Griff perused me, his wrinkles wrinkling even more. “Let’s get Hoop in on this.” He banged the heel of his fist on the wall, and shortly Hooper came in, bringing his own chair.
I described to them that morning’s experience, and the unlikelihood that the two idlers were pet fanciers. “Keep this to yourselves, please. I don’t wish to worry Grace about this.”
“Or have her kick you out of here on your can,” Hoop said.
“Well put.”
Griff hopped off the bed, went to the window, and pulled down the blind. “Tell me this,” he intoned, turning to me. “When you lit down from the train, was there a couple of bruisers hanging around?”
“Big and bigger,” Hoop specified.
“Beefier than ordinary, yes, now that you say so, there was such a pair at the depot.”
“That’s them,” Griff said. “Anaconda’s goons. The one big enough to eat soup off the top of your head is Typhoon Tolliver.”
I felt as if the seat of my chair had just pinched me.
Hoop was saying, “Jim Jeffries flattened him-”
“-in the second round of the title bout, right hook to the jaw,” I finished for him. “What on earth is he doing in Butte?”
“Beating people up,” Griff had no trouble answering that. “The Anaconda Company don’t play pattycake.”
“But-” Some questions scare off words. Why was I a candidate for a beating from an ex-heavyweight pug?
Hooper answered that without it being asked. “That bunch in the Hennessy Building sics the goons on any union organizers who come in from the outside.” He and Griff looked at me critically.
I shook my head.
“Especially anybody working for the Wobblies,” Griff prompted.
I shook my head harder.
“Somebody who’d lay low until the right time,” said Hoop.
“Then stir things up like poking a hornets’ nest,” said Griff.
“Anaconda don’t like that kind of thing,” Hoop added.
Another shake of my head, as much to clear it as anything else. “I am not any kind of an organizer, believe me. I simply came here to get ri-to find decent work.” Both old men watched me mutely. “The goons, as you call them, are wasting their time on me.”
One or the other of my listeners, like ancients who had heard it all before, spoke up. “You better hope they get tired of it.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY, day of rest for the library, but not for the boardinghouse. Scarcely was I seated for breakfast, wondering where the others were, when Grace forged out of the kitchen all but wrapped in a tie-around apron over a nice dark dress. Along with my plate of sidepork and eggs, she delivered with a flourish:
“I wondered if you might like to go to church.”
“Church.” I hadn’t meant for it to come out quite like that, but it sounded as though I was trying to identify the concept.
Hooper came through the doorway, also dressed in surprising Sunday best and smelling of musky cologne. “What this is, Griff’s filling in with the choir. They’re hard up.”
“Ah. And bringing his own audience, insofar as it can be conscripted?”
“He’ll be in much better voice if he sees us there, he happened to mention,” Grace coaxed with a nice example of a Sunday smile.
“He can stand all that kind of help he can get,” Hoop chipped in.
I put up my hands. “I know when I’m outnumbered.” Obligation takes strange shapes. Back in Casper’s earliest bouts, I had mastered the tactic myself of “papering the house,” as it was called, by giving away tickets by the handful if necessary to fill the seats of the arena. If Griffith dreamed of a sellout crowd for his star turn with the choir, I understood intrinsically.
THE SNUG REDBRICK CHURCH with its peaked hat of cupola looked as if it had been smuggled in from a vale in Wales, and no sooner had Grace and I and Hooper slid into seats at the back of the congregation than the creased little minister, peering over half-moon eyeglasses like a veteran counter of crowds, nodded to himself and launched into prayer. In Welsh. Evidently Grace had not anticipated this any more than I had, both of us trying to keep a straight face at not understanding a word of what plainly was going to be an hour of many hundreds of words. Actually, some time into the minister’s spate my ear figured out the repeated invoking of “Iesu Grist,” and I sat there caught up in the wayward notion of Christ as grist, the mills of faith grinding fine the belief in a clear-eyed savior at that moment across half the world. Sunday certainties, which left only the rest of the week.
The praying rolled on like thunder until the minister reached a final crescendo of syllables that sounded like tragwyddoldeb!
“Eternity!” Hoop translated to the other two of us in a hoarse whisper, and that was definitively that.
“Welcome, all ye, the accustomed and the new faces.” The surprise lilt of English from the minister sent Grace and me melting toward each other in relief. Not much taller than his pulpit, the elderly man of faith again peered around the church as if counting the house, this time shook his head instead of nodding, and declared: “A sufficiency will be heard from me soon enough. Let us get on with the singing.” With that, the male choir filed up, all in severe black suits and blinding starched white shirts, two dozen strong, Griff at one end, proud as a parrot. Church or not, he sought out the three of us with a broad wink, welcoming us to the occasion he plainly saw as the Welsh Miners’ Choir of Butte, starring Wynford Griffith.
The choir director, burliest of the bunch, stepped from the ranks, gave a steady bass hum, which was picked up by the others in a communal drone that seemed to vibrate the building. Then, as if in one glorious voice the size of an ocean’s surf, they swept into hymn after hymn. I sat there enchanted, Grace swaying gently next to me. Music makes me almost willing to believe in heaven.
Then, though, came a chorus I could have done without.
Were I to cherish earthly riches,
They are swift and fleet of wing;
A heart pure and virtuous,
Riches and eternal gain will bring.
There is that about the Welsh: they can sing their way under your skin, to the bones of your being. I needed no reminding that riches, in what pursuit I had given them, had proved to be elusively swift and winged. Yet why did a Richest Hill on Earth and its supposed opportunities exist, if not to be tapped? Was I really supposed to count my gains in life only afterward, in the time of tragwyddoldeb? Eternity did not seem much of a payoff if you had to scrimp to get there.
My spell of brooding broke off when the old minister, frail as a leaf after the gusts of the choir, ascended to the pulpit once more.
“ ’Tis no sense to maunder about, when but one thing is on every mind.” He gazed severely over the settled moons of his glasses. “There is talk of a strike in the mines, is there not?” The rustle of the congregation answered that.
“I have had my say any number of times before,” the ministerial voice sounded weary, “on the stopping of work and the negotiating of wages. The two seem as bound together in this town as the two sides of a coin.” Aha! Not even the man of the cloth could set aside the propensity for earthly gain. Perhaps I was imagining, but his own choir seemed to be looking at him as though he had just caught up with a main fact of life. “The shepherd does not leave his flock, even when it may have wool over its eyes,” he went on drily. “If the mines do shut down, the church shall again have a strike committee. We’ll again gather food and clothing for the families left bereft. Depend on that.” He paused, drawing on the silence. “A word of caution, however. If you men do go out”-he looked out over the stooped miners’ shoulders that filled half the church-“or you women march in their support”-a similar gaze to the upturned faces of the wives-“as you have been known to do, walk the line of the law very carefully. The times are not good. The sedition laws that came with the war are not fine-grained as to whether a person is the Kaiser in disguise or a Bolshevik with a bomb under his coattails or an honest miner seeking honest pay. Some of you had a taste of that last time, when I had to go down to the jail and bail you out for the hitherto unknown crime of ‘unlawful assembly.’ ” Reaching in over his glasses, he pinched the bridge of his nose as if to shut off that memory. “The church coffer is no longer sufficient for bail,” the words came slowly now, “nor can we keep contributing to legal defense funds. This time around, it will all be up to your union. You can help its cause and your own by being mindful of that pernicious statute until wiser heads can change it. Otherwise, Butte’s finest, to call them that”-it was well known that Butte policemen were Irish, and not the Dublin Gulch ore-shoveling type-“will pick you off like ripe apples. For now,” his voice rose, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”