Sweet Thunder (13 page)

We got the job done just as a wild skirl of tune announced the bagpiper entering the auditorium, followed by two other kilted figures bearing the haggis platter between them. The contingent advanced in a slow march as the bagpipe brayed and huffed, until reaching the victuals table, where a spot had been cleared for the prize of the night. As was his due, Sandison posted himself there to preside as the wail of the pipes wound down and the red-faced piper awaited his traditional reward.

Grandly Sandison hoisted the pitcher in one hand and a tumbler in the other, then with a generous hand poured what looked for all the world like lemonade, meanwhile booming the customary question, “Piper, wha'll ye ha' in your libation?”

“More libation, mon.”

Pouring further, Sandison included a glassful for himself to toast the deserving bagpiper and then the poet of the land of thistle and heather and lastly the crowd—“Here's to honest men and bonnie lasses!”—with a healthy swig each time. “And now for the food of the gods!” So saying, he advanced to the victuals table, flourished the ceremonial dirk, and grandly cut into the haggis for serving.

Glimpsing the mushy gray contents, Hoop and Griff along with a good number of others faded back, but Grace, ever the provider of meals, and I, incurably curious, tried the haggis. “It's not as bad as you might think,” she judged, maybe the best that could be said for a recipe that begins,
Take one sheep's stomach . . .

Once the Scotch version of feasting was done, the only thing left on the evening's program was a parting message from our host. Sandison, however, showed no sign of mounting the stage and in fact had withdrawn behind the punch bowl again. Something in his manner told me to visit the situation, and I excused myself to the others.

Standing there as pensive as it is possible for a bare-kneed white-maned colossus to look, Sandison was gazing off somewhere in a world of his own. Well, the lord and master of the Butte Public Library and its birthday gala had every right, didn't he. But there was still the matter of an auditorium full of guests starting to mill uncertainly.

“The shade of Rabbie Burns awaits an appropriate good-night, Sandy,” I exuded encouragement as I came up to him, “as do the rest of us.”

“I can't do it, Morgan.” He was clutching the pitcher of scotch to his breast with both arms and I realized a significant amount of its contents must have gone into him. “Dora always did this part,” he blubbered, with tears leaking into his beard. “You'll have to.”

“Me? Oh, no. I haven't a clue how to end a Scotch soiree.”

“Don't quibble.” He snuffled. “Just get up there, slowpoke.”

Pressed into service, I nearly tripped on the steps leading to the stage—the confounded eye patch—as I tried to think what to do or say. The trouble with Burns is that he is like Shakespeare; everyone's head already was full of language on loan from him.
The best laid schemes o' mice and men. Let us do or die! Nae man can tether time or tide. My love is like a red, red rose. Should auld acquaintance . . .
Why could the Scotch bard not have been less prolific?

Gulping, I took my position at center stage as the audience quieted in anticipation or apprehension, it was impossible to tell which. The faces of Grace and Rab and Jared, at first surprised, were gamely supportive, and behind their backs Russian Famine grinned conspiratorially at the sight of me at that unexpected elevation. The Miners Band onstage in back of me, though, were gathering their music sheets and starting to put away their instruments. Down front, the dignitary brigade, as I thought of them, the whiskery trustees and city fathers, were glancing back and forth in perplexity at Sandison's absence and my presence. Depend on it, in the back of the crowd Quinlan cupped his hands and called out, “Show us your tonsils, man!”

Think, Morgan! I enjoined myself, think how to end this labyrinthine evening.
And not for the first time, the library itself came to my aid. One of Famine's toeholds had been that shelf of Tolstoy, the immortal holdings of
War and Peace
and
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and
The Kreutzer Sonata
and most pertinently
Anna Karenina
. The splendid ball that Anna attends at the Shcherbatskys' palace floated in my mind like a vision, and while Butte was not nearly Moscow except for snowfall, a dance floor bridges many differences. I had only to pluck the right opening note, whatever that was.

