Sweet Thunder Read online

  “That’s what I mean, oaf. If he was an unquestionable hero, he’d have his own epic poem, wouldn’t he.”

  “But, I was about to say, if antiquity’s penchant for dualism has given us Janus, a god with faces looking in opposite directions, why can’t there be a twofold reflection of character in the myth, or myths, if you will, of Ajax? Perhaps representing mind and matter?” I thought I had him there, but Sandison just snorted.

  “Pah. I said he was a two-bit soldier, didn’t I? A bit of this and a bit of that. You should learn to listen, rattlebrain.”

  About then we rounded the corner toward downtown, leaving mythology behind. Like Grace, I nearly had to pinch myself into believing my own senses, for the view ahead stretched like no other in America, with the winter-capped Rocky Mountains rising to the Continental Divide seemingly just beyond the city limits, and every manner of dwelling place and work spot of a hundred thousand people jumbled in between here and there. It was as if a section of Pittsburgh had been grafted onto an alpine scene, the power of industry and that of nature juxtaposed. The contest between the two was in the air, literally. You might think a city dominated by smokestacks and dump heaps would look its best under a covering of snow, but logic did not always apply to Butte. The weather could not keep up with production on the Hill, its low industrial rumble lending to the illusion that the humpbacked rise simmered like a volcano, belching constant smoke and venting muck from dozens of mineshafts, so that the snow being shoveled from paths and doorways as we passed was a mushy gray. “We need a good blizzard,” Sandison prescribed as we made our way down the sloping streets toward the business district. Once again I marveled at my benefactor-cum-boarder, as wintry himself in his silvery wreath of beard and breath as Father Frost of the nursery rhyme. How did it go—King of the whitened clime, ever there / Leaving tokens of wintertime everywhere. Season in, season out, Samuel Sandison was like no one else I had ever encountered or expected to.

  Conversation was a sometime thing with this uncommon man, I knew from experience, and so to keep matters going I pitched in with topics ranging from the weather to politics. As ever, Sandison’s responses varied from grunts and silences to pronouncements that snapped a person’s head around. As the saying was, life was serious when it made him; in all the time I shared his office, the only real mirth he showed was when he spotted a bargain in a rare-book catalog and would let out a “Heh!” and smile in the deeps of his beard. Yet there was almost no other person, save Grace, whom I found more compelling.

  Just now he was grumbling about the recent national election, which had picked as president the most wooden member of the U.S. Senate. “Warren G. Harding is barely bright enough to operate an umbrella. Damn it, what’s this country coming to?”

  “History reminds us that worse has happened, Sandy. You will recall that Caligula elected his horse to the Roman Senate.”

  “Hah. The American electorate has chosen the north end of that animal going south.”

  As we talked on, our breath wreathing our beards, that feeling of being in the company of fate came over me, perhaps just from nearness to Samuel Sandison, a figure monumental enough, Janus-like, to have “The Earl of Hell” inscribed on one side of him and “Progenitor of the Finest Book Collection West of Chicago” on the other. And somewhere between, the unlikely genie who bestowed a mansion as if giving away an old suit of clothes. Impetuously I told him he must inform me or Grace if there was anything we could do to cushion his life at the house. “I know you must miss Dora greatly.”

  “About like losing one eye,” he said simply.

  Glancing at me and then away, he turned gruff again. “The natural order of things turned upside down somehow, Morgan. Who would have thought you’d be the married man and I’d be the tangle-foot bachelor.”

  By now we were approaching his domain, his realm and his scepter, the Butte Public Library, and my heart skipped at the first full sight of it. How I loved that castle of literature, a granite Gothic extravaganza, with its welcoming arches like the entranceway of a cathedral and a balcony neatly cupped above and a corner tower with its peak inscribing the sky. The library’s holdings were the even greater glory, with beautiful first editions of the output of authors from Adams, Henry, to Zola, Émile, shelved along with lesser works. Again like a many-sided figure, Sandison as librarian was also the institution’s prime benefactor by mingling these treasures on loan from his own collection with the library’s standard fare, an act of stupendous generosity that also made it impossible to fire him.

