Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  While that hung in the air, I hopped down from the desk. “That’s why the newspaper is rightly called the Thunder, and why I think I’ve come to the right place for its best possible newsboys.”

  “Yeah, but,” the silence was broken by a high-pitched voice from the end of another row, “my brudda tried that wit’ the Post. He always ended up wit’ a pile of papers nobody’d buy.”

  “I promise that will not happen with the Thunder, which lives up to its word in fairness for the workers. We will buy back any of your unsold newspapers at half the street price,” I improvised, with mental apologies to Jared and Armbrister, who would have to figure out the further economics of that. “You’re guaranteed that much of a wage, while you’re making profits from all the papers you sell.”

  “No hooey?” This came from the evident ringleader, who had spoken up at the very start. The others again let him speak for them all as he thought out loud, “There’s still a catch. The Posties already got the good corners.”

  “Ah, but—every intersection has four corners.”

  My questioner persisted. “Then what if the Posties don’t want us on any of ’em and gang up to run us off?”

  “Streets are a public thoroughfare. You have as much right to be there as they do, if you take my meaning.”

  “Now you’re talkin’.” He gave me a sudden wink, and craftily translated for the roomful of waiting faces. “If they try to give any of us a bad time, we all pitch in and knock their blocks off.”

  “Yeah! You bet! That’s the way!” acclamation resounded, and with that, Rab moved in, bearing a large map of the city so that the carriers of the Thunder, as they now were, could each pick out intersections to claim as their own.

  Stepping away from the stampede of newly made newsboys, I wiped my brow and was putting my coat back on when I heard a small, worshipful voice somewhere around my elbow. “That was really something, mister.” The cherubic one with the flaming hair was looking up at me with puppy eyes. “How you talked a streak like that.”

  Resisting the urge to pat him on the head, I warmly thanked him for the compliment and he skipped away as I waited to have a last word with Rab, still busy enforcing crowd control at the map. All of a sudden, I heard a commotion in the hall outside the room.

  “Give ’em back.”

  “Lay off, Famine. Ow!”

  “Give ’em back, I tell you.” The scuffle escalated until I rushed out and found Russian Famine with the wildly kicking redheaded tyke wrapped in a choke hold.

  “He’s got something of yours,” Famine panted as soon as he saw me, discharging the little kicker in my direction. “He was just gonna pony up, wasn’t you, Punky.”

  “Uh, sure.” The redheaded angel without wings shuffled toward me. “I found ’em just laying around.” Still with a guileless expression, he dropped into my hand with a clink the set of brass knuckles ordinarily in my suit coat pocket.

  As the little pickpocket left us with a beneficent shrug and as I was hurriedly checking for my wallet and watch, Famine moved close and, eyes shining, said confidentially, “I bet knuckies like that are just the ticket in a fight, huh?”

  “They can be.” I patted the side pocket where the knobbed brass items were safely restored. “But their greater use is in warding off fisticuffs. They serve as persuaders for the other fellow to think twice, shall we say.”

  He pursed in thought. “That ain’t bad, either.”

  Glancing in at the melee of newly minted news merchants around Rab and the map, I lowered my voice. “Famine, it might be best if my little metal friends stayed just our secret, do you think? Some of your, mmm, classmates could gossip in the direction of the wrong ears if they knew about these, perhaps.”

  The boy’s face squinched in wise agreement. “Yeah. You never know what’s gonna happen in a hoosegow like this.”

  6

  IF LIFE CAME WITH an instruction book, I had reached the chapter on taking stock of oneself without the help of a mirror. Looking at the larger picture, much seemed to have been lately set right in the world of me and mine. With the streets of Butte once again ringing with “Extra! Extra! Getcha Thunder here!” there was considerable to celebrate along with Robert Burns’s nativity, really. Jared’s bold newspaper venture was holding its own against almighty Anaconda, the manse had not fallen down on us, and I could see no lasting effects from my neck-saving impersonation of the Highliner. So let the grand day, or at least night, come, sang my heart.

