Ivan Doig - Work Song

The old saying could not have been more right: my blood ran cold.

Had I gambled wrong, in coming with him to this desolate patch of earth? Was I about to be murdered, for knowing too much? The pistol stayed glued to me where it rode in my pocket; I realized, for once and all, that I could not bring myself to use it. Sandison’s stare had my fate in it, but I could not read those icy eyes. I tried to speak and couldn’t.

He stared at me that way long moments more, then his words came slowly.

“What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executioner? I made those dim-witted rustlers pay far too high a price.” He shook his head. “Cows are just cows.” Turning from me, he gazed at the gray old trees as if looking a long way back. His shoulders slumped. As I watched, the Earl of Hell was deposed, by himself.

After some moments, I found words.

“Section 37 is off the face of the earth.”

“That’s where I sent them, on a length of rope,” Sandison was speaking huskily. “Now you know why I brought you here, eh?”

I thought so, but said nothing, watching the same shrewd expression come over him as when he found a bargain in a rare books catalogue. “You’re a learned man,” he said in that husky tone, “you know a little something about how to read a life. But there’s always more. I know what they say about me behind my back, but they miss half the story.” One more time he shook his head. “ ‘The music of men’s lives’ isn’t as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks, you were right about that. Back then”-he pointed his beard to the cottonwood grove-“I let the money men call the tune on me and did more than any man should, to hold on to the best ranch in Montana. And then poison came out of the air and I lost the Triple S anyway.”

Now he looked hard at me, nodding as if making sure to himself. “It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf. You’ll remember this, fair and square, there’s that about you. Not like the ones who only gossip, which is almost everybody.” He set his face as if into a prevailing wind. “I goddamn well know I could turn Butte into a city of gold, and still the one thing I’ll take with me to my grave is the reputation for stringing people up.”

Monumental and weary, Samuel Sandison cast a last glance at the hanging tree, then turned away to where our horses stood. Over his shoulder, he said, as if we were back in the library:

“Add it all to your brainbox, Morgan.”

Night was coming on, with the streetlights of downtown Butte starting to glow golden and the mines of the Hill already lit like the mineral earth’s own constellation, when Sandison and I left the train.

He had said next to nothing during our journey back from Section 37. As ever, the beard masked more than just his jawline. Accordingly, there on the depot platform he turned to me and dispensed the day in the shortest manner possible: “That takes care of that.” His boot heels resounded on the planks as he traipsed off, leaving me with the parting sentiment: “Don’t be late for work in the morning, it’s a bad habit.”

I stood there for an extended moment, inhaling the chill air, simply to breathe free.

“Hsst! Over here, you!”

My nerves shot back up to high alarm, the threat of goons never absent. Fumbling for the pistol in my side pocket, I stopped when I got a full look at the figure speeding toward me from the depot waiting room. “Grace!”

In a sensible woolly wrap against the early October night, she still shivered as she drew up to me and stared after the monumental form of Sandison receding into the dusk. “If you hadn’t been on this train, I’d have gone to the police yelling bloody murder. Where on earth did that creature haul you off to?”

“It is not exactly on the map.”

Setting off together up the sloping street, I recounted the day to her as best I could, on edge as I was, and she listened the same way as we navigated the noisy neighborhood and reached the boardinghouse. The shared time of the previous night was still with us, but so was too much else and we were uncertain and awkward with each other. It didn’t help matters that Venus Alley, a mere block away, was filling the night with lusty laughter and more.

Paused at the door of our lodging, I glanced aside at Grace and could only come up with: “Thank you for watching out for me.”

“You seem to need it,” she replied with a small smile, shyly pocketing the pearl-handled gun I had handed back to her. “Besides, I hate to lose a boarder.”

“You’ll have this one again in the morning.” I gestured in the general direction of the library. “For now, though, I’m too wound up to go to bed-there’s something waiting for me I must tend to.”

“Good night, then, Morrie. Don’t let the bad dreams bite,” she said soberly.

I SWITCHED ON the mezzanine lights. The Reading Room below was as dark and hushed as the audience portion of a theater. Up onstage, so to speak, the books waited in titled ranks, and in their reassuring company I moved idly along the laden shelves, running the tips of my fingers over the exquisite spines, taking down an old loved volume every so often and opening it to the stored glory of words. Around me was the wealth of minds down through all of recorded time. The dramatic capacities of Shakespeare, as all-seeing in his foolscap scripts as in the sagacious portrait above the doorway to reading. The gallant confabulations of Cervantes, showing us the universal meaning of quixotic. The Russian army of impossible geniuses, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. Mark Twain, as fresh on the page as a comet inscribing the dark. Robert Louis Stevenson, master of tales goldenly told. (The twofold nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seemed a lot more convincing after being around Samuel Sandison.) And my ever-familiar exemplar of classic Latin and daring generalship, Caesar, in tanned leather and impeccable threading. These and the hundreds upon hundreds of others Rabrab and I had evaluated, insofar as mortals can, into the inventory. Valued treasures, in more ways than one.

In such company, you wonder about your own tale in the long book of life. What would they have made of me, these grandmasters of storytelling? Arriving out of nowhere to the richest of hills with the intention of filling my pockets from it, and all this time later, finding that the only thing that had paid off was the railroad, for my own trunk. Thrown together for a second time in life with an appealing widow, and for a second time gaining no ground there, either. Casting my lot with an unpredictable bibliophile who also turned out to be Montana’s leading vigilante. No matter how I looked at it, my story lacked conclusion.

Suddenly I knew what to do. Can inspiration come off on the fingers? I rubbed my hands together appreciatively, there among the literary classics. It was as if the risk-taking lifetimes of composition, the reckless romances with language, the tricky business of plots stealing onto pages, all the wiles of Samuel Sandison’s glorious books answered to my touch. There was no mistaking their message: sometimes you must set sail on the winds of chance.

Stroking a last row of embossed titles as I went, I turned off the mezzanine lights and made my way out of the darkened library. What I was about to attempt was a gamble, but that was nothing new in human experience. The first thing it required was a messenger who was not Russian Famine. I headed directly to the cigar store where Skinner hung out.