Magnolia City (37 page)

When they reached the blockade, the heat was so searing in the August evening Hetty had to shield her face with her hand. What they saw set Ada and the other Baptist women to keening: Only the skeleton of a church was left, flames eating at the bones of the building like a brood of fiendish maggots. Ashes floated in the air. The half-charred page of a hymnal drifted before Hetty’s eyes.
On a hill far away,
she could make out. A single fire truck fed water into the blaze, which evaporated instantly into steam.

When the last colored glass window popped, the wall where the altar stood fell backward like a sinner being saved at a Revival meeting. Then the whole roof caved in, beam by beam. It all crumbled to the ground, scattering red sparks over the onlookers. This sent a final gasp rippling through the crowd until all became silent, so stunned was the town to see the Baptist Church, their rock of ages, evaporating before their eyes. Ada fell to her knees, whispering prayers. Fumes scorched Hetty’s lungs.

“Why would anybody burn our church?” Ada moaned when they lifted her up. She commiserated with some of her fellow parishioners, all asking the same questions: Who? Why? When the light started leaking out of the sky, she asked Roy to take her home, terrified of being downtown after sunset.

“I want to see Humble’s inferno before we leave,” Hetty said.

“We’ll go, too.” Roy nodded with a firm grip on his wife’s arm.

They elbowed their way toward the other vapors rising over the rooftops a few blocks away. As they turned onto Main Street, Hetty spotted a white Stetson bobbing above the heads of the crowd. They pushed their way out into the middle of the street and nearly collided with a huge black horse. Hetty saw a flash of pearls out of the corner of her eye, then a set of broad shoulders high above her, a dashing Latino face under the rakish brim of the hat. He was towing a group of prisoners in chains, the latest harvest for his trotline. His black stallion pawed at the dirt, trying to get through the mass of bodies shuffling away from the fire.

Without hesitation, Hetty stepped up to the horse, standing on tiptoe to address its rider. She felt like she was gazing at a deity in the sky.

“You were at the San Diego massacre, weren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You were the one who killed all the Mexicans—your own people.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” he said, tipping his white Stetson at her, “the men I killed were outlaws who’d invaded our country illegally.”

“Was El Víbora Seca killed?” Hetty still feared that the Dry Snake had been slaughtered along with the other outlaws at
Las Ánimas.

He picked up the lisp in her voice and sniggered back in Spanish,
“La culebra muda su piel varias veces.”

A snake sheds its skin many times.
She knew it.
He was alive!

Then she heard Ada’s voice quiver in her ear, “Ain’t that last one a woman?”

Hetty’s eyes followed the scraggly faces of the prisoners until she came to a head that was held higher than the others, a set of black eyes that weren’t downcast but peered at her with the haughty slant of a lizard, dark gashes of anguish that welled unashamedly in the dusk. Hetty was shocked to recognize Brown Sugar. She was used to seeing the tall willowy body in sequins, commanding a pink spotlight, not staggering behind pimps and thieves in a faded housedress.

“It’s that blues singer,” Hetty murmured back. She was being egged on by another Ranger at the back of the line, a cold-eyed man cursing at the crowd.
This must be the infamous Poker Face.
“Mr. Pritchett,” Hetty shouted at him. His head jerked around. “You’ve chained up a woman!”

“Out of the way,” he snarled and spurred his horse.

As she was shunted forward, Brown Sugar’s mournful gaze cut into Hetty’s breast, tearing at her heart until she realized that the heavy lids were looking past her. At Garret. He and the blues singer were exchanging a glance that Hetty didn’t like and wanted to interrupt. She inched her arm around her husband and drew him away, saying, “It’ll be too dark to see the inferno soon.”

But the singer cried after them: “Help me, Mac!”

Hetty stopped. “What’s she talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Garret said, looking after her.

“Help me . . .” she pleaded, then was pulled into the crowd and disappeared.

Hetty felt uneasy as they moved forward through the milling pedestrians. “How come she knows your name, honey?”

“We were friends back in Houston.”

“You were?”

“Don’t you remember? Andy Boy’s was one of our customers.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Hetty wanted to dig deeper, to find out what he meant by “friends,” but Nella had once warned her never to perform archeology on your husband’s premarital amours. Once you start excavating, she said, you might not like what you find.
Leave it buried,
Hetty told herself.

