“Pierce?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard? Charlotte had a miscarriage. She’s not going to be giving us that grandson.”
Hetty gasped into the phone. “At Christmas? How awful. She was so elated at your party.”
“Pobrecita. You should call her, m’ija. She’s in a bad way.”
Hetty wondered if that was a good idea.
Later that afternoon, after putting Pierce down for a nap, Hetty got up the nerve to dial Splendora’s number. The phone rang and rang. She was about to hang up when a familiar but irritated voice answered. “Rusk residence.”
“Tuggie?”
“Speakin’.”
“It’s Hetty.”
“Miss Hetty? Well, I’ll be. But hold on, you ain’t a miss anymore, I hear. And a mother, too. How’s your baby boy?”
“Wonderful, thanks. What are you doing answering the phone?”
“You tell me. Like to rung off the wall. And me with so much dirt to scratch. Wait’ll I get my hands on some niggers.”
“I’m calling to talk to Charlotte. How is she?”
Tuggie lowered her voice. “She not doing good. Just lie on the sofa listening to radio. And Chief shunning her. Poor child. She’ll be glad to hear from you.”
“I hope so. Can you put her on?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hetty heard a rustling, then Tuggie’s contralto voice booming through the vast rooms. “Charlotte! Phone!”
Clicking followed by a whispered, “Hello.”
“Charlotte, it’s Hetty. I heard the news. I’m so sorry. How are you?”
“All right.” There was a long pause. Hetty didn’t know what to say. She heard sniffling, then, “I just feel so blue.”
“I can imagine.”
“Can you? Can you really? Did Lamar tell you?”
“No, Mamá called.”
“I thought he might have come to you.”
Hetty wasn’t sure how to respond to that. A loud protestation would sound like an admission of guilt. She tried to keep her voice steady as she said, “I don’t think I’ve seen Lamar since the wedding.”
“I know he’s disappointed.”
“A lot of women lose their first child. You’ll have another. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got Tuggie. She’s been a big help.”
“How about I bring Pierce by to cheer you up?”
Hetty heard more sniffling. “I . . . I don’t think I could witness your happiness right now.”
“Oh . . .” Hetty stammered. “I didn’t mean it that way. I just want him to get to know his aunt.”
“Use me another time. Not now.”
“Char . . .” Hetty sighed. “I wish there were something I could do.”
“There isn’t. You’re making it worse, actually.”
“Oh . . .” Hetty never knew how to talk to her sister. “Then I’d better go. Let me know if you need me—for anything.”
“I don’t . . . but thanks.” There was a hollow click.
Hetty left the stroller at home. She knew the New Year’s brunch at the club was always a lavish affair and didn’t want to try and wheel her way through the ice sculptures and the silver tea sets. She wrapped Pierce in a creamy wool and satin blanket, and herself in her long silver fox. Garret got his papers in order and knotted on a crisp four-in-hand silk to set off his pin-striped suit. Hetty glimpsed him in the bathroom, parting his hair precisely down the middle, adding an extra splash of luster to make it shine even more.
As a waiter led them through the vast dining hall, she nestled Pierce against her fur coat. Cleveland Yoakum didn’t rise when they approached the table. He sat there stony as the Sphinx, Bloody Mary in one hand, Cinco cigar in the other. As her father hailed them and drew out a chair for her to sit in, Cleveland nodded a head thick with white hair in their direction. She noticed that he was wearing a diamond-studded bolo instead of a tie. That didn’t surprise her, but the plate of half-eaten ham and eggs in front of him did. He had helped himself before they arrived. Hetty’s mind stung with the Morse code he was telegraphing by that gesture: This young couple wasn’t important enough to wait for, even if she was Kirby Allen’s daughter. Even now he hardly acknowledged their presence. Hetty ignored him right back, leaving the baby with his grandfather and sidling up to the buffet for some of the club’s famous creamed crab over toast.
When she returned, Garret was thanking her father for the invitation and turning to Cleveland. “Mr. Yoakum,” he began (she’d warned him not to use his first name), “I’d also like to thank you for that contact with Humble.”
