Sweet Thunder (6 page)

“And naturally, you are the crusading editor leading the charge and I am the, ah, working stiff.”

He gave me another looking-over to see if I meant that, and by some intuition must have decided I deserved the benefit of the doubt, at least temporarily.

“Hell, man,” he rasped, “maybe we're a pair of a kind, jokers wild. We'll see.”

I nodded at the eyeshade of green celluloid, prominent as the visor on the helmet of a knight. “I don't mean to be impertinent, but I thought only editors like the one in
Barnaby of Drudge Street
wore one.”

That brought a laugh like a bark. “Buster, if I didn't wear this for reading copy under every kind of light except Jesus' halo, I'd be one of the blind cases selling papers on the street instead of editing one. You a bookworm, then?”

I confessed I was.

“Damn good thing,” he surprised me. “An editorial writer needs all the ammo there is.”

Having observed our colloquy, Jared came over and said it looked to him like we maybe could stand to be in the same office with each other. “So far so good, in getting things set up,” he rubbed his hands in satisfaction as the news staff shoved desks into arrangement as decreed by Armbrister, and the compositors and pressmen trooped off to ready their work sphere in the rear of the building. Armbrister's lair, besides a strategic desk in the middle of the newsroom, turned out to be a tightly glassed-in cubicle that likely had been the instructor's refuge of quiet when the typing school was going full blast. Rab joined us in there, saying brightly, “I have a question for you gentlemen of the press. What's the name of the newspaper?”

Seeing the three of us were stumped, she declared: “I thought so. Let's think. What about”—I could practically hear her mind whirring as if she were trying out an idea on backward pupils—“the
Plain Truth
? That's been in short supply in Butte newspapering.”

Jared rubbed his jaw. “It's nice, Rab, but I like something that sounds a little tougher, like maybe the
Sentinel?
”

“That'd do in a pinch,” Armbrister said with a grain of editor-to-publisher deference, “but we want something with some real kick to it.” He started reeling off feisty possibilities—the
Spark, Liberator,
the
Free Press.
Then, almost bashfully, he confessed: “I've always wanted to have a masthead in type big as what they use on Wanted posters that just goddamn outright says
Disturber of the Peace.
”

“No, no,” I exclaimed, the thought ascending so swiftly in me I was light-headed, “it must be something that carries the sound of promise, that resonates across the land, that dramatically bespeaks the coming clash with Anaconda.” The two men were set back on their heels, while Rab gleefully watched me balloon off into the upper atmosphere like old times. Passionately I invoked Shakespeare, the magically phrased passage in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
when Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, with rhythmic zest recounts the great hunt with Hercules and the dragon slayer Cadmus,
“When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear / With hounds of Sparta,”
concluding with the inimitable turn of phrase,
“I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”

Thus was the Butte
Thunder
born.

  4  

“S
O,
M
ORGAN, WELCOME TO THE DEN
of lost souls,” Armbrister initiated me into the ranks as the newsroom full of novitiates turned to their tasks the first frantic day of publication, each hunched over a desk or a typewriter or talking into a telephone. I had much to learn, such as calling the vital opening sentence of any newspaper article a lede to differentiate it in print from the soft metal, and slugging each page of copy, as that term was, with topic and page number in the upper right corner, and noting that a less than urgent writing assignment was referred to as AOT, meaning “any old time.”

Besides such lessons learned on the run, simply being around Armbrister was a fast education in journalism, I was finding. The long-faced editor was gruff, salty, uncompromising; from the first minute, the staff idolized him. In the green world of inspiration beneath his eyeshade, he was constantly thinking up angles of coverage and fresh features to dress up the paper; that bald head in the center of the newsroom reflected the adage that grass doesn't grow on a busy street. He passed judgment on assignment suggestions with a swift “Amen” or just as decisive a “Nix” that sent a reporter off either to report or to rethink. Along with the bluer part of his vocabulary was the dreaded utterance that he needed such-and-such column inches pronto, or if a deadline really loomed, prontissimo. It quickly became ritual for the first staff member growled at a certain way to go around the room and warn the rest of us our editor was turning into Generalissimo Prontissimo. With the general air of purpose driven by Armbrister's personality and, yes, deadlines, the newsroom seemed on the point of vibration. And at press time, when the almighty machine in the back room began spinning out newspapers by the thousands, that actually proved to be the case; the thrum could be felt in the whole building, as if the news on the page were a wave of sound reverberating into the waiting world.
Thunder
, indeed.

