The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  Fine specimens of men they were—muscular, real men—big men for a big job of work. Dirty! They would come clomping in to dinner at noon looking as if they had struck oil already, only a circle of white around their eyes, black with grime, machine oil, axle grease. To wash themselves up before supper they required a hundred gallons of water boiled in drums in the back yard, blackened two dozen towels daily. And how they did eat! Geraldine was kept going at a steady run from the kitchen to the table and back. Platters of fried steaks, pans of biscuits, stacks of hoecakes vanished in a trice. For Sybil, even without other reason, it was hard to remember to be cautious as she heaped up those platters of food. Keeping a boardinghouse was new to her; in her older and more congenial role as housewife and occasional hostess it flattered her vanity to see men relish her cooking so.

  Her boarders spoke of the countless boardinghouses which in the course of their footloose lives they had known, heaping scorn upon the grasping and cheating tribe of professional boarding-house keepers. Not only to Sybil’s face but among themselves at table they declared loudly that none could compare with her. Hearing this out in the kitchen, Sybil felt ashamed of her impulse to stint them, and taking from the pantry the cutlets or the chops intended for tomorrow’s supper, and rousing the fire with a shake of the ash hopper, she refilled the four big skillets just beginning to cease to sputter on the range.

  For the drilling crew the day’s work began at seven, for Sybil at five. First she split kindling, brought in stovewood, and started the fire. Then she milked the cows, separated the cream and churned butter, collected the eggs. She kneaded dough and stamped out biscuits and when the range was roaring and hopping on its feet and the heat in the kitchen enough to singe your brows, she made breakfast. For each man four fried eggs. Bacon and sausage and fried ham, grits and red gravy, fried potatoes, coffee by the gallon. Breakfast finished, the table cleared, the dishes washed and dried and the table reset, it was time to begin making dinner. There were peas by the bushel to shell and potatoes by the bushel to peel, roasting ears to shuck in stacks like cordwood. There were chickens to kill and pluck and draw, fish to scale, meat to grind. After dinner a dash in the truck into town to shop for the next day while at home Geraldine made the beds and swept, then back in time to scrub and wring and hang out the bedsheets and the towels and iron and start the pies and cakes baking for supper and slice the peaches or the strawberries for ice cream and set Elgin to cranking the freezer. By bedtime Sybil’s face was bright red from standing over the range and peering into the oven door, the skin drawn taut, her eyes glazed; and lying beneath the eaves in the attic where the heat made the kitchen seem cool, she passed out murmuring her assent to Elgin’s latest plan for where they would go and what they would buy when the money started pouring in.

  Elgin could do nothing for hanging around the works all day. All that activity was just too engrossing for a man to tear himself away. To go alone down to the field while all that was going on, to follow behind the mule breaking the stubborn soil beneath a broiling sun while visions of ease filled his mind—Sybil hadn’t the heart to nag him. To the tapping of the carpenters’ hammers the derrick rose skywards in diminishing X’s. The heavy gear was brought in, unloaded from the great tractor trailers, and maneuvered into place. The generator hummed to life, the drilling rig clattered and clanked, the earth shuddered. At night there was a report of their progress: a hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand. A thousand feet! As far as out to the chicken house and back down through that stiff red earth which to have to open one foot of with a plow strained a man’s back. Elgin’s vocabulary blossomed. He spoke of faults, of lignite, of casings, and when they began to break, of diamond-head drilling bits.

  Encouraged by their loud and constant praise, Sybil regaled her boarders with more and more tasty and elaborate dishes. The competent-looking and noisy bustle going on outside, the table talk, rich in the jargon of oil, which reached her out in the kitchen, Elgin’s enthusiasm, all combined to lull her prudence asleep. The profit she might expect to make from her enterprise came to seem trifling when compared with the fortune she soon might have. To wish to profit from those who were working so hard on her behalf seemed mean. Sybil ceased to consider the crew as paying boarders and began to consider them her guests. Before long in her off moments she was darning their socks, patching their pants, mending and sewing buttons on their shirts: making for the boys a home away from home. To save, she scrimped the family. She and Elgin and Geraldine ate in the kitchen after the men had finished and were sitting around the parlor listening to the battery-set radio which Sybil had provided for their evening entertainment.

