Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  He gave me that look of his. “Knew that, almost. Didn’t you tell me once he’d pull out the Little Red Songbook when things got too quiet at a wake?”

  “I confess, I thought he simply liked a good song.”

  “Hah. A person can do that and still be a rascal. You of all people should know.” Now I was giving him a look, but he only said as if in passing, “Aren’t journalists supposed to be students of human nature?”

  “On that”—I exhaled a good deal of regret—“my grades perhaps are not always the highest.”

  “A card-carrying IWW member, what next.” He had gone back to musing on Quin. “Some secret threat to society they are.” Absently rubbing the stonework of the library as a captain on the bridge of a ship might stroke a railing of familiar oak, he pondered aloud. “Doesn’t mean he was wrong about the state of things. The Anaconda Company needs to be leveled to the ground and their bones stomped in.” The glacier-blue eyes were perfectly mild as he surveyed the Hill, where the belching smokestacks of the Neversweat were most prominent. “Not that I’m in favor of violence, mind.”

  It was too much for me. My despair coming out, I heard myself say: “I’m wondering if I’m cut out for Butte.” He glanced at me sharply. “Don’t take me wrong,” I hurried to add, “I am happy to be employed at the Thunder, just as I was here in your bailiwick. It’s only that I’m not sure I have as much staying power as Jared Evans and the rest. It’s their fight, in the end. I’m simply something like a cornerman.”

  “Odd analogy,” he drawled. “I’d have thought you’re more like the old hand who knows how the best punches are thrown.”

  “Yes, well,” I could have done without his own analogy, “it may seem that way, but I am about out of combinations with any real jab to them, when it comes to Anaconda.”

  “Don’t give up, Morgan.” Sandison leaned back to his full, snowy height, as if sizing up the hurly-burly of busy humanity in the street below us. “You never know what might come along and change the story.”

  It didn’t take long.

  • • •

  “Another box of rocks for the old gentleman.”

  The postman handed me what was undoubtedly Sandison’s latest hefty book purchase when I answered the door the following Saturday forenoon. “Oh, and this for you,” he fished a letter out of his mailbag. “Sorry to be the bringer of bad news.” Clucking his tongue, he went on his way as I studied the official-looking piece of correspondence.

  My curiosity piqued, I at once tore open the envelope. Its contents staggered me.

  Flabbergasted as I was, I needed advice at once. Grace was out buying groceries. Hoop and Griff were in the basement, noisily doing something to the furnace. That left only Sandison to consult about what I held in my hand, if I could get over being speechless.

  First he spotted the package under my arm, as I stepped into the round library room.

  “Hah. That’ll be Moby-Dick, the deluxe edition with N. C. Wyeth illustrations. Melville is quite the coming author, now that he’s been dead long enough. About time it got here,” he said as though I had dawdled en route from the front door. As usual on weekends, he still was in pajamas, his idea of leisure being a stroll directly from bed to his book-lined lair. He did not believe in slippers, only a pair of run-down cowboy boots softened by time, which made his toilet trips in the middle of the night a disturbing experience for anyone within hearing. Comfortable as a king in his big boots and striped nightwear, he slit the package as quickly as I handed it over and opened the illustrated tale of the whale, about the size of a breadboard and twice as heavy. The richly colored set of pages depicted Captain Ahab lashed to the leviathan, about to be dragged down to his doom. Which was how I felt as the master of the manse at that moment.

  Paying me no further mind, Sandison leaned over the Wyeth handiwork, chortling. “Tells the story right there, wouldn’t you say?”

  I was too upset to do anything but wordlessly thrust my own piece of mail between him and the book.

  Frowning, he plucked the paper from me and gave a hasty read. “The property tax bill,” he identified it, as if I couldn’t. He handed it back. “A bit steep this year, isn’t it,” he said, already paging through Moby-Dick again.

  “Steep? It’s, it’s precipitous!” I sputtered.

  “Welcome to home ownership in the great state of Montana,” he replied mildly.

