The Son (37 page)

Oil was what mattered. The Allies had burned seven billion barrels during the war; 90 percent of that had come from America, mostly from Texas. The Big Inch and Little Big Inch: they could not have invaded Normandy without them. The Allies had sailed to victory on a sea of Texas oil.

She sometimes wondered about that—if the pipelines had not been finished—if the liberation of Europe had been canceled—maybe Paul and Clint would still be alive. Or maybe the war would still be going on. Maybe Jonas would be dead as well. That was what they always said—if this or that terrible thing had not been done, the war would never have ended.

She was not sure she believed them. They sounded like men who’d been thrown from horses because they’d wanted to get off anyway. And as for the war ending, it turned out the Russians were as bad as Hitler.

No, she would not go to Europe. She would not follow her brother around like a stray. Something would change, she could feel it.

S
INCE THE VAQUEROS
had done their work on the landman, there had not been any other callers, but one day there was a letter from a manager at Humble Oil. He wanted to take her to lunch.

They met in town and he was nicely dressed with fine features and gray hair that was neatly parted. He was handsome and tan and she liked him immediately and right after they ordered their steaks he offered four million plus 25 percent royalties.

It was double the offer from Southern Minerals but after pretending to think it over carefully she said: “What else will you give us?”

He held the same sweet expression.

“I know that you put in bump gates for people, but we already have them.”

“What else would you like?” he said.

“What if I asked you to clear all the land within”—she thought of a large number—“five thousand feet of each well?”

“You want us to root plow your mesquite.”

She nodded.

“You want us to root plow five hundred sixty-eight acres of mesquite around each well.”

Was that the real number? She had no idea. She had no idea how he’d calculated it without pen and paper. But she knew she couldn’t reveal her ignorance so she said: “Actually we want you to clear the acreage around each drilling site, whether it’s a good well or not.”

He laughed, reminding her of Phineas. “Honey, you realize there’s a lot of proven land in South Texas, and no one else is asking for these improvements.”

“I know you paid three and a half million plus royalties for the King Ranch,” she said. “And that was ten years ago, with nothing proved, and I know all the work you’ve been doing to their land, because we are friends with Bob Kleberg.”

It was quiet and it continued to be quiet. Outside it was busy, people dressed in city clothes, shopping or out for lunch. She started to apologize, she’d pushed too far, but of course this man wanted something from her, same as the other one, and she made herself sit as if the silence was perfectly natural. She could sit without talking for a hundred years. The man was looking out the window. She took note of his bright eyes, his small features—a man’s features, but finely done—he had clearly taken more from his mother. He was quite a striking man. It occurred to her that he was just as aware of this as she was. He seemed to decide something. Now he was judging.

“I wish we could do better, but . . .” He put up his hands.

“What if we just connected to your pipeline?”

“That is funny,” he said.

“Well, there is very little oil going through it at present. It will likely rot.”

“If you’re planning on drilling your own oil, Ms. McCullough, let me assure you there is no faster way to go bankrupt, and you’ll end up living in one of these houses with the niggers and the never-sweats. If you take our offer, that land will be supporting your family for the next few centuries and you will not have to dirty a finger except to sign the lease.”

She knew he was wrong but she didn’t know why and she knew if she said another word her ignorance would be laid bare, if it had not been already. She collected her purse and shook his hand and walked out of the restaurant before their food even came. It was a three-dollar steak and she wondered if she ought to leave money. No. She slowed her pace, making her way down the street in the town named after her family, the shade of the awnings, parked cars, the sky looking bright between the brick storefronts. Four million dollars. It did not seem meaningful to her. In truth she felt more guilty about the three-dollar steak.

Then she began to feel stupid. She was not a grown-up at all, she was a girl, the accountant said she would owe the government five million dollars in estate taxes—that had not seemed real, either. They could get an extension but they would have to drill, and soon; it was a question of finding the right people. Phineas had told her not to worry, but she had not been worrying anyway.

