Magnolia City (33 page)

Garret could hardly rest until he’d put together the two crews he’d need to run a double shift. He drove into Tulsa’s and came back with a report of the men he’d hired: two brothers named Elwyn and Jim who knew how to run the motors, backed up with four floor hands who’d just arrived by rail from the Oklahoma oil fields looking for work. That meant he could finally sit down at the dining table and savor the moment he’d anticipated for years—ordering plans for a derrick out of the National Supply Company catalog.

The next day, Mr. Hillyer hitched up his mule team and followed the Wichita into town to help haul back all the supplies they would need: fresh pine planks from a local sawmill, thousands of feet of pipe, drill bits that looked like fishes’ tails. Hetty, Pearl, Ada, Oleta, and Hollis lined up in front of the barn that afternoon, all agog as the farmer’s wagon rolled by hoisting the traveling block that would nudge the bit through tons of solid rock. It was huge, like a hippopotamus or beached whale. “Weighs as much as a freight car,” Garret boasted from his seat on the bench. Hanging from it was a giant iron hook.

“Looks like something God might lower from the sky,” Ada said in awe, “to raise the righteous.”

Hetty could see how happy Garret was orchestrating all this frenzied activity. He was no longer just a weevil working the decks; he was now the foreman, ordering the other men around, standing back as they hammered the derrick together, making it rise a hundred feet or more over the tops of the pines, like the skeleton of a great obelisk.

Garret didn’t want to admit that he’d chosen the spot to drill based on Hetty’s dream. He put it down to creekology, the tradition that a prime spot for finding oil was laid between a creek and an acclivity, one of the geological terms he’d picked up in his reading, a fancy name for a hill. He told her that the first oil well dug in America, the Drake Well in Pennsylvania, had been discovered that way and it was still good enough for him. He spurned the use of diviners and the even more scientific doodlebugs, special instruments guaranteed by their operators to pinpoint reservoirs under the earth. No, Garret depended on the time-proven folk wisdom of wildcatters, who studied the coils of rivers and creeks. Just as serpents had always guarded great hordes of treasure, so the snakings of a creek bed around a bend or hill, if you knew what to look for, could reveal the secret geology at work deep in the earth. Still, Hetty suspected that her dream and Ada’s reaction to it might have exercised some gravitational pull as Garret had scoured the bank with a pine branch and drawn an
X
in the sand at a point between the water and the hill that might have been a Caddo mound.

Once the drilling started, it was relentless. Sixteen hours a day with hardly a break for food and coffee. Darkness fell early, smudging the line between January and February. Garret’s second shift had to work mostly by electric lights strung up on the derrick. Hetty saw them shimmering in the creek as she walked through the black pines, bearing supper on a metal camp tray. She could hardly coax Garret to stop and eat, or get enough sleep. She would wake up at midnight, alone in bed.

The longest days came when they had to “make a trip,” as the workers called it, pulling each length of pipe out of the hole and unscrewing it in order to change the drill bit that had grown dull from days of cutting through limestone and chalk. During these pauses, it was quiet enough to hear the spirituals intoned in a deep baritone by Pick from his perch in the sky. Hetty would stand in the cold twilight and listen to him sing of hammers ringing and the Rock of Ages. She got to know his favorite by heart:

One night during a trip, Garret left his supper steaming on the tray she had set on the edge of the platform.

“Eat it while it’s hot,” she called up to him.

“Can’t. Got to get kelly out of the rathole first.”

Hetty frowned. So that was why he stayed at the well so late. They had a woman in the doghouse. “And just who is Kelly?”

“The kelly,” he shouted at her, as they lifted a long stem of pipe out of its sleeve at the corner of the derrick. “That’s what spins the bit.”

“It’s named after a woman?”

Elwyn guffawed. “She’s like a woman, too. Eight-sided.” As they lifted it into the air, Hetty could see that it was indeed hexagonal in shape.

“So that’s what keeps everything turning?” Hetty asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Elwyn said, grunting as they joined the kelly to the drill stem. “Fits down yonder into your kelly bushings.”

