Work Song (3 page)

T
he C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home admitted just enough daylight through leaded windows to let a few sunbeams wander among the casket display as if shopping from heaven. Otherwise, everything in the building was somber as a dead bouquet, and that included Peterson.

“Hmm.” His back turned to me, he was leafing through a black-bound ledger that, with professional interest, I tried to peek at. All I could glimpse past his out-thrust elbows were column headings such as
Place of Death
,
Next of Kin
, and
Payment Due
. “Yes, yes, here they are, Griffith and Hooper, the both of them fully paid up on a ‘Miner’s Farewell’ burial contract, our nicest. Candles and all.” He clapped the ledger shut and turned around in creaky fashion. “Sound men, sound judgment. Generally.” This last was accompanied by a lidded look that took me in from hat to shoetop.

“I give equal weight to their vouching for you as a possible employer, Mr. Peterson. Your establishment is very, ah, businesslike.”

He seemed to brood on that. “Mr. Gorman—”

“Morgan.”

“—what would you say recommends you to this line of work?” He swept a hand around the casket display.

You can’t just say,
A strong stomach.
I glanced past him to the darkly furnished room that served as the funeral home’s chapel, with its waiting bier and an antiquated organ that I could almost tell by looking would wail out notes fit for a Viking pyre. A thought struck me. “My funerary experience is not vast,” I admitted, “yet I have been fortunate enough to be an observer at some historically solemn occasions. I happened to witness the funeral procession of Edvard Grieg, to name one.”

“In Oslo?” He straightened up like a stork on the alert.

“There under the Scandinavian sky of heroes, with his own music resounding like the heartbeat of the fjords.”

“What did they lay him away in?” he whispered.

“Rosewood,” came to mind.

“The diamond of woods,” Peterson uttered with reverence. “My golly, that casket must have been something pretty to see.”

“Unforgettable.”

“Hmm.” He moved to his desk at such an unctuous pace that I saw where the nickname “Creeping Pete” came from. Picking up a list there, he read off: “
Dempsey, O’Connor, Harrigan
—and that’s just this week’s deceased. You’re hired.”

We dickered over the wage and, as we both knew we would, met in the middle. There was a further matter: my attire. Displaying a jacket sleeve nearly worn through at the elbow, I told him my tale of the missing trunk as if it were the loss of a royal wardrobe. “Surely if I am to uphold the name of this establishment, I should be better clothed than circumstances have left me, wouldn’t you say?”

Not so much as a
hmm
met that; Peterson apparently took it as a matter of principle that anyone representing the funeral home should be at least as well-dressed as the corpse. He scrawled something on a pad and handed it to me. “Take this over to Gruber the tailor. He’ll fix you up.”

Tucking the note in my pocket, I turned to go, the vision of a new suit warming me inwardly. “Mr. Morgan,” the sepulchral tone stopped me in the doorway. “You have been to Irish wakes before, haven’t you?”

I was intimately acquainted with mourning; how many variations could there be? “Uncountable times.”

“You start tonight.”

 

 

“YOU’RE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED? That’s not bad for a start.” Standing on a chair, Grace took time from feather-dusting the chandelier to nod at me in general approval. “Even if it is when things go ‘boo’ in the night.”

“I am not naturally nocturnal,” I admitted, “but that seems to be when wakes take place.”

“Just come in quiet, that’s the rule of the house.” She turned back to brushing at the chandelier with a practiced light touch, its crystals tinkling softly. Turbaned with a towel as she attacked these higher parts of the house, she looked exotic there on her perch, except for the familiarity of the violet gaze whenever she glanced around at me. I watched while she went at the chore, unexpectedly held by her stylish housekeeping. I had intended to go straight to my room and pass the time until lunch relaxing with a book, but the moment would not let loose of me. “You’ll get to know the Hill”—Grace’s words reached me as if across more distance than was between us—“like it or not.”

Rousing myself, I began to say I could blame her prime boarders Hoop and Griff if the job didn’t fit, when the floor shook under me, the chandelier crystals rattling as if trying to fly off.

“Jump!” I cried in alarm, my arms out to catch her.

