Work Song (6 page)

“It seems there is no end to your talents,” Grace said with exaggerated wonder, making room for me at the sink. It had been a long while since I settled in side by side with a woman to such a chore. With her braid tucked back and her sleeves rolled up, she was an aproned vision of efficiency at her dishpan task. Still, I could tell something troubled her. I asked, “Have the glory hole grabbers been giving you a bad time again?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s our anniversary. Arthur’s and mine.” Slowly washing a plate, she went on: “Seven years ago today we were married. I don’t know why this year bothers me so much.” She looked cross with herself. “I’m sorry, Morrie, I didn’t mean to mope.”

“Grief sometimes goes by numbers,” I suggested gently. “Seven, that’s the copper anniversary.”

“I might have known you’d have the answer, you schoolbook.” She flicked a few drops of dishwater at me. “I’ll simmer down, I promise.” By now I was well aware she could also simmer up faster than the law of heat transfer ever predicated, but I was learning to weather that. It seemed worth it for the glimpses of the woman behind the landlady veneer. When something serious was not on her mind, she had the best smile, bright and teasing. That came out again now as she glanced at me and the dimple did sly work. “Let’s fish around in you, for a change. Off on a toot again tonight, are you?”

“Grace, it is my job. I seem to recall you being all for it.”

“Anyone who runs a boardinghouse needs to be in favor of whatever a lodger does to come up with the rent.” That canny glance again. “Within reason.”

I smoothed my mustache while I thought that over. I had to admit, presenting myself at a wake most every night made me feel uncomfortably like one of those mechanical statuettes of Death that clank out of a guildhall clock tower at the appointed hour and chase the merrymakers around the cupola. Grace had a point about the reasonableness of that as a lasting occupation. “Life as cryer does have its drawbacks,” I conceded to her. “A main one is that I wake up each morning feeling as if my brain were being pickled, gray cell by gray cell.”

She prompted: “And while you still have a few to spare?”

“Tomorrow,” I said with sudden decision, “I shall find the public library and consult Polk.”

Grace paused in her sudsy grapple with the meat platter, puzzled. “Poke who?”

“The Polk city directory.” I smiled. “The treasure map to where ledgers are kept.”

4

T
here is an old story that any Londoners with a madman in the family would drop him off at the library of the British Museum for the day. I was given a searching look as if I might be the Butte version when I presented myself at the desk of the public library that next morning and requested both the
R. L. Polk & Co. City Directory
and Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
in the original Latin
.

The stout woman I took to be the head librarian—she had eyeglasses enchained around her neck commandingly enough for it—scrutinized me some moments more, then marched off into the maze of shelves while I found a seat at a broad oaken table. Everything was substantial, the brass-banistered stairway up to the mezzanine of books in tall rows, the green-shaded electrical lights hanging down from the high ceiling like watch fobs of the gods. I have always felt at home among books, so when the woman from the desk plopped my requested two in front of me, they seemed like old friends dropping by.

Aware that I should get down to business, I nonetheless drew the
Gallic Wars
to me first, unable to resist. I had ordered it up by habit, as a test. To me, a repository of books is not a library without that volume in the mother of languages, but merely a storehouse for worn copies of H. Rider Haggard’s jungle thrillers and the syrupy novels of Mrs. Mary V. Terhune. No, Caesar’s prose that reads like poetry—
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
—is essential in a collection of knowledge, a siren call from Roman words to ours. Handling the book fondly as I was, I became aware of its own touch: tanned leather, not the more common calfskin cover put on for show. I examined the binding: sewn rather than glued. On the pages, lovely to finger, the sentences practically rose from the paper in a strong clear Caslon typeface. What I was holding was an exceptionally fine copy, so much better than my own that had gone astray with my missing trunk that I momentarily found myself envious of the Butte Public Library.

Just then a drove of schoolchildren came pattering through, herded toward the downstairs by their shushing teacher, evidently to a story hour. Second-graders, I judged, that unhushable age when whispering is as natural as breathing. I felt a pang as the class passed through like a murmur in church. The distance of ten years evaporated, and I swear, for some moments I was back at the Marias Coulee one-room school, my stairstep eight grades there in front of me as intricate and intriguing as a daily circus. And after school, the mental workout of Latin lessons with the keenest pupil a teacher ever had, Paul Milliron. Sitting there, watching this motherly teacher shoo her boys and girls along as they descended the library stairs a whisper at a time, I envied her the job but knew it was too late in the school year for me to even think of such an application. Besides, my credentials were not exactly the standard ones.

Sighing, I patted Caesar and closed him away. Opening the city directory, I began to work my way through the idiom of Polk. There they were as ever, the abbreviated citizens found throughout America,
brklyr, carp, messr, repr
, et cetera. The skills of bricklayers, carpenters, messengers, and repairers were not my own. Nor on subsequent pages could I see myself employed in feather dying, felt mattress manufacture, or fish salting. Dutifully I paged on through, searching for where ledgers that fit my talents might be found. Butte, I discerned, had a modest number of banks for a city of its size; a plenitude of funeral homes; an uninspiring variety of mercantile enterprises; and one Gibraltar of assets, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. I can’t deny, it was tantalizing, that financial colossus which surely needed
bkpr
s—bookkeepers—of a certain talent to sluice the riches of the Hill into Anaconda coffers.

Temptation had to vie with distraction, however. Something about the
Gallic Wars
at my elbow kept diverting me. Even when they are closed, some books do not shut up. Why was this beautifully sewn leather edition, a collector’s item if I had ever seen one, spending its existence on a public shelf in a none too fastidious mining town? Once more I peered at those tiers on the mezzanine, and if I was not severely mistaken, many other handsome volumes sat there, beckoning, in bindings of royal reds and greens and blues and buffs. Curiosity got the better of me. Up the stairwell I went.

