Stormy Weather (11 page)

The coffeepot rattled its glass topper and Violet poured them all more coffee.

“I think our twenty-five seventy-five thousandths come out of the oil.” Lillian took up her pencil and tried to figure out what her twenty-five dollars would bring her.

“Think of what-all has to be paid before we see a cent,” said Elizabeth. “All those other people Mr. Spanner has sold certificates to, and you got to pay your driller and his crew, and people have to haul things. They got to lay pipe to get it somewhere.”

Violet said, “But listen, what if the price of oil goes up? Y’all never thought of that.”

Lillian said, “That’s right! Are we tied to the price it first came in at?”

They bent anxiously over their certificates again.

“No, here it is. Initial production sale…pro rata. That’s what pro rata means. If the price of oil goes up, we’ll get more.”

Elizabeth said, “Come to think of it, I remember plenty of wildcats that came in. Kilgore wasn’t anything but independents. They drilled a well right in the churchyard in the middle of town.” She might be able to make some money on her own, it was a surprising and happy thought. Her very own money. If the well came in. The happy thought was irresistible and warm, tranquil.

“And then the big operators come and buy you out,” said Violet.

Lillian had big, wide shoulders and did herself no favors with her crown of tightly plaited braids. There was nothing yielding about her.

“I never paid much attention when Reid and us were in the field.” She read over the report, written in stiff and legal men’s language. She held it in her large hands, they were shiny and cracked from detergent and heavily muscled from lifting the ironing beams of the Sno-White Dry Cleaning and Laundry. “I was trying to make a woodstove out of a fifty-five-gallon steel drum while Reid and Jack were hauling pipe and going to the beer joints. Burned shingles in it, that were laying in a heap from where somebody tore down a bunkhouse.”

“We had one too,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“You sat it up on Garden Valley tomato cans. For legs.”

Violet got up and went to the cookie jar to lay out a plate of sugar cookies. An offering of delicacies, when they spoke of the hardships she had avoided by the simple solution of marrying a dull regular guy and living a boring ordinary life in one single place.

“I’m glad Joe got out when he did,” Violet said. “After those men got killed at the Mexia blowout, he said, ‘That’s it for me.’”

“This well is going to come in.” Lillian slapped her papers down on the table.

“Yes, it could come in,” said Elizabeth. “It could come in at a barrel of salt water a day and them having to pump it to get it out.” She twisted her wedding ring on her finger. She looked around at the neat kitchen with its pop-up steel toaster and the bright squares of linoleum. “I should try to get work somewhere, I guess. Maybe at the laundry.”

“Just hang on and see, Liz,” said Lillian. “Wait and see.”

“I sort of wished we would have gone to the oil strikes with you-all,” said Violet. “All your-all’s stories.”

“No, you wouldn’t have wanted to go,” said Elizabeth. And an image flashed through her mind of a man running through the streets of Ranger with a dead child in his arms and a crowd following behind and all of them screaming for the doctor and the child covered with mud, drowned in an abandoned slush pit. And how she had seized her girls close and backed against the wall of the Blue Eagle Café when he ran past, gripped their hands as if she would link and forge them all together, a chain that like the circle would be forever unbroken. Elizabeth stared at the ceramic tiles of the gas heater. Thus it was they had brought oil to the cities of the East. “You wouldn’t have, either, Vi. Those stories were hard bought. Those stories come at a high price.”

E
lizabeth drove out of Mineral Wells, on State Highway 66, toward the big oil field that lay just at the county line. She was driving the Keeners’ car with great caution, it was a nearly new Studebaker with an ornate steering wheel. She wore her maroon coat and her hat and her gloves.

The field had been brought in by Magnolia a few years ago. Most of the wells were now in production; only a few other wells were being drilled. Making hole, the men said. The horsehead pumpjacks seemed like alien beings, lately come to the country and still confused as to their whereabouts. They worked away untended, nodding and nodding, as if perpetually agreeing with everything, with the state of the weather and the cattle strolling by and the machines and the people in the fields, white farmers and black farmers and the hired families, scrapping the fields, taking up the remains of the cotton from its clawed husks that tore the fingers.

The pumpjacks stood on an upright beam called the Sampson post, and across this was laid the walking beam. On one end of the beam was the heavy horsehead and on the other end the counterbalance, and thus like great seesaws they tilted up and down, up and down. The horsehead and the counterbalance lifted and sank with a perpetual creaking and thudding noise. From the horsehead end was suspended the sucker rod, which plunged thousands of feet into the ground and drew up the oil.

Throughout the field stood several derricks, slung with giant block and tackles, and below these, men shouted to one another. The field was thriving with the noise of engines, the rolling crash of the draw works. The oak leaves were rust-colored now with the cool weather, and along the creek bottoms the pale-bodied Texas persimmons scattered yellow leaves like coins.

