Stormy Weather Page 13

  “Better go see Mrs. Joplin at the Strawn store. Her grandson is marrying Martha Jane Armstrong and they have some silk they need made into a wedding dress.”

  Jeanine bit her lip. “That’s quite a job,” she said. “A wedding dress.”

  “It was some old silk Martha Jane’s grandfather got in New Orleans,” said Alice. “When he went down there and shot somebody and went bankrupt. Now she’s getting married to Tim Joplin and they got a use for it. After all these years.”

  The John Deere exploded in backfires and smoke when Abel started it up. Jeanine rode on the drawbar behind him, holding to the edge of the perforated seat until she could understand the gears and the line to the lever that lowered and raised the cultivator blades. The clutch was operated by hand and there were two brakes, one for each foot and each wheel. It was confusing. Then Jeanine climbed into the seat and started it up and jammed the gearshift down. The tractor charged forward into the Crowsers’ garden fence. She forgot where all the levers were and so roared on and churned up two plowed rows and took down the six-foot deer fence with the fender while nails shrieked as they were ripped out of the posts. Alice put a dishtowel up to her face and turned back into the house.

  “Never mind, I’ll fix it,” said Abel. “Back her up.”

  Jeanine wrapped her scarf carefully around her neck and shoved the left-hand stick shift backward. There were two stick shifts. She had to remember which was the reverse and what foot went with it. She stared at her feet for a minute as to fix in her mind which was on the right brake and the left brake. She backed up. Abel attached the cultivator to the drawbar and she made it out to the road.

  She drove it at ten miles an hour from the Crowsers’ place to their own, the cultivator on behind, carried six inches above the road. The great steel wheels banged along on their rigid cleats. She wanted to wave at people passing by, to be jaunty and lighthearted and important, a slight girl in charge of a huge machine, but then they might want to stop and give her advice. So she ignored passing cars and gripped the bucking wheel and crashed through the front yard, through the gate at the sugar barn and then started up the hill toward the orchard.

  The brochures from Texas A &M said the grass and weeds would drink up all the nutrients from the soil and she would have nothing but sour peaches the size of marbles if she didn’t rip them up and that was what she was going to do, starting today. Big sweet lamps of fruit would shine from the limbs in August. Wasn’t that what they had longed for all those years in the oil field towns?

  She let go the line that dropped the cultivator blades but it was hung up on something she couldn’t see. She got down, climbing over all the levers and gears. She bent over the square links of the chain drive. The engine was still running and she suddenly found she couldn’t move her head. Both ends of her wool scarf were caught in the chain drive.

  She fought with the scarf with both hands and the John Deere started to move forward into the peach trees. Jeanine was dragged along with it. The square links drew the woolen fabric in their teeth in a slow, regular progression as if it were something very good to eat and they were going to eat it all and her head along with it. The tractor lumbered forward and caught one wheel on a twisted small peach tree and tore the limbs with a shrieking sound. It spun around to the left and stopped and then tore on again. Jeanine began to choke and her head was drawn farther down until it looked as if she were bowing to the cultivator blades and she realized she was going to die in the most horrible way right here in the peach orchard, or at least lose some portion of her face or her scalp. With the cold noise of the gears in her face she came to the edge of a bottomless knowledge of how people could be torn into pieces. The chain chewed and spun and finally ripped the scarf in half. She tore loose and flung herself backward with all her strength.

  Bright round spots drifted through the black peach trees. They blanked out her vision wherever she turned, but she reached with one hand to where she knew the spark lever was and she turned it down and the engine died.

  Jeanine waited until the luminous round spots diminished into red sparks and faded. She sat for a long time on the steel seat with her hands around her throbbing neck. Water trembled in minute drops on the points of the graveyard fence and on the bayonets of the sotol. She felt very small under the awning of the universe; her life was a pale and insignificant spark, easily extinguished. She swallowed over and over again, trying to open her throat. I must have something to do in life, she thought. And the Lord said, Jeanine, build me a peach orchard ten cubits by fifteen cubits. Then she wiped the cold sweat from her eyes and turned the spark lever until the engine started up again and shook all the metal of the engine block and the tall exhaust pipe. She was taken unaware by an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. It was like a warm flood and it flushed the blood into her face and limbs again. Jeanine slowly began to drag the clawed cultivator through the beautiful bare trees even though her hands were shaking. She must never let her mother know this had happened.

