Centennial (123 page)

The first step would be the pamphlet, which Wendell would supervise. “No finer pen exists in the west than that of Miss Keller,” he assured Norris, “and we can depend on her to provide the facts. But the presentation of them ...” He felt that this required his special attention, and he began by requisitioning a railroad photographer to come to Centennial to take a series of bold, exciting pictures. The captions, similar to those in all railroad pamphlets of the time, told the story of irrigation:

Palatial home of Messmore Garrett, who runs sheep in the Centennial district.

Elegant home of Mervin Wendell, well-known agriculturist, who arrived in Centennial nine years ago penniless.

Imposing bank of Centennial, owned locally and the source of loans at low interest.

Hans Brumbaugh, immigrant from Russia. Observe the size of the squash he has grown on his irrigated land.

James Lloyd, who arrived from Texas without a penny, standing beside his herd of white-faced Herefords.

The pamphlet contained twenty-four photographs of palatial homes. thriving businesses and outsized vegetables. The last picture in the booklet showed Mervin Wendell’s fine office on First Avenue facing the railway station.

The strange thing about this pamphlet was that it contained no hyperbole. The palatial homes shown had been built by men who arrived on the scene with no money. The crops of the farmers were exactly as pictured. And any hard-working newcomer who bought irrigated land in the years from 1896 through 1910 acquired a bargain whose value would multiply with the years. This was bonanza time, when the last of the great irrigation ditches were being dug, when desert land was being made to blossom.

Mervin Wendell’s real estate business flourished. Using Union Pacific funds at first, then reinvesting his substantial profits, he patiently acquired for himself a collection of the choicest acres. Whenever a new area was opened up, and the railroad delivered fifty or a hundred eager buyers, he sold off the poorest land first and managed by careful investment to hold back the best for himself.

He now owned not only the Karpitz farm, which had been his first purchase, but also some four thousand additional acres, not all of them irrigated, to be sure, but all of them capable of producing some kind of crop. He became, indeed, the largest landowner in the district, if one counted only cropland, and if his fields received enough rainfall, he would soon be the richest.

The “elegant home of Mervin Wendell” was not a new structure. He had taken the place won from Gribben in the badger game, and imposed upon it a new façade, a wine to the north, a new porch, new cement walks and a bright new iron fence. Its size had been doubled and it was, as the photograph claimed, elegant.

The citizens of Centennial took pride in the way the Wendells had handled themselves. Starting with practically nothing, this engaging couple had worked in the community, had helped others and had been exemplary citizens. Apart from the renovation. they did not spend money conspicuously. “Every nickel that man earns he puts into land,” the admiring banker reported. Long before the Union Pacific arrived with its plan for a real estate operation, Mervin Wendell had acquired enough land to launch one of his own.

As Maude Wendell grew older, she grew more gracious. As an actress heading her own company, she had always had a flair for clothes and a dignified manner, but now, with middle-class stability, she blossomed and became the social leader of the community. She exerted this leadership not by virtue of her income, which was becoming substantial, but because she was a relaxed woman with a sincere interest in the community and what it wished to accomplish. Dinner at the Wendells’ became the highlight of any week, and the
Clarion
duly noted the sedate but delightful entertainments given there.

Few of the leaders of our intellectual and social community were absent on Thursday night when Maude and Mervin Wendell entertained at their refurbished home on First Street. The sideboards groaned with refreshments hastened in by train from Chicago and California. One saw on the library table the latest magazines from New York and even one from London. A string quartet from the college at Greeley played Mozart, but as always when this gracious couple entertains, the highlight of the evening came when they were persuaded to give their delightful rendition of
“
Listen to the Mockingbird.
”
This reporter never heard a finer whistler than Maude. She brings distinction to this community. They closed the evening by demand with the duet which has become their trademark,
“
Whispering Hope.
”

The reporter did not share with his readers the one contretemps of the evening. Some guests, recalling the old days, wanted young Philip Wendell to join his parents in the duets, but he refused. They then asked him to play the violin, but again he proved surly, whereupon Mervin Wendell said sharply, “Play for the people,” and the fair-haired young man, now approaching twenty-one, glared at his father and stomped from the room.

