Work Song Page 17

  He hunched forward as if about to rake in a poker pot. “That’s where you come in. I want to remind that pack of meddling fools which side their bread is buttered on.” He looked at me craftily. “I’ve never signed my book collection over to the library,” there was a sly note in his voice I had not detected before, “it’s here on loan, like museums have with paintings of people with their clothes off.” That explained much: for Butte to house the finest collection west of Chicago, the obsessive keeper of the books came along with it.

  “Told you there’s something I have for you to do,” he was saying, as though I were looking for a way to fill my time. “Draw up an inventory of what’s mine out there on the shelves,” he waved in the direction of the prized books on the mezzanine. “That’ll bring the trustees to their senses,” the grandee of the library finished, sitting back and cracking his knuckles in satisfaction.

  “I shall need a helper.”

  That caught him by surprise, and before he could cloud up enough to tell me I was out of my mind, I said, “Fortunately, Sandy, the staffing has been a little light for some time, hasn’t it.” I flipped to the ledger page that listed library positions and wages, his piggybank for those Miscellaneous expenditures when irresistible books showed up in dealers’ catalogues. He eyed me as my finger singled out positions budgeted for but chronically unfilled. “Very wise of you,” I drove the point home with a final finger tap, “to leave leeway for an occasion just such as this.”

  Sandison coughed. “Let’s be reasonable about this. We can’t be cluttering up the place with some moron we don’t absolutely need, just because—”

  “No, no,” I headed off that objection, “summer help will do. A teacher, perhaps, with free time now that school is out. In fact, I think I know of one.”

  “Don’t waste time talking about it, then.” He heaved himself around in his seat as if compelling business awaited on his desk. “Hire this summer wonder you have your eye on, and get going on the inventory. You have to make decisions in this life, Morgan.”

  “THIS IS EXCITING, working for Sam Sandison. It’s like being on a pirate ship.”

  “Rab, contain your imagination. This is a library.”

  “You know what I mean,” she whispered back secretively, there on the mezzanine. “Everyone in Butte has an opinion about him. What’s yours, Mr. Morgan?”

  “It’s too deep to go into. Pull down Pride and Prejudice and see if it has the bookplate.”

  She took a peek inside the tanned leather cover and giggled. “It does. Just like on a heifer.” Volume by volume, our library lord’s collection bore the bookplate lettered in bold SSS, with the smaller, uncompromising line below, Property of Samuel S. Sandison. I hadn’t put this together until Rab’s remark, but now my first conversation with the man came back to mind, when he berated me for not knowing that the most famous cattle herd in Montana history had borne the Triple S brand. Leave it to him to put a brandabetical stamp on the world’s literature.

  Rabrab—or Miss Rellis, as I had to make myself call her in front of other staff members—was a diligent worker, as we were both going to need to be. Already we each had a heaping armful of exquisite books, and this was only Adams, Arnold, and Austen. As we tottered off to the sorting room, where Sandison had let us set up shop for the inventorying, she marveled: “Say what they will about him, he really does have a soft spot for books, doesn’t he.”

  And Ivan the Terrible perhaps loved his staghounds. My private opinion of Sandison, inconstant in the best of times, varied almost hourly during those first busy weeks of summer. He was as demanding as ever in the office chores he foisted onto me, the Earl of Hell with a list in his head, and between those I would dash back to the sorting room to work with Rab on the inventory. Sometimes we would look up and see the snowy beard and cowlick pass by as he came stalking out of his office to stand there on the mezzanine and contemplate the ranks of books on the shelves. When he loomed there in one of these trances, white as a sacred elephant, Rab and I simply detoured around him in our task. I was certain as anything that bibliomania did not mean a maniac loose in a library, but there were times Sandison made me wonder whether the definition needed adjusting. Yet, fume at him and his high-handed ways as I so often did, there were the immortal books, which would not have graced the Constantinople of the Rockies but for him. In life’s list of complications, this one seemed to carry an acceptable price.

