Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  Pausing, he looked at me, eye patch and eye, to make sure I saw where this was heading. “We’ll have to take to the streets if that happens. Whatever Jared thinks, we’ll have to. This time, tear the town down, if it comes to that, soldiers be damned.” That came fiercely, then he settled back to merely darkly determined. “So, if you wonders at the Thunder are going to get any leverage on Anaconda, sooner is better.”

  “I see, I think.”

  “I figured you might. Well, don’t let me ruin the party for you. The good woman is waiting for you at the punch bowl.”

  “Aren’t you partaking?”

  Not unexpectedly, he slapped a side pocket of his pitman’s jacket. “When I want a nip, I carry my own. Tallyho, Morgan.” He moved off toward the end of the room, where Griff and Hoop and other old-timers were carrying on. “I’ll join the stag line. One thing about Butte, it has enough widows to keep life interesting.”

  • • •

  “What’s put the wind up him?” Grace wanted to know when I joined her.

  “Quin’s a man in a hurry. Perhaps for good reason.”

  “What did he want?”

  “For me to hurry Jared along, against Anaconda.”

  She pursed her lips in concern. “It doesn’t have to be tonight, I hope.”

  “Lass, for you I’d postpone the end of the world,” I gave her my best Burns imitation, and she smiled, dimple deep. Fortified with punch, we moved along to the victuals end of the table, where Sandison had stationed himself in tartan lordliness, knees as big as hams showing beneath his kilt.

  “Samuel, you certainly know how to throw a party,” Grace told him gaily, fanning herself. “I haven’t danced so much in years.”

  “Scotch parties require a lot of footwork, Dora always said,” he responded mirthlessly.

  I cocked a look, or at least half of one, at him. “I’m interested, Sandy, that you do not use the prescribed term ‘Scottish.’”

  “Don’t be a jackass. The Dutch don’t call themselves the Duttish.”

  Suddenly Rab swirled in on us, anxiously looking in every direction. “Have you seen Famine? I told him to stay here in the room with us, but he’s disappeared, the pup.”

  Sometimes you just know. “I believe I can find him.” Grace granted me leave with the assurance that she wouldn’t turn into a wallflower with Hoop and Griff available to dance the light fantastic with her, and I went off in search of a junior wisp.

  • • •

  Fortunately I knew every nook and cranny of the building, from being dispatched by Sandison on every conceivable kind of librarianly chore. And if I were a boy—no, if the daredevil boy haunting my memory were Russian Famine—there would be one place above all others sure to lure him.

  I took the shortcut of the back stairs and in a minute was in the rear of the darkened Reading Room. Guided by feel and instinct, I worked my way to the central desk, pausing there to listen. Somewhere overhead there was the hop hop hop sound of the peever game, although more lightly done.

  Quietly as I could, I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. Sure enough, there were the boots and puttees and helmet he had shed. I peered down the aisles between the lofty shelves of books, but could not make him out in the dimness. Careful to keep my voice down and not startle him, I softly called: “Famine? Your absence has been noticed by headquarters.”

  Silence for a long moment, then another of the subdued hopping sounds.

  “Mrs. Evans is awful nice, but she don’t trust me out of her sight.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Beats me. I never busted my neck yet.”

  “That may be, but she and Jared are naturally concerned when you vanish like that.” Still searching from aisle to aisle, I saw nothing but shadows. “All right, poltergeist, I give. Where are you?”

  “Up top. What’s a poltergeese?”

  Startled by the response literally over my head, I shot a look upward past the highest shelf of books. Belatedly remembering, I pushed up my eye patch to make sure of what I was seeing. Squatting on his haunches, gazing down at me for all the world like a stone carving in a cathedral eave, the light-haired boy roosted on the narrow top framing of the nearest set of bookshelves. Directly above the works of Tolstoy, if I was not mistaken. I realized he had been leaping from bookcase to bookcase, traversing the room without ever touching the floor.

  “It’s a fancy word for ‘ghost,’” I answered his question, “which you will find out all too much about if you fall off there.”

  “Nah. That’s why I’m in socken feet. Makes climbing around easier and such.”