  “But it seems to me a terrific sum, for someone of my salary,” I protested, my spirit still sinking like Ahab.

  Sandison sighed. “Morgan, do I have to spell out the facts of life to you? The tax is based on what you own, ninny, not what you make.” He swept an arm expansively toward the bulk of the manse beyond his private room. “And this place is quite a bit of property, you know. Horse Thief Row doesn’t come cheap.”

  “Sandy, just this one tax year, I wonder if you could possibly—”

  “No, I couldn’t possibly,” he scotched that. “My funds, such as they are, are tied up in the account book dealers need to draw on. I thought I’d made that plain, back when I signed over the house to you and madam. Good Lord, man, can’t you manage to own a piece of property and pay up like a normal person?” he all but stamped his nightwear boots at me.

  “I am willing, but the cash is weak,” I would have paraphrased that into Latin if I’d had the presence of mind. “How am I—Grace and I—supposed to pay up, as you so casually put it, and still afford the upkeep on this omnivorous house?”

  Sandison stroked his beard in a wise way. “Maybe you ought to take up bootlegging. There probably aren’t taxes attached to that, don’t you think?”

  Doubly dumbfounded now, I gawked at him. How did he know I got away with impersonating the Highliner at the warehouse? Yet if my ears were not playing tricks on me, what was the Earl of Hell suggesting but—“That Old Ballycleuch, you certainly produced in timely fashion on Burns night,” he drawled, to my utter relief. “I still take a dram when the spirit calls, heh, heh.” He reached toward his bottom desk drawer. “You look like you need one now, laddie.”

  “No. No, thank you. I need to think.”

  • • •

  “Oh, dear,” Grace groaned, settling at the kitchen table when I gave her the bad news about the size of the property tax bill. “And that’s just the half of it.”

  “Just the—what do you mean?”

  “The boardinghouse, Morrie. Surely you haven’t forgotten about it?”

  “How could I?” Although, truth be told, I had. A second weight of domicility on my back—on our backs, to be fair to Grace, although I was the wage earner—bent me to what felt like the breaking point.

  “So,” she was saying with resignation, “there must be a tax notice in my old name waiting at the post office—we should fix that with the recorder of deeds, Morrie.”

  “Yes, yes, all in good time. But as to the tax bill, bills, I mean—”

  “Here, help me put away these groceries,” she shook off the matter and got up to busy herself unloading her shopping bags, “the taxman isn’t at the door this very moment. I’ve been meaning to talk to you anyway about the boardinghouse,” she said, a lilt coming into her voice. “In a little while we can maybe open it for business again, Griff and Hoop and luck willing. That would help out the provider considerably, don’t you think?”

  The provider, such as I was, dumping the seasonal fare of rutabagas and turnips into the vegetable bin, for once did not know what to say. Finally words found their way out. “Grace, lovesome, you give every appearance of listening, but are you hearing? We’re strapped. Driven to the wall in our finances. Trapped in this fancy poorhouse with Ajax on the door, however you want to put it.” A stray potato had got away, and I fired it into the bin. “We have only just been getting by on my salary, and there is no money lying around to pay preposterously high property taxes that are due now, now, not in a little wh
ile, and—what did you say?”

  “Now who’s hard of hearing, honeybun?” She reached over from the canned goods cupboard and prodded my shoulder. “I said, it’s a good thing I have some tucked away.”

  “You do? I mean, do you. How much?”

  Hearing the sum, I nearly swooned in relief. “My dear, you are a treasure in more ways than one. If the boardinghouse isn’t taxed like the Waldorf Astoria, that amount should tide us over, this time. But how did you ever . . . ?”

  She dimpled becomingly. “Remember when we’d arrive in Venice or Marseilles or one of those places and you’d send me to the exchange window to trade in some of our American money while you tracked down newspapers? Now, this is not to criticize in any way, darling, but given your spending habits, I thought it might not hurt to put aside a certain amount each time before cashing the rest in for the foreign money. I’d slip it into the bottom compartment of my purse, where husbands always fear to go.” Sweet reason prevailed in her gaze at me. “You’d be surprised how much it added up to in a year.”

