8  

A NEWSPAPER WITHOUT A CAUSE is little more than a tally sheet of mishaps local and national and whatever social gatherings and sporting events will fill the rest of the pages. Distinctly like our insipid rival, the Daily Post, in other words, and every other docile daily on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s leash, all across the state. Thank heavens, the Thunder never waned to that extent after going silent about the disaster in the Neversweat, but some days it was close. Deprived of Quin as a martyr, I had to reach farther and farther up my sleeve for editorials taking the fight to Anaconda. Over at the Post, Scriptoris had nothing much to do but casually snipe back; we could have written some of our exchanges in our sleep. While still putting out a paper people wanted to read—still cranking the hurdy-gurdy, in Armbrister’s term for it—our sense of direction was less sure than in the first heady months of publication. The staff sensed it. Journalists have a nose for that. Newsroom morale was helped only a little by Jared gamely introducing in the legislature a toughened mine safety law, doomed to have the life choked out of it by the copper collar, everyone knew.

“What I don’t understand,” Griff groused at supper during this time, “is how come you don’t keep after the snakes about that blast going off on Quin. There’s something fishy about that. In our day we handled every kind of dynamite and such, didn’t we, Hoop—”

“Enough to wage a war, just about.”

“—and you didn’t see us blowing ourselves up.” He tapped the air with his fork for emphasis. “You just had to have the right touch, know what you were doing. And wouldn’t you think Quin did?”

In answer, I could only say cryptically that Jared Evans had a strategy that might take a while, and try to let it go at that. Only he, Armbrister, and I knew—and of course, Grace and Rab—about the incriminating IWW card and Quin’s dangerous duplicity to us as well as to Anaconda, if that’s what it amounted to. Accordingly, my policy necessarily was De mortuis nil nisi bonum—Speak no ill of the dead—and not incidentally, keep Hoop and Griff from letting the cat out of the bag while gossiping with their old mining cronies.

The other person at the supper table stroked his snowy beard and said nothing, which in a way said something in itself.

•   •   •

Not since Robert Burns Night had I visited the Butte Public Library, and as ever it was like entering the world as it should be, organized, hushed, welcoming. Good day to you once again, William, I greeted Shakespeare at his post above the Reading Room as I passed on my way up to Sandison’s office. He was not in. Back downstairs, I started my search for him at the Reading Room, where Smithers at the periodicals desk and pretty Miss Mitchell in the cataloging section wigwagged fond greetings to me. I knew better than to expect anything of the sort from Miss Runyon, the gorgon of the main desk and an old antagonist from my time as Sandison’s assistant in charge of this, that, and her.

Registering unpleasant surprise as I approached, her eyeglasses swinging on the chain around her stout neck as she pulled back in her high chair to increase the distance between us, she whispered forbiddingly, “What can I do for you?”

“I wonder, Miss Runyon, if out of your vast store of information”—I should not have, but I let my gaze graze across her voluminous forbidding chest as I said that—“you can tell me where I might find Sandy.”

“Mr. Sandison,” the words all but leaned across the desk and cuffed me, “is on the prowl. He spends more and more time in the stacks, with those precious books of his. That man.”

Up the grand staircase to the mezzanine and its tall ranks of richly hued books I went. Stopping to listen, very much as I had done when Russian Famine was flying overhead from bookcase to bookcase, I heard a sound faint but distinct as a rippling brook, the riffle of pages being turned.

There he was when I stuck my head around Poetry A–K, open book in hand. I could just make out the gilt title on the spine, A Life in Verse, by the sometimes inspired, sometimes pedestrian poet Cheyne. White eyebrows ascending toward his cowlick in surprise at the sight of me, Sandison appeared almost shy at having been discovered fondling the volume. “Caught me counting the herd,” he rumbled, reshelving Cheyne and passing a lingering hand over the beautiful leather of the works of Matthew Arnold, Baudelaire, Blake, the two Brownings, and of course, Burns. I was the one surprised as he lowered his voice to ask, “Ever have the urge to write?”

“I thought that was what I do for a living.”

“A book, man,” he said as if I were simple-minded. “The real thing.” The next came out rough as a grindstone, but was nonetheless a confession. “Sometimes I’d like to get it all down. What the country was like when Dora and I came in by stagecoach, young pups that we were, and started the ranch. And everything that followed. It’d make quite a tale, don’t you think?”

Possible titles flooded my mind. We Hung Them High. The Earl of Hell Remembers. Finagling the Finest Book Collection West of Chicago.

Reading me from the inside out, Sandison sighed and changed the topic. “What are you doing in here this time of day anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be saving the world, editorial driblet by driblet?”

“Ostensibly, I’m here to look up statistics on mining production. Actually, I just wanted to get out of the office for a while.”

“Statistics, ay?” He glanced at me shrewdly. “Pluvius getting hard up for material, is he?”

“Things are a little dry right now,” I had to admit.

With a grunt, he turned in the other direction, his bulk nearly filling the aisle between bookshelves. “Come on out on the balcony where we can talk. I have a touch of the office strain of cabin fever myself.”