  By the end of the first month they were down to fifteen hundred feet and the string, as they called it, was drawn out for a test sample. This indicated the kind of soil associated with oil. Elgin was elated and Sybil also was cheered. She had been sobered to learn when the bills from the butcher and the grocer came in that her expenses exceeded her income and that to make up the difference she would have to make a further withdrawal from the family savings account.

  They were down to twenty-one hundred feet when one evening just as the men were starting in on second helpings at the table the world exploded and caught fire. The noise was as though the earth were a balloon and a pin had been stuck in it. On the site of the derrick a column of fire too bright to be looked at shot from the ground up to heaven.

  “We’ve struck gas!” groaned the foreman.

  “We’ve struck,” said Elgin in tones of awe, “Hell.”

  A telegram was sent off to the company’s head office. Next day a black motorcycle, its noise silenced by the roar of the fire, stopped at the gate in a puff of dust and the driver dismounted.

  He looked like a man-sized bug, shiny black, with big yellow bug’s eyes sticking out beyond the sides of his head. He wore an aviator’s black leather helmet strapped underneath the chin, the immense wraparound goggles, seated on sponge-rubber padding, made of amber glass, reflecting the light like the multicellular eyes of a fly seen under a microscope. He wore a black leather bow tie and a leather jacket with, counting those on the elbows, a dozen zipper pockets, fringed leather gauntlets, black pants as tight as a coat of lacquer, and knee-high black puttees with chrome buckles. Dividing his thorax from his abdomen was a waist no bigger around than a dirt dauber’s enclosed in a black kidney belt studded with cat’s-eyes in hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades.

  He removed the helmet, disclosing a head as hairless as a hard-boiled egg and of the same whiteness. He had neither eyebrows nor lashes nor trace of beard: all had been burnt away. His features were fixed, rigid, expressionless; only the eyes, beneath their lashless lids, moved. A weathered china doll decorating the grave of a long-dead child was what he reminded Geraldine of.

  Judging from appearances he was ageless, but according to the crewmen he was no more than twenty-five. And it would surprise them all if he ever lived to see thirty. In that boy’s trade few grew old. If he didn’t kill himself on that motorcycle first he would either be burnt up or blown up one day.

  What on earth would anybody do it for then? Sybil asked.

  Some for the money, others because they were too dumb to know any better, Speed here because he was drawn to flame like a moth and because he loved explosives. For what he was about to do, which in actual work time would amount to maybe half a day, he would be paid two hundred dollars at the least. He, however, though at twenty-five his burns had left him hardly any original skin of his own for further grafts, and though he had one elbow stiffened in a permanent half-bend, was missing a finger on one hand and the thumb on the other, and wore a silver plate in his skull the size of a tea saucer—he would probably have done it without pay. He was an artist—and every bit as temperamental; not with a brush nor with mallet and chisel: an artist in dynamite.

  “Well, I just hope he don’t blow hisself up here,” said Sybil.

  “I hope not too,” said Geraldine.

  “I’d soo
ner not have the oil than for anything like that to happen,” said Sybil.

  “Poor little old burnt bashed-up thing!” said Geraldine.

  He refused Sybil’s offer to fix him a bite to eat. Unfortunately she did not have in the house any RC Cola and Tom’s Toasted Peanuts, which according to the crewmen was what he lived on. If she had known he was coming she would have gotten some.

  In his fire-fighting suit, a padded and quilted asbestos coverall as white as his road costume was black, as bulky as the other was sleek, Speed looked more than ever like a bug, this time one wrapped in its cocoon. Again great goggles, these of brown isinglass like the windowpane of a stove, covered his eyes. In this outfit, it soaked with water, he was going to approach the fire carrying a charge of dynamite fused to go off within seconds and drop it down the hole. When told this, and that it was the only way to put out the fire, Sybil said, “Then let it burn.” Elgin seconded her. He had decided, he said, that he didn’t care any more whether he struck oil.

  “You may not,” the foreman said, “but we got money down that hole.”

  From the parlor window Sybil and Geraldine watched up to the point where, carrying his bundle of sticks of dynamite with its sputtering short fuse, Speed got near enough to the blaze to be forced to crawl on his hands and knees. One, two, mother and daughter both passed out. When they came to the fire was out. The gas capped, the crewmen were piping it to the adjacent field. From the escape pipe, ten feet high, it issued with the hiss of five hundred blowtorches. Such was its force that when it was ignited the base of the flame was twenty feet above the opening of the pipe. The flame itself stood six stories tall, pointed and shaped like a blade. The even pressure kept it ever the same. Not even the wind off those Oklahoma plains could sway it.