“As the strains of the bagpipe have reminded us,” I put that as generously as I could, “Robert Burns's native land was a commonwealth of music as well as of rhyme. Therefore, it may be fitting to conclude this evening of festivity with a musical excursion that takes in his Scotland, the old country, and our own land, the new.” There is a trick to speaking swiftly and firmly enough that a crowd has to listen to catch up. “This particular promenade dates from 1773, when James Boswell accompanied the learned Dr. Johnson on their tour of the Hebrides,” I sped on. “Hosted on the Isle of Skye, the two of them joined in, Boswell tells us, a reel of ‘involutions and evolutions,' suggesting the partings and arrivals of emigration. It was, in the wonderfully simple words of Boswell, ‘a dance called America.'”

Quickly I hummed a snatch of what passed for a reel to the suddenly alert Miners Band. The bandmaster allowed as how they could probably do something with that. Turning to the crowd, I quickly described the sequence, the first couple addressing the pair behind them before whirling away, the next couple addressing the third, until the entire line of dancers was awhirl in a great circle. “First in procession, fittingly,” I extended a gesture as if I were the master of the ball, Shcherbatsky-style, directly at the suddenly sobering Sandison, “shall be our incomparable host, the Butte city librarian!”

While the band worked up the tune and I clapped a rhythm, Grace alertly slipped over to Sandison and separated him from the scotch pitcher, seized him by a reluctant arm, and steered him to the head of the line with her. Rab and Jared stepped lively into place behind them. Hoop and Griff, no slouches, each picked a willing widow, and with some hesitation even Quinlan did the same. The mayor, proving himself a good sport, joined arms with his wife next. On down the procession the couples multiplied, downtowners and those from the Hill, old-timers and newcomers dancing as one in a Rocky Mountain outpost where copper and blood mingled, all in the dance called America.

  7  

“Y
OU REALLY DO SEEM
to have found your calling.” My astute wife did not mean my impromptu role as dance caller a few nights past, which was unlikely to be repeated unless Robert Burns were to have more than one birthday per year. Snuggled in bed to read, as had become our custom with Sandison's treasury of books to draw from—vintage leather-bound
A Tale of Two Cities
ready on her nightstand and a fine new collector's edition of
My Ántonia
on mine—we first were attending to the day's news, the
Thunder
rustling as Grace flapped it open against the bedcovers. “‘Copper Goliath Shall Inevitably Fall' is today's masterpiece, is it. I don't know how you keep it up, Morrie,” she tweaked my ear affectionately, “Anaconda must be getting thoroughly sick of Pluvius.”

“They deserve to swallow their medicine, let us say.” Armbrister made sure it was a heavy dose, with headlines of screaming boldface atop my editorials. Socratic dialogue conducted in mannerly fashion, the newspaper battle was not.

“Mm hmm. Too bad it isn't poison.”

Her harsh words surprised me, and my expression must have shown so. “Sorry to sound that way,” she met my eyes, “but it's the plain truth.” She heaved a breath. “When it comes to the company and the copper bosses, I want them to burn in hellfire equal to what happened in the Speculator.”

“You have every reason,” I said quietly, out of respect to the fate of her Arthur.

“And yours?” She cocked a look at me, one that counted for a lot, I could tell. “You haven't lost anyone in the mines.” She rattled the newspaper a little. “What brings it out in you, Mr. Thunderer, taking on Anaconda as you are?”

I took time to think of how to say it, but in the end, it just came out. “I hate men who skin other men for profit.”

My surprising wife, who to my knowledge did not have a mean bone in her body, patted my pajama sleeve in approval. “Good for you. Don't let up on them.” Her hand did not move from my arm. “Speaking of that. Quin, the other night. He's a hothead, but his notion that Jared Evans could stand some prodding—have you?”

“Exceedingly carefully, which I would say is the only way Jared can be prodded. I suggested to him that our readers might like a hint now and then of any weakening of Anaconda's grip on the legislature. You know him—he told me that was not a half-bad idea, whenever he got any of it weakened.” I must have caught something from Quinlan, for I very nearly winked in saying the next. “I also put a bug in Rab's ear that possibly, just possibly, the rest of humankind does not exhibit the patience of Jared in this matter. Who knows, the marital bed may be the place to get a message across.”