“He’s behaving like a ten-year-old,” the banker muttered, and his wife said, “He’s always been turned around. When he was ten he behaved like a grown man.”

The Wendells were not happy with the way Philip was developing. A student of music at the university in Boulder, he demonstrated a solid comprehension of classical works and had trained himself to be a violinist of some skill, but when he was home he refused to perform at his parents’ entertainments. If Mervin persisted, he made excuses and retired to his room. Nor could he manifest any interest in the family real estate business; Mervin told his associates, “I really don’t know what’s going to become of Philip.” Maude understood that her son’s involvement in the murder of Mr. Sorenson had affected him much more deeply than they had recognized at the time, but she never spoke to him about the burden he was carrying.

The senior Wendells certainly did not allow the murder to trouble their consciences. From her seat at the dining-room table, Maude could look out the window and see the spot on Beaver Creek where her son had concealed the corpse, but she felt no morbid preoccupation with it. She was free to look at it or not, as her fancy dictated.

Philip’s main problem was with his father, whom he saw with increasing clarity as a pompous, vain poseur. Once he confided to a girl in Boulder who had a similar problem with her father, a lawyer in Denver, “If he told me that tomorrow was Thursday I’d check to see whether it was Friday or Tuesday. He’s incapable of telling the truth.”

For Mervin, the passage of time had erased completely those moments of agony following the murder. He could no longer recall having pitched the corpse down the well, nor of having fainted when Sheriff Dumire came up empty-handed. Indeed, he had come to treat the event as a family joke. “Come on,” he would say if he ever saw Maude looking out the window in the direction of the well. “Tell me where you hid it.”

If Philip ever chanced to hear this, he would wince and stare at him harshly, and Mervin could guess what the boy was thinking. “All right, all right. You think I’d blab the secret ... get drunk at the Railway Arms ... All right, if that’s what you think, don’t tell me.”

On January 17, 1904, he said brightly at breakfast, “This is my birthday, Philip. Today you must tell me where you hid it.” Philip left the table and was not seen again that day.

The one man Mervin Wendell fooled completely was Mr. Norris of the Union Pacific. After the Centennial pamphlet was published and the railroad began receiving inquiries about the purchase of land along the Platte, Norris returned to town at the end of a trip during which he had encouraged other communities along the line to publish pamphlets as enticing as Centennial’s.

He visited Miss Keller, and told her, “You should be proud of that effort. Your text is being copied by all the railroads that run into the west. A beautiful piece of writing, Miss Keller.” Then he added, “Of course, you and I were lucky to stumble upon an experienced farmer like Mervin Wendell to pull the thing together.”

“He’s never farmed,” Miss Keller said.

“He’s known as an agriculturist,” Norris protested. “He talked with me at the highest level of authority.”

“He can discuss anything at the highest level,” Miss Keller said. She was not being derogatory but merely descriptive, like the good teacher she was.

“You mean Mervin Wendell never farmed?”

“He was an actor ... and a good one. Take him to Omaha and he’ll explain to your president how to run the railroad.” She was an old lady now, but she loved the nonsense of life. Rising, she went to Mr. Norris and with her left hand grasped his arm. With her right she drew great windy pictures against the wall of her little room. “Mr. President,” she said in a cathedral voice, “I see your Union Pacific probing into the mountains, crossing Berthoud Pass to unite Denver and Salt Lake. I see hordes of people ...”

She laughed and returned to her chair. “There’s a church social tonight, Mr. Norris. I haven’t attended one for a long time, but I’m inviting you ... as my guest. It’s time you heard Mervin Wendell sing.”

As Wendell and the Union Pacific continued to bring farmers into the Platte Valley, and when all of them wanted to grow sugar beets as their cash crop, it became obligatory that a stable labor supply be found, and in early March of 1906 Potato Brumbaugh, in his customary bang-bang way decided to do something about it.

