Work Song (22 page)

Had she been ticking these off on her fingers, she now was out of fingers. Looking as doubtful as she sounded, she concluded:

“For now, you may as well stay. One more thing, though. We need to be as clear as we can about each other. Yesterday was too, um, too forward of me, Morrie, and it wasn’t really fair to you.” Something more than an itch was making her chalky face twitch. “You shouldn’t get the wrong idea and feel . . .” There she faltered.

“Taken up with,” I finished for her, and I was surprised at how sad it sounded.

 

 

THIS WAS ONE of the nights of the week when I had to go back to the library and lock up after the evening groups, and I trudged off to do it with the old weight of disappointment on me.

First Rose, now Grace. Rejection as soon as someone personable and pretty took a good look into me, whatever it was they thought they saw.

Women were the fairer sex? What was fair about their fingersnap judgments of me? Even Sandison, grumpy and flatfooted around women, had found someone to put up with him, the redoubtable Dora. While my best efforts caused them to dust their hands of me or break out in hives.

I felt lonely as a castaway, and, what was worse, from present indications I had better get used to it.

My acidic mood was at odds with the gentle summer dusk, spreading down from the Hill over the brick canyons of the city, casting the streets into picturesque shadow. That sank through to me, and a couple of times I whipped into a doorway and looked back. There was no sign of goons, at least. Brass knuckles seemed to get the job done, although I couldn’t see how to apply that to courtship.

In the library basement when I arrived, the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle was still going strong. A balding young man with the look of a bank clerk was onstage, reciting in round tones:
“
.
. . now when heaven holds starry night in its keep / and on moonlit Olympus, the Muses gently sleep.”
Ordinarily I am all in favor of the Muses, but tonight I shooed the literature lovers mercilessly, and they filed out of the auditorium in shy pairings. The big room echoing with emptiness now, I was stacking away the chairs when I heard a single set of footsteps rapid on the stairs. The goons always traveled as a pair. Or did they? Just in case, I hefted a chair, ready to hurl.

“What the devil,” Jared stopped short as he came through the doorway and saw me with the chair in my hands, “are you cutting the janitor out of his job?”

“It’s his lodge night, so he’s excused early,” I said crossly. “My employer has a habit of bending the rules for this, that, and the other, except where I’m concerned.”

“You need a union,” he joked, or not, lending a hand with the stray chairs. He looked at me curiously. “That poor thing who’s your landlady told me you’ve about taken up residence in the library.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I imagine. Anyway, I’m glad I could track you down.” He glanced around to every corner of the auditorium even though we were alone. “Any luck with you know what?”

“Luck is the residue of endeavor, in some situations,” I responded, still not in my best mood. “Come on up to the office.”

Our footsteps were magnified in the empty darkened building as we went upstairs, and I sensed Jared was jumpy in the unfamiliar surroundings. But if situations were reversed, I would not be particularly at ease in a mineshaft, would I. When I switched on a light in the office, he stayed by the door and took everything in. “So this is the lion’s den.” His gaze came to rest on me, with that flavoring of curiosity again. “I have to hand it to you, you’ve got guts, holed up in here with him all day long. I’ve heard about old Triple S since I was a kid.”

“He hasn’t taken my head off my shoulders, so far,” I muttered, my attention on the contents of the hiding spot in the cabinet where the ledgers were kept, the one place I was sure Sandison would not go near now that he had shed the bookkeeping to me. I brought out the pink sheets and my pages of calculations of each mine’s differential between raw tons of ore and tally of processed copper. “Is this what you had in mind?”

Not wasting a moment, Jared laid out my pages on the nearest desk—Sandison’s—and ran his finger down the figures. When he reached my totals, he pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and compared. His whoop startled me, and probably the pigeons on the library roof. “You’ve nailed it! Anaconda’s been feeding us low numbers on the finished copper. We’ll give them holy hell in the negotiations now and they won’t even know how we figured it out.” Exuberantly he batted my shoulder. “Rab thinks you’re the greatest thing going. I’m starting to see why, Professor, if I can call you that.”

“I’m flattered, I suppose.”

As the two of us headed downstairs, I could make out just enough of Jared in the library’s moonlit atmosphere to know he could hardly wait to turn the tables on Anaconda. Now I was curious. “You have the lost dollar back. What are you still negotiating about so urgently?”

