Sweet Thunder (8 page)

“I guess I am. We'll give it a try.” Jared already was half laughing. “Any contributors close to home you happen to have in mind, Professor, just for instance?”

•   •   •

And so we entered the period of what I think of as the skirmishing before the decisive battle, daily editorial blasts of whatever caliber I and my opposite number at the
Post
could come up with, heavy artillery yet to be brought to bear. In the set of reflections where a person reads his or her life, I would not have traded that experience for anything, nor, as it turned out, would anything have persuaded me to repeat it ever again.

The home front, so to speak, was seldom quiet during this. It is scarcely fair to say the Sandison mansion was a white elephant. More like a woolly mammoth, hard to know where to attack. Palatial to live in, mostly—the music room with its
Mikado
wallpaper aside—the spacious residence simply demanded this, that, and the other be done to it, upkeep without end. The furnace tended to balk, the plumbing to gulp. A stair tread somehow would work loose in the night, necessitating a storm of hammering by Griff and Hoop the next morning. The rain gutter over the front stoop sagged in a V under the weight of icicles, daggers of ice as if to challenge Ajax. The ladder work it took the pair of them to repair it practically constituted mountaineering. Grace indubitably had a point about the manse needing them. The best I could furnish was support of another sort, that countenance of a natural-born home owner, even if the snail analogy did keep creeping up on me.

Accordingly, the day I came in after work and saw that the dining room table was not yet set, I made myself hum with apparent unconcern while I went to the kitchen to investigate.

Grace was so engrossed in the volume open before her on the meat block, she didn't hear me enter the room. Assuming she was looking up a recipe, I cheerily called out, “Hello, chief cook and bottle washer. What's for supper?”

Her head snapped up as though I had broken a hypnotic spell. “Nothing, yet,” she moaned, casting a frantic look across the kitchen at the clock. “The time got away from me.” She gestured helplessly at the open pages. “Oh, Morrie, it's those books of his. I was just curious about what you and His Nibs see in them all the time, so I took one down to read a little. And now I can't stop.”

I edged near enough to peek at the prose. Dickens. I might have known. “My dear, let's trust that David Copperfield will prove to be the hero of his own life, at least long enough for us to put some food on the table, all right?” So saying, I traded my habitual daily complement of newspapers for an apron. “I'll whip up some ham omelets and scalloped potatoes, how's that sound?”

“Music to the ears.” Bustling toward the larder, she gave me a grateful peck on the cheek in passing. “What would I do without you, Mr. Morgan? Here, I can at least peel the spuds.”

We busied ourselves at the meal preparation, side by side. As the potato peelings flew, Grace regained herself. “Morrie? Now I have to ask you about some reading of your own. That paper.” She pointed the paring knife at the tabloid of shouting headlines that lay atop the comparatively quiet
Thunder
. “I didn't say anything during baseball, when you tracked down the
Sporting Whatsis
even in London. Or football, when you would snatch up a copy as soon as we got off a boat or train. But this time of year? Please tell me you're not doing something like betting on racing or”—she wrinkled her nose—“boxing.”

“No, no, worry not.” I hastened to justify the
Sporting News.
“Basketball, the winter sport. See there, the University of Chicago overwhelmed Northwestern, thirty-four to twenty-six. As a loyal alumnus, I am true blue to the Maroons, in a manner of speaking. I always follow their sporting exploits.”

Which was true as far as it went. The fuller explanation, which I was determined to spare her, was that I was keeping a careful watch on the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal. The ballplayers involved were getting the worst of it, banned from major league baseball, but so far the gamblers behind the fixed World Series were evading prosecution, not the outcome I devoutly wished for. If the fixers ever entirely escaped entanglement in the case, their criminal minds might well turn to the fortune lost to some mysterious bettor in the Montana hinterlands, the kind of curiosity I could not afford in more ways than one. That encounter in San Francisco showed that if Bailey could seek and find me, it was hardly beyond the capability of the Chicago gambling mob. My hope had to be that the gangsters were kept busy staying one jump ahead of the investigating authorities long enough for the so-called autumn classic of 1919 to fade into the history books. Time was on my side, at least.

