Work Song - Ivan Doig [92]
Whatever it was, it hadn’t caught my attention yet; certainly the cold toast was the same as ever.
“The house, Morrie,” she prompted, “the house!”
“Ah.” I scanned around. “New curtains?”
“All right, you,” she said in mock exasperation—at least I hoped it was mock. “There hasn’t been any dynamiting for days and days, has there?” She knocked on wood, but her smile was triumphant. “I was curious,” she continued in a confiding tone, “so I had Arthur’s old partner in the mines look into it for me. And guess what? The shaft under here is played out and Anaconda has had to seal it off. You can quit worrying about sleeping in a glory hole,” she teased.
Little did she know that the Chicago watery version had just passed me by. “Grace, that’s nice news,” I could say unreservedly. “Butte would not be the same without the Faraday Boarding House.”
Bouncing up when she heard Hoop and Griff on the stairs, she went off to fry their breakfast.
The two of them came in grinning, grinned at each other, then grinned at me some more as they sat at the table.
“We been thinking,” said Hoop as if it was something new.
“You’ve got yourself a lulu of a problem, slipping a couple hundred people into the library the night the song gets voted on,” Griff said as if that fact might have escaped me.
“Wouldn’t be the first time the cops broke up a meeting and arrested everybody in sight,” Hoop went on, tucking in his napkin.
“Righto,” Griff confirmed, spooning sugar into his coffee. “So we figure what you need, Morrie, is an eisteddfod.”
I did not want to say that something pronounced eye-steth-vod stumped me as much as if he had been speaking mumbo-jumbo. But it did.
“Perhaps you could elaborate on that just a bit, Griff.”
“Glad to. Like everybody knows, an eisteddfod is when the finest singers and the greatest bards in Wales gather from the hills and the valleys and every mine pit from Caernarvon to Caerphilly”—he swept a knobby hand around like an impresario—“and try to outdo one another.”
“Kind of a jollification,” Hoop put in. “Like Miners Day that just don’t stop.”
With that, my tablemates sat back and slurped coffee, magnanimously ready for all due praise.
“I see,” I coughed out. “Actually, I don’t. The Welsh miners are the only ones who would have any idea what an eye—eisteddfod is, and they’re just a handful among the song bunch. Everyone else—?” I spread my hands.
Griff squinted at me. “You’re a little slow on the uptake today, Morrie. Everyone else outside of the song bunch, after we clue those in.”
“Nobody is gonna go near the thing,” Hoop expanded on that, “who don’t know the lingo.”
Thinking back to the Welsh minister and the tongue-tying eternity of tragwyddoldeb, I couldn’t argue with that.
Somewhat against my better judgment, I tested the matter out loud.
“Such as the public at large and the police, you mean.” Both wrinkled heads bobbed at my response, gratified that I was catching up. My tablemates now took turns expanding on why an indecipherable event that would unobtrusively slip a couple of hundred people into the basement of the Butte Public Library was such a surefire idea.
Grace came from the kitchen with a plate in each hand, stopping short at Griff’s grand culmination:
“Hoop and me can handle the whole proceedings for you, don’t worry none.”
I had not really started to, until he said that.
IT WAS LIKE TRYING to rein in runaway horses, but I managed to