Ivan Doig - Work Song

“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?”

“Hell no,” he let out, and immediately after that, “but you’re right in a way. SSS stood for Seymour-Stanwood-Sandison. I had to have backers in the ranch operation. Money men.” Those last two words he practically spat. Eyeing me as though I were guilty by association, he drawled: “I saw you with your nose stuck in Polk. I suppose you’re another refined hobo who heard about the Hill and came here to make a killing.”

“A living, I had in mind.”

“Hah. You packing around any education worth the description?”

“The Oxford variety.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“I bootstrapped my way through.”

“Another shoeleather philosopher,” he grumbled. “The Wobblies were full of them; they must empty out the bughouse into Butte every so often.”

“I see my little joke did not catch on. Actually, I did work my way through an institution of higher learning-the University of Chicago.”

He tugged at his beard. “In other words,” he said as if it might be my epitaph, “all you know anything about comes from books.”

I bridled. “That is hardly a fair assessment of-”

“Never mind. You’re hired.”

“You are mistaken, I haven’t even made up my mind where to-here?”

“Here is where the books are, ninny.”

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?”