Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  I typed like a man possessed. If Shakespeare was not enough, Cavaretta passed by with his account of the latest bone-crushing accident in the depths of the Hill, telling me savagely, “Go get them, Morgie.”

  When I handed in the editorial, deadline looming, Armbrister read it through without putting a pencil to it. “That ought to do the job. We’ll give it a screamer,” by which he meant an inch-high headline, in newspapering terms an absolute shout for readers’ attention.

  Plight of Property Owners. All Except One.

  A taxing situation exists within the boundaries of the Treasure State, in more ways than one. It is as indelible as a seemingly innocent line from the Bible: Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests. Let us suppose you own a modest house nestled on no more space than it needs, and your neighbor owns a gigantic business atop the most bountiful hill in the world. Good citizen that you are, you pay full taxes on your property, while what does that neighbor pay? The answer, alas, does not hew to biblical justice of any kind:

  Next to nothing.

  The hole in the taxation system that the foxes of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company have added to their vast den of mines has let them hide the pittance they pay, compared to the fortune they earn.

  Then came the magic numbers, adding up to the fact that in the course of a mining year, it took a mere six hours—or as Armbrister gleefully had it set it in boldface, six hours—of Anaconda’s profits to cover its property tax bill.

  • • •

  Reaction at the Post, and no doubt at certain desks high in the Hennessy Building, was a predictable tantrum. Scriptoris squealed in print at the word t-a-x and pulled out the old argument Jared and Armbrister groaned over in unison, that it was only to be expected that domiciles which otherwise put no product into the world should pay on a different basis than productive property which already contributed to community prosperity, and furthermore any penny wrongly wrung out of the Anaconda Company would take away from wages for the workingman, et cetera. That, and calling me, in my Pluvius persona, a hysterical jackass.

  “Ouch, Morrie,” Grace said as the Post screed got passed around the supper table. “It makes it sound as if I’m married to someone who has taken leave of his senses.”

  “Never fear, that’s merely what we expected. The stars are now aligned for our next phase of the battle. That’s if”—I swept a look past Sandison, who was chewing an antelope cutlet and keeping his own counsel, to Hoop and Griff—“our two secret weapons are willing and able.”

  Their forks paused in midair, the pair looked at each other for a long moment before saying anything. “It’s like Rudy says,” said the one, “you got to chuck it in the laundry and see what comes out in the wash.” It took me a moment to identify Kipling as translated by Griff, but no time at all to take to heart what Hoop then uttered. “Ready as I’ll ever be, this side of the grave.”

  10

  AND AS PLANNED, the next day’s Thunder featured, in the top-of-the-page spot where my editorial customarily held forth, an extended “Voices of the Hill.”

  I worked in the mines for all of my life that amounted to anything, and on my first day in the Nevada Bonanza my three names, Maynard Emlyn Hooper, got barbered down to one, Hoop. Ten years old, I was. Starting out as putter boy, fetching tools and feeding the mules and so forth all the way down in the old Boney. I wasn’t so poorly off as Huck Finn with that no-good Pap of his, but my old man was what you might call seasonal, going off somewhere for months on end and leaving my mother and us six kids to get by as best we could. It’s funny about life—the only way I could see to go up in the world was down there in the hard rock where it was hotter than the hinges of Hell. I stuck with it, and by the time I was fourteen, I was as much a miner as anybody, following the ore from one place to the next.

  Which is how I lit into Butte from the silver diggings in Alta, Utah, where the boss was Marcus Daly. Mark Daly could see into the ground deeper than any other man, and I figured he was worth tagging along with when he came here to the Hill to have a look. I was on the crew in the Anaconda, a good enough mine but nothing special as far as anybody knew, when he had us blast into some “new material,” as it was called, at the 300-foot level. I was standing right there when he picked up a chunk of ore with copper showing all through it and turned to the foreman and said, “Mike, we’ve got it!” That was the making of Butte, the largest deposit of copper in the world, and it set a lot of us up to stay and be miners here. It was not a bad life then. Marcus Daly always got along with the union, and things were pretty peaceful on the Hill. It was a sad day for Butte when he let the Anaconda get away from him and the ownership changed from day to night.

