Description
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…………