Work Song (30 page)

Somewhere within the whisker cloud he snorted. “What’s the matter, sissy, coming down with a case of
Hic sunt dracones
?”

I had to bridle at that. A measure of caution about traveling in the company of someone nicknamed the Strangler did not equate me with skittish mariners of old who feared sailing off the edge of the map into the abyss that carried the warning
Here be dragons
.

“That’s hardly fair, I am only naturally curious as to—”

Sandison didn’t pause over my hurt feelings. “Never mind.” He briefly stared at me again with that strange gleam. “Don’t tell anyone we’re going, eh? Tongues are already too busy in this town.” Turning back impatiently to the newspaper spread on his desk, he told me to meet him at the depot, good and sharp, for the six a.m. westbound train.

 

 

THERE WAS A MIDNIGHT TRAIN. Eastbound.

Why not be on it?
the ceiling posed the question, a certain seam in the plaster straight as a railtrack as I lay fully clothed on my bed. I was as alone as ever in this latest dilemma. At supper, Hoop and Griff had been as animated as carnival pitchmen, while Grace put actual cutlets on the table in evident celebration of the boardinghouse’s new lease on life. No one seemed to pay particular attention to my unmoored state of mind; when that happens, it makes you wonder about your normal mien.

The bed was crowded with debate. Sandison was a latent noose-wielding unpredictable madman. Or not. He’d had the perfectly sound sense to hire me, I tried telling myself. Just to be on the safe side, though, pack the satchel for the train; saying a permanent goodbye to Butte would be only a strategic withdrawal, after all. But so was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

My head now really did ache from going back and forth. I checked my pocket watch again. Midnight was not far off. Abruptly my mind made itself up, almost as if I had not participated. I scrambled off the bed.

Quietly as I could, I opened the door of my room and tiptoed into the hall. Snores emanated from Griff’s room, and Hoop’s next to his; at the end of the hall, Grace’s bedroom kept a silence. Feeling like a burglar in the darkened house, I slipped past one door. Then another. And stealthily turned the doorknob of the end one.

I crept to the sleeping form and, hesitating just a bit, shook the bare shoulder where the nightdress had slipped down.

“Grace, I hate to interrupt your slumber. But I must talk to you.”

My whisper penetrated as if I had jabbed her. Bolting upright in the bed, she clutched the coverlet around her, huskily reciting: “In the name of decency, Morrie, we really ought not—”

“This is imperative or”—I looked at the ivory slope of shoulder still showing—“I would not come uninvited. Please just listen, Grace.”

Vigilantly, she did so while I told her she had to be my witness, to attest that I was alive and in one piece before boarding the train early in the morning with Samuel Sandison. “Just in case worse should come to worst.”

“Worse coming to worst, is it.” There was just enough light in the room that I could see she had let down her flaxen hair when she went to bed, and now she ran a hand through the long tresses. “Morrie, you are the most complicated boarder there ever was.”

“I wish I could dispute that.”

“Why do I have the honor of this, why not Griff and Hoop?”

“They’ve been at a union meeting, and you know the condition they come home in after that.”

Grace gave an extended sigh. “All right, you want a sober witness. But why go with Sandison at all?”

“He’s the kind who will not let loose of an idea—the man is a bulldog. If I don’t humor him on this, he’ll do away with my job at the library. Then I won’t have charge of the auditorium. Then the eisteddfod can’t be held in the—It’s, well, complicated.”

All that was wordlessly weighed on the landlady scale of things. Then she reached to the bedside table, opened the drawer, and took something out. “Here.”

In the dimness of the bedroom, I peered down stupidly at the cold metallic item, with some dull opalescence to it, that she put in the palm of my hand. If I was not mistaken, it was the type of small pearl-handled pistol called a Lady’s Special.

“You’re—you’re armed,” I stammered.

“I’m a widow, sleeping alone,” she said quietly. “And Butte is a rough and tough place, as you may have noticed.” Again she passed a hand through her hair, looking at me as if memorizing me. “That little thing is called an equalizer for a reason, don’t forget, Morrie.”

I hesitated, then pocketed the gun. “I’m sure I am in better health than when I came in here, thanks to you.”