  “I’ll take your word on that. But you’re being missed at the party.”

  “Nothing much going on there. I can do that dumb peever game with my eyes shut.”

  “No doubt. There’s the matter of manners, though. Being nice to those who are nice to you.”

  “I try, but it’s a pretty small bunch.” Suddenly grinning at me from his perch like a mischievous gargoyle, he asked, hushed, “Sir? Got ’em on you, in that rig?”

  I clinked the brass knuckles in the swag pocket of my breeches. “I’m never without.”

  “Attaway. A guy has to look out for hisself, don’t he.”

  Springing to his feet as if taking off to fly, he toed back and forth along the precipitous top of the shelving like a tightrope walker; it was all I could do not to hold out my arms in the vain hope of catching him. Abruptly he crouched again, flipping the hair out of his eyes to peer down at me. “I figured I had the place all to myself. How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “By divination.”

  “Huh?”

  “It simply occurred to me, is all.” True, as far as it went. Memory returned me to a first time, one of those markers in life. I had been filling in at the reference desk, answering questions about everything under the sun, when Rab appeared with her restive troop of sixth-graders, consigned to the basement for story hour. Trailing the others was this boy, awkward as if made out of sticks yet quick in every way, gazing hungrily around the holy Reading Room as if desperate to take in the world of grown-ups with their riches of books open before them. Nameless as he then was, I knew him in a flash, the teacher in me recognizing the restless soul, the burning wish to rise beyond his circumstances. Now the roles were reversed, something in my face giving me away as he scrutinized me from his perch. Hesitating, he spoke, more hushed yet. “Can I ask you a thing?”

  “Anytime.”

  “You ever get like me? Itchy to do something but you don’t know what?”

  “On occasion,” I admitted to more than I wanted to.

  “That’s good. I was afraid I was the only one with those kind of skitters.”

  I braced for a slew of unanswerable questions, of how to contain wild urges and blind desires, the riptides in the blood. But Russian Famine only gave me that gremlin grin again, a gleam coming into his eyes. “Know what’s most fun for climbing around on?” He couldn’t wait for any guess from me. “The Hill.”

  Seeing my puzzlement—the copper-rich rise of land was one of the most dangerous places on earth underground, but hardly any physical challenge above that—he confided further: “Those whatchums that stick up. Gallus frames.”

  “Good heavens, those?” I should have known. Gallows frames, as the headframes were called that towered over the mineshafts to raise and lower elevator cages by cable and pulley. “Famine, that’s too dangerous, with the cable hoist running and all the other machinery that could catch your clothing or—”

  “Huh-uh.” The expert’s scorn for my objection. “I only do it on the dead mines.” He looked at me shrewdly. “They shut the Muck a while back. That’s a good one. You can see plenty from up there.”

  The demise of the Muckaroo, the one mine I had ever descended into, or ever intended to, came as startling news to me, an epit
aph of a kind, and Famine shifted himself a little as if catching my discomfiture. Suddenly a spine-chilling note echoed through the building, making him freeze like a hunted quarry. “What’s that? Somebody getting killed?”

  “If my ears don’t mislead me, it’s a bagpiper warming up. You’d better come on down—you wouldn’t want to miss the ceremony of piping in the haggis, now, would you?”

  “Depends. What’s a haggis?”

  “Food. Of a sort.”

  “Huh. That sounds halfway interesting.”

  “Now, how do you get down?”

  “Easy. Same’s I got up.” Like a tightrope walker he tiptoed the length of the bookcase to the poetry section, where slim volumes left a few inches of exposed shelves, which he descended as handily as a ladder. Alighted and scooping up his soldier gear and already in motion toward the source of the not yet melodious wails, he glanced over his shoulder at me. “You coming?”

  “At my own speed. Don’t inquire too closely about what’s in the haggis, all right?”