Kelly Bushings,
Hetty thought.
If I ever change my name, that’s what it will be. Kelly Bushings.

On a murky afternoon in February, as more rain lurked at the edge of the sky, Hetty clutched the newspaper she’d bought and ran down the slope from the shotgun houses. She crossed the crude bridge they’d built over the creek. “Look at this,” she shouted above the roar of the steam engines. The men only glanced at her, their breaths streaming around them like gossamer scarves.

“Later, honey,” Garret said, as he helped Pick, ninety feet up, guide a string of pipe into its stand.

“I think you want to read this now,” she shouted again, unfolding that morning’s edition of the
Kilgore News Herald
. She and Pearl had just returned from an expedition into town with the Hillyers, and she’d snatched up the paper with the article everyone was buzzing about. Garret raised his eyebrows at her and wiped his nose on the dusty sleeve of his coat. He signaled the motorman to bring the steam engines hissing to a stop.

Silence settled like early frost over the crew, as all four of them gathered around to read the headlines she held up: NEW GUSHER IN LONGVIEW! Lathrop I Blew in Last Night at 18,000 Barrels.

Garret shrugged. “I’d rather read about the Ada Hillyer blowing in at eighteen thousand barrels.”

“You didn’t read far enough. They hit the Woodbine Sand clear up in Longview. . . .”

“They did?”

“Don’t you see what this means?”

“No, ma’am,” Elwyn the motorman said, the two roughnecks behind him shaking their heads in tandem.

“It’s one big field!”

They looked at one another, frowning and cursing.

“Don’t you see? The Daisy Bradford lies miles south of here. And now the Lathrop I many miles north. All tapping into the same formation—the Woodbine Sand.” She turned the paper toward her and read:

Garret just stared at her. They all stared at her. “Read that last part again.”

“You heard me right . . . the largest oil field ever discovered in North America.” Hetty found herself laughing hysterically. Garret scooped her up and spun her around, howling in her ear while the men bellowed all around him. As she whirled, she caught a glimpse of Pick’s dark head leaning over the board high above, watching them.

“If you think it was bad in town before”—she gasped as he set her down—“you should have seen it today. Pandemonium. You know what the word on the street is, Mac?”

“Tell me, baby.”

“They’re saying it’s impossible to drill a dry hole anywhere around Kilgore. That means the Ada Hillyer’s got to be a gusher!”

The men all started a wild dance on the derrick floor, swinging off the mud hose, hugging each other, slapping hands. Pick shouted down, “What’s happening, y’all? Tell me what’s happening.”

“Get down here, Pick boy,” Garret yelped. “We’re going to celebrate.” He disappeared into the doghouse, where the supplies were stashed. Hetty could hear him in there yapping and rattling around until he emerged hoisting a fruit jar in each hand. “Here you go, boys. Let’s all get drunk.” He pitched one to Elwyn.

“Yes, let’s!” Hetty screamed in delight. In her mind, she saw hundreds of derricks sailing like the masts of ships over a vast and ancient black sea of petroleum. “Just think of it, honey. There’s going to be wells all the way from here to Longview.”

“And a bunch of them are going to be mine!” Garret said, taking the first swig and passing the jar to Hetty. She nearly gagged on the raw corn whiskey.

March spun up from the south, soughing in the pines. Garret called her to the well one warm, windy day and showed her a core sample he’d pulled from deep within the earth.

“It looks like brown sugar,” she said.

“That’s oil-saturated sand. We’ve hit the Woodbine.”

He refused to come to bed that night. Even after the crew went home exhausted, he and Pick kept on drilling with the help of Mr. Hillyer, who was anxious to bring the well in. Hetty stretched out on the chaise lounge and tried to sleep, but the rush of wind in thousands of pine branches kept her mind astir. She finally got up and stepped outside for a cigarette. On the hill, through tossing foliage, she saw a light burning in the kitchen of the farmhouse. She gathered Pierce up and headed for it like a beacon, pushing up the road against the wind. When she came to the door, she saw Ada sitting at the kitchen table, sewing under an old copper lamp. She knocked.

