Work Song (13 page)

“I can imagine. Here we are.” I unlocked the delivery door to the stacks, and we stepped in.

To be met with sounds such as I had never heard put together before: a shoeleather
chuff-chuff-chuff
spaced what seemed a dance step apart, followed by a drawn-out soft whizzing like a very long zipper being drawn down.

“That’ll be him,” Rab said under her breath. “See?”

Beyond the bookshelves sheltering us, a boy as spindly as any I had ever seen was racing up the long staircase to the floors above. As if built on springs he bounded up the stairsteps three at a time, on the brink of trying for four, and when his leaps carried him to the top, the race against gravity, against himself, momentarily over, he in one swift mounting move jockeyed his legs over the banister and slid back down. There was a heart-stopping pneumatic grace, a fireman’s fearless ride down a twisting pole, in the way he shot to the bottom. The instant he touched the floor again, he was back into motion,
chuff-chuff-chuff
, trio after trio of stairs flown over by the broomstick legs.

“He does it at school whenever he can,” Rab’s murmur was close to my ear. “You should see him on the fire escape.” Just watching him here was mesmerizing enough; I felt as the audience must have when Nijinsky first flew out of the wings onto a ballet stage, and human ability would never be seen the same again. This pint-size dervish seemed determined to spring at the steep staircase until he could sail up it in one weightless jump.

“Wladislaw, that’s enough,” Rab called to him. I could have told her a teacherly tone was not effective in cases of extremity; it took something more.

Oblivious, the boy launched off on another waterbug skim up the cascade of stairsteps. Rab cupped her hands to her mouth and let out a shout that would have cut fog: “Russian Famine, do you hear me?”

“Yes’m. Can’t not.”

Strawy hair flopping, he slowly glided off the banister and dropped on the balls of his feet in front of us. He did not appear guilty, simply caught. I could see how his classmates came up with the nickname, brutal as it was. Gaunt as an unfed greyhound, the hollow-cheeked boy did resemble a living ghost from starvation times on some distant steppe. He met our gaze with a bleak one. “I was just fooling around a little.”

“While you are supposed to be in class learning about first aid,” Rab chided, combing his hair out of his eyes with her fingers. “Come, say hello to Mr. Morgan—the library couldn’t run without him.”

The boy’s reluctant handshake was like squeezing a puppy’s paw. As quick as seemed decent, he rubbed his hand on a hip pocket and cast an appeal to his teacher. “Can’t I skip that aid junk, Miss Rellis? Pretty please? All it’s gonna be is rags and sticks,” he maintained, with a certain degree of clairvoyance. “I seen them bring that Bohunk mucker up the other day at the Neversweat, wrapped up like a mummy and just as dead anyhow. The roof comes down on them in the mine and they’re goners. How’s rags and sticks gonna help that?”

Wisely not debating the point, Rab instructed with firmness: “You’re going to be a goner of another kind—after school until the seat of your pants wears out—if you don’t get down there in that room with the rest of them, right now.”

“Yes’m. Pretty please don’t do no good with you.” The spring was gone from him as he hunched off to class.

We watched him trail away, Rab making sure he went down to the auditorium rather than out the front door. “He’s an acrobatic marvel,” I remarked, “especially since he’s so thin you can see through him.”

“Wladislaw has been given the thin edge of life in every way,” she filled in the story for me. “His parents and a baby sister died in the flu last year. He’s being brought up, if you can call it that, by an old uncle. The man has a peddler cart, he sharpens knives around town.” She shook her head somberly. “What they live on is anybody’s guess.” As if having taken a cue from her rubber-legged pupil, she pirouetted to leave. “I’d better go or your Miss Runyon will be sending out a search party. We still have catching up to do, though.” She peered at me quizzically, schoolteacher and schoolgirl merged into a single soul of curiosity. “Such as, why
does
that mustache come and go?”

I had my answer ready, along with a slight smile. “We all have our disguises in the masquerade party of life, don’t we, Rabrab?”

She took that with a laugh and another crinkle of her nose. “That sounds just like you. But I’m not letting you get away that easily. You have to meet my Jared. Tomorrow night? Join us for supper at the Purity.”

