“Professor?” He spoke now as if taking me deep into his confidence. “You see where I’m going with this?”
“Vaguely. You have in mind musical phraseology that will rally-”
He didn’t wait for me to finish. “A song of our own that will make the Wobblies sound like sick cats. And that’s where you come in.”
Well, who would not want to be the author of “ La Marseillaise ” or “Marching Through Georgia” or even “Yankee Doodle”? However, sometimes I know my limits. “Jared, that’s generous of you, but songwriting is actually not among my talents.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he sped right over that. “All I want you to do is to make the case to a few people for a hell of a good song for the Hill. Miners can be contrary. We have more factions than a henhouse.” He gazed up at the dark strutworks over the mineshafts and the spill of neighborhoods between. “The Finns would join up with the Wobblies lickety-split if the union gives them any least excuse. The Italians think the union is getting too radical. The Irish are itching to run things themselves, and the Cornish think they could do a better job than the Irish or any of the rest of us. So on down the line.” Abruptly he batted my shoulder, which was going to develop a callus if this kept on. “You’re just the right one to set the bunch of them thinking about a song that will pull everybody together instead of their own grumbles. Rab swears you’re a wonder when you get going.” Her smile ratified that.
“Ah.” Flattery is a quick worker. “I suppose I could lend whatever modicum of musical knowledge I have. If you’d like, the next time you hold a meeting, I could come by the union hall and-”
“That’s the rub,” Jared said quickly. “The bunch we want won’t come near the union hall, the way everyone is being watched like sin these days.”
The rogue had already calculated the next, I later realized, but he offered it as if the notion just then strolled up to him.
“Come to think of it, though, there’s one place in all of Butte where the cops and goons know better than to go. Down the shaft.”
No three words in the language could have been more unwelcome to me. I am not subterranean by nature. Quite the opposite; I tend to look up, not down, in life. The sky has held fascination for me since I was a boy sneaking out to the Lake Michigan shore on clearest nights, tracing out the constellations shimmering over the water. Above me in the hypnotic dark, Sagittarius the archer bent his everlasting bow while Pegasus flew on wings of light; those and all the other patterns etched in star-silver define heaven to me. I know of no mine pit in the sky. Now I was being asked to reverse my basic inclination and point myself into the blind paths under the ground. Down where a glory hole led to.
“Must we?”
Jared brushed aside my quavery question. “It’s our only shot at getting the right people in one place at the same time.” Rabrab watched him with adoration as he tackled tactics. “How are you at being somebody else?” he asked me and didn’t wait for an answer. “Your pals Griff and Hoop never took themselves off the extra gang list, it makes them feel like they’re still miners. We can sneak you onto the night shift on one of their work tickets.” He wrinkled his brow. “First we have to get you past that pair of apes at the gate.”
I groaned. “Big and bigger? One of them with eyes that belong on a sea creature?”
Jared showed surprise. “How’d you know? The company stuck them there to watch for Wobs.”
“It’s too long a story to go into.” I felt a guilty kind of relief as I explained that Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver would know me on sight; with them on lookout at the gate, it was impossible for me to enter the mine.
During this, Rabrab had been studying me.
“Your mustache, Mr. Morgan. If that were to come off, you’d look like a different you.”
MY UPPER LIP SMARTING, I trudged up the Hill in the company of Griff the next night. I felt undressed without the mustache, although I was in the same regalia as the hundreds of other miners around us: substantial trousers, a workman’s jumper, and an old hat.
Griff was practically hopping with anticipation. “You’re in luck,” he had me know as we trooped along. “The Muckaroo is as nice a digging as there is on the Hill.”
“Is it,” I responded without enthusiasm; doubtless there was a similarly prime spot in the salt mines of Siberia, too. To try to bolster myself for this, after the library closed I had gone down on my knees and examined the mine model in the glass case long and hard, but right now that seemed like no preparation whatsoever for the real thing. The screeching of pulleys and the throb of machinery sounded louder than in the daytime. Ahead of us, lit harshly, the headframe of the Muckaroo mineshaft towered into the darkness. The graveyard shift-how I wished it wasn’t called that-converged at the pinch of the mine gate and then spread out as men filed off to their eight hours of labor beneath the surface of the earth. Jared was a steady but discreet number of strides behind us, which was somewhat reassuring, but Griff hustling along next to me, madly eager to redeem himself after the Miners Day drilling contest, was not. I kept hearing Grace’s strained words when my conscience made me draw her aside after supper and confess what we were up to: “Think twice about this, Morrie, please? The Hill is the most dangerous place on earth, even for those who know what they’re doing.”
By now I’d had those second thoughts and many more, with no result but Griff to show for it. Allegiance to a cause is a prickly thing. Put your hand to it just right, and there is the matchless feeling of being part of something greater than yourself. Grab on to it the wrong way, though, and it draws blood. Back and forth this scheme of Jared’s wavered in me as our rough-dressed procession tromped out of the dark to the mine entrance.
The enemy was at the gate, the oversize pair of them scrutinizing every passing face, Eel Eyes with that sideways stare, Typhoon with doggish concentration. Griff braced up beside me as we neared that inspection. “Here we go, Mor-Hoop, that is.” He sneaked a look toward the weedy shadows along the high fence, muttering: “If that kid’s gonna do it, he better be doing it.”
“He will,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
Just then a rock clanged off the tin siding of the gatehouse behind the goons. “Scabs!” came the taunt. “Anaconda stinks and so do you! ”
As hoped, Tolliver reflexively bolted off after the stone thrower, although he had no chance in the world of catching up with Russian Famine. Eel Eyes angrily stayed sentry, but his gaze kept dodging toward the darkness or in search of the jeering laughs from the rank of passing miners, while Griff and I, prim as monks, flashed our work tickets and slouched past him.
Jared caught up to us in the mine yard.
“Nice work. When we get in the lamp room, stay at the back”-he was addressing me-“and keep your head down. Griff, you know what to do.”
The lamp room, jam-packed with men and equipment, was where we were to outfit ourselves with helmets with a small headlamp atop like a bright Cyclops eye. Finding one that more or less fit, I plopped it on, hoping it would help to hide me. No sooner was it down around my brow than the night supervisor stepped into the room, a list of names in his hand.