Work Song Page 5

  “You look like a bookworm on a spree.”

  I am of medium height, but when I turned around, I was seeing straight into a white cloud of beard. Considerably above that, a snowy cowlick brushed against furrows of the forehead. In a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, the man frowning down at me had considerable girth at the waist and narrowed at the chest and shoulders; like the terrain around us, he sloped.

  Caught by surprise, I had no idea what to make of this apparition confronting me amid the books. The beard was as full as that of Santa Claus, but there was no twinkle of Christmas nor any other spirit of giving in those glacial blue eyes.

  Keeping my own voice low, I responded: “Butte is rich in its library holdings, as I assume we both have discovered?”

  “Finest collection west of Chicago. Too bad the town doesn’t have the brains to match the books,” he drawled at full volume. “Quite a reader, are you? Who do you like?”

  Appropriately or not, my gaze caught on a lovely marbled copy of Great Expectations. “Dickens,” I began a whispered confession that could have gone on through legions of names. “There’s a person who could think up characters.”

  “Hah.” My partner in conversation reached farther along in the shelves of fiction. “I’ll stick with Stevenson, myself.” He fondled along the gilt-titled set of volumes from boyish adventure to phantasmagoria of shape-shifting souls. “It takes a Scotchman to know the sides of life.” Abruptly he swung around, towering over me again, and demanded loudly: “You like Kipling, or don’t you?”

  Oh, was I tempted to recite: ‘What reader’s relief is in store / When the Rudyards cease from kipling / And the Haggards ride no more.’ Instead I put a thumb up and then down, meanwhile murmuring, “His stories are splendid sleight of hand, the poetry is all thumbs.”

  “Not short of opinion, are you.” He fixed a look on me as if he had shrewdly caught me at something. “Saw you down there, pawing at Caesar. English isn’t good enough for you?”

  “Lux ex libris,” I tried to put this absolute stranger in his place, “whatever the language on the page.”

  “If light comes from books,” he drawled back, “how come Wood-row Wilson isn’t brighter than he is?”

  That stopped me. Was I really expected to debate the intellect of the president of the United States within hearing of everyone in the building?

  Just then a couple of elderly ladies entered the Reading Room below, still chattering softly from the street. Frowning so hard the beard seemed to bristle, my companion leaned over the mezzanine railing. “Quiet!” he bellowed.

  That legendary pairing, madman and library, seemed to be coming true as I watched. All heads now were turned up toward us, the woman at the desk whipping her eyeglasses on and glowering in our direction. I envisioned arrest for disturbing the literary peace, even if I was barely an accomplice. “Perhaps,” I whispered urgently, “we should adjourn to a less public spot, lest the librarian take steps—”

  “Ignoramus, I am the librarian.” Straightening himself to new white heights of cowlick, he frowned fiercely down at me. “Do you genuinely not know who the hell you’re talking to?”

  “I remember no introduction,” I said coolly.

  He waved that off. “Samuel S. Sandison. Come on into my office before you cause any more ruckus, I want to talk to you.”

  I hesitated before following, but the ravishing books were too much of a lure. Edging through the doorway of his overflowing office at the back of the mezzanine, I made sure that the nameplate on the desk matched what he had told me. Sandison sandwiched himself behind the desk and wordlessly pointed me to a book-stacked chair. I cleared away the pile and gingerly sat. “Mr. Sandison, the books you have here . . .” I hardly had the words. “They’re works of art in every way.”

  “They ought to be.” He stroked his beard, as if petting a cat. “A good many of them are mine.”

  “Yours? ”

  “Hell yes. From the ranch.”

  “Ah. The ranch. You were a livestock entrepreneur, I take it? Sheep?”

  “Cattle.” He delivered me a look that made me want to duck. Well, how was I to know? From the train, Montana expanses appeared to me to be as populous with fleeces as the heavens are with clouds.

  Sandison leaned across the mess of his desk as though I might be hard of hearing as well as dim of intellect. “You mean you have never heard of the Triple S ranch?”

