Work Song (29 page)

“The house, Morrie,” she prompted, “the house!”

“Ah.” I scanned around. “New curtains?”

“All right, you,” she said in mock exasperation—at least I hoped it was mock. “There hasn’t been any dynamiting for days and days, has there?” She knocked on wood, but her smile was triumphant. “I was curious,” she continued in a confiding tone, “so I had Arthur’s old partner in the mines look into it for me. And guess what? The shaft under here is played out and Anaconda has had to seal it off. You can quit worrying about sleeping in a glory hole,” she teased.

Little did she know that the Chicago watery version had just passed me by. “Grace, that’s nice news,” I could say unreservedly. “Butte would not be the same without the Faraday Boarding House.”

Bouncing up when she heard Hoop and Griff on the stairs, she went off to fry their breakfast.

The two of them came in grinning, grinned at each other, then grinned at me some more as they sat at the table.

“We been thinking,” said Hoop as if it was something new.

“You’ve got yourself a lulu of a problem, slipping a couple hundred people into the library the night the song gets voted on,” Griff said as if that fact might have escaped me.

“Wouldn’t be the first time the cops broke up a meeting and arrested everybody in sight,” Hoop went on, tucking in his napkin.

“Righto,” Griff confirmed, spooning sugar into his coffee. “So we figure what you need, Morrie, is an
eisteddfod
.”

I did not want to say that something pronounced
eye-steth-vod
stumped me as much as if he had been speaking mumbo-jumbo. But it did.

“Perhaps you could elaborate on that just a bit, Griff.”

“Glad to. Like everybody knows, an
eisteddfod
is when the finest singers and the greatest bards in Wales gather from the hills and the valleys and every mine pit from Caernarvon to Caerphilly”—he swept a knobby hand around like an impresario—“and try to outdo one another.”

“Kind of a jollification,” Hoop put in. “Like Miners Day that just don’t stop.”

With that, my tablemates sat back and slurped coffee, magnanimously ready for all due praise.

“I see,” I coughed out. “Actually, I don’t. The Welsh miners are the only ones who would have any idea what an
eye—eisteddfod
is, and they’re just a handful among the song bunch. Everyone else—?” I spread my hands.

Griff squinted at me. “You’re a little slow on the uptake today, Morrie. Everyone else
outside
of the song bunch, after we clue those in.”

“Nobody is gonna go near the thing,” Hoop expanded on that, “who don’t know the lingo.”

Thinking back to the Welsh minister and the tongue-tying eternity of
tragwyddoldeb
, I couldn’t argue with that.

Somewhat against my better judgment, I tested the matter out loud.

“Such as the public at large and the police, you mean.” Both wrinkled heads bobbed at my response, gratified that I was catching up. My tablemates now took turns expanding on why an indecipherable event that would unobtrusively slip a couple of hundred people into the basement of the Butte Public Library was such a surefire idea.

Grace came from the kitchen with a plate in each hand, stopping short at Griff’s grand culmination:

“Hoop and me can handle the whole proceedings for you, don’t worry none.”

I had not really started to, until he said that.

 

 

IT WAS LIKE TRYING to rein in runaway horses, but I managed to make the pair promise to contain their eisteddfod enthusiasm until I could test the notion on Jared. Meanwhile, I was late and had to bolt for the library. People were out and about in unusual numbers, I couldn’t help but notice, all heading down toward the railroad tracks where a sizable crowd had already gathered. I presumed another political figure was arriving to make a speech off the back of a train; but President Wilson himself would not be a shield against Sandison’s displeasure if I weren’t in the head count of staff before he opened the library.

Too late. When I got there, everyone had gone in but Rab, who was practically dancing with impatience as I hastened up the steps.

“Mr. Morgan, you came from that direction,” she spoke so fast it was nearly all one word, “did you see it?”

This was not my day, linguistically. “Do you suppose, Rab, you could take a deep breath and define
it
for me?”

She was as disappointed in me as Hooper and Griffith had been. “Oh, here.” Whisking over to a stack of newly delivered
Daily Posts
beside the doorway, she handed me one with fresh ink practically oozing from the EXTRA! atop the front page.

Beneath that, the even larger headline:

And below that, a jolting photograph of the railroad overpass where the IWW organizer had been lynched a few years before. From the middle of the trestle girders dangled a hangman’s noose. Attached to the rope was a sign readable even in the grainy newsprint reproduction:

Digesting this, I had mixed reactions. Plainly the goons, stymied about me after Chicago was no help, had broadened their approach to include any other strangers in the vicinity of the Hill; when you are a target, I have to say, you do appreciate having that kind of attention shared around. On the other hand, a noose just down the street from where you lay your head at night is still too close for comfort.

“Jared says the police are taking their sweet time about removing it,” Rab confided over my shoulder, again as fast as words could follow one another, “so Anaconda gets to scare everybody.”

“We have to let Jared handle that,” I stated, “while we have to get inside and handle books or face the wrath of our employer.”

Her mischievous laugh surprised me. “We wouldn’t want that, heaven knows.”

 

 

DISPATCHING RAB TO TAKE OUT her ardor on the book collection, I had to tend to a few office matters before joining her. If I was in luck, Sandison would be out on one of his prowls of the building. But, no. There he sat, stormy as thunder. Before I could utter any excuse for being late, he flapped the
Post
’s front page at me. “Did you see this damn thing?”

“By this hour of the day, I believe everyone in the city has seen either the newspaper or the actual piece of rope, Sandy.”

