Sam Sandison? He’s meaner than the devil’s half brother. If you’re gonna be around him, you better watch your sweet-”
“The rules, Griff.”
“-step, is all I was gonna say, Mrs. Faraday.” Griffith speared a potato and passed the dish onward to me, along with a gimlet gaze. “You must have hit him when he was hard up for help, Morrie. He don’t hire just anybody.”
“I was as taken by surprise as the rest of you appear to be.” Announcement of my sudden employment at the library had set my suppermates back in their chairs, for some reason that I could not decipher. “What can you tell me of my new lord and master? None of you were so bashful about the business practices of the Anaconda Company.” The gravy boat came my way, but nothing else of substance from any of the threesome. “For a start, Griff, what exactly is the meaning of ‘meaner than the devil’s half brother’ in regard to Samuel Sandison?”
“He’s one of the old bucks of the country, tougher than”-cutting strenuously at the piece of meat on his plate, Griff glanced in Grace’s direction and hedged off-“rawhide. Had a ranch they say you couldn’t see to the end of. I don’t just know where. You, Hoop?”
Hooper gestured vaguely west. “Someplace out there in scatteration.”
“Employing, he told me, a veritable army of cowboys-but I would imagine any livestock enterprise of that size needed a rugged crew and a firm hand?”
“You’re lucky he’s only bossing books around anymore,” was the only answer from Griff. Vigorously chewing, he turned toward the head of the table. “Heck of a meal, Mrs. Faraday.”
I sampled the stringy meat and sent an inquiring look. “Not chicken.”
Grace shook her head.
“Rabbit, then.”
“My, you do know your way around food,” she remarked, a compliment or not I couldn’t tell. It occurred to me how much I was going to miss the tablefuls at wakes.
TAKING LEAVE of the C. R. Peterson Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home took some doing.
“As I have been trying to say, Mr. Peterson, I am sorry-”
“But you’re the most popular cryer I’ve had in ages.” He himself appeared ready to weep.
“-to have to give notice, but another opportunity has presented itself.”
He cast a mournful look at the ledger. “One of our busiest times since St. Patrick’s Day.”
“I am sure an equally qualified cryer will be called forth by the need.”
“There’ll always be an opening here for you,” he said feelingly, the lids of the caskets standing at attention behind him.
THAT WAS THE END of being chased every night by shadows. Yet something lurked from that experience, the sensation of being trailed through life by things less than visible. I tried telling myself Butte after dark simply was feverishly restless, what with the thirst of thousands of miners built up in the hot underground tunnels being assuaged in speakeasies, and desire of another kind busily paying its dues in Venus Alley-practically nightly, Grace turned away some lit-up Lothario seeking a house of the other sort. In that city of thin air and deep disquiets, wasn’t it to be expected that even shadows would have the fidgets? It is surprising how persuasive you can be when talking into your own ear.
So, I set out from the boardinghouse that first morning with a sense of hope singing in me as always at the start of a new venture. Samuel Sandison had instructed me to present myself at the library before it opened at nine, and I knew he did not mean a minute later. When I approached the rather fanciful gray granite Gothic building on the central street called Broadway-modesty seemed to have no place in Butte-I saw a cluster of people outside the front door and was heartened by this sight of an eager citizenry lined up to get at the literary holdings.
In their midst, however, loomed Sandison, and bringing up the rear was unmistakably the Reading Room matron, looking sour. The group proved to be the entire library staff, all the way to janitor. Sandison was counting heads before letting anyone through the arched doorway-the same mode of management, I was to learn, he had used on his cowboys each morning at the horse corral.
He took notice of my presence with a vague gesture. “This is Morgan, everybody. He’ll be puttering around the place from now on.”
I filed in with the rest of the staff, happily conscious of the palatial grandeur, the Tuscan red wainscoting, the dark oaken beams set against the ceiling panels of white and gold, the all-seeing portrait of Shakespeare above the Reading Room doorway. And beyond, the regal reds and greens and gilts of those books of Sandison’s collection, the best of their kind anywhere.
But no sooner were we in the building than he cut me out of the herd, and, just as adroitly, the matron of the Reading Room. “Miss Runyon will show you the ropes,” Sandison provided with another of those gestures that might mean anything. “Come on up when she’s had her fill of you,” he dismissed us and mounted the stairs to his office.
Miss Runyon and I considered each other.
“What foolishness has he put you in charge of?” she demanded, as though she had caught me trespassing.
“That seems yet to be determined.”
“That man.” Her voice had a startling deep timbre, as if the words resounded in her second chin. “He runs this place to suit himself. The trustees would never have named him librarian but for those precious books of his.” Clapping her chained eyeglasses onto her formidable nose, she directed: “Come along, you had better know the catalogue system.”
Miss Runyon kept me in tow as we circumnavigated the Reading Room, her realm and her orb, her temple and her fortress, she let me know in every manner possible. I took note of the goodly assortment of dictionaries and cyclopedias, and the respectable selection of magazines and the newspapers racked on spine sticks, all of it recited to me as if I were a blind man in a museum. One oddity, though, she paid no attention to; conspicuously paid it no heed, if I was not mistaken. It was a display case, glassed over, taking up one corner of the room. My mild inquiry about it brought:
“Pfft, that. The boys’ dollhouse.”
Naturally that increased my curiosity and I went over to it, Miss Runyon clopping after me. Encased there, with plentiful nose smudges and handprints on the glass testifying to the popularity of its viewing, sat an entire miniature mine. It looked so amazingly complete, I half expected it to bring up teaspoonfuls of earth from under the library. Headframe, machine house, elevator shafts, tunnels, tiny tracks and ore cars, the entirety was a Lilliputian working model. With disdain Miss Runyon told me the diorama had been built for a court case over a mining claim and afterward donated to the library. “He”-her eyes swept upward toward Sandison’s office-“insists it sit here in the way. It’s a nuisance to keep clean.”
“Wonders often are,” I murmured, still taken with the remarkable model of the workings of the Hill.
“Now, then,” Miss Runyon said haughtily, “is that enough of an initiation into librarianship for you?”
“The most thorough, Miss Runyon, since my introduction to the Reading Room of the British Museum.”
I seemed to have invoked the Vatican to a Mother Superior. “You, you have actually been-?”
“Under that great domed ceiling, with its delicate blue and accents of gold, with every word ever written in English at one’s beck and call,” I dreamily sketched aloud, “yes, I confess I have. And would you believe, Miss Runyon, the very day I walked in, my reader’s ticket in my hand, the seat of destiny was vacant.”
“The seat of-?”
“Seat number three, right there in the first great semicircle of desks.” I leaned confidingly close to her. “Where Karl Marx sat, those years when he was writing Das Kapital. I will tell you, Miss Runyon, sitting in that seat, I could feel the collective knowledge, like music under the skin, of all libraries from Alexandria onward.”
With a last blink at me, Miss Runyon retreated to her desk and duty.
WHEN I WENT UP to Sandison’s office, I found him standing at its cathedral-like window, trying to peek out at the weather through an eyelet of whorled clear glass. “Damned stained glass,” he grumbled. “What do the nitwits think a window is for?” He rotated around to me. His old-fashioned black suit was as mussed as if he had flung it on in the dark, and instead of shoes he wore scuffed cowboy boots that added still more inches to his height. “The downstairs dragon show you every mouse hole, did she?”