  Off he went, scooting down the back stairs, but by impulse I chose to go out through the Reading Room. A pale cast of light from the foyer lent just enough outline to the massive oaken tables and softly conjured the Romanesque clock above the reference desk as I gripped the banister in my descent. If I had been able to levitate like a certain wraith of boy, right then is when I would have, for these old loved surroundings cast me into a spell of my own. My introduction to the Butte Public Library, and to Samuel Sandison and so much else, had taken place in this very room when I requested the Latin edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars—my own copy a victim of the luggage-devouring railroad—and realized from the tanned leather cover and exquisitely sewn binding that I was in a literary treasure house. What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time. Now, as if in that daydream state between waking and sleeping, I wound through the maze of darkened chamber with my smile lighting the way.

  Only to go cold as I stepped into the illuminated foyer. A pair of overcoated figures, hats low on their brows, lurked in the nearby corner of the otherwise empty lobby. They were ogling me with an astonishment equal to mine with them.

  “Boss!”

  Before I could draw back, the broad face of Smitty loomed into mine. “What a disguise! If we didn’t know it was you, we wouldn’t know it was you, huh, Ralphie?”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” The other bootlegger goggled at my knee breeches.

  Smitty meanwhile was squinting hard at my pirate patch. “I bet I get it. Keeping an eye on the jerks who run the town, right?”

  I managed to coarsen what there was of my voice. “You said it.”

  “Smart.” Smitty clucked in admiration. “They got to get up early to beat you, boss. Wait till we get back to the warehouse and tell the boys how slick the Highliner is, it don’t matter where or when.” He turned to his sidekick and tenderly took something in soft wrapping from him. “Since you’re here, how about you deliver the baby?”

  I nearly dropped what he deposited in my arms before I realized the gurgle it made was the liquid sort, not the infantile kind. Peeking inside the wrapping, I read the label on the bottle. OLD BALLYCLEUCH, 90 PROOF. “We had to send all the way to Calgary for it,” Smitty said proudly, his fellow bootlegger nodding in reverent affirmation.

  “I’ll mind the bundle of joy,” I borrowed some of Sandison’s gruffness without apology.

  “Swell, boss, we’ll leave you to it.” Smitty gave one last admiring wag of the head at my pirate costume. “C’mon, Ralphie, back to the egg truck.”

  “Wait.”

  They stopped in their tracks. I glanced the length of the corridor to make sure it was deserted, both of them doing the same. “Tell the boys—”

  They hung on my words.

  “Keep the hens setting.”

  “Right, boss!”

  “You bet, boss!”

  • • •

  Downstairs, the dancing was breaking up in anticipation of the haggis ceremony. Grace, looking flushed from twirls around the floor with Griff and Hoop, met me with a whoosh of relief. “I’d nearly given you up for lost, you.” She touched a curious finger to the parcel I was so carefully cradling. “So, Captain Kidd, what do you have there? Buried treasure?”

  A closer guess than she might have thought, actually. Telling her it was a delivery for our host and I would explain later, I sidled off through the crowd, trying to look unobtrusive, toward the punch bowl table where Sandison still presided like a Highland chieftain. His frosty eyebrows cocked slyly when he saw the bundle in my arms. “You look like you’re carrying nitroglycerin,” he chortled as I edged in close enough for us to talk without being overheard.

  “It maybe amounts to the same. Old Ballycleuch, Sandy?”

  “Heh.” He poked into the wrapping enough to verify the bottle of scotch. “That’s the stuff. Strong enough, it probably walked from Scotland by itself.”

  Glancing nervously toward where the mayor and the police chief stood swapping jokes, I hissed to him: “Need I remind you it is a prohibited substance? As in Prohibition, remember?”

  “I must have missed that page in the book of fools. Hand me that lemonade pitcher.” Shielding the action with the bulk of his body, he emptied it into the punch bowl, then barked, “Make yourself useful, can’t you? Get around here and pour the needful into the pitcher, hurry up.”

  We got the job done just as a wild skirl of tune announced the bagpiper entering the auditorium, followed by two other kilted figures bearing the haggis platter between them. The contingent advanced in a slow march as the bagpipe brayed and huffed, until reaching the victuals table, where a spot had been cleared for the prize of the night. As was his due, Sandison posted himself there to preside as the wail of the pipes wound down and the red-faced piper awaited his traditional reward.

  Grandly Sandison hoisted the pitcher in one hand and a tumbler in the other, then with a generous hand poured what looked for all the world like lemonade, meanwhile booming the customary question, “Piper, wha’ll ye ha’ in your libation?”

