder in appreciation.

Buoyant with relief, I admitted: “Now I can tell you, I half-expected that pair of goons and forty others to burst in on us tonight.”

He tugged his ear thoughtfully. “I guess you haven’t heard. Butte has seen the last of those two.”

Stunned, I visualized the two of them meeting the fate that had been hinted at for me, at the bottom of a glory hole.

I must have gasped, because Jared lifted his hands in clean denial. “None of it was our doing, and they’re still among the living. The word is”-I understood he was alluding to gossip on the Hill-“the Wobblies were pretty badly annoyed about that noose and decided to return the hint. So, when the goons went to turn in the other night, there was a dynamite fuse on each pillow and a note saying next time it would be the dynamite.” He grinned in admiration of a maneuver neatly done. “The last anyone saw, the pair of them were piling onto a train with their suitcases.”

Alas, then, for Eel Eyes and Typhoon, their part in the story flickered out as Rab surged over to us. “See? I knew the two of you could bring this off.” She linked arms with Jared and invited triumphantly, “Come celebrate with us at the Purity, Mr. Morgan.”

“You’ll manage nicely without me. I have one last thing to do here.”

I waved them on their way, and as they went out, Jared did an about-face in the doorway and snapped me a salute, while Rabrab blew me a kiss.

WHEN THE AUDITORIUM WAS CLEARED, I took a final look around and went upstairs in search of Sandison.

His desk lamp was on, an open catalogue of rare books in the pool of light, but the big chair was empty.

When Samuel Sandison was in a room, however, you could feel it. Over at the window, the stained glass muted in the darkness, he was peering steadily at the Hill through a whorl peephole. With the starry host of night lights at the mines, it was a rare Butte quietude to remember. Hearing me come in, he glanced in my direction and away again. “What are you doing here? You know we don’t pay overtime.”

“I came to say what a wonder ‘The Song of the Hill’ is, Sandy. Written with a pen of iron and the point of a diamond.”

Sandison grunted.

“And cleverly adapted,” I said the rest to his back, “from when the unheralded pastoral poet Jonathan Cartwright put it to paper as ‘The Song of the Mill’ a century ago.”

He stood deathly still, long enough that my heartbeats grew loud in my ears. At last the slope-shaped man swung around to me, the dim light making it hard to read the face that had taken other men off the earth. Clomp, clomp, the boots advanced toward me, the beard and summit of hair growing whiter as the lord of the library came looming into the lamplight. Just when I began to fear for my neck, he stopped short, an armlength away. “Morgan,” he sighed heavily, “you’re the only one in Butte who’s enough of an educated fool to know that. Sit down, nuisance.”