Work Song - Ivan Doig [29]
“I have had my say any number of times before,” the ministerial voice sounded weary, “on the stopping of work and the negotiating of wages. The two seem as bound together in this town as the two sides of a coin.” Aha! Not even the man of the cloth could set aside the propensity for earthly gain. Perhaps I was imagining, but his own choir seemed to be looking at him as though he had just caught up with a main fact of life. “The shepherd does not leave his flock, even when it may have wool over its eyes,” he went on drily. “If the mines do shut down, the church shall again have a strike committee. We’ll again gather food and clothing for the families left bereft. Depend on that.” He paused, drawing on the silence. “A word of caution, however. If you men do go out”—he looked out over the stooped miners’ shoulders that filled half the church—“or you women march in their support”—a similar gaze to the upturned faces of the wives—“as you have been known to do, walk the line of the law very carefully. The times are not good. The sedition laws that came with the war are not fine-grained as to whether a person is the Kaiser in disguise or a Bolshevik with a bomb under his coattails or an honest miner seeking honest pay. Some of you had a taste of that last time, when I had to go down to the jail and bail you out for the hitherto unknown crime of ‘unlawful assembly.’ ” Reaching in over his glasses, he pinched the bridge of his nose as if to shut off that memory. “The church coffer is no longer sufficient for bail,” the words came slowly now, “nor can we keep contributing to legal defense funds. This time around, it will all be up to your union. You can help its cause and your own by being mindful of that pernicious statute until wiser heads can change it. Otherwise, Butte’s finest, to call them that”—it was well known that Butte policemen were Irish, and not the Dublin Gulch ore-shoveling type—“will pick you off like ripe apples. For now,” his voice rose, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”
I squirmed at that. I perfectly well knew it to be a biblical parable, but it was not Caesar up there in the Hennessy Building, pulling strings attached to the police department.
The minister took off his spectacles, folded them, and seemed to shake his head at himself. “Let us return to the singing.”
As we walked out after the service, Grace pursed a look at me as if to see what I thought. “My Arthur used to say there are those who make a scarecrow of the law.” I thought it best not to say Arthur had read some Shakespeare along the way. Directly ahead of us, Hoop and Griff were stumping along, sleeve cuffs flying as they dissected the sermon. Watching them, Grace said soberly: “The union is going to have its hands full, isn’t it.”
THERE WAS NO KNOWING how these things come about, but somehow that Sunday spate of Welsh sermonizing and song rinsed away the window men. The way was clear, to and from the library, the next day and the next and those after that, and while I habitually peeked over my shoulder for figures lurking half a block behind, they were notable only for their absence. It was as I indeed hoped, I could tell myself: the goons or their bosses saw me for what I was, a glorified library clerk sauntering meek and mild to church, and were wasting no further time on me.
Which was a lucky thing, because I was falling in love with the Butte Public Library. Walking up to it each fresh morning, its Gothic turret like the drawbridge tower into the castle, I warmed to the treasures within those softly gray granite walls. Sandison standing there at the top of the steps counting us off as if checking his herd came to seem patriarchal rather than high-handed. The staff softened toward me—with the exception of Miss Runyon—as I picked up stray tasks that they wanted to dodge. The nooks and crannies and grandiosities of the old building intrigued me, like an ancient mansion labyrinth leading back to Gutenberg’s printing press and the start of everything,