Work Song (15 page)

“The word comes from
thuggee
, Hindu for someone who sneaks around and, ah, does mischief to you.”

She shook her head, making her braid dance. “I always learn something around you.”

I made no answer. A fresh apprehension was coursing through me. Over in the corner of the disheveled room, my satchel was missing.

Busily fluffing a pillow, Grace took a few moments to catch up to my alarmed gaze. “Oh. I had to move your bag out of the way. It’s in the closet.”

Undisturbed or gone through? I nearly asked. Suspicion was the contagion of Butte; now I was the one catching it. For once I was glad my trunk was not there, to disclose any of its secrets.

My landlady, dimpled with either innocence or guile, by now was done with the freshened bedding, the room miraculously back in order, and she announced she had better see to supper. “Grace?” I halted her before she could swish out the door. “You’ve been through the war of nerves between the men and the mining company before. What’s your sense of this one?”

She bundled her hands in her apron as she considered my question. “My Arthur,” she invoked somberly, “used to say taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope its muzzle doesn’t come off.”

 

 

THE SPEED OF SOUND is slightly less than that of a shock wave, and so the tremor in the dark of that night shook my bed, and every other in the city, a few instants before the noise of the blast arrived.

Even foggy with sleep, I knew this was no usual detonation, no dynamiting at the depth of a glory hole. I stumbled to the hallway. Half-dressed, Hooper struggled from his room, yanking into the remainder of his clothes, while Griffith already was putting on coat and hat. At the head of the hall, Grace clutched her bedgown around her throat as she witnessed the exodus, then sent me an agonized look.

She did not even have to deliver my marching orders aloud. I dressed hastily and set off with the limping pair of old boarders to the Hill.

 

 

UP THERE, in the ghostly light of the headframes, a murmuring crowd was clustered around a mineshaft called the Flying Dutchman. When people gather from the nooks of a mining town to the surface of a disaster, they bring every degree of dread, and as the three of us edged through the throng I could feel the mood of apprehension, the air was sticky with it. Each arriving set of eyes, mine included, expected the sight of bodies laid out on the hard ground. But Griff and Hoop, pointing and muttering, saw at once this was no mineshaft accident, no explosion and flash of deadly flame deep in a tunnel. Instead, over near the machine house, beneath a now askew sign reading PROPERTY OF THE ANACONDA COPPER MINING COMPANY, the mine’s pay office stood open to the night, its front wall blown out.

Blue-uniformed policemen were chiding the crowd to stay back, while burly civilian types who could only have been plainclothesmen prowled the blast site. Reporters were clamoring out questions and receiving no answers. Flash powder kept going off, the hollowed-out pay office in rinses of light that would put it on front pages all across the state.

My companions were not impressed. “Mighty poor job of setting the dynamite,” either Hooper or Griffith appraised there in the deep shadows of the Hill.

“Could’ve done that much with firecrackers, couldn’t we?” said the other.

To me, the building looked devastated enough, the huge ragged hole in its front displaying broken bricks like snaggled teeth. I moved closer to the skeptical experts. “Do I hear that this blast wasn’t up to your standards?”

“The stupid pay office is still standing, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes.”

“That’s no kind of a result, if you’re gonna blow something up.”

“Waste of a good fuse and a match.”

“But,” I wasn’t able to budge from the evidence of my eyes, “the front of the building is by and large gone.”

“So what? They’ll get bricklayers in here in the morning and have it fixed back up before you can say boo.”

“Spell this out for me, then,” I gave in. “How would someone who was an old hand at blowing things up have done it?”

“All it would have taken,” Hoop explained patiently, “was to set the dynamite at the corner of the building.”

“It’d slump over like a dropped cake,” Griff mused, practically smacking his lips as he envisioned it.

By now the cloud of reporters and chain lightning of photography flashes were concentrated around one small circle of men next to the Flying Dutchman’s headframe. Even though I had expected something of the sort, my heart sank. As flash powder flared again, I saw in the glare the strong but strained features of Jared Evans in the midst of his beleaguered union officials. Although I had nothing to lend but moral support, I headed over.

