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.
CHAPTER TWO
Adopted by the Dominguez Family
Buster’s mother was buried on a sunny January day at the Lone Cone Cemetery. The storm that caused her death was long gone. In fact, all the roadside snow had already melted, and it now looked as if the storm had never happened. Mrs. Poult brought Buster to say a final goodbye before showing him off to local prospects for adoption. Serving as Official Breast Feeder was beginning to show its wear and tear on poor Mrs. Poult. It was virtually impossible to get Buster to give up a sore nipple once he had clamped on. Mrs. Poult would be forced to pinch Buster’s nostrils together making him gag for air while she switched him off to the auxiliary. Once, when she had fallen asleep while nursing, she awoke to discover the breast that Buster had been suckling had been reduced to the size of a zucchini, while the other one was still the size of a 4-H winning eggplant.
After the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on his mother’s coffin, Buster was passed around to interested parties. Everyone agreed that he was a nicely behaved baby of sanguine temperament. Jimmy Morgan looked on grumpily as Edita Dominguez held Buster over her head and jiggled him until a long strand of drool ran from his mouth down onto the head of her eldest son, ten-year-old Cookie. From the expression on his face, one could gather that he was none too happy to acquire a new brother, although perhaps it was too soon—it had been only three months since his last baby brother suffocated mysteriously in his crib. Mrs. Dominguez, on the other hand, was thrilled to tears as she hugged Buster and looked entreatingly to the Vanadium Women’s League for approval. They gave it.
Mrs. Dominguez was a Cantante. The Cantantes were a famous Hispanic family who, some people said, lived in Vanadium before the Indians used the area as a respite from the brain-cooking heat of Sleeping Ute Mountain. When the whites came, the Cantantes were able to coexist peaceably with them because they had nothing the whites wanted. The Cantantes did not compete with them for grazing land, for they raised no cattle. Nor were they involved in the early contretemps between the cattlemen and the sheep men, for they herded no sheep. They already had a trade—one that had been passed down through generations. They were tile makers. Their work could still be found on every countertop and in every restroom in Vanadium. They manufactured their products at their ten-acre homestead and were particularly famous in tile circles for their “Negrita,” a small black octagon which received its distinctive lustrous ebony patina by way of a long-held family secret: the tiles were kilned under layers of sheep manure.
The Cantantes were the first Vanadians to keep books and have a bank account. During the Great Depression, they were the first to supply food and clothes to the needy, even to the Indians. The Cantantes were the first to use a lawyer instead of arson and firearms to resolve a business conflict, the first to suggest a tax to provide schooling for Vanadian children, and the first to suggest having a lawman who was responsible for keeping the peace in the town.
Edita Cantante was the first woman to be elected President of the Vanadian Rotary. She was also the head of the PTA and the Library Association. To their faces, the Cantantes were respected. But to their backs, Vanadians distrusted them. They were suspicious of their success and their ability to handle money. Some people said the Cantantes were Maranos—secret Jews hiding from the Spanish Inquisition—in spite of the fact that they wore conspicuous crucifixes and attended Catholic mass three times a week. That’s why the family always felt they had to try a little harder. They drew the line, however, with the first serious man to court their eldest daughter, Edita Theresa, Buster’s new mother.
Carlito Dominguez had