  “I confess I have not, but I have been in town only a short time.”

  “It’s gone now,” he growled. “That’s why I’m here. It was the biggest spread in the state; everybody and his brother knew the SSS brand.”

  “Mmm. By ‘brand,’ do you mean the practice of searing a mark onto the animal?”

  “That’s what branding is. It’s the Latin and Greek of the prairie.”

  That startled me. “Intriguing. And so SSS would translate to—?”

  He laughed harshly. “Saddle up, sit tight, and shut up, my riders called it. Most of them stuck with me anyway.” An odd glint came to him. “I had an army of them, you know.”

  “I regret to say, I am not seer enough myself to know the intricacies of reading burnt cowhide.” It fell flat with him. “But I am eager to grasp the principle behind alphabetizing one’s cows—”

  “It’s not alphabetical, fool. Brandabetical.”

  “—excellent word! The brandabetical concept, then. Do you start with the full lingual entity, in this case ‘saddle up, sit tight, and shut up,’ and condense from there?”

  “Hell no,” he let out, and immediately after that, “but you’re right in a way. SSS stood for Seymour-Stanwood-Sandison. I had to have backers in the ranch operation. Money men.” Those last two words he practically spat. Eyeing me as though I were guilty by association, he drawled: “I saw you with your nose stuck in Polk. I suppose you’re another refined hobo who heard about the Hill and came here to make a killing.”

  “A living, I had in mind.”

  “Hah. You packing around any education worth the description?”

  “The Oxford variety.”

  He looked at me skeptically.

  “I bootstrapped my way through.”

  “Another shoeleather philosopher,” he grumbled. “The Wobblies were full of them; they must empty out the bughouse into Butte every so often.”

  “I see my little joke did not catch on. Actually, I did work my way through an institution of higher learning—the University of Chicago.”

  He tugged at his beard. “In other words,” he said as if it might be my epitaph, “all you know anything about comes from books.”

  I bridled. “That is hardly a fair assessment of—”

  “Never mind. You’re hired.”

  “You are mistaken, I haven’t even made up my mind where to—here?”

  “Here is where the books are, ninny.”

  5

  Sam Sandison? He’s meaner than the devil’s half brother. If you’re gonna be around him, you better watch your sweet—”

  “The rules, Griff.”

  “—step, is all I was gonna say, Mrs. Faraday.” Griffith speared a potato and passed the dish onward to me, along with a gimlet gaze. “You must have hit him when he was hard up for help, Morrie. He don’t hire just anybody.”

  “I was as taken by surprise as the rest of you appear to be.” Announcement of my sudden employment at the library had set my suppermates back in their chairs, for some reason that I could not decipher. “What can you tell me of my new lord and master? None of you were so bashful about the business practices of the Anaconda Company.” The gravy boat came my way, but nothing else of substance from any of the threesome. “For a start, Griff, what exactly is the meaning of ‘meaner than the devil’s half brother’ in regard to Samuel Sandison?”

  “He’s one of the old bucks of the country, tougher than”—cutting strenuously at the piece of meat on his plate, Griff glanced in Grace’s direction and hedged off—“rawhide. Ha
d a ranch they say you couldn’t see to the end of. I don’t just know where. You, Hoop?”

  Hooper gestured vaguely west. “Someplace out there in scatteration.”

  “Employing, he told me, a veritable army of cowboys—but I would imagine any livestock enterprise of that size needed a rugged crew and a firm hand?”

  “You’re lucky he’s only bossing books around anymore,” was the only answer from Griff. Vigorously chewing, he turned toward the head of the table. “Heck of a meal, Mrs. Faraday.”

  I sampled the stringy meat and sent an inquiring look. “Not chicken.”

  Grace shook her head.

  “Rabbit, then.”

  “My, you do know your way around food,” she remarked, a compliment or not I couldn’t tell. It occurred to me how much I was going to miss the tablefuls at wakes.

  TAKING LEAVE of the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home took some doing.

