Work Song - Ivan Doig [7]
“Grace, let me try to catch up here. Doesn’t the mining company offer you a good price? Good heavens, you have what they want, this property. A classic case of supply and demand if I ever heard one, and—”
“That’s not Anaconda’s way,” she set me straight. “They’ll only pay the going price for a none-too-new boardinghouse, and that’s next to nothing in these times. No, they’d rather set off their blasting every so often to get on my nerves and make me sell. They don’t know my nerves,” she said staunchly, hives evidently notwithstanding.
My own nerves still were feeling the quivers of the floor a few minutes before. “I am not an expert on cave-ins, but simply for the sake of speculation: What if they keep dynamiting and digging until a giant hole in the ground becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and this house falls in?”
Rather grandly, I thought, Grace shook that off. “The company bigwigs downtown won’t let that happen. They don’t want a lawsuit even Anaconda could lose.”
“Let us hope not. I don’t want to sleep in the bottom of a glory hole.”
“This place will be as dusty as one if I don’t get back to house-cleaning.” She closed off my concern, only to give me another gauging look before she got up from the table. “I’ve spilled more to you than I intended to, Morrie. Why do you have that effect? Please, though, don’t pass along any of this to Hoop and Griff, promise? I don’t want them fretting about whether they’re going to have a roof over their old fool heads the rest of their days.”
“I shall be a sphinx,” I assented.
“I figured you were capable,” she said, the dimple adding emphasis.
THE BANTAM FIGURES of Hooper and Griffith, each talking into one of my ears, took me around town later that day. Downtown Butte, set into the lower slope of the Hill like the till in a cash register, was as busy as the streets could hold. One moment we had to dodge bowler-hatted Rotarians congregating for luncheon fellowship, and step aside for a covey of nuns the next. The bustling business district was only six or seven blocks long but made up for that size in other ways: amid the shops and stores were saloons (now speakeasies) as big as barns, and every block or so a grandiose hotel or office building stood out, as if bits of Chicago’s State Street or New York’s Fifth Avenue had been crated up and shipped west. Griff and Hoop took turns pointing out local landmarks: the restaurant where Teddy Roosevelt once ate a steak in plain sight, the theater bar frequented by Charlie Chaplin and other troupers in the prime of vaudeville, and around a corner from other commerce, the red-light district called Venus Alley, said to be the biggest in the West.
What aroused the passion of my tour guides, however, was the most dominant name in Butte. Passing the Daily Post building, where the faint whiff of newspaper ink hung in the air, Hoop spat and said, “Anaconda owns that rag.” When I remarked on the architectural preference of brick over stone in so many of the tall office buildings, I was informed the Anaconda Company owned the brickworks. Not to mention—although Hoop and Griff assuredly did—the lumberyard, profiting off the woodframe neighborhoods where the mineworkers lived. Then our stroll brought us to the Hennessy Building, dressier than its neighbors in its terra-cotta trim and window mullions—if buildings could be said to be attired as we are, the Hennessy wore cuff links and a tie pin.
But the pertinent article was escaping my attention, Griff and Hoop had me know, as one or the other profanely attested that this grandest building was where