“You name it. Working conditions. Hiring and firing. Safety.” His voice turned hollow. “On first shift, just this morning, one of our men in the Muckaroo was killed when a tunnel roof fell in on him. Left a wife and six kids.” I recalled his delivering the union tribute—cash and consolation—to the widow at my first wake as a cryer; again and again, from the sound of it, he faced that duty.

Mustering himself now, Jared went on with what he had been saying. “All of it causes bad feelings in the union. There are those who say getting the wage back is what counted, let’s don’t beat our heads against the shed on these other matters until we get some pay-days behind us. And then there’s plenty who are ready to shut down the Hill again like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if the company doesn’t give us every last thing we want.”

He glanced sideways at me. “Professor?” In the splendid acoustics—we were in the foyer by now—he sounded like a messenger of fate in a Greek drama as he laid matters out. “I wouldn’t guess you’re a military man at heart, but you maybe know what an accelerated march is. It covers ground a lot faster than parade cadence, but it’s not a run that makes your tongue hang out. That’s about what I’m trying for. We can’t let up much on Anaconda or things slip back. But we’re never going to turn copper mining into a picnic, no matter what we try. Either way, as I see it, those of us on the council have to keep things moving, just fast enough.” The next came out as if he were thinking to himself. “Particularly now.”

When I halted short of the front door and gave him a questioning look, Jared hesitated. “All right,” he granted, “Rab will probably blab this to you if I don’t. Anaconda isn’t our only problem—we’re scrambling to stay ahead of the Wobblies. The word is, they’re going to make a big push to take away our members.” He tilted his head to one side as if trying to see the situation from a fresh angle. “Who knows, if things had been different, maybe I’d be on their side. But I was born a union man. The union stuck up for the workingman on the Butte Hill all those years, every day of my father’s life when he went down into the mine. The Wobs always say they would, too, and take over the mines and everything else besides.” He shook his head. “I don’t trust that, Professor. It would go to hell in no time, I think. Look at Russia. The Bolshies did away with the Czar, and now they’re knocking off anybody they don’t like the looks of.”

I just listened, Jared needing to get the weight of fate off his chest; he had earned the right in the trenches that were the maw of the Great War.

“I have to hand it to the IWW,” he was saying ruefully, “they’re a persistent damn bunch. The last time they sent a bigtime organizer in here, the goons hung him from the railroad trestle. Lynched him. The old remedy, the Montana necktie.” With a laugh that had no humor in it, he gazed around at the grandeur of the library as though wondering how it and a lynching site a dozen blocks away could exist in the same realm of time. “Maybe I have Wobs on the brain,” he mused. “That one at the parade yesterday, singing that damn thing?” Jared Evans startled me again by mimicking, quite presentably, the phantom voice that had mocked the parading miners’ union with
pie in the sky, when you die.
He banged his head with the heel of his hand. “It gets in there and I can’t get it out.”

“It’s called a mnemonic effect,” I informed him. “Something that prompts remembering, usually voluntary but not necessarily. A musical phrase is particularly suited. For instance, ‘Camptown—’ ”

At the library door now, Jared put up his hands to hold off my discourse.

“I appreciate the definition. But I’ll just call it trouble. Good night, Professor.”

 

 

I WAS WARY in every direction I could think of, those next few days. But there was no sign of lurking goons, and on the home front, Grace—still a picture of misery, under the ghostly layer of lotion—did not come up with any further charges against my personality. She and I were painfully polite with one another, to the point where Hoop and Griff grew nervous around us. They talked a blue streak at meal-times to cover our silences, and while I learned a lot about assorted topics of interest to retired Welsh miners, it was a relief each morning to go off to work at the library.

Until, that is, the pertinent day when Sandison spun around in his chair as soon as I stepped into the office and announced, “Morgan, it’s time we get some ammunition to use on the trustees.”

I knew “we” meant me, so I simply cocked my head to listen.

“You’ve done a good enough job of balancing the ledger, the board can’t find anything to kick about in there,” he went on. “Now they’re fretting about where the money is going to come from for new carpets, all the wear and tear we’ve had in here lately. I keep telling them any board of trustees worth its name would just pony it up, but they want to steal it out of the book budget, the damn thieves.”

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.