“Quite an educational tour. What I am wondering, Mr. Sandison-”
“Hold it right there.” He held up a rough hand as he moved to his oversize desk chair and deposited himself in it heavily. “When somebody calls me that, I feel like I’m around a banker or lawyer or some other pickpocket.”
To escape that category, I asked, “Then what form of address am I to use?”
He looked across his desk at me conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you what. Call me Sandy. The only other person I let do that is my wife.” He chortled like a boy pleased with a new prank. “It’ll drive that old bat Runyon loco.”
“Sandy, then,” I tried it on for size, none too comfortably. “What I need to know is the scope of my job.”
“I suppose.” Rubbing his beard, he gazed around the cluttered room as if some task for me might be hiding behind one of the piles of books. “Morgan”-there was a dip of doubt in his tone as he spoke it-“how are you at juggling?”
“Three balls in the air at once is a skill that persists from boyhood,” I answered cautiously, “but when it comes to ninepins-”
“No, no-the calendar, oaf, the calendar.” Irritably he pawed around in the pieces of paper that carpeted his desk and finally came up with that item. “People always want to use this damn place, they need a room to hold this meeting or that, you’d think a library was a big beehive. Myself, I don’t see why they can’t just check out a couple of books and go home and read. But no, they bunch up and want to cram in here and talk the ears off one another half the night.” He squinted as if drawing a bead on the offenders penciled in on various dates. “The Shakespeare Society. The Theosophists. The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle. The League of Nations Advocates. The Jabberwockians. The Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group. And that’s hardly the half of them, wanting some damn night of their own to come in here and take up space. They’ve all got to be juggled.”
“I think I can tend to that, Mr.-”
He shot me a warning glance.
“-Sandy.”
There may have been a cunning smile within the beard. The librarian of Butte, for everything that entailed, settled more deeply into his chair. “I figured if you’re a man who knows his books, you can deal with the literary types who come out when the moon is full.” He passed the much-scrawled-upon calendar to me. “They’re all yours now, Morgan,” said Samuel Sandison with that intonation I came to know so well.
Looking back, that exchange set a telling pattern. You would think, with two persons in one cloistered office, for he had me clear a work space for myself in a corner, that he might sooner or later call me Morrie. Yet that familiar form of address never passed his lips. Each time and every time, he would either preface or conclude what passed for conversation between us with a drawled Morgan? even when it wasn’t a question. As if it were my first name.
As if he knew.
MORGAN LLEWELLYN. That IS my rightful name. Yes, that famous breed of Llewellyn. I know I carry only a minor share of its renown in the world, but reflected glory is still glory of a sort. It was my brother, Casper, who reigned as lightweight boxing champion of the world, “Capper” Llewellyn in the inch-high headlines every time he won by another knockout. And I was his “genius” of a manager.
Even yet he causes me to lie awake, when the mind tussles with itself before sleep comes, thinking of how life paired us so peculiarly. Casper was magical, if confidence and prowess count as magic. Even as a boy, he had the cocky outlook that nothing was out of the reach of a good left hook, and my role as older brother often amounted to fishing him out of trouble. Which perhaps made it inevitable, when he was matriculating as a boxer in Chicago ’s West Side fight clubs and I was graduating from the university, that he insisted I become his manager. He did not possess my brains and I did not have his brawn, he pointed out all too accurately, so we had better join onto one another as if we were Siamese, in his words. Casper could be exasperating, but in the ring he was a thing of beauty, a Parthenon statue of a perfect athlete sprung to life, and I have to say, I felt somewhat wizardly in fashioning his boxing career for him. Carefully I chose opponents who would build his record, alternating his bouts between the easy fighters called “cousins” and the tougher ones we stropped Casper’s skills on. It became only a matter of time until the name Casper Llewellyn would be on the card of a title fight.
Now the other tussle in the mind’s nightly shadows. Rose, delightful maddening Rose.
Along the way, he and she met, a wink served its purpose, and they fell for each other like the proverbial ton of bricks. Brother-in-law was added to my responsibilities. At first I was wary of Rose as an adventuress-why don’t I just say it: a gold digger-but soon enough saw that she and my brother were a genuine matching of hearts. Pert and attractive, whimsical and ever whistling, she was a sunny addition to the Llewellyn name. Luck seemed to have found us, as Casper’s purses for winning grew and grew, and when he became the lightweight champion, we felt we had truly hit the jackpot. The three of us grew accustomed to high living. Somewhat too high. Rose never saw a satin dress and a saucy hat to go with it that did not appeal to her, while Casper threw money around as if it were going out of style. And I have to admit, money does not stick to me, either. That’s why a large supply seemed such a good idea.
It was one of those situations you know you ought not to get into, but do: the pugilistic science, the fight game, the glove trade, boxing in all its guises was uncommonly good to us, yet income did not nearly keep up with outgo. So, it was Casper’s brainstorm to throw the fight with the challenger, Ned Wolger. Rose and I might not have listened to him but for the odds on his side-he was a three-to-one favorite to wallop Wolger. That walloping could simply be postponed, as he put it, until the inevitable rematch. In the meantime, all we had to do was put our money on Wolger, spreading those bets around out of town so as not to attract suspicion. Rose and I saw to that, and in the last round of the title match, Casper, shall we say, resigned from the fight. And we collected hand over fist. Too much so. The Chicago gambling mob turned murderous about the amount it had lost on an apparent sure thing.
That part haunts me to this minute: Lake Michigan, blue as sword steel beside the city, and the gamblers seizing Casper and making an example of him, in the infamous fate called “a walk off the dock.”
Before they could lay hands on us, Rose and I fled together. Not with the money, alas, which was consigned forever to a biscuit tin wherever Casper had stashed it; he never did trust banks. Left on our own, with the gambling mob ever on our mind if not on our trail, she and I took shelter in Minneapolis, where she had been in household service. Minneapolis was still too close to Chicago for comfort. Then a propitious ad we had placed in Montana newspapers brought Rose a job as housekeeper for a widower and his three sons, and like so many seekers of a new life, we boarded a train for the homestead country of the West. Events took their own willful course after that. We posed as brother and sister, but in the alone-ness of prairie lodgings the two of us became man and woman in the flesh, so to speak.
Only for a season, it turned out. I lost her, fair and square, to the widower, Oliver Milliron, a good man and friend. His eldest son, Paul, was astute in other matters besides Latin, and it was he who drew from me the pledge to mean it when I gave away Rose at the wedding and to never return to Marias Coulee, and the vicinity of temptation. It has not been easily kept. No day since have I not thought of Rose.
“MORRIE? MORRIE, anyone home between your ears? I asked: How was your day at the library?”
“Sorry, Grace. My thoughts were elsewhere.”
“Miles away, I’d say. White meat or dark?” She was majestically carving off slice after slice of turkey, a surprise feast to the other three of us at the supper table. “I hope it’s not as hard on the nerves as standing over a corpse every night. Wakes would give me the willies.”
