11  

CUTLASS, AS I TOO WELL KNEW, was the byline and trademark of the newspaperman more familiarly called Cutthroat Cartwright, the most famous and feared columnist in the savage pages of Chicago journalism. Just the thought of him anywhere in my vicinity made my head hurt.

Cecil Cartwright had claimed early fame in the Spanish-American War for writing dispatches under fire during the charge up San Juan Hill by Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and parlayed that into the safer but still combative career of sportswriter. Meaner than Ring Lardner and shrewder than Damon Runyon, he scourged anyone he set his sights on—I’d immediately recognized touches such as “cue the guffaw” and “let’s don’t mince words” as characteristic of his cold-eyed, coldhearted style. The fact that the Anaconda Company had imported him to wage editorial battle with the Thunder was bad enough, to judge by our stunned newsroom. But his arrival to Butte brought with it an even worse threat to me. Cartwright’s latest notch in his belt was breaking the story of the Black Sox scandal, and should it somehow come to his attention that his wordslinging counterpart across town, a rival to be eliminated by innuendo or whatever else it took, happened to be the mysterious Montana bettor who had outguessed the World Series fixers and won a fortune, he would leak that news back to the Chicago gambling mob as surely as water runs downhill. So I was in deep, deep trouble if Cutthroat, as I would always think of him, ever saw through me and my beard.

At the moment, the urgent need was to rally the shell-shocked Thunder staff. Putting up a show of confidence as bold as it was illusory, I addressed the silent ring of faces around me, Armbrister’s worried one foremost.

“Never fear. Tomorrow Pluvius will respond in kind, fang and claw.”

•   •   •

“My, you are a marvel,” Grace greeted me, beard and all. “You’ve grown another one already.”

“I’m more fond of it than I knew.”

“I’m glad. It makes you stand out.” Before I could blink that away, she was giving me a kiss and asking, “And how was your day at the paper?”

“Heart-stopping. You’ll hear more than enough about it at supper.”

The mealtime consensus was that the Cutlass editorial was deadly. Coming to the “soviet of Butte” phrase in the Post I had forced myself to buy on the way home, Griff observed to Hoop, “That’s pretty strong, ain’t it.” In her turn at it, Grace gasped—“Bolshevik! Oh, Morrie, how awful!”—and wrung her hands until I put a calming one atop hers and repeated my ill-founded assurance that I would take care of the matter on the morrow. For his part, Sandison scanned the invective with a series of grunts but otherwise stayed dangerously quiet. As we rose from the table, however, he gave me a sharp glance and I followed him to his library quarters as if magnetized.

“Good grief, so-called wordsmith,” he wasted no time, “you handed them the billy club to beat you into the ground with. ‘Red menace,’ hah,” he practically spat out, “but you left yourself wide open for that one, didn’t you. Jared Evans can’t help but be utterly sick when this reaches Helena and the louts in the legislature, can he. What were you thinking, man?”

“Sandy,” I sounded as miserable as I felt, “I was writing at deadline speed and the connection of ‘What is to be done?’ to Lenin’s infernal revolutionary tract simply never occurred to me.”

“You’d better race the deadline for wriggling out of the straitjacket this Cutlass character slapped on you.” Irritably he reared back, his paunch bulging as he considered me, down the formidable slope of himself. “Well? What are you going to do about it, mad dog Marxist. Skedaddle off the newspaper, so it can say you’re out of the picture and the revolution isn’t coming to Butte after all?”

“Quite the opposite.” I repeated to him my last-ditch vow to the Thunder staff that I would parry Cutlass’s slashing attack. “Toward that end, may I borrow this”—I indicated to his library trove that surrounded us on all walls—“for the evening?”

“I should hope so,” Sandison drawled as if it were his idea all along. “You need all the help you can get, Pluvius.” Grumbling to himself, he lumbered to a shelf and plucked out Paradise Lost, the beautiful edition with Gustave Doré illustrations. “Myself, I’m retiring for the night with Milton as company. There’s a man who savvied ‘confusion worse confounded.’ You might read him sometime yourself. Heh.”

