We more or less did, although even Griff eased off somewhat now that we had survived inspection. Still, I was sweating so much I felt like a sponge, and every muscle on me was protesting. I was nearly done in by the time a bell signaled somewhere in the distant tunnels.
“Chow time! Here we go.” Griff bounded down the ladder and scuttled off, and I followed as best I could.
The route he led me on was as twisty and unpredictable as the wildest of the streets of Butte somewhere over us. Here, however, the thoroughfares were a mere few yards wide, and all the way there was the encroaching roof of solid rock or splintery timbering barely overhead. People speak of the ends of the earth, places beyond all normal geography: the South Pole, the Amazon, the Sahara. The deep mine was that extreme to me; even though I knew the Hill was as pierced as the catacombs of Rome, the unending tunnels we were trekking through made me feel trapped in a maze. That feeling redoubled when we came to a place where borehole pathways diverged left and right and Griff abruptly halted. “Let me just kind of sort this out a little.”
I waited, twitching, while he studied the two choices, fidgeting considerably himself. At last he swayed into motion in one direction, declaring, “The left one’s the right one.” Was I imagining, or did I hear him mutter to himself, “I think”?
This passage showed no signs of recent mining; the dead air of abandonment was unpleasant to breathe. Except when our boots met rocks on the uneven footing, the silence was absolute. And the going became increasingly narrow; I did not have to put out either arm very far to touch a side of the tunnel. This was what the circle of Hell for claustrophobics must be like. Long minutes passed, and as far as I could tell, we were not getting anywhere except deeper into a labyrinth.
“Griff, are you sure this is the way?”
“Pretty sure. Watch your head on that overhang.”
You wonder sometimes where your common sense disappeared to, just when you most needed it. Over and over I asked myself that as I followed Griff toward nowhere. I could not stop remembering the Miners Day drilling contest when his hand had so miserably failed him. My only hope was that the part of his brain which held the instinct of a badger wasn’t similarly cramping up.
The tunnel, though, seemed to have no end, and I was frantically wondering whether we had left the Hill behind and were doomed to roam some crevice of the earth where no other human existed. Finally I could contain my doubts no longer.
“I really and truly think we ought to turn back and-”
“Shh. Don’t talk so much, Morrie. Let’s just have a listen.”
We did. Water dripped somewhere. Our own breathing was loud. But faintly, some immeasurable distance ahead, there were voices.
In the beam of my helmet lamp, my guide gave me a silent frog-mouth grin. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell whether he was as relieved as I was or just being the essential Griff.
WE EMERGED into a musty chamber which had been mucked out and abandoned. A few glowing helmet lamps hanging from spikes driven into the rock walls illuminated this cavern, showing a scene of open lunch buckets and grimy faces as darkened as my own, as though the bunch of us were in vaudeville. Naturally Griff seemed acquainted with everyone in sight. There were a dozen or so of these miners of various persuasions and nationalities, Jared in their middle. The only other one I recognized was Quinlan, who grinned a wolfish welcome. I couldn’t care about manners, I was famished. Collapsing onto a convenient rock, I grappled open my lunch bucket and tore into a turkey sandwich Grace had fixed. Jared cleared his throat and announced: “Here’s the gent I was telling you about.”
After a silence broken only by my munching, someone in the jury-like assembly posed the question prevailing in them alclass="underline" “He’s the brains?”
Quinlan chortled. “They’re running out his ears. He has to stick corks in at bedtime, don’t you, Morgan.”
Swallowing a major bite of sandwich, I managed to respond: “Mental miracles are in short supply with me at the moment. Music lore, I perhaps can provide as Jared has requested.”
A man built like a small haystack stirred from where he was squatting against the inmost side of the cavern. “Why should we fiddle around with music,” he demanded of Jared in the declarative accent of Cornwall, “when there’s every kind of thing to fight Anaconda about?”
“Tell it to the Wobblies, Jack. I can’t get to sleep at night without hearing about pie in the sky. Can you?”
“Thee be right, it’s somewhat like a bug in the ear,” the Cornishman acknowledged, “but a ditty is just a ditty.”
“Ah, but it is much more than that,” I was roused in defense of melody and lyric. “A song says something to us that we can’t hear in any other way. There is a kind of magic to it. Music does not simply soothe the savage breast, it reaches to our better nature, wouldn’t we all agree?”
Not a word nor nod from this uncooperative audience.
“A tune keeps us company,” I refined that, “when we need a bit of cheer. We don’t whistle just to let air out of ourselves, do we?”
Whistlers in their spare time or not, the entire bunch sat there with lips firmly clamped.
“Or,” I tried a different tack, “sing in the church choir merely to show off the starch in our shirts?”
Even Griff was looking stony now, in the frieze of unmoved faces.
Frustration giving way to desperation, I burst out: “How else was the Erie Canal dug but to the chant of workmen who had come from the world over ‘to see what they could see / on the Ee-rye-ee’? Nor would railroads such as the Union Pacific have conquered the continent without the chorus of Irish tracklayers”-a hopeful glance toward Quinlan here-“swinging their sledgehammers to the rhythm of ‘No leshure in your day, / no sugar in your tay, / working for the U Pay Railway. ’ ” By then I was onto my feet. “And I would bet any amount some of you lately marched in the service of your country to the memorable strains of ‘You might forget the gas and shell, parlee voo! / You might forget the gas and shell, / but you’ll never forget the Mademoiselle, / hinky dinky parlee voo! ’ ” Head up, chest out, I tramped in place to make the point. Jared’s expression said he remembered that anthem of soldiery all too well.
In the dim and shadowed light, expression among my other listeners was mostly limited to brows and eyeballs, and I could see some widened gazes by the time I registered a final ringing parlee voo!
After that died away, one of the most grizzled miners spoke up. “All them songs you been reaming our ears out with are for bunch-work, while we’re scattered just a few at a time in every mine on the Hill. So what kind of thing are you talking about that would ever fit us?”
“Mmm.” Inspiration is hard to produce on demand. “A work song does have to fit the job and its circumstances, you could not be more right,” I stalled. “In our instance here, now don’t hold me to this as a finished product, but perhaps something along the lines of-” Insidious as ever, the catchy rhythm of “Camptown Races” crept to mind, and in what I like to think of as a passable tenor voice, I improvised:
I’m a miner through and through; you too, you too!
We dig all day and nighttime too, in the Muckaroo!
Utter stillness met the finish of my performance. Eyebrows came down like dropping curtains, and I saw a wince on Griff. “That was merely one of many possible examples,” I offered up feebly. Shaking their heads, the miners began gathering themselves, lunchboxes were snapping shut-Jared looked as defeated as I felt. Any hope for a song for the union cause was walking out with these men.