Cupped neatly in the stonework above the main entrance’s keystone arch, the small balcony looked out on Broadway, the Butte version, busy enough with automobile traffic and delivery vans—a Golden Eggs truck casually putt-putting along with the rest, I couldn’t help but notice—and the familiar sight of messengers trotting through the more leisurely passersby to run purchases from the Hennessy department store or bank errands or, of course, Anaconda pouches of directives to its managers on the Hill. Winter at least having retreated if not gone, pedestrians had become recognizable as something other than walking piles of clothes, and optimistic bonnets instead of headscarves could be seen on some of the more fashionable ladies. By now it was April, fooler of a month. One day the weather would be what passed for spring at an elevation of a mile, and the next would feel as if it had come from Iceland. Leaning his elbows on the rim of the balcony as I was also doing, Sandison sniffed the air. “Hmmp. The time of year is doing its damnedest to change, once you get past the smell from up there.” Silently we looked past the downtown buildings, even the tallest ones dwarfed by the hill of copper—its serape of snow in its last tatters by now—that was this contentious city’s fortune and its curse.

“You’ve slacked off on Anaconda since right after those two miners were blown up,” he said as if still conversing about the weather. “What’s that about?”

Why did I feel some sense of relief in unburdening myself to this cantankerous old mountain of a man? Sometimes we need ears other than our own, but there seemed to be more to it with Sam Sandison; there always did with him. In any case, I owned up as soon as he asked. “Don’t pass this on to Hooper and Griffith, please, they’re better off not knowing. But we found out Quinlan was . . . not quite what he seemed.”

He gave me that look of his. “Knew that, almost. Didn’t you tell me once he’d pull out the Little Red Songbook when things got too quiet at a wake?”

“I confess, I thought he simply liked a good song.”

“Hah. A person can do that and still be a rascal. You of all people should know.” Now I was giving him a look, but he only said as if in passing, “Aren’t journalists supposed to be students of human nature?”

“On that”—I exhaled a good deal of regret—“my grades perhaps are not always the highest.”

“A card-carrying IWW member, what next.” He had gone back to musing on Quin. “Some secret threat to society they are.” Absently rubbing the stonework of the library as a captain on the bridge of a ship might stroke a railing of familiar oak, he pondered aloud. “Doesn’t mean he was wrong about the state of things. The Anaconda Company needs to be leveled to the ground and their bones stomped in.” The glacier-blue eyes were perfectly mild as he surveyed the Hill, where the belching smokestacks of the Neversweat were most prominent. “Not that I’m in favor of violence, mind.”

It was too much for me. My despair coming out, I heard myself say: “I’m wondering if I’m cut out for Butte.” He glanced at me sharply. “Don’t take me wrong,” I hurried to add, “I am happy to be employed at the Thunder, just as I was here in your bailiwick. It’s only that I’m not sure I have as much staying power as Jared Evans and the rest. It’s their fight, in the end. I’m simply something like a cornerman.”

“Odd analogy,” he drawled. “I’d have thought you’re more like the old hand who knows how the best punches are thrown.”

“Yes, well,” I could have done without his own analogy, “it may seem that way, but I am about out of combinations with any real jab to them, when it comes to Anaconda.”

“Don’t give up, Morgan.” Sandison leaned back to his full, snowy height, as if sizing up the hurly-burly of busy humanity in the street below us. “You never know what might come along and change the story.”

It didn’t take long.

•   •   •

“Another box of rocks for the old gentleman.”

The postman handed me what was undoubtedly Sandison’s latest hefty book purchase when I answered the door the following Saturday forenoon. “Oh, and this for you,” he fished a letter out of his mailbag. “Sorry to be the bringer of bad news.” Clucking his tongue, he went on his way as I studied the official-looking piece of correspondence.

My curiosity piqued, I at once tore open the envelope. Its contents staggered me.

Flabbergasted as I was, I needed advice at once. Grace was out buying groceries. Hoop and Griff were in the basement, noisily doing something to the furnace. That left only Sandison to consult about what I held in my hand, if I could get over being speechless.

First he spotted the package under my arm, as I stepped into the round library room.

“Hah. That’ll be Moby-Dick, the deluxe edition with N. C. Wyeth illustrations. Melville is quite the coming author, now that he’s been dead long enough. About time it got here,” he said as though I had dawdled en route from the front door. As usual on weekends, he still was in pajamas, his idea of leisure being a stroll directly from bed to his book-lined lair. He did not believe in slippers, only a pair of run-down cowboy boots softened by time, which made his toilet trips in the middle of the night a disturbing experience for anyone within hearing. Comfortable as a king in his big boots and striped nightwear, he slit the package as quickly as I handed it over and opened the illustrated tale of the whale, about the size of a breadboard and twice as heavy. The richly colored set of pages depicted Captain Ahab lashed to the leviathan, about to be dragged down to his doom. Which was how I felt as the master of the manse at that moment.

Paying me no further mind, Sandison leaned over the Wyeth handiwork, chortling. “Tells the story right there, wouldn’t you say?”

