Work Song - Ivan Doig [69]
“What the devil,” Jared stopped short as he came through the doorway and saw me with the chair in my hands, “are you cutting the janitor out of his job?”
“It’s his lodge night, so he’s excused early,” I said crossly. “My employer has a habit of bending the rules for this, that, and the other, except where I’m concerned.”
“You need a union,” he joked, or not, lending a hand with the stray chairs. He looked at me curiously. “That poor thing who’s your landlady told me you’ve about taken up residence in the library.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I imagine. Anyway, I’m glad I could track you down.” He glanced around to every corner of the auditorium even though we were alone. “Any luck with you know what?”
“Luck is the residue of endeavor, in some situations,” I responded, still not in my best mood. “Come on up to the office.”
Our footsteps were magnified in the empty darkened building as we went upstairs, and I sensed Jared was jumpy in the unfamiliar surroundings. But if situations were reversed, I would not be particularly at ease in a mineshaft, would I. When I switched on a light in the office, he stayed by the door and took everything in. “So this is the lion’s den.” His gaze came to rest on me, with that flavoring of curiosity again. “I have to hand it to you, you’ve got guts, holed up in here with him all day long. I’ve heard about old Triple S since I was a kid.”
“He hasn’t taken my head off my shoulders, so far,” I muttered, my attention on the contents of the hiding spot in the cabinet where the ledgers were kept, the one place I was sure Sandison would not go near now that he had shed the bookkeeping to me. I brought out the pink sheets and my pages of calculations of each mine’s differential between raw tons of ore and tally of processed copper. “Is this what you had in mind?”
Not wasting a moment, Jared laid out my pages on the nearest desk—Sandison’s—and ran his finger down the figures. When he reached my totals, he pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and compared. His whoop startled me, and probably the pigeons on the library roof. “You’ve nailed it! Anaconda’s been feeding us low numbers on the finished copper. We’ll give them holy hell in the negotiations now and they won’t even know how we figured it out.” Exuberantly he batted my shoulder. “Rab thinks you’re the greatest thing going. I’m starting to see why, Professor, if I can call you that.”
“I’m flattered, I suppose.”
As the two of us headed downstairs, I could make out just enough of Jared in the library’s moonlit atmosphere to know he could hardly wait to turn the tables on Anaconda. Now I was curious. “You have the lost dollar back. What are you still negotiating about so urgently?”
“You name it. Working conditions. Hiring and firing. Safety.” His voice turned hollow. “On first shift, just this morning, one of our men in the Muckaroo was killed when a tunnel roof fell in on him. Left a wife and six kids.” I recalled his delivering the union tribute—cash and consolation—to the widow at my first wake as a cryer; again and again, from the sound of it, he faced that duty.
Mustering himself now, Jared went on with what he had been saying. “All of it causes bad feelings in the union. There are those who say getting the wage back is what counted, let’s don’t beat our heads against the shed on these other matters until we get some pay-days behind us. And then there’s plenty who are ready to shut down the Hill again like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if the company doesn’t give us every last thing we want.”
He glanced sideways at me. “Professor?” In the splendid acoustics—we were in the foyer by now—he sounded like a messenger of fate in a Greek drama as he laid matters out. “I wouldn’t guess you’re a military man at heart, but you maybe