Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  But back there at the very start, any tremors were confined to those of us clustered around the editor’s desk, as Armbrister, a hawk hovering in his element, scanned around relentlessly for assignments ready to be turned in. Jared, looking on with Rab proudly hooking arms with him and myself, kept tugging at his tie, dressed as he was in the sober new suit befitting a publisher and legislator. “Damn this collar,” he ran a finger inside the neck of his duly starched shirt, “how do you put up with it, Professor?”

  “Just remind yourself it’s not copper,” I said easily.

  “Hear, hear!” said Rab. “Besides, this way you’re all spiffed up to celebrate the new newspaper and the new year, both,” she brought out a grin on her self-conscious spouse by straightening his tie back from where he had just adjusted it. “The senator here will be kicking his heels up at the union hall—the Serbs are going to show us all some dance they swear won’t resemble a polka. What about you, Mr. Morgan—are you and Grace and Sam Sandison going out to paint the town red?”

  “Our household is catching its breath tonight, Rab. Maybe a wink at the new year as it slips in, is all.”

  “Good riddance to the old one,” Jared said somberly of the mineworkers’ annus horribilis that had left Anaconda with the upper hand, and Armbrister dourly added his amen to that. “You’re going to have to get us off to a flying start,” the editor gave me a certain kind of look from under his eyeshade, “so I hope you’ve exercised your brain about—” Just then the newsroom door banged open and the stutter of typewriters momentarily stilled.

  Turning her head to see who it was, Rab showed surprise. “Did you ask him to show up? Today, of all?”

  “Better to deal him in than not,” Jared replied softly. “And he’s a good reminder to us all what this is about. Look at that—it’s like the coming of Saint Patrick, isn’t it. Nobody can take their eyes off him.”

  I’d had my back turned to the man, and faced around to a strapping figure sweeping toward us in a rolling gait, lunch box swinging in his hand and the mark of the Hill on him in that slight lean as if stooping under a mine timber. Every shoulder within reach he batted as he progressed through the newsroom, dropping “That’s the stuff!” and other plaudits along the way, companionable yet commanding. Nearing us, his keen gaze fixed on me, he laughed and called out:

  “Is it Morgan underneath all that? If whiskers could talk, you’d be Cicero, boyo.”

  I blinked. “Quin!” The unexpected sight of him took me back, in both meanings. Pat Quinlan had been the life of the party at Dublin Gulch wakes, and I use that contradictory term advisedly, when I was forced to attend as the representative of the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home. Memories of the bootleg rye that flowed from his pocket flask into me on those occasions washed away most of the rest of my doubts about becoming a newspaper employee, where drinking on the job was merely optional.

  “I’d forgotten,” Jared was saying to me as Quin’s hard hand pumped mine, “you’re already acquainted with our negotiator.” My surprise redoubled. Beyond doubt, Pat Quinlan was surpassingly capable of giving Anaconda holy hell, and the other kind, too. However, he and Jared had not seen eye to eye on union matters in that other year of trouble, 1919. Quin was perhaps not quite the fieriest firebrand in the ranks of Butte labor, but never that far from flaming up, either. Enlisting him as the union’s second-in-command surely was a gamble on Jared’s part—shrewd, possibly, but a gamble nonetheless to have a rival so close.

  “Morgan, my fellow, Jared tells me you’re our editorial scribe.” When he looked at a person the way he was eyeing me, Quin had a sort of dark gleam to him, his the so-called Armada complexion, consequence of shipwrecked sailors blending their Spanish blood with the Irish many generations ago. “A man who’s dynamite with words, have we. I like that.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

  I coughed. “I’m glad I pass muster with Dublin Gulch.”

  “We’ll put you up for pope,” he said airily. He glanced past Jared. “And our Barbara! You look like the Rose of Tralee amongst these bog trotters.”

  “Tsk, aren’t you the gravel patch of the Blarney Stone,” Rab absorbed the compliment in the spirit given.

  Armbrister had been tolerating the disruption to his newsroom about as expected, which was to say barely. “Back to work, everyone,” he bawled to the staff, then wheeled to Quin. “Come on over, you need to meet Cavaretta. He’ll be covering union matters, such as the ongoing negotiations with Anaconda. They are ongoing, aren’t they?”

  “Like Niagara.” As Quin strutted off in the company of the editor, Jared rolled his eyes and shadowed after them to tamp down whatever the dark prince of the bargaining table told the reporter.

  Rab watched expressionlessly, no small feat for her. “The show-off,” she whispered to me. “I can’t stand him. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

  “Quin isn’t to everyone’s taste,” I murmured back, “but as I understand it, Jared’s strategy is that Anaconda chokes on him worse than the rest of us do.”

  “Oh, he’s useful, in that way,” she retorted, her lips barely moving like the skilled whisperer she had been in my classroom. “But I can’t forgive him for how he behaved in the big strike. Jared would be trying to keep people from killing one another, and Quin would come around behind him, yelping about striking the blow against Anaconda.” She shook her head. “There’s always been a union faction at the Neversweat that’s out for blood, and Quin’s their man.” Her whisper turned fierce. “They and the Wobblies drew blood, all right, on themselves when the goons started shooting.”

