Work Song - Ivan Doig [9]
Brows all of a sudden furrowed with thought, my companions exchanged glances. “Morrie,” said Hoop, “you maybe ought to know something—”
“—about the boardinghouse,” said Griff, and then and there, they chorused the likelihood that in time to come Anaconda would have its greedy eye on Grace’s property.
“Don’t blab that to Mrs. Faraday,” they anxiously cautioned me. “There’s no sense worrying her head off beforehand.”
“I won’t be the bringer of that news,” I pledged.
MY TOUR, to hear my guides tell it, now was about to really begin. For there, amid the gray polar wastes of that Richest Hill, were scattered the pockets of populace that I had glimpsed from the train station.
“Here’s where the work of the world comes from,” Griff pronounced, and Hoop bobbed agreement. Between them, they pointed out each neighborhood. Finntown, straggling below the colossal Neversweat. The Italians, it was stressed to me, occupied Meaderville, not be confused with Centerville, where the Cornish congregated. Griff proudly singled out the smallish Welsh area of St. David’s, christened for its church, near our boardinghouse; beyond that, the Serbians had their several blocks, elsewhere the Scandinavians had theirs, and below, at the edge of downtown, lay Chinatown, self-explanatory. My head was beginning to spin, and we had not even come to the sprawl of streets dead ahead, the Irish avalanche of small frame houses and overloaded clotheslines that constituted Dublin Gulch and beyond.
Wisely, Hoop hailed a mailman, and in a brogue that justified his assignment to the route, the postal carrier told me with great elaboration how to find the house of that night’s wake.
That job done, Griff proclaimed: “You’re all set, Morrie. The only thing to watch out for tonight is—”
Commotion blasted the last of his words away, so sudden and sharp my eardrums winced. The Hill had turned into a calliope, whistles shrieking at every mineshaft. “Change of shifts!” one or the other of my companions yipped as if school had let out.
Those next minutes will never leave me. Down from the mine mouths into the sloping streets cascaded hundreds of workworn men, turning into thousands as we stood watching. The Hill was black with this exodus. Here, on foot, the neighborhoods sluiced together as the miners trudged past, accented English of several kinds mingling with tongues my ear could not readily identify. It was as if Europe had been lifted by, say, the boot heel of Italy and shaken, every toiler from the hard-rock depths tumbling out here. Old habits had followed them across the ocean, husky Finns clustered with other Finns, the Cornishmen not mingling with the Italians, on across the map until each of the nations of Butte came to its own home street.
By now Griff and Hoop were wistfully calling out to fellow Welshmen going by. “Keep fighting for that lost dollar, boys! We’re with you all the way, Jared!” This last, I could tell, was addressed to a lean, dark-featured individual at the front of the group, not nearly as far along in years as most of the other miners but plainly a leader. Striding along with a measured tread I identified as military, the younger man grinned through his grime and sent my companions a half wave, half salute.
“What, is there a wage dispute?” I asked in surprise, having heard the hosannas about the riches of the World’s Richest Hill.
“There usually is,” Griff grumped, Hoop nodding, “but this one’s bad. The damn company just told the union it’s lopping a whole dollar off the daily wage, can you imagine?” The calculating part of my brain certainly could; a twenty-two percent cut, a severe reversal of the Hill’s holy standing. “That’s a poke in the eye if there ever was one,” Griff was fulminating further. “Jared there and his council are working on how to turn it around, you can bet.”
“A strike?” I knew from their earlier recital of labor’s struggles that the last time the union leadership called one, the strike had failed