  “As I have been trying to say, Mr. Peterson, I am sorry—”

  “But you’re the most popular cryer I’ve had in ages.” He himself appeared ready to weep.

  “—to have to give notice, but another opportunity has presented itself.”

  He cast a mournful look at the ledger. “One of our busiest times since St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “I am sure an equally qualified cryer will be called forth by the need.”

  “There’ll always be an opening here for you,” he said feelingly, the lids of the caskets standing at attention behind him.

  THAT WAS THE END of being chased every night by shadows. Yet something lurked from that experience, the sensation of being trailed through life by things less than visible. I tried telling myself Butte after dark simply was feverishly restless, what with the thirst of thousands of miners built up in the hot underground tunnels being assuaged in speakeasies, and desire of another kind busily paying its dues in Venus Alley—practically nightly, Grace turned away some lit-up Lothario seeking a house of the other sort. In that city of thin air and deep disquiets, wasn’t it to be expected that even shadows would have the fidgets? It is surprising how persuasive you can be when talking into your own ear.

  So, I set out from the boardinghouse that first morning with a sense of hope singing in me as always at the start of a new venture. Samuel Sandison had instructed me to present myself at the library before it opened at nine, and I knew he did not mean a minute later. When I approached the rather fanciful gray granite Gothic building on the central street called Broadway—modesty seemed to have no place in Butte—I saw a cluster of people outside the front door and was heartened by this sight of an eager citizenry lined up to get at the literary holdings.

  In their midst, however, loomed Sandison, and bringing up the rear was unmistakably the Reading Room matron, looking sour. The group proved to be the entire library staff, all the way to janitor. Sandison was counting heads before letting anyone through the arched doorway—the same mode of management, I was to learn, he had used on his cowboys each morning at the horse corral.

  He took notice of my presence with a vague gesture. “This is Morgan, everybody. He’ll be puttering around the place from now on.”

  I filed in with the rest of the staff, happily conscious of the palatial grandeur, the Tuscan red wainscoting, the dark oaken beams set against the ceiling panels of white and gold, the all-seeing portrait of Shakespeare above the Reading Room doorway. And beyond, the regal reds and greens and gilts of those books of Sandison’s collection, the best of their kind anywhere.

  But no sooner were we in the building than he cut me out of the herd, and, just as adroitly, the matron of the Reading Room. “Miss Runyon will show you the ropes,” Sandison provided with another of those gestures that might mean anything. “Come on up when she’s had her fill of you,” he dismissed us and mounted the stairs to his office.

  Miss Runyon and I considered each other.

  “What foolishness has he put you in charge of?” she demanded, as though she had caught me trespassing.

  “That seems yet to be determined.”

  “That man.” Her voice had a startling deep timbre, as if the words resounded in her second chin. “He runs this place to suit himself. The trustees would never have named him librarian but for those precious books of his.” Clapping her chained eyeglasses onto her formidable nose, she directed: “Come along, you had better know the catalogue system.”

  Miss Runyon kept me in tow as we circumnavigated the Reading Room, her realm and her orb, her temple and her fortress, she let me know in every manner possible. I took note of the goodly assortment of dictionaries and cyclopedias, and the respectable selection of magazines and the newspapers racked on spine sticks, all of it recited to me as if I were a blind man in a museum. One oddity, though, she paid no attention to; conspicuously paid it no heed, if I was not mistaken. It was a display case, glassed over, taking up one corner of the room. My mild inquiry about it brought:

  “Pfft, that. The boys’ dollhouse.”

  Naturally that increased my curiosity and I went over to it, Miss Runyon clopping after me. Encased there, with plentiful nose smudges and handprints on the glass testifying to the popularity of its viewing, sat an entire miniature mine. It looked so amazingly complete, I half expected it to bring up teaspoonfuls of earth from under the library. Headframe, machine house, elevator shafts, tunnels, tiny tracks and ore cars, the entirety was a Lilliputian working model. With disdain Miss Runyon told me the diorama had been built for a court case over a mining claim and afterward donated to the library. “He”—her eyes swept upward toward Sandison’s office—“insists it sit here in the way. It’s a nuisance to keep clean.”

