The End of Country (30 page)

And for the life of him, he didn’t know how to feel about that. Sure, he could now lavish gifts on his grandchildren if he decided to, and he could step aside and let Emmagene spend the way he suspected that she had always wanted to. He might even break down and buy Crybaby a new collar, nothing elaborate, no spikes or rhinestones, just something a little more fitting for a rich man’s hunting dog. Financially, 2008 was shaping up to be a damned good year, and his personal life wasn’t bad, either. Back in July, while Ken and Emmagene had been sitting around the cottage, he had reminded her, gently, of her promise to marry him that year. “Let’s go get our marriage license,” he had said.

“Really?” Emmagene said.

“Yup.”

There wasn’t much more discussion. They hopped in the car and drove up to the courthouse, picked up their license, and then headed down to the valley to pick out wedding rings. They’d put it all on a
credit card. For the first time, they could afford to take a chance on something other than each other, they figured. Ken chose a plain gold band for himself. Emmagene was about to do the same when Ken showed her a diamond-encrusted one. “I’ll get the plain gold one,” she told him as she pushed the ring away, “and later, when the money comes in, you can get me a diamond heart to go on it.”

It was one of the few times that Ken ever pushed Emmagene on anything. “You ought to get the diamond one, diamonds look good on you,” he said. She relented. The way she figured it, they had both spent a lifetime counting nickels, and soon they’d never have to do that again. A couple of days later, they wandered into a judge’s office in New Milford, and as Ken put it, forty years after they should have gotten married, they did.

From the outside, it seemed Ken was finally getting everything he had ever wanted. He was married to the woman he had loved since he was nineteen, he was in comparatively good health—he had long since beaten his cancer, and though he had been diagnosed with diabetes, it was easily manageable—and for the first time in his life, he was not going to have to worry about money, and never would again.

That earlier unpleasantness with the Cabot driver was not forgotten, but both the Cabot boys and Ken had decided to pretend that it was. An uneasy truce had descended on the hill. Crybaby had done a lot to help that along, of course. Ken might have had his misgivings about the roughnecks and the roustabouts and the drivers, but Crybaby sure as hell didn’t. Every time she saw one of them, she’d dash out, tail wagging, and roll over and show her belly, just begging them to scratch her. Being country boys themselves, most of them, they were only too happy to oblige, and they’d bring her treats of all kinds, and lavish affection on her. Just like Ken, Crybaby was becoming one of the Haves. But unlike Ken, she wasn’t the least bit conflicted about it.

The truth was, Ken had been among the Have Nots far too long to stop thinking like one. He told Emmagene that it troubled his sense of fairness that this new money that was now about to start rolling into town was every bit as fickle as the old money, the only difference being that there was more of it. For every Ken Ely or Cleo Teel or Rosemarie Greenwood who was about to become rich, there were scores of others who were going to be left behind. In fact, a lot
of Ken’s old customers from his days at the service station, among them the ones who had always paid for what they took, were seeing their chances for a shot at the big money—or any money at all—vanish now that the gas companies had stopped leasing and were focusing exclusively on drilling.

That was particularly true up on Ellsworth Hill, where folks had been counting on the Texas landman George W. Clay.

I
HAD SEEN THAT
for myself just a few days after my mother had signed her contract with Marshall Casale. Maybe it was that she didn’t want to seem to gloat, or maybe it was the good old Irish mistrust of her own good fortune, but my mother had not mentioned to anyone that she had signed with Chesapeake. The truth was, she didn’t have to. The ink wasn’t dry on the contract before everyone in the neighborhood knew that she had done it, as I discovered one summer afternoon while flogging my old Mercedes up the hill toward her house. Out of the corner of my eye I had caught a glimpse of Roger Williams, hunkered down in a dirt patch beside his barn trying to fix his broken hay baler with a penknife. Somewhere deep inside I felt a twinge of nostalgia. It was not just awe at his native grit and determination; more than that, it was a sense that Roger and his Barlow were linked by breed and nature to the kinds of men who 180 years before had started the mad chase for fossil fuels in the first place. It had been men just like Roger who had set in motion the chain of events that were now about to change this place forever and would in time make men like Roger obsolete. I wanted to explore that notion a bit, but I could tell the second I greeted Roger that he wasn’t about to indulge my philosophical ruminations any more than he was willing to indulge my mother’s misplaced sense of propriety. “How you doin’?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, without looking up from his work, “I could be doin’ about twenty-five hundred an acre better.”