  “More libation, mon.”

  Pouring further, Sandison included a glassful for himself to toast the deserving bagpiper and then the poet of the land of thistle and heather and lastly the crowd—“Here’s to honest men and bonnie lasses!”—with a healthy swig each time. “And now for the food of the gods!” So saying, he advanced to the victuals table, flourished the ceremonial dirk, and grandly cut into the haggis for serving.

  Glimpsing the mushy gray contents, Hoop and Griff along with a good number of others faded back, but Grace, ever the provider of meals, and I, incurably curious, tried the haggis. “It’s not as bad as you might think,” she judged, maybe the best that could be said for a recipe that begins, Take one sheep’s stomach . . .

  Once the Scotch version of feasting was done, the only thing left on the evening’s program was a parting message from our host. Sandison, however, showed no sign of mounting the stage and in fact had withdrawn behind the punch bowl again. Something in his manner told me to visit the situation, and I excused myself to the others.

  Standing there as pensive as it is possible for a bare-kneed white-maned colossus to look, Sandison was gazing off somewhere in a world of his own. Well, the lord and master of the Butte Public Library and its birthday gala had every right, didn’t he. But there was still the matter of an auditorium full of guests starting to mill uncertainly.

  “The shade of Rabbie Burns awaits an appropriate good-night, Sandy,” I exuded encouragement as I came up to him, “as do the rest of us.”

  “I can’t do it, Morgan.” He was clutching the pitcher of scotch to his breast with both arms and I realized a significant amount of its contents must have gone into him. “Dora always did this part,” he blubbered, with tears leaking into his beard. “You’ll have to.”
r />   “Me? Oh, no. I haven’t a clue how to end a Scotch soiree.”

  “Don’t quibble.” He snuffled. “Just get up there, slowpoke.”

  Pressed into service, I nearly tripped on the steps leading to the stage—the confounded eye patch—as I tried to think what to do or say. The trouble with Burns is that he is like Shakespeare; everyone’s head already was full of language on loan from him. The best laid schemes o’ mice and men. Let us do or die! Nae man can tether time or tide. My love is like a red, red rose. Should auld acquaintance . . . Why could the Scotch bard not have been less prolific?

  Gulping, I took my position at center stage as the audience quieted in anticipation or apprehension, it was impossible to tell which. The faces of Grace and Rab and Jared, at first surprised, were gamely supportive, and behind their backs Russian Famine grinned conspiratorially at the sight of me at that unexpected elevation. The Miners Band onstage in back of me, though, were gathering their music sheets and starting to put away their instruments. Down front, the dignitary brigade, as I thought of them, the whiskery trustees and city fathers, were glancing back and forth in perplexity at Sandison’s absence and my presence. Depend on it, in the back of the crowd Quinlan cupped his hands and called out, “Show us your tonsils, man!”

  Think, Morgan! I enjoined myself, think how to end this labyrinthine evening. And not for the first time, the library itself came to my aid. One of Famine’s toeholds had been that shelf of Tolstoy, the immortal holdings of War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata and most pertinently Anna Karenina. The splendid ball that Anna attends at the Shcherbatskys’ palace floated in my mind like a vision, and while Butte was not nearly Moscow except for snowfall, a dance floor bridges many differences. I had only to pluck the right opening note, whatever that was.

  “As the strains of the bagpipe have reminded us,” I put that as generously as I could, “Robert Burns’s native land was a commonwealth of music as well as of rhyme. Therefore, it may be fitting to conclude this evening of festivity with a musical excursion that takes in his Scotland, the old country, and our own land, the new.” There is a trick to speaking swiftly and firmly enough that a crowd has to listen to catch up. “This particular promenade dates from 1773, when James Boswell accompanied the learned Dr. Johnson on their tour of the Hebrides,” I sped on. “Hosted on the Isle of Skye, the two of them joined in, Boswell tells us, a reel of ‘involutions and evolutions,’ suggesting the partings and arrivals of emigration. It was, in the wonderfully simple words of Boswell, ‘a dance called America.’”