Work Song - Ivan Doig [28]
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