Work Song - Ivan Doig [49]
“I get the picture.”
There was nothing to be done but square myself up and advance to the stage of the auditorium. Restive in the seats below, the class eyed me like cub lions in the arena waiting for a Christian meal. So be it; I took off my suitcoat and tossed it to a surprised Rab, then rolled up my sleeves as if for a fight.
“Blood,” I said in a tone practically dripping with it.
The word did its work, for the moment at least. Two dozen sulky faces showed flickers of interest.
“Blood is red as fire, and thicker than rain,” I did not let up. “Blood percolates secretly all through us, from finger to toe. It outlines our family, whom we speak of as our own flesh and blood. When we are afraid, we feel our blood run cold, and when we are angry, we are hot-blooded. No other substance carries the magic of life so tirelessly.” As I talked on, I pressed a set of fingers to my wrist. “The heart beats in its mysterious way, day and night, so blood never sleeps.” I finished taking my pulse. “While I have been speaking, my heart has pumped blood sixty times. If it had stopped doing so, back there when I rolled up my sleeves to test it, by now I would stand before you dead.”
Several more heartbeats went by as my audience caught up with that. A litany of gasps, a lesser peal of nervous laughs. One girl crossed herself.
Before such attention wore off, I swept my listeners through the Greek suppositions of Hippocrates and Galen—that blood simply sloshed in us like water in a jug—to William Harvey’s discovery that the substance in fact goes around and around. “The circulatory system, as it is called, sends this miraculous fluid circling through us.” There is a glaze that comes over a class if too much of a topic is pressed on them at one time, and I could tell from a first few restless feet and territorial elbows that I was reaching that limit.
Folding my arms on my chest in thinking mode, I paced the stage. “Roll up your sleeves, everyone.” This was a gamble. Hardboiled boys and pouty girls among the group showed no inclination to do so. But Rab got on the job, patroling mercilessly, and soon enough I had a forest of naked arms in front of me.
“There is a superstition that your life can be read in the palm of your hand,” I began, “but really, it is written there on the underside of your wrist.” I bustled them through taking their own pulse, emphasizing that the underskin rhythm was actually the contractions of arteries as blood was pushed through by the pumping of the heart. As intended, even the most heedless twelve-year-old could not ignore the message of existence there just beneath a surface barely thicker than paper. “And,” I rounded off the arm lesson, “the blood that keeps us going has to find its way back to the heart to be pumped again. See the blue tracings between your wrist and elbow? Each of those is a vein. A word you have heard at home, am I right? Your fathers and perhaps your brothers descend into the body of the earth to find those streaks of ore. If you think about it, copper is the blood of Butte.”
As I said so, a part of my mind filled with visions of what lay ahead of these youngsters in this veined city. By all odds, at least one among the fresh-faced boys who would follow the family path into the mines would die underground in that relentless toll of a death a week. A greater number of their classmates in pigtails and curls, women-to-be, would experience perilous childbirth and the innumerable ills of the Hill. Yet others sitting here today would go on uneventfully to what passed for average life in Butte. Those flashes of precognition were hypnotic; I could see as if it were written in me the circlings of fate which would single these young lives out, as always happens in the human story, within the rushing bloodstream of time.
“Mr. Morgan?” Rab prompted me out of my trance. “You were saying . . . ?”
“Ah.” I scrambled for new ground.