Sweet Thunder (7 page)

—PLUVIUS

•   •   •

“I'd've said ‘snake' somewhere in it.”

“Me, too. Kind of people they are.”

“Pretty much readable otherwise.”

“Not too bad for a start, Morrie.”

Griff and Hoop passed suppertime judgment on my editorial debut along with the potatoes and gravy and baked chicken until I had my fill in both respects. Grace had been so occupied with cooking and serving our New Year's Eve feast, to dignify it with that—I looked ahead to the day we could afford roast beef—she'd had time only to glance at the newspaper page and exclaim, “Ooh, it looks as serious as a hymnal.” Sandison merely issued a series of grunts as he read the copy of the
Thunder
folded open to my words. But something told me he wanted to see me alone after the meal.

I slipped into his tower cave of books as Grace dealt with the dishes and my Welsh critics hobbled off to their rooms. “And so? Is my prose up to literary standards?”

The chair groaned under him—it had a bad habit of that—as Sandison stroked his beard and considered me. “It's too bad there isn't a pill for foolhardiness.”

“The cure might be worse than the ailment, Sandy,” I mounted in self-defense. “I admit spelling out ‘Anaconda' that way may have been a bit dramatic for a start, but Jared Evans was happy with it and the newspaper staff honestly cheered. Sometimes a chance must be taken, wouldn't you say? Caesar at the Rubicon. George Washington at the Delaware.”

“Quixote at the windmill,” he trumped those without effort. Waving away my further protest, he conceded: “All right, all right, you're determined to be a hornet up Anaconda's nose—”

“Actually, I prefer the locution ‘bee in the bonnet'—”

“—but that doesn't mean you can sit down to the typewriter and torment the company's highly paid thieves up there in the Hennessy Building that same way day after day and get away with it. You're going to have to be ready to be attacked in return, laddie. The
Post
isn't in business just to sell patent medicines and hernia belts.”

I took his point. I had to. I'd given no thought to what came next. At such a time, thank heaven for the courage history lends. My gaze lifted to the erect spines ranked row upon proud row around the room. “If I may, Sandy, I would like to call on your friends for aid from time to time.”

“Now you're showing a lick of sense. Help yourself.” He swept a hand around the wall of books behind him, where I had to hope to find the right inspiration from the likes of Addison and Steele sharpening with
Tatler
wit the debates of England, Horace Greeley defending the Union with the verbal artillery of the
New York Tribune
, and, yes, Tom Paine, ever his own man but speaking for all in detestation of domination. The great typeset voices to bolster my own unfledged one.

•   •   •

The new year blew in with snow that whitened the night, our bedroom far from dark with the blue-silver reflection off the freshly blanketed Hill and the whirling flakes. Sandison's wish for a blizzard to clean the town was being granted in full with the arrival of 1921.

Beside me, Grace raised her head from the pillow to sigh at the storm howling and scratching at the arched window. “Too bad. Someone always climbs to the top of the Muckaroo headframe and sets off whiz-bangs at midnight. Not tonight, they won't.”

“The storm before the calm, perhaps.”

She puffed lightly at me and my quip as if putting out a candle. “New Year's is no laughing matter, you. Where does the time go, answer me that.” Restless as the weather, she sat up against the bed's headboard, ran her hands through her flowing hair, then hugged her knees as she gazed at the flurries smacking the window. “It seems only yesterday we were being married and going off to see the world, doesn't it?”

“No.” I rolled over enough to kiss her elbow. “It seems like many perfect yesterdays ago spent in the best company since matrimony was invented.”

“Flatterer.” She looked down at me, the dimpled smile I so loved just visible in the pale night. “Are you pleased?”

“With life in general? I have you, I have house enough for several people, I have employment and a living wage, how can I not be pleased?”

“With yourself, I mean, Mr. Pluvius.”

“Mmm, that.” Assessing whether you are living up to your pen name—choosing one with the mystical properties of a Roman god sets a shamefully high mark—pits one side of you against the other, but try I did. “There too”—she could tell I meant the
Thunder
and its cause—“I feel I'm in the right company. If words can carry the day, as Jared Evans thinks they can, I am not short of words.” I smiled up at her. “As you may have noticed.”