Elizabeth drove through the main gate. It was only a quarter mile to the engine house and the office. She drove slowly down a good hard road of gravel between rigs, passing men carrying their lunch boxes, looking for a place to sit and eat their sandwiches, for it was now nearly noon. They laid out their food carefully, everything about them was careful, they had the gravity of men who knew they were lucky to have jobs, and food in their lunch pails. The sun gleamed off the slush pits. The gray chemical mud boiled up under the pressure of hammering pumps.

She came to the office where a man stood in front of the corrugated steel building flipping through sheets of data. It was George Lacey, the connections foreman. He wore a pale brown fedora with a pair of sunglasses tucked on top of the brim, around the crown. There was a pile of cores lying nearby, stone cylinders four inches across and a foot long, drawn up from the deep strata by the core bits. She shut off the Studebaker’s engine and got out and walked toward him.

She said, “Mr. Lacey?”

His head jerked up. He was startled by the sound of a woman’s
voice. A woman dressed in heels and a suit and a hat had no business whatever in an oil field. He was also struck by her quiet and simple good looks and her careful small steps across the stony ground.

After a moment’s pause he took off his hat.

“I’m Mrs. Stoddard,” she said. “I was married to Jack Stoddard.”

“Mrs. Stoddard,” he said. The sunglasses fell off the hat and he bent down to pick them up. “I was very sorry to hear about your husband.” Elizabeth nodded. He had probably heard quite a lot. “How can I help you?”

“Well, Jack said you owed him money. For hauling a load of acid for you-all.”

“Come in.” George Lacey opened the door of the office for her, walked in after her, and stood at a desk until she had seated herself in a wooden kitchen chair against the corrugated wall. In the corner was a pile of turnbuckles and somebody’s oil-covered boots. The ceaseless noise of the oil field came through the unlined wall.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me his pay.” She folded her gloved hands on her lap in a soft, formal gesture.

“Yes, I am more than happy,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do about it.” His hands were raw and big. He took up a checkbook and a pen. He said, “I can make it out to you if you want.” His hand held the pen suspended over the check, he was about to place her name on the paper. He would learn what her first name was.

“Well, cash would be better.” She tipped her feet forward and back.

“Yes, of course,” he said, and then opened a safe, rolling the tumblers over quickly, then counted out fifty dollars, a month’s wages for freighting.

Elizabeth took the bills and shut her purse on them. Part of the money should go for food and gas. And then every cent of it that was left would go into the well.

Lacey said, “You know, there’s another man owes your husband some money. I don’t know if he said anything.”

Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows in surprise and her mouth opened. Then she shut it. Good, more money for the well. She smiled again.

“Really? Who’s that?”

“A driller named Crowninshield. He’s come up from Louisiana for a drilling job for the Beatty-Orviel Oil Company, a little outfit. He’s got an old cable-tool rig and contracts out.”

“Oh yes, I know about that well.”

“It’s a wildcat, Mrs. Stoddard. I hope you haven’t been talked into investing anything in it.”

“Oh, I bought one share.” She smiled and lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug.

The connections foreman picked up several tungsten drill-bit teeth, they lay in a heap on his desk. He rattled them back and forth in his hand and then he dropped the drill-bit teeth on his desk. He felt a powerful urge to protect the woman, to ask her to let him look at what she had bought from Beatty-Orviel.

“Mrs. Stoddard, everybody is in a bind for money what with the bank failures. A person could hope he would hit something and pay off. But don’t buy any more shares in it. They’re selling shares to suckers for twenty-five dollars each. Don’t let them talk you into buying shares. It’s a wildcat well. Isn’t that a dry hole? I’ve seen it on an old lease map. They drilled there before.”

She pushed at her jaunty hat and flushed and tucked back the little veil. “I wouldn’t let anybody talk me into buying any more. They already drilled there?” She developed an innocent expression and put a gloved forefinger to her bottom lip.

“Yes, ma’am, and they didn’t hit nothing. I understand there’s a new producer, and he’s selling blocks of shares. He’s had a fortune-teller and a water-witcher and a carny barker and I don’t know what-all. Everything but a seismograph crew.”

She shook her head. “I know, it’s such a fraud.” She did not say
But he does have a seismograph report!
And she knew she would tell
this to the girls, and they would get them out and go over the smeared purple ink yet again. “Well. And how much did the driller owe Jack?”

The connections foreman reached in a desk drawer and handed her a note. The date on it told her it was from when Jack had been gone for two weeks last year, and now she wondered where he had gone besides hauling the boiler for Crowninshield. Two weeks was a long time to haul a boiler over from Louisiana. She wondered if he had been somewhere else as well. Who he had seen. Staring at the note she understood how suspicion had begun to shadow every past year, every past hour of her marriage, and the wild and improbable thought occurred to her that he could even have another family somewhere, like H. L. Hunt, like old Dad Joiner.

“Fifty dollars. Your husband hauled a derrick for him up to Jacksboro. Crowninshield was out of money and gave him a note.”

“This will be very welcome,” she said.

“I guess he thought he’d mislay the note, so he asked me to hold it for him.” He smiled and was glad to do something for her, anything, a good-looking woman. Prudent and dignified.