Innocent of such concern, Grace paused in her peeling to tug mischievously at my apron strings. “You men and your games.”

•   •   •

With Griff and Hoop proclaiming, “Best meal in ages, Mrs. Morgan,” and Grace keeping a rueful silence, Sandison surprised us all by not grunting a good-night as usual when the last bite was done and going off to his lair of books. “Here, madam.” He thrust a squarish envelope across the table to Grace. “Morgan can read over your shoulder.” He tendered a similar envelope to the other side of the table. “You two can share one, surely.” Hoop opened it and Griff leaned over to read.

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE ANNUAL

ROBERT BURNS BIRTHDAY AND COSTUME PARTY

JANUARY 25, 8 P.M.–MIDNIGHT BUTTE PUBLIC LIBRARY

“Sandy,” I exclaimed, “I had no idea you are an aficionado of the Ploughman Poet.”

“His rhymes are all right if you like wee this and bonny that,” Sandison allowed. “But the main thing is his birthday comes at the time winter is driving people crazy. The library has been throwing this party for years. It was—it was Dora's idea.”

“And what a nice one,” Grace warmly endorsed the notion of a Scottish extravaganza in the Constantinople of the Rockies, even if there were a few more wintry weeks to endure to get to it. “Thank you ever so much for the invitation, Samuel. We'll be there in full regalia, won't we, Morrie.”

“Unquestionably.”

“Eh, us, too.”

“Righto. Wouldn't miss it for the world.”

Sandison acknowledged our thanks with a slight bow, or at least his beard seemed to, and he hoisted himself off to his books. As Grace cleared the table, I headed to the living room to finally peruse the
Sporting News.
However, Griff and Hoop had preceded me as far as the staircase.

“
Hsst.
Can we have a word with you?”

I looked up to two worried faces, ancient as Ajax in the gloaming of the stairwell, halfway to the top. “And that word is . . . ?”

One hemmed and the other hawed, combining into the protestation that they did not want to hurt Sandison's feelings, not the least little bit, understand, and I was beginning to before it came. “This Scotch party of his. Are we gonna have to wear them little dresses?”

“Kilts, you mean?” How mighty the temptation, to see the pair of them, bowlegged as barrel staves, stumping through the social evening in drafty Highland tartans. Somehow I resisted and told them they might well costume themselves as, say, shepherds instead.

After making absolutely sure that sheepherders wore pants even in Scotland, the two of them retired to their rooms and I set out for the living room again. Passing the door to Sandison's library tower, though, on impulse I stopped and knocked.

“Come in, it's on hinges.”

Seated at his desk as if moored there, he glanced up from what was evidently the latest treasure, still nested in its wrappings. “Ever seen this?”

Even closed,
Oeuvres Complètes de Buffon
was a true work of art, the leather spine elegance itself and the marbled cover aswirl with blues beyond blue. “Paris, 1885,” Sandison said clerically. “Go ahead, have a look.” Inside, the steel engravings of Buffon's beasts and birds were the most vivid menagerie imaginable. It is a trick only the finest illustrators can pull off, a bit of egg white mixed into the hand coloring to give sheen and add life. Holding my breath, I turned the folio pages to the peacock. The colors practically preened off the page, so vivid were they.

“Exquisite, Sandy.” I thought again what an achievement a book is, a magic box simultaneously holding the presence of the author and the wonders of the world. Ever so carefully I shut the dazzling volume. “A marvelous find.” My curiosity couldn't be held in. “Will it live here”—I meant the shelves stocked with his personal favorites, which ran to hundreds and hundreds of everything from fiction to phenomenology—“or downtown?”—meaning the public library.

“Haven't quite decided.” He patted the gorgeous cover and chortled into his beard. “It would make the dimwit trustees sit up and take notice, wouldn't it, to have this in the collection. The only copy west of Chicago.” Without looking up at me, he asked, “What's on your mind besides your hat? You didn't pop in here to see if I have
Mother Goose Rhymes
for bedtime reading.”

“It caught my attention during supper the other night that the mention of Teddy Roosevelt drew a bit of reaction from you.” He had harrumphed like a bullfrog. “I wondered why.”

