Tom was used to being handed information. This was his most salient quality, the apparently innate characteristic that made him an effective reporter. He might ask himself why complete strangers so often trusted him and spilled their guts within minutes of first meeting him. Was it because he had an open expression and was good-looking without being so handsome as to be intimidating? Because his build was average and he didn’t appear like a physical threat? Was he so neutral in the way he presented himself that he was perceived as a blank slate upon which the people he interviewed felt safe to inscribe their own versions of reality?
And yet, though he was used to being taken into the confidence of strangers, the confession of the Uranium King staggered him. Was he now called upon to write it down and publish it?
Of what use was the confession if it remained a secret? But the opposite question – of what use would DeRichter’s biography be if it were to be written? – was equally without a clear answer.
The story of how Dick DeRichter and Whispering Jim came to fatal blows over their strike had the quality of a founding myth, and not just the founding of a family empire that inevitably collapsed in vitriol and bitterness. This was a narrative that suggested that uranium itself was a substance so potent in its destructiveness that it instantly corrupted the men who dug it out of the earth – before it subsequently undid everything else that it touched. But this was mere metaphor, of lyrical interest only, while the notion of justice for Whispering Jim, after all these years, with DeRichter near the end of his life and obviously suffering from dementia, was even less than that: It was an abstraction.
In addition to an apparently crystal clear memory of how he found the Whispering Jim, a half-century before, and how he had secured sole ownership of it by dispatching his partner, DeRichter talked knowledgeably about the current state of the world’s energy balance. It was an odd trick of the brain that a man so obviously in the grip of senility could be so coherent on selected subjects. There was a basis in reality for DeRichter’s declaration that he was reopening the Whispering Jim. Major mining companies were poking around and making provisional plans to resume mining and milling uranium on the West End, so why not UK Mining? Of course, it was far more likely that Albert DeRichter, who unquestionably ran the old man’s affairs, would have already sold the claim to one of the multinationals with the resources to pay for it handsomely if it truly had remaining value.
More immediately, Tom wondered, why now? Was it just a coincidence that the Uranium King had turned up on Radium’s deserted main street at this moment? Or had something motivated him to bolt the seclusion of his home on North Mountain for the first time in years? Even an old man’s dementia might have its reasons.
Tom’s options were limited, but he could make a move: he could report in the pages of the Forum the King’s announcement that he was planning to reopen the Whispering Jim. From the perspective of a legitimate journalist, it would be wildly irresponsible to publish a story based on nothing more than what DeRichter had just told him. A responsible editor would consider the reliability of the source and require confirmation that there was substance behind the claim that the Whispering Jim would reopen soon before publishing a story about it. But nobody was holding Tom up to those standards. He could publish the story with impunity; even as an old man’s grandiosity talking, nothing more than his valedictory, the story was still of local interest. DeRichter was a figure of such local importance that his utterances were automatically newsworthy.
And so, that Friday, the Uranium King was back on page one, sharing top billing with the story Tom wrote about the pending reconstruction of Dead Man’s Curve.
Whispering Jim to Reopen
Back to the Future?
By Tom Austin
Dick DeRichter isn’t finished yet. At the age of 82, the Uranium King announced this week that he will reopen the Whispering Jim, the legendary mine that put the West End on the map as one of the world’s richest mining districts. The region will be rich again, DeRichter predicts.
“Uranium is coming back,” DeRichter said this week. The price is up, he explained, and will go higher because uranium is the world’s best answer to the threat of global warming.
DeRichter announced that he is in the process of hiring as many as a dozen men to work the mine. The ore will be shipped to the mill in Blanding, DeRichter said, though it is possible that production will be great enough to reopen his shuttered mill here.
DeRichter is exhibiting the same independence he did fifty years ago, and said he is operating without the backing of one of the major multinational corporations that have come to dominate the uranium business.…
“Whispering Jim to reopen,” Molly Buford said cheerfully when she stopped off to drop off her history column for the next week. She was reading the headline of the paper she was carrying.
“Do you think he’s got it in him?”
“At 82? How did he seem to you?”
“Well, apart from the fact he walked in the door wearing a bathrobe and slippers and looked like he’d just wandered away from the Alzheimer’s wing of a nursing home, wasn’t he always a bit odd?”
She laughed, but then considered the question seriously.