  “Amazed, is more like it,” I said fervently.

  “Under this roof, then, we’re all of us saved,” my miraculous wife mused, folding away her shopping bags. “Hoop and Griff don’t own any more property than the soles of their shoes, and His Nibs passed his along to us, the old smarty.” The offending tax notice lay open on the kitchen table, where she gave it the Butte eye. “But most people aren’t as lucky as we are, are they. Just imagine how hard it must be in Dublin Gulch and Finntown and the rest when the postman comes today and— Morrie? You seem lost in thought.”

  “No. Perhaps finding something, actually.”

  9

  “OH, HELL, MORGIE, IT’S BEEN tried before,” Armbrister objected, shrugging like someone tired to death of the litany. “It’d be like shooting at the moon, trying to hit Anaconda with that. Every damn time the issue gets brought up, the votes are never there in Ulcer Gulch, am I right, Jared?”

  “But what if—” I spun out my idea at greater length, my pair of listeners leaning to take it in even though we were in the quiet confines of the editor’s office, away from the newsroom’s racket of phones going off and typewriters accelerating toward deadline. With a train to catch, Jared kept checking his watch; Ulcer Gulch waits for no man, his expression said. But he heard me out to the final word before saying, “That’s a brainstorm if there ever was one, Professor. It’s a long shot, but maybe worth a try. Jake, what do you think?”

  The glum editor still did not think much of it. “I still say we’d only be whistling Beulah, same old tune that never gets anywhere. You can dig up whatever you want on Anaconda, and they just throw it back at you and buy off enough politicians, excuse my language, Jared, until the matter goes away again.”

  “But there’s digging, and then there’s digging,” I invoked what must be a Butte truism. “All we need is to hit just this little bit of, mmm, paydirt”—what on earth would we do without analogies?—“and then we can refine things.”

  “Sounds to me like a show of color,” Jared decided with a miner’s phrase beyond any I could have come up with. “I’ll see what I can find out in the capitol.” Putting on his overcoat and heading out the door, he called over his shoulder: “You do the homework at this end, Professor, and we’ll figure out what it adds up to. Good hunting.”

  • • •

  Jared reported back after his legislative week, this time with Rab at his side practically purring with intrigue.

  “Sure enough, one of my colleagues”—the political life was drawing him in enough that he no longer said that with any irony—“knew how to get the dirt. He’s Williamson’s man in the Senate, actually. Likes to joke that he’s the cow herder of the place. He checked with Williamson, and from the sound of it, what we’re after took some asking around in the major’s old Harvard crowd back east, but somebody knew somebody else who knew to the decimal point how much Anaconda has been raking in. You can see why they hide the figure.”

  Armbrister and I waited with shrinking patience while, unconsciously or not, Jared tugged at his short ear as though the profit had come out of miners’ hides, looked at Rab for the courage needed after what he was about to say, and finally said it. “Last year, it was twenty million dollars.”

  “Imagine,” Rab murmured, although none of us could really picture a fortune of that size—even Henry Ford, industriously spewing out Model Ts every minute on his famous assembly line, was probably a pauper compared to that—accruing in the copper company coffers like clockwork.

  Dazzled as we all were, Jared wasted no time prompting me. “Your turn. What did you come up with at the assessor’s office?”

  What Grace came up with, actually. Carrying off this part of my scheme like a trouper, she drew no particular attention at it, merely a boardinghouse owner—better yet, a widow, as she still was on the county’s assessment and tax records—come to see if there was not some horrible mistake about the tax bill on her humble property. And when directed to the ledgers to see for herself, naturally such a person would timidly open those from the very front, where it could hardly be her fault that the alphabet delivered the A’s.

  “The Anaconda Copper Mining Company last year paid taxes in the grand sum of”—I could not resist a slight dramatic pause—“thirteen thousand, three hundred forty-six dollars.”