An expectant silence. She patted my hand there in the dark, in a feathery way that was either shy or sly. “I would only be telling the truth if I said you had life in you the last I saw of you, wouldn’t I.”

An honest enough affidavit, under the circumstances. I returned her caress pat for pat. If I could trust anyone in Butte, it was Grace.

If I could trust anyone in Butte.

 

 

“SANDY, HOW ARE WE TO DO THIS?” Stumbling along before dawn in Sandison’s wake, I dubiously approached the depot platform. “If I am not mistaken, those are ore cars.” The line of heaped railcars stretched off as far as I could see in the dim light.

“Keep walking, don’t be a nervous Nellie.” Sandison strode along recklessly enough himself that I wished the pair of depot goons would pop around a corner and be steamrollered by him. No such justice, however, at that early hour. Only a yawning conductor, beside what I perceived to be one lone Pullman car behind the train engine, stood in our line of march.

I followed Sandison aboard, feeling tipped to one side by the unaccustomed gun in my coat pocket, even if it was the most decorous of firearms. He and I were the only passengers at that hour. As the train lurched into motion, I could contain the question no longer. “West is a long direction—where exactly do we get off?”

My traveling companion grumpily pawed at his whiskers as if herding the word out.

“Anaconda.”

“The company?”

“The town.”

 

 

IT TURNED OUT TO BE BOTH. A company town, Anaconda was as orderly and contained as Butte was sprawling and unruly. The train pulled in past boxy workers’ houses lined up in neat rows, along streets laid as straight as shelves. Sandison appeared to pay no heed to the town itself, gazing away into the valley beyond. At least, I thought as I looked out the window on that side of the train, it was a bright clear day for this. I happened to look out the other side, and the sky was clothed in heavy gray.

When the two of us climbed off at the trim crenellated depot, another chess piece of municipal order, the division in the sky over Anaconda was made plain. On a slope above the murky side of town could be seen the immense smelter for copper ore such as had accompanied us from Butte, and dominant over the smelting works stood a skyscraping smokestack, thickly built and hundreds of feet tall. The scene leapt from every accusatory line ever written about dark satanic mills—the smokestack like the devil’s forefinger, black fume trailing evilly as it pointed its challenge to heaven.

Dumbstruck as I was by this sight, only slowly did I register the other product of the smelter besides copper and smoke, a series of slag heaps surrounding the town like barren hills.

“That’s Anaconda for you,” Sandison growled. “Let’s get a move on.” So saying, he stalked off toward a livery stable across the tracks.

Now I was alarmed. A saddle horse is not my preferred mode of transportation. Of necessity, I had spent some time on horseback during my prairie teaching career, but no more than I had to. Sandison brayed to the stableman that we wanted genuine riding stock, not nags, and shortly I found myself holding the reins of a restless black horse with a bald face, named Midnight. When a rangy steel-gray steed was brought out for Sandison, he looked in disgust at the stirrups on the rented saddle and lengthened them six inches to account for his height. That done, despite his bulk he swung up onto the horse as easily as a boy and waited impatiently for me to hoist onto mine.

“Going to be a blisterer out in the valley. Here.” He tossed me a canvas water bag to tie to my saddle and spurred his horse into motion, leaving Midnight and me to catch up.

We managed to do so at the edge of town, past one last ugly dark slag heap where children ran up and down. With the cries of their playing fading behind us, the horseback pair of us cantered into another existence entirely, a sudden savannah-like landscape that seemed to exhale in relief at leaving the pall of Anaconda behind.

The valley extending before us was a classic oval of geography, broad and perfect as a French painting. Rimmed by mountains substantial enough to shoulder snow year-round, the valley floor was uninterrupted except for a few distant settlements strung out near a willowed river like memory beads on a thong. Gazing wide-eyed at the breadth of landscape—truly, here a person was a fleck on the sea of ground—I said something about this startling amount of open country so near the industrial confines of Butte and Anaconda.

Unexpectedly Sandison reined to a halt, and I pulled up beside him. He massively shifted in his saddle to turn in my direction. “Take a good look, Morgan. I owned it all.”

