Work Song - Ivan Doig [40]
Rabrab had been leaning in, tasting something off his plate, as lovers will, and as her bobbed head came up into view, she spotted me and waved.
Mindful of his manners, the young man stood and turned to me with a soldierly correctness that I could have predicted. He’d had that same deportment while tendering the union’s envelope of benefit to the widow Dempsey, and in marching like a Roman at the head of the miners in shift change on the Hill. Rabrab gazed up at him as if she’d had him made to order.
“The men in my life,” she announced fondly. “Jared Evans, this is Morris Morgan.”
“Morrie,” I amended over the handshake, to put us on familiar terms.
“Jared,” he said, perhaps humorously, perhaps not.
As soon as chairs were under us, he sat back and regarded me through dark deep Welsh eyes that reminded me of Casper’s, only more reflective. Beyond that, he and Rab together were like matched cutouts in charcoal paper by a scissor portraitist, his slicked-back hair black as hers. Any children of these two would be ravens. Yet there was something even more striking about this lean chiseled man, and it took me a second to single it out. His ears were different sizes; the left one was missing its earlobe, clean as a surgery. Together with the fathoms in that gaze, it gave him the look of a reformed pirate. I tried not to stare at the foreshortened ear, which of course only creates another level of attention.
Still examining me with those grave eyes, Jared spoke as if I were a question brought before the podium. “You’re the cryer. You get around.”
“A temporary appointment,” I brushed away my career of wakes.
“The best kind to have where a coffin is involved.”
Rab rippled a laugh. “Now he’s the resident genius of the library, aren’t you, Mr. Morgan? Have you read every book in it by now? I remember when you knew everything there was to know about comets, and that was just the start of—”
“Flattery does not have to be laid on more than an inch thick, Rab,” I waved that to a halt. Basking in her words more than I should have, I shared to Jared: “You must know how she is by now—when her enthusiasm gets going, she’ll talk your ear off.”
Immediately I wanted to crawl under the table. Jared’s dark brows drew down as he leaned in and pointed a cocked thumb and finger at me like a pistol, and I wildly wondered what I was in for. Then, of all things, he winked.
“A German bullet took care of that for me. I got off lucky—they didn’t call that sector Dead Man’s Hill for nothing. A medical corps-man slapped a patch on me and I went right back into the thick of it.” Fingering what was left of the ear, he dispatched a droll half of a smile to the rapt Rab and around to me. “I have to watch out not to be too proud of it—the earmark none of the rest of the herd has.”
As when Sandison plunged off into livestock terminology, I chuckled uselessly.
Rab came to my rescue. “Mr. Morgan, you need to hunt up some food. We had to start, Jared has a meeting. He usually does.”
“To dicker the lost dollar out of the Anaconda lords and masters?” my natural interest in wages prompted me to ask.
The question was flicked right back to me. “How is it that you know we’re in there dickering?” Over a deliberative sip of his coffee, the union leader held me in that compelling gaze again. What was it about the Richest Hill on Earth, that I seemed to be a suspect of some kind no matter which way I turned?
“My usual dining partners,” I alibied hastily, “are Griffith and Hooper at the boardinghouse. They discuss matters.”
Jared’s look softened somewhat. “If that’s who you’re hanging around with, you probably know more about anything and everything in town than I do.”
In the time soon to come, I would learn that Jared Evans had been thrust from the thick of one war into that of another. The combat between the hierarchies of Europe had at last reached a mortal end, while the struggle he came home to on the Hill showed no sign of abating as long as there