“Oddly enough, the library is somewhat more solemn, in a way. May I ask what the occasion is, with this festive bird?”
“The price is down, always to be celebrated.” Dishing out judicious servings of turkey, she returned to that other topic: “Just what is it you do all day there in Sandison’s stronghold, besides keep the books company?”
An apt question, not easily answered. Day by day, besides my juggling act with the meetings schedule, it had been gruffly suggested to me that I organize the disorganized subscription list of magazines and newspapers, find someone to fix the drinking fountain, deal with Miss Runyon’s complaints about squeaky wheels on book carts passing through her sanctum, respond to a stack of letters from people with the kinds of questions only a library can answer-in short, I was tasked with anything Sandison did not want to do, which was very nearly everything.
“This, that, and the other,” I replied to Grace honestly enough. “If the library can be thought of as the kitchen of knowledge, I seem to be the short-order cook.”
Griff and Hoop were saying nothing. She gave them an exasperated look and sat down at her place. Almost immediately, Griff gasped and straightened up sharply. I had the impression Grace’s foot may have given his shin a tap. More than a tap. “I was about to say,” he rushed the words, “you getting along hunky-dory with Sandison?”
“We are on”-first-name basis did not quite cover the situation-“what might be called familiar terms. I call him Sandy.”
“Heard him called a lot, but never that.”
This seemed to bring a sense of relief around the table. Hoop came to life. “Might have plenty of library customers pretty soon, Morrie. Mornings anyway. There’s strike talk. We was at the union meeting last night-”
“I could tell,” Grace inserted. “I heard you come in.” As I unavoidably had, too.
Griff stiffened again, apparently of his own accord this time. “Refreshments are in order after a business session,” he maintained, prim as if the pair of them hadn’t reeled in around midnight, bumping the furniture and misjudging the stairs.
“Anyhow,” Hoop sped past the spree after the meeting, “there’s talk that the union might go out if the snakes won’t give on the lost dollar.” Even I knew that would be something like a declaration of war.
“And bring in more goons and strikebreakers,” Grace underscored that, “like the last several times?”
“Those yellow-bellied buggers got on everybody’s nerves a little too much the last time,” Griff said, wielding a fork as if fending off such invaders. “The other unions didn’t like the way we was treated, they might be next. Evans and his council have made the rounds, they’re not as hot in the head as the last fellows were, and they’ve got most everybody ready to side with us. Even the streetcar drivers. Shut down the whole town this time, we could, if the mine strike gets called.” He summed up magisterially, “Things could work out just fine, if them others don’t stick their noses in and make trouble.”
Grace, I noticed, looked as if strike talk was the kind of thing that gave her hives. Trying to keep up with the nuances of Butte, I asked, “Those others are…?”
“The Wobblies,” said Hoop. “Who else?”
“They’d just love to see a strike get out of hand,” Griff laid it out for me. “The more blood in the streets, the better they figure it is for them. The Wobs would turn this into Russia if they could.” All at once the crimson cover of the jolly Little Red Songbook made more sense to me.
“They aren’t the only ones who can play it cute, though.” Griff still was wound up, his fork punctuating his words. “Thanks to them, Evans has got Anaconda looking at its hole card in the negotiations about getting the dollar back. It’d rather deal with him than the IWW any day.”
“The meek shall inherit, if they are clever enough about it,” I mused aloud.
“That sounds like something that shook out of a library book.”
“I was merely complimenting the union’s strategy at the table, Griff. I am not taking sides on the issue of a strike.”
Grace was. She reached to the turkey platter and plucked up the wishbone. “See this, you pair of busybodies?” Snap, and she brandished the wish-fulfilling piece of the bone at the supposedly retired miners. “There, now, I’ve asked that you not get your old fool heads broken on a picket line.”
“Aw, Mrs. Faraday, it maybe won’t come to that.” Griff sounded as if he was trying to convince himself along with her.
Something Hoop had said stuck with me, and I turned to him. “If the men do go on strike, why would any of them frequent the library just mornings?”
“Speakeasies don’t open until noon.”
IN MYTHOLOGY, Atlas alone has the world on his shoulders, but in real life the globe of concerns rests on each of us at any given time. After that suppertime discussion, what weighed on me when I settled into bed as usual with a lovingly done book from the library-The Education of Henry Adams, in this instance-was the gravity of the times. The immeasurable shadow of the 1914-1918 war still lay over the affairs of nations; Europe’s old jealously held boundaries were being torn up and rewritten, for better or worse, at the Paris peace conference. Russia already had shaken the political firmament by doing away with the Czar and yielding to the new fist of the Bolsheviks. America’s habit of throwing a fit to ward off contagion was at high pitch; activists with a leftist tinge were being hounded by government agents, even jailed or deported. Alongside that, the laboring class started at a deep disadvantage whenever it challenged the masters of capital. Strikes were its only effective tool, the way things were, but the powers that be resisted those with force if necessary. It added up to a jittery period of history, did it not? I knew enough of life to understand that every era has a set of afflictions, yet 1919 seemed to be a double dose. The pages in front of me, stylishly written, did little to dispel such heavy thoughts. Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents and with as much blue blood in his veins as there is in America, confessed at length in his autobiographical Education to a life contradictorily adrift on oceans of ignorance. Adams had not lived to see the turbulent aftermath of the Great War, but even so he professed little hope of ever finding “a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.”
I closed the book on that sentence. There was no point in reading about timid natures in Butte.
THE EDUCATION OF MORRIS MORGAN had a new chapter waiting the next day. It began in the Reading Room, where I was poring over the subscription list with Smithers, the young librarian on the periodicals desk, to see how we might squeeze more magazines into the budget we had. I felt a tap on the shoulder and turned around to an angular woman dressed in old-fashioned style, gray and gaunt as a duchess in a Goya etching. “You are the person,” she enunciated to me so loudly and clearly that every head in the room snapped up from reading, “in charge of evening groups, I believe? I wish to speak with you.”
I looked hopefully toward the mezzanine, but for once, Sandison was not on hand to roar “Quiet!” at the offender. Peculiar characters are drawn to a library like bees to a flower garden, so I turned to this one with the most authoritative air I could, and, indicating I was nearly finished with what I was at, murmured, “If you’ll wait in the foyer, ma’am, I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
“Hsst!” The warning hiss from Smithers came a little late. In an ingratiating tone, he was saying: “How are you today, Mrs. Sandison? ”
“Ah. Actually, we can finish this later,” I told Smithers, and quickly ushered the visiting personage into the mineralogy section, the nearest room not in use.
Now that we had privacy, Dora Sandison paused to study me, which did not take her long. Even her eyes were gray, and they were the sort that did not miss a trick. She was as tall as her husband, and acted taller. I had heard the library staff refer to the Sandisons as the grandee and the grandora, and could understand why. “I regret taking you away from your other task,” she said, her expression indicating nothing of the sort. “However, the evening group of which I am a member has a most pressing need.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I responded warily, trying to imagine which of the clubs that met in the basement auditorium would attract such a personality. The Theosophists, to unravel the mysteries of the Divinity? The League of Nations supporters, to correct the habits of governments?
