Sweet Thunder (3 page)

For the first time, he looked less than commanding, the chair groaning some more as he shifted uncomfortably. “Can't be done, Morgan, as much as I'd like to. The trustees have gone off their rocker about the payroll. The idiots won't even let me hire a book-cart pusher, let alone an assistant like you were. It's a damn shame.” His turn to take in the mansion with a gesture. “Naturally I'll kick in some rent. I'll discuss that with the landlady,” he said with another glint, “she looks like that is right up her alley.” From under snowy cowlick and frosty eyebrows he studied me in a way I knew all too well. “The rest, though, you're going to have to provide by putting that head of yours to work, aren't you.”

“I see.” I wished I did.

•   •   •

That night in bed, an ornate one that must have held Sandison and Dora comfortably enough but was big as a barge for us, neither Grace nor I could close our eyes, let alone sleep. A large arched window at the end of the bedroom looked out over the lights of the city, with the white web of stars above like a reflection. I have always loved the night sky and its desires coded in constellations and comets, but it was not that keeping me awake. It was Grace.

“I have to keep pinching myself that this is really happening, Morrie.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I'm practically black and blue.”

“No doubt.”

She turned toward me, her flaxen hair garlanding the pillow. “I have to tell you something. Don't take it wrong. Promise? This, this palace or whatever it is, is a housekeeper's nightmare. I mean, it's wonderful, in all other ways. Everything done so fine. The woodwork. The furniture. The Turkey rugs. But it's so”—I could just make out her face in the dark as she searched for the proper word—“endless.”

“Yes, I've begun to notice that.”

“Not that His Nibs”—the jocular lordly moniker fit Sandison rather nicely, I had to grant her—“isn't the soul of generosity for giving us the house. But he had reason to, didn't he. Imagine how he must have rattled around in here alone until he had his, his—”

“Epiphany.”

“—whatever you want to call it, to pass this barn of a place along to us and turn himself into a high-class boarder. Him and a thousand books.” She was gaining speed all the time. “It's too much house even for me, Morrie. I could work myself to a nub trying to keep up with all that needs doing, and it would still gain on me every hour of every day. Can we afford hired help?”

“In a word, no.”

“Then I know of only one thing to do. I take that back. Two.”

“Grace, love, you're not really going to say—”

“Griff and Hoop. They're the only answer.”

With difficulty I held my tongue from asking, “To what question?” Describing themselves as retired miners—“at least the tired part”—Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper had been fixtures at Grace's boardinghouse when I alighted there new to Butte, bandy veterans of mine disasters and union struggles and other travails they could recite at Homeric length. It was true, as Grace now was pouring into my ear, that Griff was something of a handyman and Hoop was, well, constantly available; we had left them in charge of the boardinghouse during our honeymoon sojourn without too many qualms. The pair of them as house staff on Ajax Avenue, though? For one thing, they were getting so old they creaked. For another, as I protested to her, if they moved in here, who was going to mind the boardinghouse?

“We'll have to close it until we get this place whipped, that's all there is to it,” she said conclusively. “No boarder in his right mind is going to show up in Butte in the middle of winter anyway.”

She raised on one elbow, her flaxen hair spilling to her shoulders as she gazed down at me.

“That leaves you, J. P. Morgan.”

I matched her wavery smile with my own. “I don't suppose it's an honor I can decline, hmm?” We had counted on my old job at the library, which Sandison scotched. The void yawned distressingly large.

The fact is, I do not take well to most forms of employment. The acid of boredom sets in insidiously and my mind finds other pursuits. Life among the blessed books of Butte aside, the one occupation I had found to give my head and heart to was teaching in a one-room school, in my first venture into Montana a dozen years before. Grace knew only the vaguest of that brief prairie episode of my life, and the question was what gainful work I could find, and stick to, in the here and now. Her first husband, who perished in Butte's worst mining disaster, the 1917 Speculator fire, evidently had been a paragon of husbandly virtue, uninterruptedly employed, steady as a clock in most ways, right down the list except for an unfortunate habit of betting on greyhound races, the surest way to have one's wages go to the dogs. Given that, I knew what a leap of faith and love it had been for her to risk life with me. Trying to sound as confident as a man can while flat on his back, I gazed up at her. “
Nil desperandum
, my dear. Never despair.”

