Work Song - Ivan Doig [65]
Which is why I thought I was seeing wrong—Grace’s reaction was even more pronounced than mine—when just ahead of us, swinging a sledgehammer and hoisting a drilling bar to loosen up, were Griffith and Hooper, shirts off, in their overalls and long underwear.
The weight of years defined this competition, as the placard bluntly announced: OLDTIMERS DRILLING CONTEST.
“No wonder they were so full of themselves this morning,” Grace burst out. “I hope they don’t fall over dead, the old fools.”
Across on the other side, there seemed to be no similar trepidation around their competitors, a pair of Finns who had lost no huskiness to age. Their supporters were whooping and clapping and singing in Finnish as if the contest already was won.
Wordlessly I assessed the matchup, although it didn’t take much study. I reminded myself that the gambling spirit should be harkened to only when the gamble carries a discernible chance of reward. I protectively patted the winnings Russian Famine had supplied to my wallet. In short, I took myself through the whole breviary of common sense, then told Grace I would be right back and went in search of Skinner again. She bit her lip even harder this time.
THE RIVAL TEAMS were poised to start by the time I rejoined Grace, each pair of men at a block of bluish granite the size of a packing crate. These drilling matches were of the old classic type, before compressors and air hoses replaced muscle and diligence at the rockface; in other words, by hand. Two sets of hands, and two steel tools. The holder knelt with a five-foot drill of tempered metal, like a slim crowbar, gingerly in his grasp. The hammerman, swinging a sledge, would strike the end of it, and as he drew back for the next stroke, the holder twirled the steel a quarter-turn for the drill head to make another flaking cut. In the early rise of Butte to mining eminence, I gathered, this blow-by-blow assault on rock—offhandedly called “breaking ground”—was an essential skill; the hole drilled in this laborious but effective way would be tamped with dynamite and the resulting blast would bring down the wall of rock for the ore to be separated out. Life tells tales as strange as those we can make up: the copper that wired the world for electricity was set loose, like fresh water from a struck stone in a fable, by those pairs of hands and driven steel in the chinks of the Hill.
Fortunately, dynamite was not involved in this match, which was to be a race to see which team could drive the deeper hole in a given time. Grace and I, already tense, watched intently as the judge fondled his stopwatch and instructed the two teams to get ready. Hoop, the hammerman, spat in his hands; Griff, the drill holder, flexed his fingers. The hardy Finns at the other block of rock did the same.
“Ready,” the judge chanted, “set . . . DRILL!”
The ear-ringing sound of steel hitting steel echoed off the hill where flowers spelled out COLUMBIA GARDENS, on up into the mountains beyond, and in not many seconds resounded again. The strokes of the sledgehammers set up a clanging rhythm best described as Hell’s bells. Yet the process was strangely hypnotic and suspenseful to watch; the hammerman had to hit, each and every time, a target no bigger than a nickel, while the holder had to absorb the sting of the blow and make his fingers turn the drill the correct fraction. It was inherently dangerous, the eight-pound head of the sledgehammer arcing at the holder if the hammerman missed, the shaft of steel thrusting spearlike toward the man with the hammer if the holder mishandled it. I watched in fascination as Hoop, scrawny as he was, swung his sledge in a pace steady as a pendulum, and Griff, equally meager, knelt fearlessly over the drill as if his life depended on its next turn. Their opponents meanwhile seemed built for the job. One of them gravely white-haired, the other with a