 

 

THE PURITY CAFETERIA, I found, prided itself on its snowy table-cloths, the forest of tables and chairs that could hold a couple of hundred customers at a time, and, the dubious piece of progress that demarcated it from a café, a total absence of waiters. NO WAITING! YOUR FOOD AWAITS YOU! proclaimed a large sign in red, and across the rear of the ballroom-size dining area stood a line of counters with the menu’s offerings, condiments, cutlery, glassware, and so forth. “A new customer! They must be cleaning out heaven!” I was greeted by a plump bow-tied individual, evidently the owner, presiding over the cash register. “Sir, I can tell from here, your belt buckle is hitting your backbone. Skip right in and fill on up.”

Smiling thinly at that gust of Butte bonhomie, I cast around for Rab and her fiancé amid the eating crowd. I spied him first, with a prickle of inevitability up my backbone.

Rabrab had been leaning in, tasting something off his plate, as lovers will, and as her bobbed head came up into view, she spotted me and waved.

Mindful of his manners, the young man stood and turned to me with a soldierly correctness that I could have predicted. He’d had that same deportment while tendering the union’s envelope of benefit to the widow Dempsey, and in marching like a Roman at the head of the miners in shift change on the Hill. Rabrab gazed up at him as if she’d had him made to order.

“The men in my life,” she announced fondly. “Jared Evans, this is Morris Morgan.”

“Morrie,” I amended over the handshake, to put us on familiar terms.

“Jared,” he said, perhaps humorously, perhaps not.

As soon as chairs were under us, he sat back and regarded me through dark deep Welsh eyes that reminded me of Casper’s, only more reflective. Beyond that, he and Rab together were like matched cutouts in charcoal paper by a scissor portraitist, his slicked-back hair black as hers. Any children of these two would be ravens. Yet there was something even more striking about this lean chiseled man, and it took me a second to single it out. His ears were different sizes; the left one was missing its earlobe, clean as a surgery. Together with the fathoms in that gaze, it gave him the look of a reformed pirate. I tried not to stare at the foreshortened ear, which of course only creates another level of attention.

Still examining me with those grave eyes, Jared spoke as if I were a question brought before the podium. “You’re the cryer. You get around.”

“A temporary appointment,” I brushed away my career of wakes.

“The best kind to have where a coffin is involved.”

Rab rippled a laugh. “Now he’s the resident genius of the library, aren’t you, Mr. Morgan? Have you read every book in it by now? I remember when you knew everything there was to know about comets, and that was just the start of—”

“Flattery does not have to be laid on more than an inch thick, Rab,” I waved that to a halt. Basking in her words more than I should have, I shared to Jared: “You must know how she is by now—when her enthusiasm gets going, she’ll talk your ear off.”

Immediately I wanted to crawl under the table. Jared’s dark brows drew down as he leaned in and pointed a cocked thumb and finger at me like a pistol, and I wildly wondered what I was in for. Then, of all things, he winked.

“A German bullet took care of that for me. I got off lucky—they didn’t call that sector Dead Man’s Hill for nothing. A medical corps-man slapped a patch on me and I went right back into the thick of it.” Fingering what was left of the ear, he dispatched a droll half of a smile to the rapt Rab and around to me. “I have to watch out not to be too proud of it—the earmark none of the rest of the herd has.”

As when Sandison plunged off into livestock terminology, I chuckled uselessly.

Rab came to my rescue. “Mr. Morgan, you need to hunt up some food. We had to start, Jared has a meeting. He usually does.”

“To dicker the lost dollar out of the Anaconda lords and masters?” my natural interest in wages prompted me to ask.

The question was flicked right back to me. “How is it that you know we’re in there dickering?” Over a deliberative sip of his coffee, the union leader held me in that compelling gaze again. What was it about the Richest Hill on Earth, that I seemed to be a suspect of some kind no matter which way I turned?

“My usual dining partners,” I alibied hastily, “are Griffith and Hooper at the boardinghouse. They discuss matters.”

Jared’s look softened somewhat. “If that’s who you’re hanging around with, you probably know more about anything and everything in town than I do.”

