Читать книгу Improbable Fortunes - Jeffrey Price - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

Native Son

According to town lore, Buster McCaffrey was born on New Year’s Day. His mother, a slight nineteen-year-old Mormon girl from Monticello, Utah, left her folks to run off with a Jack Mormon—one who had lapsed in his faith and broken from the church. McCaffrey père was said to have worked for the Atomic Mines Corporation. This was 1987 and by then the mine was over forty-five years old—requiring the miners to go down two thousand feet to work a seam. Sheriff Dudival was never able to gather a complete picture of the man. Some said he claimed to have worked at the famous Eldorado uranium mine in Canada. Because of this experience, management put him on a jackleg percussion drill. A co-worker vaguely remembered a guy named Tom McCaffrey as a complainer, that he hadn’t been on the job more than a week before he started saying the mine tunnels were narrower than what he was used to up in Canada—and the place was giving him claustrophobia. One of the muckers—the people assigned to slushing the blasted rock and ore from the stopes and bringing them up the chutes to the main haulage-way—remembered a new guy, he believed his name was McCaffrey, being assigned to a miniature diesel bulldozer—six feet long and four feet wide. The muckers were paid less than drillers, but on the bright side, they got to sit on their asses all day. One of the old timers said he recalled a story about a guy—was it McCaffrey?—asleep on his dozer, not fifty feet from where the blasting crew put a charge of Tovex in the hole. After the blast, this fellow, McCaffrey, had the brass to tell the supervisor that fumes from his diesel had stultified him. He blamed the Atomic Mines Corporation’s lack of proper ventilation, once again citing the Eldorado Mine in Canada as the paragon of mining procedure. Management asked Sheriff Dudival to run a background check on him. When it came back, Sheriff Dudival said that McCaffrey wasn’t who he said he was. There had never been a McCaffrey on the payroll at the Eldorado Mine in Canada and his Social didn’t match. Concerned that he might be a troublemaker or a rank malingerer angling for a free ride on Workmen’s Comp, the Atomic Mines people instructed Sheriff Dudival to escort him off the property.

Dudival recorded in his journal that he waited for him at the main gate the next morning, but McCaffrey never turned up for work. He learned that McCaffrey and his wife had bought a little piece of land up on Lame Horse Mesa—this was when you could still get it for cow pies—and headed over there to tell him he was fired for falsifying his application.

He found the McCaffreys living in an abandoned sheepherder’s wagon. Sheriff Dudival knocked on the tiny, rickety door. This missus came out and said McCaffrey was gone.

“Where did he go?”

“Didn’t they tell you?” she said, tearing up.

According to Sheriff Dudival, Mrs. McCaffrey broke down and said that her husband had come home from work the day before with bad news. There had been an accident at the mine. He had been exposed to a deadly level of radiation.

She said the doctor at the mine gave her husband one week to live. Even worse, he said there was a 90-percent chance he would contaminate their unborn child if he were to stay with them—in as close quarters as theirs. She suggested that they move, and get a second doctor’s opinion, but he wouldn’t hear of it. There was no time, or money. No, the only thing for him to do, in everyone’s best interest, was to leave. Were any of the other men exposed as he was? No, he said. But then, none of the other men had stood up to the Corporation and complained about the unsafe mining conditions, either. Had management tried to kill him? Who knows? I’m dead anyway, he answered. He asked that she put a change of his clothes in his rucksack and hand it to him through the window with some of the money from the coffee can. With much hand wringing and tears, off he went to die at the Miners’ Hospice in Grand Junction.

After telling the tragedy to Sheriff Dudival, she apologized for not offering him a cup of tea or coffee and asked why he had driven all the way out there. Dudival was momentarily flummoxed. There was no use, at this point, telling her that her husband had been fired. He excused himself saying that there was something in the patrol car that Atomic had asked that he give her. Sheriff Dudival had just been to the First Bank of Vanadium exchanging parking meter coins for paper money. He put the bills in a plain envelope and wrote “Atomic Mine—McCaffrey” on the front of it.

“He left without collecting this,” he said. “Good luck to you, little lady.”

He handed over the money and left.

The night the baby came, the Mormon girl was alone. Even if there had been a phone in the creaky sheepherder’s wagon, there was no one she knew to call.

Confident from her experience as midwife to countless kittens and cattle born on her parents’ Utah farm, she went into labor at four in the afternoon. Calmly, she boiled some water and prepared clean rags for swaddling. Things went smoothly at first. She dilated. Buster’s head began to appear, albeit painfully. From the mother’s perspective, the baby’s skull was as large as a Hopi dancing gourd, and his shoulders were as broad as the front quarters of a spring lamb. She bore down. She squatted. She used imagery—pretending he was a stubborn piece of sourdough that needed rolling out with a rolling pin. Dithered, she even tried pulling him out by his ears. But he was just too big—a “buster,” as it were. Six long hours later, labor ground to a halt, with the baby hanging halfway out. To complicate matters, a storm had moved in and had blown four-foot snowdrifts across the mesa. Buster’s mother decided to go for help. She put on her overcoat and headed for the highway walking bow-legged through the snow, with Buster hanging upside-down from her body, swinging between her legs like the clapper of a church bell.

Fortunately, Buster’s mother was young and strong enough to plow through the snow and climb three barbed-wire fences. There had been much conjecture in later years as to whether this had a bearing on Buster’s lagging mental development. Being introduced to the world upside down for such an extended amount of time must have had an adverse effect on him, everyone said—not least because of the life-long scar that ran along the medial section of his skull, from when mama didn’t quite clear that last barbed wire fence at the highway.

It was the cowboy, Jimmy Bayles Morgan, the only one in town sober on New Year’s Eve, who stopped to help her. Vanadium’s sole doctor had recently had his medical license revoked. The closest hospital was one hundred and twenty miles away. The mother had lost too much blood already, and there was no time to be delicate about it. Jimmy was forced to make a decision that even a doctor would have been reluctant to make. In the back of his pickup were chains for delivering breach-birthed colts. And so, Buster McCaffrey was yanked roughly into this world, and his mother left it less than an hour later. That’s how the sheriff recorded it in his journal. Jimmy, not knowing what else to do with this gigantic baby, wrapped him in a horse blanket and drove him and the body of the dead mother to the only place that was open that night, the sheriff’s office.

Sheriff Dudival called Janet Poult and told her to get down to the jail immediately to do some emergency nursing. She had just had her fourth child. Her breasts were huge and still filled with milk. So much did she lactate that the sheriff’s Half ‘n’ Half and Dr. Peppers were forced off the shelves of the office refrigerator and replaced with Ball jars filled with her breast-pumped over-production. Before long, Dudival was able to track down Buster’s mother’s family but they’d wanted no part of him. His mother had been shunned. To her kin, she no longer existed; therefore, Buster didn’t exist, either. That’s how the sheriff recorded it. The only thing left was to give the girl a proper burial. The county paid for the service and named Buster a ward of the court.

Jimmy Bayles Morgan wanted to keep him for his own, but the Women’s League of Vanadium would not hear of it. Buster was no stray calf, dog, or crippled chipmunk that had limped into cow camp. He was a human being, they said, and more importantly a Christian—despite his dubious pedigree. Besides, Jimmy Bayles Morgan was a rough character and a blasphemer to boot. And so, the town set out to find Buster a good Christian home.