At first I thought he meant the plot of land we were riding across. Then I realized he meant the entire valley.

I cannot forget that moment. Picture it if you will. A woolsack of a man, surely two hundred and fifty pounds, nearly twice of me, sitting on his horse, looking down on me like a wild-bearded mad king.

Suddenly he raised a meaty hand and swiped it toward me, his action so swift I had no time to grab for the pistol.

Paralyzed, I felt the swish of air as the thick palm passed my face and descended to mash a horsefly on the neck of my mount.

Flicking away the fly carcass, he rumbled, “Don’t just sit there with your face hanging out, we’ve got a ways to go.”

He put his horse into a trot, and mine followed suit. I rode holding tightly to the reins and my Stetson. In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn’t blow your hair off. Besides, it gave me something to concentrate on, other than the thought that I might have shot a man for swatting a fly. But Sandison’s behavior still unnerved me. Keen as a tracker, he stood in his stirrups every so often to peer ahead at the print of ruts we were following; it might once have been a road but looked long unused.

Leading to where? There were wide open spaces around us to all the horizons, but no arithmetic of logic that I could find in the destination Sandison had set for us. I knew from my time among the homesteads of Marias Coulee that land is surveyed into townships of thirty-six sections, each section a square mile. The numbering starts over at each township. Where, then—and for that matter,
what
—was Section 37? Was I going to survive to find out?

After an eternity of joggling along, we came to a plot of land boxed by a barbwire fence. We—rather, I—opened the treacherously barbed gate, and the horses stepped through, skittish enough about it that they had to be reined hard.

It could be said they were showing horse sense. The ground changed here. The soil, to call it that, had an unhealthy grayish hue, like the pallor of a very sick person. The sudden change was puzzling to me. I did not know thing one about the raising of cattle, but what was beneath our horses’ hooves would not pasture any creature, I was quite sure.

My riding companion now simply sat in his saddle, lost in contemplation of the expanse of valley. I resorted to my water bag. The day was warming to an extreme, and I could see sweat running down Sandison’s cheeks into his beard, although he paid it no heed.

“Back then,” he all at once spoke in the voice of a man possessed, “this was a paradise of grass. And I bought up homestead claims and mining claims and every other kind of land until every square foot of it was Triple S range. I tell you, there never was a better ranch nor a prettier one.” His words cast a spell. What a picture it made in the mind, the green valley filled with red cattle with that sinuous brand on their hips.

The bearded head swung in my direction. His voice dropped ominously.

“Then it got to be the old story. The snake into Eden.” The meaty hand swept around again and, past my ineffectual flinch toward the Lady’s Special, pointed over my shoulder.

“That thing.”

He had taken dead aim at the smelter stack. Even at this distance, the giant chimney dwarfed all of nature around it, clouding that half of the horizon like a permanent storm. Staring at that ashen plume along with Sandison, I felt something more oppressive creep over me than the heat of the day.

With a great grunt he climbed down from his horse, stooped low, and scooped a handful of dirt. Holding the dull-colored stuff up to me, he uttered:

“Here. Have some arsenic.”

Choosing to consider that rhetorical, I cleared my throat and managed to respond.

“Sandy, am I to understand we are camped on a patch of poison?”

“That’s what it comes down to,” he said, letting the unhealthy soil sift from his fist. Each word bitter, he recited to me that the furnaces of the smelting process released arsenic and sulphur, and the Anaconda stack piped those into the air like a ceaseless spout.

Wiping his hand on his pantleg, he went on: “It kills cattle like picking them off with a rifle. The first year after the smokestack came in, we lost a thousand head. Hell, it wasn’t ranching anymore. All we were doing was burning carcasses.” He shook his head violently at the memory. “We sued the mining company every way there is. The Anaconda bunch had the big money for eastern lawyers, so they beat us. But that was later.” His voice sharpened again. He gestured as if in dismissal toward the smokestack and its almighty smudge. “That isn’t what you’re here to see. Let’s get to it.” With cowboy agility, he again swung onto his horse and headed us toward a grove of trees along a slip of a stream not far ahead. Damp as I was with sweat from the unrelenting sun—and just as relentless, Sandison—I welcomed the notion of shade.