  A Scottish costume party might seem to be overdoing the obvious, merely a matter of showing up in customary garb ranging from those drafty kilts that so unnerved Griff and Hoop to the pulpit black of preachers thumping John Knox and the Covenanters back to life. But that overlooks the wardrobe potentialities in the pages of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and, for that matter, Burns himself. No sooner had I enlightened Grace as to the rural nature of much of his poetry than she chose to dress as a milkmaid, saucy bonnet and all. “If that doesn’t put me in the spirit, I don’t know what will.” She looked doubtfully at me in my usual suit and vest and watch chain. “Morrie, excuse me all to the dickens for saying so, but you don’t much resemble a Scotch version of a cowboy—”

  “Cowherd.”

  “—who’d be a milkmaid’s honey—”

  “Swain.”

  “—see there, we’re already running out of vocabulary. Why are you grinning like a hyena?”

  I couldn’t help it, because Sandison, bless him and his strange ways, was granting me a boyhood dream. From the time I was old enough to take a book in my lap and make sense of sentences, I had loved Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ruffianly crew aboard the Hispaniola as it hoisted sail for the isle where a chest of gold lay “not yet lifted” captured my imagination, and here was my chance, tucked in me somewhere ever since discovering young Jim Hawkins in his classic adventure, to sign on as a sea dog. “I shall be a none too ancient mariner, my dear, knee breeches and all. How does that sound?”

  “Overboard.”

  When the celebratory night arrived, however, she enthusiastically pitched in on my maritime getup, fussing over details as though she were a wardrobe mistress. “My, you do look piratical,” she ultimately circled me in inspection. “Isn’t the eye patch a nice touch?”

  “If I could see better, I might think so.”

  She powdered my beard to make me appear appropriately grizzled, and one last flourish, clipped a hoop earring onto my earlobe. “There now, you’re ready to sail the seven seas.”

  “I’ll be content to navigate whatever Sandison’s notion of a party is,” I said in all honesty.

  Having perfected me, Grace ducked to the dresser mirror for one last primp. I couldn’t see that she needed it, her flaxen hair peeking fetchingly from under her ribboned bonnet, her firm figure doing full justice to a maidenly blouse and ankle-long skirt. She caught my watching reflection. “Now what’s the grin about?”

  “Merely thinking how well you fit the story of Robert Burns and the milkmaid.”

  “A Morrie story, is it,” she turned to me quite coquettishly. “All right, I’m in for it, while you do something with this impossible bow, please.”

  Going to her, I began, “Our man Burns is strolling along a country lane, no doubt writing poetry in his head by the ream, when who should he meet, a full pail in each hand, but a pretty milkmaid.” I tugged the bowstrings of Grace’s bonnet and her with it closer than absolutely necessary for tying, and continued. “Naturally he stops and bows and greets her, but she scarcely even replies and keeps on her way. Great one with the girls that he was,” I went on as my fingers flew with the bonnet strings and Grace listened with mock soberness, “this would not do, and he calls out after her, ‘Lass, d’ye not ken who I am?’”

  “‘Nay, sir,’ she barely glances over her shoulder at him, ‘ought I?’”

 
“‘I’m Rabbie Burns,’” I finished the bow, and the story, with a flourish. “‘Ay, well,’ says she. ‘In that case, I’d better put my pails doon.’”

  Grace whooped at the tale, poking my chest with a provocative finger. “I knew there must be some way around crying over spilled milk.”

  • • •

  Waiting for us at the bottom as we came giggling down the stairs were Griff and Hoop, attired as shepherds in rough clothes and sturdy boots. Not so different from their mining days, except for the tam-o’-shanters perched on their bald heads like tea cozies. Laughing like children playing dress-up, the four of us piled into a taxi where the driver barely glanced at us before setting out for the library.

