Work Song

by Ivan Doig

  Unexpectedly Sandison reined to a halt, and I pulled up beside him. He massively shifted in his saddle to turn in my direction. “Take a good look, Morgan. I owned it all.”

  At first I thought he meant the plot of land we were riding across. Then I realized he meant the entire valley.

  I cannot forget that moment. Picture it if you will. A woolsack of a man, surely two hundred and fifty pounds, nearly twice of me, sitting on his horse, looking down on me like a wild-bearded mad king.

  Suddenly he raised a meaty hand and swiped it toward me, his action so swift I had no time to grab for the pistol.

  Paralyzed, I felt the swish of air as the thick palm passed my face and descended to mash a horsefly on the neck of my mount.

  Flicking away the fly carcass, he rumbled, “Don’t just sit there with your face hanging out, we’ve got a ways to go.”

  He put his horse into a trot, and mine followed suit. I rode holding tightly to the reins and my Stetson. In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn’t blow your hair off. Besides, it gave me something to concentrate on, other than the thought that I might have shot a man for swatting a fly. But Sandison’s behavior still unnerved me. Keen as a tracker, he stood in his stirrups every so often to peer ahead at the print of ruts we were following; it might once have been a road but looked long unused.

  Leading to where? There were wide open spaces around us to all the horizons, but no arithmetic of logic that I could find in the destination Sandison had set for us. I knew from my time among the homesteads of Marias Coulee that land is surveyed into townships of thirty-six sections, each section a square mile. The numbering starts over at each township. Where, then—and for that matter, what—was Section 37? Was I going to survive to find out?

  After an eternity of joggling along, we came to a plot of land boxed by a barbwire fence. We—rather, I—opened the treacherously barbed gate, and the horses stepped through, skittish enough about it that they had to be reined hard.

  It could be said they were showing horse sense. The ground changed here. The soil, to call it that, had an unhealthy grayish hue, like the pallor of a very sick person. The sudden change was puzzling to me. I did not know thing one about the raising of cattle, but what was beneath our horses’ hooves would not pasture any creature, I was quite sure.

  My riding companion now simply sat in his saddle, lost in contemplation of the expanse of valley. I resorted to my water bag. The day was warming to an extreme, and I could see sweat running down Sandison’s cheeks into his beard, although he paid it no heed.

  “Back then,” he all at once spoke in the voice of a man possessed, “this was a paradise of grass. And I bought up homestead claims and mining claims and every other kind of land until every square foot of it was Triple S range. I tell you, there never was a better ranch nor a prettier one.” His words cast a spell. What a picture it made in the mind, the green valley filled with red cattle with that sinuous brand on their hips.

  The bearded head swung in my direction. His voice dropped ominously.

  “Then it got to be the old story. The snake into Eden.” The meaty hand swept around again and, past my ineffectual flinch toward the Lady’s Special, pointed over my shoulder.

  “That thing.”

  He had taken dead aim at the smelter stack. Even at this distance, the giant chimney dwarfed all of nature around it, clouding that half of the horizon like a permanent storm. Staring at that ashen plume along with Sandison, I felt something more oppressive creep over me than the heat of the day.

  With a great grunt he climbed down from his horse, stooped low, and scooped a handful of dirt. Holding the dull-colored stuff up to me, he uttered:

  “Here. Have some arsenic.”

  Choosing to consider that rhetorical, I cleared my throat and managed to respond.

  “Sandy, am I to understand we are camped on a patch of poison?”

  “That’s what it comes down to,” he said, letting the unhealthy soil sift from his fist. Each word bitter, he recited to me that the furnaces of the smelting process released arsenic and sulphur, and the Anaconda stack piped those into the air like a ceaseless spout.

  Wiping his hand on his pantleg, he went on: “It kills cattle like picking them off with a rifle. The first year after the smokestack came in, we lost a thousand head. Hell, it wasn’t ranching anymore. All we were doing was burning carcasses.” He shook his head violently at the memory. “We sued the mining company every way there is. The Anaconda bunch had the big money for eastern lawyers, so they beat us. But that was later.” His voice sharpened again. He gestured as if in dismissal toward the smokestack and its almighty smudge. “That isn’t what you’re here to see. Let’s get to it.” With cowboy agility, he again swung onto his horse and headed us toward a grove of trees along a slip of a stream not far ahead. Damp as I was with sweat from the unrelenting sun—and just as relentless, Sandison—I welcomed the notion of shade.

  The trees, though, revealed themselves to be leafless as we approached. What had been a thicket was now a stand of lifeless trunks and limbs, graying above the soil that had sickened them. In the midst of the witchy trees stood eight or ten huge old cottonwoods, dying more slowly than the rest.

  Sandison dismounted and walked his horse over to the nearest great wrinkled trunk. I gingerly did likewise. Under a big overhanging limb, he turned to me with that unsettling royal glint in his eyes again.

  “Welcome to the grove of justice, Morgan.”

  At first I did not take his meaning.