With that, I was left alone with the silent legion of books standing at attention all around me, tier upon tier of the world’s finest literature. I draped my suit coat over the back of Sandison’s oversize chair and tried to decide where to begin, on a search through so many pages. What I was after had to be somewhere in the riches of this room. It had to be.

•   •   •

I still was hunting, groggy and haggard in the small hours of the night, when Grace tapped on the door and came in before I could respond. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she peered worriedly at me and the books piled in the pool of light given by the desk lamp. “Aren’t you coming to bed at all?”

“Sleep isn’t the answer,” I mumbled, not looking up from the open pages.

I heard her slippers shuffle on the carpet as she crossed the room, and then she was beside me, hefting War and Peace from the stack at my side, weighing her words along with it. “Morrie? I realize you’re in a fix and looking for a way out of it, but I have to ask.” Strain thinned the usual lilt out of her voice. “You aren’t trying to read yourself to death, are you?”

Until right then I had never considered an overfill of books as one of the mortal varieties of fate. There are worse. But that was not my mission. “No, darling,” I answered hoarsely. “I’m trying to raise the Thunder from the dead.”

•   •   •

However, the newsroom the next day was like a tomb when I dragged in, so exhausted I could hardly see straight. All eyes were on me, although that changed as soon as the reporters who had covered the newsprint conflagration incited by the Cutlass editorial straggled to the editor’s desk with their eyewitness accounts. They’d had the sickening experience of watching their own words go up in smoke while mobs, doubtless spurred on by Anaconda operatives, seized stacks of Thunders from outnumbered newsboys and chanted “Burn the Bolshie rag!” while turning the newspapers into bonfires on street corners. Naturally Armbrister in hearing these painful reports was long-faced as an undertaker whose dog had died, but when the last reporter had his dispirited say, the editor had his. “Don’t bring me a laundry list, get me a story, damn it,” he instructed with an intensity that made heads snap back even among those of us merely listening in. “Pull up your knickers, the whole bunch of you,” he barked—which happened to include Mary Margaret Houlihan, pressed into service in the scramble to cover the firestorm of anti-Thunder thuggery—“and sit down with Matthews on rewrite and give him what you’ve got, one by one, like with any other assignment. I know this story hits you in the gut, but we’re going to pull it together and front-page the sunuvabitch like it’s the lede of the Bible, everybody savvy that? Now get at it.”

Everyone else in the newsroom, including me, walked a wide circle around Armbrister after that outburst. Not to my surprise, Jared came in practically on my heels, redeploying himself from the legislative fight in Helena to try to rally the Thunder troops in the crisis my editorial had caused. Noble fellow, he did not assess blame, although his expression was much like it must have been under fire from German snipers. After a brief exchange with Armbrister that won a dour nod of the green eyeshade, our publisher called the staff together, with the exception of the reporters working with the rewrite man typing at machine-gun pace in the rear of the room.

“Chin up, everybody,” Jared started right in on what we faced. “Anaconda has tried this old stunt on us before, playing the Red card. It didn’t work then because there were always the Wobblies raising hell and the union looked sane in comparison. Now we have to slug it out on the Bolshie issue, so we will.” Smacking a fist into his palm, he turned to me. “I hope you’re loaded for bear, Professor.” In my sleepless near trance, Grace’s image of Anaconda as a carnival bear dangerous when unmuzzled so transfixed me that the roomful of Thunder staff began to shift uneasily before I thought to respond.

“I’ve . . .” I had to swallow that croak and start again, “I’ve found what is needed. I’ll put it to use.”

Depend on it, Armbrister rapped out, “You need to make it prontissimo. We’re coming up on—”

“—yes, yes, deadline.” Without another word, I started across the newsroom to my typewriter, trying not to totter. Armbrister and Jared shadowed me as if I might fall and break, the latter asking in my ear, “Professor, are you sure you can write straight? You look like you’ve been dragged by the eyeballs.”

“Just get me coffee. Lots of it.”