She surprised me with a conspiratorial smile. “We require music stands.”
“Music-? ”
“The Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group is not provided with music stands, if you can believe that.”
“I see.” A sense of caution grew in me. “Surely this is the kind of request that your husband has dealt with, up until now?”
“Oh, horsefeathers,” she brushed away my concern. “You know how Sandy is about such things.”
Now I really did see. I could just about recite what Sandison’s response to a request solely on behalf of Gilbert and Sullivan aficionados would have been. “Don’t they have hands? Holding a piece of sheet music in front of their noses shouldn’t strain them too much.”
“My husband, bless his soul,” she went on in a confiding tone, “sometimes carries matters too far. He takes the ridiculous view that answering the needs of a group I coincidentally am a member of would constitute preferential treatment, can you imagine?”
I chuckled nervously. “There is the point, Mrs. Sandison, that no other group has seen the need for such, um, equipment.”
She snorted, very much like Sandison himself. “That is their failing rather than ours, then,” she instructed me with a glint in her eye that wouldn’t be argued with. “We sorely lack such equipment, as you call it, to hold our libretto sheets when the member whose turn it is takes our group through the intricacies of the lyrics of the chosen operetta. For example, ‘Strike the concertina’s melancholy string! Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything! Let the piano’s martial blast rouse the echoes of the past! ’ ” During this demonstration she waved her arms in my face as vigorously as a semaphore flagger.
She paused and caught her breath. “You can surely understand,” she said as if I’d better, “the presenter needs to be free to gesture, or the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan is lost.”
Sometimes it is wise to bend before the gale. “I’ll see what can be done about music stands.”
She smiled slyly again. “I’m so glad Sandy put a reasonable person in charge of such matters.”
With that, Dora Sandison departed in as grand a fashion as she had arrived, and I was left with the equipment problem. I searched the building high and low, but the marvelous holdings of the Butte Public Library did not include music stands. Somehow a purchase would have to be made, and I groaned at what was ahead of me, knowing how tight Sandison was with a dollar when the purchase of anything other than a book was involved.
“Sandy? If I could have a minute of your time?” Grumpily he left off reading a rare books catalogue and creaked around in his desk chair to face me. “Spit it out, Morgan.”
“We have a request from an evening group for some freestanding smallish reading racks to hold the sheets of paper they work from, and-”
“Hah. You’ve been hearing from the Giblet and Mulligan Society about those damn music stands. My wife is in that group, and I’ve told her the same thing I’ll tell you: the library can’t show favoritism to any one bunch.”
“Naturally not. But those rather modest implements would be of use to other groups as well.”
“What for? Don’t they have-”
“-they do have hands, but there are occasions when they would welcome some kind of device to hold certain items.” I groped for some sort of example. “The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle, for instance, when they wish to have photo displays to go with their discussion of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. The mystical castle in Edinburgh.” My fingers conjured that citadel in the air. “The sinister backstreets of London where Jekyll transmogrifies into Hyde.” I turned my hands into claws and made a grotesque face.
Sandison watched my little performance incredulously. “That’s what goes on with that la-de-da bunch? Dry-goods clerks and young women afraid they’ll be old maids sit there and actually follow Stevenson’s stories from scene to scene?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said, true as far as it went.
He smacked a hand to his desktop, a sound like a shot. “That’s genius for you. What a writer.” I was given the kind of look a cowboy probably received for coming late to the corral. “Why didn’t you tell me this before, Morgan? Go on over to Simonetti’s music store and buy the things.” He jerked open his bottom drawer, dug into the small strongbox that held petty cash, and handed me some money. I waited for him to jot down the sum or have me sign for it or however he handled a disbursement, but he simply waved me out of his sight and went back to pawing through the list of books he craved.
Out on the street in the freshness of the day, and having survived both Sandisons, I sauntered along with snatches of song in me; Gilbert and Sullivan can do that to you. The Montana weather for once was as perfect as could be, sunshine slanting between the tall buildings, checkerboarding the busy street, passersby in their downtown clothes brightening or dimming according to warmth or shade. The street tableau of shoppers and strollers seemed removed from talk of a strike, even though the Hill and its clashes were never far off. The day was so fine I tried to put such thoughts away and simply enjoy being out on my errand.
Emerging from the music store with my arms full of music stands I felt like an itinerant choirmaster, but Butte apparently saw stranger sights every day and no one paid me much attention. I was passing a haberdashery when my own eye was caught by the window display. An Arrow collar mannequin was admiring itself in a mirror; I could do without the collar, but draped on the mannequin torso was an exemplary suit-blue serge, librarianly. I stopped to admire the cut and material, smiling to myself as I thought of something Casper would say when about to commit an extravagance: “How’s a guy ever going to be rich if he doesn’t practice at it?” Riches were still eluding me-I needed to do something about that at some point-but my library wages were adding up a trifle, and that suit beckoned, come payday.
Turning to go, I glimpsed past the mannequin into the mirror and froze in my tracks. In the reflection, I could see across the street, half a block down, to where two bulky figures were assiduously studying the plate-glass display of a pet store. They were not the type to be in the market for parakeets.
Window men.
I would know the species anywhere, but in Chicago they had been rife enough to be a civic nuisance. Private detectives spying on lovers who happened to be married to other people. Pinkerton operatives lurking on some mission. Plainclothes policemen trying to keep an eye on the mob, or mobsters trying to get something on the police. Sometimes it seemed every Chicagoan was trailed by another, half a block behind. And whenever the one in front paused to tie a shoelace or buy a newspaper, the one trailing had to evince sudden interest in the nearest store window. The duo in the mirror-why should I rate two?-still were rapt over pets.
As I committed their sizable outlines to memory, another mental image was jostled: these two together were a near fit to the worst of those shadows that had followed me from wakes. But that was too much imagination. Wasn’t it?
Casually as I could manage, I walked back to the library, the music stands feeling like an armful of lightning rods with a storm on the horizon. When I reached the big front door, I opened it slowly so that I could see behind me in the glass. The window men were gone, naturally.
THAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER, I knocked on Griffith’s door.
The shuffle of carpet slippers, then the door flung open and Griff stood there in his long underwear and workpants, like a watchman roused by an out-of-place noise in the night. “What’s up, Morrie?” Down at his side, in his right hand, something sharp glinted. “Need a new notch in your belt?”
For the second time that day, my feet felt planted in quicksand. “I didn’t mean to intrude, I’ll come back another-”
“Naw, step on in.” The pointed instrument cut a circle in the air as he indicated a table and chair crammed into the far corner of the room. “Fixing Grace’s purse strap for her.” Ushering me in, he went on over and put down the awl he was holding, atop the leatherwork. “Guest gets the chair.” He perched on the edge of his bed, toes of his slippers barely reaching the floor. “What’s on your mind? You look spooked.”
“This will sound silly, but I think I’m being followed around town.”
Griff perused me, his wrinkles wrinkling even more. “Let’s get Hoop in on this.” He banged the heel of his fist on the wall, and shortly Hooper came in, bringing his own chair.
I described to them that morning’s experience, and the unlikelihood that the two idlers were pet fanciers. “Keep this to yourselves, please. I don’t wish to worry Grace about this.”
