Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  I groaned. “Not again?”

  “That trunk of yours got sidetracked somewhere between Frisco and here, I’d say,” he cheerfully proffered the claim check. “It’ll catch up with you sooner or later, you can just about bet.”

  “Not if experience is any guide,” I protested hotly, citing my own previous trunk lost when I first arrived to Butte, and still missing after all this time. I was well launched into an impassioned lecture to the unimpressed baggage man about this trunk of ours having accompanied us uneventfully on railroads around half the world until this accursed one, when Grace tugged at the sleeve of my overcoat. “Morrie, never mind. I have my overnight case and you’ve your satchel, we can get by.”

  Resigned to the loss, evidently my own personal admission ticket to Butte, I sighed heavily and accompanied Grace out to the street. A jitney sat chugging at the snowy curb, and the bundled-up taxi driver poked his head out to ask, “Where to, folks?”

  I said with what I hoped was the air of a mansion owner, “Ajax Avenue, please.”

  “Horse Thief Row it is,” the driver said nonchalantly. “Hop in.”

  • • •

  Probably since the villas of Pompeii, palatial homes are ornaments of wealth, and Butte had more than its share of fanciful big houses. Our route swung past the monstrosity built by the early copper magnate William A. Clark, a many-gabled Victorian monument to vanity that took up half a block. More ostentatious yet was the château his son had imported from Europe and reassembled to the last cubit. Housekeeper that she’d had to be in operating her own boardinghouse, Grace peered apprehensively through the frost-flowered windows of the taxi as we passed other West End behemoths, her gloved hand gripping mine harder and harder. “Grace, Sandy’s residence as I recall it is not as gargantuan as these,” I sought to reassure her. To no avail. More firmly, I tried again. “It’s only a house, remember.”

  “Around here, that’s some ‘only,’” she said with a swallow.

  Now I was the apprehensive one. “I hope you’re not getting—”

  “No! I’m fine. Fine.”

  The driver called out, “This’s the street. Which shack is yours, pard?”

  I pointed over his shoulder to a stonework architectural mix with a peaked tower room predominating. Draped in snow and icicles, the three-story house looked like a polar castle.

  “There, see?” I soothed Grace when the taxi left us off outside the gray granite manse. “Smaller than Versailles.”

  “A little,” she allowed doubtfully, as we negotiated the frosty front steps and porch. The second time I rapped the brass knocker in the shape of a helmeted warrior’s frosty-eyed visage, Ajax on guard duty, a familiar gruff voice called from somewhere inside. “Coming. Don’t wear out the door.”

  “Morgan,” the figure that flung it open and loomed there almost filling the doorway issued, as if identifying me to myself. As commanding as Moses, he rumbled, “It’s about time you stopped gallivanting all over the landscape. Heh.”

  Samuel Sandison himself was nearly geographic, the great sloping body ascending from an avalanche of midriff to a snowy summit of beard and cowlick. Glacial blue eyes seemed to see past a person into the shadows of life. Attired as ever in a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, and boots long since polished by sagebrush and horsehide, he appeared to be resisting time in every stitch of his being. Description struggled when it came to his mark on history, cattle king turned vigilante turned bookman and city librarian, who had bent every effort and not a few regulations to provide a rough-and-tumble mining town with a world-class reading collection. And always, always, the long shadow of the hangman’s tree followed him, carried forward from when he’d owned the biggest ranch in Montana. Having shared an office with him in something like companionable exasperation—the feeling may have been mutual—I always connected this outsize man with those lines of the poet Cheyne: Greater than his age was he / Story and legend his legacy.