An arm slipped authoritatively through mine, nearly scaring the life out of me. “I just knew you’d show up, Mr. Morgan,” Rab’s warm voice was next to my ear. In stylish scarf and jumper, she cut an unlikely figure there in the industrial spoils of the Hill. With perfect prepossession, she assessed the cordon of newspapermen surrounding Jared and the other union men. “Look at the mob of them. They’re like pecking birds.”

As the two of us sorted our way there in the semidark, we could hear the volley of questioning. Peppered from all sides as he was, Jared raised a hand for quiet.

“We’re told no one was hurt,” he chose what to deal with and what not to. “Given that someone is killed in the working conditions in these mines every week of the year, in this nasty incident only bricks suffered any harm, for a change.”

“Anaconda says provocation like this will make it take ‘all necessary measures’ to deal with a strike,” called out a newspaperman in a better topcoat than the others, which marked him as working for the
Daily Post
, the mining company’s mouthpiece. “What’s the union think of that?”

“There is no strike,” Jared deliberately raised his voice above the clanks and clatters of the night shift in the other mines around. “When the miners of this hill go out, there’s never any mistaking it—you can hear the grass grow, up here. That’s it, gentlemen, no more chitchat, thanks.” To his council members: “I’ll catch up with you at the union hall. We’re in for a late night.” Jared’s expression had lifted measurably when he spotted Rabrab, and she and I skirted the pack of reporters to join him. As we did so, Rab “accidentally” tripped the
Post
man, sending him stumbling into an oily puddle and cursing at the splatter on that spiffy coat.

Smiling tiredly, Jared chucked his feisty fiancée under the chin. “You’ll get us a big headline.”

“They’ll smear you no matter what,” Rab predicted, “in that waste of ink they call a newspaper.” Making a face at the mangled pay office, she went on: “So the sneaks resorted to this. I suppose they think they’re clever.”

“They’re not far from it,” Jared let out a slow breath of judgment. “They’ve put us in a hole about the size of that, for now.”

By then I felt reasonably sure that in the company of Jared and his union followers, I was not in with dynamiters—even inept dynamiters. To catch up with the conversation, I contributed in a confidential tone: “The Wobblies, you mean. It’s in their interest to stir up all the trouble they can, so they did it with a bang, hmm?”

Jared and Rab looked at me as though I were speaking in tongues. He shook his head. “If the Wobs wanted into this, they’d more likely blow up a machine house. Something that would really cripple this mine.”

I was back to bafflement. “Then who?”

“Mr. Morgan, put your thinking cap on,” said Rab. “It’s so obvious.”

Weary as he was, Jared took pity on me. “Anaconda. Their goons. To blame it on the union.”

 

 

THERE ARE MOMENTS in a lifetime when you can taste history as it is happening. When the flavor of time, from one hour to the next, somehow is not quite the same as any day before. So it was, at the start of the intense summer of 1919, as the miners of Butte and the mining corporation cooked up strategies against each other. Dickens should have been living in this hour to tell the tale of the two cities, the one of the neighborhoods of the Hill, and the other of the tall offices downtown, in the double-numbered year.

The morning after the bombing of the pay office, along with breakfast Grace delivered a firm suggestion. “This might be a good day for everybody to stay in.”

“How come, Mrs. Faraday?” Griff could have taught innocence to a cherub. “Nice weather, it’d be a shame not to take a little walk downtown.”

Hoop went to the point: “We wouldn’t want to miss anything.”

“And I suppose you,” Grace turned to me in exasperation, “are going to say the library will curl up and wither away if you’re not there.”

“Not at all,” I said from behind my coffee cup. “But my job might, if I don’t show up as usual.”

Off the three of us went, into the tense center of things. There is an atmospheric condition known as earthquake weather, a blanket stillness that forecasts a shaking-up; this day was like that. Hoop and Griff and I hiked up the Hill to that vantage spot of my first day in town and waited. With the city braced, with squads of policemen at the ready, we held our breath as it came time for the morning shift of miners to appear. They did so in eerie silence, the long files of men spilling into the streets of Meaderville and Centerville and Finntown and Dublin Gulch as if forming a somber parade. They marched toward the police lines with barely a murmur. And then turned in at the gates of the mines and went to work as if all was normal.

