Work Song - Ivan Doig [101]
Suddenly I knew what to do. Can inspiration come off on the fingers? I rubbed my hands together appreciatively, there among the literary classics. It was as if the risk-taking lifetimes of composition, the reckless romances with language, the tricky business of plots stealing onto pages, all the wiles of Samuel Sandison’s glorious books answered to my touch. There was no mistaking their message: sometimes you must set sail on the winds of chance.
Stroking a last row of embossed titles as I went, I turned off the mezzanine lights and made my way out of the darkened library. What I was about to attempt was a gamble, but that was nothing new in human experience. The first thing it required was a messenger who was not Russian Famine. I headed directly to the cigar store where Skinner hung out.
DISCORDANT AS IT WAS by nature, the song session the next night came as something of a relief after Section 37. At least, up there onstage I did not have to fear for my neck when one rough-hewn miner or another climbed up with me and sang off-key, although my ears were another matter.
The songwriting efforts unveiled at this tryout were all over the map, in more ways than one. The only thing the musical penchants of the neighborhoods of the Hill had in common was strenuous exercise of the vocal cords. As diplomatically as I could, I touched up rhyme and word rhythm here and there, and the concertina tuned things up a little, but in the end the attempted songs were pretty much the same rough creatures as at the start of the evening.
Well, no one in his right mind could expect to turn the basement auditorium of the Butte Public Library into Tin Pan Alley, I had to tell myself afterward. But Jared and Rab and I were a somber trio when we adjourned to the Purity.
“What do you think, Professor,” Jared asked directly over pie and coffee, “is the work song we want hiding in any of those?”
“You heard the same performances I did,” I sidestepped. “The groups still have almost a week to work on things, perhaps something”—I almost said miraculous—“unforgettable will find its way in.” We both looked to Rab for a boost in our spirits.
“I’ll stick with my sixth-graders,” she passed judgment ruthlessly now that she was back to teaching. “They only get into fistfights at recess.” At the height of the song session Jared had needed to jump in and separate a Finn and an Italian who came to blows over a question of tempo.
He conceded that was a case of somewhat too much enthusiasm, but maintained strong feelings of that sort could be a good sign. “The men are fired up against Anaconda, and the right song will catch that,” he insisted, as if insistence would do the job. I could see what was coming next as he looked over at me: in his checklist way he would want to know how I was going to handle the big night when two hundred people had to materialize in the library basement without anyone noticing. Omitting to say it was the brainstorm of Griff and Hoop, I brightly volunteered that our salvation was an eisteddfod.
Jared turned his unscathed ear toward me as if that would help with the word. “Run that by me again?”
I did so in as much detail as I could think up. The dubious expression on Jared kept growing until Rab, at her conspiratorial best, poked him insistently. “Mr. Morgan has the knack of doing what can’t be done,” she said, canny as an abbess. “You either have to let him or think up something better, sweetheart.”
That decided him. “Well, hell, if none of us can savvy it, maybe the cops and goons can’t either.” As we rose to go, though, he gave me the Butte salute, a whap on the shoulder, and warned, “Just remember, Professor, plenty of people are going to want your hide if this doesn’t work out right.”
Out into the night he and Rab went, with me brooding behind, when the bow-tied impresario at the