Magnolia City (36 page)

“But I don’t. That’s Pick’s job.”

Smack leaned forward and spoke in a gruff whisper: “There you go. Have your nigger meet me at the well. They’ll never spot him in the dark. I ain’t never seen a man as black as Pick. It’s like he’s carved out of coal or something.”

“Onyx.” Hetty smiled, spooning sugar into her coffee. “But I don’t want Pick getting into any trouble, either. I feel responsible for him.”

“I’m sure he won’t mind,” Garret said. “It’s no different from what he does during the day.”

“Just tell him what we East Texans say. You can grow more cotton in a crooked row than a straight one.”

“Okay, I’ll ask him,” Hetty said, staring into the dark brown whirlpool in her cup.

Garret lifted his coffee. “Here’s to survival.”

Hetty touched her cup to his. “Amen.”

The next night, Hetty made her way down to the well under a full moon, looking for Pick. The light was incandescent, mother-of-pearl, and everything moved in slow motion as if taking place under water. A black shadow lay under each pine. The truck docked at the holding tank, a pirate vessel Hetty thought, waiting to be loaded with contraband. All someone had to do was crank up the pump, open the valve, and cross a forbidden line. The creek gurgled now and then. The underbrush rustled. Otherwise the night was utterly still.

Then the air eddied around her. Hetty gasped. Pick was standing right beside her, not a foot away, in the thick shade of a pine. Wearing black, he was virtually invisible.

“Pick?” she whispered.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Hetty held her breath in the cage of her teeth. Did she dare let the question escape? Inspectors combed the field, checking every well, handing out cease and desist orders. One could be lurking in the trees right now, watching them. On the other hand, if they didn’t pirate some petrol soon, they might have to let Pick go completely. Then what would happen to Addie, Ollie, Lewis, and Minnie? She listened to the black man so close beside her—steady, quiet. He knew what was coming. He was ready—she could sense it.

Hetty parted her lips and let the words fly out. “Would you be willing to pump hot oil for us at night?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Looks like you’re the one. I didn’t even see you come up.”

“I know.”

She looked across the watery floor of the pine forest. Mr. Smackover came floating around the truck . . . furtive . . . afraid. On nights like this, he would drive all the way to Gladewater with his headlights off. “Be careful, Pick,” she turned to say, but he had vanished.

Covered by the camouflage of night, into the damp dawns of July, Mr. Smackover continued running his truckloads of hot oil up to the teapot refinery in Gladewater. He was never caught. Hetty seldom saw Pick during the day, assuming he slept through the sultry afternoons in his room at the back of the shotgun house, waiting until dark to slip on his black clothes and emerge unseen to practice his nocturnal occupation.

At dusk every night, he’d stop by Hetty’s for a strong cup of coffee to keep him awake, and he’d sit down and talk about “my well.” His proprietary pride grew the more he cared for the Ada Hillyer, even crawling down into the tank to clean out the sludge coating the bottom.

“Time to go milk my well,” he’d say as he swallowed the last mouthful of Folgers and pushed his chair back from the table. Thanks to the extra money he generated, Garret was able to make small royalty payments to the consortium, cover the interests held by Pearl and the Hillyers, and keep food on the table. He gave Pick a raise.

But not all independent drillers were so lucky. Many wells were shut down by proration, and many men were put out of work. Mr. Smackover brought them the reports every night as his truck glided, motor turned off, down the hillside. Roughnecks grumbled in the shadows of the Cot Houses, he said, and there were murders down in the Hollow. The whole town of Kilgore seethed with discontent.

“Don’t y’all dare go in there at night,” he warned them over a midnight shot of corn whiskey. The three of them huddled around an oil lamp, their shadows huge on the ceiling. “You’ll get robbed, or worse. Things are so bad they called in some Texas Rangers to keep law and order. And guess who the ringleader is—none other than Sergeant Gonzaullas hisself.”

“Ohhhh!” Garret moaned. “Not Lone Wolf Gonzaullas?”

“Ain’t we lucky? Everybody’s scared of the Wolf.”

“We know. He’s the man who put Pearl’s husband away,” Hetty said.

