Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  “I gather that it is,” Jared snapped. Like me, he was dressed nattily, but in the tension of his body and the set of his shoulders, he was once again all miner underneath. “Now, will you quit beating around the bush and—”

  “The pair of them were getting set to blast a fresh run of ore, and the charge must have went off on them,” Delaney reported in a rush of words. “It’s taken some digging to get them out. They’re both gone. I’m sorry as hell.”

  Jared looked like he wanted to throttle him. “Two men dead and you don’t even have the union shift rep in here to start notifying the families and the rest? It’s in the contract, you know that—you’re supposed to get our man on the first fast cage for this.” He shot a look out into the corridor. “Where the hell is Quinlan? Isn’t he up yet?”

  Blindly defensive, the mine supervisor blathered, “They’re bringing him up as quick as the stretchers could get there, I told you it happened in the deep shaft and it takes—”

  “Bringing?” Jared turned pale, and no doubt I did, too. “It’s Quin, in this?” It was an accusation, not a question.

  No sooner had that truth crashed into the room, while I was still sitting paralyzed, than a voice trilled in my ear: “I’m so sorry, but has your party spoken with you yet?”

  “No, I mean yes, he’s there, he’s merely occupied.”

  “I’m awfully sorry, but other departments are waiting to use this line.”

  “Things are delayed,” I said tersely, hoping that would sound like official business to the switchboard operator and newspaper business to the mine overseer.

  “I’m just terribly sorry, but the company rule is that an outside line should be used no more than—”

  “I am sitting at the desk of the supervisor of the entire mine,” I said slowly and distinctly. “Does that tell you enough?”

  The voice went away without even saying it was to any degree sorry.

  More shaken than I had ever seen him, Jared was hearing out Delaney’s pleading try at explanation. “God’s truth, Jared, I wish it had been anyone but Quin. I know how this looks, but it was a total accident, it has to be.”

  “Then it’s a sonofabitch of a coincidence, isn’t it,” Jared said savagely. “The one man, after me, that Anaconda would be glad to be rid of. What’s the company trying to pull? Pick us off, the way the goons did outside your gate and—”

  Frantic, Delaney interrupted and pointed at me. “Is it all right for him to hear this? He’s one of those, you know.”

  Of course Jared waved that away and went on with his tirade. But that was the moment I truly realized I was one of those. A newspaperman. Fresh to me, the hunger of the newsman to be first with the story, but oh, how I felt it. The same appetite raged in Cavaretta, Sammy, Armbrister, Matthews hunched ready at his typewriter on the far end of the line, every man and woman of the Thunder, it was our calling: To tell the reading public this story of the Hill, before the Post could bury it away on page eight in the death notices. If we could only get the news out. The time, the time. How I did so with both hands engaged with the telephone, I don’t know, but I fished my pocket watch from inside my topcoat, suit coat, and vest pocket, and looked. Deadline was not that far off.

  Meanwhile Delaney was still maintaining that Quinlan’s fatal accident was only that, sheer chance, until Jared coldly broke in on him.

  “Just tell me this. Will you swear to me, man to man, the company didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  Delaney’s face froze. “Them downtown, you mean.”

  Jared and I realized in the same instant. The Neversweat overseer was frightened. Nervously he rattled out, “I don’t see how they—anybody—could have set this up to happen. I make every shift boss inspect the blasting supplies for short fuses, powder leaks, all that. You raise such hell with us anytime anyone’s hurt, I come down hard on handling explosives. I swear to you, that’s the honest truth.”

  Still incredulous, Jared asked: “Then how do you explain it? Two drillers, as savvy as anybody on the Hill, get blown up just like that?”

  Delaney mustered himself. “You know what Quin was like. He never saw a corner he couldn’t cut. How many times did I get after him for chasing into new rock ahead of the timbering crew? He’d laugh in my face and tell me he’d never yet heard the undertaker’s music in the rock, he’d back off when he did.” He stopped, his jaw working as if deciding whether to say the next. “Jared, you had better know. He was drinking, some. On the job, I’m pretty sure, although I couldn’t ever catch him at it.”