  Would you believe, the heavens sent the old romantic scamp of a poet a present on his birthday, a resplendent full moon, the night on a silver platter. Butte looked its best in the snowy dark, the lofty downtown buildings washed by the moonlight. Grace nudged me in the ribs—“Oh, look!”—as the taxi drew into view of the library itself, lit like a filigreed lantern, every window to the topmost in its Gothic tower an aperture of glow. “Doesn’t it remind you of the Rhine? Those castles.”

  Up the broad steps we grandly went, arm in arm, bandannaed and bonneted, trailed by Griff and Hoop, wordless for once. Striding into the handsomely lit foyer, I had the uncanny sensation of returning to an earlier life, when Sandison for some reason known only to himself hired me as his assistant and the Butte Public Library became my abode. It was as if nothing had changed, the palatial proportions, the Tuscan red wainscoting, the ceiling panels of white and gold interset among the dark oaken beams, the all-seeing portrait of Shakespeare above the Reading Room doorway. Most regal of all, arrayed in ranks as if holding court on the mezzanine were the reds and greens and gilts of those books of Sandison’s unmatched collection.

  Knowing my helpless affection for this citadel of literature, Grace pinched my elbow and whispered, “Welcome back.” But there was too much traffic in the royally decorated hallway for me to dawdle like a tourist. “Looky there, the mayor,” Hoop was murmuring to Griff about a stout personage attired, if I was not mistaken, like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. “Righto,” Griff responded in kind, “and that pack of deacons or whatever coming through the door are them trustees Sandy’s always grousing about.” In short, all manner of costumed partygoers were pouring in, wigs and crinolines and buckle shoes and tasseled shawls back in fashion, the crowd parting like water around a stationary massive figure, kilted and outfitted with sporran and dirk and a claymore broadsword in a decorated scabbard, a veritable statue of Highland legend. Except it was Sandison.

  He let out a “Heh, heh” at the sight of us, Griff and Hoop chorusing in greeting, “Swell outfit.” Pointing with his beard, he instructed us that the festivities were getting under way downstairs. “Enjoy yourselves,” he ordered.

  The tingle at being back in such familiar surroundings increased in me as we descended to the basement of the library, which was as snug a venue as could be found in a mile-high city with the temperature hovering near zero. The thick stone walls did away with noise from outside, and the curtained stage at one end of the long room nicely turned the space into an impromptu auditorium. In that earlier time, among the countless tasks Sandison tossed to me was juggling the calendar of organizations that met here in evenings, and while bunches such as the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle and Dora Sandison’s Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group not infrequently had given me fits with their needs and foibles, I found myself thinking back on them with something like nostalgia. Parts of the past lend themselves to that while others—

  “Isn’t this a picture!” Grace’s exclamation did justice to the thronged scene we stepped into. Onstage, above the bewigged and bonneted heads of the multitude, was the Miners Band, magnificently embossed and brass-buttoned in their emerald green uniforms as they played a Burns air, “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon.” People were clustered thick around the food table, where serving girls dished out oatcakes and scones. Griff and Hoop wisely migrated toward the punch bowl.

  “Mr. Morgan, you only lack a peg leg and a parrot.” Rab swooped on us from behind, Jared self-consciously following in the uniform of a lighthouse keeper, medallioned cap and all. She herself wore a startling blood-red gown, yards of it, which had Grace and me guessing until we hit upon ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots.

  “That leaves only our youngest member unaccounted for,” I said, looking around for Russian Famine.

  Rab pointed. “That’s him over there, hopping like a jackrabbit.”

  Off to one side, a number of children were playing peever, an Edinburgh street game that was a cross between rosey toesy and hopscotch. Sure enough, when I squinted my seeing eye, the wraith in a soldier uniform complete with a soup plate helmet was adroitly hopping from one chalked square to the next while lightly kicking the flat-sided peever stone along. “It’s one of Jared’s old uniforms I cut down to fit him, he insisted so,” Rab confided as if it were a family secret. “He absolutely worships this man of mine.”