They came up to the edge of the crater and looked across a pit the size of a small lake roiling with angry black mud. Nothing was left of the derrick, the doghouse, or the tank. Everything had sunk into the hellish mire. All Hetty could see in the fading light were the sulfurous vapors dancing about and the eerie yellow flames escaping as the earth opened a fissure now and then. She tried to peer down into the cracks, but all she could make out was blackness.

Ada, however, was looking skyward. “I see them!” she wailed.

“See what?” Roy asked.

“The faces. The faces in the fumes. Look—up there!” Hetty followed her finger and tried to make out features in the billowing smoke.

“It’s a sign, Roy,” Ada said. “Hell’s coming right out of the earth and taking over our town.” She turned away and shivered as darkness closed in on them. “Something’s got to be done, y’all. The money ain’t worth it.”

O
n a close night the next week, Hetty had trouble falling asleep. Garret was already drifting in the ebb and flow of steady breathing . . . in and out . . . in and out. But she couldn’t seem to follow him, legs fighting against the damp sheets. Then she realized what was wrong: It was too quiet. The frogs weren’t singing. She wondered why. Was mating season over for the summer? Had a plague of snails lured them into Ada’s garden? She listened for the slightest peep or twang. Nothing stirred. Only an ominous hush, undercut by the distant chundering of a few oil rigs pumping out the last of their day’s ration. She rolled over into the shadows and let them clothe her in unconsciousness.

Later, she dreamed of swaying in a hammock slung over the creek. Pierce slept above her, in the treetops, in a cradle made of spiderwebs. He kicked off his blanket. She looked up at his silhouette in front of a gigantic moon. He had frog legs instead of baby feet.

The bedroom window shuddered and woke Hetty up. Someone was rapping on it. She pulled herself to the ledge and peered out. There in the blue light of dawn, Roy Hillyer waited with his head bowed.

“Roy—what’s wrong?”

“It’s finally happening.” He kept his face averted from her window.

Since their church had burned last week, the Hillyers had warned Hetty that some sort of doom was imminent in East Texas. Beetles would devour the pines, hogs would turn rabid, and first born would die. There were signs everywhere, they said: the diabolical faces appearing in the smoke above Humble’s inferno, another church burned down in Kilgore (this time the Presbyterian), brawls in the streets almost every night. Angry locals were threatening to take the law into their own hands. And some did. So many more wells were dynamited that the Humble Oil Company had been forced to organize a private police force. In a newspaper article only yesterday, the governor had declared the whole area to be in a “state of insurrection.”

“Did you hear some news?” Hetty asked.

“We got a call. Trains and trucks been slipping into town like thieves in the night.”

Hetty gasped. “Troops?”

Roy nodded. “Ada says you better come up for breakfast and follow us into town.”

“Oh my God—yes!” Hetty shook Garret awake and slipped into the first clothes she could find. She knocked on the shotgun house next door, knowing Pearl wouldn’t want to miss anything. After some quick eggs and coffee up at the farmhouse, they found themselves following Roy’s Model T on another emergency trip into Kilgore.

“Something’s up all right,” Pearl said, as Garret slid to a stop in traffic inching toward the new City Hall. They had to park blocks away and push through mobs of people. Hetty staggered, trying to keep up with the others and carry Pierce at the same time.

Police had cleared the intersection, but the sidewalks around City Hall were hives of buzzing rumors. Several trains arrived at the depot in the middle of the night, someone said. Somebody else swore they’d seen convoys of trucks heading this way from the base in Palacios. “Governor been swamped with telegrams,” another man boasted. “I know—my sister works at Western Union.” Everybody seemed to have an item of gossip or two to add to the buzz. Only when a trumpet rang out from down the street did the bystanders grow quiet and pivot their heads in that direction.

Hetty sat on the curb and held Pierce in her lap, craning her neck to see past the legs of men standing on tiptoe. She heard the rumble of marching feet and felt a chill of fear. Then she saw them, six Texas Rangers on horseback flanking an officer in full uniform on the back of a great steed. Her heart turned to quicksand.

“It’s the brigadier general!” someone shouted.

He led his horse with arrogant strides into the intersection while, behind him, a wall of olive drab drove forward as several companies of the National Guard marched into Kilgore. Exclamations and gasps shivered through the crowd like ill winds, followed by a thunderous
thump!
as hundreds of boots stopped all at once in front of City Hall. The brigadier general dismounted and was escorted by several officers onto the steps.