“You can’t sleep neither?” the farmwife said, as she got up and opened the door to invite her inside.

Hetty shook her head no, yawning as she passed. “My baby’s the only one who’s going to sleep through this.”

Ada took Pierce and rocked him in her arms, humming something that might have been a lullaby or hymn. Hetty reached for a high-backed chair and sat down at the old wooden table. The kitchen was the largest room in the house—and the most popular. A long wall of whitewashed, built-in cabinets divided itself by a double porcelain sink. The doors of a primitive American pie safe had been left cracked, and Hetty could see rows of Mason jars inside with their lids clamped down. Ada nestled Pierce in a rocking chair over in the corner.

“Let me make some coffee,” she said, reaching for a burlap sack full of beans. She poured some into an old iron grinder bolted to the drain board and turned the handle. A rich brown fragrance followed the fresh coffee into the room and was met by the crackle of fire in the woodstove. She put the kettle on to boil.

“We wives might as well hold our own wake as sleep alone in bed,” she said, bringing out her best china cups. They settled in for the night, talking and nibbling on biscuits and jelly with their coffee.

Hetty looked through the dusty windows at one point and saw the sky turning blue. The wind had settled down, and dawn started to creep with its startling light over the hills.

“That day I told you about my dream . . .” Hetty spoke after a long silence. “You said it was
her
. Who were you talking about?”

“Well . . . I’ve never told Roy about this. Men, they don’t understand, but the Caddo, they had some powerful women among them. The right woman, they let her rise to the top. I expect that was Santa Adiva that appeared to you.”

“Santa . . . ?”

“Adiva. The Great Lady. My mother used to tell me stories about her, which she heard from her mother. Folks say she had a large house . . . with many rooms. The whole Caddo Nation brought gifts to lay at her feet. She was married to five Indian men.”

“All at once?”

Ada threw her a mischievous glance. “Um-hmm.”

“Now that’s my idea of being queen.”

“It’s the turkey feathers, that’s how I knew. Only the highest of the Caddo were allowed to wear the cloak.” She went on telling some of the tales about the Great Lady and her powers.
We have no goddesses in America,
Hetty thought as she grew sleepy.
That’s our problem.

Then something flashed in the corner of her eye. She looked over. Mr. Hillyer was drenched in sun, peeping in. “Miss Hetty,” he called, cracking the door. “Your husband wants you down at the site. Right away. He says to bring one of your scarves.”

Hetty’s chair fell to the floor as she stood up. “Oh, my God. Is he hurt?”

“No, ma’am. He says y’all don’t want to miss this.”

“Don’t worry about the baby,” Ada said. “I’ll bring him along presently.”

Hetty skipped out the door, sprinting through the morning hills lacquered with light. She took a detour home and grabbed the first thing she could find draped over an easy chair—the wedding shawl. She pounded on the door of the other shotgun house on her way to the creek.

When she arrived at the derrick, the crew was standing over the well core, waiting for her. Garret signaled for her to step up. “Don’t anybody dare light a cigarette,” he said. Hetty could hear a hissing sound.

“Now hold your scarf over here.” As she did so, the shawl floated up like a parachute. Pearl joined the group shortly, followed by Roy and Ada, holding Pierce up so he could see his mother.

They stood there in a circle, nobody speaking, watching the shawl drift about in the currents of gas, its fringes swaying, knowing that behind this gentle wafting a giant eruption was about to follow, a shiver that would travel up the earth’s spine and burst out with such fury it would send the cap splintering through the crown block and hurtling hundreds of feet into the clear blue sky.

“It won’t be long now,” Garret said.

H
etty and Pearl spread out a blanket on the bank opposite the well so they could watch the show. Ada came and went all morning, thinking of more people to ring up on her party line. The day opened into a warm, sunny noon.

After lunch, a caravan of dusty Ford trucks came creaking in—one dented bumper after another—and parked in the meadow beyond the willows. So many God-fearing folks assembled along the shores of Caney Creek, Pearl said it looked like a baptism was about to take place—the men lean and crooked in overalls, the women nodding about in starched-brim sunbonnets.

