Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  Quickly I hummed a snatch of what passed for a reel to the suddenly alert Miners Band. The bandmaster allowed as how they could probably do something with that. Turning to the crowd, I quickly described the sequence, the first couple addressing the pair behind them before whirling away, the next couple addressing the third, until the entire line of dancers was awhirl in a great circle. “First in procession, fittingly,” I extended a gesture as if I were the master of the ball, Shcherbatsky-style, directly at the suddenly sobering Sandison, “shall be our incomparable host, the Butte city librarian!”

  While the band worked up the tune and I clapped a rhythm, Grace alertly slipped over to Sandison and separated him from the scotch pitcher, seized him by a reluctant arm, and steered him to the head of the line with her. Rab and Jared stepped lively into place behind them. Hoop and Griff, no slouches, each picked a willing widow, and with some hesitation even Quinlan did the same. The mayor, proving himself a good sport, joined arms with his wife next. On down the procession the couples multiplied, downtowners and those from the Hill, old-timers and newcomers dancing as one in a Rocky Mountain outpost where copper and blood mingled, all in the dance called America.

  7

  “YOU REALLY DO SEEM to have found your calling.” My astute wife did not mean my impromptu role as dance caller a few nights past, which was unlikely to be repeated unless Robert Burns were to have more than one birthday per year. Snuggled in bed to read, as had become our custom with Sandison’s treasury of books to draw from—vintage leather-bound A Tale of Two Cities ready on her nightstand and a fine new collector’s edition of My Ántonia on mine—we first were attending to the day’s news, the Thunder rustling as Grace flapped it open against the bedcovers. “‘Copper Goliath Shall Inevitably Fall’ is today’s masterpiece, is it. I don’t know how you keep it up, Morrie,” she tweaked my ear affectionately, “Anaconda must be getting thoroughly sick of Pluvius.”

  “They deserve to swallow their medicine, let us say.” Armbrister made sure it was a heavy dose, with headlines of screaming boldface atop my editorials. Socratic dialogue conducted in mannerly fashion, the newspaper battle was not.

  “Mm hmm. Too bad it isn’t poison.”

  Her harsh words surprised me, and my expression must have shown so. “Sorry to sound that way,” she met my eyes, “but it’s the plain truth.” She heaved a breath. “When it comes to the company and the copper bosses, I want them to burn in hellfire equal to what happened in the Speculator.”

  “You have every reason,” I said quietly, out of respect to the fate of her Arthur.

  “And yours?” She cocked a look at me, one that counted for a lot, I could tell. “You haven’t lost anyone in the mines.” She rattled the newspaper a little. “What brings it out in you, Mr. Thunderer, taking on Anaconda as you are?”

  I took time to think of how to say it, but in the end, it just came out. “I hate men who skin other men for profit.”

  My surprising wife, who to my knowledge did not have a mean bone in her body, patted my pajama sleeve in approval. “Good for you. Don’t let up on them.” Her hand did not move from my arm. “Speaking of that. Quin, the other night. He’s a hothead, but his notion that Jared Evans could stand some prodding—have you?”

  “Exceedingly carefully, which I would say is the only way Jared can be prodded. I suggested to him that our readers might like a hint now and then of any weakening of Anaconda’s grip on the legislature. You know him—he told me that was not a half-bad idea, whenever he got any of it weakened.” I must have caught something from Quinlan, for I very nearly winked in saying the next. “I also put a bug in Rab’s ear that possibly, just possibly, the rest of humankind does not exhibit the patience of Jared in this matter. Who knows, the marital bed may be the place to get a message across.”

  Grace pinched me lightly through the sleeve. “It has been known to, you rogue.” Satisfied for now, she went to loyally reading my excoriation of the lords of copper, while I spread open the Sporting News for the latest on the Black Sox aftermath, in which only the ballplayers and small fry of the gambling mob still were getting the worst of it, unluckily. To an ironic eye, the pair of us might have looked like one of those comical illustrations of bums bedded down on park benches beneath newspapers, but of course appearances deceive. The mansion with its upkeep demands had not driven us to shivering poverty. Yet.

