Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  As deeply as if in a séance, with the ghosts rising in the dark streets outside, those shadows that had followed me in my earlier Butte experience, window men in the employ of Anaconda whom I finally outwitted but not with any great margin of safety; oh, yes, I was listening.

  “Has he recited everything but the Bible to you, Mr. Morgan?” Rab and Famine came bearing their meals and Jared’s. But before my companion in conversation could so much as lift a fork, she leaned in conspiratorially. “Show him.” She giggled. “Go ahead.”

  Perfectly poker-faced, Jared dug out a calling card and presented it to me. The official-looking imprimatur was as boggling to me as the legal scripture in Sandison’s missive that produced a mansion.

  STATE SENATOR JARED EVANS

  REPRESENTING SILVER BOW COUNTY

  AND THE CITY OF BUTTE

  Well, that explained his spiffed-up appearance. “Politics now? Jared, you’re full of surprises.”

  Over Rab’s proud boast that he was elected by a landslide, he confided to me: “A change of tactics, is all.” This least playful of men grinned ever so slightly. “It seems to have gotten Anaconda’s attention.”

  Rab leaned across the table to whisper: “They’re scared he’ll be governor next.” With her racehorse keenness she looked like she couldn’t wait for that result, and Russian Famine between shoveling his food down was listening for all he was worth. Still looking at me, Jared sobered. “The idea is to build some bargaining power, for dealing with Anaconda. They’ve had their way with the legislature and so many other politicians for so long, people are getting fed up. I can at least give the copper bosses a bad time on the floor of the senate and”—the bit of grin showed on him again as he looked at Rab—“beyond, if it ever comes to that. We’ll see what the voters think after I raise enough ruckus.”

  “Intriguing,” I had to commend his plan of attack. “And classic in its approach. You draw on the countryside, in this case the voting public, to harass the opponent into retreat, very much as the Russians rose up against Napoleon on his march to Moscow. I wish you every success, Senator Evans.”

  “There, see?” Rab nudged him.

  “The thing is,” he confided further, “we need to whip up public opinion like never before for this to work. The power of the press, no less. But that’s the catch.”

  “Oh?”

  “Anaconda owns every daily newspaper in the state.”

  “The snakes got their mitts on everything,” Russian Famine echoed that.

  “Hush a minute, Sharp Ears,” Rab chided gently.

  “Except,” Jared continued, his grin growing now, “for the one the union is about to start.”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  I sat upright as if jabbed. “Jared—and Rab, need I say—I am not a journalist. It is a noble profession, but I’m not fitted to scurry around reporting on this and that.”

  “You wouldn’t have to.” Jared leaned in closer, his voice lowered. “You’d be our editorial voice. We need a wordslinger. Someone to tear the living hide off Anaconda, day after day.” He held me in his commanding gaze. “Professor, you’re our man.”

  • • •

  How does it happen with such regularity? As if intrigue and predicament were the Adam and Eve of my family tree, situations seek me out. With the best intentions in the world, I find myself catapulted into circumstances far out of the ordinary. Chicago; Marias Coulee; Butte; and now chapter two of this city of perils. Was this my role in life, to be a gazetteer of risky occurrences?

  • • •

  My protestations were batted down as quickly as I could bring them up, with Rab pitching in whenever Jared paused for breath. “That is so typical, Mr. Morgan. You’re entirely too modest about your wordslinging ability.”

  I could not even prevail on the central issue of Anaconda siccing its goons on me again if I joined the union cause as its editorial tribune, Jared pointing out that the pair who had shadowed me previously had left town in a hurry after hints in the form of dynamite fuses were dropped on their pillows. “We learned something from the Wobblies there,” he said firmly. “Don’t worry, we’ll play rough if Anaconda gets on your tail. Odds are, they won’t pick you out ahead of me or anyone else on the newspaper staff. You’ll just blend in and be writing pieces without your name attached.” His steady gaze took me in. “Besides, that beard changes your appearance like night and day from the last time around. I had to look twice to be sure it was you.”

  “Those’re some whiskers,” Russian Famine backed that up.