  “How long you reckon it will take to burn itself out?” asked Elgin.

  “Got ’em down south Texas been going like that forty years,” said the foreman.

  Speed reappeared in his road costume. The women went out to bid him good-by, Sybil offering up to the time he stomped the starter pedal to fix him a bite to eat, a sandwich for the road, he again with that look of slight nausea in his eyes which the mention of food brought on. He disappeared behind his goggles. He stomped the starter pedal and the cycle roared to life. He lifted his gauntleted hand in a brief farewell.

  “Wait! I’m coming with you!” Geraldine yelled. “Can I?”

  His reply exceeded in length everything else he had said since his arrival put together. “Hold on you can. Ast for no sidecar. One em thangs on go no fastern a kiddycar.”

  “Geraldine!” Sybil shrieked. “Get down off of that thing this minute!”

  “Mama, you’ll have to just manage the best you can without me,” said Geraldine, straddling the saddle seat, her skirt three quarters of the way up her thighs, her arms hugging that narrow waist encased in its jeweled kidney belt. “Good-by. Tell Papa good-by. I’ll write when I get a chance.”

  Speed twisted the handlebar grip. The engine responded impatiently.

  “I hope,” Geraldine shouted back, “yawl hit oil.”

  But although a new derrick was erected and a new string brought in and sent down fifty-one hundred feet, six weeks later the foreman was saying, “Well, Floyd, that’s how the dice roll. Sometimes you strike it lucky, sometimes you don’t. Right?”

  “Yeah,” said Elgin. “Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes you strike it lucky, sometimes—”

  “It’s all in the game,” said the foreman. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” said Elgin. “Yeah, that’s—”

  “Can’t bring them all in,” said the foreman. “Right?”

  “No,” said Elgin. “No, you can’t bring them all in.”

  They were dismantling the derrick from the top, throwing down the pieces and stacking them in a trailer. Others meanwhile took apart the toolshed. When they were finished all that was left was the enlarged outhouse which looked now like a boxcar forgotten on a railroad siding, a hole in the ground seven eighths of a mile deep, and an eternal flame. When all the equipment was stowed they drove away. In one truck rode the crew, waving back as they went, beginning already on the box lunches Sybil had packed for them. The Floyds waved until they were out of sight, sighed, and turned back towards the house. Over everything a stillness settled, made more intense by the hiss of the flare.

  With only the two of them to cook and keep house for Sybil did not know what to do with herself. She sat in the kitchen or out in the yard peeling potatoes or shelling peas in piddling amounts, rousing herself with a jerk now and again from out of a study, dashing a tear from her eyes from time to time at the memory of Geraldine. Elgin poked about the spot where the derrick had stood, kicking clods. It was too late in the year to think of planting a crop, though how they were to get by without one was hard to figure, Sybil having told him that rather than making a profit on her boardinghouse venture she had used up their savings and owed the butcher and the grocer the bills for the last three weeks. They tried to occupy themselves but they both just moped. Their lives had gone flat. The gas flare made it impossible to do anything. Its light kept them awake, its noise deafened them, its heat scorched them. Too bright to be looked at even in the glare of noon, it illuminated the midnight: a flaming sword, like the one set to guard the east gate of Eden.

  “Well, Elgin, never mind, hon,” said Sybil. “We’ve still got our health and we’ve still got each other. So don’t go breaking your heart over that million dollars.”

  “Aw, for pity’s sake, Sybil,” said Elgin, “what kind of a fool do you take me for? Do you think I ever really believed we were going to strike oil? Me?”