She did not smile back. “I'd be the last one to doubt you can pluviate or whatever it is until the other party falls down dizzy. But I can't forget what my Arthur always used to say. Taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope—”

“—its muzzle doesn't come off, yes, yes, I fully remember the saying.” Along with Shakespeare's loftier one about so musical a discord when the bear was bay'd; that was not exactly the tune I was hearing in my debut as a newspaperman. First Sandison, and now my heartmate—I did not lack for concern about my well-being, at least. But if I couldn't sound reassuring on a feather bed, I might as well trade in my tongue. “Grace, this is not like before, when I needed to watch my step every time I set foot outside. Anaconda wins when the battle is in the streets, no question. But a sparring match in newspaper columns is quite another matter, surely. The snakes, to borrow Hoop and Griff's term, would face prosecution if something befell me or any other of the newspaper staff, Jared has enough political power now to see to that. No, our bet is—forgive that figure of speech, my dear—the battle will be fought out on the page, where it can be won.”

Still clutching her knees, Grace heard me out to the last word, the only sound for some moments the howling of the wind. Then she patted my hand in the feathery way I had come to know and count on, and gave me the kind of kiss that sealed one year and promised much for the next. “All right, Morrie. I have to hope you're right, don't I. Good night, you.”

“Good night and happy new year, Mrs. Morgan.”

•   •   •

“Lords and ladies of the press, gather 'round to have our fortune told,” Armbrister called out the next day in the newsroom. The
Thunder
staff surrounded him, Jared and Rab and even Russian Famine thrown in, as the fingers-crossed editor opened a
Post
snatched from the earliest available newsboy. “Let's see what the bastards uptown think of us,” he muttered. I held my breath, and I was not nearly the only one, as he scanned the rival editorial page for the response to my initial denunciation of Anaconda and its might. Then, it had to be seen to believed, an actual look of satisfaction came over him. “Hot damn, folks. We caught them with their pantaloons down. Listen to this.”

Will they never learn, the inkslingers who crop up periodically to decry commercial success and general prosperity? A succession of so-called opposition newspapers have talked themselves to death in trying to pit labor and capital against each other, instead of celebrating the American way of wages and profits going hand in hand. This latest journal of misinformation, with a name that suggests it has its head in the clouds, we predict will shortly follow the others into oblivion.

Amid hoots and cries of derision at that, Armbrister humorously shook the paper as if to make any more invective fall out, and when none did, cast the
Post
into the nearest wastebasket.

During the celebratory commotion, Jared batted my shoulder as if slapping on a brevet of commendation and soundly told me, “Well done, Professor.” I reciprocated by saying I could not have written what I did without his disclosure of the copper company's secret set of legislative proposals. He slipped me a glance not without political guile; he was learning fast. “We'll see what other surprises we can come up with,” said he. During this, I became aware of an outbreak of restlessness down at my side. Bright-eyed, Russian Famine whispered up to me. “What's pantaloons?”

“Britches that are too big,” I gladly defined our adversary as well as the item of apparel.

“But that's awful, what it said,” Rab was bursting with indignation, whirling from Jared to me seeking outraged response to match her own. “‘Journal of misinformation,' phooey. ‘Head in the clouds,' my foot. Mr. Morgan, why on earth are you looking like you've been paid a compliment?”

To try to settle her down, Jared called Armbrister over. “Jake, am I right that we won the first round because they were only shadowboxing?”

The green eyeshade bobbed. “That load of horse pucky in the
Post
is a fragrant example of the low journalistic art of Afghanistanism. Going as far afield from the topic as the map will allow.” His expression took a saturnine turn. “The SOBs are afraid to even say ‘legislature.' So we have to make them. Won't you, Morgan?”

And so I went to my typewriter and set off the newspaper war.

  5  

It is legend locally that President Theodore Roosevelt, in plain view at a window table in the Finlen Hotel, heartily ate a steak as the admiring citizenry of Butte looked on. Not so well remembered is what he wanted for dessert: hearts of monopolists, sauced with justice. It was the late, great Teddy who dubbed them, let us not forget, “malefactors of great wealth.”

There is no wealth greater, in this city and state and far beyond, than that of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Nor is there a malefaction—mark it well: the word comes from Latin,
malus
meaning “bad, ill, evil” and
facere
meaning “to do”—more unjust than the grip of the copper colossus on the legislative process of the Treasure State.

An appetite for change, anyone?

G
RACE WAS EVEN MORE RIGHT
than she knew, in remarking that my calling had been found, or as I preferred to think of it, I had been searched out by a fitting profession at last. For I stepped forth from Horse Thief Row and down the sloping streets of Butte to the newspaper office each day with a hum in my heart and words flowing in my head. Oh, I was aware of the old bromide that an editorial writer does nothing more than observe from the high ground until the battle is over, then descend and shoot the wounded on both sides. But that was not the Butte fashion, not the
Thunder
style. I was proud that from the first inked copy off the press, I, or at least Pluvius, was in the thick of the crusade against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and its despotic power over the mines and the city and the state. And if I could enlist the lately deceased trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt into the cause, so much the better.