“Of course it set me off, nincompoop. Knew him in the line of business, didn't I.”

“What, politics? Sandy! Are you a secret Bull Mooser, you're telling me?”

“Hell no, before any of that nonsense of him trying to be president every time there was an election.” Sandison gazed off into the distance of the past. “Teddy was a rancher out here for about as long as it takes to tell it. Had a herd of cattle, over in the Dakotas. One bad winter was all he could take, and he scooted back east to something simpler, like policing New York or conquering Cuba.” I waited. Sandison sighed, taking his voice down with it. “Yes, ninny, he was in the cattlemen's association with me, at the time we had to deal with rustlers. Good citizen Theodore lucked out and didn't get known as Roosevelt the Rope Fiend—his cowboys weren't as quick at stringing up cow thieves as mine.”

How the strands of fate twine mysterious ways. One man is snared in the reputation of a vigilante, and another dangles free and becomes president. It would take more than leather-bound volumes of phenomenology to contain the workings of chance. Such thoughts were interrupted by the next rumble from Sandison. “You were smarter than you knew, using him in that editorial.” That is not a comment I too often get, and I cocked an eyebrow for him to continue.

“He's popular as hotcakes in the great state of Montana, from being out here in boots and spurs,” Sandison obliged gruffly. “You'd think he was a top hand with cattle, when he hardly knew which end the grass goes in.” He laughed, none too humorously. “How you do it, Morgan, I don't know, but sometimes you plunge in blind and come out walking on water. The Galilee shortcut, ay?”

“It is not a talent I set out to attain, actually.”

“It could be worse, you could have a knack for the accordion.” He fingered the Buffon bestiary again. “That educate you enough for one night?”

“Amply as always, Sandy.”

“By the way, the sliding door in the drawing room is stuck half-shut.”

“Righto,” I sighed.

•   •   •

Frowning so hard his green eyeshade was practically a beak, Armbrister summoned me into his office on an otherwise ordinary day of editorial mudslinging. “You seen this?” He brandished a galley of overset at me. When I took the freshly inked strip of proof sheet and held it up for a look, the spatters of consonants told me this could only be Griff's contribution to “Voices of the Hill.” Armbrister meanwhile ranted that it “practically drove Sully cross-eyed setting it.” The compositor Sullivan who had delivered the item from the pressroom did look somewhat woozy on his way out. “What the blazes does it say, anyway?”

“Oh, a joke of some sort, I imagine. I told Griff to keep the item short and light.”

Armbrister nibbled his lip. “All those
ff
s, I don't like the looks of it. What if it's a dirty joke?”

“In
Welsh
?”

“Well, not that, then. Code of some kind to the Wobblies? Or something libelous about Anaconda? Those two old hoodoos aren't exactly the souls of moderation.”

There he had a point. Now I was nibbling my lip. “We must trust Griff.”

“That's not good enough. I'm not slapping something in the paper I can't read a syllable of.”

“Jacob, really, it's not intended for us, it's for those miners whose souls still yearn for the sounds of the green valleys and gentle streams of Wales.”

“It's still Greeker than goddamn Greek to me and I'm the editor.”

“Jake,” I tried, “you're being overly suspicious.” He merely strummed his suspenders, waiting me out. “You win,” I conceded. “I shall take responsibility if anything goes wrong with it.”

“All right, we'll run the thing.” Calling for a copyboy, the editor gave me a last speculative glance. “You're adventurous, Morgie. That probably has double
f
s and
l
s in it in Welsh.”

•   •   •

After that, Griff was greeted on the street for days by fellow Welshmen who would repeat what sounded like a series of gargles and practically fall over laughing. Griff's manner around the manse suggested authorship came naturally to the chosen, and he airily told me anytime the
Thunder
needed another contribution of the language of heaven, to just let him know. At first Hoop grinned along in the reflected glory, but something came over him during this time, I couldn't help but notice. He was saying little at meals and bolting off to his room as soon as possible, and his mind often seemed elsewhere as Griff and he tackled the house's latest ailment.