Ivan Doig - Work Song

The bed was crowded with debate. Sandison was a latent noose-wielding unpredictable madman. Or not. He’d had the perfectly sound sense to hire me, I tried telling myself. Just to be on the safe side, though, pack the satchel for the train; saying a permanent goodbye to Butte would be only a strategic withdrawal, after all. But so was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

My head now really did ache from going back and forth. I checked my pocket watch again. Midnight was not far off. Abruptly my mind made itself up, almost as if I had not participated. I scrambled off the bed.

Quietly as I could, I opened the door of my room and tiptoed into the hall. Snores emanated from Griff’s room, and Hoop’s next to his; at the end of the hall, Grace’s bedroom kept a silence. Feeling like a burglar in the darkened house, I slipped past one door. Then another. And stealthily turned the doorknob of the end one.

I crept to the sleeping form and, hesitating just a bit, shook the bare shoulder where the nightdress had slipped down.

“Grace, I hate to interrupt your slumber. But I must talk to you.”

My whisper penetrated as if I had jabbed her. Bolting upright in the bed, she clutched the coverlet around her, huskily reciting: “In the name of decency, Morrie, we really ought not-”

“This is imperative or”-I looked at the ivory slope of shoulder still showing-“I would not come uninvited. Please just listen, Grace.”

Vigilantly, she did so while I told her she had to be my witness, to attest that I was alive and in one piece before boarding the train early in the morning with Samuel Sandison. “Just in case worse should come to worst.”

“Worse coming to worst, is it.” There was just enough light in the room that I could see she had let down her flaxen hair when she went to bed, and now she ran a hand through the long tresses. “Morrie, you are the most complicated boarder there ever was.”

“I wish I could dispute that.”

“Why do I have the honor of this, why not Griff and Hoop?”

“They’ve been at a union meeting, and you know the condition they come home in after that.”

Grace gave an extended sigh. “All right, you want a sober witness. But why go with Sandison at all?”

“He’s the kind who will not let loose of an idea-the man is a bulldog. If I don’t humor him on this, he’ll do away with my job at the library. Then I won’t have charge of the auditorium. Then the eisteddfod can’t be held in the-It’s, well, complicated.”

All that was wordlessly weighed on the landlady scale of things. Then she reached to the bedside table, opened the drawer, and took something out. “Here.”

In the dimness of the bedroom, I peered down stupidly at the cold metallic item, with some dull opalescence to it, that she put in the palm of my hand. If I was not mistaken, it was the type of small pearl-handled pistol called a Lady’s Special.

“You’re-you’re armed,” I stammered.

“I’m a widow, sleeping alone,” she said quietly. “And Butte is a rough and tough place, as you may have noticed.” Again she passed a hand through her hair, looking at me as if memorizing me. “That little thing is called an equalizer for a reason, don’t forget, Morrie.”

I hesitated, then pocketed the gun. “I’m sure I am in better health than when I came in here, thanks to you.”

An expectant silence. She patted my hand there in the dark, in a feathery way that was either shy or sly. “I would only be telling the truth if I said you had life in you the last I saw of you, wouldn’t I.”

An honest enough affidavit, under the circumstances. I returned her caress pat for pat. If I could trust anyone in Butte, it was Grace.

If I could trust anyone in Butte.

“SANDY, HOW ARE WE TO DO THIS?” Stumbling along before dawn in Sandison’s wake, I dubiously approached the depot platform. “If I am not mistaken, those are ore cars.” The line of heaped railcars stretched off as far as I could see in the dim light.

“Keep walking, don’t be a nervous Nellie.” Sandison strode along recklessly enough himself that I wished the pair of depot goons would pop around a corner and be steamrollered by him. No such justice, however, at that early hour. Only a yawning conductor, beside what I perceived to be one lone Pullman car behind the train engine, stood in our line of march.

I followed Sandison aboard, feeling tipped to one side by the unaccustomed gun in my coat pocket, even if it was the most decorous of firearms. He and I were the only passengers at that hour. As the train lurched into motion, I could contain the question no longer. “West is a long direction-where exactly do we get off?”

My traveling companion grumpily pawed at his whiskers as if herding the word out.

“Anaconda.”

“The company?”

“The town.”

IT TURNED OUT TO BE BOTH. A company town, Anaconda was as orderly and contained as Butte was sprawling and unruly. The train pulled in past boxy workers’ houses lined up in neat rows, along streets laid as straight as shelves. Sandison appeared to pay no heed to the town itself, gazing away into the valley beyond. At least, I thought as I looked out the window on that side of the train, it was a bright clear day for this. I happened to look out the other side, and the sky was clothed in heavy gray.

When the two of us climbed off at the trim crenellated depot, another chess piece of municipal order, the division in the sky over Anaconda was made plain. On a slope above the murky side of town could be seen the immense smelter for copper ore such as had accompanied us from Butte, and dominant over the smelting works stood a skyscraping smokestack, thickly built and hundreds of feet tall. The scene leapt from every accusatory line ever written about dark satanic mills-the smokestack like the devil’s forefinger, black fume trailing evilly as it pointed its challenge to heaven.

Dumbstruck as I was by this sight, only slowly did I register the other product of the smelter besides copper and smoke, a series of slag heaps surrounding the town like barren hills.

“That’s Anaconda for you,” Sandison growled. “Let’s get a move on.” So saying, he stalked off toward a livery stable across the tracks.

Now I was alarmed. A saddle horse is not my preferred mode of transportation. Of necessity, I had spent some time on horseback during my prairie teaching career, but no more than I had to. Sandison brayed to the stableman that we wanted genuine riding stock, not nags, and shortly I found myself holding the reins of a restless black horse with a bald face, named Midnight. When a rangy steel-gray steed was brought out for Sandison, he looked in disgust at the stirrups on the rented saddle and lengthened them six inches to account for his height. That done, despite his bulk he swung up onto the horse as easily as a boy and waited impatiently for me to hoist onto mine.

“Going to be a blisterer out in the valley. Here.” He tossed me a canvas water bag to tie to my saddle and spurred his horse into motion, leaving Midnight and me to catch up.

We managed to do so at the edge of town, past one last ugly dark slag heap where children ran up and down. With the cries of their playing fading behind us, the horseback pair of us cantered into another existence entirely, a sudden savannah-like landscape that seemed to exhale in relief at leaving the pall of Anaconda behind.

The valley extending before us was a classic oval of geography, broad and perfect as a French painting. Rimmed by mountains substantial enough to shoulder snow year-round, the valley floor was uninterrupted except for a few distant settlements strung out near a willowed river like memory beads on a thong. Gazing wide-eyed at the breadth of landscape-truly, here a person was a fleck on the sea of ground-I said something about this startling amount of open country so near the industrial confines of Butte and Anaconda.