  Volume by plated volume, Rab and I kept compiling and adding up the Sandison library-within-the-library. If the edition in hand matched a listing in a rare books catalogue, it was no problem to assign a value. Any we could find no listing for, one or the other of us would take, several at a time, for appraisal by old Adamson, the coldblooded antiquarian book dealer across town. As you might guess, there is a secret satisfaction in going through the streets with your arms around the Artful Dodger and Natty Bumppo and Emma Bovary, no one knowing you are hugging a monetary fortune as well as a literary one.

  So, its hectic moments aside, the inventorying was the most pleasant kind of work, engaging the mind, and no unduly heavy lifting involved. Rab was sparkling company, as I had counted on. She showed up each morning bright-eyed for whatever the day might bring, and in plucking the SSS books from the shelves, she whisked in and out of the mezzanine stacks as if on jeweled skates. From the number of upturned male heads among the Reading Room patrons as she winged past overhead, I was not the only one appreciative of her presence.

  I suppose I should not have been surprised when Sandison called me in to his office, and there, like one of the frowning Easter Island stone heads, was Miss Runyon.

  “It seems there is a distraction in our otherwise flawless service to the reading public,” Sandison addressed me pontifically from behind his desk. “State your case, Miss Runyon.”

  She drew herself up as if to huff and puff and blow me away. “It’s that helper of yours. She wears those little dresses, you can see everything she has.”

  “You can? I mean, I had not noticed.”

  “Then you are the only man breathing who hasn’t,” she declared.

  I looked from her to Sandison and back again, both of them dressed twenty years behind the times. “Perhaps it is natural that the younger people take a different view of wardrobe than, ah, we do.”

  Rousing himself, Sandison abandoned his chair and clomped out from behind the desk. “Your concern for propriety is notable, Miss Runyon,” he said soothingly as he escorted her to the door, “and I’m sure Morgan can deal with the issue.”

  When she was gone, he rounded on me. “The next couple of days, you be the one to prance out there on the mezzanine and fetch the books,” he directed, “just on the chance that people may not be quite as interested in seeing everything you have.” His frosty eyebrows were hoisted high as he studied me. “You’re a sharper operator than I thought, Morgan.” He laughed bawdily. “Make the most of your time with Miss Rellis.”

  I LOOK BACK on that midsummer stretch of weeks as a season of life that went up and down with the regularity of a carousel. Each day divided itself according to the female company of the time. At the boardinghouse, Grace and I stayed as self-consciously civil as schoolchildren who had been told to mind their manners or else; her hives had gone away, but her allergy to being taken up with me had not. Then I would go off to the library and the short-hemmed zephyr that was Rabrab Rellis.

  With her keenness for being in on things, Rab was as intrigued with the inventory books as I was, both of us beaming like babies at the chance to handle lovely volumes that even the most omnivorous reader would miss out on in a lifetime. On nice days we carried the mood outside, joking to one another, and ate lunch on the library steps. Butte sunned itself those noon hours, as if storing up for rougher weather ahead. Gangs of boys swarmed down from the Hill neighborhoods, heading for the swampy attractions along Silver Bow Creek. On the next street, the Post building had put up a baseball scoreboard on its front, and the amplified voice of the
sports telegraphist relaying diamond drama as it took place in Cincinnati and Washington and other major-league outposts carried to us like opera arias: “Flash! It’s a home run! The Redlegs lead one to nothing!” Sometimes Russian Famine, scrubbed and neatened, would stop by on his errands as a Hennessy Building runner, and one of us would share a sandwich with him before he sprang to his duty again.

  “Mr. Morgan, there’s something I’ve been puzzling about,” Rab broached during one of those pleasant noontimes when we were alone. “I noticed it all the way back at Henry Adams and his Education . That was published only last year.” She had her old look of a schoolgirl circling what might be a trick question. “Aren’t the Sandison books supposed to be what he collected when he was on the ranch, ages ago?”