  Right now, he was some manner of unprecedented tenant ushering us into a sprawling residence newly ours. Parlor, drawing room, music room with piano and peach-and-plum wallpaper wrongly inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, living room, dining room, nameless others, kitchen somewhere in the distance. Fine-grained oak here, bird’s-eye maple there, Turkish carpets everywhere. “Bedrooms and such are upstairs,” he waved toward the heavens, “there’s a mob of them. Help yourselves.” With Grace wearing the wide-eyed expression of a first-time museumgoer, he trooped us on through the downstairs until we reached a conical room at the base of the substantial tower, practically submerged in books. “Library,” he pronounced, probably just for the satisfaction of the word. Spying a rare-books catalog open on the overflowing desk, I couldn’t help but ask, “How’s shopping, Sandy?”

  “About like dealing with pirates, as usual.” He frowned at me a certain way, book lover to book lover. “What do you think of The Song of Igor’s Campaign?”

  “Where ‘the wolves in the ravine conjure the storm,’ if I am translating rightly? The poetic flavor of that might not be received as well as it should by your library patrons, this time of year.” I inclined my head to the depths of snow and thermometer, which evidently were here to stay through the Butte winter.

  “You maybe hit on a good point there,” Sandison drawled. “I’ll hold out for something less Siberian.” Noticing Grace biting a finger—I could tell she was trying to tally the number of rooms encountered so far, with floors yet to go—he addressed her with elephantine gallantry. “My hat is off to you, madam, for turning this hopeless case,” he indicated to me, “into husband material.”

  “What? Oh, yes. I mean, Morrie had a hand in that, too.” The topic of matrimony reminding her, she paid her respects to the late Dora: “I’m sorry about your loss.”

  He bobbed his head in almost schoolboyish fashion, evidently not trusting his voice. Clearing his throat, he returned to eyeing me critically. “What are you doing with all that foliage on your face? Hiding the mud fence?”

  There is quite a philosophy to growing a beard—or a mustache, as I occasionally resorted to—but in this instance, I’d done so simply as a precautionary measure. That winning bet on the corrupted World Series may have upset the Chicago gamblers who lost their shirts to some smart aleck with too much of a hunch, as they no doubt saw it, and I thought it best not to fit my description while Grace and I hit the high spots of the world. I had also added some pounds in our sampling of national cuisines; advancing from lightweight to middleweight, as I preferred to think of it. A bit of camouflage never hurt, in my experience.

  “I think it’s very becoming on him,” Grace said loyally, of my carefully tended whiskers. “Hmmp,” Sandison grunted, himself bearded as a Santa. The glint in the gaze he gave me showed he was restraining himself, barely, from asking, “Becoming what?” Before he could hold forth about me any further, Grace put in, “I’d like to look over the kitchen, if I may.”

  “Madam, be my”—he halted the sweep of his hand toward the rear region of the house—“I started to say guest, but landlady is more accurate, isn’t it. Heh.” Grace flinched ever so slightly and left us.

  “That brings up something, Sandy.” I strolled the circle of the room for the pleasure of running my fingers over the valuable books. “Exactly how is this living arrangement supposed to work?”

  “Easy as pie, simpleton. I’ll hole up here when I’m not downtown at the public library,” he deposited himself in his chair at the heaping desk, “and use a stray bedroom. The rest of the place is yours and hers. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  “That leads to my next question.” The chair groaning under him as he shifted haunches, Sandison waited for me to ask it. I gestured to include everything from ancient Ajax guarding the entrance to the mansion to the gift of title in my pocket. “Why?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to live forever, do y
ou?” he said, mildly for him. “You might as well have the place instead of the taxman.”

  That seemed to sum the matter up, at least as far as he was concerned. It was only the start of it for me. “Thank you very much, I think. But ah, taxes, and upkeep—”

  “Coal,” he added to the list with a grunt. “The place eats it like a locomotive.”

  “—and staff—”

  “The cook and a couple of maids left, after Dora passed away. I figured you and the missus would take care of all that your own way anyhow.”

  “—all of which,” I drew a needed breath, “leads me to wonder if I might have my old job back. A steady wage would be most welcome at this point, Sandy.”

  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?”

  Ceremoni
ously 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—”