“Or have her kick you out of here on your can,” Hoop said.
“Well put.”
Griff hopped off the bed, went to the window, and pulled down the blind. “Tell me this,” he intoned, turning to me. “When you lit down from the train, was there a couple of bruisers hanging around?”
“Big and bigger,” Hoop specified.
“Beefier than ordinary, yes, now that you say so, there was such a pair at the depot.”
“That’s them,” Griff said. “Anaconda’s goons. The one big enough to eat soup off the top of your head is Typhoon Tolliver.”
I felt as if the seat of my chair had just pinched me.
Hoop was saying, “Jim Jeffries flattened him-”
“-in the second round of the title bout, right hook to the jaw,” I finished for him. “What on earth is he doing in Butte?”
“Beating people up,” Griff had no trouble answering that. “The Anaconda Company don’t play pattycake.”
“But-” Some questions scare off words. Why was I a candidate for a beating from an ex-heavyweight pug?
Hooper answered that without it being asked. “That bunch in the Hennessy Building sics the goons on any union organizers who come in from the outside.” He and Griff looked at me critically.
I shook my head.
“Especially anybody working for the Wobblies,” Griff prompted.
I shook my head harder.
“Somebody who’d lay low until the right time,” said Hoop.
“Then stir things up like poking a hornets’ nest,” said Griff.
“Anaconda don’t like that kind of thing,” Hoop added.
Another shake of my head, as much to clear it as anything else. “I am not any kind of an organizer, believe me. I simply came here to get ri-to find decent work.” Both old men watched me mutely. “The goons, as you call them, are wasting their time on me.”
One or the other of my listeners, like ancients who had heard it all before, spoke up. “You better hope they get tired of it.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY, day of rest for the library, but not for the boardinghouse. Scarcely was I seated for breakfast, wondering where the others were, when Grace forged out of the kitchen all but wrapped in a tie-around apron over a nice dark dress. Along with my plate of sidepork and eggs, she delivered with a flourish:
“I wondered if you might like to go to church.”
“Church.” I hadn’t meant for it to come out quite like that, but it sounded as though I was trying to identify the concept.
Hooper came through the doorway, also dressed in surprising Sunday best and smelling of musky cologne. “What this is, Griff’s filling in with the choir. They’re hard up.”
“Ah. And bringing his own audience, insofar as it can be conscripted?”
“He’ll be in much better voice if he sees us there, he happened to mention,” Grace coaxed with a nice example of a Sunday smile.
“He can stand all that kind of help he can get,” Hoop chipped in.
I put up my hands. “I know when I’m outnumbered.” Obligation takes strange shapes. Back in Casper’s earliest bouts, I had mastered the tactic myself of “papering the house,” as it was called, by giving away tickets by the handful if necessary to fill the seats of the arena. If Griffith dreamed of a sellout crowd for his star turn with the choir, I understood intrinsically.
THE SNUG REDBRICK CHURCH with its peaked hat of cupola looked as if it had been smuggled in from a vale in Wales, and no sooner had Grace and I and Hooper slid into seats at the back of the congregation than the creased little minister, peering over half-moon eyeglasses like a veteran counter of crowds, nodded to himself and launched into prayer. In Welsh. Evidently Grace had not anticipated this any more than I had, both of us trying to keep a straight face at not understanding a word of what plainly was going to be an hour of many hundreds of words. Actually, some time into the minister’s spate my ear figured out the repeated invoking of “Iesu Grist,” and I sat there caught up in the wayward notion of Christ as grist, the mills of faith grinding fine the belief in a clear-eyed savior at that moment across half the world. Sunday certainties, which left only the rest of the week.
The praying rolled on like thunder until the minister reached a final crescendo of syllables that sounded like tragwyddoldeb!
“Eternity!” Hoop translated to the other two of us in a hoarse whisper, and that was definitively that.
“Welcome, all ye, the accustomed and the new faces.” The surprise lilt of English from the minister sent Grace and me melting toward each other in relief. Not much taller than his pulpit, the elderly man of faith again peered around the church as if counting the house, this time shook his head instead of nodding, and declared: “A sufficiency will be heard from me soon enough. Let us get on with the singing.” With that, the male choir filed up, all in severe black suits and blinding starched white shirts, two dozen strong, Griff at one end, proud as a parrot. Church or not, he sought out the three of us with a broad wink, welcoming us to the occasion he plainly saw as the Welsh Miners’ Choir of Butte, starring Wynford Griffith.
The choir director, burliest of the bunch, stepped from the ranks, gave a steady bass hum, which was picked up by the others in a communal drone that seemed to vibrate the building. Then, as if in one glorious voice the size of an ocean’s surf, they swept into hymn after hymn. I sat there enchanted, Grace swaying gently next to me. Music makes me almost willing to believe in heaven.
Then, though, came a chorus I could have done without.
Were I to cherish earthly riches,
They are swift and fleet of wing;
A heart pure and virtuous,
Riches and eternal gain will bring.
There is that about the Welsh: they can sing their way under your skin, to the bones of your being. I needed no reminding that riches, in what pursuit I had given them, had proved to be elusively swift and winged. Yet why did a Richest Hill on Earth and its supposed opportunities exist, if not to be tapped? Was I really supposed to count my gains in life only afterward, in the time of tragwyddoldeb? Eternity did not seem much of a payoff if you had to scrimp to get there.
My spell of brooding broke off when the old minister, frail as a leaf after the gusts of the choir, ascended to the pulpit once more.
“ ’Tis no sense to maunder about, when but one thing is on every mind.” He gazed severely over the settled moons of his glasses. “There is talk of a strike in the mines, is there not?” The rustle of the congregation answered that.
“I have had my say any number of times before,” the ministerial voice sounded weary, “on the stopping of work and the negotiating of wages. The two seem as bound together in this town as the two sides of a coin.” Aha! Not even the man of the cloth could set aside the propensity for earthly gain. Perhaps I was imagining, but his own choir seemed to be looking at him as though he had just caught up with a main fact of life. “The shepherd does not leave his flock, even when it may have wool over its eyes,” he went on drily. “If the mines do shut down, the church shall again have a strike committee. We’ll again gather food and clothing for the families left bereft. Depend on that.” He paused, drawing on the silence. “A word of caution, however. If you men do go out”-he looked out over the stooped miners’ shoulders that filled half the church-“or you women march in their support”-a similar gaze to the upturned faces of the wives-“as you have been known to do, walk the line of the law very carefully. The times are not good. The sedition laws that came with the war are not fine-grained as to whether a person is the Kaiser in disguise or a Bolshevik with a bomb under his coattails or an honest miner seeking honest pay. Some of you had a taste of that last time, when I had to go down to the jail and bail you out for the hitherto unknown crime of ‘unlawful assembly.’ ” Reaching in over his glasses, he pinched the bridge of his nose as if to shut off that memory. “The church coffer is no longer sufficient for bail,” the words came slowly now, “nor can we keep contributing to legal defense funds. This time around, it will all be up to your union. You can help its cause and your own by being mindful of that pernicious statute until wiser heads can change it. Otherwise, Butte’s finest, to call them that”-it was well known that Butte policemen were Irish, and not the Dublin Gulch ore-shoveling type-“will pick you off like ripe apples. For now,” his voice rose, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”
I squirmed at that. I perfectly well knew it to be a biblical parable, but it was not Caesar up there in the Hennessy Building, pulling strings attached to the police department.
