Heiress (4 page)

At the age of fifteen, R.D. went to work in the Texas oil fields. That's where the big money was. It made sense to him that if he was going to dig in the dirt, he might as well get paid for it. He got hired on by a man with the wishful name of "Gusher" Bill Atkins, who owned a rotary drilling rig. His first job was working in the mud pits. Eventually he graduated to a "roughneck," working on the floor of the drilling rig, handling the pipe. Within a few years, he'd tried his hand at nearly every job on the rig.

Those were the wild, freewheeling years of the oil business. The whole nation was certain the country was on the verge of running out of oil. Dire warnings were regularly issued by the government in the late 1910s and early 1920s, accompanied by statistics that showed production and consumption of oil were increasing at a considerably faster rate than new reserves were being found. The rush to find new fields was on, led by the "wildcatters," the independent oil men. For the most part the major oil companies, who had the pipelines, the refineries, and the distribution market, sat back and watched, letting the wildcatters take the risks in a new area. Once oil was found, it was a simple matter for them to step in and buy up leases on adjoining land, or buy a piece of some wildcatter's action, or simply purchase the crude oil he produced.

It didn't take much money to drill a well back then, and little scientific knowledge was required. New drilling sites were selected on a basis that was pretty much "by guess and by golly." The only way to know for sure whether there was oil beneath a particular formation was to drill.

More than once, R.D. had been tempted to raise some money and drill his own well. But he'd heard too many stories and seen too many wildcatters who were rich as Croesus one year lose it all in a string of dry holes the next. The only ones consistently making money, other than the majors, were the men supplying materials and equipment.

Maybe because it was his first job, or maybe because he'd been raised a dirt farmer, R.D. was fascinated by the drilling mud used in the hole. All he had to do was scoop up some in his hand and he could tell by the feel and the texture of it—sometimes by the taste or smell of it—whether it was the right consistency for the job, or if it needed to be thinned or thickened.

After six years of working in oil fields, R.D. recognized the many functions mud performed. It did more than soften the formation the drilling bit was cutting through, more than bring the bit's cuttings to the surface for disposal, and more than sheathe the wall of the hole to stabilize it so it wouldn't cave in. If the mud was the right weight, it exerted more pressure than any gas, oil, or water formation the bit encountered, thus preventing the blowout of a well. Over the years, he'd seen his share of blowouts—lengths of pipe, the drill, and other equipment thrown high in the air and turning into lethal missiles. Whenever a blowout was caused by natural gas, invariably there was fire. A gusher was nothing more than a blowout caused by oil. As spectacular as they were, they were still dangerous and a colossal waste of oil.

As his fascination with mud grew, R.D. began experimenting with different mixtures and ingredients, picking the brains of geologists and chemists in the oil fields, and learning terms like viscosity. In 1922, he came up with a formula that seemed to be consistently successful. That same year his father died, killed when his horse bolted and overturned the wagon he was riding in.

R.D. found himself back at River Bend, faced with a difficult decision. His mother, Abigail Louise Lawson, better known as Abbie Lou, couldn't work the farm by herself, and they couldn't afford a hired hand. But how could he stay and run it when his heart was in the mud pits of the oil fields? To make matters worse, that skinny little neighbor girl, Helen Rae Simpson, had grown into a doe-eyed young woman while he was gone, and R.D. found himself in love.

Determined to do the right thing, he stayed to farm River Bend and follow in the tradition of his ancestors. He married Helen, and a year after their wedding, Robert Dean Lawson, Jr., was born. He should have been happy: he had a son, a lovely wife, a home, and a farm that was producing enough for them to get by. For three years R.D. tried to convince himself that a man couldn't ask for more, but he just couldn't stop talking about mud.

Abbie Lou Lawson recognized her son's discontent. One December night at the supper table, she—who had given him her dark hair and blue, blue eyes—offered him a solution that would provide him with the means to achieve his dream. They would sell the roughly two hundred acres of River Bend's cropland and keep the rest. The old mansion was a white elephant nobody would buy, and the one hundred acres of pasture wouldn't bring much either. The money from the sale would start him in the mud business and she would keep the books, the same as she had for the farm.

