Work Song Read Free

couples do.
    “So, Morrie, you’ve latched on in life as a bookkeeper, Mrs. Faraday says,” Griff was holding forth as Grace appeared with the replenished meat platter, rosettes from the cookstove heat in her attractive cheeks. It was surprising how much more eye-catching she was as the Widow Faraday.
    “Except when the books keep me.” Both men bobbed quizzically and Grace sent me a glance. Offhand as my comment was, it admitted to more than I probably should have. With rare exceptions, my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere. One boss said I spent more time in the clouds than the Wright brothers ever dreamt of. I had found, though, that I could work with sums while the remainder of my brain went and did what it wanted. “But, yes,” I came around to Griff’s remark about bookkeeping, “I have a way with numbers, and Butte by all accounts produces plentiful ones. First thing in the morning, I’ll offer my services at the office of the mining company, what is its name—Anaconda?”
    Forks dropped to plates.
    “You’re one of those,” Grace flamed. Yanking my rent money from her apron pocket, she hurled it to the table, very nearly into the gravy boat. “Leave this house at once, Whoever-You-Are Morgan. I’ll not have under my roof a man who wears the copper collar.”
    “The—? ”
    Hooper and Griffith glowered at me. “Anaconda is the right name for company men,” Griff growled. “They’re snakes.”
    “But believe me, I—”
    “Lowest form of life,” Hoop averred.
    Enough was enough. Teetering back in my chair as far as I dared, I reached to the switch on the wall and shut off the chandelier, plunging the room into blackness and silence. After a few blank moments, I spoke into the void:
    “We are all now in the dark. As I was, about this matter of the Anaconda Company. May we now talk in a manner which will shed some light on the situation?”
    I put the chandelier back on, to the other three blinking like wakened owls.
    Grace’s braid swung as she turned sharply to me. “How on earth, you, can you land into Butte as innocent as a newborn?”
    “I have been elsewhere for a number of years,” I said patiently. “I knew nothing of this ogre you call Anaconda. To the contrary, I have only seen ‘The Richest Hill on Earth’ described in the kind of glowing terms the argonauts lavished on the California goldfields in 1849.”
    Hooper built up a sputter. “That, that’s—”
    “Hoop, house rules,” Grace warned.
    “—baloney. The company hogs the whole works. They’ve turned this town into rich, poor, and poorer.”
    Griffith furiously took his turn. “Anaconda men sit around up there in the Hennessy Building on their polished—”
    “Griff, the rules,” came Grace’s warning again.
    “—rumps, figuring out new ways to rob the workingman. They bust the union, and we build a new one. They bust that, and we try again. Accuse us of being Wobblies, and sic their goons on us.”
    I looked around the table for the definition. “Wobblies?”
    “You really have been off the face of the earth, haven’t you,” Griff resumed crossly. “The Industrial Workers of the World. They’re radical, see, and when they hit town, they tried to edge out our miners’ union. The Wobs had their good points, but they riled things up to where the company squashed them and us both.”
    One chapter spilled over another as Hoop and Grace chorused in on Griff’s recital of Butte’s story. To hear them tell it, Anaconda was a devilish adversary. The company grudgingly paid good wages when unimaginable millions of dollars flowed in from its near-monopoly on copper, and slashed the miners’ pay the instant those profits dipped. Across the past ten years the Hill and the city, I was told, had witnessed a cat’s cradle of conflicts among the mineworkers’ union, the Wobblies (they were called that,