The minister took off his spectacles, folded them, and seemed to shake his head at himself. “Let us return to the singing.”
As we walked out after the service, Grace pursed a look at me as if to see what I thought. “My Arthur used to say there are those who make a scarecrow of the law.” I thought it best not to say Arthur had read some Shakespeare along the way. Directly ahead of us, Hoop and Griff were stumping along, sleeve cuffs flying as they dissected the sermon. Watching them, Grace said soberly: “The union is going to have its hands full, isn’t it.”
THERE WAS NO KNOWING how these things come about, but somehow that Sunday spate of Welsh sermonizing and song rinsed away the window men. The way was clear, to and from the library, the next day and the next and those after that, and while I habitually peeked over my shoulder for figures lurking half a block behind, they were notable only for their absence. It was as I indeed hoped, I could tell myself: the goons or their bosses saw me for what I was, a glorified library clerk sauntering meek and mild to church, and were wasting no further time on me.
Which was a lucky thing, because I was falling in love with the Butte Public Library. Walking up to it each fresh morning, its Gothic turret like the drawbridge tower into the castle, I warmed to the treasures within those softly gray granite walls. Sandison standing there at the top of the steps counting us off as if checking his herd came to seem patriarchal rather than high-handed. The staff softened toward me-with the exception of Miss Runyon-as I picked up stray tasks that they wanted to dodge. The nooks and crannies and grandiosities of the old building intrigued me, like an ancient mansion labyrinth leading back to Gutenberg’s printing press and the start of everything, and always, always, there were the lovely classic books tucked away here and there for stolen snatches of reading. Down any aisle, Stendhal or Blake or Wharton or Cather or Shakespeare or Homer or any of the Russians waited to share words with me, their classic sentences in richly inked typefaces as if rising from the paper. I suppose the best way to say it is that the library’s book collection, courtesy of that snowtopped figure with the Triple S initials, was the kind I would have had myself if I were rich.
In short, work of this sort fit me from head to toe. I could even put up with sharing office space with Sandison, as his chain-lightning moods kept a person alert. The old saying had his name on it: he may have been hard to get along with, but harder to get along without.
The library ran on one principle: Samuel S. Sandison was next to God. Whether above or below, opinions varied. His style of administration was as effective as it was unpredictable. For hours on end he would stay holed up in the office, apparently oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in the building. Then without warning he would barge out of his lair and prowl from floor to floor, wearing the expression of a man who took pleasure in kicking puppies. The result was an amazing library: the staff was on its toes every second, and its offerings were, of course, first-rate. I have to say, the man responsible for all this was not exactly an officemate easy on the nerves. The only mirth Sandison showed was when he spotted a bargain book in some catalogue of rarities and he would let out a “Heh!” and smile beneath his wreath of beard. Mostly, being around him was like having the Grand Inquisitor grading one’s homework.
“Goldsmith,” he characteristically would snap over his shoulder from where he was enthroned in his desk chair, and I had mere seconds to figure out whether he meant for me to trot across town to the dealer in fine metals or commence a conversation about the poet of England’s peasantry.
Guessing, I recited: “ ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ Rather daring for his day, wouldn’t you say, Sandy?”
“Romantic twaddle about how nice it was to live in huts, I’d call those elegies of his.”
“That’s too dry a reading of him,” I protested. “He had a wicked wit. Who else would have said of Garrick that onstage he was wonderfully simple and natural, it was only when he was off that he was acting?”
That brought a snort. “Doesn’t mean old Goldilocks could tell a hoe from a hole in the ground. Robert Louis Stevenson, now, he knew his stuff about how life really is.” And with that, Oliver Goldsmith, or whomever, would be consigned to the vast second rank and remain unbought.
“Morgan?” The dubious drawl that met me this particular day told me I was in for another assignment of the Sandison sort. “You started something with those music stands. Now Miss Runyon claims she can’t function unless she has a corkboard on a tripod to pin pictures on for the kids’ story hour. Go down there and see what you can rig up.”
As I was passing his desk, he looked askance at me over one of the catalogues of rare books that were perpetually open in front of him. “ Oxford flannel?”
“Serge.” I brushed a bit of lint off the new blue suit. “Like it?”
“You look like an undertaker.”
Down the stairs I went, past Miss Runyon’s cold eye, to the spacious meeting room all the way in the basement. The basement had originally been intended as an armory, and its thick walls made it a fine auditorium, no sounds escaping to the outside. You could about hear the spirited echoes of the Shakespeareans and the philosophical ones of the Theosophists lingering amid the pale plaster foliage of the scrollwork around the top of the walls. A curtained stage presided across one end of the room, and at the other stood a spacious supply cabinet. I was rooting around in the cabinet for anything resembling corkboard and a tripod when I heard the entry door swish closed in back of me.
I glanced over my shoulder and there the two of them were, big and bigger.
“Look at him, Ty.” The one who was merely big had a pointed face with eyes that bulged like those of an eel, probably from so much time spent planted in front of store windows peering sideways. “In that prissy suit, you’d almost think he’s the real item, wouldn’t you.”
The response from the figure half a head taller than him clipclopped in at a heavy pace: “If we wasn’t smart enough to know he’s up to something, yeah.”
The lesser goon was alarming enough, but Typhoon Tolliver I knew to be made of muscle, gristle, and menace. In the boxing ring his roundhouse blows stirred a breeze in the first rows of seats-hence his nickname-and had he been quicker in either the feet or the head, he might have become an earlier Jack Dempsey. As it was, his career of pounding and being pounded made him no more than a punching bag that other heavyweights needed to get past on the way to a championship bout. His flattened features and oxlike blink were the kind of thing I had been afraid would happen to Casper, another reason behind cashing in on our fi xed fight and the intention to steer the ring career of Capper Llewellyn into early retirement after he regained the title. Trying not to stare at Tolliver and his ponderous bulk, I brushed my hands of my cabinet task and managed to utter:
“The business of the library is conducted upstairs, gentlemen. If you would follow me-”
My break for the door was cut off by Eel Eyes, barring my way with a coarse left hand that justified the Latin sinister. “We like it down here,” he said lazily. “Nice and private, we can have a talk.” He sized me up with a tilt of his head. “Let’s start with what brings a fancy number like you to Butte. You slipped into town real easy, didn’t you, no baggage or nothing.”
That threw me. “Just because the railroad lost my-”
“You’re pretty slick,” Eel Eyes gave me credit I did not want. “But you can’t pull the wool over Ty and me. We get paid good dough to be on the lookout for wise guys like you. Some gold-plated talker who just shows up out of nowhere,” his tone was mocking, “if you know the sort. And sure enough, you no sooner hit town and that Red songbook starts doing its stuff at those burying parties. Then you latch on at this joint, where all kinds of crackpots come out at night. It all adds up to one thing, don’t you think, chum?”
