Work Song

by Ivan Doig

  Too late. When I got there, everyone had gone in but Rab, who was practically dancing with impatience as I hastened up the steps.

  “Mr. Morgan, you came from that direction,” she spoke so fast it was nearly all one word, “did you see it?”

  This was not my day, linguistically. “Do you suppose, Rab, you could take a deep breath and define it for me?”

  She was as disappointed in me as Hooper and Griffith had been. “Oh, here.” Whisking over to a stack of newly delivered Daily Posts beside the doorway, she handed me one with fresh ink practically oozing from the EXTRA! atop the front page.

  Beneath that, the even larger headline:

  OUTSIDE AGITATORS WARNED

  And below that, a jolting photograph of the railroad overpass where the IWW organizer had been lynched a few years before. From the middle of the trestle girders dangled a hangman’s noose. Attached to the rope was a sign readable even in the grainy newsprint reproduction:

  THE MONTANA NECKTIE

  YOU ONLY WEAR IT ONCE

  WOBS AND OTHER TROUBLEMAKERS—

  LEAVE TOWN BEFORE THIS FITS YOU

  Digesting this, I had mixed reactions. Plainly the goons, stymied about me after Chicago was no help, had broadened their approach to include any other strangers in the vicinity of the Hill; when you are a target, I have to say, you do appreciate having that kind of attention shared around. On the other hand, a noose just down the street from where you lay your head at night is still too close for comfort.

  “Jared says the police are taking their sweet time about removing it,” Rab confided over my shoulder, again as fast as words could follow one another, “so Anaconda gets to scare everybody.”

  “We have to let Jared handle that,” I stated, “while we have to get inside and handle books or face the wrath of our employer.”

  Her mischievous laugh surprised me. “We wouldn’t want that, heaven knows.”

  DISPATCHING RAB TO TAKE OUT her ardor on the book collection, I had to tend to a few office matters before joining her. If I was in luck, Sandison would be out on one of his prowls of the building. But, no. There he sat, stormy as thunder. Before I could utter any excuse for being late, he flapped the Post’s front page at me. “Did you see this damn thing?”

  “By this hour of the day, I believe everyone in the city has seen either the newspaper or the actual piece of rope, Sandy.”

  “This town,” he said in a tone that it hurt to hear. “It just can’t resist having dirty laundry out in the open. Hell, anyone knows outsiders are asking for it, that’s where rope law comes from.” Saying that, he took another furious look at the front page photograph, his gaze so hot I thought the paper might singe.

  “The ‘Montana necktie,’ ” he ground out the words, “what’s the sense of dragging that up?” He started to say something more, but instead crushed the newspaper in the vise of his hands and thrust it into the wastebasket.

  I stood there, gaping at the outburst, until his glare shifted to me. “Don’t you have anything to do but stand there with your face hanging out?”

  I left in a hurry. The calm ranks of the books on the mezzanine were particularly welcome after that. Was there any way in this world to predict the actions of their combustible collector?

  Hearing me come, Rab spun from the shelf where she had been flicking open covers to look for the SSS bookplates. “This is the day, you know.”

  From my experience, that could be said about every twenty-four hours in Butte. But I did know what she meant.

  “The sixth grade is about to meet its match,” I said with a smile. Tomorrow was the start of school and the teaching year of Miss Rellis, as she had to turn into. I was going to miss Rab’s company and the noble ranks of the inventory. Reaching to the shelf nearest her, I asked: “Ready?” She nodded. Into her waiting arms I stacked the plump volumes of Thérèse Raquin, Nana, Germinal, and on top the slim, elegant masterpiece J’accuse; Zola, the end of the inventory alphabet.

  “The ones we’ve been looking for,” she joked a little sadly as we went to the sorting room to tally these treasures in with the rest.

  “Maybe the full inventory will improve Sandison’s disposition,” I thought out loud. “The commotion about the noose seems to offend his civic sensibilities.”

  The mischievous laugh again. “Quit being funny, Mr. Morgan.”