A guttural grunt was the only reply.
“I’ve been on a rig for over a year now.”
A long silence. Then a deep drawl: “Learned anything?”
“I think so, sir. I started as a floor hand, worked the motors for a while, and this fall was promoted to driller.”
Cleveland looked at Garret directly for the first time. “Driller?” Drillah?
“Yes, sir, Mr. Yoakum.”
“So you think you know how to drill an oil well?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But do you know the difference between a driller and a wildcatter?”
Garret hesitated. “Is this a trick question?”
Kirb spoke up. “Wildcatters usually hire someone to do their drilling.”
Garret looked a little chagrined. Cleveland flicked his cigar into an ashtray and stuck it in one corner of his mouth. Out of the other, he said, “Let me put it this way. Now that you’ve given Kirb a grandson, I suppose you’ll go on working at Humble?”
Garret glanced at Hetty. “I know that’s what I should do, but I just can’t. I’m going to East Texas.”
Cleveland’s chest heaved with laughter. Garret went over to the buffet to get some food.
“Before you arrived,” Kirb said, “we were placing bets on whether Garret was wildcat material or not. Cleve is surprised he’s kept the same job for a year.”
Hetty glanced at him with a puzzled look.
“You see, ma’am,” Cleveland said, “the wildcatter’s problem, he’s plum farsighted. Can’t see what’s right in front of him ’cause he’s always looking out yonder . . .”
“That’s Garret all right,” Hetty said.
Kirb kissed his grandson on the cheeks and smiled beatifically. “We have to hand it to him, Cleve. He predicted the strike in East Texas when the rest of us were scoffing.”
Cleveland stoked his cigar. “We never reckoned they’d find the Woodbine Sand up east.”
Garret heard the tail end of the sentence as he sat down. “The Woodbine? Now there’s something to talk about! It was right where Doc Lloyd said it would be, at thirty-six hundred feet.”
Garret’s boast drew a flinty glance from Cleveland. “Didn’t prove a damned thing.” A damned thang.
“With all due respects, Mr. Yoakum, how can you say that? It proved that Doc Lloyd wasn’t the charlatan everybody said he was but, indeed, a great geologist.”
“It proved he was damned lucky, that’s all.” He took a swig of scalding hot coffee, black as crude. “But this new well, this Lou Della Crim, makes me think we have an oil field on our hands.”
Hetty handed Garret a fork so he’d eat something.
“Twenty-two thousand barrels is nothing to sniff at,” Kirb said.
“It was the cleanest wildcat ever drilled in Texas,” Cleveland announced. “They didn’t spill a drop. The temperature was only seventy-four degrees. Now that’s what I call an elegant oil well. None of this gusher crap like you had with Joiner and his crew. This one was all done scientifically.”
“Maybe so, but the frenzy’s started,” Kirb said, rocking his grandson in his arms. “The day after the well came in, they say the people of Kilgore woke up and found thousands of boomers swarming into town.”
Garret’s silverware clattered to his plate. “Damn! I’ve got to get up there before it’s too late.”
“We’ve got t
o get in there before the big boys buy up all the leases, that’s what we got to do,” Kirb said. “And we have to be quiet about it. That’s why I invited Mr. Yoakum to brunch today.”
“Um-hmm,” growled Cleveland.
“You see, Garret, Cleveland thinks he could get together a consortium of interest owners willing to gamble on East Texas. I’m one of them, in fact. We’re just looking for an operator that can do the job.”
“Give me a chance, gentlemen,” Garret said with reverence. “I know I can do it.”
Cleveland ignored him and drawled, “Strictly speaking, it’s not a wildcatter we’re looking for, Kirb. The field’s been discovered. We just need somebody to get in there, buy a lease, and drill us a well without messin’ up.”
Garret fumbled with his papers. “We don’t need a lease, sir. I’ve already got a one-acre share. Look—” He waved the certificate in front of them.