  That had tickled my interest, too. By now we were at Kafka, Keats, and Kipling. The romantic poet was sadly gone, but the other two were up and writing and I had just catalogued recent contributions to literature by both that also carried the SSS bookplate.

  So as not to heat up Rab’s instinct for intrigue, which never needed encouragement, I shrugged past the matter of newly minted books among the old: “An occasional stray may have wandered into his literary herd, large as it is. Isn’t there a ranching word for that?”

  “Maverick, you mean? An unbranded cow that someone slaps their own brand on?” Rab wrinkled her nose as if sniffing something spicy. “Oh, that’s so funny.”

  It was more so than she knew. Possibly Sandison, from long habit, was simply buying valuable books out of his own pocket and folding them into his collection, as he had every right to do. But the more tantalizing possibility, I sensed, was that those Miscellaneous purchases drawn from the library’s payroll budget were being cunningly mingled into his earlier holdings. If I knew anything about Samuel S. Sandison by now, it was that he never saw a thing of worth that didn’t look better to him with SSS on it.

  Brushing away lunch crumbs as though that took care of the topic, I told Rab, “We had better get back at it, there’s a shelf of Longfellow ahead.”

  “HOW’S THAT INVENTORY COMING?” Sandison rumbled when I passed by the office that afternoon.

  “Sandy, you are to be commended for your buying eye,” I stuck to what I could honestly say. “The books you have gathered amount to a financial fortune as well as a literary one.”

  “They damn well ought to,” he said as he hunched over an antiquarian catalogue and some notations to himself which, I was quite sure, added up to more books for the Sandison collection.

  “Oh, by the way,” the issue of expenditure reminded me, “a cyclopedia salesman this morning left us a sample of his newest.” I stepped to my desk for the brochure as Sandison groaned at the distraction. “Here you go, the sales pitch for Prominent Figures of Montana, Past and Present. He assured me no self-respecting library should be without such a volume. As an added inducement, he told me you will find yourself prominently in it, Sandy.” I passed the brochure to him for inspection.

  He took one look, informed me it was nothing more than the usual attempt by some robber to steal names and sell them back to flattered fools, and tossed it aside. “Bury it in Section 37,” I thought I heard him mutter as he turned back to what he had been doing.

  “Excuse me, please”—by then I thought I knew every corner of the library—“but you’ll have to tell me where that section is.”

  “Eh?” His head jerked up and around as if I had been eavesdropping. Catching up with himself, he waved me off the subject. “Never mind. Get back to the inventory and making eyes at Miss Rellis, why don’t you.”

  NOT LONG AFTER, I was met at the breakfast table by two long faces. Griff asked mournfully, “You heard what they’re doing to us now?”

  “I am barely out of bed, Griff, how could I?”

  “They’re cracking down,” said Hoop, equally doleful.

  I waited, but both informants were too overcome to provide anything more. Mystified, I had to look to Grace for an explanation.

  “The police have heard from a higher power,” she said with a frown. From the look on her, I translated that to mean the top floor of the Hennessy Building, home of the copper collar. “They’re arresting characters who hang out downtown without any business for being there.” For a change, she spoke to me in the old dulcet way, I supposed to make two sets of deaf ears perk up and listen in. “A couple of those come to mind at this table, don’t they.”

  “Spitting on the sidewalk, the cops call it,” Hoop said with disgust.

  “Vagrancy is another way of putting it,” Grace provided for my benefit.

  Griff burst out, “It’s that ‘unlawful assembly’ crap”—Grace did not rebuke him—“whatever name the buzzards put on it.”

  Still behind, I asked around the table: “What put the authorities on this rampage?”

  “The Wobblies,” Hoop and Griff answered together, while Grace’s expression said she had heard all this too many times, and she went off to the kitchen. The IWW wanted to cut in and take the lead in the miners’ struggle with Anaconda—it just wasn’t right, my tablemates stated. From what they heard, the specter of operatives filtering into town to mold discontented workers of the Hill into a radical legion had thrown Butte’s powers that be into a tizzy. Hence, jail awaited anyone deemed a “vagrant.”