And found myself in a book lover’s paradise.

As though some printerly version of Midas had browsed through the shelves, priceless editions of Flaubert and Keats and Tolstoy and Goethe and Melville and Longfellow and countless other luminaries mingled on the shelves with more standard library holdings. I could not resist running my fingers along the handsomely bound spines and tooled letters of the titles. What on earth was the matron at the desk thinking, in scattering these treasures out in the open? Yet the more I looked, the more I met up with the complete works of authors, surely deliberately collected and displayed. Mystified, I was stroking the rare vellum of a Jane Austen title when a loud voice made me jump.

“You look like a bookworm on a spree.”

I am of medium height, but when I turned around, I was seeing straight into a white cloud of beard. Considerably above that, a snowy cowlick brushed against furrows of the forehead. In a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, the man frowning down at me had considerable girth at the waist and narrowed at the chest and shoulders; like the terrain around us, he sloped.

Caught by surprise, I had no idea what to make of this apparition confronting me amid the books. The beard was as full as that of Santa Claus, but there was no twinkle of Christmas nor any other spirit of giving in those glacial blue eyes.

Keeping my own voice low, I responded: “Butte is rich in its library holdings, as I assume we both have discovered?”

“Finest collection west of Chicago. Too bad the town doesn’t have the brains to match the books,” he drawled at full volume. “Quite a reader, are you? Who do you like?”

Appropriately or not, my gaze caught on a lovely marbled copy of
Great Expectations
. “Dickens,” I began a whispered confession that could have gone on through legions of names. “There’s a person who could think up characters.”

“Hah.” My partner in conversation reached farther along in the shelves of fiction. “I’ll stick with Stevenson, myself.” He fondled along the gilt-titled set of volumes from boyish adventure to phantasmagoria of shape-shifting souls. “It takes a Scotchman to know the sides of life.” Abruptly he swung around, towering over me again, and demanded loudly: “You like Kipling, or don’t you?”

Oh, was I tempted to recite:
‘What reader’s relief is in store / When the Rudyards cease from kipling / And the Haggards ride no more.’
Instead I put a thumb up and then down, meanwhile murmuring, “His stories are splendid sleight of hand, the poetry is all thumbs.”

“Not short of opinion, are you.” He fixed a look on me as if he had shrewdly caught me at something. “Saw you down there, pawing at Caesar. English isn’t good enough for you?”

“Lux ex libris
,
”
I tried to put this absolute stranger in his place, “whatever the language on the page.”

“If light comes from books,” he drawled back, “how come Wood-row Wilson isn’t brighter than he is?”

That stopped me. Was I really expected to debate the intellect of the president of the United States within hearing of everyone in the building?

Just then a couple of elderly ladies entered the Reading Room below, still chattering softly from the street. Frowning so hard the beard seemed to bristle, my companion leaned over the mezzanine railing. “Quiet!” he bellowed.

That legendary pairing, madman and library, seemed to be coming true as I watched. All heads now were turned up toward us, the woman at the desk whipping her eyeglasses on and glowering in our direction. I envisioned arrest for disturbing the literary peace, even if I was barely an accomplice. “Perhaps,” I whispered urgently, “we should adjourn to a less public spot, lest the librarian take steps—”

“Ignoramus, I am the librarian.” Straightening himself to new white heights of cowlick, he frowned fiercely down at me. “Do you genuinely not know who the hell you’re talking to?”

“I remember no introduction,” I said coolly.

He waved that off. “Samuel S. Sandison. Come on into my office before you cause any more ruckus, I want to talk to you.”

I hesitated before following, but the ravishing books were too much of a lure. Edging through the doorway of his overflowing office at the back of the mezzanine, I made sure that the nameplate on the desk matched what he had told me. Sandison sandwiched himself behind the desk and wordlessly pointed me to a book-stacked chair. I cleared away the pile and gingerly sat. “Mr. Sandison, the books you have here . . .” I hardly had the words. “They’re works of art in every way.”

“They ought to be.” He stroked his beard, as if petting a cat. “A good many of them are mine.”

“Yours? ”

“Hell yes. From the ranch.”

“Ah. The ranch. You were a livestock entrepreneur, I take it? Sheep?”

“Cattle.” He delivered me a look that made me want to duck. Well, how was I to know? From the train, Montana expanses appeared to me to be as populous with fleeces as the heavens are with clouds.

Sandison leaned across the mess of his desk as though I might be hard of hearing as well as dim of intellect. “You mean you have never heard of the Triple S ranch?”

“I confess I have not, but I have been in town only a short time.”

“It’s gone now,” he growled. “That’s why I’m here. It was the biggest spread in the state; everybody and his brother knew the SSS brand.”

“Mmm. By ‘brand,’ do you mean the practice of searing a mark onto the animal?”

“That’s what branding is. It’s the Latin and Greek of the prairie.”

That startled me. “Intriguing. And so SSS would translate to—?”

He laughed harshly. “Saddle up, sit tight, and shut up, my riders called it. Most of them stuck with me anyway.” An odd glint came to him. “I had an army of them, you know.”

“I regret to say, I am not seer enough myself to know the intricacies of reading burnt cowhide.” It fell flat with him. “But I am eager to grasp the principle behind alphabetizing one’s cows—”

“It’s not alphabetical, fool. Brandabetical.”

“—excellent word! The brandabetical concept, then. Do you start with the full lingual entity, in this case ‘saddle up, sit tight, and shut up,’ and condense from there?”