  A block away, overtaken by so many memories good and the other sort, I was slowing to such an extent that Sandison looked over his shoulder at me. “Coming in?”

  “Not today, Sandy.”

  “Suit yourself, if you’d rather loaf than improve yourself,” he drawled, lumbering off to where the staff awaited him as usual in a line at the top of the library steps. With a pang, I watched him count them in through the arched doorway as he had counted cowboys at the corral in his previous life.

  On my way back to the house, it was only when I stopped at a newsstand to buy the Sporting News and what passed for a local paper, the wretched Anaconda-owned Butte Daily Post, that the odd fact occurred to me. Sandison in our wide-ranging conversation had not bothered to bring up the copper company and its mailed-fist grip on the city at all. Which was a bit like that Sherlock Holmes mystery of the dog that did not bark in the night.

  3

  I HAD NEVER BEEN DOMESTIC. Which is to say, a householder, owner of a home of any sort—let alone a moose of a house up there with the most grandiose of them on Horse Thief Row, thanks to Sandison’s quirky bequest. Back a decade and more ago, my brother and I and the love of his life necessarily dwelled under the same roof during the rise of his career, but the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, when we were in the money, was such address as the three of us had. Therefore, Ajax’s pop-eyed stare each time I put a key in the big front door of what was now the Morris and Grace Morgan domicile was apt enough.

  The house, the mansion—the manse, as some imp within me couldn’t help categorizing it—this home-owning opportunity or burden or responsibility or whatever it constituted, made me look at myself in a new way. To be painfully honest about it, until then I amounted to something like a tourist excursioning through life. Episode followed episode, never uninteresting but somewhat lacking in basic design. I lived by my wits, sufficient company most of the time. But now there was Grace to be thought of. Didn’t I owe her, if not myself and my page in the book of life, a more settled and assured existence? In a word, domestication?

  It would have been less a test of my resolve if the most perfect example of carrying a house on one’s back were something other than the snail.

  • • •

  The pair of them were hard at it, Griff whanging away at a loosened stairway runner while Hoop handed him carpet tacks, when I returned later in the day after a trek around town scouting for employment, a discouraging exercise if there ever was one. With Montana again on hard times—the Treasure State, as it was known, seemed stuck in the mining-camp cycle of wild boom and precipitous bust—any jobs that I was more or less fitted for were scarcer than hen’s teeth, which left me facing the prospect I dreaded. The C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home. “There’ll always be an opening here for you,” Creeping Pete, which was to say Peterson, long since had assured me amid the display of caskets with lids up. Briefly I’d served as his establishment’s cryer at Dublin Gulch wakes when I first alighted in Butte, but this time around, I would have to plead sobriety and confine myself to the undertaking parlor; the rest of the nation may have signed on to Prohibition, but in this city, three hundred saloons merely turned into three hundred speakeasies and bootleg liquor flowed so freely at wakes that the corpse’s brain wasn’t the only one being pickled. I had no doubt that Creeping Pete would make room for me on the premises of the Modern Mortuary and Funeral
Home, however. Somebody had to put on a fixed smile and sell those caskets. Accordingly, I was not in my best mood as I headed for the kitchen to tell Grace she was about to have an undertaker’s assistant for a husband.

  “By the way, Morrie,” Griff called between slams of his hammer. “You’re wanted.”

  That stopped me as if impaled. The vision of oneself portrayed in every post office in the land with that incriminating word beneath would halt any thinking person. Confusion asked the sizable question: for what?

  Griff sized me up as if putting a price on me himself. “Got the note on you, Hoop?”

  “Somewhere.” The other oldster patted his pockets to finally retrieve it. With no small measure of trepidation, I unfolded the message.

  Mr. Morgan—

  Welcome back to Butte—we’ve missed you something awful. Jared needs to talk to you, and you know I always want to. Meet us at the usual place, the usual time, tonight.

  Yours until the fountain pen runs dry,

  Rab

  I checked to make sure. “This was brought by—?”

