Work Song - Ivan Doig [3]
Just then my hostess popped out of the kitchen with a bowl of boiled potatoes and nodded to where I was to sit, saying, “Make yourself to home, the other pair will be right along. Griff had to stoke the furnace and I told him to go wash up or eat in the street—ah, here’s the thundering herd.”
Through the doorway limped two scrawny half-bald figures that made me think I was seeing double. Both wore work overalls that showed no evidence of work, both held out knobby hands for a shake, and both were grinning at me like leprechauns, or whatever the Welsh equivalent might be.
The nearer one croaked out: “I’m Griff. Welcome to the best diggings in Butte.”
“Same here,” echoed the other. “I’m Hoop.”
Was it humanly possible? I wondered, doing my best not to glance in the direction of the wedding photo during the handshake exchange with the wizened Griff. What manner of marriage could deplete a man from that to this?
With a twinkle, the lady of the house rescued me from my confusion. “These specimens are Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper, when no one is looking. They’ve been part of the furniture here since my husband passed on and I’ve had to take in boarders.” As the duo took their places like old Vikings at a feast, she delivered the sufficient benediction: “We all three could be worse, I suppose.”
“I’ll try to fit in, Mrs. Faraday.”
“Start by saving words and call me Grace, even though this pair of old Galahads refuses to.”
“Wouldn’t be right, Mrs. Faraday,” Griff or Hoop said.
“Manners is manners,” said Hoop or Griff.
“I go by Morrie.” I dealt myself in, and formalities fell away in favor of knives and forks.
“Didn’t I tell you, Hoop?” Griff said as he sawed at his meat.
“That new sign works like a charm. What part of Wales do your people hail from, Morrie?”
“Chicago.”
“Before they crossed the pond,” he persisted.
“Griff, I am sorry to say, the exact family origins are lost in the mists of ”—I searched the gazeteer of my mind—“Aberystwyth and Llangollen.”
“The grand old names,” he proclaimed, adding a spatter of unintelligible syllables that could only have been Welsh. “ ’Tis the language of heaven.”
“Why nobody talks it on earth,” Hoop explained.
By then I was on about my third bite of the meat and ready to ask. “Venison?”
“Close,” Grace allowed guardedly. “Antelope.”
“Ah.” I looked down at the delicate portion. “What a treat to be served cutlets.” I emphasized the plural. “Are there seconds?”
She mulled that. “Tonight there are.” Off she went to the kitchen stove.
While we awaited replenishment, the history of my tablemates came out. Now retired—“at least the tired part”—the pair had been miners, to hear them tell it, practically since the dawn of Butte. Which was to say, since copper became a gleam in the world’s eye. The Hill, as they called it, held the earth’s largest known deposit of the ore that wired everything electrical. Much of this I knew, but there was a tang to hearing them recite it with the names of mines such as Orphan Girl and Moonlight and Badger. The crisscross of their conversation about life deep underground was such that I sometimes had to remind myself which was Griffith and which was Hooper. Although they looked enough alike to be brothers, I figured out that they had simply worked together so long in the mineshafts that the stoop of their bodies and other inclinations had made them grow together in resemblance as some old married couples do.
“So, Morrie, you’ve latched on in life as a bookkeeper, Mrs. Faraday says,” Griff was holding forth as Grace appeared with the replenished meat platter, rosettes from the cookstove heat in her attractive cheeks. It was surprising how much more eye-catching she was as the Widow