The road turned back to dirt. She passed the houses of the Mexicans, their filthy alleys, doors that didn’t close properly, people living ten to a room, slabs of meat hanging in the sun, collecting flies. She was sure she ought to turn around, to catch the man from Humble before he left.

But she was still walking. It was brush and farmland. Her feet, in her good shoes, sank into the dust; they would be ruined. It was stupid talking to people without Phineas around. It was stupid what she’d said about the pipeline. She should not be taking these meetings alone. But that made no sense, either. Phineas would not live forever, he was no different from her father.

Ed Freeman was in his onion field, tinkering with his irrigator. Did he still owe her father money? She waved and he looked as if something might be wrong—as if he might be required to help her. She continued along the bar ditch, sweat running down her back now.

Her father had allowed her to hate mathematics; he’d told her it didn’t matter if she were good at it or not. He had been wrong about that as well. It did matter. What had the man figured—five thousand times five thousand? No, it was a geometry problem.
I haven’t the faintest,
she thought.

She watched a car pass, roiling up the dust, a white man taking four Mexicans to work. License number 7916. Seventy-nine times sixteen. It seemed impossible. She did not see how the man had done it. And yet he had.

A
S SOON AS
she got home she had called Phineas and told him what happened, including what she’d said about the pipeline. He told her not to worry: she hadn’t said anything they weren’t already thinking. She felt relieved but Phineas was still talking. He was inviting her to Austin. He had someone for her to meet.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Diaries of Peter McCullough

A
PRIL 17, 1917

“Would you ever go into farming yourself, Colonel?”

“Sure,” he says. “Natural progression of the land.”

There are perhaps fifty of them, all in their Sunday best, eating tenderloin and drinking claret in the great room, listening to the Colonel expound on the wonders of our southern climate. I consider leaving my shady spot on the gallery to tell them that his policy was to shoot at any farmers who tried to toll us on cattle drives. And has said his whole life that grubbing in the dirt is the lowest form of human existence. He blames this on his time with the Indians, though it is common among all horse people, from landed cattleman to poorest vaquero.

“ . . . the winter garden of Texas,” he is saying, “two hundred eighty-eight growing days . . . you’ll never lift a hand to shovel snow again.” Scattered applause. “Further,” he says, “you will find the proportion of advanced females greatly reduced compared to what you are used to in Illinois.” Laughter and more applause. I close my ears; I decide to go for a walk.

Naturally they will only show the farms that are doing well; none whose water was too salty for irrigation, none of the farms on the old Cross S land, subdivided less than ten years ago, most of which are reverting to the lowest class of scrub rangeland. The soil as dead as anything you might find in Chihuahua.

A
PRIL 18, 1917

Ran into Midkiff’s son Raymond at the store. He was driving a few critters along the road after the hailstorm this afternoon when he saw the caravan of Illinois farmers pulled over under some trees.

They were standing in the road examining hailstones the size of oranges, remarking how they might have been killed. One of them called to Raymond to ask if this weather was unusual.

“Sure is,” he told them. “But you should have been here last year, when it rained!”

When the Colonel returned he was furious and told me we needed to fire the limp-dicked droop-eyed son of a bitch who was driving brindle calves on the lower road.

Explained we could not fire Raymond Midkiff. He said that was fine—we would shoot him instead. Reminded him the Midkiffs are our neighbors.

Naturally, all the farmers thought Midkiff was joking. The irrigated fields are quite lush. They have no mental ruler to understand the country here; a few of them were overheard repeating the old saw “if you plow, the rains will follow.” I wonder what century they are living in.

A
LL OF IT,
for some reason, makes me feel almost unbearably lonely . . . but I have always been a keen student of that emotion.

A
PRIL 19, 1917

The entire Pinkard Ranch—over one hundred sections—has been sold and divided. The family is moving to Dallas. I went to visit with Eldridge Pinkard. He could barely look at me. We are nearly the same age—his father settled this country not long after the Colonel.