Hetty bought lemonade from Hollis and Oleta, who’d set up a makeshift stand. As she passed with the cold glasses in her hands, the crowd parted to let the Baptist preacher through, his fearless wide-open eyes blinking with zeal.

The crew spent the afternoon crawling over the well like worker ants, clamping down valves, checking the pipes that ran to the large holding tank Garret had just purchased with an advance from the interest owners.

After dinner-on-the-ground, the crowd grew restive in the fading light. Ada brought the neighboring farmers, the Gosses, over to meet Hetty and Pearl. They owned the farm just south of the Hillyer spread. Clay Goss seemed dubious about drilling on his land, but his wife, a rosy-cheeked woman named Wavie, glanced at Ada’s well with undisguised greed.

“Why not, Clay?” she kept saying over her husband’s objections.

Finally, the motorman, Elwyn, flicked on Nella’s carbide lantern and spotlighted Garret on the derrick. All heads turned together in that direction.

“Let ’er blow, son!” Wavie Goss shouted. “It’s getting dark.” She was followed by a blast of encouragement.

“Hold on, folks.” Garret raised his arms to quiet them. “I want to thank everyone for coming out today to this historic moment. But I’m here to tell you—after consulting with Cleveland Yoakum, my promoter—I’ve decided not to let the well blow in.”

A wave of grumbling swept through the air, and Ada’s frowning face emerged from the edge of the crowd. Garret spoke directly to her, explaining how much money they’d saved by not letting the well spew its wealth onto her farm. She lifted her shoulders in a shrug, while a swarm of relatives congratulated her.

“What’s the readin’?” Wavie Goss yelled.

Elwyn handed the log to Garret. Everyone grew silent with anticipation. Hetty stood. “The Ada Hillyer Number One is a good steady producer with an average flow of”—Garret checked the numbers in the logbook again, then glanced back at the crowd—“four hundred barrels a day.” There were confused murmurs. A sigh of disappointment rose in the dusk.

Pearl grappled onto Hetty’s arm. She heard a worried voice in her ear. “How much was that well up yonder in Longview?”

“Eighteen thousand barrels.”

“A day?”

Hetty turned to Pearl, nodding.

“And we’ve got four hundred?”

Hetty took her hands. “I’m sorry, Pearl. The oil game’s always a gamble.”

“Oh, don’t worry for me, hon. My share seems like a small fortune—twelve hundred a month! In hard times, too. But what about Garret?”

Hetty sighed and let go of Pearl’s hands. She pushed through the crowd, pulled herself up onto the derrick floor, and approached her husband, who wore black streaks on his face like war paint. She wanted to kiss him, long and deep, but he shrugged her off and jumped down into the shadows of the doghouse.

She followed him. “I’m sorry, honey.”

His face tilted into the intense light from the lantern for a moment, showing what he’d hidden from the crowd. He looked close to tears. “I’ve been running the numbers through my head ever since we read the gauges,” he said. “Ten percent to Pearl, twelve point five to the Hillyers. I’ll be lucky to have eight thousand a month to pay in royalties.”

“It could be worse—we could have a dry hole on our hands.”

“I don’t know which is worse—a dry hole, or a well that doesn’t give you enough of what you need.”

She could hear him spitting again. Flecks of tobacco hit her face. She could imagine him twisting the cigarette in his hands. “Look, honey, I know you’re disappointed, but we’ll just do the best we can. Let’s vow to put every cent toward paying back the consortium—we’ll go on living right where we are.” She slipped into his arms and was enveloped in the earthy aroma of oil-soaked skin. She held him while she told one of the stories Chief used to recite when Nella would have the Rusks over for dinner. “I remember him bragging about living in a shack on the field in the early years. He had to pawn his best gold watch just to pay his crew’s wages. We’re not that bad off, see? We’ve got the Cliff behind us.”

“More like in front of us,” Garret said, dodging into the doghouse to avoid the onlookers, who were becoming unruly.