  Jared winced but shook his head. “I can’t buy that entirely. Quin could hold his whiskey, he had a hollow leg.” I’d have said the same. I watched Jared reach his decision. “Whatever the hell happened, no matter whose fault, I’m calling the men out.”

  Delaney cursed, then pleaded. “How’s a wildcat strike going to help matters any?”

  “Nobody said ‘strike,’” Jared made the terms plain. “Just this shift, a walkout. We owe Quin that much.”

  “Do what you must,” the supervisor gave up. He glanced uncertainly at me jealously guarding the phone. “I’ll let them downtown know, whenever.”

  No sooner had he said that than a sudden wash of light through the office window startled the three of us, before we realized it was photographer’s flash powder going off like daylight lightning. Delaney drew a breath. “I suppose that’ll be the cage with the bodies.”

  Cavaretta came racing in, puffing from sprinting from the mine head and searching the corridor for me. He drew up momentarily at the sight of Jared and the mine superintendent, but swiftly stepped around them. “Don’t mind me, just borrowing the phone a few minutes. Thanks, Morgie.” He began dictating: “Two veteran miners perished in an explosion of unknown cause deep in the Neversweat mine earlier today. Patrick Quinlan, mineworkers’ union representative on the afternoon shift and a well-known figure in the Irish community, and his drilling partner, Terence Fitzgerald, were said to be setting a dynamite charge in the four-thousand-foot level when—”

  • • •

  “—history repeated itself as tragedy,” my editorial picked up the story the next day. It went on in this vein:

  In rough numbers, the mining operations of the Hill kill a miner a week. This week it was two, one of them the combative presence across the bargaining table from the Anaconda Company in wage and safety negotiations. Pat Quinlan died, insofar as is known, because something went terribly wrong in a routine blasting of a wall of ore. Whatever happened, it fits on the list of mining conditions terribly wrong in the copper monopoly’s empire of mines:

  Is there enough ventilation at the extreme depth Anaconda has pushed its mineshafts in, say, the greatly misnamed Neversweat, so that a mineworker is not blinded by his own sweat as he handles dangerous materials? No.

  Is there medical help, even of the first-aid sort, in place and prepared when the dreaded signal of five whistles goes off? No.

  Is there a change of course in the company’s administration of its mines since the Speculator fire, when the escape doors that were supposed to be in the tunnels’ cement bulkheads somehow were not there and one hundred sixty-four miners died? No.

  That’s Anaconda history for you. That’s tragedy.

  “About close enough to the line,” Armbrister judged, Jared reluctantly concurring, as they read over my words practically letter by letter before letting them into print. The Thunder could not accuse the Anaconda Copper Mining Company of murder, without proof, because of the libel law. But people could read beneath the ink of our version of Quin’s death if they wanted. Take that, Scriptoris and company.

  • • •

  “All right, Sherlock. Who do you think did it, them or him?” Grace with her common sense got right to the question, handing the editorial back to me from her side of the bed.

  I smoothed the Thunder atop the Sporting Ne
ws before setting both away for the night. “I would not put money either way. One is treacherous, one was reckless. Unless something else comes to light, it’s anybody’s guess.”

  • • •

  I attended Quin’s wake, and then the burial, for to my surprise I was asked to be a pallbearer. In the nature of things Jared was, too, and it was after the service at the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home while we waited for the hearse that he took me aside. “I’ve had a word with Armbrister, you’d better know. No more editorials about Quin.”

  “What!” Funeral home or not, my voice rose to a pitch. “Why not? After what happened, it gives us all kinds of ammunition to—”

  Jared squeezed my shoulder hard enough to shut me up. “I found a Wob card on him.”