Within three months, the plan became a reality. R.D. applied for his patent and began peddling his products, making the rounds of the various oil fields and calling on drillers. But it was hard to make sales. Few were interested in such revolutionary ideas. Only the drillers in trouble with stuck drill pipes or cave-ins were willing to listen. Most of them were skeptical, but desperate enough to try anything. However, his successes usually only guaranteed him that the next time the driller was in trouble, he would call R.D.

Those first years were discouraging. And that discouragement was compounded by the stock market crash and then the death of his wife. A few times he would have given up, but his mother wouldn't let him. She encouraged him to expand, to set up a laboratory to test new products and equipment, and to hire field representatives to sell the company's products and educate the drillers on their use. The world might be suffering a depression, but the oil industry wasn't. Within ten years, he went from being a one-man operation to having seventy people on the payroll. He started buying up smaller companies, taking over their patents, quadrupling the size of his business. Suddenly he was a millionaire several times over.

Thanks to the woman who believed in him: Abigail Louise Lawson. R.D. gazed fondly at the gilt-framed photograph of her taken a year before her death. Blue eyes smiled back at him from a face crowned with snow-white hair swept atop her head in a mass of curls, a pair of chandelier drop earrings dangling from the delicate lobes of her ears.

"Real diamonds, they are, too." R.D. winked at her, as he had the day he'd given them to her. "You and me, we made 'em sit up and look, didn't we? Hell, we never did do what they expected. They all figured we would buy us one of those big fancy homes in River Oaks, but we fixed up River Bend instead—and reminded them all that Lawsons had been here long before most of them were. This time Dean's the Lawson who's foolin' 'em, marryin' that Torrence girl. And a damned fine wedding it's going to be, too."

The gold mantel clock chimed the quarter-hour from its perch on the carved walnut shelf above the fireplace. As if he could hear her reprimand, R.D. grimaced faintly and faced the mirror above his dressing table once more.

"I know I left this getting-ready business a bit late." He made his third attempt at tying the black bow tie. "But I had to go down to the barns and make sure they had the mares all harnessed up right and the carriage ready. Remember that fancy horse carriage I bought you so you could ride in that parade we sponsored to get people to buy war bonds? That's what the bride's gonna arrive at the wedding in. She's over at the cottage with her family, gettin' ready."

He paused for a minute to stare at his reflection. He just didn't feel like a man about to turn fifty, despite the gray spreading through his thick hair. His face had the look of smooth leather with permanent creases worn across his forehead and around his mouth and eyes. There was no sagging skin along his strong jawline, although maybe just a little under his jutting chin, emphasized now by one end of the tipsy-tilted bow tie.

Exasperated, R.D. yanked it loose and started over again, absently resuming his conversation with his mother's photograph. "You should see that carriage. Garcia has it covered with white flowers. Lilies of the valley, gardenias, and apple blossoms. It reminds me of those buggies they use in the Rose Parade. I'm having it pulled by those two matched gray Arabians. White as milk, those two mares are now. I've got 'em in the black harness with white plumes. That young Pole polished the leather on that harness until it shines like a pair of patent-leather shoes on a fancy nigger. I like that Jablonski boy." He nodded decisively. "He definitely has a way with horses. And he knows a helluva lot about the breed. Although, half the time I can't understand him, his accent is so damned thick." Again the bow tie sat askew. "Hell, I never could tie these damned things," R.D. muttered and ripped it apart. "Dean!"

His booming voice sent the silver-lead crystals on the master suite's chandelier jingling as he stalked out of the room, dressed in the required tuxedo with the tie dangling around his neck, but minus his shoes. He padded down the hall toward his son's turret bedroom, his feet making little sound on the hardwood floor of heart pine.