Grace pinched me lightly through the sleeve. “It has been known to, you rogue.” Satisfied for now, she went to loyally reading my excoriation of the lords of copper, while I spread open the
Sporting News
for the latest on the Black Sox aftermath, in which only the ballplayers and small fry of the gambling mob still were getting the worst of it, unluckily. To an ironic eye, the pair of us might have looked like one of those comical illustrations of bums bedded down on park benches beneath newspapers, but of course appearances deceive. The mansion with its upkeep demands had not driven us to shivering poverty. Yet.

“Morrie?” A finger holding her place in the editorial, Grace glanced over at me as if she had thought of something else that could not wait. “Do you ever feel . . . singled out?”

Something in me answered before I could think. “All the time.” Realizing how that sounded, I hastily reeled off, “There's you. There's all this.” I swept my hand as if we owned everything from the creaky floor of the manse up to the stars. “How could I not feel the favors of good fortune?”

“More than that, though.” Her glance had turned into a serious gaze, as if trying to read me like a crystal ball. “I mean, things that don't seem to happen to other people somehow pick you out. I know it sounds silly, but—”

“Do you have that kind of feeling, too?” I asked cautiously.

“Around you,” she attempted a smile, “how can I help it?”

“Grace, I don't know how to account for luck, good or bad, if that's what it is,” I tried to laugh off her concern. “I'm simply me, you're you, and life writes the rest, don't you think?”

“I suppose you're right.” With a little frown of concentration, she went back to her newspaper and I to mine.

“Oh, before I forget for the morning,” she moved to the domestic topic after finishing my editorial contribution. “Griff needs money to buy coal. A ton wouldn't hurt, he said.”

“Of coal or money?” I moaned.

Grace gave me a little swat with the society page. “Don't be so down in the mouth about our home sweet home. We're gaining on it. Hoop and Griff are sure of it.” Adding as she traded the
Thunder
for Dickens: “Just as you are making headway against Anaconda, yes?”

“
Labor omnia vincit
, I suppose.”

That drew me a warning look.

“Sorry. ‘Toil conquers all.'” Thinking to myself, it had better.

•   •   •

Fidget or
fugit
, time restlessly moves on, and in the aftermath of January's rite-of-winter night of revelry as orchestrated by Sam Sandison, February's abbreviated page seemed to vanish almost as soon as the calendar was turned, and here came an early thaw and March with it. Butte coming out from under the snow was not a particularly pretty sight, but I welcomed the lengthening days—each a chicken step longer than the last, Grace assured me—with their gradually warmer weather for walking to work, while the meltwater running down the steep guttered streets made music in its way. Everyone assured me snow could be back anytime and frost would not leave until at least May, but the way things were going, it was something like springtime in my spirit. Bootleggers did not waylay me—although at odd moments I rather missed Smitty and his effusions about my Highliner persona—now that I knew to go nowhere near the warehouse district. At home, as I was determined to think of the temperamental manse, life passed peacefully enough, particularly in the evenings, when up and down the bedroom hallways the only sounds were the rustle of pages and accompanying intakes of breath and occasional chuckles.

At the
Thunder
, similarly, the only thing earthshaking was the daily start-up of the backroom press, sluicing our challenge to the
Post
and its corporate masters into the world. Jared Evans, carrying responsibilities that would have buckled a Samson, I was sure had taken to heart the anxiety expressed by me, Quinlan, and no doubt Rab, but right then time and the times were too much at odds for him when it came to grappling with Anaconda. He and the other legislators were sidetracked in the extended legislative session, trying mostly in vain to deal with Montana's latest hard times. Collapse is a strong word, but the homestead boom that for nearly twenty years had promised to make Montana “the last great grain garden of the world” fell to earth, literally. The climate had turned around, drought withering the dryland crops that had flourished on rains that no longer came. Crop prices plunged after the appetite of the Great War was sated and peace set in. Across the state, banks were going under and towns with paint still fresh on their false-front stores were shrinking away in, I hate to say it, classic decline. Like a sooty dump-pocked mining city emerging from winter, history is not always pretty to watch.

The
Thunder
newsroom, though, like any newsroom, thrived on dire events.

On the unforgettable day, I was fashioning the next editorial lambasting the lords of copper in their downtown aerie, my typewriter thwacking at a measured pace in the traffic of clatter in the newsroom, when kittenish Mary Margaret Houlihan, the society reporter desperate for a lede about oncoming social doings, called out, “Remind me, Morgie, dear, what the Ides were about?”