  “It was before copper was on everyone’s mind,” he began. “This valley was just sitting here, best place on the face of the earth to raise cattle. My backers put up most of the money and I built the herd, cows from here to breakfast. Until one branding time when the count was way off. There weren’t dead cows lying around from winterkill or some disease, so you didn’t need to be a genius to figure out the malady was rustlers.” The fi xed intensity of that blue gaze was hypnotic as he told it all. “The money men threw a fit, said if it happened again they’d sell the place out from under me. They were town men, they didn’t have a fig of a notion about how you have to let the good years carry you through the bad ones in the livestock business. I had to do something to keep the herd count up or lose the ranch.” Trickles of sweat from under his hat into his beard retraced that predicament of long ago. “My riders told me they’d seen some of the squatters up in those hills”—he indicated across the valley to coulees that must have held shanties at that time—“acting funny around our stock. And there were always drifters riding through, you could bet they’d about as soon rustle your cattle as look at them. Try tell that to a sheriff who’d rather sit with his boots up on his desk than chase after rustlers with a couple of days’ head start, though.” His gaze at me never wavered. “Now, you know what my answer to that was, don’t you?”

  I was afraid I did. The Montana necktie had a reputation to the far ends of the world, ever since frontier times when vigilantes in the untamed gold camps took the law, along with a noose, into their own hands.

  “My riders knew how to handle a rope in more ways than one,” he was saying in that voice terrible to hear. “Anybody they caught in the vicinity of a cow or calf with a Triple S brand on it had some hard answering to do.” The man who had been lord of this valley turned ponderously, broad back to me now, toward the line of sturdy cottonwoods. “We hung them like butchered meat. Right here.” Facing around to me again, he lifted those thick hands. “Many a time I tied the noose myself.”

  The old saying could not have been more right: my blood ran cold.

  Had I gambled wrong, in coming with him to this desolate patch of earth? Was I about to be murdered, for knowing too much? The pistol stayed glued to me where it rode in my pocket; I realized, for once and all, that I could not bring myself to use it. Sandison’s stare had my fate in it, but I could not read those icy eyes. I tried to speak and couldn’t.

  He stared a
t me that way long moments more, then his words came slowly.

  “What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executioner? I made those dim-witted rustlers pay far too high a price.” He shook his head. “Cows are just cows.” Turning from me, he gazed at the gray old trees as if looking a long way back. His shoulders slumped. As I watched, the Earl of Hell was deposed, by himself.

  After some moments, I found words.

  “Section 37 is off the face of the earth.”

  “That’s where I sent them, on a length of rope,” Sandison was speaking huskily. “Now you know why I brought you here, eh?”

  I thought so, but said nothing, watching the same shrewd expression come over him as when he found a bargain in a rare books catalogue. “You’re a learned man,” he said in that husky tone, “you know a little something about how to read a life. But there’s always more. I know what they say about me behind my back, but they miss half the story.” One more time he shook his head. “ ‘The music of men’s lives’ isn’t as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks, you were right about that. Back then”—he pointed his beard to the cottonwood grove—“I let the money men call the tune on me and did more than any man should, to hold on to the best ranch in Montana. And then poison came out of the air and I lost the Triple S anyway.”

  Now he looked hard at me, nodding as if making sure to himself. “It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf. You’ll remember this, fair and square, there’s that about you. Not like the ones who only gossip, which is almost everybody.” He set his face as if into a prevailing wind. “I goddamn well know I could turn Butte into a city of gold, and still the one thing I’ll take with me to my grave is the reputation for stringing people up.”

  Monumental and weary, Samuel Sandison cast a last glance at the hanging tree, then turned away to where our horses stood. Over his shoulder, he said, as if we were back in the library:

  “Add it all to your brainbox, Morgan.”

  12

  Night was coming on, with the streetlights of downtown Butte starting to glow golden and the mines of the Hill already lit like the mineral earth’s own constellation, when Sandison and I left the train.

  He had said next to nothing during our journey back from Section 37. As ever, the beard masked more than just his jawline. Accordingly, there on the depot platform he turned to me and dispensed the day in the shortest manner possible: “That takes care of that.” His boot heels resounded on the planks as he traipsed off, leaving me with the parting sentiment: “Don’t be late for work in the morning, it’s a bad habit.”

  I stood there for an extended moment, inhaling the chill air, simply to breathe free.

  “Hsst! Over here, you!”

  My nerves shot back up to high alarm, the threat of goons never absent. Fumbling for the pistol in my side pocket, I stopped when I got a full look at the figure speeding toward me from the depot waiting room. “Grace!”

  In a sensible woolly wrap against the early October night, she still shivered as she drew up to me and stared after the monumental form of Sandison receding into the dusk. “If you hadn’t been on this train, I’d have gone to the police yelling bloody murder. Where on earth did that creature haul you off to?”

  “It is not exactly on the map.”

  Setting off together up the sloping street, I recounted the day to her as best I could, on edge as I was, and she listened the same way as we navigated the noisy neighborhood and reached the boardinghouse. The shared time of the previous night was still with us, but so was too much else and we were uncertain and awkward with each other. It didn’t help matters that Venus Alley, a mere block away, was filling the night with lusty laughter and more.

  Paused at the door of our lodging, I glanced aside at Grace and could only come up with: “Thank you for watching out for me.”