“He was always very determined,” she said, “whether it turned out he was right or wrong about something. And he was right often enough that he could afford to be as odd as he wanted to be. I have to admit I thought we’d seen the last of him. Even Dick DeRichter can’t live forever. But I guess I was wrong. The past is coming back.”
“Why, you of all people know that the past isn’t even past,” Tom rejoined. “Didn’t somebody famous say that?”
“Well, I guess Faulkner knew a thing or two,” she laughed.
“It’s hard to imagine the West End is quite as convoluted as the Deep South,” Tom said. “For one thing, there was no slavery here.”
“There was, actually.”
“Slavery?”
“We had Utopianists. A lot of people who are still here after the uranium bust are descended from them.”
“But they weren’t slaveholders….”
“No. Just polygamists. They practiced polygamy well into the 1970s, some probably still do, and that made for some pretty complicated family ties, at least as complicated as Faulkner’s, I’d say. Of course, nowadays most people don’t like to be reminded of it. It’s just so much easier for them to be mainstream Mormons. Which is why I do you the favor of only very lightly touching on it in my column. Didn’t you ever wonder how I ended up in New York after growing up here?”
“I guess I never thought about it.”
“Seventy years ago, when I was a girl, all of us who lived here were Utopianists, and this was a 100 percent polygamist community,” she said. “It was perfectly normal that when I was 12, I was chosen to be married to my uncle Matthew Taylor, who was in his fifties. I would have been his third wife. The leader of our church, a man named Emerson Redd, made the match over my father’s objections.”
“Wow,” Tom said. “At 12.”
“I was the youngest child in my family and my two older sisters had already been married off. My father had started to question church teachings when neither of my older brothers could find even one wife between them because the Redds didn’t favor them, or more likely because there just weren’t enough girls to go around. When the church tried to take me, it was the last straw and my family left the church. Or they were excommunicated by Redd. I never got clear which came first. It took a lot of courage for them to take the stand that they did.”
“Why is that?”
“It was difficult enough to be shunned by the community,” Molly said. “But I believe there was a risk of violent retribution, too. My father and two brothers were strong men prepared to defend themselves, so the Redds left it alone.
“It wasn’t easy for the Bufords to stay here after that, but they wouldn’t leave. We had homesteaded, had built our house, had cleared fields, and most of all, my father and brothers had spent years digging the ditch, and they had to dig the last quarter mile to our place all by themselves. We were the last place to get water, and if you look you’ll see that even today there’s nothing cultivated beyond. After we got water, it was unthinkable to leave. Instead, my father and brothers and a few others started an LDS church affiliated with the church in Salt Lake. It was a schism among Mormons that played out in a lot of places after polygamy was outlawed in 1890. There were a lot of men like Emerson Redd who figured they had as much right to be a prophet and take multiple wives as Joseph Smith or anyone else. As far as Center was from Salt Lake, especially back then, it just took that much longer for the new Mormon doctrine to reach us here. Especially being across the state line from Utah we escaped a lot of notice, from the church in Utah and we were remote from the government in Colorado, and that’s how the Redds were able to remain true to the Book of Mormon, as they saw it, while the mainstream church abandoned fundamental beliefs like plural marriage.
“How did you end up in New York?”
“My parents sent me to stay with relatives back East. They were afraid I would be kidnapped, that Redd would just take me. There were never enough women here, which is how it goes when the pathway to heaven for the men is plural marriage. That’s the basic problem with polygamy. If you can do simple math, it’s pretty obvious: too many baby boys and not enough baby girls. Naturally, the Redds wanted to control all the girls born to church members. Awarding a girl to a particular follower was a way of controlling everyone, the men and the women. You could reward the men who were loyal and the others were forced to remain bachelors, like my brothers, or they were sent away, exiled, a lot of them when they hit the age of 17 or 18 and started to compete for the girls’ attention.”
“Why would you want to come back after you’d built a life for yourself in New York?”
“Radium is not like it was and I had to retire somewhere that I could afford,” Molly shrugged. “My parents died a long time ago and I inherited the old homestead. There was nobody else who wanted it. And, strangely, as harsh as it is, this place speaks to me. The ditch my father and brothers dug still waters the fruit trees and I’ve never tasted a better peach than the ones from our orchard. After so many years, I didn’t really see how the past could hurt me anymore. I think I write my column for you to try to make sense of it, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I think that maybe I should have married Matthew Taylor after all. I might have had a richer life. I never did meet a man in New York.”