Work Song - Ivan Doig [52]
“Good heavens, yes.” She cut a thick slice of bread, put it on a plate, and set it in front of the famished-looking youngster. Pouring from the syrup can, she said, “Say when.”
“I like it sogged.”
The syrup pooled on the plate before the boy nodded. As he tucked in to the food, Grace wordlessly cut another slab of bread for him. I excused myself to fetch my hat from upstairs. When I came back down, Grace’s guest reluctantly licked his fork and edged out of the chair to go with me. “I may be a while,” I told her. “Skip me at supper.”
“The larder can stand a chance to recover,” she bade us off, still looking mystified.
Another side of Butte showed itself in the route I was now led on. With a nonchalance you might not expect in a sixth-grader, my guide took an immediate shortcut through Venus Alley. Overhead in one of the red-curtained windows, the sash was flung up and a woman in a kimono leaned out. “Hey, kid! How about running over to Betty the bootlegger’s and getting us a bottle of her best?”
“I’m busy, can’t you see?” the boy called back importantly.
“Then how about you, Mustachio? Come on up and we’ll cure what ails you.”
“I’m busy keeping up with him,” I tipped my hat, “thank you very much anyway.”
Block after block, we wound our way past buildings that put all their respectability out front, their back ends grimy with the detritus of coal chutes and the leavings of garbage. Around every other corner a view of the Hill was framed between brick walls, the tower over a mineshaft like a spiked ornament on the roof of the city. I could hear the throb of ore lifts and other machinery, so pronounced after the silence left behind when the morning shift walked off; Jared and his tactic of work actions was turning the Hill off and on like a master switch. If, that is, the Anaconda Company didn’t find a way to break his hold on the matter. Or already had. I wondered again why Rab was summoning me.
Suddenly my hotfooted escort was talkative. “How come you work at the library ’stead of the schoolhouse? I was just telling Miss Rellis she’s the best teacher in the whole world and she said not as long as you’re on two legs.”
That touched me deeply. Yet it also mandated an answer. “Life likes to surprise us, Wladislaw, and so—”
“I hate getting called that,” he muttered, squirming as if to dodge the name. “It sounds too much like coleslaw.”
“Russian Famine, then—”
“Don’t like that no better. I ain’t any kind of a Russian. My unk says if we’re anything, it’s Glishians.” I tried to remember if Galicia was central to what the Europeans from time immemorial called the Polish Problem, and whether that part of Poland was another jigsaw piece on the table in front of Wilson and Clemenceau and Lloyd George as they sought to remake the world with the peace treaty. In any case, the Old Country was forever off the map of a peddler whose only ware was the sharpening of knives, and a skin-and-bones street tough nephew, wasn’t it. The thought clutched at me: the fostering places that we are exiled from, in the irreversible twists of life.
Back to the question at hand, though. “Young citizen of the world, we are running out of possibilities—what would you like to be called?”
He thought for the next some steps, slowing his pace to mine. “Famine ain’t too bad. It’d be one of those nicked names, huh?”
Gravely I took off my hat and in due ceremony tapped him on a narrow shoulder with it. “By whatever authority is vested in me, I dub thee Famine.” He bounced a little higher his next couple of steps. “Now, then, Famine, as I was saying. Sometimes a person finds himself doing the unexpected. And so you give each job everything you have, but stay on your toes for what comes next. Isn’t it that way with you at school?”
A shrug. “I guess. Miss Rellis’s flame says it’s the same in the army—now you’re peeling spuds and next thing you’re shooting back at somebody.”
“Jared is at the Purity with her?”
“Uh-huh.” The boy flopped his hair out of his eyes and looked around at me hopefully. “That