  “Morrie?” A finger holding her place in the editorial, Grace glanced over at me as if she had thought of something else that could not wait. “Do you ever feel . . . singled out?”

  Something in me answered before I could think. “All the time.” Realizing how that sounded, I hastily reeled off, “There’s you. There’s all this.” I swept my hand as if we owned everything from the creaky floor of the manse up to the stars. “How could I not feel the favors of good fortune?”

  “More than that, though.” Her glance had turned into a serious gaze, as if trying to read me like a crystal ball. “I mean, things that don’t seem to happen to other people somehow pick you out. I know it sounds silly, but—”

  “Do you have that kind of feeling, too?” I asked cautiously.

  “Around you,” she attempted a smile, “how can I help it?”

  “Grace, I don’t know how to account for luck, good or bad, if that’s what it is,” I tried to laugh off her concern. “I’m simply me, you’re you, and life writes the rest, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose you’re right.” With a little frown of concentration, she went back to her newspaper and I to mine.

  “Oh, before I forget for the morning,” she moved to the domestic topic after finishing my editorial contribution. “Griff needs money to buy coal. A ton wouldn’t hurt, he said.”

  “Of coal or money?” I moaned.

  Grace gave me a little swat with the society page. “Don’t be so down in the mouth about our home sweet home. We’re gaining on it. Hoop and Griff are sure of it.” Adding as she traded the Thunder for Dickens: “Just as you are making headway against Anaconda, yes?”

  “Labor omnia vincit, I suppose.”

  That drew me a warning look.

  “Sorry. ‘Toil conquers all.’” Thinking to myself, it had better.

  • • •

  Fidget or fugit, time restlessly moves on, and in the aftermath of January’s rite-of-winter night of revelry as orchestrated by Sam Sandison, February’s abbreviated page seemed to vanish almost as soon as the calendar was turned, and here came an early thaw and March with it. Butte coming out from under the snow was not a particularly pretty sight, but I welcomed the lengthening days—each a chicken step longer than the last, Grace assured me—with their gradually warmer weather for walking to work, while the meltwater running down the steep guttered streets made music in its way. Everyone assured me snow could be back anytime and frost would not leave until at least May, but the way things were going, it was something like springtime in my spirit. Bootleggers did not waylay me—although at odd moments I rather missed Smitty and his effusions about my Highliner persona—now that I knew to go nowhere near the warehouse district. At home, as I was determined to think of the temperamental manse, life passed peacefully enough, particularly in the evenings, when up and down the bedroom hallways the only sounds were the rustle of pages and accompanying intakes of breath and occasional chuckles.

  At the Thunder, similarly, the only thing earthshaking was the daily start-up of the backroom press, sluicing our challenge to the Post and its corporate masters into the world. Jared Evans, carrying responsibilities that would have buckled a Samson, I was sure had taken to heart the anxiety expressed by me, Quinlan, and no doubt Rab, but right then time and the times were too much at odds for him when it came to grappling with Anaconda. He and the other legislators were sidetracked in the extended legislative session, trying mostly in vain to deal with Montana’s latest hard times. Collapse is a strong word, but the homestead boom
that for nearly twenty years had promised to make Montana “the last great grain garden of the world” fell to earth, literally. The climate had turned around, drought withering the dryland crops that had flourished on rains that no longer came. Crop prices plunged after the appetite of the Great War was sated and peace set in. Across the state, banks were going under and towns with paint still fresh on their false-front stores were shrinking away in, I hate to say it, classic decline. Like a sooty dump-pocked mining city emerging from winter, history is not always pretty to watch.

  The Thunder newsroom, though, like any newsroom, thrived on dire events.

  On the unforgettable day, I was fashioning the next editorial lambasting the lords of copper in their downtown aerie, my typewriter thwacking at a measured pace in the traffic of clatter in the newsroom, when kittenish Mary Margaret Houlihan, the society reporter desperate for a lede about oncoming social doings, called out, “Remind me, Morgie, dear, what the Ides were about?”

