Abel Crowser got up stiffly out of his chair and went into the kitchen. He started a fire in the cookstove and then turned the crank on the battery charger so he could click on the Admiral radio. He had wanted to go over and be friendly but the women all seemed distracted and closed up, and who could blame them? With Jack Stoddard arrested for fooling around on Elizabeth with a young girl and then dead in a jail cell. Anyhow, that’s what they said at the Strawn’s crossroads store. Adultery always made for gripping stories, never failed to take your attention, look at the Vanderbilt trial. It was always a damn train wreck. The women kept to themselves and their dark stallion stood at the fence line and called out to Sheba and Jo-Jo, paced up and down, lonely and, like the rest of the world, without a job.
Abel rolled the knob through the landscape of Central Texas radio, through WBAP out of Fort Worth and KVOO from Tulsa until he found the National Hayride. There was a crackling burst of either static or applause. Alice clattered among the dishes and the flatware. She sang along with the staticky tenor of the music:
I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart
I want to learn to rope and to ride…
He listened to her and outside the windows the blue night sank in, and the horses settled among themselves which one had priority at the hay bunker. The government had paid him for his underweight cattle and shot them and brought in relief labor to bury them below the house in an eroded ravine. He understood it was to prevent overgrazing but it was still hard. Now the grass was supposed to come back but you can’t have grass without rain.
Alice always had something useful to do no matter what age she got to. He had grown useless. He longed to plow a field again, set in good Red Top sorghum even if he had to drag the sulky plow through baked hardpan. But his old work team was so used to being retired he doubted if he could get a harness on them without a knock-down, drag-out fight.
They sat and ate by the light of the kerosene lamps. In her reflection Alice tipped her cottony head from side to side as Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys sang Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry…
Alice said, “Abe, have you always been faithful to me?”
He stopped chewing. He stared at her. He swallowed and then he said, “Well, Alice. You know I have.”
“Even when you all were out there working on the Pecos high bridge?”
“You and I were just engaged then.”
“Ha. I knew it.”
“Alice, we were living in tents in Langtry and eating armadillo.”
“Mexico wasn’t five miles away.”
Abel laid his fork down. “Well, the foreman wanted ten feet of iron a day and nobody was stopping for a quick dally with a señorita.”
“I just wanted to know.”
“How come?”
“I thought you ought to get a prize. You should get an award. We could get one up from the Rotary Club there in Mineral Wells.”
“Well, Mother!” He stared out the window. “How would you prove it?”
“Word of honor.”
He was silent for a long time. “Word of honor. There you go.”
They finished their supper. Alice washed the dishes and then sat down with a dress and a needle and thread. Her white hair was cut short and fluffed out in curly waves around her head. She looked like Harpo Marx. Sometimes Abel thought all she needed was one of those ooga horns.
“What are you doing this week?”
“I don’t have much to do, Mother. I finished clearing them seedlings last year. It was something to do anyhow.”
“You could take up sewing.” She smiled and held the dress out to him. The needle and thread were thrust in the collar. “I’ll never tell.”
“Where would I hide the evidence?”
“I’ll take the blame. I’ll say it was me.”
Abel leaned back and smiled at her. “All right, I guess it’s time to confess.”
“Here it comes,” she said.
“I rode in a sidesaddle once.”
“You did not!” Alice stared at him.
“I did. It was before we were married. There wasn’t anybody to home, there on Mama and Daddy’s place. And Mama’s saddle horse was standing tied ready for her but she was in the kitchen arguing with Fat Cissy Cramer. I knew that was going to take all day.
“And I thought, ‘I’ve got to see how they ride in them.’ So I got in the damn thing and got my leg over the leaping horn and went trotting around the barn lot and then I heard somebody holler, some neighbor had come up, and I about went into a heart attack. I couldn’t get loose from it. I had the damnedest time getting out of it.” He snorted into his handkerchief and then tucked it away.
Alice began to laugh.
“It’s hell to get out of them. I nearly killed myself. I thought, ‘If I get hung up in this sidesaddle and I’m getting dragged around the barn lot when somebody comes in, I’ll have to pack up and quit the country.’”
“Who was the neighbor?”
“Thankfully it has been erased from my mind. I am going to forget my own name here one of these days.” In his mind he twisted at a doorknob that would not open. It made him impatient. Then it opened. “Everett’s youngest sister,” he said. “I think.”
They fell into silence and sat listening to a newsman talk about all the alphabet agencies that were to stem the dust storms and get the factories thumping away again. The question about faithfulness, he felt, still had not been deflected even with the sidesaddle story.
He said, “Do you have any confessions to make this evening?” He glanced up at her and observed with interest as she stitched, and folded his hardened hands one over the other.
“Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can match that one.” She shook her head. “The things I don’t know about you.”
The fire ate its way through mesquite wood. The two cows he and Alice still kept grazed in the harvested milo field, taking up the gleanings with their ponderous thick tongues. He thought he might go out to the barn and do something to the harness. He might put a saddle on Jo-Jo and tell Alice he had to go out and check on the salt trough. But instead he sat and watched the road for another hour as the possum-belly trucks went past carrying stock from Comanche County. They would kill them and can the good ones and the canned meat would go to the relief agencies. The cans would be placed into the hands of those who had nothing to eat but the gristly meat that the government handed out to them, and they would be grateful for it.