  “Wonders often are,” I murmured, still taken with the remarkable model of the workings of the Hill.

  “Now, then,” Miss Runyon said haughtily, “is that enough of an initiation into librarianship for you?”

  “The most thorough, Miss Runyon, since my introduction to the Reading Room of the British Museum.”

  I seemed to have invoked the Vatican to a Mother Superior. “You, you have actually been—?”

  “Under that great domed ceiling, with its delicate blue and accents of gold, with every word ever written in English at one’s beck and call,” I dreamily sketched aloud, “yes, I confess I have. And would you believe, Miss Runyon, the very day I walked in, my reader’s ticket in my hand, the seat of destiny was vacant.”

  “The seat of—?”

  “Seat number three, right there in the first great semicircle of desks.” I leaned confidingly close to her. “Where Karl Marx sat, those years when he was writing Das Kapital. I will tell you, Miss Runyon, sitting in that seat, I could feel the collective knowledge, like music under the skin, of all libraries from Alexandria onward.”

  With a last blink at me, Miss Runyon retreated to her desk and duty.

  WHEN I WENT UP to Sandison’s office, I found him standing at its cathedral-like window, trying to peek out at the weather through an eyelet of whorled clear glass. “Damned stained glass,” he grumbled. “What do the nitwits think a window is for?” He rotated around to me. His old-fashioned black suit was as mussed as if he had flung it on in the dark, and instead of shoes he wore scuffed cowboy boots that added still more inches to his height. “The downstairs dragon show you every mouse hole, did she?”

  “Quite an educational tour. What I am wondering, Mr. Sandison—”

  “Hold it right there.” He held up a rough hand as he moved to his oversize desk chair and deposited himself in it heavily. “When somebody calls me that, I feel like I’m around a banker or lawyer or some other pickpocket.”

  To escape that category, I asked, “Then what form of address am I to use?”

  He looked across his desk at me conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you what. Call me Sandy. The only other person I let do that is my wife.” He chortled like a boy pleased with a new prank. “It’ll drive that old bat Runyon loco.”

  “Sandy, then,” I tried it on for size, none t
oo comfortably. “What I need to know is the scope of my job.”

  “I suppose.” Rubbing his beard, he gazed around the cluttered room as if some task for me might be hiding behind one of the piles of books. “Morgan”—there was a dip of doubt in his tone as he spoke it—“how are you at juggling?”

  “Three balls in the air at once is a skill that persists from boyhood,” I answered cautiously, “but when it comes to ninepins—”

  “No, no—the calendar, oaf, the calendar.” Irritably he pawed around in the pieces of paper that carpeted his desk and finally came up with that item. “People always want to use this damn place, they need a room to hold this meeting or that, you’d think a library was a big beehive. Myself, I don’t see why they can’t just check out a couple of books and go home and read. But no, they bunch up and want to cram in here and talk the ears off one another half the night.” He squinted as if drawing a bead on the offenders penciled in on various dates. “The Shakespeare Society. The Theosophists. The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle. The League of Nations Advocates. The Jabberwockians. The Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group. And that’s hardly the half of them, wanting some damn night of their own to come in here and take up space. They’ve all got to be juggled.”

  “I think I can tend to that, Mr.—”

  He shot me a warning glance.

  “—Sandy.”

  There may have been a cunning smile within the beard. The librarian of Butte, for everything that entailed, settled more deeply into his chair. “I figured if you’re a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full.” He passed the much-scrawled-upon calendar to me. “They’re all yours now, Morgan,” said Samuel Sandison with that intonation I came to know so well.

  Looking back, that exchange set a telling pattern. You would think, with two persons in one cloistered office, for he had me clear a work space for myself in a corner, that he might sooner or later call me Morrie. Yet that familiar form of address never passed his lips. Each time and every time, he would either preface or conclude what passed for conversation between us with a drawled Morgan? even when it wasn’t a question. As if it were my first name.