•   •   •

They hovered around me like handlers tending a boxer in a corner of the ring, Armbrister snatching each finished page from me to read in one gulp and cry, “That’s the stuff!” before thrusting it to the copyboy to run it to the back shop, while Jared kept replenishing my coffee until I practically sloshed. But when the last sheet of paper was ripped from my typewriter and dispatched for typesetting, the Thunder had spoken.

What Is To Be Done? Come Clean, That’s What.

Yesterday, the copper mouthpiece known as the Daily Post sounded a note of shrill hysteria, inciting mob action against, of all innocent targets, newsboys. Those bonfires of Thunder bundles are only the flicker of the conflagration the Post and its Anaconda masters hope to set off, however. The corporate potentates and their journalistic janissaries are resorting to one of the oldest and ugliest tactics, guilt by association. Let’s examine again the inflammatory charges made against this newspaper and its purportedly notorious editorial, What Is To Be Done?

“Which was, let’s don’t mince words,” the Post blustered, “the exact question of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, with which he titled his published blueprint for undermining the existing order in Russia and seizing power for his ruthless socialistic coterie. It is all there, the plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it surfaces now on American soil with the coaxing of a supposedly legitimate newspaper. The telltale phrase is a code for Bolshevism, nothing less and nothing more.”

Oh, really?

The Post accuser-in-charge must not be much of a reader. One only has to delve into that acknowledged masterpiece of Russian and world literature, Anna Karenina, written long before Bolsheviks ever existed to serve as bogeymen, to come across this supposedly sinister catchphrase uttered time and again by the cast of characters as a cry of the Russian soul to the heavens: Oblonsky in despair over his debauched life, Levin—Tolstoy’s country squire alter ego—in guilt over the political paralysis of his privileged class, and most tellingly, Anna Karenina herself in torment over a marriage that is coming apart. If the Robespierre of the Russian revolution, V. I. Lenin, plucked a similar plaint out of the air three decades later, it only shows how common the expression is, down to the current day. To charge that anyone uttering it in print—Tolstoy, we are humbly in your company—is espousing Bolshevism is like saying the dictionary is full of words radicals use.

At that point of the piece, having fought off the worst Cutlass could throw, it was time to fight back, and I did so with vehemence.

The Post and its insinuating editorialist likely cannot be counted on to come clean about their true purpose, so the Thunder is happy to do it for them. If there is anything “Red” about this episode, it is the red-handed attempt to scapegoat a rival. This is the kind of propaganda that produces class warfare, pogroms, lynchings, and in this ridiculously contrived mob outburst, the bullying of blameless newsboys and destruction of their wares. Such malicious instigation is the venom of hate throughout the worst of history. The antidote is truth, and here it is: the only revolution this newspaper advocates is the overthrow of Anaconda’s unconfessed influence over the state of Montana’s tax system.

In short, a person could survey every liars’ club from here to Chicago and not find a bigger falsehood than that in the Post’s false diatribe of yesterday.

—PLUVIUS

“That ought to hold them awhile,” Jared exulted, and the staff cheered as the press began to roll with our boldly headlined shot back at Cutthroat Cartwright and the higher snakes on the top floor of the Hennessy Building.

•   •   •

“My, aren’t we glad Sandy had books by all those Russians,” Grace said.

•   •   •

“Maybe you’re learning your trade, Morgan,” Sandison granted. “That Chicago gibe was a nice touch. Heh, heh.”

•   •   •

True to Jared’s prediction, the Thunder’s retaliatory blast did give the Post cause for pause. Its editorials for the next some days were confined to topics such as streetlights and stray dogs—and to our relief, the corner bonfires of Thunders were quenched when Cutlass wasn’t furnishing the matches.

Our own philippics, in Jared’s choice word, kept up the drumbeat on taxes, taxes, taxes, though I was exceedingly careful not to give Cutthroat Cartwright another opening; the “Red menace” episode had been too narrow an escape. Newspaper life seemed to have settled down to the usual journalistic rivalry, our reporters resorting to every wile to scoop theirs, our newsboys outshouting theirs with catchier headlines. Yet there was a feeling in the air, distinct as the ink-and-nicotine atmosphere in the Thunder newsroom, that in the ongoing struggle with Anaconda, it was our move next.

