Centennial

by James A. Michener

  The posse rode east till they came to Calendar’s beleaguered sheep wagon, where they found the sinewy Texan bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, a Sharps buffalo gun in his hands, and one dead Kansas gunslinger on the rise overlooking the draw.

  “How did your son get through?” Dumire asked.

  “He rode,” Calendar grunted, and Dumire could visualize the cautious preparation, the sneaking through darkness, the sudden lift onto the horse and the mad dash across the prairie.

  “Where are the gunmen?” he asked Calendar. “Follow their blood. I winged one in the leg.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “West. Tryin’ to catch a train and get out of here.”

  Dumire led the posse back toward Centennial, and they entered town just in time to intercept the two killers, who had planned to catch the afternoon train to Denver. They had abandoned their horses and were hiding near the railway station when the posse arrived. As soon as Dumire and his men appeared, Philip leaped into the middle of the street, shouting, “They’re behind that store!”

  Without hesitation Dumire spurred his horse and rode right at the two bandits. Bullets flew at him, but he kept going and gunned down the bandit with the wounded leg. The other escaped.

  Now a manhunt occupied the town, and citizens with guns stalked warily down one street after another. Finally, at the intersection of Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, up toward Zendt’s store, Philip spotted the fugitive, and as he did so he saw with horror that Sheriff Dumire was walking blindly into a trap. Two more steps and the bandit would have a target he couldn’t miss. Indeed, he was already leveling his gun.

  For one moment Philip hesitated. If Dumire were to die, the secret of Soren Sorenson would die with him, for no one else in town had shared in the sheriff’s guesses. If he were dead, there would be peace, and the Wendells could slowly start to spend their bundle of bills. But it was unthinkable that Dumire should die.

  “Sher-iff!” the boy screamed with all the force he could command. Dumire jumped back and began firing. He killed the outlaw, but in doing so, took a fearful blast, which shattered his chest.

  For three days the town of Centennial awaited news from the hospital. The citizens knew that Axel Dumire had represented a strong force for good in their town, and with this final elimination of the Pettis gang, they could hope that the peace this region deserved had finally arrived.

  On Friday prayers were said, and Reverend Holly, his voice shaking, announced that for the closing of his service he had asked the Wendells to sing once more that divine song of hope. “For there is hope,” he said. “As long as God loves just men, there is hope.”

  So the Wendells took their accustomed places beside the piano and their sweet voices united in that anthem of countryside hope. Never did they sing better, but toward the end, when Philip was singing the arabesques his parents had invented for him, his soprano voice broke, as if manhood were approaching, and he pressed his hands against his face so that people in the front rows could not see that he was crying, and he prayed, “God, don’t let him die.”

  That night Sheriff Dumire told the doctor he wanted to see young Philip, so a deputy was sent to the Wendell house, and Mervin asked with intense excitement, “Is he dead?” and the deputy said, “He ain’t got long. He wants to see your son,” and as the boy left the house, his mother stepped before him and gripped his hand and would have spoken to him or kissed him, but he needed no strengthening from her. Breaking away, he ran to the hospital.

  There, in a small room lay Axel Dumire, attended by two nurses and a doctor. He indicated that he wanted them to leave, then said hoarsely, “Philip, I’m dying ... where did you hide the body?”

  The boy stared at him in the old, innocent way, and the sheriff became angry. “It can’t hurt anybody now, goddamnit. Where did you hide it?”

  The doctor, hearing the loud voice, came back in, but Dumire motioned that he was all right, and again they were alone. “I have a right to know,” he pleaded. “It’s my job.” Philip said nothing.

  Now a strange light of memory came into the dying man’s eyes. “By God, I remember!” he cried weakly. “That day ... You were swimming in Beaver Creek. Alone. You must have found something ... a hiding place ...”

  Philip stared down at the sheriff as the latter fought back a strangling cough. He saw Dumire’s body wrench in pain as he tried to hold the ends of life together for a few crucial minutes. “It had to be in the creek!” Dumire said in a low whisper. His eyes grew bright as he put together the final pieces of the puzzle. “You lugged the body from the well to the bank of the stream. You were too smart just to weight it down and throw it in, because you knew I’d drag for it. But somewhere ... a place that no one else would know ... maybe in the bank ...”

  The sorrow Philip felt for the dying man as he wrestled with death and truth drained blood from his face, and when Dumire saw that ashen countenance, he recalled the frightened boy he had seen on the bridge: “That day we were dragging the stream! You grew terrified when you saw me so close to the bank. Philip, I know where the body is!”

  He uttered these words triumphantly, for at last all pieces fitted together. “You don’t have to speak, son.” Never before had he called Philip that. “You don’t have to betray anyone. Just nod if I’m right ... tell me ... tell me ...” His pleas became an imploring moan which brought the doctor and nurses into the room.

  They found Dumire dead, and clutching his hand, a young boy with golden hair, sobbing.

  From the moment of Dumire’s death, the fortunes of the Wendell family improved dramatically. Mervin’s full-time job led to a promotion. Maude’s doing laundry and mending in turn led to dressmaking and a solid acquaintance with the better families of the region, and Philip’s reliability in doing odd jobs opened the path to friendship with the high school principal and, ultimately, a scholarship to the university.