“Glad to. The Roman occasion derives from
idus
, the Latin for ‘middle,'” I warmed to the task of walking encyclopedia, as I sometimes do. “And so, the middle of March, the fifteenth, was traditionally a festive holiday, but thanks to Shakespeare, we now think of the Ides of March as the fateful day when Julius Caesar—”

I was interrupted by a shout of “Jake!” Across the room, Cavaretta was on his feet, still clutching a telephone. “Accident on the Hill. Five whistles.” Everyone in Butte, myself included, knew that was the signal to send stretchers.

“Which mine, Cavvie?”

“The Neversweat.”

“Get up there,
now
,” Armbrister bawled. “Take a shooter, make it Sammy,” he specified the chief photographer. Snapping out orders left and right, the aroused master of the newsroom spotted me sitting in my corner, where, Mary Margaret and the Ides aside, I had been trying to think with my fingers as usual. “Morgie, go with them, see what you can pick up for your page.” His green gaze met my startled one. “I have a hunch.”

The three of us piled out of the building and into a taxi outside one of the Venus Alley establishments. The driver was used to urgent requests, apparently, and sped us through the business district, honking everything but a streetcar out of the way, until our jitney wound its way through Dublin Gulch toward the landmark mine atop the Hill, the Neversweat, with its line of smokestacks billowing, as had been written, “like the organ pipes of Hell.” The storied seven stacks of the 'Sweat, which, legend had it, were address enough to deliver a miner anywhere on earth to this colossus of copper deposits. As the taxi roared toward the mine gate, Cavaretta, who was young but enterprising, leaned from beside me in the backseat to consult with the photographer, crammed with his gear next to the driver. “What's best, Sammy, split up or stick together? I haven't covered one of these—”

“Yeah, you might not this one, either,” the photographer let out wearily, “from the looks of that ape.” The taxi driver practically overlapped his utterance with his own exclamation, “Hell, it would have to be Croft, he'd jump off a cliff if they told him to.”

A rifle-toting guard had stepped into the gateway, holding up a meaty hand that definitely meant
Stop.

“No soap, coming in here. I got my orders,” he declared as he came to the driver's window, one denizen dependent on the workings of the Hill to another. “Better turn this buggy around.”

The taxi driver was not swayed. “C'mon, let me make a buck by getting my fare where they want to go. What's the big deal all of a sudden?”

“New policy,” the guard stolidly recited. “Nobody not connected to the mine is allowed in until I hear from them downtown.”

Out the side of his mouth, Cavaretta implored: “Can't you do something, Morgie?”

I thrust my head out the car window. “It's all right, Croft, that's where we're from—didn't they tell you? These gentlemen of the press are on our side. They're with me.”

Whether the beard did it or my oratorical approximations, which were not exactly untrue, the gate guard straightened up in instant respect. “Yessir. I didn't get the word to expect
you
.”

“One more thing,” I intoned before the taxi started up. “If anyone shows up claiming to be from the
Post
, turn them away. We don't want the wrong kind of people in here.”

“I gotcha,” he all but saluted. “Any fakers, I'll give them a hard time.”

There was no question where to go in the huge mine yard, everyone gravitating to the towering headframe and its elevator shaft, where the taxi driver let us out and was generously bribed, my role again, to stand by. Cavaretta, Sammy, and I turned as one to the commotion beneath the headframe's steel strutwork. The scene has been played at mine mouths probably since Roman times, the crowd drawn to disaster, those in authority pleading for order, rumors flying every which way. Sammy, a short but authoritative man, immediately set up shop with his tripod and other camera gear, aiming at the starkly silent shaft for whatever its elevator cage would bring up. Over there a besieged, florid-faced individual who was obviously the mine supervisor was trying to settle down a thick circle of agitated miners and other employees. This was the mine where Quinlan worked and I thought I spotted him in the midst of the turmoil, but under the helmet and grime it was hard to be sure from any distance. Fast earning his reporter's stripes, Cavaretta sized up the situation. “No bodies in sight yet. This may be a while. Morgie, can you find a phone and hang on to it for me?”