This was a nightmare. “I can explain every one of those-”
“I bet you can, fancy-pants.” He leered at me. “After what happened to the last organizer for that Red pack of Wobblies, you have to come sneaking into town all innocent-like, don’t you. You can maybe fool those stupid miners up on the Hill, but Ty and me got you pegged.”
“One of them outside infiltrators, yeah.” Tolliver’s belated utterance unnerved me a great deal more than anything from the other goon. His conversation came off the top of his head and out his mouth seemingly without passing through his brain. It was as if he had speaking apparatus on the outside of his head, like English plumbing.
“I am a denomination of one,” I protested hotly, “employed by no one but this library, whose gainful work you are keeping me from. Now if you will accompany me upstairs, I can lead you to someone who will set you straight about-”
Typhoon Tolliver took a flatfooted step and planted himself in front of me. “You look like somebody, under that face spinach. Ain’t we met somewhere?”
“Surely I would recall such a mishap.”
“Don’t get smart on us.” He loomed in on me. “You been somewhere I been, I just know it. Chicago, how about?”
Here was where family resemblance was a danger. I looked like my brother, whose face had appeared on boxing posters on every brick wall in that city. Maximum as my mustache was, it amounted to thin disguise if someone concentrated hard enough on the countenance underneath to come up with the name Llewellyn. Goons do business with other goons, and this pair would not waste a minute in transacting me to the Chicago gambling mob. Which meant I was a goner, if Tolliver’s slow mental gears managed to produce the recognition he was working at.
I snapped my fingers. “Aha! The World’s Fair, of course! The African native village and the big-eyed boys that we were.” Wiggling my eyebrows suggestively, I took a chance and leaned right into the meaty face. “The bare-breasted women of the tribe, remember?”
Tolliver blushed furiously. “Every kid in Chi was there looking.”
“We know of two, don’t we, although the passage of the years has dimmed my recollection of you more than yours of me.”
“Yeah, well, sure, what do you expect, a mug like yours-”
“Knock it off, both of you.” The one with those aquarium eyes moved in on me. “Let’s try another angle on what kind of four-flusher you really are. What did you do in the war?”
“I was elsewhere.”
“Like where?”
“Tasmania.”
“Say it in English when you’re talking to us,” Tolliver warned.
“It’s in Australia, stupe,” the other one rasped. “And you weren’t in any rush to come back and enlist, is that it? You look like a quitter if I ever saw one. No wonder this country is full up with pinkoes and-”
“Infiltrators,” Tolliver recited mechanically.
“-and stray cats from half the world and-” The lesser thug’s yammering broke off and he eyed me suspiciously. “What’re you cocking your head like that for?”
“Just listening for the clink of your own medals.”
You find concern for reputation in strange places. The pointy face reddened to the same tint Tolliver’s had. “I kept the peace here at home.”
“I can imagine.”
“Hey, punk, a smart aleck like you can end up in a glory hole if you don’t watch your-”
Swish, and then bang! All three of us jumped.
Samuel Sandison towered in the doorway, the flung-open door still quivering on its hinges behind him. “What’s this? The idlers’ club in session?”
All at once there was more breathing room around me, both goons stepping back from the perimeter of authority Sandison seemed to bring with him. What was I seeing? He was twice their age, and though of a size with Tolliver, no physical match. Yet the two burly interlopers now looked very much like spooked schoolboys. Why the white-faced wariness all of a sudden?
Sandison’s ice-blue gaze swept over them and onto me, and I blinked innocently back. “We’re only here because this helper of yours is up to something,” the pointy-faced one was saying, not quite stammering, “and the people we work for need to know what he’s-”
“Quiet!” Sandison boomed, the word resounding in the enclosed room. “You tell them on the top floor of the Hennessy Building that they maybe run everything else in town, but not this library. Clear out of here, and I mean now.”
The pair cleared out, but not without glares over their beefy shoulders at me.
Now all I faced was the stormcloud of beard. Sandison inspected me as if having missed some major feature until then. “Miss Runyon told me you were taking an unconscionably long time down here. Morgan? Are you up to something?”
“Sandy, I swear to you, I am an utter stranger to the battles of Butte.” That left Chicago out of it.
He shook his head. “If you weren’t such a bookman, I wouldn’t have you on the payroll for more than a minute.” Turning to go, he said, as if he was ordering me to head off a stampede: “Get the damn corkboard rigged up so we don’t have to hear any more from that old heifer Runyon about it.”
I PICKED AT MY FOOD that suppertime, drawing a look of concern from Grace. “More turkey, Morrie? It’s not like you to be off your feed.”
Down the table, two sets of bushy gray eyebrows squinched in similar regard of me. Neither Hoop nor Griff asked anything about my disturbing day, however, in respect of our pact not to bother Grace’s head about the goons’ interest in me. Pushing away my plate, I alibied: “A touch of stomach disorder, is all. Nothing a restful evening in my room can’t fi x, I’m sure.”
Upstairs, flat on my back atop the dragon coverlet while I stared at the ceiling and waited for inspiration of some sort to show up, I never felt less sure of fi xing anything. The zigzags of life were more puzzling than ever. There I lay, in the most comfortable circumstances I had known for a long while, with work that nicely employed my mind, and the goons of the world were sure I was a secret operative for the most radical wing of the laboring class. It was dizzying. If America was a melting pot, Butte seemed to be its boiling point. The Richest Hill was turning out to be also a Cemetery Ridge of copper to be fought over, and some trick of fate had dumped Morris Morgan-all right, Morgan Llewellyn-right in the middle of it. Not the spot I thought I was choosing when I stepped down from that train.
A train runs in both directions, the ceiling reminded me, as boardinghouse ceilings tend to do. Lying there looking up at the map of plaster imaginings, I felt an old restlessness. It was a lamplit evening in the Marias Coulee teacherage, when I knew I was losing Rose, that a faint stain in the beaverboard ceiling seemed to suggest the outline of Australia. Even here in Grace Faraday’s well-maintained accommodations, did that swirl in the plasterer’s finishwork over by the window resemble South America?
Fate comes looking for us, often when we are most alone. Stealthily the conclusion I was waiting for crept down from the ceiling and took shape in the corner of the room. My gaze followed it to my satchel, shabby reliable companion in a portable life.
I swore softly to myself. Ordinarily I do not use profanity, but that was the least of what had been fanned up in me by the bluster from Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver. Bouncing off the bed, in a hurry of resolve now, I crossed to where the satchel waited. Grappled it open wide. Dug to the bottom of it, past spare socks and the poetry of Matthew Arnold, to where they lay.
Brass knuckles. The “ Chicago pinky ring,” weapon of choice for the streetwise combatant facing an unfair fight.
It had been years since I needed to resort to these, but they never aged. As I tried them on now, they fit across the backs of my hands cold and secure. Even the most vicious street fighter had to hesitate at the dark sheen of armor on a fist, the set of nubs that could gouge into skin like a can opener. Of course, knuckles of metal did you any good only within striking range of an opponent. But I had sparred enough as a warm-up partner for Casper in training camp; I knew at least as much footwork as that lummox Tolliver. And unless I had lost the knack of sizing up an adversary, the more mouthy goon was the type who would blink hard at the sight of brass knuckles. He would not rush to have that well-shaven pointy face marred to the bone.