“A sneaky bastard!” Smack’s voice grated at the darkness around them. “Appeared out of nowhere up on Pistol Hill, horse black, Stetson white. They say his pistols are studded with pearls. A shiver runs through the whole of Gregg County. And it should’ve. That night, he and his sidekick raided Newton Flats, the dance halls, the Hollow. Chained a bunch of folks up on his trotline.”

“His trotline?”

“Well, yes! There ain’t no jail in Kilgore, you know. Just last fall it was a sleepy little no-count town. So Lone Wolf takes over an old abandoned church, and he chains the transgressors up on his trotline. I pray the Lord I never land in there. You have to sit up all the time. You can’t sleep. The only bathroom is a tin can they pass along the line.”

“Do we have anything to fear?” Hetty asked.

“Naw.” Smack shook his head. “Not from Lone Wolf. He’s a perfect gentleman, I hear. It’s his sidekick you got to watch, Poke Pritchett.”

“Poke?” Hetty laughed at the name.

“Short for Poker Face ’cause he never shows no emotion. A frozen heart carrying a rifle. He’ll shoot you without flicking an eyelid.”

“That ranger sounds deranged,” Hetty said.

“Just stay out of his way. He ain’t after oilmen. Not yet, anyway.”

In the middle of a humid July night, Hetty was awakened out of a sweaty sleep by an explosion. Even through the tiny window of the shotgun house, she could see the flash of light in the sky over Kilgore. It was so bright she glimpsed the face of the clock on the bedside table: 2:34 a.m. She nudged Garret, but he only rolled over and went back to sleep. After the radiance died down, it continued to flicker against the low-lying clouds like heat lightning.

They learned what had happened the next day from Mr. Smackover. He brought them a copy of the
Kilgore News Herald
dripping with giant black letters—
HUMBLE’S INFERNO
—under a picture of a churning lake of mud right in the middle of town. The well had caved into a crater, the article said, after being blown up by a charge of dynamite.

“The parties responsible for the latest oil field disaster have not been identified,” Smack read to them over sweating glasses of iced tea leaving puddles on the kitchen table. “Ha! Like it’s some big secret!” he scoffed. “They shut us down and let the Majors go on drilling. I’d like to dynamite a few wells myself.” Although the order from the Railroad Commission had prorated existing wells, he explained, it had not prohibited the drilling of new ones.

“Yeah, but who’s got the money to drill a new well?” Garret said.

“Humble, that’s who!” Smack bellowed.

“And Splendora,” Hetty added.

He continued bringing them front pages crammed with columns of breaking news: More wells were dynamited, a public meeting in Longview turned into a riot, a special session of the Texas Legislature was called down in Austin. As if things weren’t bad enough, August made its entrance with a heat wave in tow, one of the worst anybody could remember. It felt like the breeze panting through the pines blew off a nearby forest fire.

Hetty found it impossible to stay in the shotgun house much after lunch and started hosting a daily picnic beside Caney Creek, a little downstream from the oil well. She and Pearl and Ada would stretch out along the shady bank on a red-checkered tablecloth and sip iced tea while they dangled their feet in the cool water. Hollis and Oleta waded into the deeper places, but Pierce was confined to the sandy shallows where he splashed around sans diaper.

It was during their second picnic that Hollis discovered what an ample supply of frogs the creek provided. He began tiptoeing along the water’s edge, ferreting sleepy frogs out from under leaves or logs.

About this time, Hetty felt something tickle her foot. She looked down and shrieked. A frog with spots was trying to crawl out of the water via her leg. She shook it off and lifted both feet straight out of the water. “Now I’ll get warts on my feet!”

The other women cackled.

“Why are you laughing at me? I thought toads exuded some kind of poison from their skin that gives you warts.”

“Ain’t you the one?” Pearl snorted. “First, that ain’t a toad, it’s a leopard frog, and secondly, that’s an old wives’ tale. Frogs are the most harmless creatures in the world.”

“Sure are,” Ada said.

“Where do you learn this stuff, Pearl?” Hetty began drying off her legs.

