Every night I ate dinner at the hotel, and my waiter was a man whose ancestors had come to Centennial with the building of the railroad in the 1880s and had lingered. When Nate Person gave me a haircut he told me that an ancestor of his had come north from Texas with the cattle drives and had lingered. Manolo Marquez had a father who had come north from Chihuahua to work sugar beets and he too had lingered, and it occurred to me that unlike Garvey, Georgia, where my ancestors had lived for three hundred years, everyone in Centennial had arrived within the last hundred and twenty years—just drifting through—and all had lingered.
I was much taken with the town. I had a good time with Marquez and Nate Person. I liked Paul Garrett immensely and wanted to know more about him. And the setting, with that incredible Platte River dominating everything, was much to my taste. What deterred me, then, from telephoning James Ringold and saying, ‘I’ll take the job’?
Vanity. As simple as that. I hated to play second fiddle, anonymously, to someone else, especially a beginning scholar much younger than myself. I suppose the fact that she was a girl added to my resentment, but in an age of Women’s Lib, I was not about to admit that. I feared the whole project was undignified and a potential threat to my professional reputation. I was therefore prepared to inform New York that I could not accept, when I took one last walk Friday afternoon. I was reflecting on the fact that during my visit to Centennial, I had met a black, a Mexican and many Caucasians, but not one Indian. I considered that symbolic of today’s west.
I walked idly through North Bottoms in order to catch a better understanding of how Central Beet and Brumbaugh Feed Lots interrelated, when I saw ahead of me a lone workman operating a back-hoe in the extreme elbow of Beaver Creek, and I went over to ask him what he was doing.
‘Gonna build a bridge over the creek. So’s the beet trucks from the west can enter the plant easier.’
As I watched him gouging the back-hoe into the soft earth, I became aware of a third man who had joined us. He introduced himself as Morgan Wendell, director of Wendell Real Estate, ‘Slap Your Brand on a Hunk of Land.’ He had left his offices, walked across Mountain and come through the North Bottoms to stand not far from me. I could not imagine why the digging of foundations for a bridge abutment should have concerned him, but he was obviously perturbed, and for good reason, apparently, for just as he took his place by me, the swinging arm of the back-hoe slammed down into the soft earth with extra force, hit rock and fell into a hole. It required considerable dexterity for the operator to manipulate his machine out of this difficulty, but he succeeded. I watched the maneuvering with interest; Morgan Wendell watched with horror.
When the back-hoe was again free, the driver climbed down to inspect what had trapped him. I too moved forward to peer into the hole. But Morgan Wendell elbowed us both aside and took command.
‘You’d better quit work at this spot,’ he told the operator. ‘Sink hole or something. Work on the other side.’
‘They told me to work here,’ the man said.
‘I’m telling you to work over there.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Morgan Wendell. I own the land on this side.’
‘Oh!’ He shrugged his shoulders, cranked up his machine and drove it ponderously along the creek to Mountain, crossing over to the eastern side.
As soon as he was gone, Morgan Wendell looked at me and said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and he began edging me away from the hole. I showed no inclination to go, whereupon a very firm hand gripped my arm and led me back toward town. I decided that prudence required my acquiescence, for Morgan Wendell was a tall, heavy-set man who weighed a good deal more than I and had a much longer reach.
When we got to First Street, just opposite Wendell Place, the old headquarters of the family, I said, as casually as I could, ‘Well, I’ll have some chili at Flor de Méjico.’
‘It’s good there,’ he said.
When I left him, keeping my glance carefully ahead but watching as much as I could out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rush back to the exposed hole and climb in. He was there for some time, perhaps fifteen minutes, after which he climbed out carrying something wrapped in his coat. He walked south along the bank of Beaver Creek, crossed the highway and went into his office building.
As soon as he was out of sight I ran to the opening, climbed down and found myself inside a cave, not large but very secure … until the back-hoe punctured the roof. It had been formed, I judged, by the action of water on soft limestone and must have been very old. Along the western side there was a small bench, not formed by man yet appearing almost to have been made as a piece of built-in furniture. At the far end of this bench lay an item which Morgan Wendell had apparently overlooked: a small bone, which I suspected was human.
I placed it in my pocket and climbed out of the little cave. I was none too soon, for the back-hoe operator, who was then on the other side of the creek, was now directed by Morgan Wendell to bring his lumbering machine back to the western side, come up the creek bank and begin filling in the cave and tamping it down with his machine. When he had finished, Wendell inspected the job and satisfied himself that no one would be likely to detect that a long-lost cave had been accidentally laid bare that afternoon.
I returned to my room at the Railway Arms and put in a person-to-person call to James Ringold at US: ‘This is Vernor. I’ll take the job.’ I heard him call out to Leeds and Wright: ‘Get Carol. Good news.’
I said, ‘But I’ll have to do the work my way.’
‘Wouldn’t want you to do it any other way.’
‘My first reports may go a little deeper than you intended,’ I warned.
‘It’s your ideas we want.’
‘But I’ll get it done by Christmas.’
‘Jingle bells, jingle bells’ sounded over the telephone—three male voices, joined later by a soprano. It would be an interesting time till Christmas.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 72