  Later on, I was in the shape-up when the first shaft of the Neversweat was being opened, and this fellow came up to me and said, “You look like you know which end of an eight-pound sledge to hold. Want a partner?” And that was Griff. We got ourselves known as a flash team with the hammer and steel, before drilling changed over to the air pressure machines. We was never out of work in the mines together, in the Lucky Jim, the Shamrock, the Frisco, and a bunch of others. We seen a lot. Men hurt or killed, right near us. We’re only alive because we worked the earlier shift at the Speculator, before the big fire trapped all those men.

  You get a little old, though, and the work gets to be too much for you. These days, Griff and me are new in the occupation of owning a boardinghouse—first thing we’ve ever owned besides our mining helmets and the clothes on our backs. But we’re in a spot. We don’t see how we can make a go of it, what with the taxes on the property. It just seems to us a strange situation, where working people have to be hit so heavy while we know perfectly well the biggest company in the state can afford to pay up but doesn’t. It makes a person wonder how things got so upside down.

  There, I crowed to myself as soon as I felt the vibration of the press whirling those words into the world: If, reader of the Thunder, Hoop’s tale does not speak to your heart, it is made of harder ore than the Hill’s.

  • • •

  Grace served up the fondest of smiles that suppertime and Sandison gruffly congratulated Hoop—alongside, Griff beamed as if the credit were just as much his—who shyly maintained that the newspaper piece was nothing much, “just some gab Morrie took down on paper.”

  Sandison glanced over at me with amusement. “The moving finger having writ, ay? And moves on to what, Morgan?”

  “You shall see,” I said, like the magician withholding the rabbit in the hat. “In Jared we trust.”

  If I thought that would satisfy Sam Sandison, I had another think coming. Grace and I were on our way up to bed when we heard him call from his library lair, “Step in here a minute, Pluvius. Excuse us, madam. I’ll return him to you in working order.” Rolling her eyes, Grace mouthed, “Don’t stay too late,” and headed on upstairs.

  He had his back to me when I stepped in, shelving a scattering of the books that lived in piles around the room. “The Creation story of Butte in Hoop’s own words,” he said over his shoulder. “Very moving. Damn near biblical. Anaconda’s rag had better think twice before ripping into a poor old miner who has everyone’s sympathy, hadn’t it.” He turned half around, eyeing me over a ridge of shoulder. “Clever.”

  “Why, thank you, Sandy. Even better, it’s true. Principally.”

  “Wipe the feathers off your whiskers.” He gave me The Look. “What if they find out about the boardinghouse shenanigan?”

  “I prefer to call it a ploy,” I protested, a bit for show. “Merely a necessary tactic. A mild subterfuge. Well, you see my point, I’m sure.” The Look did not bear that out. “Sandy, I assure you we are being very careful to stick to the letter of the law. Hoop and Griff are the owners of record ever since a down payment which, let me finish, took place at least on paper, and in time to come, they will simply fail to make their payments, and the property reverts to Grace, under her pre
vious name.” I whisked my hands together as if that took care of that. “It was the one way I could think of to bring the battle down to the level of the reading public’s wallets. Was I wrong?”

  He grunted neutrally. Clomping to his desk, he picked up a volume of Appleton’s Cyclopædia of American Biography, the famous edition with no fewer than forty-seven fraudulent entries, rather coincidentally, and glancing at the empty spot on the shelf and deciding it was too much trouble to cross the room again, added it to a pile. “All right, you have the snake by the tail, let us say. What now?”

  “The next step is Jared’s,” I said with confidence. “It’s all in the plan.”

  • • •

  The Post temporized frantically after Hoop’s tale of tax distress, practically inventing new dance steps to get around the issue. Scriptoris, showing the strain, dodged off into the generality that property assessments were purely a local matter overseen by a duly elected assessor, ignoring the fact that Anaconda’s handpicked candidate for that office always strangely won and prospered in life thereafter.