“Forget that swindler, son,” Cleveland said. “You got to go up yonder and find yourself a dirt-poor cotton farmer and offer him more money than he’s ever seen in his life. He’ll sign whatever you stick under his nose. East Texas is so poor the roaches are starving to death.”
“I hope you’ll take a chance on me. I can show you—I’m a good investment.” Garret reached for more papers.
“Investment?” Cleveland’s chest rumbled with amusement. “Let me tell you how I invest. I’m like the red-eared slider trying to cross the road to get to the other side. Turtle don’t move unless he sticks his neck out. Say he hears a car coming. If he pulls his head back in, he gets run over. That’s my philosophy of investing. It’s just that simple, son.”
When Pierce started to fuss, Kirb gave him up reluctantly. Hetty excused herself and found a dark corner of the bar where she could breastfeed in private. Garret emerged after a while and hustled her into a waiting elevator.
“Did you eat anything?” she asked, but his lips were pressed together tightly. Then the bronze doors slid shut, and he erupted with shouts, jumping around and making the car shake as it descended.
“Twenty thousand dollars!” he trumpeted.
“What? He’s going to raise twenty thousand dollars? Whatever for?”
“That’s how much it takes.”
“So much money! Don’t you have to put up some kind of collateral?”
“He made me promise to pay the investors back if the well’s a dud. He wants it part of the contract.”
Hetty’s voice went cold. “Oh . . . I see.” A few floors passed in silence. “Couldn’t you have asked me first?”
“It’s only a precaution. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No?” Hetty’s breath came hot. “You’ve put us twenty thousand in debt in the middle of a depression, and it doesn’t mean anything?”
“Stay out of this, Hetty. I’ll pay back the twenty thou in no time, I promise.”
“How?”
“The Lou Della Crim paid for itself in twenty-four hours.”
“It did?”
“Of course. Oil’s selling for a dollar five a barrel.”
“That doesn’t sound like much.”
“Honey, the Lou Della Crim came in at twenty-two thousand barrels.”
“So?”
“Twenty-two thousand barrels a day. You can multiply, can’t you?”
She thought about it for a moment. Then felt a sudden sinking in her stomach that wasn’t from the elevator falling to a stop. The doors hissed open and the polished pink marble walls of the lobby flashed into her eyes. Garret disappeared into the light.
Hetty ran after him. “That’s twenty-two thousand dollars a day!”
He shouted over his shoulder. “That’s a million dollars every couple of months. Six million dollars a year.”
“You mean we could be making six million dollars a year off one oil well?”
He stopped and turned to her. “Goddamn, Hetty, what do you think I’ve been talking about all this time?”
She sank onto a bronze bench at the foot of a towering Corinthian column. Looking up at Garret and past him at the portico that soared three stories above them, she had a vertiginous glimpse of power, of the thrust that had raised the Esperson Building above the simple prairie dust. It wasn’t the money that made her dizzy, it was that glimpse of a life so far off the ground, close to that high place where her sister now dwelt like a goddess with Lamar. In a small voice, she said, “I guess I never really thought about the numbers.”
He glared down at her, his hands gripping the portfolio he’d presented to Cleveland Yoakum. He’d scrubbed himself for this meeting, but still the thumbnails were outlined in black from the crude oil that had soaked into his skin. Lamar’s hands would never be soiled like this, Hetty thought. Yet his manicured fingers had taught Hetty how to play dirty tricks on her husband. She felt sullied by him, guilty by association. Only her baby had saved her from outright deception and, now, she could see how false her heart had been. To be faithful, after all, meant just that: to have faith, to believe enough in your marriage to stay with it no matter what. She had given up too easily, had given in to temptation, and failed Garret as a wife. But it was not too late. She could still serve her husband obediently and, in being true to his vision, cleanse herself. Ignoring the people passing by, Hetty grabbed one of his hands and began kissing it over and over.
“I’m sorry, Garret. I didn’t understand.” She held his palm to her cheek, the fingers thickened by labor. “Do you forgive me?”
“For what?”
