Sweet Thunder (2 page)

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T
HE TRAIN—WHICH HAD ROYALLY WHISKED
us away to more comfortable climes not so many months before—deposited us now onto the wintry platform of the Butte depot. Snowbanks of apparently arctic depth lined the railroad tracks, and the depot eaves showed long teeth of icicles. One of us at least was unbothered by the cool reception; Grace's cheeks bloomed in the frosty air. “As they say, there's no place like home,” she smiled encouragement to me, each of her words a smoky puff of breath, “even at ten below.”

I merely nodded, distracted as ever by the eye-popping view. The Richest Hill on Earth, always bragged of with capital letters, did not look the part as it hunched at the back doors of the wintry city. Rather, it appeared to be a conglomeration of belching factories and bizarre steel towers leading to nowhere and grim gray dump heaps pocking a misplaced hump of earth, which, with a fresh covering of snow, gave the startling impression of having risen like bread dough. Looks can be deceiving, never more so than in this instance, for the Butte hill contained unmatched deposits of copper, at precisely the time when civilization was wiring itself for electricity. Some twenty billion dollars of the conductive metal had been mined from the Hill. As for the community that had exploded from rough western mining camp to a secular capital of political power and cultural aspiration, Butte was no beauty but held an allure of its own. Literally sitting on riches, the unlikely mile-high metropolis, which always appeared to be trying to catch up with itself in sporadic skyscrapers and flung-together neighborhoods, had drawn seekers of wealth, from miners to moguls. I myself first arrived practically penniless in the tumultuous year of 1919, and while my path to good fortune was not the standard one, I had to grant that Butte had been a lucky diggings, as the saying was, for me as well. Although, as is too often the case where men battle for control of the earth's yield, not without risk attached. What a crime, on what a scale, for a city of such treasure to be forever squirming under one mighty thumb. Even in the innocence of snow capping the distant roofs and cornices of tall downtown businesses, it stood out to me: the top floor of the Hennessy Building, where power resided. Where the offices of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company looked down on the city and, for that matter, the state that it had long ruled like a corporate fiefdom. Where suspicions ran high against interlopers of whatever sort.

With a well-learned sense of caution, I glanced around for anyone taking undue notice of our arrival. Window men, if any, would have stood out like penguins against frosty glass backdrops, and passersby swathed from the crystalline cold all seemed to have their heads down to watch the tricky footing on the tilted streets. Nothing unwelcome about our welcome, so far. Still, certain shards of memory from 1919 sent an occasional quiver through me.

Shivering more than a little herself as we waited for our luggage, Grace murmured in wifely concern, “You look bothered. You aren't nervous about the Sandison house, are you?”

“No, no, just wondering at the whereabouts of our belongings,” I alibied, looking around for the baggage handler. With sinking heart, I spotted him emerging not from the baggage car but the depot, claim check in hand.

I groaned. “Not again?”

“That trunk of yours got sidetracked somewhere between Frisco and here, I'd say,” he cheerfully proffered the claim check. “It'll catch up with you sooner or later, you can just about bet.”

“Not if experience is any guide,” I protested hotly, citing my own previous trunk lost when I first arrived to Butte, and still missing after all this time. I was well launched into an impassioned lecture to the unimpressed baggage man about this trunk of ours having accompanied us uneventfully on railroads around half the world until this accursed one, when Grace tugged at the sleeve of my overcoat. “Morrie, never mind. I have my overnight case and you've your satchel, we can get by.”

Resigned to the loss, evidently my own personal admission ticket to Butte, I sighed heavily and accompanied Grace out to the street. A jitney sat chugging at the snowy curb, and the bundled-up taxi driver poked his head out to ask, “Where to, folks?”

I said with what I hoped was the air of a mansion owner, “Ajax Avenue, please.”

“Horse Thief Row it is,” the driver said nonchalantly. “Hop in.”

•   •   •

Probably since the villas of Pompeii, palatial homes are ornaments of wealth, and Butte had more than its share of fanciful big houses. Our route swung past the monstrosity built by the early copper magnate William A. Clark, a many-gabled Victorian monument to vanity that took up half a block. More ostentatious yet was the château his son had imported from Europe and reassembled to the last cubit. Housekeeper that she'd had to be in operating her own boardinghouse, Grace peered apprehensively through the frost-flowered windows of the taxi as we passed other West End behemoths, her gloved hand gripping mine harder and harder. “Grace, Sandy's residence as I recall it is not as gargantuan as these,” I sought to reassure her. To no avail. More firmly, I tried again. “It's only a house, remember.”

“Around here, that's some ‘only,'” she said with a swallow.

Now I was the apprehensive one. “I hope you're not getting—”

“No! I'm fine. Fine.”

The driver called out, “This's the street. Which shack is yours, pard?”

I pointed over his shoulder to a stonework architectural mix with a peaked tower room predominating. Draped in snow and icicles, the three-story house looked like a polar castle.

“There, see?” I soothed Grace when the taxi left us off outside the gray granite manse. “Smaller than Versailles.”

“A little,” she allowed doubtfully, as we negotiated the frosty front steps and porch. The second time I rapped the brass knocker in the shape of a helmeted warrior's frosty-eyed visage, Ajax on guard duty, a familiar gruff voice called from somewhere inside. “Coming. Don't wear out the door.”

