Work Song - Ivan Doig [100]
“Add it all to your brainbox, Morgan.”
12
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