I was too upset to do anything but wordlessly thrust my own piece of mail between him and the book.

Frowning, he plucked the paper from me and gave a hasty read. “The property tax bill,” he identified it, as if I couldn’t. He handed it back. “A bit steep this year, isn’t it,” he said, already paging through Moby-Dick again.

“Steep? It’s, it’s precipitous!” I sputtered.

“Welcome to home ownership in the great state of Montana,” he replied mildly.

“But it seems to me a terrific sum, for someone of my salary,” I protested, my spirit still sinking like Ahab.

Sandison sighed. “Morgan, do I have to spell out the facts of life to you? The tax is based on what you own, ninny, not what you make.” He swept an arm expansively toward the bulk of the manse beyond his private room. “And this place is quite a bit of property, you know. Horse Thief Row doesn’t come cheap.”

“Sandy, just this one tax year, I wonder if you could possibly—”

“No, I couldn’t possibly,” he scotched that. “My funds, such as they are, are tied up in the account book dealers need to draw on. I thought I’d made that plain, back when I signed over the house to you and madam. Good Lord, man, can’t you manage to own a piece of property and pay up like a normal person?” he all but stamped his nightwear boots at me.

“I am willing, but the cash is weak,” I would have paraphrased that into Latin if I’d had the presence of mind. “How am I—Grace and I—supposed to pay up, as you so casually put it, and still afford the upkeep on this omnivorous house?”

Sandison stroked his beard in a wise way. “Maybe you ought to take up bootlegging. There probably aren’t taxes attached to that, don’t you think?”

Doubly dumbfounded now, I gawked at him. How did he know I got away with impersonating the Highliner at the warehouse? Yet if my ears were not playing tricks on me, what was the Earl of Hell suggesting but—“That Old Ballycleuch, you certainly produced in timely fashion on Burns night,” he drawled, to my utter relief. “I still take a dram when the spirit calls, heh, heh.” He reached toward his bottom desk drawer. “You look like you need one now, laddie.”

“No. No, thank you. I need to think.”

•   •   •

“Oh, dear,” Grace groaned, settling at the kitchen table when I gave her the bad news about the size of the property tax bill. “And that’s just the half of it.”

“Just the—what do you mean?”

“The boardinghouse, Morrie. Surely you haven’t forgotten about it?”

“How could I?” Although, truth be told, I had. A second weight of domicility on my back—on our backs, to be fair to Grace, although I was the wage earner—bent me to what felt like the breaking point.

“So,” she was saying with resignation, “there must be a tax notice in my old name waiting at the post office—we should fix that with the recorder of deeds, Morrie.”

“Yes, yes, all in good time. But as to the tax bill, bills, I mean—”

“Here, help me put away these groceries,” she shook off the matter and got up to busy herself unloading her shopping bags, “the taxman isn’t at the door this very moment. I’ve been meaning to talk to you anyway about the boardinghouse,” she said, a lilt coming into her voice. “In a little while we can maybe open it for business again, Griff and Hoop and luck willing. That would help out the provider considerably, don’t you think?”

The provider, such as I was, dumping the seasonal fare of rutabagas and turnips into the vegetable bin, for once did not know what to say. Finally words found their way out. “Grace, lovesome, you give every appearance of listening, but are you hearing? We’re strapped. Driven to the wall in our finances. Trapped in this fancy poorhouse with Ajax on the door, however you want to put it.” A stray potato had got away, and I fired it into the bin. “We have only just been getting by on my salary, and there is no money lying around to pay preposterously high property taxes that are due now, now, not in a little while, and—what did you say?”

“Now who’s hard of hearing, honeybun?” She reached over from the canned goods cupboard and prodded my shoulder. “I said, it’s a good thing I have some tucked away.”

“You do? I mean, do you. How much?”

Hearing the sum, I nearly swooned in relief. “My dear, you are a treasure in more ways than one. If the boardinghouse isn’t taxed like the Waldorf Astoria, that amount should tide us over, this time. But how did you ever . . . ?”

She dimpled becomingly. “Remember when we’d arrive in Venice or Marseilles or one of those places and you’d send me to the exchange window to trade in some of our American money while you tracked down newspapers? Now, this is not to criticize in any way, darling, but given your spending habits, I thought it might not hurt to put aside a certain amount each time before cashing the rest in for the foreign money. I’d slip it into the bottom compartment of my purse, where husbands always fear to go.” Sweet reason prevailed in her gaze at me. “You’d be surprised how much it added up to in a year.”

“Amazed, is more like it,” I said fervently.

“Under this roof, then, we’re all of us saved,” my miraculous wife mused, folding away her shopping bags. “Hoop and Griff don’t own any more property than the soles of their shoes, and His Nibs passed his along to us, the old smarty.” The offending tax notice lay open on the kitchen table, where she gave it the Butte eye. “But most people aren’t as lucky as we are, are they. Just imagine how hard it must be in Dublin Gulch and Finntown and the rest when the postman comes today and— Morrie? You seem lost in thought.”

“No. Perhaps finding something, actually.”