  My stunned silence didn’t require the hand he now dropped. “Delaney did the decent thing and left me alone to go through Quin’s belongings, before the undertaker got there. It was right there in his wallet, big as life, along with his union card.” Jared spoke quickly, keeping an eye out for the arrival of the hearse. “Anaconda can’t have known he was a Wobbly”—he shook his head as if trying to clear it of Quinlan’s plural versions—“if he really was to any extent, or they’d have blackballed him from the Hill, the way they did all the others. And,” his face hardened, “painted us Red along with him.”

  I did not need that spelled out. Since the Russian Revolution, America from the top of government on down had undergone a spasm of fear, not nearly over, of Bolshevism, anarchism, any ism that could be deemed un-American. Only the vegetarians were spared, it sometimes seemed, the epidemic of prosecutions, deportations, jailings, blacklistings, of left-wing activists of any stripe. In the mines and forests and ports of the West, the Industrial Workers of the World and their “radical” philosophy of workers’ power had been singled out as a particular threat to the existing order, and crushed. It could keep happening.

  “I unfortunately understand,” I had to concede, meeting Jared’s sober look with my own. “Red isn’t the most becoming color these days, is it.”

  “It clashes,” he said with resigned grim humor. “Here comes the hearse. Off to the cemetery, Professor.”

  • • •

  There it was left, Pat Quinlan of Dublin Gulch six feet under Butte soil after a life at its deeper depths, the mystery of his death interred with him.

  8

  A NEWSPAPER WITHOUT A CAUSE is little more than a tally sheet of mishaps local and national and whatever social gatherings and sporting events will fill the rest of the pages. Distinctly like our insipid rival, the Daily Post, in other words, and every other docile daily on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s leash, all across the state. Thank heavens, the Thunder never waned to that extent after going silent about the disaster in the Neversweat, but some days it was close. Deprived of Quin as a martyr, I had to reach farther and farther up my sleeve for editorials taking the fight to Anaconda. Over at the Post, Scriptoris had nothing much to do but casually snipe back; we could have written some of our exchanges in our sleep. While still putting out a paper people wanted to read—still cranking the hurdy-gurdy, in Armbrister’s term for it—our sense of direction was less sure than in the first heady months of publication. The staff sensed it. Journalists have a nose for that. Newsroom morale was helped only a little by Jared gamely introducing in the legislature a toughened mine safety law, doomed to have the life choked out of it by the copper collar, everyone knew.

  “What I don’t understand,” Griff groused at supper during this time, “is how come you don’t keep after the snakes about that blast going off on Quin. There’s something fishy about that. In our day we handled every kind of dynamite and such, didn’t we, Hoop—”

  “Enough to wage a war, just about.”

  “—and you didn’t see us blowing ourselves up.” He tapped the air with his fork for emphasis. “You just had to have the right touch, know what you were doing. And wouldn’t you think Quin did?”

  In answer, I could only say cryptically that Jared Evans had a strategy that might take a while, and try to let it go at that. Only he, Armbrister, and I knew—and of course, Grace and Rab—about the incriminating IWW card and Quin’s dangerous duplicity to us as well as to Anaconda, if that’s what it amounted to. Accordingly, my policy necessarily was De mortuis nil nisi bonum—Speak no ill of the dead—and not incidentally, keep Hoop and Griff from letting the cat out of the bag while gossiping with their old mining cronies.

  The other person at the supper table stroked his snowy beard and said nothing, which in a way said something in itself.

  • • •

  Not since Robert Burns Night had I visited the Butte Public Library, and as ever it was like entering the world as it should be, organized, hushed, welcoming. Good day to you once again, William, I greeted Shakespeare at his post above the Reading Room as I passed on my way up to Sandison’s office. He was not in. Back downstairs, I started my search for him at the Reading Room, where Smithers at the periodicals desk and pretty Miss Mitchell in the cataloging section wigwagged fond greetings to me. I knew better than to expect anything of the sort from Miss Runyon, the gorgon of the main desk and an old antagonist from my time as Sandison’s assistant in charge of this, that, and her.

  Registering unpleasant surprise as I approached, her eyeglasses swinging on the chain around her stout neck as she pulled back in her high chair to increase the distance between us, she whispered forbiddingly, “What can I do for you?”