 

 

AT SUPPER, Griff and Hoop were downcast and Grace was not serving up sympathy. “No blood in the streets, how disappointing. Jared Evans must be more sane than some I could mention.”

“He’d better have something up his sleeve,” Griff said.

 

 

THREE MORNINGS LATER, I rounded the corner of the library into a teeming streetful of miners and Sandison frowning down at them.

I worked my way through the crowd, dropping questions as I went. Sandison met me at the top of the steps, looking even more disgruntled than usual. He drew me aside behind a pillar, while the library staff and the miners gawked back and forth. “What do the knotheads say?” he pumped me without preliminary. “Have they quit fooling around and actually gone on strike this time?”

“Not as such,” I reported. “It’s another work action—just the morning shift, they told me.”

“How many more times is this going to happen?” he demanded, as if I were in charge of that.

Knowing Jared Evans, I put up my hands helplessly. “Doubtless as many as it takes. Wouldn’t you say it’s a tactic that goes back to Roman history, Sandy? You will recall the great delayer, Fabius Cunctator, who outgeneraled his foes with skirmishes that put off the climactic battle time after time. It appears to me that the union similarly is using these stoppages to wear on Anaconda’s nerves and—”

“They’re practicing on mine, I can tell you that much,” he disposed of my discourse. “Are we running a library or a union hall?” Scowling at his own question, he heaved himself around for another look at the packed street. I barely caught the words in his gust of exhalation: “Oh, hell, let them in, Morgan.”

 

 

FULL AS A CHURCH on Christmas, the library brimmed with activity, much of it mine as I sped from task to task. Sandison commanded from the mezzanine, on the lookout for anyone forgetful enough to spit on the sacred floor, and things seemed to be going well until midway through the morning, when he flagged me down with the news:

“Miss Runyon has gone home in a nervous fit, the excitement has been too much for her. You’ll have to take over the story hour.”

“Now? How? Whatever short notice is, this is less.”

“The tykes are on their way,” he overrode my protest. “You wouldn’t want to break their young hearts, would you?” Did the man actually have a sense of humor? I would have had to part that beard of his like a curtain to be sure. “Get yourself down there,” he ordered.

I raced to the basement, hoping against hope that the auditorium’s supply cabinet held some storybook that Miss Runyon had in reserve for emergencies such as this. Rummaging frantically, I came up with a dog-eared
Mother Goose Tales.
Well, it wasn’t Aesop, but it would have to do. I breathed easier; from my experience in the one-room school, even jaded fifth-graders eavesdropped keenly enough when those old nursery tales were read to the younger children.

Then I heard the thumps and scuffles on the stairs.

By the time the freckled heathens of the sixth grade spilled into the room, with Rab riding herd behind them in a harried way, I had given up on Mother Goose. More like a rough-dressed horde than a class, boys and girls alike threw themselves into chairs and looked me over.
Who’s this gink?
I heard the loud whispers
. How come so much of him is mustache? Where’s Old Lady Bunion?

“Everyone, shush, or else,” Rab recited as if by rote, meanwhile shooing the final straggler in from the hallway. Pale as a chalk figure, Russian Famine slouched past her, sending me a prisoner’s gaze as he took the farthest seat of the last row.

His classmates ignored him but not one another, pinching, poking, prodding, and generally provoking disorder. How well I remembered it all. Grade six somehow transforms obedient schoolchildren into creatures with the bravado of bandits and the restlessness of overage Sunday schoolers. Rabrab herself had turned into a schoolyard Cleopatra at that time of life; the Marias Coulee sixth-grade boys went dizzy in her presence. Now I watched her brightly approaching me, while behind her a pugnosed boy and a redheaded girl swatted each other over the issue of elbow room. If Rab, with her battlefield experience, couldn’t command best behavior from this bunch, what chance did I have? The dismaying thought occurred to me that, in Butte, perhaps this
was
best behavior.