“For misjudging you. You were the one all along. I just couldn’t see it.” She began kissing his fingers one by one. She felt like kissing his feet but was drawing enough attention from patrons circling through the revolving doors nearby. “I promise to make up for it. I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I’ll be like Mellie Esperson scrubbing her husband’s overalls by hand.”
“I don’t think it’ll be that bad.”
“But I’d do it. I want you to know that. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Just believe in me. That’s what I need.”
“I do. I believed in you the first time I met you. I just forgot somehow. I lost faith. I’m sorry. You were the one I loved, Garret. You were always the one.”
He didn’t say anything. He took the baby out of her arms and set him on the bench. Then he lifted her up and gave her the kind of deep kiss with his tongue that they hadn’t shared for a long, long time. She snaked her arms around his neck and held on tight.
The crowd at the elevator tried not to watch out of the corner of their eyes.
The cold snap of Christmas eased into a January thaw wet with winter dew—although thaw wasn’t a word Texans used readily since there was rarely any actual snow or ice. But it still felt like the world was melting as the Auburn drove under the dripping porte cochere of the Warwick Hotel late Sunday morning. The door came open before the car even rolled to a stop, and a long slim leg slipped into an unbuckled galosh flopped down on the damp concrete. Hetty jumped out, asking the doorman to announce her arrival as she paced back and forth with a slapping sound. She was spent from packing, feet itching to travel, annoyed that Nella had asked them to stop by on their way out of town to accept a little going-away present.
“It’ll be a bottle of perfume,” Hetty had told Garret that morning, “or something equally useless in the oil patch.” At the moment, he sat in the car with Pierce asleep on the seat beside him, tracing roads on a map with his finger.
Hetty heard a chugging sound and turned as the Wichita flatbed truck came swinging around the circular driveway. She loved its bright orange paint, which jiggled against the blue light that spread over Hermann Park behind it with its bare branches and still-green lawns of lush Saint Augustine grass. The truck’s windshield was tilted open, and Pick braked to a stop at a distance. At her suggestion, Garret had hired Henry Picktown Waller for eight dollars a day as his derrick man. Pick kept his hat lowered over his face, not planning to budge out of the cab during this me
eting with his ex-employer. But next to him, Pearl had already swung the demi-door of the Wichita open and was alighting on the running board. She’d been unusually optimistic since Hetty had insisted that they offer her a ten percent interest in the well. She hailed from Lufkin, so was thrilled to be heading back to “God’s country” as she called it.
She dashed over, Lucky Strikes in hand. They lit, sending up a flurry of smoke and nervous chatter. “My, it’s wet,” Pearl said. “Another morning like this, and you’ll have to haul out your Japanese parasols. Two heavy dews mean a rain.”
“I hope not,” Hetty said. “I don’t want our things getting soaked.”
Just then both of the great bronze doors of the hotel swung open and a parade of bellhops began marching out, lugging an array of parcels down the grand staircase. Nella followed shortly, freshly made up and aglow in her cape of monkey fur.
“Mother, what is all this? We don’t have room for anything more.”
“I’m sure you can stuff it in somewhere, dear. You won’t need the boxes,” she said, signaling for two of the bellhops to unfurl a large kit of canvas and metal poles.
Hetty drew back. “What is it?”
With glee, Nella said, “A tent! Waterproof!”
“We’re not going camping.”
“No? Where do you think you’re sleeping tonight?”
“In a hotel, of course.”
She laughed and turned to Kirb, who had followed her out wrapped in his gray tweed overcoat. “They think they’re sleeping in a hotel tonight.” More laughter. “But wait—here’s my greatest find.” A little wave of her hand brought a second nest of hemp ropes and flaps unrolling from the arms of two more bellhops.
“Another tent?” Hetty asked.
“This one’s for you and Garret and the baby. It’s an Auto Tent. You set it up right beside your car—see, this flap gets pulled over the roof and turns your car into a drawing room.” She had the bellhops demonstrate. This brought Garret grinning out of the driver’s seat. “Good morning, Garret darling. How do you like your new home? One of the things I hate about camping is there’s never a comfortable chair to sit in.”
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