  “I wonder, Miss Runyon, if out of your vast store of information”—I should not have, but I let my gaze graze across her voluminous forbidding chest as I said that—“you can tell me where I might find Sandy.”

  “Mr. Sandison,” the words all but leaned across the desk and cuffed me, “is on the prowl. He spends more and more time in the stacks, with those precious books of his. That man.”

  Up the grand staircase to the mezzanine and its tall ranks of richly hued books I went. Stopping to listen, very much as I had done when Russian Famine was flying overhead from bookcase to bookcase, I heard a sound faint but distinct as a rippling brook, the riffle of pages being turned.

  There he was when I stuck my head around Poetry A–K, open book in hand. I could just make out the gilt title on the spine, A Life in Verse, by the sometimes inspired, sometimes pedestrian poet Cheyne. White eyebrows ascending toward his cowlick in surprise at the sight of me, Sandison appeared almost shy at having been discovered fondling the volume. “Caught me counting the herd,” he rumbled, reshelving Cheyne and passing a lingering hand over the beautiful leather of the works of Matthew Arnold, Baudelaire, Blake, the two Brownings, and of course, Burns. I was the one surprised as he lowered his voice to ask, “Ever have the urge to write?”

  “I thought that was what I do for a living.”

  “A book, man,” he said as if I were simple-minded. “The real thing.” The next came out rough as a grindstone, but was nonetheless a confession. “Sometimes I’d like to get it all down. What the country was like when Dora and I came in by stagecoach, young pups that we were, and started the ranch. And everything that followed. It’d make quite a tale, don’t you think?”

  Possible titles flooded my mind. We Hung Them High. The Earl of Hell Remembers. Finagling the Finest Book Collection West of Chicago.

  Reading me from the inside out, Sandison sighed and changed the topic. “What are you doing in here this time of day anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be saving the world, editorial driblet by driblet?”

  “Ostensibly, I’m here to look up statistics on mining production. Actually, I just wanted to get out of the office for a while.”

  “Statistics, ay?” He glanced at me shrewdly. “Pluvius getting hard up for material, is he?”

  “Things are a little dry right now,” I had to admit.

  With a grunt, he turned in the other direction, his bulk nearly fil
ling the aisle between bookshelves. “Come on out on the balcony where we can talk. I have a touch of the office strain of cabin fever myself.”

  Cupped neatly in the stonework above the main entrance’s keystone arch, the small balcony looked out on Broadway, the Butte version, busy enough with automobile traffic and delivery vans—a Golden Eggs truck casually putt-putting along with the rest, I couldn’t help but notice—and the familiar sight of messengers trotting through the more leisurely passersby to run purchases from the Hennessy department store or bank errands or, of course, Anaconda pouches of directives to its managers on the Hill. Winter at least having retreated if not gone, pedestrians had become recognizable as something other than walking piles of clothes, and optimistic bonnets instead of headscarves could be seen on some of the more fashionable ladies. By now it was April, fooler of a month. One day the weather would be what passed for spring at an elevation of a mile, and the next would feel as if it had come from Iceland. Leaning his elbows on the rim of the balcony as I was also doing, Sandison sniffed the air. “Hmmp. The time of year is doing its damnedest to change, once you get past the smell from up there.” Silently we looked past the downtown buildings, even the tallest ones dwarfed by the hill of copper—its serape of snow in its last tatters by now—that was this contentious city’s fortune and its curse.

  “You’ve slacked off on Anaconda since right after those two miners were blown up,” he said as if still conversing about the weather. “What’s that about?”

  Why did I feel some sense of relief in unburdening myself to this cantankerous old mountain of a man? Sometimes we need ears other than our own, but there seemed to be more to it with Sam Sandison; there always did with him. In any case, I owned up as soon as he asked. “Don’t pass this on to Hooper and Griffith, please, they’re better off not knowing. But we found out Quinlan was . . . not quite what he seemed.”