The Son

Chapter Eight. J.A. McCullough

She was young again, riding an old wooden roller coaster, but something was going wrong — the cars were running faster and faster until finally at the very top, the whole train of them leaped from the tracks. She was flying and then she was not, she was watching the ground, everything was taking a long time, This is very serious, she thought, and then all the cars came down on top of her.

Then she was in the desert. The biggest frac job of her life, the engineer directing tankers like the conductor of a symphony; the lines were charged, twelve thousand PSI, and then a coupler broke. A solid iron pipe whipped like a snake. Her eyes were stinging, she was looking right into the sun, there was a Life Flight on the way, but it wouldn’t do any good. Yes, she thought. That is what happened.

She opened her eyes again. Except there had been a man, she was certain of it. She wondered if he’d gone for help. She watched the logs and embers in the fireplace. The burgundy rug spread beneath her, its birds and flowers and curlicues, the busts of old Romans. She was dreaming.

She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they’d press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil.

People thought Henry Ford had ushered in the automobile age. False. Cart before the horse. It was Spindletop that had begun the automobile age and Howard Hughes, with his miraculous drill bit, who had completed it. Modern life was born at the Lucas gusher, when people suddenly realized how much oil there might be on earth. Before that, gasoline was nothing more than a cheap solvent — used to clean gears and bicycle chains — and all the oil that made John Rockefeller a millionaire was burned in lamps, a replacement for whale oil. It was Spindletop and the Hughes bit that had opened the way for the car, the truck, and the airplane, which all depended on cheap oil the way a church depended on God.

She had done right. Made something out of nothing. The human life span had doubled, you did not get to the hospital without oil, the medicines you took could not be made, the food you ate did not reach the store, the tractor did not leave the farmer’s barn. She took something useless under the ground and brought it to the surface, into the light, where it meant something. It was creation. Her entire life.

Once, she had not been unique in this. The industrialists built the country, the oilmen made it run. Now it was just the oilmen. The industrialists, or whatever they called themselves these days, led lives based on destruction, closing down factories and moving them abroad. She did not expect to be loved but there were bastards and there were bastards; those men had taken apart the country brick by brick and if there was anything she hated more than unions, it was people who couldn’t work.

Other memories came back in a rush. Visiting the houses of the Mexican hands with her father, the women out of another century, pregnant and carrying water buckets from distant wells, irons over a wood fire, bluing to steaming washpots, wringing the boiling clothes. Canning fruits and vegetables in the worst of the summer heat — hotter in the jacals than it was outside. The men in the shade, braiding lariats from horsehair. Why don’t they buy their ropes from the store? she asked, but her father didn’t answer.

Walking through the pasture hours before sunup, crouching low to find the horses against the dark sky. All around her, the hands roping their mounts. Blowing of horses, clicking of cinches, voices soothing in Spanish. Some of the ponies gave in to the rope, others bucked and kicked, not wanting to spend the day running in the sun and thorns. Many of them were nothing but scar tissue from wither to hoof; the brush took all the hair off.

A never-ending creak of windmills, kneeling with the Colonel to study the wet ground at the stock tanks, the night’s fresh tracks. Cattle, deer, foxes, javelina, rabbits, paisano, hares, mice, raccoons, snakes, turkey, bobcats. The appearance of a panther track brought her father and brothers, an old Mexican with his dogs. At some point, she did not remember when, the Colonel began to put his hand over every panther track he saw, obliterating it completely. Don’t tell anyone. The adult world ran on secrets. The derision of her father and brothers when she said she wanted to see a wolf or bear. They are better in zoos, said her father. They are better gone forever.

And what had she learned? She had lost half her family before their time. The land was hard on its sons, harder yet on the sons of other lands. Her grandmother had once proposed a bounty for each pair of Mexican ears—treat them the same as coyotes. She thought of her brothers killed by the Germans, her uncle Glenn blown to bits in a trench.

She had tried to retire twelve years ago. She had been a child kneeling by the stock tank and then her own children were middle-aged; she had not been perfect, she wanted to patch things, she wanted to know her grandchildren. There had been a window. But oil had been low, cheaper than water, they said, and the bids she got for her leases were a fraction of what they should have been. She knew it was her last chance to make things right with the family. But to sell at such a bottom — the thought made her physically ill.

Then the Arabs hit New York. She began hiring drillers. Her children had their own lives, they did not need her, oil began to climb. To see a well come in where there had just been desert, to see flow after a good frac job, from a hole everyone had given up on — that was what she lived for. Something out of nothing. Act of creation. There would always be time for family.