  Temptation knows how to find me, I had to admit. Caskets for company were looking less and less appealing. Even so, I tried to dodge a newspapering fate with one excuse or another until the accusation flew across the table, “You’re fudging.”

  “Rab, I am not fudging.”

  “Dancing all around the issue like a troupe of Cossacks, then.”

  I sighed. “All right, Perseverance.” Turning to Jared, I told him I was not promising anything, mind you, but I would take his proposition under advisement and—

  “I know what, Professor, you can have a pen name,” he forged past all that. “That’ll give you one more disguise, in case anybody gets too curious about who’s doing the wordslinging.”

  “There,” his partner in scheming declared with a toss of her head, while Russian Famine hungrily took it all in like an apprentice conspirator, “doesn’t that sound rosier?”

  I sighed again. “A pigment of the imagination, Rab.”

  • • •

  Grace was sleeping peacefully when I came in, and had gone to the kitchen by the time I got up. Thus it was at breakfast that I made my announcement.

  “I seem to have found employment.”

  “See,” Grace greeted that as though she had never had an iota of doubt, “you are a provider after all. Griff, Hoop? Hear that?” They took turns maintaining they were not surprised in the least that I was employable. Sandison was absent from the table, preferring to start his day with bread and cheese and his books. “Tell us, mysterious,” my freshly proud wife urged. “What’s the heavenly job?”

  “Writing editorials against Anaconda on a regular basis. In the newspaper Jared Evans is starting up.”

  “Oh, Morrie.”

  “Yipes,” Hoop or Griff let out.

  Those were not the kind of exclamations I’d hoped for. “It is steady work that pays a decent wage,” I defended, “which is something all three of you were prescribing for me up until this instant, I believe.”

  “We don’t count as much as some,” said Griff, glancing sideways at Grace. “Anaconda won’t like that sort of thing,” he put it, Hoop nodding gravely.

  “What is so alarming about public debate in the editorial column of a newspaper, for heaven’s sake?” I was provoked into defense of the job I hadn’t been sure I wanted. “The discussion of fair wages and safe working conditions and so on is a practical matter, not a declaration of war. I should think Anaconda can stand a bit of give-and-take where clubs and bullets are not required.”

  “Okey-doke, Morrie. It’s your neck.” Shaking their heads, the pair of them gimped off to their tasks of the day.

  Grace stayed sitting with me, fried eggs and side pork going cold on our plates while we each waited for the other to say the right thing. I noticed a flush come over her. “My love, I really do not see that much reason for concern,” I tried to sound soothing. “I’ll be writing editorials anonymously. Pseudonymously, to be exact.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Morrie, you could be writing those things posthumously and Anaconda would still find out it was you.”

  I looked at her apprehensively. “Grace, there’s one consideration I hadn’t thought of until now. Don’t tell me this makes you—”

  “No! Absolutely not. I’m perfectly fine.” She sh
ot to her feet and began ferrying dishes to the sink. “I suppose you know what you’re doing. But somebody has to worry about you if you won’t.”

  • • •

  “Mr. Morgan, if you so much as say one word about ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ I’ll bat you.”

  “Tsk, Rab,” I returned her murmur. “Would I do that?”

  Plainly, though, the vacant premises of the newspaper-to-be was on the rocks drastically enough to have been long abandoned. The building, down a backstreet in the part of town winkingly known as Venus Alley and next to a Chinese noodle shop, once had been a secretarial school, which accounted for the array of rickety desks and typing stands and abandoned typewriters in the gloomy space. Walls were peeling, light fixtures hung askew, and a musty feel prevailed as though fresh air was a foreign commodity. None of which appeared to faze Jared in the least, marching from window to window, flipping up flyspecked green blinds. Over his shoulder he called, “What do you think of the enterprise so far, Professor?”

  Rab’s shoe pressed a warning on the toe of mine. “It, mmm, has possibilities.”

  Dusting his hands, he marched past us. “This is nothing, come see what’s in the back room.”

  Dutifully Rab and I filed after him into an even bigger and grubbier space, evidently a warehouse butted up against the front structure. It too needed heroic cleaning, but in the middle of the floor sat something new and huge, its every part gleaming like rarest metal.