“House rules. English only, in the marital bed.”

“What, you've never heard of Ovid?”

“I'll Oafid you, chatterbox,” she tickled me in the ribs. And with that, everything else could wait until morning.

•   •   •

“Big.”

“Righto.”

“Lots needs doing.”

“Nothing we can't fix.”

Hoop and Griff moved in as though tooling up to attack a rockface in the days when they were a flash team of drillers in many a mine, with a clatter and a magpie glitter of interest in what awaited. Squinting around at the expanse of the house as Hoop likewise was doing, Griff assured me, “Don't worry none, Morrie. We'll pitch in here and there and it'll all add up, you'll see.” His tool bag beside their battered suitcases there in the side hall struck me as somehow ominous, but I was in no position to turn down help of any sort. Grace had disappeared to the far reaches of kitchen and pantry, and Sandison had not yet made his appearance for the day. The snow-bright morning practically wreathed our new arrivals in wrinkles, Hoop and Griff having worked underground side by side for so many years and boarded together for so many more that they had grown to resemble each other, wizened and bent as apostrophes and nearly telegraphic in their talk. Mineral, vegetable, or animal, the pair could boil down a topic almost instantly. Grace had great affection for them—as did I, with reservations—and Griff, a lifelong bachelor, and Hoop, a widower, shared a near holy reverence for her; “Mrs. Faraday,” as they primly had insisted on calling her up until now, when their tongues were going to have get used to “Mrs. Morgan.”

All at once, their speculations back and forth as to which ailment of the house merited most urgent treatment petered out as they looked past me down the hallway, and in unison doffed their hats and clasped them to their breasts.

I scarcely had to turn around to the object of their respect. “Good morning, Sandy. I hope the accommodations”—he had taken over a back bedroom in what amounted to servants' quarters, but handiest to his beloved library tower—“were up to expectation?”

“It'll do. Hell, I've slept in bunkhouses before. What's all the commotion?”

Ceremoniously I introduced Hoop and Griff as new boarders, doubling as household staff. Sandison grunted a greeting to the bandy-legged pair, who returned the sentiment in hushed tones of awe. Reputation is a mighty thing, I was reminded again. Even in this city where justice not uncommonly was meted out by fist, gun, or dynamite, the legend of Samuel Sandison's vigilante days stood head and shoulders over other such episodes. It was an old joke that civic uplift came to Montana with the lynching of the villainous sheriff, Henry Plummer, in the gold-strike town of Virginia City in 1864. Tradition of that grisly but effective sort found expression after Sandison's summary way of dealing with cattle rustlers—hence his lurid nickname “the Strangler,” or sometimes simply “the Earl of Hell”—and here he stood before us, wild-bearded and filling a suit that would have held both Griff and Hoop. Practically kowtowing, they said they'd better get at things and disappeared to an inner room, where moments later hammering broke out.

“You keep some strange company,” Sandison commented in their wake.

“They'll fit in,” I blandly replied.

He gave me a look, but then grunted again and reached for his overcoat and hat. “Walk me to work, why don't you. It'll give you something to do besides idle your life away.”

We set off in sunshine that did not take the chill out of the air, as though the sun's warmth was waning with the year. The other residences along Horse Thief Row were as frosted as cakes, and I learned from Sandison's rumbling commentary on the neighborhood that it had been his wife's idea to move there when they left the ranch. “Dora wanted a fancy house for a change,” he said of the mansion I still had to get used to thinking of as mine and Grace's. “Myself, I've never been keen about living on a street named for a two-bit soldier in the Trojan War.”

“It depends on the version of Ajax you believe in,” I protested. “In one telling of it, he was larger than life and a warrior of great prowess. In the other tale, I admit, he comes across as a bit of a peewee and thinking too well of himself. But—”

“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.