IN MINERAL WELLS the wind bullied scraps of flying cotton from the cotton gin. Buyers stuck their long knives deep into the six-hundred-pound bales to test the quality of the farmers’ cotton and loose bits of lint sailed into the air. There were very few bales at all. What the boll weevil had not eaten the drought had baked crisp. The men waited anxiously, leaning on the wagon wheels, talking and smoking. The crop was very poor, and when they bedded up and plowed the stalks under it had sent dangerous columns of dust into the air.
It came salting over the town, a vague snow of lint. Elizabeth Stoddard and her sister-in-law Lillian Stoddard and Violet Keener sat around the Keeners’ kitchen table.
“The county is going to let us pay a hundred dollars for now,” said Elizabeth. “And twenty a month. That’s as much as Mayme makes.”
Lillian placed her reddened hands together. “I’m sorry about Jack,” she said. “I didn’t want to say much more with Bea there.”
Elizabeth turned her coffee cup around on the saucer and then back again. They wanted to hear all about Jack now that the girls weren’t here. Stories like big ripe watermelons shattered open into bleeding hearts.
“You knew about him for a long time, Liz.” Violet patted her arm. “I always had my doubts.”
Elizabeth blew her nose again. She got up and walked to the window to see the ordinary streets with ordinary people walking down them because she was about to cry again and she was tired of crying, it made her face hurt. She was a good-looking woman but it was difficult to say in what way, for her features were so perfectly regular that there was nothing remarkable in her face at all; she had a wide smile, when she smiled, and ordinary brown hair and blue eyes.
“Jeanine was always his little friend,” said Liz. “She got better treatment than her sisters. She lied for him.”
“Don’t blame her,” said Lillian. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not a matter of blaming,” she said. “Just makes me hurt when I think of it, that’s all.”
“You knew it before, Liz.”
“I didn’t want to know.”
She began pacing again, to the corner shelf with all of Violet’s dimwitted doodads on it, china cherubs and a Bakelite soldier boy with a thermometer sticking out of his head.
“You two said I was supposed to get my mind on something else.”
“Well yes, we thought you ought to.”
“Yes, well, now look here.” Lillian laid out a sheaf of certificates. “This will take some figuring out.”
Elizabeth sat down again. “I’ve been married since I was eighteen and had three girls. And they’re going to be gone before long and I’ll be alone in that place.”
Violet said, “Now pay attention, Liz, this is exciting and risky.”
“Yes, look here.” Lillian pushed the papers in front of her. “We could get rich or end up in the County Home.”
They held the papers in their hands as if they were sheet music and they were about to begin singing. Violet read over the notes she had written down on the back of an envelope in an attempt to understand what the producer had told them in his office at the Baker Hotel.
Elizabeth said, “All right.” She examined one of the certificates. “And Jack was always telling me I could never handle money.”
Lillian said, “Well, there was never much to handle.”
“What do they do?” Elizabeth read one of them. “It says these certificates give us twenty-five seventy-five thousandths interest in the well. Does that mean the oil?”
Violet frowned at her certificate. It had an official number at the top, along with the words the BEATTY-ORVIEL OIL COMPANY.
Violet said, “Yes.” She paused. “The oil.”
The women examined their certificates with anxious care. Elizabeth moved her lips as she read the fine print. She and Lillian had endured the births of their children without a doctor, they had lived through the anarchy of oil strikes and blowouts and sour gas, they had kept house in two-room shanties, but the certificates and the mimeographed reports seemed dangerous to them. A frightening world of pro rata shares and seismograph readings.
Lillian Stoddard was Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, married to Jack’s brother Reid when he was there but he was there no longer, absconded at age twenty-eight and Lillian with a girl to raise. Now she folded other people’s sheets and towels and ironed their shirts in a Mineral Wells laundry and her girl Betty was selling shoes at the E-Z Step shoe store. Elizabeth took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the palms of her hands.
“Well, where is it?” Elizabeth tried to remember if she had ever heard of Beatty-Orviel.
“About ten miles north, it’s at the edge of that Jacksboro field. A wildcat means anything that’s two miles from a producing field.”
“I know that,” said Elizabeth. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
“Have you told the girls?”
“No,” she said, and thought for a moment what it would be like if the well actually came in. If they made money. Actual money.
“Now look here, look here at this other one!” Violet Keener snatched up another paper. This too said Beatty-Orviel Oil Company. “This one gives us one-hundredth of the leaseholder’s oil royalty. Now one-hundredth is per barrel. So we got stock plus a tenth of a penny a barrel.”
“What if it came in,” Elizabeth said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
The Keeners had left the oil fields early on. Joe Keener had gone to work for the telephone company instead. They had chosen whatever was staid and dull and predictable, so they had the kind of home that Elizabeth had always longed for. Elizabeth examined the borders of the certificates, the elaborate Victorian designs. She had put into it almost all they had. But still she thought of objections so that when they argued with her and disposed of her doubts she would feel better.
“That producer is hoping this well doesn’t come in,” said Elizabeth. “Then he doesn’t have to pay off.”
“But he’s got a top geologist!” said Violet. She pressed her voice into the upper registers like a cheerful radio announcer. “He showed us the seismograph reports!”
Elizabeth raised her head. “I don’t know why I did this,” she said. “But I did it.”
Lillian and Violet glanced at each other.
“For entertainment,” said Lillian.
Lillian held the seismograph reports that had been mimeographed in sticky purplish ink. The producer Albert Spanner had extracted more than a hundred dollars altogether from the three women. Violet came to look over Lillian’s shoulder and read the figures again. They had all read them several times over but the phrases Woodbine pool and anticline trap and promising seismograph registration were so reassuring.
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.”