Work Song - Ivan Doig [74]
“Spitting on the sidewalk, the cops call it,” Hoop said with disgust.
“Vagrancy is another way of putting it,” Grace provided for my benefit.
Griff burst out, “It’s that ‘unlawful assembly’ crap”—Grace did not rebuke him—“whatever name the buzzards put on it.”
Still behind, I asked around the table: “What put the authorities on this rampage?”
“The Wobblies,” Hoop and Griff answered together, while Grace’s expression said she had heard all this too many times, and she went off to the kitchen. The IWW wanted to cut in and take the lead in the miners’ struggle with Anaconda—it just wasn’t right, my tablemates stated. From what they heard, the specter of operatives filtering into town to mold discontented workers of the Hill into a radical legion had thrown Butte’s powers that be into a tizzy. Hence, jail awaited anyone deemed a “vagrant.”
When the law is bent that way, a detour around it is sometimes needed. That morning I went to the library by the back-alley route shown me by Russian Famine, just to be on the safe side.
TO MY SURPRISE, that lunchtime, Rab was mum about this newest tussle over who would contol the Hill. I don’t know what I expected to be in sight when we settled at the top of the library steps as usual—the Hennessy Building being stormed like the Bastille by maddened Wobblies, perhaps—but the streets were placid, only punctuated here and there by strolling policemen who looked vaguely embarrassed. Rab was chattering on about Melville and whether anyone who wasn’t vitally interested in blubber actually ever read every page of Moby-Dick, but there was something bubbling under that which should have alerted me. Nonetheless, I was caught by surprise when a lean figure, brisk and businesslike in a somber suit but with his hat pulled low, peeled away from the concourse of patrons in and out of the library and dropped onto the steps beside us. “See what I mean about the Wobs spelling trouble, Professor?”
“I suppose I do, Jared,” I answered him as equably as I could. “There seem to be a lot of ways to spell that in Butte.” I watched with envy as he nestled in next to Rab and was rewarded with a kiss and a sandwich. Curious as to why he was dressed up, I asked: “What’s the occasion? ”
“None in particular,” Jared provided between bites. “I just don’t want to look like somebody who might spit on the sidewalk.” A policeman went by on leadfooted patrol, giving us hardly a glance. “You can almost feel sorry for the dumb cops,” he mused. “Almost.”
The police on puppet strings were not the only ones entitled to sympathy in the situation, I could tell; the crackdown plainly hindered the activities of the miners’ union, and I charitably said something of the sort to Jared.
“An opportunity for a strategic withdrawal, we called it in the army,” came the dry response.
“Extra syllables aside, I believe that means ‘retreat’?” I made sure.
“You might say that,” he granted. “But going a different direction, even backwards,” he munched on the matter along with his sandwich, “gives a chance to gain some ground somewhere else, doesn’t it?”
Rab, eyes alight, had been flicking glances back and forth between us. “You’d better ask him, love,” she prompted. “Mr. Morgan and I have to get back to whaling all too soon.”
The ancients who invented storytelling knew to the instant when drama must put on a human mask. The soaring ambition of Icarus to consort with the sun, before the first feather melted from his wings and wafted down and down to the waiting Aegean Sea. The echo of the knight’s heartbeat within his armor before he slays the dragon. Some such flutter in the curtain of fate, now that