  Better yet, with Dumire gone, no one was left who could link the Wendells with the disappearance of Soren Sorenson, and with that basic fear removed, Mervin was free to start feeding into the economy the bundles of bills he had acquired in the small black bag. He did so with circumspection, a five this week, a ten next month, and the amounts were so restrained that they seemed in no way out of line with what the family was earning.

  Best of all, at the bottom of Sorenson’s bag of money Mervin had found a letter which the Swede had obviously intended mailing to his wife:

  A wise choice might be a small irrigated farm near Centennial plus about five thousand acres of drylands, on the chance that one of these days we’ll learn how to grow wheat on it. I’m convinced it can be done. So I’m thinking seriously of buying the Karpitz place north of town, with its forty irrigated acres, for about three thousand dollars. Then pick up all the drylands we need for twenty-five cents an acre.

  Before burning the letter, a prudent move, Mervin copied down the relevant data, and after Sheriff Dumire was safely buried he rode north to talk with Adam Karpitz, and found him eager to sell. Mervin himself was no judge of land, but he felt safe in relying on Sorenson’s conclusions as to its potential and his recommendations as to price.

  Mervin’s original offer was so low that Karpitz laughed, but gradually the two reached an agreement, but before closing it Mervin consulted with Reverend Holly, asking him, “You know values around here. Is Karpitz asking a fair price?”

  Holly studied the figures and said, “I’d be glad to buy it at that price myself ... if I had the money.”

  “I don’t have the money either,” Mervin said. “But I’m thinking of applying to the bank for a mortgage.”

  “Anyone in town would be willing to go your mortgage, Mervin. Few men have made the impression on Centennial you have. Your church work and all.” And it was then Reverend Holly gave Wendell the idea that got him fairly started. “Why bother with the bank? Why don’t you see if Karpitz himself would carry the loan? At less interest.”

  So he went back to Karpitz and propositi
oned him, and the farmer said, “I like you, Wendell, did from the first time I heard you sing in church. How much can you put down?”

  Mervin named a conservative figure, and Karpitz said, “Too low. Tell you what, I’d like to keep the farm till about this time next year. That gives you one year to come up with one thousand dollars more. Beg, borrow or steal, anything but commit murder.” The two men laughed, and Mervin let it be known around town that his family was engaged in the task of saving a thousand dollars to use as down payment on the Karpitz place, and when people heard this, it was amazing how many openings the family encountered. Each day for eleven months they worked overtime, and the whole community followed the progress of their savings.

  Every Wednesday night they met at the Union Church and listened to Reverend Holly, whose faith in them had got them started. And frequently he asked them to sing the old favorite, because as he said, “A family is always entitled to hope.”

  The rendition was somewhat different now, because only Maude and Mervin sang, and wonderful as they were, with their voices sliding up and down the scale, the obbligato of young Philip was missed. There were many inquiries as to why he did not sing; the real explanation was that he had warned his parents the night after Sheriff Dumire’s funeral, “I’m not going to sing high any more.”

  Mervin told the congregation, on the side, “You know how it is when voices change. He’s beginning to be a little man.”

  CAUTION TO US EDITORS: The laws of libel or a sense of propriety may keep you from using this story. That’s up to you. I will affirm that it is correct, even to what might seem the most intimate details. How could I have uncovered such a macabre tale? Two days after I delivered Miss Endermann to the plane in Denver, I stumbled onto the cave in which the body had been buried eighty-five years earlier. I watched Morgan Wendell rush down to it when it was accidentally uncovered, and later took from it what I judged to be a human bone. During my subsequent work in Centennial, I heard various rumors about the Wendell antecedents and did some investigating in Denver on the theatrical couple who brought the family to Colorado originally. I became very much like Axel Dumire, piecing small bits together, and when I had a fairly complete dossier I went to see Morgan Wendell, with whom I had struck up an amiable but casual acquaintance. Placing my findings before him, I watched as he nearly fainted. First he thought I was trying to blackmail him at a crucial time in his political career; remember that this was early October of an election year. When I assured him that that was not my purpose, he assumed that you had sent me out to do a hatchet job on him for your November issue, which would hit the stands just prior to election day. After explaining what lead time was on a magazine, I convinced him that nothing I uncovered could possibly be printed till two months after the election. When he was satisfied on this point, he collapsed into a chair, poured himself one hell of a whiskey and talked to me for three hours. I did not have a tape recorder, but I took copious notes, none of which would be accurate enough to defend you in a libel case, should you decide to break the story. The important thing he said was this: “My father, Philip Wendell, who was responsible for our family fortune, was a man with ice water in his veins. I never saw him flustered, never heard him raise his voice, never knew him to be diverted from the main topic at hand. He was almost brutally honest and a master of understatement. I thought he had no feelings, but when his final illness overtook him in 1951 he became extremely talkative, and for five days during a December blizzard he insisted upon telling me, only me in a wintry room, about his days with the traveling troupe, of the crime his family had committed and of the one really great man he had known, a small-town sheriff named Axel Dumire.”