  “Rab, really, you are not being fair to our employer.” For whatever reason, I felt tender toward Sandison in his upset mood. “I grant you he has a bit of a temper, but we shouldn’t judge him entirely on that. It is a truth as old as humankind that the presence of a shortcoming in a person does not preclude the existence of other worthier attributes in that same—Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Rab had the magpie gleam of possessing the hidden morsel. “Don’t you know who Sam Sandison is? He’s the Strangler.”

  11

  Rabrab’s words went directly to my windpipe.

  When I recovered enough air to speak, it was little more than a squeak. “Rab, you might have said so before now. Are you telling me the man I share an office with goes around throttling people?”

  “Not that he was ever caught at it himself,” she said, as if explaining etiquette to a child. “He had mugs who worked for him do the dirty work. ‘Necktie makers,’ they were called. Vigilantes.” She looked at me closely. “You know: types who hang first and ask questions later.”

  “I grasp the terminology,” I fumbled out. “What I am uninformed about is who my employer has had strangled, and why?”

  “Cattle rustlers,” she answered both of those. “Or anybody who looked like one, to those cowboys of his.” Rabrab calculated with the aplomb of a hanging judge herself. “Plenty of them had it coming, probably. But some might have been small operators whose herds some Triple S cows and calves just got mixed in with. You know the saying about a rope”—she looked at me as if I likely did not—“one size fits all.”

  “But—” Still stunned, I tried to reconcile the two Samuel Sandisons, the one who petted rare books as if they were living things and the other who used lethal means without thinking twice. “How can a, a vigilante be permitted to run a public institution such as this? ”

  “Oh, I suppose people think those old hangings were a long time ago,” Rab reasoned. “After all, Butte is where a lot of people get over their past. Mr. Morgan, are you feeling all right?”

  “The start of a headache,” I replied, truthfully enough. It was scarcely twenty-four hours since I had wriggled free from the grasp of the goons and the Chicago betting mob, and now I found out my library refuge was in the grip of a hangman. Whose method of tapping the library payroll budget to accumulate literary treasures in his own name was known only to me. This was an unhealthy turn of events, to say the least.

  “MORGAN!”

  I nearly jumped out of my hide, but managed to face around to the white-maned figure looming at the end of the aisle of bookshelves. Sandison looked as if he had grown even more enormous since I saw him minutes before.

  “Drag your carcass to the office,” he bawled out, turning away, “I want to talk to you.”

  Rab bade me off by wrinkling her nose prettily. “He really is something, isn’t he.”

  I WENT IN, determined not to tremble. I suppose the blindfolded man facing a firing squad tries that, too. At the other end of the office, Sandison’s black suit was the darkest kind of outline against the stained-glass window jeweled with colors. He swung around to face me, saying nothing, sizing me up. Between us, on his desk, lay the smoothed-out newspaper with the emphatic photograph of the noose.

  “Sandy?” I gambled, not for the first time, by taking the initiative. “I believe you wanted to see me about some minor matter?”

  He grunted and advanced toward me as if he needed a closer look. The gleam in his eye seemed diamond-sharp. “You’re an odd duck, Morgan,” he declared, halting an uncomfortably short distance from me, “but you’re cultured, I have to hand you t
hat. You damn well mean it when you jabber about the music of men’s lives, don’t you.”

  A weird hope sprang up in me. Maybe he had discovered I was flouting his orders against “taking sides” by letting the miners congregate in the basement in search of a song and was merely going to fire me. I would take that instead of a death sentence any day.

  “Anyhow,” he immediately brushed aside that hope, “we can talk about that tomorrow. You’re coming with me in the morning.”

  “Where to?” I asked over the thump of my heart.

  The white whiskers aimed at me. “A place you ought to see. Section 37.”

  WAS THAT A JOKE from Samuel Sandison? If so, it was his first. I cleared my throat, to try to speak without a quaver.

  “Perhaps, Sandy, you could elaborate a bit on that destina—”

  Somewhere within the whisker cloud he snorted. “What’s the matter, sissy, coming down with a case of Hic sunt dracones?”

