Work Song - Ivan Doig [8]
My curiosity was tickled. “The copper collar, though—why does just that phrase keep coming to your lips and Grace’s?”
Hoop looked at Griff. “Might as well let it rip,” he said.
“Think so?” said Griff. “Right here?”
“Where better?”
“Righto. Here goes.”
There on the sidewalk, Griff squared himself up, took a stance amid the passersby like Caruso among the opera extras, and began to sing in a croaky baritone, to the tune of “The Old Oaken Bucket.”
My old copper collar,
It makes my heart so proud.
When I wear the copper collar,
I fit right with the crowd.
No wedding band
Was ever so grand,
So it is always there to see,
The old copper collar,
That Anaconda fastened on me.
Griff finished on a sardonically sweet note that was very nearly a warble. Up in the top floor of the Hennessy Building, someone in a celluloid collar frowned down and the window was shut with a bang.
“The Butte spiritual.” Hoop defined Griff’s performance for me, and onward we went.
IT WAS WHEN the two of them tramped me up the streets to the other butte, the rising ground where those long-legged headframes spraddled atop the dozens of mineshafts and piles of tailings spilled down the hillside like gopher diggings, that the two of them truly came into their element. To me, the Hill seemed otherworldly, half mammoth factory, half fathomless wasteland; to my companions, it was home. Their bent backs straightened, and their gait became more spry. The ear-stinging screech of pulleys as ore loads were hoisted from the depths of the earth and elevator cages were let down seemed to reach them as the most melodious of sounds. In accompaniment, Hoop turned suddenly voluble. “We drilled in every corner of this hill, didn’t we, Griff. In the Neversweat and the Glengarry and the Parrot and the Nipper and most of these other mines you see. One of us on the steel and the other on the hammer. We was a flash team, if I do say so myself. We’d make the hole in the rock in nothing flat, then set the dynamite, and blooey! Break loose a wall of ore that’d keep a mucking crew busy half a day.” In all likelihood it was the effect of Hoop’s words, but I thought I felt a tremor in the ground as he spoke. He paused, gazing around at the modern-day mining apparatus. “Now they drill with air.” I took that to mean high-powered compressed-air drills, the throb of giant compressors a steady beat within the industrial medley around the mineshafts.
There is hardly any story more deeply engraved in human experience than a search for the Promised Land, a New Jerusalem where life can flourish and dreams run free. What a saga it was, then, that the barren rise of earth the three of us were standing atop had become such a place, to those unafraid to go into its depths. From what Hoop and Griff had told me the night before, I knew that the Hill’s copper diggings, in the course of time and union persistence, had brought forth wages that workingmen anywhere else could only imagine. Four and a half dollars a day! my informants chorused with pride, at that time probably equaled only by Henry Ford’s assembly line in Detroit. And no man who called himself a miner wanted to bolt fenders onto flivvers for a living. So, dust devils and dump heaps and discolored soil and everything else, the startling land I was gazing at was worshipped by hard-rock miners for its holy wage; in the pits and shafts of the world, the saying was, “Don’t even stop in America, just go to Butte.”
Griff, silent until now, had been watching the loaded ore cars trundle into view one after another at the Neversweat, a colossus of a mine with seven smokestacks rising from its buildings like a row of stark totems. “Got to hand it to Anaconda,” he said grudgingly, “the buggers know how to get the ore out. Looky there, Hoop, they’ve busted up through the south shaft of the ’Sweat.” An obviously fresh fence, its posts unweathered, enclosed a crater so gaping that it looked as if a meteor had struck and blazed