  Theater. If you illustrate this chapter or one like it, do not be misled by the grubbiness of the Maude and Mervin Wendell Theatrical Troupe. Since Centennial was on the main railroad from Omaha to Denver, it had a rich opportunity to see in its small theater most of the great actors and actresses of that day. In the 1889 seasons Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, Helena Modjeska, Edwin Booth and Thomas Keene played there. Nine different Shakespeare dramas were offered, including four starring Booth, but the artistic gem of the period was the Divine Sarah in Camille. Of it the critic from the Clarion said:

  Bernhardt faded away like a delicate flower afflicted by some deadly blight, exhaling a radiant fragrance to the last. Some deaths in the theater are beautiful in their gradual dissolution. Others come like the soft approach of a summer evening. But there is no death so sublime and moving as that which claims this ever-hopeful consumptive.

  Shortly after the dissolution of the Wendell Troupe, Centennial was visited by the Italian Opera Company, with a full repertoire and three stars of the first magnitude: Adelina Patti, Madame Albani, Francesco Tamagno. Greatest acclaim, however, was reserved for that perennial play The Count of Monte Cristo, featuring James O’Neill, heavy-drinking father of the future playwright.

  Chapter 12

  CENTRAL BEET

  The trouble with sugar beets, a man could never find anyone to do the thinning.

  For example, Potato Brumbaugh had learned that it was prudent to deep-plow his fields in late October, so that winter snow would water them and winter freezing aerate the compact soil and break up the clods. In March a brisk sequence of disk, harrow and drag would have the land moist, firm, level and ready to seed. And at this point the job looked easy.

  Unfortunately, the seed of the beet was both small and unreliable. It would have been all right if Brumbaugh could plant one seed here and another twelve inches down the row, with a reasonable expectation that each would germinate and produce its one-pound beet, but that he could not depend upon, for the seeds were capricious; one would germinate properly and the very next one, alike in every outward aspect and nurtured in identical soil, would not.

  So on April 25, when the likelihood of frost had diminished, he had to plant his sugar beets the way a housewife plants radishes: he sowed the seed heavily along the whole length of his rows, using about twenty-four times as many seeds as he really needed. This heavy overplanting was necessary to offset high losses in germinating and the early death of weak plants that did germinate; insects, weather and carelessness could cause losses as high as seventy percent.

  On May 26, therefore, he had in his carefully tended rows not one plant every twelve inches, the way he wanted, but a continuous line of young plantlings, eight for every one he intended keeping. If all eight were allowed to mature, they would be so crowded that none would have space or food to produce a usable beet. So he had to do what the housewife did: take “a long-handled hoe and chop away seven out of every eight plants, leaving one strong plant to produce its beet.

  Blocking and thinning it was called, and tedious work it was, for it required a person to move slowly over the entire field, hour after hour, hacking away at the unwanted plants: No owner had the time to block his whole acreage by himself, for the job had to be done within a brief, specified period, lest the unwanted plants grow so tall that their roots would suck away the nutrition required by the one which had been selected to produce the beet.

  A lot of men and women with hoes were needed to block a field properly, and they had to be reliable, for they were required to work fast and to exercise judgment.

  “Some farmers block their plants ten inches apart,” Brumbaugh instructed the Italian immigrants who appeared by the trainload to work the beets, “but I like mine a little farther apart, about a foot. Keep this stick with you to show how far apart the plants should be.”

  The Italians were excellent workers, with a sense of soil and a quick comprehension of what Brumbaugh wanted. They understood when he said, “I’ve been chopping beets so long, I can hack out the unwanted ones with one swipe of the hoe. More better you use two chops ... like this.”

  The Italians worked well, but wouldn’t stay on the job. They didn’t like transient work or the loneliness of sugar-beet plantations. Time and again a fine crew would spend one spring with Brumba
ugh, but come late summer they would hear about the steel mills down in Pueblo and off they would go for work where they could have their own little house in an Italian community with its priest and a good restaurant, and the sugar beets would see them no more.

  “Giuseppe,” Brumbaugh pleaded with the head of one family, “why can’t you stay north with me?”

  “Ah, I like to be with the others. Some singing. A priest you can rely on. No, I’m going to Pueblo.” And off he went, leaving Brumbaugh with no one to block his beets, or thin them, or pull and top them at harvest.

  German immigrants were arriving in New York about this time, so the beet farmers around Centennial paid the train fare for sixty families, and they were some of the best help Brumbaugh ever had. He enjoyed talking with them in German, even if they did laugh at his Russian pronunciation, but they posed a serious problem: they loved the land, and within two years of arriving at the Brumbaugh farm, they wanted land of their own, and left to grow their own beets.

  The next experiment had a more fortunate outcome ... at first. Brumbaugh, at his wits’ end, proposed to a group of his sugar-beet neighbors, “Why not the Russians? When I lived on the Volga they knew more about sugar beets than anyone.” So the community imported numerous German-Russian families—Emig, Krakel, Frobe, Stumpf, Lebsack, Giesinger, Wenzlaff—and when these sturdy men and women got off the train at Centennial they took one look at the spacious fields and knew intuitively that they had found a permanent home.