  “Hence, Jared taking the political route, instead of taking on Anaconda bare-handed as Quin is inclined to do?”

  “Hence,” Rab confirmed with a sly twist to the word.

  Conversation with the reporter had ended with a grand backslap from Quin, and here came the three of them to us, Armbrister and Quin each checking the clock like a man in a hurry and Jared glancing down at the black lunch box conspicuous at Quin’s side. “You’re going on shift, you mean?”

  “’Course I am,” said Quin as if surprised to be asked. “We don’t trade out of shifts at the ’Sweat.” He laid it on thicker yet. “It’s bad luck, you know, if you don’t work the last shift of the year in the same diggings where you did the first. Breaks the chain of fortune, it does.”

  Looking uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with neckwear, Jared said only, “Tap ’er light, Quin,” miners’ way of saying, So long and good luck, both.

  Smiling devilishly, Quin set off on his promenade out of the newsroom, but whirled as if something had just struck him. “Morgan?” He made a fist. “Give them this.”

  “I shall do my best, Quin.”

  Watching him all the way out the door, Jared then turned to the case of imminent explosion at his side. “Don’t start, Rab. He’s a scamp and a scene stealer, we know that. The trick is to give him enough of a stage to keep him satisfied.” All business now, he squared around to Armbrister and me. “We need to get out of your hair, you have work to do.” He grinned at me. “Thought up that pen name yet?”

  “Just now. A nom de plume fitting to the promise of the Thunder, I think you’ll agree. Pluvius.”

  Rab smothered a giggle, surely remembering the rain-catching instrument I introduced into the classroom when she was a schoolgirl, a pluviometer. The ostensible Latin god of downpour and freshet alike approximated my role as editorialist very well, in my estimation.

  Jared puzzled that out for a moment, glancing at her for reassurance, then granted, “Your choice, I guess.”

  Meanwhile Armbrister was clouding up beneath his green eyeshade, as editors do when deadlines loom. “Let’s never mind the fancy Latin and start producing some plain English. I need the editorial piece, dead pronto. You type, dare I hope?”

  “Assiduously.”

  He pointed me to a vaca
nt desk and typewriter in the corner next to his cubicle. The din of the newsroom did not bother me, because in my Butte Public Library phase I had grown accustomed to working in the same office with Sandison and his grunts and snorts and booted prowling of the room. I worked quickly.

  A question comes with the new year and the next legislative session, soon to start. Why, do you suppose, is it that every bill proposed in the Montana legislature is always printed in four copies, instead of three, as in other states? Let’s do the arithmetic, shall we? One for the House, one for the Senate, one for the governor, and that leaves—

  Number four, which goes to the top floor of the Hennessy Building in Butte, headquarters of a certain copper company.

  And what does that add up to?

  Control of the legislative levers of power and until now, of the daily press of this state.

  Oh, it will be said, it is merely a matter of custom and convenience for the largest employer in all of Montana to be kept abreast of pending bills and such. It has been convenient, all right, and customary, for that top-floor monopoly, though not for the rest of us.

  No other company has been a worse neighbor than the one whose coils of power extend from Wall Street through that local aperture to the depths of the richest mineshafts on this continent and up again to the legislative chambers of Helena.

  Does this mean there is nothing to be done, and the Treasure State is forever doomed to be squeezed this way?

  Absolutely not. The remedy does exist, as shall be set forth in these columns in days to come, openly and freely. The black name that slithers down this page has gripped the newspapers of Montana for too long. The Thunder is here to speak common sense and justice. Mark it well; what you hold in your hands this moment is nothing less than a declaration of journalistic enterprise that refuses to be choked by the copper collar of the Anaconda Company.

  —PLUVIUS

  • • •

  “I’d’ve said ‘snake’ somewhere in it.”

  “Me, too. Kind of people they are.”

  “Pretty much readable otherwise.”

  “Not too bad for a start, Morrie.”

  Griff and Hoop passed suppertime judgment on my editorial debut along with the potatoes and gravy and baked chicken until I had my fill in both respects. Grace had been so occupied with cooking and serving our New Year’s Eve feast, to dignify it with that—I looked ahead to the day we could afford roast beef—she’d had time only to glance at the newspaper page and exclaim, “Ooh, it looks as serious as a hymnal.” Sandison merely issued a series of grunts as he read the copy of the Thunder folded open to my words. But something told me he wanted to see me alone after the meal.

  I slipped into his tower cave of books as Grace dealt with the dishes and my Welsh critics hobbled off to their rooms. “And so? Is my prose up to literary standards?”

  The chair groaned under him—it had a bad habit of that—as Sandison stroked his beard and considered me. “It’s too bad there isn’t a pill for foolhardiness.”