Hetty had an idea. She hoisted herself up onto the derrick and stood in the bright light of the carbide lantern. “Four hundred barrels a day,” she shouted to quiet people. “Now I know that doesn’t sound like much compared to some of the other gushers we’ve had around here. But, Ada—where are you?” She searched through the crowd until Ada stepped forward. “Look at it this way, it’s over twelve thousand dollars a month.”

“Thanks be!” yelled the preacher, raising his hands into the air. A few cheers followed, and Hetty watched Ada’s apron flap in the air as she jumped up and down.

“Now listen to me, folks,” Hetty shouted over the commotion. “I’m going to give you a rare treat. You’re going to come up here one at a time and place your arms around what my husband likes to call the Christmas tree,” she said, pointing to the branching valves that had been clamped down on the well head. “I want you to feel that East Tex crude just pouring into the holding tank over there.”

This appeased people as they lined up to take their turns. The ritual lasted until well after dark. Hetty was the last to hug the Christmas tree. It hummed under her hands, a steady flow of wealth that would continue even while they slept.

The next day, as soon as Garret left the house, Hetty sat down and wrote out an application to the Cupola Club, giving Cleveland Yoakum as reference and reporting that their monthly income now exceeded twelve thousand dollars. She left Pierce with Pearl and drove into town, standing in line for an hour to mail the letter. As she was coming out of the post office, a muddy, white Ford truck chugged by with an oil company’s name painted on its door. Not something she would normally notice, but the logo was painted in golden yellow, with rays crowning a rising sun. She recognized it at once.
Splendora.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the post office steps, trying to find her breath again.

All through March the nights were filled with light: an eerie glow in the east from wells flaring off their gases, a brilliance ballooning in the sky like a second sun when a well cratered, swallowing the rig and all the men working on it. But the most colorful lights came on after dark out on the Gladewater highway, the neon pinks and blues, the strands of yellow bulbs over the beer gardens.

One night Hetty and Garret made the party at Mattie’s Ballroom when the famous Sax Kings hit town, drawn by the oil boom. It had all been described to them by Elwyn, who came here for the taxi dance. There was the booth outside where Mattie Castlebury sat on high, selling five-dollar rolls of tickets to a horny lineup of roughnecks. Couples were fifty cents. Inside, swirls of fabric turned the whole place into a giant sheik’s tent, fringed in gold and hung with spangles of stars that revolved in the soft lights. The lighting was designed to cast a romantic hue on the faces of the taxi dancers.
They look so young and fresh,
Hetty thought as Garret elbowed her to their table—farm girls trussed up in satins to try and make a living dancing for three minutes a time with any man willing to pay the price.

She and Garret blessed their success with bottles of good champagne he’d obtained in town at great expense. When he popped the corks, the bottles spewed multicolored bubbles into the air. He drew Hetty to her feet, and she moved along to the new and bigger sounds of jazz that flowed like rich cream over the shining dance floor.

Later on, when the band took a break, a colored group filled in whose lead singer’s lizard eyes looked familiar to Hetty.

“Isn’t that?”

Garret looked up. “I’ll be damned. It’s Brown Sugar.” The crooner had sung at Andy Boy’s the night that Garret had taken Hetty there against her mother’s wishes.

Later, coming back from the men’s room, she saw him stop at the side of the stage and light up a Camel, watching the singer through clouds of smoke and getting a sideways glance in return that Hetty thought lasted just a few beats too long.

She kept him away from Brown Sugar the rest of the night, tailing him to the pissoir, dancing almost every number with him, sitting in his lap like she used to, and teasing him to the point of torture. Back home in bed, Hetty crooned in the dark, caressing him in slow motion like she thought a brown woman might.

When the tan envelope bearing the Greek temple finally landed in the Hillyers’ mailbox, Hetty didn’t open it for hours. Waiting until they sat down to dinner, she slit it with her steak knife and let the words glide into her mind like silk. “The board has reviewed your application for membership in the Cupola Club, and we are pleased to inform you . . .”

She handed it to Garret. He read it and shot her an amused glance. “I think this calls for a party, don’t you?”

“We’ll invite all those people who laughed at us—Cleveland, my parents.”

“Don’t forget Lamar. I want him to see that we can get into the Cupola Club on our own.”

