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you’re not really going to say—”
    â€œGriff and Hoop. They’re the only answer.”
    With difficulty I held my tongue from asking, “To what question?” Describing themselves as retired miners—“at least the tired part”—Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper had been fixtures at Grace’s boardinghouse when I alighted there new to Butte, bandy veterans of mine disasters and union struggles and other travails they could recite at Homeric length. It was true, as Grace now was pouring into my ear, that Griff was something of a handyman and Hoop was, well, constantly available; we had left them in charge of the boardinghouse during our honeymoon sojourn without too many qualms. The pair of them as house staff on Ajax Avenue, though? For one thing, they were getting so old they creaked. For another, as I protested to her, if they moved in here, who was going to mind the boardinghouse?
    â€œWe’ll have to close it until we get this place whipped, that’s all there is to it,” she said conclusively. “No boarder in his right mind is going to show up in Butte in the middle of winter anyway.”
    She raised on one elbow, her flaxen hair spilling to her shoulders as she gazed down at me.
    â€œThat leaves you, J. P. Morgan.”
    I matched her wavery smile with my own. “I don’t suppose it’s an honor I can decline, hmm?” We had counted on my old job at the library, which Sandison scotched. The void yawned distressingly large.
    The fact is, I do not take well to most forms of employment. The acid of boredom sets in insidiously and my mind finds other pursuits. Life among the blessed books of Butte aside, the one occupation I had found to give my head and heart to was teaching in a one-room school, in my first venture into Montana a dozen years before. Grace knew only the vaguest of that brief prairie episode of my life, and the question was what gainful work I could find, and stick to, in the here and now. Her first husband, who perished in Butte’s worst mining disaster, the 1917 Speculator fire, evidently had been a paragon of husbandly virtue, uninterruptedly employed, steady as a clock in most ways, right down the list except for an unfortunate habit of betting on greyhound races, the surest way to have one’s wages go to the dogs. Given that, I knew what a leap of faith and love it had been for her to risk life with me. Trying to sound as confident as a man can while flat on his back, I gazed up at her. “
Nil desperandum
, my dear. Never despair.”
    â€œHouse rules. English only, in the marital bed.”
    â€œWhat, you’ve never heard of Ovid?”
    â€œI’ll Oafid you, chatterbox,” she tickled me in the ribs. And with that, everything else could wait until morning.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    â€œBig.”
    â€œRighto.”
    â€œLots needs doing.”
    â€œNothing we can’t fix.”
    Hoop and Griff moved in as though tooling up to attack a rockface in the days when they were a flash team of drillers in many a mine, with a clatter and a magpie glitter of interest in what awaited. Squinting around at the expanse of the house as Hoop likewise was doing, Griff assured me, “Don’t worry none, Morrie. We’ll pitch in here and there and it’ll all add up, you’ll see.” His tool bag beside their battered suitcases there in the side hall struck me as somehow ominous, but I was in no position to turn down help of any sort. Grace had disappeared to the far reaches of kitchen and pantry, and Sandison had not yet made his appearance for the day. The snow-bright morning practically wreathed our new arrivals in wrinkles, Hoop and Griff having worked underground side by side for so many years and boarded together for so many more that they had grown to resemble each other, wizened and bent as apostrophes and nearly telegraphic in their talk. Mineral, vegetable,