  That night she ran through the cold hall with the torn woolen muffler in her hands. She could see the marks on her neck in the old mirror with the beveled edges that took up the light in strange prisms all along its edges, as if saying that beyond the ordinary light of day there were other worlds. Behind her, the front double doors shut tight against the weather leaked a suffused gray luminosity into the hall. Her Tolliver grandparents sat beside each other in their ornate frame and stared down into her very thoughts. It’s all right, they said, we’ve seen worse.

  ELIZABETH, LILLIAN, AND Violet stood wrapped in their winter coats, in their worn and carefully polished shoes, among the crowd of people who came to watch the driller and his machine arrive. They were in a hayfield that had been sheared off to stubble on a farm north of Mineral Wells. They were at the edge of the Jacksboro field. Elizabeth kicked at the stubble. The farmer hadn’t got much in the haying. He and his wife stood on their back porch, looking down the gravel road as if they were watching for mounted enemies or the Second Coming.

  The three women stood close together against the wind. Elizabeth felt very widowed, like something unshelled. But inside her there must be some small riverine pearl, however misshapen. She was comforted, standing close to Lillian and Violet. They could all throw their money away together. It was something to keep her mind off things.

  The ancient steam boiler sat waiting for the drilling rig. Its chimney rose twenty feet into the air and stared with a metallic hauteur out over the stubble. Nearby were three storage tanks and a separator and a string of used pipe stacked neatly with sawmill sidings as headers. The crowd waited like a theater audience. Cars were parked all around the windmill. Milton Brown scrambled up a pile of dirt to see better and began to scribble notes. He had a photographer with him, but the photographer did not open up his camera.

  The promoter was a tall, square-shouldered man in a worn gabardine suit from the early 1930s. He wore a wide tie patterned with art deco zigzags. He had a thick head of curly hair and a broad white smile. He waved his hands at the crowd, he paced up and down on the uneven ground.

  “You see!” he said. “I told you he would make it.”

  In the distance a convoy of trucks approached, raising a cloud of pale dust. At the head of the convoy a flatbed truck carried the drilling rig. It seemed like something from the Iron Age. Its ancient wooden Sampson post waved back and forth as if it were poorly secured. The enormous bull wheel wobbled on its axle. It was made of wood and shod with steel. Most of the metal parts of the machine were rusted, and what was not rusted was covered with flaking darkred paint, and to power this unsteady rig they had the prehistoric steam boiler. Behind the flatbed was an overloaded 1918 Nash two-ton truck, and following the Nash was a Model A. In this manner apparently the rig and the trucks and the men had traveled all the way from Ruston, Louisiana, to Central Texas towing this parachute of dust behind them over every mile.

  “But it’s made out of wood,” Violet said. Her voice was high and
alarmed.

  “I can see that,” said Lillian.

  “It’s like it was from Alley Oop.” Violet wouldn’t quiet down. People glared at her and then turned back nervously to watching the machine arrive.

  “They can still drill with it,” said Elizabeth. But it was worrisome. It was an old cable-tool rig, and what was needed was something better. A rotary. They had tried a cable-tool here before and nothing came of it but a dry hole.

  Lillian shifted her cold feet and watched the outfit come crashing into the field. “I bet it was put together out of scrap,” she said.

  They held their purses in front of them. Violet Keener’s coat was tweed with a fox fur collar. Elizabeth’s was a worn, dark maroon tabby-weave with square wooden buttons that let the wind through. Her sister-in-law Lillian was wrapped in a man’s canvas chore coat and stood in her saddle shoes with a dismal expression and shifted her feet with crushing noises on the frozen rank pasture grasses.

