Work Song - Ivan Doig [86]
There was a waiting silence, which I could tell would not last beyond one more fidget from the audience.
“Lyrical,” I pronounced, and drove the matter home. “The lyrics of the work song for the union cause must sing to the heart as well as the mind.”
A miner with a bristling mustache objected. “What’d be wrong with a song that just out and out gives Anaconda hell?”
“I believe that already exists.” I warbled the first few lines of “The Old Copper Collar” in illustration. “As apt as that may be, it seems to have had no measurable effect on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, do we agree?” Griff looked hurt.
The audience absorbed my performance uncertainly until the Cornish miner from the Muckaroo called out. “Thee speak a good spoke. But what’s the first bite of the bun to get this done?”
“Aha! You have just put your tongue to it.” I spun to the blackboard and wrote bun and done. “Rhyme is the mother of song.”
THAT WAS THE OVERTURE, musically speaking, in the quest for a battle hymn for the miners of the Hill.
With the union contingent now regularly showing up, a martial set to their jaws and unpredictable stirrings in their throats, I had to enlist Hoop and Griff to direct traffic in and out of the library; it would not do for top-hatted downtowners to come face-to-face with restive Dublin Gulch and Finntown, for example. (I could just imagine Quinlan at close quarters with a library trustee.) No, at all costs I needed to keep the so-called Lyre Club from being brought to Sandison’s attention by any complainers. Only too well I remembered how he fumed against “taking sides” when the idled miners sought shelter in the library during the work actions. If he ever divined that the crowd of us in the basement were, shall we say, less than legally assembled to generate a rallying song for the union, all he had to do to be rid of us was to summon the authorities. What other choice would he have?
Jail was only one worry. Authoritative in their own way and answering to their own shadowy purposes, there were always the goons.
BUT WHERE WERE THEY?
Jared reported that the pair of them had vanished from the mine gate, replaced by uniformed guards not so apt to be taunted as scabs and bombarded with rocks in the night. Accordingly, I watched the shadows more sharply on my way home from the library in the dark, but the inky shapes at alley mouths and lightless doorways never once materialized into Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver. Which did not put to rest my sense of apprehension. In broad daylight, I was carrying a beautiful matched set of Shakespeare plays to the antiquarian shop for appraisal when I rounded a corner and nearly bumped into a hulking figure with an upraised club. I jumped back, shielding myself and the works of the Bard against a blow from Typhoon, but it was merely a hod carrier transporting bricks into the building. So, maybe the goons were nowhere to be seen, but to my mind that didn’t mean they were not, as the one called Roland had said of me, up to something.
My imagination kept asking: Up to what?
“DO ME A FAVOR, please, Rab,” I felt compelled to ask, when I was sure we would not be overheard in the book stacks as we tackled Tennyson, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. “Just as a hypothetical exercise, mind you, find out from Jared how much granite it takes to withstand dynamite.”
“Mr. Morgan, since when are you such a scaredy-cat?” she scolded. She clucked as if I were one of her more dismaying schoolboys. “Besides, I already checked. The walls of the basement auditorium are three feet thick.”
“RHYTHM.” I turned to the next session of miners and wives sitting immobile as birds on a wire while I paced the stage. “The ebb and rise of sounds, the heartbeat that gives life to the alphabet.”
I paused, which never hurts in building up drama.
“In other words, the vital pattern within each line of a verse. Art imitates nature in this, for we live amid natural rhythms, don’t we? For instance, the pit-pat, pit-pat of rain,” I clapped gently in time with that.
Climatology evidently did