  I had to bridle at that. A measure of caution about traveling in the company of someone nicknamed the Strangler did not equate me with skittish mariners of old who feared sailing off the edge of the map into the abyss that carried the warning Here be dragons.

  “That’s hardly fair, I am only naturally curious as to—”

  Sandison didn’t pause over my hurt feelings. “Never mind.” He briefly stared at me again with that strange gleam. “Don’t tell anyone we’re going, eh? Tongues are already too busy in this town.” Turning back impatiently to the newspaper spread on his desk, he told me to meet him at the depot, good and sharp, for the six a.m. westbound train.

  THERE WAS A MIDNIGHT TRAIN. Eastbound.

  Why not be on it? the ceiling posed the question, a certain seam in the plaster straight as a railtrack as I lay fully clothed on my bed. I was as alone as ever in this latest dilemma. At supper, Hoop and Griff had been as animated as carnival pitchmen, while Grace put actual cutlets on the table in evident celebration of the boardinghouse’s new lease on life. No one seemed to pay particular attention to my unmoored state of mind; when that happens, it makes you wonder about your normal mien.

  The bed was crowded with debate. Sandison was a latent noose-wielding unpredictable madman. Or not. He’d had the perfectly sound sense to hire me, I tried telling myself. Just to be on the safe side, though, pack the satchel for the train; saying a permanent goodbye to Butte would be only a strategic withdrawal, after all. But so was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

  My head now really did ache from going back and forth. I checked my pocket watch again. Midnight was not far off. Abruptly my mind made itself up, almost as if I had not participated. I scrambled off the bed.

  Quietly as I could, I opened the door of my room and tiptoed into the hall. Snores emanated from Griff’s room, and Hoop’s next to his; at the end of the hall, Grace’s bedroom kept a silence. Feeling like a burglar in the darkened house, I slipped past one door. Then another. And stealthily turned the doorknob of the end one.

  I crept to the sleeping form and, hesitating just a bit, shook the bare shoulder where the nightdress had slipped down.

  “Grace, I hate to interrupt your slumber. But I must talk to you.”

  My whisper penetrated as if I had jabbed her. Bolting upright in the bed, she clutched the coverlet around her, huskily reciting: “In the name of decency, Morrie, we really ought not—”

  “This is imperative or”—I looked at the ivory slope of shoulder still showing—“I would not come uninvited. Please just listen, Grace.”

  Vigilantly, she did so while I told her she had to be my witness, to attest that I was alive and in one piece before boarding the train early in the morning with Samuel Sandison. “Just in case worse should come to worst.”

  “Worse coming to worst, is it.” There was just enough light in the room that I could see she had let down her flaxen hair when she went to bed, and now she ran a hand through the long tresses. “Morrie, you are the most complicated boarder there ever was.”

  “I wish I could dispute that.”

  “Why do I have the honor of this, why not Griff and Hoop?”

  “They’ve been at a union meeting, and you know the condition they come home in after that.”

  Grace gave an extended sigh. “All right, you want a sober witness. But why go with Sandison at all?”

  “He’s the kind who will not let loose of an idea—the man is a bulldog. If I don’t humor him on this, he’ll do away with my job at the library. Then I won’t have charge of the auditorium. Then the eisteddfod can’t be held in the—It’s, well, complicated.”

  All that was wordlessly weighed on the landlady scale of things. Then she reached to the bedside table, opened the drawer, and took something out. “Here.”

  In the dimness of the bedroom, I peered down stupidly at the cold metallic item, with some dull opalescence to it, that she put in the palm of my hand. If I was not mistaken, it was the type of small pearl-handled pistol called a Lady’s Special.

  “You’re—you’re armed,” I stammered.

  “I’m a widow, sleeping alone,” she said quietly. “And Butte is a rough and tough place, as you may have noticed.” Again she passed a hand through her hair, looking at me as if memorizing me. “That little thing is called an equalizer for a reason, don’t forget, Morrie.”