Quitter, he’d called me. We’d see.
WOULDN’T YOU KNOW, no sooner was I prepared to put my fortified knuckles on the line against Anaconda’s lurkers than they ceased lurking. Even when I deliberately dawdled on downtown streets, passing the time of day with the blind newspaper seller or picking up the latest gossip from the hack driver at the nearby hotel, I could not draw the goons out. As the days lengthened, their cloak of shadow shrank, further discouraging any encounters. Fondling the brass knuckles in my suitcoat pocket as I went to and from the library, it was as if I were rubbing amulets that kept away evil spirits. Although I knew the real force that had stopped the goons cold in their tracks was Samuel Sandison, whatever that was about.
As for me, the lord and master of the books kept me hopping. It was a mystery how the Butte Public Library had managed to operate before I was there to catch all the tasks delegated from that kingly desk of his to mine.
This particular Friday had started as usual, with Sandison drawling, “You know what needs doing, or at least should,” and disappearing off to somewhere undisclosed, while I faced tabulating the week’s checkout slips sent up from the issue desk. He was a demon promoter of the library and wanted the list of current favorite books unfailingly in the newspaper at the end of each week. It was not an inspiring task, as the most popular book of the past seven days invariably turned out to be Mrs. Mary V. Terhune’s My Little Love, and I sometimes had to adjust the arithmetic to get Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton onto the list at all; Proust of course was hopeless. So, by the time I fiddled with the citizenry’s literary taste to more or less satisfaction, the messenger would be there waiting to rush my compilation to the Daily Post. Messengers raced across Butte, jumping on and off the trolleys and trotting the edge of the sidewalks as they carried typed instructions back and forth between the downtown headquarters and the mine offices, workers’ cashed paychecks from stores to banks, small goods from the department store to the wealthier homes, and so on. Our stretch of street was served by a gnomelike courier named Skinner. Old enough to be thoroughly bald, Skinner nonetheless had the pared build of a jockey and was never motionless, on one foot and then the other as he waited to be handed whatever was to be delivered. I had learned to let him jitter there in the doorway; the man apparently was not constructed to sit in a chair.
I was nearly done typing up that week’s list from Miss Runyon’s checkout slips when Skinner, waiting restlessly as usual, blurted:
“Where you from, pal?”
“Mmm? Chicago.”
“Small world. Me, too.” I stiffened. “ Maxwell Street and Halsted, know it?” he said from the side of his mouth, sending a deeper chill through me. The toughest neighborhood of the toughest section of that hardknuckled city. Was this going to be a repeat of Tolliver and Eel Eyes? Another message of the threatening sort from the Anaconda Company? Panic began to set in as I realized I was in my shirtsleeves, with my suitcoat-and its protective cargo of brass knuckles-on a hanger across the room. A disturbing look on him, the wiry man now bounced toward me on fleet feet as I grabbed for an inkwell, anything, in self-defense. Practically atop my desk as he leaned in face-to-face with me, Skinner demanded:
“Cubs or White Sox?”
I relaxed somewhat; baseball rivalry was not necessarily lethal. But it is surprising how an old grudge can hold up. In a ring constructed over the infield of the White Sox stadium, Comiskey Park, Casper on a cool clear Columbus Day had defeated Kid Agnelli-knockout, third round-before twenty-five thousand paying customers, and the owner of the White Sox and the ballpark, Charles Comiskey, had shorted us on the purse. Not for nothing was he known in Chicago sporting circles as Cheap Charlie. I would root against him and his team if they were the last baseball nine on earth. “My allegiance is to the Cubs,” I put it more temperately to Skinner. “I once saw Tinker to Evers to Chance produce four double plays in one game. Masterful.”
Skinner hooted. “The Cubs ain’t what they used to be. The Sox got the real players these days, they’re going to the Series, you watch.”
“I shall.” Sealing the book list in a gummed envelope, I handed it to him indicatively. “Now, do you suppose this missive could possibly find its way to the Daily Post?”
No sooner had the messenger scampered off than Sandison filled the doorway. Bypassing his desk, he lumbered over to the stained-glass window and peered out through one of the whorls like a boy at a knothole, a sign that something was on his mind. Something on his desk that he did not want to face.
“Sandy, you seem perturbed,” I said diplomatically.
“I’ve just been with the trustees. They raked me over the coals about the library budget. Wanted to know where every damn penny goes.” Turning from the window, he shook his head, the wool of his beard quivering. “They have a reason, I suppose. Few months ago, the city treasurer took off with everything he could lay his hands on.”
“Bad?”
“Enough that the elected fools downtown see an embezzler under every bed now. Damn it, I thought it was hard to keep track of a few thousand cows-that was nothing compared to running this outfit.” He passed a hefty hand over his cowlick as if trying to clear his head from there on in. “Spending that much time on numbers drives me up the wall. I don’t see why the idiot trustees can’t just trust a man.”
I remember it exactly. Opportunity was in the air of that office, distinct as ozone. Idly piling paperwork from here to there, I said as though his bookkeeping burden were merely something I could add to the other stacks on my desk: “Thank heaven you have an arithmetical person on hand.”
“Who?” Sandison eyed me. “You? You mean you can handle books that don’t have mile-long words in them?”
“Assuredly.”
“Are you telling me you’re a certified accountant?”
“Mmm, certified perhaps is too confining a term. As you might imagine, standards are different from here to there. But along the way in life, I’ve had considerable experience with ledgers.”
Sandison dropped into his desk chair, his weight sending it wheeling toward me. “Morgan? You just said you’re not an accountant. What the hell then do you do with these ledgers you’re talking about?”
“Oh, mend them. From the inside out.” From his furrowed look, I could tell Sandison was not satisfied with that reply. “Let me put it this way, Sandy. Numbers are simply a language I happen to understand-Latin, numeracy, both have certain principles, fundamental in themselves. Surely you know the story of the bookkeeper and the desk drawer? No? Allow me. Every morning, a certain bookkeeper would come into the office of the firm, hang up his hat and coat, seat himself at his desk, pull out a drawer and look in it for a few seconds, shut it, and only then turn to his work. For forty years this went on-the same drawer, opened and shut, every morning. Finally came the day he retired, and the minute he left the office for the last time, the rest of the office staff crowded around his desk and one of them slowly opened that drawer. In it was a single sheet of paper. On it was written: ‘Debits go on the left, credits on the right.’ ”
Sandison did not find my little tale as entertaining as I had hoped. “The long and short of it is,” came his rumble, “you claim you know how to balance the books.”
I nodded. “To the last penny, if it comes to that.”
He sat there and frowned for some time. He could be intent as a fiend when he was mulling a matter. “All right,” he grudgingly granted at last, “you probably can’t make any more mess of the arithmetic than I have. You’re in charge of the damn bookkeeping. Come over here and start getting acquainted with the ledgers.”
I walked on air back to the boardinghouse at the end of that day. The one fundamental principle of bookkeeping that had always stood out to me was that if you know how and where the money flows, you are hard to get rid of.