But back there at the very start, any tremors were confined to those of us clustered around the editor's desk, as Armbrister, a hawk hovering in his element, scanned around relentlessly for assignments ready to be turned in. Jared, looking on with Rab proudly hooking arms with him and myself, kept tugging at his tie, dressed as he was in the sober new suit befitting a publisher and legislator. “Damn this collar,” he ran a finger inside the neck of his duly starched shirt, “how do you put up with it, Professor?”

“Just remind yourself it's not copper,” I said easily.

“Hear, hear!” said Rab. “Besides, this way you're all spiffed up to celebrate the new newspaper and the new year, both,” she brought out a grin on her self-conscious spouse by straightening his tie back from where he had just adjusted it. “The senator here will be kicking his heels up at the union hall—the Serbs are going to show us all some dance they swear won't resemble a polka. What about you, Mr. Morgan—are you and Grace and Sam Sandison going out to paint the town red?”

“Our household is catching its breath tonight, Rab. Maybe a wink at the new year as it slips in, is all.”

“Good riddance to the old one,” Jared said somberly of the mineworkers'
annus horribilis
that had left Anaconda with the upper hand, and Armbrister dourly added his amen to that. “You're going to have to get us off to a flying start,” the editor gave me a certain kind of look from under his eyeshade, “so I hope you've exercised your brain about—” Just then the newsroom door banged open and the stutter of typewriters momentarily stilled.

Turning her head to see who it was, Rab showed surprise. “Did you ask him to show up? Today, of all?”

“Better to deal him in than not,” Jared replied softly. “And he's a good reminder to us all what this is about. Look at that—it's like the coming of Saint Patrick, isn't it. Nobody can take their eyes off him.”

I'd had my back turned to the man, and faced around to a strapping figure sweeping toward us in a rolling gait, lunch box swinging in his hand and the mark of the Hill on him in that slight lean as if stooping under a mine timber. Every shoulder within reach he batted as he progressed through the newsroom, dropping “That's the stuff!” and other plaudits along the way, companionable yet commanding. Nearing us, his keen gaze fixed on me, he laughed and called out:

“Is it Morgan underneath all that? If whiskers could talk, you'd be Cicero, boyo.”

I blinked. “Quin!” The unexpected sight of him took me back, in both meanings. Pat Quinlan had been the life of the party at Dublin Gulch wakes, and I use that contradictory term advisedly, when I was forced to attend as the representative of the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home. Memories of the bootleg rye that flowed from his pocket flask into me on those occasions washed away most of the rest of my doubts about becoming a newspaper employee, where drinking on the job was merely optional.

“I'd forgotten,” Jared was saying to me as Quin's hard hand pumped mine, “you're already acquainted with our negotiator.” My surprise redoubled. Beyond doubt, Pat Quinlan was surpassingly capable of giving Anaconda holy hell, and the other kind, too. However, he and Jared had not seen eye to eye on union matters in that other year of trouble, 1919. Quin was perhaps not quite the fieriest firebrand in the ranks of Butte labor, but never that far from flaming up, either. Enlisting him as the union's second-in-command surely was a gamble on Jared's part—shrewd, possibly, but a gamble nonetheless to have a rival so close.

“Morgan, my fellow, Jared tells me you're our editorial scribe.” When he looked at a person the way he was eyeing me, Quin had a sort of dark gleam to him, his the so-called Armada complexion, consequence of shipwrecked sailors blending their Spanish blood with the Irish many generations ago. “A man who's dynamite with words, have we. I like that.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

I coughed. “I'm glad I pass muster with Dublin Gulch.”

“We'll put you up for pope,” he said airily. He glanced past Jared. “And our Barbara! You look like the Rose of Tralee amongst these bog trotters.”

“Tsk, aren't you the gravel patch of the Blarney Stone,” Rab absorbed the compliment in the spirit given.

Armbrister had been tolerating the disruption to his newsroom about as expected, which was to say barely. “Back to work, everyone,” he bawled to the staff, then wheeled to Quin. “Come on over, you need to meet Cavaretta. He'll be covering union matters, such as the ongoing negotiations with Anaconda. They are ongoing, aren't they?”

“Like Niagara.” As Quin strutted off in the company of the editor, Jared rolled his eyes and shadowed after them to tamp down whatever the dark prince of the bargaining table told the reporter.