I gathered from our conversation that Roger and the others had not heard much from Clay, and that some of them—but not including Roger—were starting to wonder whether they had placed their faith in the wrong leader. There had certainly been plenty of criticism of Clay in the months since he had first appeared like the Lone Ranger in his white cowboy hat, and most of it focused on the unusually generous
slice of his clients’ future royalties—half of everything above the state minimum of 12.5 percent—that Clay had negotiated for himself. But Clay had also put some of his own money where his mouth was. That fall, despite the fact that the downturn had effectively frozen the lease market, Clay had purchased a 25 percent stake in a 70-acre farm at the edge of the village of Springville, some five miles from Ellsworth Hill and a stone’s throw from Dimock, that so far had not been leased to any of the gas drillers. That meant that Clay at least had some skin in the game.

But he had also admitted to some of his clients that he, too, had been caught flat-footed, first by the tanking economy and then by the sudden tectonic shift in the gas drillers’ strategies. “We were really close to a deal when all of this happened,” Clay told his clients, though with his penchant for what he called “confidentiality” he declined to say with whom or just how close to a deal he had been.

He insisted that he was still talking to gas companies about possible deals. That, after all, was the only thing he really had to do under the terms of the contract he had provided to the folks up on Ellsworth Hill, the folks like Roger who had signed up with his outfit. That contract was open-ended. As long as Clay was talking, as long as he claimed he was looking for a deal, the contract remained in effect.

But Clay was also a realist, and he understood that he needed to make some gesture to keep his clients in line, and so he planned to hold a meeting later that year at which he would offer to let them out of their contracts. He didn’t really expect any of them to take him up on his offer. The lease market had already dried up, and there was no place for them to go. He also decided to throw his clients another bone. He’d cut the percentage of the royalties he would take if and when a deal was struck, though again, citing “confidentiality,” he declined to say by how much.

That seemed to mollify most of Clay’s clients, at least temporarily. But then neither Anne Stang nor Roger Williams nor any of the others really had much of a choice. They had cast their lot with Clay, and now, at least as far as they were concerned, he was, just like the Marcellus itself, the only game in town. It was a hard fact of life. There are winners and there are losers. And sometimes it takes years to know for sure which is which.

•   •   •

T
HE WAY
K
EN
E
LY SAW IT
, there were other folks who were not getting a fair shake from this Marcellus boom. His own stepdaughter wouldn’t get rich from any gas royalties, but she was certainly paying the price for the benefits Ken and the others were reaping. It wasn’t just the noise and the traffic, the creeping industrialization of the neighborhood, though those things were taking their toll. There was also concern about the water. Ever since the drilling had begun, she had been running into problems with her water pressure, and though there was no proof that it was related to the drilling, both Ken and his stepdaughter had their suspicions. And they weren’t the only ones, Ken knew. Several of the neighbors had noticed that their water had started to fizz, as if somebody had dumped Alka-Seltzer in their wells, whenever they turned on the tap. More often than not, the problem would correct itself in a couple of days, but it raised a red flag for Ken.

The way he saw it, there was a great deal of good that could come from the Marcellus. If nothing else, it had already redrawn the lines of privilege in the community, turning people like him, the kind of guy who could expect to be escorted away from the steps of the county courthouse by a deputy sheriff if he chose to protest his tax bill too loudly, into a member of the gentry who had to be heeded.

It also carried great risk. Ken had no illusions about how much weight this new standing of his would carry. There was, he knew, no one willing or able to police the gas companies, not as rigorously as they should be policed. The state didn’t have the staff, even if it had the will. There was certainly no mechanism to assure that the drillers would treat people fairly. But those issues, Ken figured, were above his pay grade. He could only be responsible for his own land, and he could only take on the burden of making sure that he and his family were treated fairly. “I’m only one guy,” he told Emmagene. “How much can I do?” He might have to fire off a round every now and again, but Ken certainly wasn’t about to go to war with Cabot, or anyone else for that matter, over problems that weren’t his.