  “I don’t know what my husband will say when he finds out,” said Violet. “He’ll get that look on his face.” She took hold of the sleeve of Elizabeth’s coat. “Have you told the girls?”

  “I told them,” said Elizabeth. “Jeanine screamed. Mayme sat down and said Oh, Mother. Bea ran off to the bedroom to write it all down.” Elizabeth lifted her chin. “I can decide can’t I?” But her heart was speeding up, now that the machine was here and it was an old cable-tool rig, with a wooden derrick, and she could see plainly before her a slow hole being driven for months and months with no return and Bea going to school in beat-up tennis shoes and more than two hundred dollars owed in back taxes. She suddenly found herself arguing in her head with Jack, who always said she could never handle money.

  The crowd of fifty or so people stood with their eyes fixed on the approaching machine. They were farmers and farmwives, several more women without men who might be housewives from town, and clerks and a waiter from the Baker Hotel. People who should have known better.

  Milton Brown came over and took off his hat. Elizabeth remembered him. She felt sorry for him with his stutter and his thick glasses. She had heard the Mineral Wells Star was paying their reporters in scrip or even produce that farmers brought in to pay for their subscriptions and the reporters and editor had the eggs and beans for dinner. Elizabeth smiled at him and said hello. Milton said he was coming out to visit them one of these better days if there were any better d-d-days now that we are all reduced to a b-b-barter economy like cavemen paying for ax heads with turnips and fish.

  Elizabeth looked up at the farmhouse; smoke wavered out of a metal chimney and a long-eared dog lay curled up in the rocking chair while the farm couple stood on the steps. The flatbed bullied its way through the front yard and then through the gate into the pasture. It slewed to one side and took out one of the gateposts with a raw, splintering noise and then the convoy rumbled across the stubble. The men were leaning out of the windows of their vehicles shouting directions at one another.

  The producer held up one hand and announced to the crowd the present circumstances. He cleared his throat.

  He said his name was Albert Spanner. He said, You all know me, you all have trusted my vision here. And in the oil business, vision is what counts. He told them that another outfit had driven the first well here five years before because there was water in the pasture windmill nearby to make a slush pit and a promising formation below. He spoke in a loud voice so they could all hear; the first crew had shot the well in a spectacular explosion with 135 quarts of nitro and half a ton of ball bearings but it hadn’t shaken anything loose.

  I am telling you everything here, because Beatty-Orviel is an honest outfit. They gave up because they ran out of money. What was left of the first drilling was the cased hole, and the corrugated steel engine shed, two redwood tanks and a separator, some empty forty-two-gallon drums, a broken reel that had held the bailer line.

  “Now listen; that first crew said they could not get down any farther unless they used a rotary rig and a rotary rig was a machine for millionaires or for the big oil companies, it was the latest technology and not for independents like themselves running an old cable-tool rig. That was their excuse! Excuses? You’ve all heard about excuses? And so after one thousand eight hundred feet they pulled up their drill string and off they went. They had no gumption. No stick-to-itiveness.

  “And now the Beatty-Orviel Oil Company has again put together a block of leases and we are going to drill the same hole. But! Beatty-Orviel is going to win through where the others failed! All it takes is confidence. Belief. You know when you can smell oil. Remember Dad Joiner. Remember H. L. Hunt.”

  The drilling rig sat on its wide iron wheels on the flatbed truck, a 1929 Ford with a stubby nose. On the door panel was a crude but jovial painting of Pluto, the cartoon dog. Pluto’s scarlet tongue poured out of his mouth. Two men bounced on the edge of the flatbed as the entire rigging crashed and wobbled its way toward the waiting crowd. The two crewmen riding on the flatbed were singing.

  Old Joe Clark had a yellow cat,

  could neither sing nor pray,

  stuck his head in the buttermilk jar

  and washed his sins away…

  The convoy arrived at the engine shed and separator, and came to a halt. The driver shut his engine off and got out. The producer walked toward the rig with his hands clasped behind his back and his loud tie waving. The wind drove past and like a pickpocket lifted anything that was loose in its cold and biting rush. The two crewmen on the flatbed stopped singing and stared at the crowd.