“The bank would have taken it one of these days, Pete.” He shrugged. “Even with beef where it is, this drought . . . I had to pull the money out before there was none left.”

“Heard you bought a little in the cross timbers.”

He chuckled bitterly: “Two whole sections.”

“Probably run a few head.”

He shrugged and scuffed the dirt, looked out over what had been his pastures. “Before you get to thinking I am too badly looed . . .”

“I don’t,” I lied.

“You do, but I appreciate it. I wasn’t going to say this to any of you who’s staying, but you and me have known each other since there was Indians.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I was mighty down in the mouth about this until I got to talking to Eustice Caswell. On the draft board?” He shook his head. “Pete, a year from now all the good men’ll be overseas. I can’t even take a piss without some bond salesman drumming me for ten dollars. And . . . truthfully I am jealous of some of those boys who are shipping out, because by the time they get to France, they will have seen more country than I’ve seen in my whole life. And once I realized that, I got to seeing this as the last clear swing I’d ever get. And that I was a fool if I didn’t take it.”

“I guess.”

“It ain’t like our daddies grew up here, Pete. It ain’t like people have lived here long. This is just the place they happened to stop.”

“The fences got all of us,” I said.

He looked as if he might cry, but he didn’t, and then I saw that he was not happy, but he was not sad, either. The idea of moving away from here appealed to him. “You know if I was staying, I’d build roads through the whole place, get to where I could run it with a quarter of the hands, drive ten minutes instead of riding four hours, eat home every night, do the feeding out of trucks. You could get it pretty well oiled, if you put your mind to it. But even so . . .” He lifted his boot and ground it down on a mesquite seedling. “Let’s face it, Pete. This land is niggered out. I wish they’d taken pictures when we were kids, because I want to forget it ever looked like this.”

W
HEN
I
GOT
home, my father revealed he has known about it for months—he picked up half the minerals underneath the Pinkard land. I asked how we were going to pay for it.

“I decided to sell the pastures across the Nueces.”

“Where are we going to keep the bulls?”

“After the promoter’s cut we’re clearing $31.50 an acre. We can fence off whatever we want. This pays for the minerals under the Pinkard, plus half the Garcia acquisition.”

“You can see those pastures from every high point on our property,” I said.

“So what? We’ll look at the pretty farmer girls.”

“What if I refuse to sign the deed?”

“You can refuse whatever you want,” he said.

Except I cannot. I signed as he knew I would. I console myself with the fact that the Nueces pastures were not exactly convenient, anyway. The Colonel consoled me by pointing out we kept mineral rights. “Anymore, the surface ain’t worth two shits,” he said. “Luckily them ignorant Yankees were too busy carrying on about their college to figure that out.”

Fine except the Nueces pastures were the only sensible place to keep the bulls. It will be much harder to control breeding now, more work for us, more work for the vaqueros, and much more expensive.

As for the minerals, there has been a good deal of drilling along the big river; trucks and roughnecks no longer garner any notice. Lease prices have tripled. But still the closest strikes are at Piedras Pintas, far to the east, which produce only a few hundred barrels a day under pump. The rest is just gas, which for now is useless.

A
PRIL 26, 1917

The Colonel, who has been gone a week, returned today from Wichita Falls with a nearly new rotary drilling rig on several old trucks. He claims to have gotten a good price.
Feller who owned it went bankrupt,
he told me, as if this were a selling point.

Accompanying the Colonel is a very drunk man who claims to be a geologist. A second drunk who claims to be a driller. Drunks number three through five are the floor- and derrickmen. They look to have been sleeping in hog wallows.

“Where did you get all that?” I asked him.

“Wichita Falls,” he said, as if I didn’t know where he’d been.

“We puttin’ in more windmills?”

“Don’t you worry about it.”

He and the geologist went to explore in the sandy Garcia pastures. The rig builder, toolie, and driller retired to the Colonel’s porch to drink.