  Even I was at a loss for words for a moment. Reverently I approached the printing press. “Jared, if this wasn’t born in a manger, where did it come from?”

  He winked at Rab and grinned at me. “We’re not the only ones who want to find some way to take on Anaconda. Farmers and ranchers are sick of the copper collar, too.” He lowered his voice, even though it was only we three in the cavernous room. “There’s a pair of rich cattlemen, brothers, up north. One of them was going into politics, war hero and all,” his tone never betraying the fit of that description on himself, “until he ran into skirt trouble, the rumor is. Anaconda is usually behind any funny stuff like that, so he has it in for the copper bosses, and that loosened up his check-writing hand,” he finished with a benign smile at the state-of-the-art printing press.

  Rab spoke up. “It’s the Williamsons, isn’t it. The Double W ranch and all the rest.” She could see I needed enlightening. “They own everything they can get their hands on,” she could not help sounding like the homestead-bred girl she had been in Marias Coulee. Old antagonisms die hard.

  “We need all the allies we can get,” Jared said with soldierly simplicity.

  Rab nibbled her lip. “I suppose.”

  I was with Jared, in this instance. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. “I’d say equipment like this forgives the Williamson gent some sins.” I couldn’t resist running a hand over the press, in awe of the complex of machinery that turned lead impressions and ink into news articles and headlines spun onto a continuous web of newsprint and at the end of the process, into beautifully folded newspapers. “What an astounding era of communication we live in,” I mused. “Gutenberg would be proud.”

  Voices were heard out front. Jared gathered Rab by the waist and clapped a hand to my shoulder. “Come meet the staff.”

  • • •

  Milling around among the desks and typing stands were a couple of dozen individuals. I stress that last word, for even at first look this group comprised an odd lot. Old, young, predominantly male but including a few women with a Nellie Bly keenness to them, they looked so disparate as a staff that only an inclusive undertaking such as a newspaper could hold them. I marveled at how such a collection of timeworn refugees from journalistic outposts and eager neophytes had been assembled; I was quite sure I recognized a young couple from meetings of the erstwhile Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle in the basement of the public library. One figure in this crowd stood out for exactly what he was, a hunch-shouldered pallid type, stone bald, as emblematic of the newspapering profession as a wooden Indian is of a cigar store. This was none other than Armbrister, Jared’s choice of editor.

  While Jared with Rab attached was going around the room making introductions, the sallow journalist and I singled ourselves out as if by instinct. Shaking hands at a careful distance, we studied each other. Armbrister wore a trademark green eyeshade and the expression of a hound dog on a cold trail. From the look of him, he had worn both since time immemorial. He eyed my rather smart tweed suit—London; those tailors—none too neutrally.

  “You know beans about newspapering, Morgan?”

  “A bit, from a lifetime of reading every scrap of newsprint possible. Do you know beans about arousing public opinion for a good cause?”

  “I’ve heard distant rumors of it,” he answered lugubriously, “about like the existence of the unicorn.”

  “Mmm. I understand that up until now you worked for our rival, the Post.”

  “City editor on that rag, was all,” he snapped, giving me a look I thought of as the Butte eye. It was not a true squint, simply a slight lowering of the eyelids like a camera aperture finding finer focus. I had encountered it at Dublin Gulch wakes, and in a mineshaft nearly a mile deep in the Hill, and on occasion in the woman at my side in life, Butte-born as Grace was. That particular cast of eye perhaps became habitual in a city always enwrapped in conflict. Armbrister maintained it as he grudgingly spoke the next: “I didn’t have to run up to the top floor of the Hennessy Building like a coolie and have every word pass inspection with the bastards there, if that’s what you’re thinking.” At the mention of Anaconda’s lair on high, his long face grew longer. “A man has to make a living, you know.”

  “I do know.”

  Something in the way I said that drew the first twinge of interest from the hound dog face. “Evans swears you’re a pip at making the language dance.” He sniffed. “Naturally, any paper worth its ink needs a Fancy Dan for its editorial page or readers will never get past the funnies.”

  “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

  “SO, MORGAN, 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.