  The driver of the vehicle walked forward to the producer, and stuck out his hand.

  “I am the driller, Cornelius Crowninshield. Captain is what they call me, like Captain Marvel. We had a hard journey but we come through all right. Just took her slow.”

  They shook hands. Captain Crowninshield lifted his bowler hat briefly and wiped his skull with one hand. His laced boots were brand-new. So were his hat and overalls. He must have just been paid off his last job, thought Elizabeth, and now he was starting another. A gypsy driller.

  The producer said, “Well, I am glad you’re here!” He was performing on an open-air stage for the investors, he was Mr. Interlocutor and the Captain was Mr. Bones. He turned his head up to the drilling rig and portable derrick on the flatbed. “What year is this thing?”

  Elizabeth and Violet and Lillian and others in the crowd pressed in more closely to hear. Elizabeth was jammed up against an older woman who seemed to be a waitress with her hair in a net and an apron of heavy material. How they dreamed of food and shoes; of bread, made with flour, rising hot and browned inside the cookstove and filling the house with the smell of yeast, and the slick hard shine of brand-new sole leather.

  “This here thing was put together in Fort Worth by hand in nineteen and double aught. It was made by hand.” Captain Crowninshield walked over and slapped the metal-shod wooden bull wheel with a theatrical smack. “Appearances deceive. This here spudder made two thousand feet of hole back there in Louisiana in less than a month.”

  Elizabeth watched as the farmer who owned the field stepped forward.

  The farmer said, “Well, the fellows that started this well some years ago said they couldn’t get down any farther with a cable-tool rig. They said it needed one of those new rotary rigs.”

  “Aw hell no,” said Captain. “They must have been new at cable-tool drilling, either that or they ran out of money.” He hooked his thumbs in the side pockets of his new canvas coveralls as if he were surveying the audience. “Now, what have we got here for hole?”

  “Over here, Captain,” Spanner said. “Eighteen hundred feet. They capped it about five years ago. I guess the casing pipe is good, but you’ll have to see about that.”

  At this, the two men on the flatbed jumped down to the ground, as hounds leap to their feet when they hear the word hunt, and even spelling the word out has never been known to work. At the mention of hole and drill and casing pipe the two cable-tool
men came to stand behind the captain, looking about themselves eagerly. Captain Crowninshield walked over to the wellhead and the producer came after him along with the impoverished investors and the rest of the crew.

  Crowninshield said, “If it’s been cased and it’s broken up down there, we may have to jack it out. That ain’t going to be easy. I guess we could get hold of Erle Halliburton, borrow a casing jack. We’d be ripping out near two thousand feet of pipe in busted-up sections. But if we’re lucky it’s all there.”

  He squatted down on his heels and pried the cap off the five inches of pipe that stuck up above the brown stubble. He stood up and got a dime out of his pocket and lay down again with his ear to the borehole.

  He said, “It’s silver that will give you the feel of the thing. A penny won’t tell you the truth. Silver has the true ring.” He held up the coin for all to see.

  Then Crowninshield dropped the dime down the hole. The tencent piece flew into a spiral and sang down the casing. It spun down the walls of the pipe, deeper and deeper, and the long thin whine built and built and then finally the sound whistled into infinity and disappeared at 1,800 feet in a final fluted whisper. Oil lay down there somewhere, if he could only drive this abandoned hole a little farther. Maybe it lay in a pinch-out trap or an anticline trap, poured up against a subterranean wall of impermeable rock salt, dyked in a wide bay below human sight. It had to be felt for blind. Drillers were like blind men in a deep cave, feeling their way along the walls, sightless bandits searching for treasure in the earth’s unseen heart.

  Crowninshield held his ear to the pipe until the sound gave out and then said, “It ain’t broke, it’s all there. It’s continuous and it’s solid.” He stood up. “Looks like the slush pit’s still good. All right, Andy, Otto, set up the ramp and let’s get her off.”

  He strolled past the crowd with both hands in his pockets and took no notice of them. The producer trailed behind.