  “You seem to need it,” she replied with a small smile, shyly pocketing the pearl-handled gun I had handed back to her. “Besides, I hate to lose a boarder.”

  “You’ll have this one again in the morning.” I gestured in the general direction of the library. “For now, though, I’m too wound up to go to bed—there’s something waiting for me I must tend to.”

  “Good night, then, Morrie. Don’t let the bad dreams bite,” she said soberly.

  I SWITCHED ON the mezzanine lights. The Reading Room below was as dark and hushed as the audience portion of a theater. Up onstage, so to speak, the books waited in titled ranks, and in their reassuring company I moved idly along the laden shelves, running the tips of my fingers over the exquisite spines, taking down an old loved volume every so often and opening it to the stored glory of words. Around me was the wealth of minds down through all of recorded time. The dramatic capacities of Shakespeare, as all-seeing in his foolscap scripts as in the sagacious portrait above the doorway to reading. The gallant confabulations of Cervantes, showing us the universal meaning of quixotic. The Russian army of impossible geniuses, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. Mark Twain, as fresh on the page as a comet inscribing the dark. Robert Louis Stevenson, master of tales goldenly told. (The twofold nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seemed a lot more convincing after being around Samuel Sandison.) And my ever-familiar exemplar of classic Latin and daring generalship, Caesar, in tanned leather and impeccable threading. These and the hundreds upon hundreds of others Rabrab and I had evaluated, insofar as mortals can, into the inventory. Valued treasures, in more ways than one.

  In such company, you wonder about your own tale in the long book of life. What would they have made of me, these grandmasters of storytelling? Arriving out of nowhere to the richest of hills with the intention of filling my pockets from it, and all this time later, finding that the only thing that had paid off was the railroad, for my own trunk. Thrown together for a second time in life with an appealing widow, and for a second time gaining no ground there, either. Casting my lot with an unpredictable bibliophile who also turned out to be Montana’s leading vigilante. No matter how I looked at it, my story lacked conclusion.

  Suddenly I knew what to do. Can inspiration come off on the fingers? I rubbed my hands together appreciatively, there among the literary classics. It was as if the risk-taking lifetimes of composition, the reckless romances with language, the tricky business of plots stealing onto pages, all the wiles of Samuel Sandison’s glorious books answered to my touch. There was no mistaking their message: sometimes you must set sail on the winds of chance.

  Stroking a last row of embossed titles as I went, I turned off the mezzanine lights and made my way out of the darkened library. What I was about to attempt was a gamble, but that was nothing new in human experience. The first thing it required was a messenger who was not Russian Famine. I headed directly to the cigar store where Skinner hung out.

  DISCORDANT AS IT WAS by nature, the song session the next night came as something of a relief after Section 37. At least, up there onstage I did not have to fear for my neck when one rough-hewn miner or another climbed up with me and sang off-key, although my ears were another matter.

  The songwriting efforts unveiled at this tryout were all over the map, in more ways than one. The only thing the musical penchants of the neighborhoods of the Hill had in common was strenuous exercise of the vocal cords. As diplomatically as I could, I touched up rhyme and word rhythm here and there, and the concertina tuned things up a little, but in the end the attempted songs were pretty much the same rough creatures as at the start of the evening.

  Well, no one in his right mind could expect to turn the basement auditorium of the Butte Public Library into Tin Pan Alley, I had to tell myself afterward. But Jared and Rab and I were a somber trio when we adjourned to the Purity.

  “What do you think, Professor,” Jared asked directly over pie and coffee, “is the work song we want hiding in any of those?”

  “You heard the same performances I did,” I sidestepped. “The groups still have almost a week
to work on things, perhaps something”—I almost said miraculous—“unforgettable will find its way in.” We both looked to Rab for a boost in our spirits.

  “I’ll stick with my sixth-graders,” she passed judgment ruthlessly now that she was back to teaching. “They only get into fistfights at recess.” At the height of the song session Jared had needed to jump in and separate a Finn and an Italian who came to blows over a question of tempo.

  He conceded that was a case of somewhat too much enthusiasm, but maintained strong feelings of that sort could be a good sign. “The men are fired up against Anaconda, and the right song will catch that,” he insisted, as if insistence would do the job. I could see what was coming next as he looked over at me: in his checklist way he would want to know how I was going to handle the big night when two hundred people had to materialize in the library basement without anyone noticing. Omitting to say it was the brainstorm of Griff and Hoop, I brightly volunteered that our salvation was an eisteddfod.

  Jared turned his unscathed ear toward me as if that would help with the word. “Run that by me again?”

  I did so in as much detail as I could think up. The dubious expression on Jared kept growing until Rab, at her conspiratorial best, poked him insistently. “Mr. Morgan has the knack of doing what can’t be done,” she said, canny as an abbess. “You either have to let him or think up something better, sweetheart.”

  That decided him. “Well, hell, if none of us can savvy it, maybe the cops and goons can’t either.” As we rose to go, though, he gave me the Butte salute, a whap on the shoulder, and warned, “Just remember, Professor, plenty of people are going to want your hide if this doesn’t work out right.”