He said he had an announcement from Austin and began to read in a commanding voice. All murmurs grew quiet as his words rang through the streets: “Therefore I, Ross Sterling, Governor of the State of Texas and Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of this state, do hereby declare martial law in the counties of Upshur, Rusk, Gregg, and Smith—” A howl from the crowd was shushed by those wanting to hear more. “Effective at six a.m. on the seventeenth day of August, 1931, and I hereby invest Brigadier General Jacob Wolters with supreme command of the situation to shut down without delay each and every producing crude oil well in the region—”

Cheers clashed with hoots in the air. Hetty could hear Garret cursing loudly. Pierce began to cry. The crowd became more boisterous, making it harder to catch the rest of the proclamation, but one ominous phrase droned its way into Hetty’s ear as the general finished reading: “And to further take such steps as he may deem necessary to enforce and uphold the majesty of the law.”

A breathless pause hovered in the air, then people swarmed the streets, shouting, grabbing copies of the order being passed out by soldiers. Hetty held Pierce close and rocked back and forth, as much for herself as for her baby.

Garret came back clutching a leaflet: “They’re calling us criminals,” he bawled. “Look at this! ‘
Reckless, unlawful, and criminal handling of producing wells
—’ ” He read out more phrases in a disgusted voice, then crumpled the paper up and stomped on it several times in the mud.

Criminals.
Hetty’s mind chewed on the word.
So that’s what we’ve become in the eyes of Texas.

“What’d they expect us to do?” Roy Hillyer asked. “Go back to raising cotton?”

“It’s a hell of a situation,” Pearl said. “Sixteen-cent oil and two-cent cotton.”

“I’m relieved in a way,” Ada said. “Things were getting so bad.”

“You think things are bad now?” Garret sneered. “This’ll put thousands of men out of work.”

“Here I go—rolling snake eyes again,” Pearl said.

Roy scratched his head and sighed. “Going to be a tough winter, y’all, just when we thought we’d landed on easy street.”

On the way home, Garret turned to Hetty and said, with a cold fury in his voice, “I’m not turning off the well till they make me.” Shaking inside, she agreed that they should wait for the order to be delivered, sharing his hope that the army might somehow overlook the Ada Hillyer Number One, concealed as it was in a creek bed so far out of town. But that afternoon, two national guardsmen appeared at the farm with the proclamation, standing as witnesses while Garret tugged on the great wheel of the gate valve that would dam up the flow of crude.

When Smack came to collect the last of the oil that night, they walked down to the tank with him. Inching her way through the gloom, Hetty climbed up on the derrick. She hugged the Christmas tree, remembering how it used to hum under her hands. Now it felt cold and lifeless. Through the black net of pine needles, she gazed at the sky over Kilgore. Everything smoldered, dark and quiet. Over a thousand wells had been choked off in one day. She could find no flares flickering against the clouds, nothing around for miles to break the stillness of the night. Not even any frogs.

The frogs. She found them the next morning when she fled down to the creek to get away from Garret. He’d been up all night scouring the account books, filling the whole house with smoke from his incessant cigarettes, grumbling that he had to find a way to keep going. She couldn’t take it anymore, her heart heavy enough as it was.

On a carpet of pine needles, she unpinned the dirty diaper off Pierce and released him into the cool water without even washing him. He paddled around for a few minutes, then sat back and began pointing at the sandy shore, babbling.

She found a leopard frog a few feet away, surprised when it didn’t hop out of her grasp. She perched it in front of the baby. He crept forward and poked it. Nothing happened. It sat there stonily. He tried again. No hopping. He began to cry and picked it up by its limp leg. Hetty saw that the frog was dead.

She kicked off her shoes and waded into the creek. The next frog she spotted was floating on its back, yellow belly flashing in the mottled sunlight. Farther upstream, she found a flotilla of three frogs in the same position. Then she searched the banks on both sides. All up and down, under the willow trees, frogs had crawled halfway out of the water and surrendered, their big round eyes dumbfounded with death.

Pierce meanwhile was bawling, heartbroken that his toy wouldn’t play hop along with him. “Oh, kiddo,” Hetty cooed at him. “That’s why they’re not singing anymore.” She hoisted his naked body into her arms. “Let’s show Daddy.”

She let Pierce drop the dead frog in the middle of the kitchen table. A puddle spread around it. “Look what your son found,” Hetty told Garret.

“We’re going under, and you’re worried about a dead frog?”

“It’s not just one. There’s more, a lot more. Are we killing them?”