“This town,” he said in a tone that it hurt to hear. “It just can’t resist having dirty laundry out in the open. Hell, anyone knows outsiders are asking for it, that’s where rope law comes from.” Saying that, he took another furious look at the front page photograph, his gaze so hot I thought the paper might singe.

“The ‘Montana necktie,’ ” he ground out the words, “what’s the sense of dragging that up?” He started to say something more, but instead crushed the newspaper in the vise of his hands and thrust it into the wastebasket.

I stood there, gaping at the outburst, until his glare shifted to me. “Don’t you have anything to do but stand there with your face hanging out?”

I left in a hurry. The calm ranks of the books on the mezzanine were particularly welcome after that. Was there any way in this world to predict the actions of their combustible collector?

Hearing me come, Rab spun from the shelf where she had been flicking open covers to look for the SSS bookplates. “This is the day, you know.”

From my experience, that could be said about every twenty-four hours in Butte. But I did know what she meant.

“The sixth grade is about to meet its match,” I said with a smile. Tomorrow was the start of school and the teaching year of Miss Rellis, as she had to turn into. I was going to miss Rab’s company and the noble ranks of the inventory. Reaching to the shelf nearest her, I asked: “Ready?” She nodded. Into her waiting arms I stacked the plump volumes of
Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Germinal,
and on top the slim, elegant masterpiece
J’accuse
; Zola, the end of the inventory alphabet.

“The ones we’ve been looking for,” she joked a little sadly as we went to the sorting room to tally these treasures in with the rest.

“Maybe the full inventory will improve Sandison’s disposition,” I thought out loud. “The commotion about the noose seems to offend his civic sensibilities.”

The mischievous laugh again. “Quit being funny, Mr. Morgan.”

“Rab, really, you are not being fair to our employer.” For whatever reason, I felt tender toward Sandison in his upset mood. “I grant you he has a bit of a temper, but we shouldn’t judge him entirely on that. It is a truth as old as humankind that the presence of a shortcoming in a person does not preclude the existence of other worthier attributes in that same—Why are you looking at me like that?”

Rab had the magpie gleam of possessing the hidden morsel. “Don’t you know who Sam Sandison is? He’s the Strangler.”

11

R
abrab’s words went directly to my windpipe.

When I recovered enough air to speak, it was little more than a squeak. “Rab, you might have said so before now. Are you telling me the man I share an office with goes around throttling people?”

“Not that he was ever caught at it himself,” she said, as if explaining etiquette to a child. “He had mugs who worked for him do the dirty work. ‘Necktie makers,’ they were called. Vigilantes.” She looked at me closely. “You know: types who hang first and ask questions later.”

“I grasp the terminology,” I fumbled out. “What I am uninformed about is who my employer has had strangled, and why?”

“Cattle rustlers,” she answered both of those. “Or anybody who looked like one, to those cowboys of his.” Rabrab calculated with the aplomb of a hanging judge herself. “Plenty of them had it coming, probably. But some might have been small operators whose herds some Triple S cows and calves just got mixed in with. You know the saying about a rope”—she looked at me as if I likely did not—“one size fits all.”

“But—” Still stunned, I tried to reconcile the two Samuel Sandisons, the one who petted rare books as if they were living things and the other who used lethal means without thinking twice. “How can a, a vigilante be permitted to run a public institution such as this? ”

“Oh, I suppose people think those old hangings were a long time ago,” Rab reasoned. “After all, Butte is where a lot of people get over their past. Mr. Morgan, are you feeling all right?”

“The start of a headache,” I replied, truthfully enough. It was scarcely twenty-four hours since I had wriggled free from the grasp of the goons and the Chicago betting mob, and now I found out my library refuge was in the grip of a hangman. Whose method of tapping the library payroll budget to accumulate literary treasures in his own name was known only to me. This was an unhealthy turn of events, to say the least.

“MORGAN!”

I nearly jumped out of my hide, but managed to face around to the white-maned figure looming at the end of the aisle of bookshelves. Sandison looked as if he had grown even more enormous since I saw him minutes before.

“Drag your carcass to the office,” he bawled out, turning away, “I want to talk to you.”

Rab bade me off by wrinkling her nose prettily. “He really is something, isn’t he.”

 

 

I WENT IN, determined not to tremble. I suppose the blindfolded man facing a firing squad tries that, too. At the other end of the office, Sandison’s black suit was the darkest kind of outline against the stained-glass window jeweled with colors. He swung around to face me, saying nothing, sizing me up. Between us, on his desk, lay the smoothed-out newspaper with the emphatic photograph of the noose.

“Sandy?” I gambled, not for the first time, by taking the initiative. “I believe you wanted to see me about some minor matter?”

He grunted and advanced toward me as if he needed a closer look. The gleam in his eye seemed diamond-sharp. “You’re an odd duck, Morgan,” he declared, halting an uncomfortably short distance from me, “but you’re cultured, I have to hand you that. You damn well mean it when you jabber about the music of men’s lives, don’t you.”

A weird hope sprang up in me. Maybe he had discovered I was flouting his orders against “taking sides” by letting the miners congregate in the basement in search of a song and was merely going to fire me. I would take that instead of a death sentence any day.

“Anyhow,” he immediately brushed aside that hope, “we can talk about that tomorrow. You’re coming with me in the morning.”

“Where to?” I asked over the thump of my heart.

The white whiskers aimed at me. “A place you ought to see. Section 37.”

 

 

WAS THAT A JOKE from Samuel Sandison? If so, it was his first. I cleared my throat, to try to speak without a quaver.

“Perhaps, Sandy, you could elaborate a bit on that destina—”