  “The pikers,” Rab did the arithmetic with a schoolteacher’s rapidity.

  “Jumping Jesus!” Armbrister’s eyes suddenly were alight beneath the green eyeshade. “That’s peanuts! It’s only, only—Morgie?”

  “Seven ten-thousandths of one percent, rounded off.”

  Jared banged a fist into his palm, the sound like a shot. “In other words, the Hill is assessed like it’s a pile of worthless rocks while it pours out tons of money to Anaconda. And the company gets away with taxes the size of a gnat’s eyelash.”

  “Excellent analogy,” I filed the phrase away for a forthcoming editorial. “And well done in your reconnaissance, Senator.”

  “You too, Professor. We’ve got the numbers, but it’s still only half the battle.” He gave me the mock command, although with our fate and the Thunder’s behind it. “Rally the troops.”

  • • •

  “Oh, boy, Morrie, I dunno about this. What do you say, Hoop?”

  “Be a big step.”

  “Righto.”

  “Real big.”

  “All that is involved is for the pair of you to become the owners of record,” I patiently laid out the idea again.

  “That’s all, huh? Sounds like plenty.”

  “As I’ve said, it would only be temporary. Just while Jared and I are at this.”

  “Except you want to tell everybody in Montana about it.”

  “Well, yes, more or less.”

  That did nothing to erase so much as a single wrinkle of concern from the two old bald heads. Griff looked at Hoop, and Hoop at Griff, then both together at Grace, listening with her arms crossed determinedly. “Up to you, Mrs. Morgan. It’s your piece of property. We’ll do what Morrie wants if you say so, but—”

  There was a catch in her voice, but she said it. “Whatever it takes. The boardinghouse is yours.”

  • • •

  I always want my battles in life to be bloodless. In the periodic tricky situations that somehow find me, and I them, so far I had managed that, although with some escapes narrower than was comfortable. Never far from my mind was my margin of safety from the Chicago gambling mob, but the more immediate concern was the behavior of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Believe me when I say I’d had enough of window men and goons during my previous spell in Butte. Since then, people had been gunned down in broad daylight on the Hill for the temerity of challenging the mighty corporation. And there was the murky set of circumstances that cost cocky Quinlan his life. Yet even while conscious that new
sprint was no more bulletproof than my own flesh, I did feel shielded by the Thunder and its ability to make a noise in the world; that and Jared’s steely political presence. So, while Voltaire was never more trenchant than when he said God always sides with the big battalions, numbers of another sort might be deployed for a certain kind of stealthy victory in this different kind of battle, something told me. Handled right, arithmetic can be quite a weapon. For if my brainstorm worked, we might suddenly have a majority of the state of Montana on our side.

  • • •

  The heady buzz in the newsroom could be felt, like the thick hum of bees in clover, when it became known that Jared, Armbrister, and I were about to launch a new editorial campaign against the masters of the copper collar. Jared stationed himself in Helena to contend with reaction in the legislative halls, while the other two of us huddled, I suppose, like conspirators, guarding the first of our surprises until it was safely set into type.

  “You need to be ready for the Post to kick and scream,” Armbrister warned, veteran of many arrows in his own journalistic hide. “The SOBs.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ll call Pluvius every name in the book and make the same old argument Anaconda always does. It’s probably in overset, they dust it off and run it at the slightest hint of something like this. The bastards.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Fire away, then.” Leaving me alone with my typewriter, the editor raised his voice to the watching staff, “Let’s crack our knuckles and get to work, folks. We’re not going to make history by running blank pages in the rest of the damn paper.”

  As the regular newsroom commotion resumed, my fingers found the typewriter keys, old friends of the mind. And down the coarse strife-scarred streets of Butte, above the dark honeycomb of mineshafts beneath the copper-ruled city, from an all-wise portrait above the Reading Room door came the unabashed inspiration that lends words lasting power: “Devise, wit! Write, pen!”