Rab precipitated it.

On Saturday furlough from the hoosegow school, she and Russian Famine accompanied Jared when he dropped by to brief Armbrister and me on that week’s legislative progress toward the vital statewide vote on the tax commission matter. “It’s slower than digging the Panama Canal, but we’re getting there,” he vouched. “The bill survived the committee hearings despite all the company’s Ulcer Gulch stooges tried to do to it, and now it comes to the floor. We win there, and all it takes is the governor’s signature.”

And many thousand voters’ X’s, I thought but didn’t say. Jared was inhaling the smell of victory, Rab bright and keen at his side, and even Armbrister for once came out from under his cloud. Maybe we all caught exuberance from Famine, darting to the society desk where Mary Margaret Houlihan, possessed of a sweet tooth, kept a jar of gumdrops free for the taking, and helped himself to his customary handful. Back in high spirits myself—there is nothing like a close call to sharpen one’s zest for life—I caught his eye and when the others were lost in conversation, I clinked the brass knuckles in my pocket as though I were jingling loose change. Grinning conspiratorially at the sound, the newsboy bounded off to the back room for his bag and bundle of Thunders.

“He thinks you’re the cat’s meow, Mr. Morgan,” Rab observed. “All I hear is how much he wants to be like you.”

Touched by that, “He’s one of a kind himself” was as much as I could say.

“Maybe the kid is getting us more readers than we are, bless his buttons.” Armbrister really was in a sunny mood. “Circulation’s up, day by day.”

“That’s the stuff,” I chortled.

“The more the merrier,” Jared said jubilantly.

“All well and good,” the feminine voice of reason abridged us, “but aren’t you just preaching to the choir?”

We three men buttoned our lips like caught schoolboys taking our scolding and reluctantly faced around to its authority. It was up to Jared to ask warily, “How so, Rab?”

She poised for a moment before settling to the corner of the editor’s desk, in the attitude of a canny abbess revealing the Gospel. “You’re selling papers like mad here in town, but what does that prove? Butte people mostly have their minds already made up about Anaconda and the miners, they’ve had to for years, haven’t they.” She was not waiting to hear the male view of things. “What about other places? Every voter in the state is going to have a say on the tax issue, but how many of them have any chance to read Mr. Morgan’s editorials, unless they pick them up out of the tumbleweeds?” Having made her point, she crossed her arms on her bosom and looked at us sternly.

Jared recovered first. “As much as I hate to admit it, she’s right. I practically wallpaper the legislature with the Thunder when I can, but go downtown in Helena and there’s Anaconda’s local propaganda sheet being sold on every corner.”

“We’ve looked at this up, down, and sideways,” Armbrister protested. “Shipping bundles of papers around the state by train costs a fortune—the Anaconda bastards see to that with the railroads, you can just bet. And it’s slower than the Second Coming, anyway.” He shrugged fatalistically. “We’re putting out a Butte newspaper, Jared, we can’t snap our fingers and change that.”

Maybe we couldn’t, but someone could. In spite of myself, the phrase What is to be done? again raised a clamor in my brain, demanding answer. To quiet it, I entered the discussion Jared and Armbrister were having.

“If, as the Braille salesman said to the Cyclops, you’ll turn a blind eye, I believe I can arrange to have truckloads distributed to other towns.”

“At how much per delivery?” Armbrister demanded.

“As low as it goes. Don’t ask me more.”

“Truckloads?” exclaimed Jared. “How?”

“Blind eye, remember? Have the bundles waiting under a tarpaulin on the loading dock tonight.”

“There, see?” Rab said as if it had all been foretold.

Armbrister was dubiously doing arithmetic on a sheaf of copy paper. “We’d need to double our press run.”

Jared looked at me, then at the pleased pussycat that was Rab, then at me again. He set his jaw and said, “Let’s go for broke.”

•   •   •

“Hsst. Over here, Smitty.”

