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?”