She coaxed Pierce to eat more mashed potatoes. “I’ll go on one condition. You have to take me to Neiman Marcus first.”

“I thought we were going to put every penny toward paying off the consortium?”

Hetty plopped down the baby spoon. “Oh, Garret, what am I going to do with you? You don’t just mail your first royalty payment to someone like Cleveland Yoakum. You present it to him in person. Over dinner, along with a whiskey sour and a very good cigar. You want me to look like the wife of an oilman, don’t you? Especially in front of Lamar.”

“I sure do.”

“There. You see. This
will
go toward paying off the consortium.” She passed him the salt.

So they made the pilgrimage that all the new oil rich made—on the Texas and Pacific Railway from Shreveport, the sharp smell of cold new metal ringing in the air as they steamed westward. Hetty watched the Piney Woods recede and the blackland prairies stretch out on all sides, flat . . . flat . . . flat. The monotony made her drowsy. As she yawned, she wondered why she kept spotting more and more Splendora trucks in Kilgore. Was Chief Rusk moving in? Or worse, Lamar? She’d been afraid to tell Garret about it, even though there was nothing the Rusks could do to harm the Ada Hillyer. She knew everything would be fine. She’d left her baby with Pearl, their oil well under the care of Pick. Hetty lay back on the seat and drifted. Then, sometime after lunch, a city of towers lifted out of the cotton fields, immense, like magic. Hetty’s heavy eyelids fluttered. Was she seeing things?

It was Dallas, suddenly there.

They stepped out into the vastness of Union Station, checked into the Adolphus hotel, and shopped for a whole day at the famous store on the corner of Main and Ervay. Garret followed Hetty as she prowled through the spacious salons, trying on English tweeds, cinema satins, and the new afternoon dresses that dropped the hem almost to the ankle. For him, she picked out linen suits, Borsalino hats, and shoes made of soft kangaroo leather. Before they went to dinner, she insisted he soak in a hot bath while she scrubbed to get the last traces of black crude from under his fingernails, out of every pore.

While waiting for their clothes to be altered, they went sightseeing on the State Fair grounds, glimpsing eels and anemones at the aquarium, and a twelve-foot skeleton of
Mosasaur tylosaurus
at the Museum of Natural History, an aquatic lizard which had drifted through these parts when Texas was an ancient sea. At night, they found a speakeasy near the hotel where the bartender suggested they try a Dry Snake, the hottest new drink in Dallas. They had to laugh when he brought the cocktails, crowned with limes sliced to look like snakes, remembering their part in the creation of this concoction. Hetty spoke wistfully about Odell, knowing what a kick he’d get out of the name.

After bellboys carried their stacks of striped boxes down the grand staircase at Neiman’s and their new steamer trunks were loaded onto the train, Garret rifled through the sales tickets to see how much they’d spent. The total came to over eight hundred dollars. Hetty shrugged off her new English tweed jacket and settled into her seat for the ride to Houston. “That’s only two days of oil,” she said. She thought in barrels now, not dollars.

On the evening of April 1, the maître d’ of the Cupola Club slipped Hetty and Garret through the velvet rope and into the wide dining room where the drone of conversation and the clink of silver rebounded off pink marble walls. She walked arm in arm with her husband, beaming smiles at strangers who looked up from candlelit tables. She’d poured herself into one of the cinema satins she’d bought and wore her hair in the latest style, curled at the back of her neck.

Their guests rose in a body as they approached their table—the six people Hetty had chosen to witness this moment of intimate triumph: her parents, her sister and Lamar, Cleveland Yoakum and his wife, Clare. The men shook hands, the women planted kisses on each other’s cheeks, and Hetty, assuming the head of the table, called for champagne. No flasks here: In the secluded precincts of the club, alcohol was served freely.

She found herself playing the hostess with ease, describing their adventures in the oil patch, engaging in folksy repartee with Cleveland. Lamar was boastful as usual, describing the dimensions of the house he was building for Char in Courtlandt Place, who, in turn, supplied a lot of technical details about the architecture and construction, determined to hold her own in this company.