“Boss! Almost didn’t see you there in the shadows.” The thickset bootlegger veered off from entering the warehouse and joined me in the dark alley. “I thought you wasn’t coming back until next week.”

“Change of plans,” I intoned in what I hoped was a passable Highliner voice.

“I bet I know. You don’t want them dumb duck hunters catching on to your comings and goings.” He peeked around the corner until satisfied there was no sign of an ambush vehicle and someone riding shotgun, literally. “Coast’s clear. Ain’t you coming in to tell the boys what’s what, like always?”

“I’m in a hurry, I have to leave it to you.” Smitty swelled in importance. “The trucks on the Whiskey Gap run—”

“Boy, that works so slick, boss, you’d think it was a regular highway out there in nowhere.”

“—the trucks are empty on the way north, am I right?”

“Sure they are, so we can load them to the gills when they get to Canada.”

“Tell the boys here’s what I want done on the trips from now on.” I recited it as he listened closely. When I was through, he wore a puzzled expression.

“Just plain old newspapers, is this?”

“Hardly plain.” I thought fast. “More like an extra, only they can’t call it that every day. You know how people snap those up to see what has happened. Think how many more drinks that will add up to while customers sit there taking in the news.”

“Oh, I get it.” Smitty brushed the shoulder of my overcoat in case any speck had dared to light on it. “You bet, we’ll drop papers at every speakeasy from here to Canada. What a humdinger of an idea, boss.”

•   •   •

Fresh from that unblemished performance as the Highliner and riding high in the newsroom on account of the Thunder’s miraculously doubled circulation, I hummed my way up the front walk after work the next day. Even Ajax on the door knocker looked less forbidding than usual. “Grace,” I called cheerily as I stepped in, for once unconcerned about whatever mischief the house had wreaked on itself during my hours away. “I’m home, darling. Yoo-hoo.”

No answer. Or did I hear a low moan somewhere?

“Grace?” With growing apprehension I headed for the kitchen, the silence at that end of the long hallway now more ominous than any sound.

I burst in, then stepped back at the sight of her, seated at the kitchen table as if dumped there. Her face was smeared white. The calamine lotion she was slathering on her arms barely covered the red welts from wrist to elbow. Stopping to scratch like fury, she looked at me woefully through her tragic white mask.

“Morrie,” she said in an awful tone, “you’re giving me hives.”

“I just got here,” I said in confusion.

“You know what I’m talking about.” She strenuously banged the bottom of the calamine bottle with the palm of her hand for more of the soothing lotion, which unfortunately for me could not be taken internally.

“Grace”—I circled in as close as I dared, knowing better than to touch her—“I have no idea what brought this on.”

“Your, your past history,” she half whispered as if in agony. I blanched. She went on miserably, “There was a knock on the door after you left for work this morning. Who else but the railroad drayman, saying our trunk had turned up finally. Hurrah, I thought, but when he brought it in, I saw it wasn’t ours”—she gritted her teeth and dug at both elbows before going on—“and figured it had to be the one you’d lost when you first came to Butte.”

I had lamented the loss of that trunk, with all my earthly belongings in it, for a year and a half, but right then I wished it had vanished forever.

“Then I thought,” Grace was struggling to tell the rest, “I don’t know what I thought, but I peeked in the trunk and there were some clothes and things but mostly books. I picked up the one on top, wanting to surprise you with it when you came home—it was something or other in Latin—”

“Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars,” I said numbly, knowing what was coming.

“—and when I opened it out of curiosity, there it was on the flyleaf, wasn’t it. ‘To Morgan. Merry Christmas 1908 in any language. Forever yours, Rose.’” She looked at me furiously. “Another wife, have we here?” She scratched at herself so hard it hurt to watch. “And that wasn’t all.”

“No, but I can expl—”

“Newspaper clippings of a prizefighter. Who looked for all the world like a younger you, but with some name I never heard of.” This woman I so loved, the mending spirit of my life, gazed at me through her wretched mask of lotion and asked the question I had hoped would never come. “Who are you, if you’re not Morris Morgan?”