“You forget, hon, I’m from Lufkin. My brothers used to go gigging for frogs, so I know all about them. Lord, they’d bring in a mess of the things, leave the sink all bloody, then fry up them frog legs that’d still be twitching when they threw them in the hot grease. But I could never bring myself to eat one. I loved them too much.”

“Loved them!” Hetty arched an eyebrow.

“Yes, you come to. They’re such magical things. I mean, just think. They start out as tadpoles, and before you know it, they crawl out of the water just like a butterfly out of a cocoon.” Pearl’s spindly fingers spread like wings. “And they make such music at night!”

“Is that where all the noise comes from? I thought it was crickets or something.”

“You been in Houston too long,” Ada said.

“That’s the frog chorus you’re hearing—the sound of East Texas. I let them serenade me to sleep every night. Some of them sound like they’re plucking a banjo, others a bass fiddle. Then there’s the whole percussion section—all the clicks, buzzes, pops, and whistles. It’s the males that make the noises.” Pearl leaned back on one bony elbow and murmured to Hetty, “They’re love songs, you know.”

“You mean, every night . . . ?”

“In these parts”—Pearl nodded, stealing a glance at Ada—“all summer long.”

Hollis came over to his mother, proudly clutching a reddish-brown frog bleating like a lamb.

“Show it to the baby, son,” Ada said.

He set it down on the sand in front of Pierce, who reached for it and watched it hop away, lifting his little hands into the air and chortling with delight. He pointed toward the exiting frog and burbled. Hollis brought it back again, and the game was repeated. This went on for an hour or more. The shade deepened.

Ada unwrapped a tea towel and passed around little sweet wisps of divinity. She began telling them Caddo legends about frogs and turtles that she’d heard from her mother. “They bring fertility,” Ada said. “Caddo women gave birth all alone in special huts beside streams, to be near the frogs. They would sing you through your labor, making the pain easier to bear.”

“Beats a midwife any day,” Hetty said. That night, she began to distinguish the sounds Pearl had described to her: the deep manly croaking, the plucking and sawing, the peeps and trills. The love songs of the frogs rose and fell in sensuous waves, interweaving—the call of the waters, as soothing as tides washing in and out at the shore. Hetty smiled and snuggled into her pillow, letting the sounds lull her into sleep.
Dear God,
she prayed,
please don’t let me fall in love with frogs.

One blistering afternoon, as Garret helped Hetty pack her picnic basket, Smack barged into their kitchen, red-faced and sweating, brandishing the day’s paper with the headline: OKIE FIELDS SHUT DOWN!

“Alfalfa Bill’s gone and done it, goddamn him,” he shrilled, referring to the Oklahoma governor’s decision to call in state troops and halt production statewide until oil prices rose again to a dollar a barrel.

“What’ll we do if they shut us down?” Hetty reached for Garret.

“Texans won’t hear of it.” Smack slapped his thigh with the paper.

That week, a group of Humble geologists announced the final dimensions of the field around them. Smack unfolded the pages of the
Kilgore News Herald
across their kitchen table, and they all stared at the map in disbelief: The East Texas Oil Field not only flowed under Gregg County, where Kilgore, Longview, and Gladewater were situated, but also stretched itself out into Upshur, Smith, Rusk, and Cherokee counties, five in all, its size a staggering one hundred and forty thousand acres—which made it officially the grandest trove of petroleum to be tapped in the history of the world. Over one thousand wells had been drilled since December, the paper said, and Dad Joiner’s Ocean of Oil now flowed with one million barrels of rich East Texas crude every single day.

The frantic pounding came as Hetty was setting the table for dinner. She thought the door of the shotgun house was going to fly off its hinges. When she opened it, Roy Hillyer was hunched there, his jaw trembling as he said, “Our church is on fire.”

Hetty and Garret followed the Hillyers into Kilgore, the tornado of black smoke visible from miles off. They had to park blocks away; there was such a tangle of traffic crawling toward the spectacle. They stepped into the crowd of people pushing forward, necks craned to see what they could already hear, the snapping and crackling of a clapboard chapel in flames. Hetty held on to Ada’s arms, which were clammy with dread.