  “That kid,” said Hoop. “Thin as a whisker.”

  Relieved, I went directly to the kitchen to inform Grace. Slicing onions, she was in tears, but greeted me with a world-beating smile all the same. As Hoop and Griff and I knew and Sandison was about to find out, her years of balancing a boardinghouse budget had made her a canny if unconventional grocery shopper, and today’s triumph was a bargain on rabbit. “Those French. Remember that meal, lapin à la something or other?”

  Touching her cheek to wipe away a trickle, I managed to look regretful as I told her to set one less plate for supper. “Jared Evans wishes to see me about something.”

  “Of course you need to go, then,” she said at once. The leader of the mineworkers’ union inspired almost royal loyalty, and I had been proud to stand with him in a certain episode in 1919. “Still,” she sniffled from the effect of the onions, “it’s a shame you’ll miss the stewed rabbit.”

  • • •

  The spacious eatery with the big red welcoming sign NO WAITING! YOUR FOOD AWAITS YOU! was called the Purity Cafeteria. Butte never undernamed anything. I scanned the ballroom-size dining area but could not spot Rab and Jared yet, and so went to the serving counter at the back and, with a mental apology to Grace, got myself a pasty. Fortunately pronounced like past, not paste, this was a meat-and-vegetables dish encased in pastry crust, introduced to Butte by Cornish miners, and in my experience, that rare thing, a hearty delicacy. It proved to be so, again this evening, as I ate, watching the traffic of customers waiting on themselves, until a wraithlike presence at my side caught me by surprise.

  “Hiya, sir.”

  “The same to you, Famine!” The boy had grown in height the past year, but not at all in girth, still skinny as an undernourished greyhound. Straw hair flopping over his pale brow as he stood on one stilt leg and then the other, he retained the personification put on him by schoolmates, Russian Famine, which he greatly preferred to Wladislaw. Close behind the lad, natural authority resting on him as ever, Jared Evans provided me a serious smile along with a handshake and the greeting, “Professor, how you doing?” Then came the whirlwind, Rab, exclaiming, “Mr. Morgan!” and flinging herself into hugging me while I was only half onto my feet.

  What a family tableau they made as they settled at the table with me. The boy restless in every bone but his mind at ease, I could tell, in the company of these trusted grown-ups. Jared, lean and chiseled, his dark eyes reflective of battles he had been through, from the trenches of death in France to the sometimes deadly front lines of the miners’ union contending with the copper bosses of Butte. To my thinking, Jared Evans always looked freshly ironed, with a touch of starch. Not his clothing; Jared himself. On that score, though, I noticed he was better dressed than I remembered, which I credited to the influence of Rab, frisky clothes horse that she had been since school days. Properly named “Barbara” until in a classroom moment I never regretted I permitted her to flip that around to “Rabrab,” and now a teacher herself, she still exuded the zeal of a schoolgirl, albeit one who happened to have the chest and legs of a circus bareback rider. Jared had made a fortunate catch with her. And she him. Russian Famine luckiest of all, nearly a street orphan but for these two as his guardians. I could tell the boy thought the sun and moon rose and set in them, the pair in his parentless life to look up to.

  Gratified to be reunited with them so fast, I wondered, “How did you know I was back in town?” Rab only wrinkled her nose as though the whereabouts of Morris Morgan were common knowledge, while Jared winked and said, “Moccasin telegraph,” the old rubric for the soft-footed way news travels. Laughing as much as we talked in catching up, we shared quick stories, including mine of the mansion bequest from Sandison. The fidgety seventh-grader doing his best to follow the maunderings of adults brightened. “Ain’t he the one called the Earl of—”

  “Careful with your language, Famine,” Rab admonished.

  “I was gonna say ‘heck,’” he maintained guilelessly.

  I chuckled and asked the boy whether his current teacher was as strict as that stickler last year, meaning Rab.

  “Got her again, don’t I,” he reported with a fresh outbreak of fidgets. “Her and me are in the hoosegow.”