  The Rainmaker

  I

  THE HUNDRED-MILE stretch of the Red River from the Arkansas-Oklahoma line west to Hugo (or if you were on the other side, from Texarkana west to Paris, Texas) was, in 1936, served by a single ferry: the one on the Clarksville-Idabel road. You were, in either case, always on the other side from the side the ferryboat was on when you drew up at the landing; and as it had no schedule, not even one to fall behind in, you could sit there honking till the cows came home, the ferryboat would cross over for you whenever its owner felt like it and not before. Maybe not then. For if, in running his trotline as he came across (he hauled in sometimes as much as twenty pounds of channel catfish), the ferryman should sight an alligator gar, he would drop his tiller and cut loose with his .30-30—the bullets whining off the water and over the heads of any waiting passengers—and he might on such rudderless occasions fetch up a mile or more downstream from the landing; for the current is deep-running and strong, though on the surface it does not look as if there is any current; indeed, it does not look like a liquid, but rather like a bed of red clay, of the consistency of what potters call “slip,” and looks as if it would not only be unsuited to any of the uses to which water is generally put, but that getting it to pour would be like starting a new bottle of ketchup.

  The ferryboat (raft, really) took but one car at a time. If there should happen to be more than one they just had to wait while the boat went across and came back—an inconvenience which the driver of the lead machine in the field of fourteen bearing down upon the Oklahoma landing one July day in 1936 was counting heavily upon. He was a stranger to those parts, but no stranger to back-road ferries. Neither, however, was he a stranger to the tricks of fate; and should the boat happen to be on the other side, well, he thought, with a glance of his strained and bleary eyes into the rearview mirror, he might just as well drive right into the river. And with a glance at the speedometer and a thought for his brake-drum linings, or lack thereof, he might not be able to keep from it if he tried.

  By chance the ferry was on the Oklahoma side that day, having been trapped there the previous noon when the wind began to rise and the sky to blacken over. Now the wind had died but the darkness lingered. It was not evening or even very late afternoon, but over everything lay, lower than any cloud, denser than fog or smoke, and of a color like
snuff, and almost as acrid, a uniform suspension of fine red dust, so that the air was to air what the river water was to water. And so the ferryman could hear the cars coming long before he could see them, could hear the horns honking steadily as a flight of southering geese and growing louder, nearer, in numbers such as had never before demanded his services at any one time, hardly in any two weeks’ period, sounding like a wedding cortege or like a high school celebrating a victory of its football team. So he was ready and waiting for them, with his engine started and idling, the gate chain lowered, his two running lights lit, the hawser poised to cast off, and his other hand out for his half dollar. He coughed and spat, thinly and of the color of tobacco juice, though at the moment he was not chewing. This dust was not something raised by the approaching cars; it was the prevailing atmosphere in Oklahoma that spring and summer, and the one before, and the one before that, when with dust storms following one another often not two days apart, dark as night piled on night, it had come to seem almost the native air. This had been one of the worst.

  Then the ferryman saw them, the headlights filtering bloodshot and diffuse through the red pall, then saw the line of cars, with one, a truck or a van or a bus, away out in front, the ones in the rear all closely strung together and undulating in waves over the rutty road like the segments of a caterpillar, the horns whooping now like a pack of hounds, and all of them coming at considerable speed—considering, that is, the visibility, the state of the road, and the fact that the combined age of the fourteen cars and pickups running the race was in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty years.

  The river level during the past three rainless years had dropped steadily; now there was a long sandy incline down to the ferry landing. When it reached the top of this bank the winning car was a good hundred yards in the lead. If the driver even paused to see whether the boat was there, it was not apparent to the ferryman. The car came down the bank lurching and swaying from side to side, rattling, the radiator boiling, out of control or with a flat tire or, as was entirely possible from the look of it, with no brakes, picking up momentum as it came and headed for the boat as if with deliberate intent to sink it. The ferryman had no time to shout and barely time to jump. He jumped onto the boat rather than aside on the bank; had he not he would surely have been left ashore, for with the propulsion imparted by the car the boat shot twenty feet out into the water at one bound. It slapped down, scattering spray, bounced again and then again, skipping like a flat skimming stone, the front end leaping so high that whereas in the first moments it had seemed certain the car would plunge over the wheel chocks and through the forward chain, it seemed certain the next moment to roll into the river off the stern. Each time the bow slapped down it lunged forward, then as the bow rose it scurried backwards, and now with the deck awash it began skidding sideways. All this while the ferryman was down on his knees looking as if a mule had kicked him and slipped the knot in that hawser in his hand. The truck heaved a final burp from the radiator, sputtered, and died. The ferryman staggered to his feet, fetched breath, and commenced cursing. Clenching his fists, he started forward. From behind him on the shore came a chorus of derisive honks and laughter and shouts.