  “He’s at that age,” Jared said soberly. I still watched the boy, remembering the nimbleness of that time of life. While Grace and Rab chatted, Jared accepted attention from constituents dropping by to urge him to give ’em hell in the senate, “them” needing no translation. In an interval, he grinned at me and shook his head. “It’s a little different from when we had to hide out down here, wouldn’t you say, Professor?” One of my prouder moments had been smuggling him and other union men into this basement time after time to come up with the miners’ anthem that the labor movement had sorely needed at an earlier moment of suppression brought on by wartime hysteria. Music perhaps has no battalions, but it conquers worlds, too.

  Just then the band struck up a dance tune—the schottische, of course—and Jared and I were practically swept off our feet by our eager wives. The evening galloped on that way for some time until a break in the music, and a chance to catch breath.

  But as Grace and I adjourned from the dance floor, what wind I had left was nearly knocked out of me by a slap on the back. I turned around to the nearly coal-black face of Pat Quinlan. In old work clothes and a flat cap, he looked as though he had come straight from mucking out ore on the Hill, except the substance darkening him all the way to the eye sockets appeared really to be coal dust, not the usual grime that went with copper mining. “The Morgans!” he greeted us like the long lost. “Grace, you nabbed yourself a dilly with this one.” He winked at me as the worthy successor to her Arthur, one of his mates in the mines.

  She recovered from the greeting, but not quite from the sight of him. “Quin, what ever are you supposed to be? A one-man minstrel show?”

  “Let me guess,” I interposed. “A pitman.”

  “Right the first try, Morgan my man. Solidarity with our brothers in the coal pits, over there in the thistle patch.”

  “Very effective,” Grace said, still looking at him as if she would like to scrub him down. “A dancing man, are you? I didn’t know that.”

  Quinlan laughed, more or less. “It’s Jared’s doing, my being here, I’ll warrant you. He’ll primp me into respectability if it kills us both.” He cast a look around at the crowd in its finery of make-believe. “Besides, I had to come to see how the other half lives, didn’t I?” All too casually, his gaze returned to me. “That reminds me. Might I have a word with you about when the Thunder is ever going to be accompanied by lightning?”

  Grace cocked her head as if she had heard a rumble, all right. “You’ll find me at the punch bowl, Morrie.”

  As she left, Quinlan moved in to speak confidentially, arms folded on his chest as he again took in the laughing, talking, dancing celebrants in the great room. “What I was saying to Grace I meant, you know. How many of them have ever been down a mineshaft? Or even up on the Hill, to see the way we live, see what it’s like on the hin
d tit of Anaconda?” He nudged me with his elbow. “You know Dublin Gulch.” I did. The sprawl of streets right in amid dump heaps of the mines, shanties with laden clotheslines bucking in the gritty wind. For moments longer Quinlan stared out of his coal dust mask of a face at the other Butte gathered there, then expelled a deep breath. “That’s just people, I suppose.” Lowering his voice, he came to the point. “I don’t mind telling you, the commotion about the copper collar you and Jared are kicking up in the newspaper is all well and good, but from where I sit, it’s also slower than the wrath of God.” Another wink from under the flat cap. “Tempus fidget, you know.” Joke that was not a joke, as he went on: “I don’t know how long I can bluff the company lackeys there in the Hennessy Building, in the bargaining. Oh, don’t think I mind ranting on a bit and giving them this.” He made that fist again. “It makes them squirm in those fine chairs of theirs polished by the seat of their tailored suits. I like that.

  “Howsomever,” another of those gusty breaths practically up from his toes, “the buggers are starting to push back, more every session. They were on good behavior, for them, for a while there after shooting us down at the gate of the ’Sweat.” He laughed bitterly. “Even the so-called authorities, the sheriff and police and whatnot, thought that was a little much.” He tapped my arm as if in warning. “But now the company has something up its sleeve, or my mother didn’t name me Pat Quinlan. The snakes keep bringing up the dollar we won back in the last wage talks. So far, it’s still just dickering, but if they see the chance, they’ll take it away again, like that,” he snapped his fingers.