The bedroom door was ajar: R.D. started to push it open, but he paused when he caught sight of his son in the room. Dean was every bit the gentleman R.D. had hoped he'd become. Well aware of his own rough edges and lack of formal education, R.D. had been determined his son would have it better. The rough-and-tumble days were gone—the days when a handshake was all it took to make a deal. That's why he sent Dean to Harvard Law School after he'd graduated from the University of Texas. Ever since the boy was ten years old, R.D. had worked him every summer in the company, making him learn the business from the ground up. He sent him to the best schools and made him learn about the arts and manners. That's what it took in today's world. And, from the beginning, R.D. had been grooming Dean with one thought in mind: that someday he'd take over the reins of the company.

And there was the result, lounging on the arm of an overstuffed chair, totally relaxed and comfortable in his formal attire: and smiling affably at his former college chum at Texas, his best man for the wedding, Lane Canfield. Dean was tall—although not as tall as R.D.'s six feet—and good-looking, with the Lawson eyes and thick, brown hair. His face still had the smooth, fresh look of a boy without a care in the world. But when had he ever had to worry about anything? Sometimes R.D. wondered if he hadn't given the boy too much, made life too easy for him. But then he remembered how he had worked him every summer while most of his friends played.

If R.D. could change one thing about him, he wished Dean had some of Lane Canfield's gumption. From what he'd been able to learn, Lane had taken over much of the operation of his family's petrochemical plant in Texas City and almost single-handedly put it in the black. Rumor claimed that he planned to enlarge the facility.

So far, Dean simply hadn't shown R.D. he could be that aggressive. But he hadn't had a chance to, either. All that was going to change now that Dean was coming on board full time—as soon as his honeymoon was over, that is.

A door slammed somewhere in the house. As Dean glanced over to the door, R.D. hesitated a split second, then pushed it open the rest of the way and walked into the room.

"I think you forgot your shoes, R.D." Dean grinned.

"I've been fighting with this damned tie for twenty minutes."

"Let me tie it for you, Mr. Lawson." Lane walked over to him and took the mangled ends of the tie and adjusted the two to the proper length.

R.D. tilted his head back to give him room and eyed his son, still calmly perched on the chair arm. "I expected to find you pacing up and down, pawing the ground like an eager stallion at the trying bar."

"That's what Lane keeps telling me, but there'll be time enough for that when the ceremony's over," Dean replied with a negligent shrug of one shoulder, then rolled gracefully off the arm of the chair and stood up. "Lane and I were just going to have some of that champagne Jackson brought up. Care to join us and toast the end of my bachelor days?"

"Sure, but don't pour me any of that champagne. I'd just as soon have some bourbon and branch water, if you got any handy."

"Coming right up."

When Lane finished tying the bow tie, R.D. inspected the result in the dresser mirror. The knot was squarely in the center and the bow was perfectly straight. "I'll be damned if I can ever get it to look like that."

"Practice. That's all it takes," Lane assured him.

"I suppose. It's for sure I never had much cause to get duded up like this when I was a young man. Formal attire wasn't the required dress in the oil fields." Smiling, R.D. turned from the mirror. "Some of those old boys would get a real belly laugh if they could see me now."

"To hear him talk, you'd think he didn't like getting all dressed up. But believe me, Lane, he loves it," Dean said, coming over to hand them their drinks and remaining to lift his glass in a toast. "To my last hour as a free man."

After a clink of glasses, they all took a sip, then R.D. raised his. "I think we should drink to havin' a woman in the house again to make this place come alive."

"Hear, hear," Lane agreed, not quite certain whether Dean's hesitancy had been imaginary or not.

Ever since R.D. had entered the room, Dean's behavior had changed. True, they had been laughing and cracking jokes before, but it had been a way of easing the wedding jitters. Dean had been nervous—plucking at upholstery threads on the chair and smoking cigarette after cigarette. But all that had vanished the minute his father walked in. Dean had thrown his guard up, become subtly reserved and aloof, and disguised it with his teasing banter. Although Lane would never say as much to him, it was obvious Dean was intimidated by his father.

"I stopped by the cottage a little while ago to make sure there weren't any last-minute hitches," R.D. said.

"Did you see Babs?" Dean inquired, ever so casually.

"No, but I heard her, tittering and tee-heeing away in the back bedroom."