  I blinked. “He means the detention school, up on the Hill,” Rab hastened to explain. “It’s a dormitory school, for boys who are truant too much or delinquent in other ways that their families can’t handle. They learn some shop work, along with regular classes. They can be a handful—I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Morgan, remembering what I was like—”

  “Justice is served,” I said it anyway with a smile tucked in my beard.

  “—but they tame down if treated right.” She left no doubt that was her calling, explaining that she was a day matron at the so-called hoosegow. “That way, Famine can come along and go to school under me.”

  “She’s terrible hard, sir,” the boy testified.

  “So are diamonds, my friend,” I said with a fond swipe at the hair perpetually clouding in on his eyes. Now Rab suggested the two of them tend to the matter of food, and Famine in a few bounds sprang ahead of her to the serving line.

  Silently proud, Jared watched them go, and then there were the two of us, and the topic always on the table in the shadow of the Hill, it seemed. I tried to put it diplomatically: “As those more statesmanlike than I might ask, how stands the union?”

  Jared tugged at his wounded ear, an answer in itself. A German bullet had clipped the lobe neatly off, lending him a swashbuckling look advantageous in leading an organization of hardened miners. He was every inch the combat veteran now, in more ways than one. “The war over here goes on and on,” he more than answered my question. “Anaconda just kills us more slowly than the Fritzies did.” By that, I assumed he meant the long-standing reputation of the Hill’s mines as the most dangerous anywhere, one mortal accident a week on the average, not counting conflagrations such as the Speculator fire, which claimed 164 lives, or the slow burn of silicosis in the lungs of hundreds of other doomed mineworkers. But no. Jared Evans practically blazed with fresh intensity as he leaned across the table toward me. “You missed the fireworks, Professor.” I listened in stunned silence as his recital of the happenings of the past year added to the frieze of Butte’s historic battles between labor and capital. The mineworkers’ union had been ending 1919 on a high note, literally, when Grace and I left on our extended honeymoon. With a newly contrived work song, which I and a highly unlikely collaborator in the person of Sam Sandison had a hand in, to serve as the rousing anthem of its struggle and Jared’s shrewd new generation of leadership, the union was intrepidly facing off against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company on the eternal issue of working conditions in the deadly mines. “The lost dollar” of wages, a cruel twenty percent cut Anaconda had arrogantly clipped
from mine pay, was won back that year by carefully spaced walkouts—the phrase “wildcat strike” was never uttered on the labor side—and mineworkers ten thousand strong were finding their voice in the words of that “Song of the Hill,” I back you and you back me, all one song in unity. All in all, matters had been brought to what seemed a favorable negotiating stage by the time Grace and I were boarding our train and bidding farewell to a copper-rich city with a fresh start of decade ahead of it. But in Jared’s telling, history brutally repeated itself when an unforeseen circumstance brought in troops again. That circumstance shocked me into exclaiming:

  “A general strike? Jared, that sounds extreme of you.”

  “The Wobblies forced our hand,” he said wearily. The radical Industrial Workers of the World whipped up such anti-Anaconda fervor, his explanation ran, that the mineworkers’ union had to side with them on the call to strike that past spring. A disastrous showdown followed, with guards outside the emblematic Neversweat Mine opening fire on pickets, killing one and wounding sixteen. Martial law was immediately imposed, miners saw no choice but to return to work, and Anaconda blacklisted anyone suspected of IWW sympathies.

  “That pretty well broke the Wobs’ power,” Jared concluded, “but it left us scrambling for some way to deal with Anaconda besides walking off the job into bayonets and bullets.” Good soldier that he was, he wryly credited the enemy who was always there: “Wouldn’t you know, they’re right back at it again, up there in the Hennessy Building, trying to make us swallow a pay cut. That’s right,” he registered my reaction, “the hogs are back at the trough.” Lowering his voice, he passed me a look with more behind it than he was saying. “I’ve given them something to think about, though, in who I’ve got negotiating for us. He not only tears into them about wages, he gives them holy hell every time about conditions in the mineshafts and the company goons who did the shooting at the Neversweat and you name it.” He hunched closer. “And that lets me— Professor, are you listening?”