Grace held to where she was, only flashing me a bemused smile. “My, how gallant. It’s not an earthquake, if that’s what you’re thinking. Only dynamite.”

Feeling foolish, I toed the floorboards, which seemed to have settled back into place. “What, they’re mining here? Right under us?”

“Under every bit of Butte. There are miles and miles of tunnels—Arthur used to say it’s like Swiss cheese down there.” Her gaze at me had something like a jeweler’s appraisal to it now. “Morrie? Do you have a minute?”

“Easily.”

She allowed me to help her down from the chair. But as soon as we were settled at the kitchen table, where serious talk is most comfortable, Grace Faraday, landlady, took charge. “There’s something you had better know, if you’re going to be rooming here for a while.” Contemplating me across the oilcloth, she tapped a finger on her cheek as if consulting the dimple. “Besides, you seem the sort who finds out anyway.” She inclined her head to indicate the spacious yard that wrapped around the house, then again to include the room we sat in. “The mining company wants to get its hands on this,” she confided. “Buy the boardinghouse, that is to say, and tear it down. They send someone around every so often, and I throw hot water at them.”

I nearly swooned. “This house is sitting on a copper fortune?”

“Don’t we all wish.” She clasped her hands in a moment of mock prayer, then crumpled that. “No, it’s quite the opposite,” she sighed. “Anaconda wants to turn this into a glory hole.”

I didn’t even have to plead ignorance. Grace took one look at me and laid the matter out:

“A pit, really, but dug from below. If the ore vein they’re drilling on happens to head for the surface, they follow it on up. When the ore plays out, it’s cheaper for the company to bust through the ground and fence it off than to maintain an empty shaft.” She made a wry face. “Glory holes aren’t just any old where or we’d fall to China every time we go across town. The luck of the draw decides when and where Anaconda wants one, the company shysters try to tell me. That’s the kind of luck I can do without.” She ran her hands up and down her arms, shuddering as she did so. “At first it gave me hives, every time the house shook like that. Right away I’d break out as if I’d been rolling in the nettles.” Seeing my reaction, she hurried to say, “Don’t be upset, by now it takes more than a little dynamite to make me itch, and this house isn’t going away if I can help it. The next time one of those copper collar monkeys comes calling . . .” The towel turban had been slipping toward her worked-up brow throughout this, and now she ripped it off as if it were one more nuisance.

“Grace, let me try to catch up here. Doesn’t the mining company offer you a good price? Good heavens, you have what they want, this property. A classic case of supply and demand if I ever heard one, and—”

“That’s not Anaconda’s way,” she set me straight. “They’ll only pay the going price for a none-too-new boardinghouse, and that’s next to nothing in these times. No, they’d rather set off their blasting every so often to get on my nerves and make me sell. They don’t know my nerves,” she said staunchly, hives evidently notwithstanding.

My own nerves still were feeling the quivers of the floor a few minutes before. “I am not an expert on cave-ins, but simply for the sake of speculation: What if they keep dynamiting and digging until a giant hole in the ground becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and this house falls in?”

Rather grandly, I thought, Grace shook that off. “The company bigwigs downtown won’t let that happen. They don’t want a lawsuit even Anaconda could lose.”

“Let us hope not. I don’t want to sleep in the bottom of a glory hole.”

“This place will be as dusty as one if I don’t get back to house-cleaning.” She closed off my concern, only to give me another gauging look before she got up from the table. “I’ve spilled more to you than I intended to, Morrie. Why do you have that effect? Please, though, don’t pass along any of this to Hoop and Griff, promise? I don’t want them fretting about whether they’re going to have a roof over their old fool heads the rest of their days.”

“I shall be a sphinx,” I assented.

“I figured you were capable,” she said, the dimple adding emphasis.

 

 

THE BANTAM FIGURES of Hooper and Griffith, each talking into one of my ears, took me around town later that day. Downtown Butte, set into the lower slope of the Hill like the till in a cash register, was as busy as the streets could hold. One moment we had to dodge bowler-hatted Rotarians congregating for luncheon fellowship, and step aside for a covey of nuns the next. The bustling business district was only six or seven blocks long but made up for that size in other ways: amid the shops and stores were saloons (now speakeasies) as big as barns, and every block or so a grandiose hotel or office building stood out, as if bits of Chicago’s State Street or New York’s Fifth Avenue had been crated up and shipped west. Griff and Hoop took turns pointing out local landmarks: the restaurant where Teddy Roosevelt once ate a steak in plain sight, the theater bar frequented by Charlie Chaplin and other troupers in the prime of vaudeville, and around a corner from other commerce, the red-light district called Venus Alley, said to be the biggest in the West.