“Morgan,” the figure that flung it open and loomed there almost filling the doorway issued, as if identifying me to myself. As commanding as Moses, he rumbled, “It's about time you stopped gallivanting all over the landscape. Heh.”

Samuel Sandison himself was nearly geographic, the great sloping body ascending from an avalanche of midriff to a snowy summit of beard and cowlick. Glacial blue eyes seemed to see past a person into the shadows of life. Attired as ever in a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, and boots long since polished by sagebrush and horsehide, he appeared to be resisting time in every stitch of his being. Description struggled when it came to his mark on history, cattle king turned vigilante turned bookman and city librarian, who had bent every effort and not a few regulations to provide a rough-and-tumble mining town with a world-class reading collection. And always, always, the long shadow of the hangman's tree followed him, carried forward from when he'd owned the biggest ranch in Montana. Having shared an office with him in something like companionable exasperation—the feeling may have been mutual—I always connected this outsize man with those lines of the poet Cheyne:
Greater than his age was he / Story and legend his legacy.

Right now, he was some manner of unprecedented tenant ushering us into a sprawling residence newly ours. Parlor, drawing room, music room with piano and peach-and-plum wallpaper wrongly inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan's
Mikado
, living room, dining room, nameless others, kitchen somewhere in the distance. Fine-grained oak here, bird's-eye maple there, Turkish carpets everywhere. “Bedrooms and such are upstairs,” he waved toward the heavens, “there's a mob of them. Help yourselves.” With Grace wearing the wide-eyed expression of a first-time museumgoer, he trooped us on through the downstairs until we reached a conical room at the base of the substantial tower, practically submerged in books. “Library,” he pronounced, probably just for the satisfaction of the word. Spying a rare-books catalog open on the overflowing desk, I couldn't help but ask, “How's shopping, Sandy?”

“About like dealing with pirates, as usual.” He frowned at me a certain way, book lover to book lover. “What do you think of
The Song of Igor's Campaign
?”

“Where ‘the wolves in the ravine conjure the storm,' if I am translating rightly? The poetic flavor of that might not be received as well as it should by your library patrons, this time of year.” I inclined my head to the depths of snow and thermometer, which evidently were here to stay through the Butte winter.

“You maybe hit on a good point there,” Sandison drawled. “I'll hold out for something less Siberian.” Noticing Grace biting a finger—I could tell she was trying to tally the number of rooms encountered so far, with floors yet to go—he addressed her with elephantine gallantry. “My hat is off to you, madam, for turning this hopeless case,” he indicated to me, “into husband material.”

“What? Oh, yes. I mean, Morrie had a hand in that, too.” The topic of matrimony reminding her, she paid her respects to the late Dora: “I'm sorry about your loss.”

He bobbed his head in almost schoolboyish fashion, evidently not trusting his voice. Clearing his throat, he returned to eyeing me critically. “What are you doing with all that foliage on your face? Hiding the mud fence?”

There is quite a philosophy to growing a beard—or a mustache, as I occasionally resorted to—but in this instance, I'd done so simply as a precautionary measure. That winning bet on the corrupted World Series may have upset the Chicago gamblers who lost their shirts to some smart aleck with too much of a hunch, as they no doubt saw it, and I thought it best not to fit my description while Grace and I hit the high spots of the world. I had also added some pounds in our sampling of national cuisines; advancing from lightweight to middleweight, as I preferred to think of it. A bit of camouflage never hurt, in my experience.

“I think it's very becoming on him,” Grace said loyally, of my carefully tended whiskers. “Hmmp,” Sandison grunted, himself bearded as a Santa. The glint in the gaze he gave me showed he was restraining himself, barely, from asking, “Becoming what?” Before he could hold forth about me any further, Grace put in, “I'd like to look over the kitchen, if I may.”

“Madam, be my”—he halted the sweep of his hand toward the rear region of the house—“I started to say guest, but landlady is more accurate, isn't it. Heh.” Grace flinched ever so slightly and left us.

“That brings up something, Sandy.” I strolled the circle of the room for the pleasure of running my fingers over the valuable books. “Exactly how is this living arrangement supposed to work?”

“Easy as pie, simpleton. I'll hole up here when I'm not downtown at the public library,” he deposited himself in his chair at the heaping desk, “and use a stray bedroom. The rest of the place is yours and hers. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“That leads to my next question.” The chair groaning under him as he shifted haunches, Sandison waited for me to ask it. I gestured to include everything from ancient Ajax guarding the entrance to the mansion to the gift of title in my pocket. “Why?”

“You don't think I'm going to live forever, do you?” he said, mildly for him. “You might as well have the place instead of the taxman.”

That seemed to sum the matter up, at least as far as he was concerned. It was only the start of it for me. “Thank you very much, I think. But ah, taxes, and upkeep—”

“Coal,” he added to the list with a grunt. “The place eats it like a locomotive.”

“—and staff—”

“The cook and a couple of maids left, after Dora passed away. I figured you and the missus would take care of all that your own way anyhow.”

“—all of which,” I drew a needed breath, “leads me to wonder if I might have my old job back. A steady wage would be most welcome at this point, Sandy.”