Garret followed her back to the creek, where he tasted the water. “It’s salty,” he said, glancing upstream. He fetched his knee-highs out of the doghouse and yanked them on, wading into the creek. “I’m going to investigate.”

Hetty rocked Pierce until he stopped crying, then tried to distract him with the smooth pebbles she fished out of the sandy bottom.

Garret came back a half hour later, sloshing toward them, looking worried. “You won’t believe what I found!”

“What now?” she called, stepping in barefoot.

He balanced himself in the current and pointed. “The creek bends to the south, through the Goss farm. I followed it onto their property and came upon pipelines dumping salt water right into the creek. Dead frogs all over the place. A massive die-off. I guess they had no place else to go.”

“Salt water?” Hetty frowned for a moment, then remembered her mother’s gift of fossils. “Of course—from the ancient sea. But who . . . ?”

“I snuck along the pipeline until I found myself in the middle of a big oil field, with crews drilling a string of new wells. Not far from here.”

“I guess Wavie Goss got her better offer after all.”

“She sure did. There was a whole fleet of trucks parked there from one of the Majors.”

The creek suddenly felt cold on Hetty’s feet. “Trucks?”

Garret nodded. “Guess what name was splashed all over them.”

It felt like an electric shock stunned the water. Hetty fell back onto the bank as an emblem flashed through her mind: a golden crown capping the initial
S
like a rising sun. “Splendora!” She gasped, clutching her cheeks. “Oh my God—Lamar.”

“You knew he was here.”

“Yes, but”—Hetty caught her breath—“I never expected him to be this close. You’d think Chief would grab a prime spot farther east.”

“Nope. He’s in our offset location.” Garret pointed through the trees. “Right over there.”

Hetty looked into the distance, trying to spot some derricks. “But why?”

“Been thinking about that all the way back. Remember the map Smack showed us? The Woodbine slants westward, so a little south of here you’d be closer to the deep of the field. But that explains the salt deposits. Some of their wells have obviously watered out.”

“And you saw them operating? Why aren’t they shut down like everybody else?”

“Because it’s Chief Rusk, honey. He probably paid off the sheriff, damn him.”

“But he can’t bribe the whole National Guard, can he?”

“I hope not. If your sister weren’t married to him, I’d turn him in like that.” Garret snapped his fingers.

“I wouldn’t let that stop me. It’s not fair.”

“It sure as hell isn’t.” Garret kicked at the water, capsizing a dying frog as it floated by.

The next day, Hetty heard a horse whinny on the farm road. She went outside. Lone Wolf’s Stetson, so white in the August noon it blinded her for a moment, flashed above his black horse. Another Ranger was with him, a tall gangly man. As he rode closer, Hetty recognized the glare fixed on her from under his swooping hat brim. It was Poker Face. She tried to meet those stony eyes without blinking but, after a couple of breaths, had to look down, the grief she’d choked back all week surging far too close to the surface.

“We’ve come to inspect the Ada Hillyer Number One,” Lone Wolf said.

“I know,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “I’ll get my husband.”

She scooped Pierce off the kitchen floor and followed them down to the derrick, where they dismounted to do a thorough inspection. They made sure the well wasn’t humming, checked the pipes and gauges, and even made Garret remove the manhole cover so one of them could climb the ladder and peer into the huge tank.

Lone Wolf clunked around the site in his boots. Hetty couldn’t help gazing at the pearls studding the six shooters slung on his slim hips.

“These look like fresh tire tracks,” he said.

“They’re from last week.” Garret folded his arms. “When our trucker came to pick up the last load of crude.”

Lone Wolf poked around in the dirt with the toe of his cowboy boot, his spurs clinking. “I’ll let it pass this time,” he said, stepping into his stirrups. “But don’t let me catch your well running, Mr. MacBride. General Wolters has asked the Rangers to help enforce martial law. And we intend to do just that.” He steadied himself on the automatic rifle riding in his saddle holster. “You’ve had your warning. Good afternoon.” He turned his horse to leave.

“Just a minute, Sergeant,” Hetty said. “I have something to show you.” She could hear their saddles creaking as the riders walked their mounts down to the bankside, now crawling with flies and ants feasting on the carcasses. “The whole creek has become one big frog graveyard. Do you know why?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Salt water from the wells on the Goss farm. What do you plan to do about it?”

The two men chuckled at each other. “I don’t think Governor Sterling is too worried about salt water, ma’am.” The horses shied away from the insects and turned back up the hill. Pierce squirmed in her arms so she set him in the sand at her feet.