What aroused the passion of my tour guides, however, was the most dominant name in Butte. Passing the
Daily Post
building, where the faint whiff of newspaper ink hung in the air, Hoop spat and said, “Anaconda owns that rag.” When I remarked on the architectural preference of brick over stone in so many of the tall office buildings, I was informed the Anaconda Company owned the brickworks. Not to mention—although Hoop and Griff assuredly did—the lumberyard, profiting off the woodframe neighborhoods where the mineworkers lived. Then our stroll brought us to the Hennessy Building, dressier than its neighbors in its terra-cotta trim and window mullions—if buildings could be said to be attired as we are, the Hennessy wore cuff links and a tie pin.

But the pertinent article was escaping my attention, Griff and Hoop had me know, as one or the other profanely attested that this grandest building was where the copper collar was fashioned: the headquarters of the Anaconda Company, up there on the top floor.

My curiosity was tickled. “The copper
collar
, though—why does just that phrase keep coming to your lips and Grace’s?”

Hoop looked at Griff. “Might as well let it rip,” he said.

“Think so?” said Griff. “Right here?”

“Where better?”

“Righto. Here goes.”

There on the sidewalk, Griff squared himself up, took a stance amid the passersby like Caruso among the opera extras, and began to sing in a croaky baritone, to the tune of “The Old Oaken Bucket.”

Griff finished on a sardonically sweet note that was very nearly a warble. Up in the top floor of the Hennessy Building, someone in a celluloid collar frowned down and the window was shut with a bang.

“The Butte spiritual.” Hoop defined Griff’s performance for me, and onward we went.

 

 

IT WAS WHEN the two of them tramped me up the streets to the other butte, the rising ground where those long-legged headframes spraddled atop the dozens of mineshafts and piles of tailings spilled down the hillside like gopher diggings, that the two of them truly came into their element. To me, the Hill seemed otherworldly, half mammoth factory, half fathomless wasteland; to my companions, it was home. Their bent backs straightened, and their gait became more spry. The ear-stinging screech of pulleys as ore loads were hoisted from the depths of the earth and elevator cages were let down seemed to reach them as the most melodious of sounds. In accompaniment, Hoop turned suddenly voluble. “We drilled in every corner of this hill, didn’t we, Griff. In the Neversweat and the Glengarry and the Parrot and the Nipper and most of these other mines you see. One of us on the steel and the other on the hammer. We was a flash team, if I do say so myself. We’d make the hole in the rock in nothing flat, then set the dynamite, and blooey! Break loose a wall of ore that’d keep a mucking crew busy half a day.” In all likelihood it was the effect of Hoop’s words, but I thought I felt a tremor in the ground as he spoke. He paused, gazing around at the modern-day mining apparatus. “Now they drill with air.” I took that to mean high-powered compressed-air drills, the throb of giant compressors a steady beat within the industrial medley around the mineshafts.

There is hardly any story more deeply engraved in human experience than a search for the Promised Land, a New Jerusalem where life can flourish and dreams run free. What a saga it was, then, that the barren rise of earth the three of us were standing atop had become such a place, to those unafraid to go into its depths. From what Hoop and Griff had told me the night before, I knew that the Hill’s copper diggings, in the course of time and union persistence, had brought forth wages that workingmen anywhere else could only imagine.
Four and a half dollars a day!
my informants chorused with pride, at that time probably equaled only by Henry Ford’s assembly line in Detroit. And no man who called himself a miner wanted to bolt fenders onto flivvers for a living. So, dust devils and dump heaps and discolored soil and everything else, the startling land I was gazing at was worshipped by hard-rock miners for its holy wage; in the pits and shafts of the world, the saying was,
“Don’t even stop in America, just go to Butte.”