  When the law is bent that way, a detour around it is sometimes needed. That morning I went to the library by the back-alley route shown me by Russian Famine, just to be on the safe side.

  TO MY SURPRISE, that lunchtime, Rab was mum about this newest tussle over who would contol the Hill. I don’t know what I expected to be in sight when we settled at the top of the library steps as usual—the Hennessy Building being stormed like the Bastille by maddened Wobblies, perhaps—but the streets were placid, only punctuated here and there by strolling policemen who looked vaguely embarrassed. Rab was chattering on about Melville and whether anyone who wasn’t vitally interested in blubber actually ever read every page of Moby-Dick, but there was something bubbling under that which should have alerted me. Nonetheless, I was caught by surprise when a lean figure, brisk and businesslike in a somber suit but with his hat pulled low, peeled away from the concourse of patrons in and out of the library and dropped onto the steps beside us. “See what I mean about the Wobs spelling trouble, Professor?”

  “I suppose I do, Jared,” I answered him as equably as I could. “There seem to be a lot of ways to spell that in Butte.” I watched with envy as he nestled in next to Rab and was rewarded with a kiss and a sandwich. Curious as to why he was dressed up, I asked: “What’s the occasion? ”

  “None in particular,” Jared provided between bites. “I just don’t want to look like somebody who might spit on the sidewalk.” A policeman went by on leadfooted patrol, giving us hardly a glance. “You can almost feel sorry for the dumb cops,” he mused. “Almost.”

  The police on puppet strings were not the only ones entitled to sympathy in the situation, I could tell; the crackdown plainly hindered the activities of the miners’ union, and I charitably said something of the sort to Jared.

  “An opportunity for a strategic withdrawal, we called it in the army,” came the dry response.

  “Extra syllables aside, I believe that means ‘retreat’?” I made sure.

  “You might say that,” he granted. “But going a different direction, even backwards,” he munched on the matter along with his sandwich, “gives a chance to gain some ground somewhere else, doesn’t it?”

  Rab, eyes alight, had been flicking glances back and forth between us. “You’d better ask him, love,” she prompted. “Mr. Morgan and I have to get back to whaling all too soon.”

  The ancients who invented storytelling knew to the instant when drama must put on a human mask. The soaring ambition of Icarus to consort with the sun, before the first feather melted from his wings and wafted down and down to the waiting Aegean Sea. The echo of the knight’s heartbeat within his armor before he slays the dragon. Some
such flutter in the curtain of fate, now that I look back on everything that was about to happen, came with Jared Evans that noontime.

  “You brought this on yourself, Professor,” he said as though I didn’t know any better. His dark eyes held a glimmer as he went on: “Remember when you were telling me why ‘pie in the sky’ gets in a person’s head and won’t leave? The ‘nimo gizmo’ side of things, you called it?”

  “The mnemonic aspect,” I was glad to clarify. “It derives from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and—”

  “That’s what I’m saying, the union needs that kind of brain food.” Past the brim of his hat I could see Rab glistening with interest. Jared scanned around as if scouting enemy terrain and lowered his voice. “I got to thinking about what you’d said and it hit me—why shouldn’t the union have a song like that?” He made a fist. “Something that shows our spirit. There on Miners Day, when the band played ‘Men of Harlech,’ I damn near bawled and I wasn’t the only one. That kind of thing. I mean, hell, up against Anaconda, we’re in a fight just as much as any army.” I practically had to shield my eyes in the face of his fiery determination. It took only one look at Jared to know he was purposeful as a harpoon, and another at Rab to remind me that the whiff of anything venturesome was catnip to her. I had to admit, the two of them were made for Butte.

  “Professor?” He spoke now as if taking me deep into his confidence. “You see where I’m going with this?”

  “Vaguely. You have in mind musical phraseology that will rally—”

  He didn’t wait for me to finish. “A song of our own that will make the Wobblies sound like sick cats. And that’s where you come in.”