  “Glad to. The Roman occasion derives from idus, the Latin for ‘middle,’” I warmed to the task of walking encyclopedia, as I sometimes do. “And so, the middle of March, the fifteenth, was traditionally a festive holiday, but thanks to Shakespeare, we now think of the Ides of March as the fateful day when Julius Caesar—”

  I was interrupted by a shout of “Jake!” Across the room, Cavaretta was on his feet, still clutching a telephone. “Accident on the Hill. Five whistles.” Everyone in Butte, myself included, knew that was the signal to send stretchers.

  “Which mine, Cavvie?”

  “The Neversweat.”

  “Get up there, now,” Armbrister bawled. “Take a shooter, make it Sammy,” he specified the chief photographer. Snapping out orders left and right, the aroused master of the newsroom spotted me sitting in my corner, where, Mary Margaret and the Ides aside, I had been trying to think with my fingers as usual. “Morgie, go with them, see what you can pick up for your page.” His green gaze met my startled one. “I have a hunch.”

  The three of us piled out of the building and into a taxi outside one of the Venus Alley establishments. The driver was used to urgent requests, apparently, and sped us through the business district, honking everything but a streetcar out of the way, until our jitney wound its way through Dublin Gulch toward the landmark mine atop the Hill, the Neversweat, with its line of smokestacks billowing, as had been written, “like the organ pipes of Hell.” The storied seven stacks of the ’Sweat, which, legend had it, were address enough to deliver a miner anywhere on earth to this colossus of copper deposits. As the taxi roared toward the mine gate, Cavaretta, who was young but enterprising, leaned from beside me in the backseat to consult with the photographer, crammed with his gear next to the driver. “What’s best, Sammy, split up or stick together? I haven’t covered one of these—”

  “Yeah, you might not this one, either,” the photographer let out wearily, “from the looks of that ape.” The taxi driver practically overlapped his utterance with his own exclamation, “Hell, it would have to be Croft, he’d jump off a cliff if they told him to.”

  A rifle-toting guard had stepped into the gateway, holding up a meaty hand that definitely meant Stop.

  “No soap, coming in here. I got my orders,” he declared as he came to the driver’s window, one denizen dependent on the workings of the Hill to another. “Better turn this buggy around.”

  The taxi driver was not swayed. “C’mon, let me make a buck by getting my fare where they want to go. What’s the big deal all of a sudden?”

  “New policy,” the guard stolidly recited. “Nobody not connected to the mine is allowed in until I hear from them downtown.”

  Out the side of his mouth, Cavaretta implored: “Can’t you do something, Morgie?”

  I thrust my head out the car window. “It’s all right, Croft, that’s where we’re from—didn’t they tell you? These gentlemen of the press are on our side. They’re with me.”

  Whether the beard did it or my oratorical approximations, which were not exactly untrue, the gate guard straightened up in instant respect. “Yessir. I didn’t get the word to expect you.”

  “One more thing,” I intoned before the taxi started up. “If anyone shows up claiming to be from the Post, turn them away. We don’t want the wrong kind of people in here.”

  “I gotcha,” he all but saluted. “Any fakers, I’ll give them a hard time.”

  There was no question where to go in the huge mine yard, everyone gravitating to the towering headframe and its elevator shaft, where the taxi driver let us out and was generously bribed, my role again, to stand by. Cavaretta, Sammy, and I turned as one to the commotion beneath the headframe’s steel strutwork. The scene has been played at mine mouths probably since Roman times, the crowd drawn to disaster, those in authority pleading for order, rumors flying every which way. Sammy, a short but authoritative man, immediately set up shop with his tripod and other camera gear, aiming at the starkly silent shaft for whatever its elevator cage would bring up. Over there a besieged, florid-faced individual who was obviously the mine supervisor was trying to settle down a thick circle of agitated miners and other employees. This was the mine where Quinlan worked and I thought I spotted him in the midst of the turmoil, but under the helmet and grime it was hard to be sure from any distance. Fast earning his reporter’s stripes, Cavaretta sized up the situation. “No bodies in sight yet. This may be a while. Morgie, can you find a phone and hang on to it for me?”