Grace dramatically read my latest
Thunder
salvo to the suppertime audience, Hoop and Griff chewing along in agreement, while Sandison sat back in judgment.

Finished, she stretched to pass the newspaper back to me across the huge dining room table, where the five of us spent mealtimes like picnickers at a wharf. “That should give them indigestion at Anaconda headquarters, if that's what you wanted.”

“Well put, madam.” Sandison turned to me. “Taunting doesn't get the job done in the end. When do you get down to brass tacks?” Hoop and Griff perked up their ears at the phrase.

“All in good time,” I said with the air of invincibility fitting to an editorialist. “It is a matter of tactics.”

•   •   •

How often does a name fit so perfectly it cannot be improved on? From the very start, the atmosphere around the
Thunder
held that tingle of anticipation that the air carries before a rain. The spell was contagious. With its aroma of ink and paper and cigarette smoke and its staccato blurts of writing machines and jingling of telephones, the newsroom was a strangely exciting place where nothing definitive seemed to be happening, yet everything was. A newspaper is a daily miracle, a collective collaboration of wildly different authors cramped into columns of print that somehow digest into the closest thing to truth about humankind's foibles and triumphs there is, i.e., the draft of history, and no day had yet come when I was not profoundly glad to do my part.

The staff, a high-spirited bunch, raucously welcomed me into their number. In the newspaper world, you can be a boozehound, a Lothario, a grouch, a moocher, almost anything, and if you can sit up to the keys of a typewriter and play the English language as if on a grand piano, you are prized. So it was with me, none of the usual journalists' peccadilloes attached to my person, and my prose as quick as my fingers—Armbrister never had to hover over me near deadline—was abundantly acclaimed. Moreover, my reputation in the newsroom grew when there was confusion at the copy desk over Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell, and I rattled off the couplet that distinguished the ill-fated royal minister from the later Lord Protector:
Tommy bowed before the king and lost his head / Ollie stood tall and the king lost his instead.
One of the old hands working the rim cackled and called out, “What are you, a walking encyclopedia?” As a brand-new journalistic enterprise the
Thunder
lacked a morgue, a newspaper's library, and after that I was often called on to fill in. Routinely an outcry from somewhere in the newsroom would be heard, such as “Quick, Morrie, who was the inventor of the guillotine?” and I would furnish the answer. Some wag soon modified Morrie to Morgie, a conflation of name and role that I rather liked, and I felt thoroughly established in the fellowship of the press.

Meanwhile, it was up to Pluvius, among my wardrobe of names, to wage battle with the
Post
and by implication its puppet masters high atop Butte and loftier yet on Wall Street. My editorial-page opposite number went under the inane
nom de plume
of Scriptoris. The fool; he was self-evidently a writer, or at least a typist. Why waste the Latin? That aside, the journalistic exchange of insults was something like the stutter step when you meet someone in your path and each moves in front of the other.

The
Post
:

That organ of propaganda trying to pass as a newspaper seems not to know even the basics of the mining industry, that smelter smoke is the smell of money.

The
Thunder
:

Also of lung disease, the leading cause of death among miners and their families.

The
Post
:

The latest diatribe from that ill-named broadsheet down by the district of ill fame disputes the right of the largest employer in the state to make itself known in the halls of the legislature. We ask you, what is wrong with proper representation of management and capital in civic debates?

The
Thunder
:

Representation is one thing, colonial domination is another. Anaconda has made Montana the Congo of America.

•   •   •

Yet, in this gloves-off fight, part of the foe was always out of reach. A villain is supposed to have an identifiable face, the more prominent the wicked features, the better the target. Against this classic rule, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company wore the most impassive mask in America: that of Wall Street. Oh, there were names, fearsome ones—the Rockefellers and Henry Rogerses of the dragon's nest of all monopolies, Standard Oil—attached to its corporate ownership, but those kept their distance from Butte and bloody deeds in the streets; and their hirelings, while notorious enough locally, comprised a shifting cast of characters there in the loft of the Hennessy Building. “Quin and I agree on that much—you never quite know who you're dealing with, they come and go like shadows,” Jared spoke from experience in round after round at the bargaining table over wages and safety conditions in the mines, negotiations that seemed to have no end. The only thing to be counted on was that up on that top floor, men in celluloid collars worked to keep the copper collar tight on the workers of the mines and the rest of society that constituted Montana as well. Faceless as it was heartless, Anaconda to all appearances could be attacked only by barrage, as the
Thunder
was doing, yet any thinking person pined for the one sure blow that would bring a giant down.