“Well, thank you.” She folded the signed note. She had fifty dollars in cash now, and fifty in a promissory note. “I appreciate it.”

“I’ll just indicate here in my books that you took possession of the note. I don’t think I know your first name.” Mr. Lacey whisked up a sheet of Magnolia Oil notepaper and took up the pen again with a neutral expression on his face.

She hesitated. She should say
Mrs. John C. Stoddard
and that her first name was no concern of his. After a couple of seconds she straightened her shoulders and said, “Elizabeth.”

“Very well.” He wrote quickly. “Just an indication here to myself that you took possession of the note.” He paused. “You’ve got three daughters,” he said.

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Stoddard. If any one of them can type, well, there’s probably work in the oil field office in Tarrant for her.”

“In the office?”

“Yes,” he said. “There might be a position there in a few weeks and I would be glad to put in a word for her.”

For a moment she was too surprised to speak. “That would be my oldest, Mayme.” Men were begging for work and he was saying the Magnolia oil field office might hire a single girl. “A woman? They would hire a woman?”

Mr. Lacey smiled. “Yes. I would put in a good word for her.”

“Well, I can’t thank you enough.”

“My pleasure.”

She smiled in return and then got up and walked to the door. He hurried to open it for her. A roughneck came up; he was carrying a pressure gauge in one fist and both fists on his hips and his battered, oily fedora drooped around his head.

The connections foreman said, “Just a minute, Lloyd.” Behind them, in the nearest derrick, the enormous block and tackle called the traveling block was drawing drill pipe from the hole, two hundred feet into the air, a joint at a time.

The roughneck said, “Tom, I wanted to ask you about one of them cores pulled up. If I could have it. It’s got a fish in it. For my fish collection.”

“Yes, just a minute.” He lifted his hat again to Elizabeth. “Like I said about that well.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lacey,” she said. “I wouldn’t put a penny on a wildcat.”

“Mrs. Stoddard, if you need advice or anything, please call me.”

“I will.”

He stood and watched as she got into the Studebaker and drove away down the road between the derricks and the pumpjacks.

BEA HAD TO
go out and sit in the fodder shed, on a discarded old kitchen chair with no back, beside the cane shredder to write in her journal. Her breath poured out in frozen clouds. They had had the first freeze of the year on November 12 and it hadn’t let up yet but nonetheless the thirteen-year-old was flushed with a grateful, joyous feeling, like somebody pulled alive out of a collapsing house. They had paid an installment on the taxes and they would not foreclose for now. Life was possible. Bea put an old blanket over her knees and laid her journal on it.

She had to find out how you made a script. Where could she find a radio script? If she wrote to
One Man’s Family
would they send her an old one so she could copy it, and see how they did it? And how much did they pay you? It was easy to see how you had to write things up for magazines. Radio scripts were mysterious. They were a hidden, arcane secret.

Bea bit the end of her pencil. The eraser in her other hand was gummy and crumbling. There were spiders in this place. She drew her feet together.

AT GAREAU’S DAIRY
, Mayme joyfully tore off her head scarf and said good-bye to Mr. Gareau. She would wait until she actually went into town to apply for the office job to tell him she was quitting, but in the meantime they all said she seemed so happy. Whistling when she scalded the separator vat and forked chopped cane to the Holsteins in the foggy atmosphere of the cow-house. Their breath and the manure and the hot milk made a constant lifting mist in the place. Her auburn hair was in spirals when she walked into the front door of the old Tolliver house.

JEANINE BENT OVER
the cookstove, drying her own short hair in the rising heat. Their mother was sitting at the kitchen table, worrying over some papers. She had decided to make herself a little desk. Her own desk. Elizabeth’s mother’s old enamel worktable was on the back porch and she could bring it in and
call
it a desk. Nobody would remember her mother cutting up chickens on it.

“You said you were going to keep house while I made the money,” said Mayme. She sponged off her shiny old gabardine coat and blew the dust from her little cloche hat. “When are you going to fix the roof?”

“I need help,” said Jeanine. “There’s got to be two of us do it.” Her light-brown hair whipped and crackled through the bristles.

“And you can’t just turn those chickens loose in the barn. Varmints will get them. And that’s my brush, sister.” Mayme pointed accusingly and then beat on the hat with a dishtowel.

“I’m doing it! I’m closing in one of the old stalls.” Jeanine put the brush down.

“You need chicken wire for a run, Jeanine, and a dog. We need a dog to kill the varmints. Whoever heard of a farm without a dog?”

“Will you let me do the work, Mayme? Who asked you to supervise?”

“Well it’s got to get done!” Mayme slapped the hat down on the safe counter. “And you can’t hang colored clothes out in the sun!” Her voice was rising. “They fade, you faded my only good dress!” She turned to the laundry basket and jerked the dress out in an explosion of cloth, making Albert bolt out of the basket and across the room. Loud voices made him afraid of getting his nose smashed again. Mayme threw the print dress, now faded from navy and green to the color of old denim, at Jeanine. “Look at that!”