Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“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.

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?”