“You're doing your part like a real fighter,” Jared applauded my free-swinging editorial style. “Just what we need.” He now had to divide himself between the ongoing Butte struggle and the legislative session under way in Helena, and the double effort showed on him. His dark, deep Welsh eyes seemed to hold more than ever, calculations on two fronts active behind his gaze when he came by the newsroom to confer with Armbrister and me.

“Unlike Ulcer Gulch, it at least sounds like something is getting done around here,” he ruefully contrasted legislative life with the contrapuntal rhythms of typewriters and telephones around the trio of us in session at the editor's desk. Three and a variable fraction, actually, as he had Russian Famine along, fresh from selling the
Thunder
on the street as the newest of our newsboys
,
while Rab attended to some after-hours task at the detention school. The lad was in motion even standing still, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, taking his cap off and putting it back on, restlessness accentuated by indoor confinement. Absently stopping him from playing with the spindle where Armbrister spiked the overset, stories waiting to be used, Jared thought out loud to the other two of us.

“It's pretty much as we figured, a lot of legislators don't move a muscle without orders from the top floor of the Hennessy Building. But you'd be surprised how many don't like it that way. I get the feeling there are quite a few, maybe enough to do us some real good, who'd turn their back on Anaconda if they thought they could get away with it.” His quickness of thought always surprised me. “What's the Latin for that, do you suppose, Professor?”

“Mmm, perhaps most aptly,
Ad rei publicae rationes aliquid referre.
To consider a thing from the political point of view.”

“To be scared to death of a kick in the slats from the voters,” Armbrister translated more aptly yet. “But how do we get them panicked enough in Ulcer Gulch to ditch Anaconda?”

“That's the trick entirely,” Jared granted. “We'll need to come up with something that'll do it, later in the session, when I learn the ropes a little more.” Uncomfortably realizing how much he was sounding like a politician, he made a face. “Some of the old bulls in the cloakroom gave me the wink on how to get anything done in Ulcer Gulch, which is to take it easy, take my time. Save anything big for my maiden speech, is what it amounts to. Oh, I know”—he raised his hands against Armbrister and me reacting as newspapermen were bound to at any letup whatsoever in the campaign against Anaconda—“it's going to be hard for all of us, holding our fire.” His face took on the rigid set of a combatant who had learned that in the trenches of the western front. “The waiting is always the worst part.” Then he was back from the past, taking the edge off with what could pass for a grin. “In the meantime I have to watch out for what happens to maidens, don't I.”

Russian Famine worked on that while the others of us laughed in manly fashion, then Jared sobered into his publisher's role. “Don't get me wrong, the
Thunder
and the Professor's editorials read like Holy Writ to me, but I wonder if we're getting across to people, or is that going to take until Judgment Day, too?” He jerked his head toward the Gibraltar always to be conquered, the Hill. “I made the rounds through the tunnels at chow time, and I hate to say so, but more men had their noses into the funnies than the editorial page.”

I winced at that, but Armbrister merely lifted his hawklike shoulders. “That's what we're up against in this business. Morgie can write in purple and gold and still not get them away from Krazy Kat.”

Truer words were never heard, according to Famine's rapid nods. “Krazy's my favorite,” he piped up in a voice as thin as the rest of him. “Boy, Ignatz Mouse really knows how to throw a brick, and Offissa Pupp always after him, that's good stuff. I even read the funnies some in school,” he confided to us in man-to-man fashion, “if Mrs. Evans don't catch me.” Armbrister's sardonic expression said,
There, see?

The boy's testimonial made me think. “Perhaps what's lacking is some compelling entertainment of our own.” I asked Armbrister, “Those small items that fill in the bottom of a page—what are they called?”

“Fillers.”

“Exactly, those. Just suppose we were to use that space instead for brief submissions from the miners in their native languages. Say, oh, Finnish one time and Italian the next and on down the line, day by day. Jokes, sayings, bits of song. Perhaps call it ‘Voices from the Hill.' It might draw their eyes to the editorial page.”

Jared turned to Armbrister. “Jacob, what do you think?”

What the editor thought could be read in his grimace. “It'd be a hell of a headache to deal with in the page makeup. But you're the publisher.”