Elizabeth 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!”
“It’s only faded a little!” Jeanine was yelling as well. They were yelling because they were afraid of taxes and drought, afraid of being reduced to taking relief in town, of being alone without their father to help them and it had come upon them suddenly, like a little hot dust devil full of field debris, stinging them. Jeanine’s hands shook. “They wouldn’t hire you if you walked in there stark naked with your hair on fire so shut up about it!” She wadded the dress into a tight ball and threw it back at Mayme and it hit the sugar canister and knocked the canister over. Sugar spilled out onto the floor, a rare and precious treasure pouring through the cracks of the floorboards.
“Stop it!” Elizabeth stood up and banged the hairbrush on the table. “Clean that up.”
Mayme and Jeanine got down on their knees with a spatula and a box top and began to scoop up the sugar. They were rigidly, furiously polite with each other. Jeanine knew she should say she would hang out the colored clothes overnight from now on. She should say Sorry. But she was too mad and also hurt and so she didn’t. Sugar clung to her fingers.
MAYME CAUGHT A ride on Gareau’s milk truck to the high school library in Tarrant and returned with an instruction book on typing. She made herself a piece of cardboard covered with rows of circles that said QWERTYUIOP and ASDFGHJKL and ZXCVBNM and she pressed these imaginary keys with her eyes on the ceiling with great fervor for hour after hour while Jeanine brought in wood and bleached out the tea towels and Bea sat with her homework, her small cat on her lap. The lithograph of the small girl in the forest turned in the rising heat from the stove and the glass flashed and it seemed to Bea the bird’s song had turned into fragments of light to enchant the solitary child. Then she sighed and forced herself back to the gray printed page and facts about the produce of the state of Texas. Cotton. Cattle. Oil. Peanuts.
“Try to stay friends with Mr. Gareau,” said Elizabeth. “We are going to need rides to town in the milk truck to save gas.”
Jeanine heard Smoky calling down in the field. It was a kind of scream. She pulled on her jacket and ran with the halter in her hand across the graveyard, through the peach orchard, then into the field with the seedling cedar. Smoky stood on one side of the fence line and old Mr. Crowser’s Jo-Jo on the other. Smoky was trying to paw the fence down to get at him. He wanted to kill him and then he would have the lovely Sheba all to himself. Sheba stood off to one side. She was a dark half-Percheron and very elderly and at this moment, coy. Jeanine saw old Mr. Crowser coming down in a stiff and jerky run. He was also carrying a halter and lead rope.
“Get away, Miss Stoddard,” he said. “You’re going to get hurt. Don’t get between them.” He put the halter on Jo-Jo to lead him away. Smoky shifted with tense, small movements, darting back and forth, his two front legs stiff as fence posts and squatting on his hind legs. He wanted to go over the fence and couldn’t make up his mind whether he would or not.
“I can handle him,” she said. But she was afraid of him. She held the halter in her left hand and put her right hand on his neck. His neck muscles were so tense they had the feel of warm iron. She slipped the halter over his nose and buckled it and jerked at the lead rope. “Pay attention to me,” she said. “Here, look here.” Her hair flew into her eyes.
“I’ll repair this fence line,” Mr. Crowser said. “But you’ve got to do something with that stallion.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She took the slack of the lead rope in her left hand and lifted it. “He’ll mind me.”
Smoky flung his head against the lead rope and suddenly darted his head at her with all his teeth exposed. She struck him across the nose with the end of the lead rope and he reared. She held on and pulled him down.
“Young woman, you are going to get yourself killed,” said Mr. Crowser. He turned back to the barn with Jo-Jo following. “Keep him in the barn for a couple of days while I repair this fence.”
It took a long time to get Smoky back to the old sugar barn. It was like fighting with a tornado on the end of a rope. He circled her and once stood very still, watching her, as if he would charge. He was thinking about it. By the time Jeanine coaxed him into the barn she was sweating and shaking.
She rested for a while and then got up and warmed water to wash out the juniper green silk. She had to do something about Smoky Joe. When he got near a mare he became some other creature. He became volcanic. He was no longer her friend. He was nobody’s friend. She plunged the silk into lukewarm water and chipped soap into the tub. She handled it very carefully. She would make a pretty dress for Mayme from it and then they wouldn’t be mad at each other anymore. When she was done it hung on the line with the sun behind it sinking into a dust haze, and the material lifted and sank like a pale flag.
Mayme put on her faded good dress and the shiny gabardine coat, and drove the Ford truck with its balding tires into Tarrant to apply at the oil field office. They hired her.