“Who?” Sandison eyed me. “You? You mean you can handle books that don’t have mile-long words in them?”
“Assuredly.”
“Are you telling me you’re a certified accountant?”
“Mmm, certified perhaps is too confining a term. As you might imagine, standards are different from here to there. But along the way in life, I’ve had considerable experience with ledgers.”
Sandison dropped into his desk chair, his weight sending it wheeling toward me. “Morgan? You just said you’re not an accountant. What the hell then do you do with these ledgers you’re talking about?”
“Oh, mend them. From the inside out.” From his furrowed look, I could tell Sandison was not satisfied with that reply. “Let me put it this way, Sandy. Numbers are simply a language I happen to understand-Latin, numeracy, both have certain principles, fundamental in themselves. Surely you know the story of the bookkeeper and the desk drawer? No? Allow me. Every morning, a certain bookkeeper would come into the office of the firm, hang up his hat and coat, seat himself at his desk, pull out a drawer and look in it for a few seconds, shut it, and only then turn to his work. For forty years this went on-the same drawer, opened and shut, every morning. Finally came the day he retired, and the minute he left the office for the last time, the rest of the office staff crowded around his desk and one of them slowly opened that drawer. In it was a single sheet of paper. On it was written: ‘Debits go on the left, credits on the right.’ ”
Sandison did not find my little tale as entertaining as I had hoped. “The long and short of it is,” came his rumble, “you claim you know how to balance the books.”
I nodded. “To the last penny, if it comes to that.”
He sat there and frowned for some time. He could be intent as a fiend when he was mulling a matter. “All right,” he grudgingly granted at last, “you probably can’t make any more mess of the arithmetic than I have. You’re in charge of the damn bookkeeping. Come over here and start getting acquainted with the ledgers.”
I walked on air back to the boardinghouse at the end of that day. The one fundamental principle of bookkeeping that had always stood out to me was that if you know how and where the money flows, you are hard to get rid of.
6
Live it up while you can, Mister Man About Town,
Because what you gonna do when the rent comes roun’?
Whistling it softly to myself, I contradicted the catchy popular tune by counting out my rent money as usual, that subsequent week, as I came down a few minutes early for supper. Grace was not there to take it. The table was not yet set. This was a new experience; generally the Faraday Boarding House ran like a seven-day clock.
I peeked in the kitchen, to find supper uncooked but Grace steaming.
“Make yourself useful, please,” she said testily, bent low to the opened oven. “Yell up to the others that supper will be a while yet. This bird refuses to get done.”
In double defiance-pale and dry-the latest turkey lay there in the roaster, and after calling upstairs to Hoop and Griff to hold on to their appetites, I returned to the kitchen, rolling up my sleeves. “If I might suggest, it is time to baste the beast.”
“Baste,” Grace said, with a fry cook’s doubtfulness.
“Allow me.” Crouching where she had been, I spooned the turkey’s drippings over the breast and drumsticks, then stoked up the kitchen stove with a couple of pitchy sticks of wood. “There, now, the meal has no choice but to cook.”
No sooner had I said so than the floor did a little dance. Silver-ware jingled, and Grace steadied a cream pitcher. After a moment, she dismissed the latest shake of everything. “That could have been worse.”
“Grace,” I let out along with my breath, “I will gladly take your word for that.” I doubted I could ever get used to dynamite going off beneath the house.
Pushing a rather fetching flaxen wisp of hair off her forehead, she studied me as if I was the newest distraction. “Sit down for a minute, star boarder. There’s something we need to talk about.”
I went still. Was I in for another grilling about whether I was an IWW secret operative? What was I supposed to do, march around Butte wearing a sandwich board that read I AM NOT A WOBBLY?
“If it’s about an unfortunate event in the library a while back,” I fended as I settled across the kitchen table from her, “that was sheerly a case of mistaken-”
“It’s church,” she announced, rolling her eyes. “There’s talk. About us. ‘Ye and me,’ ” and she did not a bad imitation of the wee Welsh preacher. Griff had been asked to fill in with the choir a few more times, and the two of us and Hoop duly had made command performances as audience. What was wrong with that? Answering my inquiring look, Grace fanned with a hand as if brushing away pests. “What some of the nosy ones around the neighborhood are saying is”-she reddened at the exact words-“I’m taking up with a boarder. The old biddies.”
Gossip, forever the whisper in the wind. “Mmm,” I met Grace’s report with uncertainty.
“Morrie?” Her violet eyes took in mine, a test that wouldn’t go away. “Do you feel, um, taken up with?”
“I am about to fork over my week’s rent,” I said, unsure of how much honesty beyond that was a good idea just then. “That tends to put matters in a certain perspective.”
Carefully folding my money away into her apron pocket, she allowed: “It does, doesn’t it.” Still hesitant, she went on: “There’s the matter of appearances, though. A boardinghouse has to be extra careful not to be lumped in with-” She gestured off toward the fleshly neighborhood of Venus Alley.
Now Grace looked at me, but not quite straight at me. “So you know what this means. I’m sorry, but-”
I waited, dreading the prospect of trying to find any other lodging in Butte as cozy as this.
“-you’ll have to go to church just with Hoop,” she finished off her decree. Then bounced up to take out the perfectly roasted turkey.
REPRIEVED AT THE BOARDINGHOUSE, I could now busy myself learning the ins and outs of the library’s finances. Sandison’s style of bookkeeping had been what might be called extemporaneous, with occasional casual entries of Miscellaneous book purchases followed by sums that might well make a library trustee gulp. Trying to untangle his method, if that’s what it was, I finally spotted in the ledger pages of staff wages and hours his hole card, so to speak. Me. Counting up, I could see there was not quite as much staff as was budgeted for-always a position or two short-and he covered those gaps in service, and doubtless put what would have been the wages into that bland expenditure on books, by shuttling employees from job to job during the course of a day. That works until, say, the board of trustees’ president’s wife is kept waiting at the temporarily vacant genealogy desk. My arrival plugged a lot of slots. Shunting me from task to task as Sandison did took those burdens off the other staffers; on a ranch I believe I would have been called the choreboy. I didn’t mind; variety has always been more to my taste than its opposite. I even was growing fond of the diverse evening groups, catching the end of the discussion those nights when it fell to me to go back to the library and close up, enjoying the verbal volleying about Hamlet’s nervous condition or Wilson’s strategy at the Paris peace conference. (However, I prudently waited for the Gilbert and Sullivan clan to vacate entirely before I tended to the music stands, lest Dora Sandison pounce on me with some other demand.) And on a more daily basis, when needed at a desk, I happily stepped into that role of librarian as bartender of information. Presiding over shelves of intoxicating items, dispensing whatever brand of knowledge was ordered up, I am sure I poured generously. At least Sandison must have thought so, the morning he told me to get downstairs and fill in for Miss Runyon at the Reading Room main desk as she made her grand descent to prepare for story hour.