Rab watched expressionlessly, no small feat for her. “The show-off,” she whispered to me. “I can't stand him. I'm sorry, I just can't.”

“Quin isn't to everyone's taste,” I murmured back, “but as I understand it, Jared's strategy is that Anaconda chokes on him worse than the rest of us do.”

“Oh, he's useful, in that way,” she retorted, her lips barely moving like the skilled whisperer she had been in my classroom. “But I can't forgive him for how he behaved in the big strike. Jared would be trying to keep people from killing one another, and Quin would come around behind him, yelping about striking the blow against Anaconda.” She shook her head. “There's always been a union faction at the Neversweat that's out for blood, and Quin's their man.” Her whisper turned fierce. “They and the Wobblies drew blood, all right, on themselves when the goons started shooting.”

“Hence, Jared taking the political route, instead of taking on Anaconda bare-handed as Quin is inclined to do?”

“Hence,” Rab confirmed with a sly twist to the word.

Conversation with the reporter had ended with a grand backslap from Quin, and here came the three of them to us, Armbrister and Quin each checking the clock like a man in a hurry and Jared glancing down at the black lunch box conspicuous at Quin's side. “You're going on shift, you mean?”

“'Course I am,” said Quin as if surprised to be asked. “We don't trade out of shifts at the 'Sweat.” He laid it on thicker yet. “It's bad luck, you know, if you don't work the last shift of the year in the same diggings where you did the first. Breaks the chain of fortune, it does.”

Looking uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with neckwear, Jared said only, “Tap 'er light, Quin,” miners' way of saying, So long and good luck, both.

Smiling devilishly, Quin set off on his promenade out of the newsroom, but whirled as if something had just struck him. “Morgan?” He made a fist. “Give them this.”

“I shall do my best, Quin.”

Watching him all the way out the door, Jared then turned to the case of imminent explosion at his side. “Don't start, Rab. He's a scamp and a scene stealer, we know that. The trick is to give him enough of a stage to keep him satisfied.” All business now, he squared around to Armbrister and me. “We need to get out of your hair, you have work to do.” He grinned at me. “Thought up that pen name yet?”

“Just now. A
nom de plume
fitting to the promise of the
Thunder
, I think you'll agree. Pluvius.”

Rab smothered a giggle, surely remembering the rain-catching instrument I introduced into the classroom when she was a schoolgirl, a pluviometer. The ostensible Latin god of downpour and freshet alike approximated my role as editorialist very well, in my estimation.

Jared puzzled that out for a moment, glancing at her for reassurance, then granted, “Your choice, I guess.”

Meanwhile Armbrister was clouding up beneath his green eyeshade, as editors do when deadlines loom. “Let's never mind the fancy Latin and start producing some plain English. I need the editorial piece, dead pronto. You type, dare I hope?”

“Assiduously.”

He pointed me to a vacant desk and typewriter in the corner next to his cubicle. The din of the newsroom did not bother me, because in my Butte Public Library phase I had grown accustomed to working in the same office with Sandison and his grunts and snorts and booted prowling of the room. I worked quickly.

A
question comes with the new year and the next legislative session, soon to start. Why, do you suppose, is it that every bill proposed in the Montana legislature is always printed in four copies, instead of three, as in other states? Let's do the arithmetic, shall we? One for the House, one for the Senate, one for the governor, and that leaves—

N
umber four, which goes to the top floor of the Hennessy Building in Butte, headquarters of a certain copper company.

A
nd what does that add up to?

C
ontrol of the legislative levers of power and until now, of the daily press of this state.

O
h, it will be said, it is merely a matter of custom and convenience for the largest employer in all of Montana to be kept abreast of pending bills and such. It has been convenient, all right, and customary, for that top-floor monopoly, though not for the rest of us.

N
o other company has been a worse neighbor than the one whose coils of power extend from Wall Street through that local aperture to the depths of the richest mineshafts on this continent and up again to the legislative chambers of Helena.

D
oes this mean there is nothing to be done, and the Treasure State is forever doomed to be squeezed this way?

A
bsolutely not. The remedy does exist, as shall be set forth in these columns in days to come, openly and freely. The black name that slithers down this page has gripped the newspapers of Montana for too long. The
Thunder
is here to speak common sense and justice. Mark it well; what you hold in your hands this moment is nothing less than a declaration of journalistic enterprise that refuses to be choked by the copper collar of the Anaconda Company.