  Meanwhile, letters to the editor sympathetic to the plight of Hoop and Griff poured in to the Thunder. “Here’s another doozy, lords and ladies,” Armbrister trumpeted across the newsroom, plucking the prize from the overflowing mail basket. “‘Why must the rest of us be soaked while Anaconda floats above it all? Drown the reptile in fair taxation!’” Over the cheers and guffaws, he called over to me, “They’re doing your job for you, Morgie, bless their angry souls.”

  Not to the extent I might have wished, as it turned out on what would go down in Thunder history as the red-letter day.

  The elated editor and I were debating whether to pull an AOT piece out of overset and settle for that or fill the editorial hole with a fresh Pluvius offering on the plight of the Hoops of the world, when Jared Evans made his appearance, still in his senatorial suit and tie but also wearing a warrior’s conquering grin. At the jerk of his head, Armbrister and I stepped out into the editor’s sanctum with him.

  “We’re ready,” Jared told us, tired but exultant. “It took so much arm-twisting that half the legislature look like pretzels, but the votes are lined up and the governor will sign it.” His eyes met mine, the message there before he spoke it. “Let’s tell the world, copper is going to start paying its way. Get out the big type, Jacob.”

  Armbrister checked the clock and grimaced. “It’ll have to be damn fast, Morgie.”

  “Duly noted.”

  I raced to my typewriter, flexed my fingers, prayed to the gods of the alphabet, and began.

  The time has come. For far too long, the Treasure State has been robbed of a source of its natural wealth—the jealously guarded profits of the mining industry. As this newspaper has chronicled, under the influence of the Anaconda Company and its Wall Street owners the tax burden has fallen almost entirely on the home owner—which is to say, the miner, the storekeeper, the rancher, the farmer, all of the citizenry shut out of the narrow corridors of power in Helena and unable to prevail in local elections where a certain key candidate proves to be bought and paid for by the company.

  Does this mean there is nothing to be done, and Montana is forever doomed to have its mineral treasure extracted nearly tax-free while its citizenry must pay in full to support roads, schools, and other necessities of civil society? Absolutely not. To remedy this fiscal injustice, the Thunder is proud to propose a plan as simple as it is fair. Even as we go to press and these words reach your eyes, Senator Jared Evans is preparing to introduce a measure that will put to a statewide vote the creation of a tax commission to review the levels of revenue from all—all—segments of society. . . .

  It was here that Jared’s twist came in—a lovely double snare, really—for Anaconda and its political puppets; the war may have cost him the bottom of an ear, but it certainly taught him the art of ambush. Precisely according to the plan he, Rab, Armbrister, and I worked out one night at the Purity, only legislators willing to openly wear the copper collar—even the dimmest of politicians had to choke at that—could oppose letting voters have their say on something that hit home in every pocketbook, and once approved, a tax commission was the ready route to a state levy on mining properties or, lo, even profits. And not coincidentally, a seat on that cocked-and-loaded commission to be appointed by the governor was quietly reserved, with a wink and a handshake, for Senator Evans of the city of Butte. It was almost enough to make an editorial writer swoon. At one swoop, Jared’s proposed legislation—and the philippic I was composing as fast as my fingers could fly—took the tax iniquity out of the hands of the company’s stooges in the legislature and assessor’s offices. Abracadabra, and one link of the copper collar was gone. I would have cheered myself hoarse if I hadn’t been so busy writing.

  I pounded out the last of the editorial just as Armbrister shouted “Copyboy! Make it snappy, damn it!” As he and Jared gave my words one last careful look, he said aside to me, “Needs a grabber, Morgie, see what you can come up with.” Wheeling back to my typewriter, almost without thinking I produced:

  What Is To Be Done?

  That hurried headline seemed to fit the case, the copyboy went scrambling away to the typesetter with the finished result, and like mountaineers who had scaled a treacherous escarpment, the jubilant three of us—editor, publisher, and editorialist—slapped one another on the back in the rare alpine air of success.