  I hesitated, then pocketed the gun. “I’m sure I am in better health than when I came in here, thanks to you.”

  An expectant silence. She patted my hand there in the dark, in a feathery way that was either shy or sly. “I would only be telling the truth if I said you had life in you the last I saw of you, wouldn’t I.”

  An honest enough affidavit, under the circumstances. I returned her caress pat for pat. If I could trust anyone in Butte, it was Grace.

  If I could trust anyone in Butte.

  “SANDY, HOW ARE WE TO DO THIS?” Stumbling along before dawn in Sandison’s wake, I dubiously approached the depot platform. “If I am not mistaken, those are ore cars.” The line of heaped railcars stretched off as far as I could see in the dim light.

  “Keep walking, don’t be a nervous Nellie.” Sandison strode along recklessly enough himself that I wished the pair of depot goons would pop around a corner and be steamrollered by him. No such justice, however, at that early hour. Only a yawning conductor, beside what I perceived to be one lone Pullman car behind the train engine, stood in our line of march.

  I followed Sandison aboard, feeling tipped to one side by the unaccustomed gun in my coat pocket, even if it was the most decorous of firearms. He and I were the only passengers at that hour. As the train lurched into motion, I could contain the question no longer. “West is a long direction—where exactly do we get off?”

  My traveling companion grumpily pawed at his whiskers as if herding the word out.

  “Anaconda.”

  “The company?”

  “The town.”

  IT TURNED OUT TO BE BOTH. A company town, Anaconda was as orderly and contained as Butte was sprawling and unruly. The train pulled in past boxy workers’ houses lined up in neat rows, along streets laid as straight as shelves. Sandison appeared to pay no heed to the town itself, gazing away into the valley beyond. At least, I thought as I looked out the window on that side of the train, it was a bright clear day for this. I happened to look out the other side, and the sky was clothed in heavy gray.

  When the two of us climbed off at the trim crenellated depot, another chess piece of municipal order, the division in the sky over Anaconda was made plain. On a slope above the murky side of town could be seen the immense smelter for copper ore such as had accompanied us from Butte, and dominant over the smelting works stood a skyscraping smokestack, thickly built and hundreds of feet tall. The scene leapt from every accusatory line ever written about dark satanic mills—the smokestack like the devil’s forefinger, black fume trailing evilly as it pointed its challenge to heaven.

  Dumbstruck as I was by this sight, only slowly did I register the other product of the
smelter besides copper and smoke, a series of slag heaps surrounding the town like barren hills.

  “That’s Anaconda for you,” Sandison growled. “Let’s get a move on.” So saying, he stalked off toward a livery stable across the tracks.

  Now I was alarmed. A saddle horse is not my preferred mode of transportation. Of necessity, I had spent some time on horseback during my prairie teaching career, but no more than I had to. Sandison brayed to the stableman that we wanted genuine riding stock, not nags, and shortly I found myself holding the reins of a restless black horse with a bald face, named Midnight. When a rangy steel-gray steed was brought out for Sandison, he looked in disgust at the stirrups on the rented saddle and lengthened them six inches to account for his height. That done, despite his bulk he swung up onto the horse as easily as a boy and waited impatiently for me to hoist onto mine.

  “Going to be a blisterer out in the valley. Here.” He tossed me a canvas water bag to tie to my saddle and spurred his horse into motion, leaving Midnight and me to catch up.

  We managed to do so at the edge of town, past one last ugly dark slag heap where children ran up and down. With the cries of their playing fading behind us, the horseback pair of us cantered into another existence entirely, a sudden savannah-like landscape that seemed to exhale in relief at leaving the pall of Anaconda behind.

  The valley extending before us was a classic oval of geography, broad and perfect as a French painting. Rimmed by mountains substantial enough to shoulder snow year-round, the valley floor was uninterrupted except for a few distant settlements strung out near a willowed river like memory beads on a thong. Gazing wide-eyed at the breadth of landscape—truly, here a person was a fleck on the sea of ground—I said something about this startling amount of open country so near the industrial confines of Butte and Anaconda.