But one morning in early October, Ken’s attitude dramatically changed.

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER 5
, to be precise. The trucks had been rolling onto Ken’s property at an unusually brisk clip for a couple of days by then, setting up for the next phase of a frack job, and Ken had been keeping
an eye on them that morning, making sure that none of the drivers pinched any of his rocks. But really he had been halfhearted about the task. There was something else troubling him. It had been three days since he had seen Crybaby. The last time he had seen her, she was heading out to greet the driver of one of the frack trucks, and though she had been wagging her tail and twisting her torso, she was doing it with less enthusiasm than usual. That was understandable, Ken had thought. The dog had gone into heat a day or two earlier, and that, coupled with the fact that it was an unusually warm day for autumn, had left her a bit lethargic.

What wasn’t as easy to understand was why she hadn’t come back that evening. Or the next morning. Or the next evening. Ken was starting to worry. He wondered if maybe she had run off with one of the coyotes that sometimes prowled the hillside at night, but then he realized that Crybaby was far too devoted to him, and far too addicted to the generous affection that the roughnecks lavished on her, to take her chances in the wild. He didn’t say anything to anyone, not even Emmagene. But he was getting suspicious. Though things hadn’t been what you might call friendly between the Cabot men and Ken, they had at least maintained a semblance of civility and would nod and even wave at each other from time to time, but now it seemed to Ken that the Cabot boys were being unusually reserved in his presence. It almost seemed like they were going out of their way to avoid eye contact with him.

Those suspicions kept building, and early one morning, while standing guard near his stone hedge, he caught sight of one of the Cabot men. The guy was a little older than most of the others, and Ken knew he was in a position of authority. He seemed to flinch as Ken walked up to him.

“Have you seen Crybaby?” Ken asked. “I can’t find my dog.”

The look on the man’s face told it all. It was a look that combined raw fear and crushing guilt.

For an instant, Ken almost felt sorry for him. But right behind that was a feeling of cold dread, as if he knew that the guy was going to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. And then the man let it all spill out. It was hard to follow the torrent of words, but Ken got the gist of it. It seemed that Crybaby had made it up to the drill site on that morning three days earlier, but the trip up there had worn the poor
dog out, so, after spending a little time collecting love and treats from the Cabot boys, she had curled up in the shade under a truck. “The driver didn’t know she was there,” the Cabot man stammered, and when he finished dropping off his load of water, he hopped back in the cab and threw the truck into reverse. Crybaby never had a chance.

“Where is she?” Ken hissed through clenched teeth. The man pointed to a small cairn that had been hastily erected across the road, not far from where they stood. “They buried her up there.” The Cabot man tried to apologize, tried to tell Ken how broken up they all were about Crybaby’s death. “Some of the boys cried,” he told Ken. Ken didn’t say a word. He turned on his heel and marched stiffly to the spot where Crybaby was buried.

He stood there for a long time. He knew the Cabot men were all watching him. That just made it harder. He didn’t cry, though he wanted to. As much as Ken loved that dog, he couldn’t. Until Emmagene had come back into his life, Crybaby had been his truest friend, his companion, his hunting partner, his fishing buddy. But country men don’t cry. Not ever, they’ll tell you, and certainly not when anyone’s looking. It’s not that they don’t feel. They do, and deeply. But they live in a place where nature can be cruel and accidents can happen. Surrounded always by the rhythms of life and death, country people come to accept that without complaining.

But there are rules. There is a correct and honorable way to deal with a tragedy, and the Cabot men had not done that. Instead, the way Ken saw it, in their desperation to avoid his wrath, they had cheated him out of the chance to cope with Crybaby’s death the way he needed to. And in so doing, they had guaranteed his wrath. “All they needed to do was tell the truth,” Ken told himself as he stood before the grave. “All they needed to do was tell me.”