Climbing into his six-cylinder Model K touring Ford—he would naturally be the first in Centennial to own an automobile and he would want a big one—he thundered down to Denver, asked where the Mexican quarter was, and pushed his way into the cantina where laborers were whiling away the last of the good winter days.

“Evening,” he said.

“Alloo,” one of the Mexicans replied suspiciously.

“I’m Potato Brumbaugh. Grow beets at Centennial. I have three good jobs open. Good pay. Good house.”

The men looked at him suspiciously. The girl serving beer eyed this old man with his suspenders and belt but did not smile.

“Well?” Brumbaugh said. No response.

He stood in the middle of the smoke-filled cantina and his eye fell on a hollow-cheeked man sitting alone in a corner. This man had black hair hanging down to his eyes, and the general look of a man who knew how to work. Ignoring the others, Brumbaugh walked over to him, extended his hand and said, “It’s a good job. You better come.”

The quiet man looked at the big hand being thrust at him, reflected for a moment, then grasped it and rose. “What do you like to be called?” Brumbaugh asked, and so far as the man could recollect, this was the first time in his life that any Anglo had ever asked his preference on anything.

“Tranquilino,” he said.

“You got two friends?”

Tranquilino looked about the cantina, then nominated two likely men. Brumbaugh went to each and made an offer of employment. To his gratification, the men accepted and asked when Brumbaugh wanted them. He said, “Right now,” meaning within the week, and the men said, “Good,” and indicated that they were ready to go.

“Where shall I pick you up?” Brumbaugh asked.

“Here,” the men said.

“When?”

“Now.” Yes, they meant now. When Brumbaugh asked what they would do about their rooms, they said, “We’ll be back in November,” and it was arranged. They left the cantina for a few minutes, reappearing with small bundles. “We go,” they said, expecting to walk to the railroad station. When they saw the automobile and realized that they were to ride in it, they shouted for the others in the cantina to come see.

An impromptu fiesta was held in the street, after which the three men climbed into the Ford, and Brumbaugh headed north.

The ride was even more exciting than the automobile, for Brumbaugh drove as if the highway had been built for him. Tearing down the middle of the road, he swore right and left at anyone or anything that threatened to encroach, and when he reached open countryside north of the city, he proved himself a terror to dogs and chickens. The three Mexicans loved the boisterousness and joined Brumbaugh in shouting at pedestrians and cats. In this joyous manner they went to work.

At the end of the first week Brumbaugh was afraid to tell anyone else what good workers Mexicans were, lest they be stolen from him. The men liked farming, understood problems of soil and were not averse to doing stoop-work. They had been employed to work from March to November, and what they were asked to do made no difference. They were meek people, Brumbaugh noticed, not at all like the pushy Russians, who hated to be told what to do, nor the industrious Japanese, who stared as if their eyes would pop out when a new procedure was being explained in a language they could not understand. You told a Japanese farmer once, he never forgot.

The Mexicans liked to be told three times, not because they were slow to learn but because they wanted to be absolutely certain they knew what the boss wanted. Once they felt that they and the boss had agreed on what was needed, they performed stolidly and well. Because the men had no children to help them, the way the Russians and Japanese did, they evolved their own back-breaking way of blocking and thinning beets. It was ingenious and effective, founded upon the short-handled hoe. Tranquilino, for example, blocked and thinned two rows simultaneously. Squatting with his left knee firmly on the ground between the two rows, he kept his body weight on the bent right leg. This left his right hand free to chop with the hoe, now one row, now the other, while his left thinned the multiple clumps as far ahead as he could reach. Next he dragged the right knee forward, while his left leg bent to support his body for the next chopping-thinning operation. This duck walk was an art which allowed his deft hands to chop and thin an acre of beets during each twelve-hour day. Of course his back ached. Of course his knees grew scabs, but always he told the others, “It’s better than climbing poles in the silver mine.” And he began to visualize how much easier his work would be when he had his children to trail behind him, doing the thinning.