  • • •

  Then the strangest thing. No word was heard from the Post in response, rebuttal, refutation, anything. A day passed, another, two more, then three, and it was as if Scriptoris had taken no notice of a proposal that would shake Anaconda in its giant boots, and all in the world the Post was concerned about were the old standbys, potholes, and patriotism.

  “I don’t like it.” Armbrister tossed the latest namby-pamby example in the trash with the rest of the week’s worth. “They’re too quiet over there. The sunuvabitches.”

  “I’ll take it,” Jared said with relief. “While they’ve got their heads stuck in Afghanistan or wherever you call it, we’re building support for the tax commission vote all the time. The Stockmen’s Association is lined up to pass a resolution—we can thank Williamson for that, the Farm Bureau will follow suit, and, get this, every lodge in Butte, from the Moose to the Knights of Columbus, is with us. Not to mention these.” He fondly patted the overflowing mail basket.

  Even the saturnine editor had to admit things appeared to be going well, although not before snapping the question to me, “The boardinghouse boys—they making sure to do their part?”

  I assured him Griff and Hoop were going through the motions of new property owners, and with them, motions were loudly noticeable. They enthusiastically spoke of having the boardinghouse open—with Grace’s consent, of course—for the summer turnover, when numbers of miners returned to families in the old country and newcomers drawn by the smoky beacon of the stacks of the Neversweat arrived to take their place. I saw no reason to add that Hoop and Griff, for company’s sake, still slept and ate at the manse.

  Thus it was that I left work at the end of one of those heady days of editorial cloudwalking in the best of moods, humming the “America” reel from the Burns celebration as I started home. Spring was providing more definite indicators than Sandison’s sniff sorting the Hill smoke from pleasant airs to come; any tree that managed to survive in Butte was showing buds, nature’s assertion that hope springs eternal. Caught up in the season and my even sunnier mood, I did not pay particular mind when my usual route was interrupted by a broken water main, which had turned the street into a pond.

  As a glum municipal crew tried to stem the flood, I detoured through an alley that brought me out on an unfamiliar backstreet. The prime business on the block, from the look of it an original bucket-of-blood saloon, now announced itself as the MILE-HIGH BILLIARDS AND PINOCHLE SOCIAL CLUB, making me chuckle at the resourcefulness of speakeasies. A
lthough the enterprise evidently had not yet opened for the evening, out front a hawk-nosed man in a bowler hat was holding forth to a uniformed policeman, gesturing in frustration at the purported social club. He broke off at the sight of me.

  “Well, well. Speak of the devil.” Swaggering up to me, he thrust his face practically into mine. “Couldn’t resist dropping by”—he jerked his head toward the speakeasy—“to see how business is, huh?”

  “You are mistaken,” I sputtered, drawing back from his intrusion. “I’m a, a property owner and a taxpayer and a fully employed—”

  “The mistake’s all yours, Highliner,” he sneered the word, “showing your face around here in broad daylight. Rub our noses in it, I suppose you think, strutting around collecting your bootlegging swag like a real businessman. We’ll see about that.” Hawknose flashed a badge and practically purred, “Let’s run him in, Murph.”

  “No, wait, I’m not—” The uniformed policeman, the burly sort called a harness bull, clamped me by the biceps. “Shut your yap and come on along to the station house.”

  • • •

  There, the desk sergeant sat back in shock. “Jaysis, Davis, you’ll be arresting the pope next.”

  “If I catch him running booze right under our noses, you better bet I will.” The hawk-nosed detective cut off my attempt to protest that I had been doing no such thing. “Book him on something or other—‘spitting on the sidewalk’ will do until I can come up with better charges—and toss him in the drunk tank. We’ll see how he likes his customers for company.”

  • • •

  The view from behind bars was a disturbing one. The world abruptly striped with iron, smelling bad, and rife with company of dubious character. My cell mates were a pale, bony man still wearing a full-length apron that marked him as a dishwasher, traditional occupation of drunks, and a stouter individual with the characteristic stoop of a miner. The aproned one had the shakes. In a cracked voice he asked me, “Got a flask on you, buddy?”