Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“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.

“Go on, Elizabeth,” said Lillian. “Go on now.”

Violet gave her a little shove. “Go talk to him now.”

Elizabeth took a deep breath and pulled her gray gloves tight and then walked over to the promoter.

“Mr. Spanner?”

“Yes.”

He turned to her, to her mild and pleasant face, her wide smile. His loud tie beat on his shirtfront in the wind like a single hand clapping.

“Um, the driller there, that Mr. Crowninshield, owes my husband fifty dollars.” She held out the note. Spanner took it and examined it carefully. She said, “For hauling this boiler up to here this last September.”

“Well, he is going to have to wait a little longer to be paid,” he said. “But it won’t be for very long, madam, not very long!”

“Well, my husband has passed away, Mr. Spanner.”

“Madam! I am so very sorry!” He lifted his hat to her. “But this well is going to produce, madam, and you will be proud of having lent money to this enterprise. Proud. There is oil down there and it’s going to deliver itself into our hands.” He also lifted his porkpie hat to Lillian and Violet, up and down, up and down. “Now here are two ladies with faith in this well. Mrs. Keener, the other Mrs. Stoddard. They are trusting the Beatty-Orviel Oil Company with their hard-earned dollars. Y’all are in for…?”

“Seventy-five each,” said Violet.

Elizabeth said, “Well, what I thought was, I would exchange this note for shares. Fifty dollars’ worth of shares.”

“Madam! You have made an extremely wise choice!” He turned to another small grayish man sitting with a bored expression in the front seat of his car. “Let’s do the paperwork!”

They rolled the strange machine off the flatbed. Both crewmen and the captain and several volunteers all began to shove. It rolled down the ramps and struck the ground with its iron wheels. Then Crowninshield hooked a chain between it and the 1918 Nash and pulled it into place.

Elizabeth and Lillian and Violet stood for a while, watching them haul wooden boxes and suitcases out of the Nash truck, pack them into the engine shed and set up house. They even had a small cookstove and a chuck box. The farmer’s wife came up to the crew, her full dress skirts were ballooning and her hair sprang out from under a slat bonnet.

“Ma’am,” they all said. “Howdy, ma’am.”

“Do you-all eat hominy?” she asked. “Black-eyed peas?”

The men nodded eagerly.

The captain said, “They’ll eat anything you send over, ma’am. Andy here, he used to be a geek in a carnival. He bit heads off chickens and then he got religion and joined a drilling crew.”

Andy lifted his hat again.

“I’ve eat chicken before,” he said. “Fried.”

“Tastes just like armadillo,” said Otto.

Prince Albert sat on the old well curb and made nervous mewing noises. He was watching the sparrows that lived up in the well cover in their trashy little nests. It was in early December and the entire world of the Brazos valley was crisp and dry and burnt out. Bea had decided to pray that morning that her mother would not throw away all their money on the oil well certificates. She didn’t know what else to do. Her mother was going to lose all they had, and then they would take the house for the taxes still owed and this time there would be no rent house to go to. She had wished her father dead and then he had died. But it didn’t work the other way around. She could not wish him back again alive out of his jail cell, out of his lonely grave in Wharton. They would be evicted from their own land and house and then they would go and live in a tent under the bridge in Fort Worth. That was where Bonnie Parker and her family lived when Bonnie Parker was a little girl, before she had taken up a life of shooting policemen. When her father was arrested Bea understood that there were unknown depths to which people could fall, when all the structures of the world came loose, the framework gave way. When, like the king, you abdicated.

Bea came out of the back door of the house with a lard pail full of cracked corn for the chickens, in her ragged housedress and tennis shoes without socks. She saw the cat reaching out over the empty space of the well toward the little roof and the sparrows’ nest.

“Albert, get away!”

His tail lashed and he gathered himself for a jump. Bea threw down the lard pail, and the bits of corn scattered over the hard dirt. She ran for the well.

“Albert, no!”

He saw her and jumped straight up into the construction of the roof over the well, and when Bea leaned on the well curb to reach for him the entire curb gave way. The mortar that had been dried out by seven years of drought shattered and Bea went down into the well along with the blocks of limestone. They fell alongside her and before her. She fell twenty feet in an endless cascade of rock and showering mortar. She struck the projecting stones of the bottom where the well narrowed and several rocks the size of bread loaves fell onto her head and her legs. There was four feet of water at the bottom. Her head was above water and one arm was jammed between fallen stones and the wall. Far above her was the narrow eye of light from the upper world. She was not entirely conscious. She couldn’t tell whether the dripping from her ear and jaw was water or blood. She couldn’t make her mouth work.