  “The cure might be worse than the ailment, Sandy,” I mounted in self-defense. “I admit spelling out ‘Anaconda’ that way may have been a bit dramatic for a start, but Jared Evans was happy with it and the newspaper staff honestly cheered. Sometimes a chance must be taken, wouldn’t you say? Caesar at the Rubicon. George Washington at the Delaware.”

  “Quixote at the windmill,” he trumped those without effort. Waving away my further protest, he conceded: “All right, all right, you’re determined to be a hornet up Anaconda’s nose—”

  “Actually, I prefer the locution ‘bee in the bonnet’—”

  “—but that doesn’t mean you can sit down to the typewriter and torment the company’s highly paid thieves up there in the Hennessy Building that same way day after day and get away with it. You’re going to have to be ready to be attacked in return, laddie. The Post isn’t in business just to sell patent medicines and hernia belts.”

  I took his point. I had to. I’d given no thought to what came next. At such a time, thank heaven for the courage history lends. My gaze lifted to the erect spines ranked row upon proud row around the room. “If I may, Sandy, I would like to call on your friends for aid from time to time.”

  “Now you’re showing a lick of sense. Help yourself.” He swept a hand around the wall of books behind him, where I had to hope to find the right inspiration from the likes of Addison and Steele sharpening with Tatler wit the debates of England, Horace Greeley defending the Union with the verbal artillery of the New York Tribune, and, yes, Tom Paine, ever his own man but speaking for all in detestation of domination. The great typeset voices to bolster my own unfledged one.

  • • •

  The new year blew in with snow that whitened the night, our bedroom far from dark with the blue-silver reflection off the freshly blanketed Hill and the whirling flakes. Sandison’s wish for a blizzard to clean the town was being granted in full with the arrival of 1921.

  Beside me, Grace raised her head from the pillow to sigh at the storm howling and scratching at the arched window. “Too bad. Someone always climbs to the top of the Muckaroo headframe and sets off whiz-bangs at midnight. Not tonight, they won’t.”

  “The storm before the calm, perhaps.”

  She puffed lightly at me and my quip as if putting out a candle. “New Year’s is no laughing matter, you. Where does the time go, answer me that.” Restless as the weather, she sat up against the bed’s headboard, ran her hands through her flowing hair, then hugged her knees as she gazed at the flurries smacking the window. “It seems only yesterday we were being married and going off to see the world, doesn’t it?”

  “No.” I rolled over enough to kiss her elbow. “It seems like many perfect yesterdays ago spent in the best company since matrimony was invented.”

  “Flatterer.” She looked down at me, the dimpled smile I so loved just visible in the pale night. “Are you pleased?”

  “With life in general? I have you, I have house enough for several people, I have employment and a living wage, how can I not be pleased?”

  “With yourself, I mean, Mr. Pluvius.”

  “Mmm, that.” Assessing whether you are living up to your pen name—choosing one with the mystical properties of a Roman god sets a shamefully high mark—pits one side of you against the other, but try I did. “There too”—she could tell I meant the Thunder and its cause—“I feel I’m in the right company. If words can carry the day, as Jared Evans thinks they can, I am not short of words.” I smiled up at her. “As you may have noticed.”

  She did not smile back. “I’d be the last one to doubt you can pluviate or whatever it is until the other party falls down dizzy. But I can’t forget what my Arthur always used to say. Taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope—”

  “—its muzzle doesn’t come off, yes, yes, I fully remember the saying.” Along with Shakespeare’s loftier one about so musical a discord when the bear was bay’d; that was not exactly the tune I was hearing in my debut as a newspaperman. First Sandison, and now my heartmate—I did not lack for concern about my well-being, at least. But if I couldn’t sound reassuring on a feather bed, I might as well trade in my tongue. “Grace, this is not like before, when I needed to watch my step every time I set foot outside. Anaconda wins when the battle is in the streets, no question. But a sparring match in newspaper columns is quite another matter, surely. The snakes, to borrow Hoop and Griff’s term, would face prosecution if something befell me or any other of the newspaper staff, Jared has enough political power now to see to that. No, our bet is—forgive that figure of speech, my dear—the battle will be fought out on the page, where it can be won.”

  Still clutching her knees, Grace heard me out to the last word, the only sound for some moments the howling of the wind. Then she patted my hand in the feathery way I had come to know and count on, and gave me the kin
d of kiss that sealed one year and promised much for the next. “All right, Morrie. I have to hope you’re right, don’t I. Good night, you.”

  “Good night and happy new year, Mrs. Morgan.”

  • • •

  “Lords and ladies of the press, gather ’round to have our fortune told,” Armbrister called out the next day in the newsroom. The Thunder staff surrounded him, Jared and Rab and even Russian Famine thrown in, as the fingers-crossed editor opened a Post snatched from the earliest available newsboy. “Let’s see what the bastards uptown think of us,” he muttered. I held my breath, and I was not nearly the only one, as he scanned the rival editorial page for the response to my initial denunciation of Anaconda and its might. Then, it had to be seen to believed, an actual look of satisfaction came over him. “Hot damn, folks. We caught them with their pantaloons down. Listen to this.”