  It took no great divination to guess that if the person in charge was caught up in the stormy scene surrounding the mineshaft, his office might well be vacant. Head down as if I had urgent business, I strode across the mine yard to the appropriate building and brazenly walked in.

  I was in luck. Everyone in any office down the long corridor was caught up one way or another with the mine accident and the interruption of production, and those who did glance at me as I passed presumed from my topcoat and hat—and beard—that I must be someone important sent up from the Hennessy Building headquarters. At the office marked SUPERVISOR, I ducked in.

  Aha, unoccupied. And, sitting right there on the desk, a telephone. I at once appropriated both, clapping the receiver to my ear and hurriedly tapping the switch hook for the operator, to place the necessary call to the rewrite desk in the newsroom. Only to be intercepted by a prim female voice at a switchboard somewhere on the Neversweat grounds, “Sorry, what department are you ringing, please?”

  I was struck wordless. The telephone system was internal to Anaconda; was there nothing the damnable company did not control to the very last detail?

  Swallowing hard, I said with forced casualness, “I’m calling to downtown,” gave the Thunder’s telephone number, and hoped.

  After forever, a familiar raspy intonation came. “Matthews here, what’ve you got?”

  “Matt, it’s Morgan, at the Neversweat,” I spoke fast and low to the rewrite man. “Don’t use my name or Cavaretta’s on here, I’ll explain later. I’m holding the line open for him, he’s still at the mineshaft getting the story.”

  “Sure thing, I’ll stay on. But he’ll need to go some to make deadline.”

  “He will, we will. Sammy’s set to shoot when they bring the victims up, let Armbrister know for the front-page layout.”

  Just as I finished speaking, the red-faced man from the din around the mineshaft barged into the office, charging toward what was unmistakably his desk, his chair, his telephone.

  He stopped short at the sight of me sitting there, dressed to the gills and hat still on, hugging the phone to myself. “Do I know you?”

  “Hardly.” Which was true enough. The mine supervisor, whose name I fumbled out of memory from 1919 as Delaney, had laid eyes on me, somewhat disguised—and beardless—when he was night overseer at the Muckaroo and Jared had smuggled me into an unimaginably deep shaft to meet with miners on the matter of a union anthem; it’s a l
ong story. With deliberate vagueness, I now said, “I’m new at the newspaper.”

  “Reporters,” he said as if the word left a bad taste. “Tell your yobbos at the Post to be damn careful how they handle this one, understand?” He jerked a thumb. “Out of the way. I need to use that.”

  My heart skipped as he rounded the desk and reached for the phone still in my possession.

  “No,” I startled both of us, holding the instrument away from him. “You can’t, right now, this in use. I’ll explain later.”

  “Can’t?” Knocked back a step or two by my effrontery, he was turning apoplectic. “Who do you think you are? Get up from there! This is my office, my—”

  Before he could finish, a storm burst in the room. No gate guard could keep Jared Evans out. “What’s going on, Delaney?” he demanded as he hurtled in, angry to the point of bursting. “Five whistles, and you don’t let us know at union headquarters, we have to find out for ourselves? That’s a new low, even for your bunch of snakes.” Throwing a look my way for an additional target, he did a slight double take at my still presence. Something told him what I was at, maybe the white of my knuckles in my death grip on the phone stem and receiver, so, showing no hint of recognition, he spun from me to the mine supervisor. “Don’t stand there like you’ve lost your tongue, let’s hear the accident report.”

  “It . . . it happened in the Chinese Laundry, that’s why it’s taking so long.” Listening for all I was worth, I blanched. The hottest, sweatiest level of any mine, in this case nearly a mile deep. Delaney hesitated, caught between being cowed and in authority. Jared’s shrewdness in entering the political realm was proven again; an incensed union leader who was also a state senator was obviously more than a mine overseer wanted to face. Delaney licked his lips and fumbled out, “It’s a nasty one, see, and we—”