“He hasn’t taken my head off my shoulders, so far,” I muttered, my attention on the contents of the hiding spot in the cabinet where the ledgers were kept, the one place I was sure Sandison would not go near now that he had shed the bookkeeping to me. I brought out the pink sheets and my pages of calculations of each mine’s differential between raw tons of ore and tally of processed copper. “Is this what you had in mind?”
Not wasting a moment, Jared laid out my pages on the nearest desk-Sandison’s-and ran his finger down the figures. When he reached my totals, he pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and compared. His whoop startled me, and probably the pigeons on the library roof. “You’ve nailed it! Anaconda’s been feeding us low numbers on the finished copper. We’ll give them holy hell in the negotiations now and they won’t even know how we figured it out.” Exuberantly he batted my shoulder. “Rab thinks you’re the greatest thing going. I’m starting to see why, Professor, if I can call you that.”
“I’m flattered, I suppose.”
As the two of us headed downstairs, I could make out just enough of Jared in the library’s moonlit atmosphere to know he could hardly wait to turn the tables on Anaconda. Now I was curious. “You have the lost dollar back. What are you still negotiating about so urgently?”
“You name it. Working conditions. Hiring and firing. Safety.” His voice turned hollow. “On first shift, just this morning, one of our men in the Muckaroo was killed when a tunnel roof fell in on him. Left a wife and six kids.” I recalled his delivering the union tribute-cash and consolation-to the widow at my first wake as a cryer; again and again, from the sound of it, he faced that duty.
Mustering himself now, Jared went on with what he had been saying. “All of it causes bad feelings in the union. There are those who say getting the wage back is what counted, let’s don’t beat our heads against the shed on these other matters until we get some pay-days behind us. And then there’s plenty who are ready to shut down the Hill again like that”-he snapped his fingers-“if the company doesn’t give us every last thing we want.”
He glanced sideways at me. “Professor?” In the splendid acoustics-we were in the foyer by now-he sounded like a messenger of fate in a Greek drama as he laid matters out. “I wouldn’t guess you’re a military man at heart, but you maybe know what an accelerated march is. It covers ground a lot faster than parade cadence, but it’s not a run that makes your tongue hang out. That’s about what I’m trying for. We can’t let up much on Anaconda or things slip back. But we’re never going to turn copper mining into a picnic, no matter what we try. Either way, as I see it, those of us on the council have to keep things moving, just fast enough.” The next came out as if he were thinking to himself. “Particularly now.”
When I halted short of the front door and gave him a questioning look, Jared hesitated. “All right,” he granted, “Rab will probably blab this to you if I don’t. Anaconda isn’t our only problem-we’re scrambling to stay ahead of the Wobblies. The word is, they’re going to make a big push to take away our members.” He tilted his head to one side as if trying to see the situation from a fresh angle. “Who knows, if things had been different, maybe I’d be on their side. But I was born a union man. The union stuck up for the workingman on the Butte Hill all those years, every day of my father’s life when he went down into the mine. The Wobs always say they would, too, and take over the mines and everything else besides.” He shook his head. “I don’t trust that, Professor. It would go to hell in no time, I think. Look at Russia. The Bolshies did away with the Czar, and now they’re knocking off anybody they don’t like the looks of.”
I just listened, Jared needing to get the weight of fate off his chest; he had earned the right in the trenches that were the maw of the Great War.
“I have to hand it to the IWW,” he was saying ruefully, “they’re a persistent damn bunch. The last time they sent a bigtime organizer in here, the goons hung him from the railroad trestle. Lynched him. The old remedy, the Montana necktie.” With a laugh that had no humor in it, he gazed around at the grandeur of the library as though wondering how it and a lynching site a dozen blocks away could exist in the same realm of time. “Maybe I have Wobs on the brain,” he mused. “That one at the parade yesterday, singing that damn thing?” Jared Evans startled me again by mimicking, quite presentably, the phantom voice that had mocked the parading miners’ union with pie in the sky, when you die. He banged his head with the heel of his hand. “It gets in there and I can’t get it out.”
“It’s called a mnemonic effect,” I informed him. “Something that prompts remembering, usually voluntary but not necessarily. A musical phrase is particularly suited. For instance, ‘Camptown-’ ”
At the library door now, Jared put up his hands to hold off my discourse.
“I appreciate the definition. But I’ll just call it trouble. Good night, Professor.”
I WAS WARY in every direction I could think of, those next few days. But there was no sign of lurking goons, and on the home front, Grace-still a picture of misery, under the ghostly layer of lotion-did not come up with any further charges against my personality. She and I were painfully polite with one another, to the point where Hoop and Griff grew nervous around us. They talked a blue streak at meal-times to cover our silences, and while I learned a lot about assorted topics of interest to retired Welsh miners, it was a relief each morning to go off to work at the library.
Until, that is, the pertinent day when Sandison spun around in his chair as soon as I stepped into the office and announced, “Morgan, it’s time we get some ammunition to use on the trustees.”
I knew “we” meant me, so I simply cocked my head to listen.
“You’ve done a good enough job of balancing the ledger, the board can’t find anything to kick about in there,” he went on. “Now they’re fretting about where the money is going to come from for new carpets, all the wear and tear we’ve had in here lately. I keep telling them any board of trustees worth its name would just pony it up, but they want to steal it out of the book budget, the damn thieves.”
He hunched forward as if about to rake in a poker pot. “That’s where you come in. I want to remind that pack of meddling fools which side their bread is buttered on.” He looked at me craftily. “I’ve never signed my book collection over to the library,” there was a sly note in his voice I had not detected before, “it’s here on loan, like museums have with paintings of people with their clothes off.” That explained much: for Butte to house the finest collection west of Chicago, the obsessive keeper of the books came along with it.
“Told you there’s something I have for you to do,” he was saying, as though I were looking for a way to fill my time. “Draw up an inventory of what’s mine out there on the shelves,” he waved in the direction of the prized books on the mezzanine. “That’ll bring the trustees to their senses,” the grandee of the library finished, sitting back and cracking his knuckles in satisfaction.
“I shall need a helper.”
That caught him by surprise, and before he could cloud up enough to tell me I was out of my mind, I said, “Fortunately, Sandy, the staffing has been a little light for some time, hasn’t it.” I flipped to the ledger page that listed library positions and wages, his piggybank for those Miscellaneous expenditures when irresistible books showed up in dealers’ catalogues. He eyed me as my finger singled out positions budgeted for but chronically unfilled. “Very wise of you,” I drove the point home with a final finger tap, “to leave leeway for an occasion just such as this.”