In the time soon to come, I would learn that Jared Evans had been thrust from the thick of one war into that of another. The combat between the hierarchies of Europe had at last reached a mortal end, while the struggle he came home to on the Hill showed no sign of abating as long as there was corporate capital and there was unionized labor. Flint and gunpowder had the same relationship. Put simply, although Hoop and Griff in their telling of it to me seldom did, the Great War had crippled the once-mighty Butte miners’ union; its bargaining power had been hampered by government decrees, rivalry from the IWW, and Anaconda’s imperious determination to fatten profits at the expense of wages and workers’ lives. Jared alit back into the middle of all this, chosen for that sense of capability he carried as naturally as the set of his shoulders. The better I came to know and observe him, I could not help thinking of Rab’s beau as a paradoxical version of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier who fought his battle and returned to his plow; Jared had been summoned from the battlefield to plow the ungiving ground of Butte’s conflicts.

“You two,” Rab broke in now, her napkin a flick of white flag between us, “would rather talk than eat, I know, but that’s not me.” She was onto her feet, poised in the direction of the dessert counter. “Rhubarb pie. I can’t resist. Jared, sweet, can I bring you some?”

He leaned back in his chair and stretched mightily, a man with much on his mind and a long night of negotiating ahead of him. “Just some more java, thanks, if you have enough hands.”

“Back in a jiffy,” she promised. She sailed off, spiffy as a Riviera princess in the shorter style of dress that was coming into fashion; you could actually see she had legs.

“I had better follow Rab’s example,” I said, starting to get up to find a meal for myself. Only to be stopped in mid-rise by Jared’s thumb pinning the sleeve of my suitcoat to the table. It was a very substantial thumb.

“How does it come to be”—unmistakably the words were those of a stern young fiancé—“that you call her ‘Rab’?”

“I, ah, officiated on that name.”

That didn’t seem to help. “Officiated how?”

Rapidly I told the story of Barbara’s verbal somersault into Rabrab in my classroom. The thumb grudgingly lifted from the fabric of my sleeve. “All right,” he granted, “it makes two of us who call her that. That’s a great plenty.”

With a measure of relief I moved off toward wherever the food waited. “You’re lagging,” Rab scolded as she passed me, bearing a tray with her slice of pie and Jared’s cup of coffee. “Only until I can track down the breaded veal,” I assured her. Grace had many virtues as a landlady, but it had been a considerable time since I had seen a cutlet.

Cafeteria dining, Butte style, evidently meant that half the clientele was fetching mounds of food for itself at any given moment, and so I had to work my way through the crowd to the counter where the meat dishes were listed, past a huge mahogany breakfront stacked with glassware and coffee cups and saucers. Squeezing around that furniture, I popped into an opening in the meal line, nearly bumping into the larger-than-life figure piling a plate with liver and onions.

Typhoon Tolliver and I stared at each other.

“The rumor is wrong, then, Typhoon. You don’t eat hay.”

“You,” he said thickly. Beside his tray, I saw his fists ball up. Something about the way I thrust my hands into the side pockets of my coat halted any further movement from him. I had decided that if it came to blows, I would try to hit him on the left fist with my brass knuckles, in the hope of putting his best punch out of action. But I did not particularly want to test that tactic, and from his slow, perplexed blinks, Typhoon seemed not sure he wanted to initiate anything either. Before he could think it over too much, I rushed to say: “The crowd in here is not going to be entertained by you beating me up in public—this isn’t the boxing ring.”

“No, it ain’t,” he agreed with that.

“Where’s”—I cast a hasty glance around for the telltale set of sideways eyes—“your partner in crime?”

“Who, Roland? He goes for that Chinee stuff.” Typhoon swiped a dismissive paw in the direction of Chinatown and its bill of fare. “Noodles and chicken feet or something. I can’t stomach it myself.” Independence seemed to be linked to appetite somewhere in that big thick head. “He and me ain’t joined at the rib cage.”

“Then he doesn’t need to know we’re showing the good sense not to whale into each other in front of two hundred witnesses and get ourselves arrested, does he.”

“I guess maybe not.” The mention of witnesses caused the flat-faced pug to look around nervously, peeking over the top of the breakfront for anyone watching our impromptu meeting. I did the same, around a corner of it. We both had more than enough reason to be jittery. It was perilous for me to be seen talking to a prime Anaconda goon, and just as detrimental on his side of things to be caught conversing with me, possible Wobbly that I might be. Luckily, back at the table, Jared’s attention centered on Rabrab, and Typhoon’s jerky scan around the room evidently did not pick up any watchers either. Rolling his big shoulders, he huffed to me: