One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  This is the day Jerry and Vivian see T.T. Wilkins and five others chopping hay from a freight car. It is blackened hay, strands of marsh grass frozen hard in blocks of mud. They chop it to feed their starving plow horses and milk cows. The hay is abysmal and not enough. Three of the men, including T.T., will sell their farms in the spring to pay for bad hay they fed to animals already half dead.

  T.T.’s buyer will be his friend and neighbor Skiff Norgaard, who promises to sell the land back, cheap, when T.T. gets on his feet again. Skiff has somehow survived these years in slightly better shape than most. He planted a strain of wheat that was not so vulnerable to the worms. He got some spatterings of rain that skipped most everyone else.

  The hay costs sixty dollars a ton, six times the normal price. They chop it out, split it six ways, and cart it to their shacks and their starving livestock. The animals chew it slowly, crunching ice.

  Both of T.T.’s young children have died. His wife has stopped speaking and has gone away, silent, to her sister’s in Pennsylvania.

  Horses are turned loose and chased off if they return. Some of them survive to wander the prairie like mild derelicts, gnawing on fence posts, gnawing on their own long manes. Railroad tracks snap. Humans freeze, freeze and starve both.

  Over west, up by the mountains where the trees are, five Blackfeet are sledded, board-stiff, from a shack in Heart Butte to reservation headquarters, half a day away. Two of them clutch frozen potatoes. They are sledded to headquarters, where their clothes are replaced with dark-blue business suits. The suits arrive inside the government coffins that are stacked against a wall of the big store.

  They will be buried in the blue suits in the government cemetery. It is the law. With the ground too cold to break, they will lie for some days in the coffins in a shed. In the blue business suits. White shirts. Bow ties. Hands made to pray.

  There was something as final about that winter as there was about the Great War. Some knowledge of how much loss there was to be borne; an end forever to easy sentiment. Now it was down to the last of those who were down to their last—and if they had someplace to go, they went.

  When spring came, the farmhouses, the shacks of those once-young people from Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Canada, stood empty in the season’s first mud, doorways agape.

  A tongue of a wagon. A spool of rusted wire. The carcass of a pet who had to be shot.

  They were called relinquishments, those abandoned homesteads, and they could be bought for a song.

  The spring thaws finally came and the small sounds of running water and returning birds were loud against the stunned silence of those plains. The sun shone full and melted the last of the ice, and those who were still there looked around and blinked.

  The baby is due in July. Jerry is working full shifts at the railyard now, switching. Good fortune, that job.

  He owes his brother Carlton $600, so he works any extra hours he can. The switching is dirty, sometimes difficult, work. Some days he looks greasy and hollow-faced, but there is, in general, a new quickness to his movements and he has gained bulk in his shoulders and upper arms. His hands, battered and blackened around the nails, are not the hands of the man Vivian married, and she is sometimes oddly captivated by the change. She will find herself studying his hands at the dinner table, tantalized. Then she chalks her driftiness up to the baby inside her and does something practical and brisk.

  She knows they are leaving this place as soon as they have the money for a move, and that seems part of some new calmness in her head and body. She writes frequently to George and Emily—Emily’s daughter, the one who cut off the cat’s tail, is now a pretty teenager and engaged to be married to an optician—and she has accumulated hundreds of possible details about a future life in Seattle. This is, in fact, what she did over the brutal winter as the baby grew. She built a whole vision of herself and her family in that city on the coast. Down to the placement of the candles on the mantel.

  They would live in a white frame house with green trim and a Japanese maple in the yard. It would be fifteen minutes by streetcar from her brother’s, not so close that they’d all be on top of each other. The kitchen looks out on a small backyard that has a lawn, a stone bench, and a trellis for roses. The roses are a mixture of American Beauty, Black Prince, and Paul’s Scarlet Climber. It was roses during the worst of the Montana winter, in late January, but then as spring came on, the trellis went away and raised beds of poppies—Peacock, Helen Elizabeth, Sultana—were what Vivian saw from the kitchen window. A wilder, more exuberant, less tidy sight. The poppies were linked to the sounds of streetcar bells. That is, she would see a bed of bending red flower heads, gemlike in the wet sun, and always hear, at the same time, the brisk pinging of the climbing streetcar, so bright and clean it looked lacquered.

  At three in the afternoon there would be a soft rain shower, and that’s when the children would have their naps. She would brew herself a pot of tea while they slept and would read one of the magazines George had brought over, a Literary Digest or a National Geographic, or perhaps a chapter or so of a novel she had bought in an old store with mahogany floors and a Tiffany lamp. She would read the novel while the rain washed the city and flowed down the leaded windows of the modest sitting room. And then the rain would stop and a sunburst would push through and the skies would fold back again to blue.

  Jerry would come home around six from an office. He would be relaxed and would carry a thick newspaper and an umbrella. He would laugh about some bit of business, a prospect, some small unexpected development regarding a piece of real estate, and she would laugh with him. And then he would talk to the children and read the newspaper in a chair by the grate. The chair was new and had a matching footstool. The material was moss green with a thin brown cross-grain stripe.

  Occasionally, not often, Jerry stopped off at the card room of the Metropolitan Hotel after his shift at the depot. He had a smoke and a cup of tea, which the waiter sometimes made medicinal if the day was raw. There were usually a few men he knew in there, and he found the sound of their voices consoling. Vivian had grown quiet. She seemed to speak only to the children, and then only about the practicalities of dressing, eating, school.

  One day at the Metropolitan, Jerry struck up a conversation with a couple of fellows he’d noticed driving around in a big Ford truck. Their names were McCloud and Stone. They spoke in soft Texas accents and wore khakis and high boots. Field geologists, they had come to Montana to investigate the Cat Creek field, 150 miles east of Cut Bank, where several gushers had come in. Now they were conducting a reconnaissance of the larger area. They were not young men, but they seemed fresher, more alert, than anyone else around.

  The card room was dim and low-ceilinged, with mud-tracked floors. The new men sat at a rickety table by the window, the setting sun lighting their map. Jerry sat with them and watched their fingers move across the paper.

  “Oil,” he would say as an old man. “Oil has long been my ruling passion.”

  It began, that long passion, in the late dripping spring of 1920 in the card room of a bare-bones prairie hotel. It began with a chance conversation with a couple of geologists named McCloud and Stone.

  They were rather unprepossessing representatives of the breed, not like some of the flashier ones who would show up before long. They weren’t hustlers or doodlebug men divining oil with willow sticks and flashing gizmos. They had not consulted fortune-tellers or the boy down south with the x-ray eyes. No, McCloud and Stone were men of science, low-spoken fellows whose instruments of divination were topographical drawings and core samples and exhaustive, detailed logs.

  They had thin scholarly shoulders, both of them, and skin that was burnished by the outdoors, weathered, with deep lines fanning from the corners of their eyes.

  They had both been in Texas for Spindletop. Stone had gone to Persia in 1908. McCloud had watched the Alamitos No. 1 blow in. And now they were in northern Montana because oil was clearly the coming thing and there
clearly wasn’t enough of it in the world.

  Jerry visited with them casually at first. Then he began to stop almost daily at the Metropolitan, and he began to ask for explanations of their maps, their language. He began to absorb some of what they knew. And as that happened, an odd little urgency grew in him like an important word on the tip of his tongue.

  It was a quickening. He became quickened.

  He began to see that the parched, scraped ground he walked upon was only the shallow ceiling of another realm. There were layers beneath his feet that descended in stairs and rooms and tunnels to the fiery liquid at the center of the earth.

  Sometimes the risers heaved and thin seams of gas-oil-water fell off to the sides and pooled themselves according to the laws of lightness.

  The risers, the layers, were called horizons—a term that charmed Jerry with its sweep and hope. “Producing horizons,” the geologists said casually, and it seemed the perfect term for what a person might want above all. “Pay horizons,” they sometimes said.

  He saw black lakes, liquid fortune, resting against chalky walls that displayed the imprints of clams. Lakes that lapped against the slopes of domes. Domes that wore swirling, misty caps of gas.

  He studied a well boring that held on its surface the lacy indentation of a sea scallop. McCloud said the scallop was part of a “suite of fossils.” The fossils, he said, were “markers for horizons.” Domes. Anticlines. Suites. Horizons.

  All this beneath the blowing dirt, the crackling grasshoppers.

  The structure. Folds and rooms that held or waited for oil. Because oil, they told him one day, is not always fixed, indigenous. It can move. Forced by water or gas, it will move through porous strata until it is caught in a structural trap.

  Moving oil. Immigrant oil sliding lazily toward the borders of all those abandoned homesteads, those relinquishments.

  And how do you guess where the stuff might be?

  “Underground folding is reflected at the surface,” McCloud told him in his professor’s way. “This is what we know now. This is what we must not forget. No more willow sticks. No more gizmos.”

  The informed eye will see in broad stretches of land some evidence of the unseen arch, the hidden dome. “Oil on the flanks,” they said. On the flanks of the Rockies perhaps, where the Blackfeet Indian reservation lay. Or east and north. North of Shelby near Canada, near the Sweetgrass Hills.

  The geologists McCloud and Stone rumbled onto the prairie with their Brunton pocket transits, their hand levels and aneroid barometers, their hand magnifiers and flap hats like Conan Doyle’s sleuth. On one of their trips north, they identified surface signs of a shallow dome. They called the hidden dome a name that seemed, to Jerry, the essence of promise—the Sweetgrass Arch.

  Oil. Fuel. Blue-black as a crow’s wing and warm to the touch. Oil that sends signs of presence to the surface for anyone with an informed eye to see.

  They warned him about the false signs. How glaciers a thousand feet thick had moved across northern Montana and how that monstrous plowing ice could crumple shales and sandstones into sharp folds that appeared to be evidence of heavings underneath but were really only fancy frosting. Deceptive glacial squeezes, they said. Beware.

  Jerry saw glacial ice as tall as the Woolworth Building scraping across the floor of an ocean gone waterless. He saw the layers, the horizons, gathering themselves in slow arches beneath that ocean floor. He watched the convulsive lift, the curve of the spine, and the way that lovely movement slid oil into the lower regions, where it waited. Pagan lakes of it.

  All this beneath the hooves of horses who had chewed on their own manes.

  He borrowed a book called Practical Oil Geology from McCloud and pored over it, though he pretended, when Vivian asked, to be only casually interested in these men and their theories and the books they loaned out. He began, after the baby was born and all the chaos now of midnight feedings and three children in a small house, to wake himself at five in the morning to read and make notes.

  Vivian made her own notes. She made lists from the Sears catalogue. They were inventory lists—detailed listings of household furnishings, garden tools, clothes for a family of five. She was not an acquisitive person by nature. This was something else. She was not planning to order these things. How could she, after all? They were still broke and it looked like another year before the move.

  It simply felt good to be going through the motions of a life that wasn’t yet onstage. Rehearsing new surroundings.

  She would leaf through the catalogue, checking things briskly with a sharpened pencil, coming back with the baby in her arm to make a new decision and write it down. She had headings on the paper for various rooms. The list of contents went under each heading, numbered. Piano, sofa, phonograph.

  Jerry asked her once what she was doing—he was puzzled, a little nervous—and she brushed him off. She was tired in her very essence. Her skin seemed to have lost its firmness and color, and she had a faint steady cough that she couldn’t seem to shake. They were hers, those lists, that catalogue. She kept them at the back of a cupboard, where the children couldn’t get at them.

  So she did her lists of furnishings and Jerry did his oil reading. Occasionally they read and made lists at the same time, on those rare evenings when all the children were asleep early. It was as if they were holding conversations with separate groups of people in widely separate rooms.

  McCloud and Stone told Jerry they were going to set up a base in Shelby, twenty-five miles east of Cut Bank. The play, they said, was likely to be north of Shelby on the Sweetgrass Arch. They came no more to the Metropolitan card room. Jerry stopped going there too.

  Instead, he began to go to Shelby on the one-car train shuttle—the skidoo. Several times a week, after his shift, he climbed aboard the skidoo just to move across land he hadn’t really seemed to see for a decade.

  He thought about oil. About the structure. He began to imagine himself as some big gun from out of state who might be interested in an oil venture in northern Montana, and he was amazed, then, to realize how cheap this stricken land was, how empty, how so many homesteads had simply been abandoned. And some of them, he now saw, were on the very edges of the possible strikes.

  Flying along through the summer evenings, he felt something like joy ruffling up his spine.

  He went to Shelby after working ten hours at the railyard, simply to be closer to the idea of oil. To hear the talk. To visit with the geologists, the land men, who drove around the countryside, stalked in their big boots through the café, the hotel lobby. Not so many, that year. But a buzz was in the air. A geologist named Campbell was sinking wells all over the place—practice for his huge verifying hit in the spring of 1922. The one that would turn the country upside down.

  Toward the end of the summer, Jerry got a tip and he put his entire paycheck down on two parcels of land near the Sweetgrass Arch.

  Two weeks later, $600 was on its way to Carlton with a small flamboyant note of thanks. A week after that, sniffing telegrams from Carlton began to arrive. He wanted to know exactly what Jerry had bought. He wanted to know about the reservation land too. He and some other fellows had the idea of loaning money to the Indians, money they knew wouldn’t be paid back, and getting some properties that way. Would Jerry be the intermediary, or should Carlton come out himself and check out the situation? Respond soonest.

  He is making a campaign sign and his son Francis is helping him. Vivian looks gray and angry. The signs say Jerry is running for city treasurer in the November election. It would be a modest but steady salary and would get him away from the depot to an office. He would simply resign when they moved to Seattle in the spring.

  In an office, he could store information from the land office. His title searches. His list of best bets. His purchase agreements and bills of sale. His records from the reservation loans.

  The winter of 1921, and Jerry spends his days in a business suit in the treasurer’s office, the railroad behind hi
m forever. He does the city’s work. Before that, he does his own work. At office 5:30 a.m. And it is his own work he pores over. Maps with pins. Notations. Charts. Reminders to meet with so-and-so. Favorable wire from Carlton about 320 oil land.

  At home, Vivian sits into those same evenings with George’s wife, Emily, who has come from Seattle to help out for a few weeks because Vivian has been so run-down.

  Jerry comes home about eleven. Vivian not well. The two women are heads in the window.

  10

  311 W. 88th Street

  Apt. B

  New York, N.Y.

  June 21, 1920

  Dear Jerry, Vivian and kiddies,

  Greetings to you all from the new song bird of New York!

  I am all settled in with Lelia Todd now, and she says I may keep a cot in the parlor while I search for my own lodgings. She is a dear and we are very congenial for the most part, tho she has of course become a professional whistler and has many demands on her time so she occasionally becomes impatient with me.

  Thank you so much for the handkerchiefs. They are lovely and it was sweet of you to remember my birthday, though I try not to remember it myself because of the “Spectre of Advancing Age” and so much to accomplish yet before I can launch my singing career the way I should like to.

  I met this week with the Aeolian-Vocalian record people and they said they will send for me and I will make a test record shortly! They charge $20 for the test record because they are taking a chance on an unknown voice, but the manager told me, Miss Malone you have an absolutely lovely voice and it is very possible we will sign a contract with you. I have to sing several times for test records so they can find out what I can do.

  I am practicing very long hours, and my voice is much rounder and less hard than it was last year and I sing with much more finish of course, hit a High C now with perfect ease and real beauty. For the test record I shall sing “The Volga Boat Song” by de Gorgoza. I have recently added to my repertoire three new songs: “Life” by Curran, “Vale” by Russell and “The Star” by Rogers. In the past month I have learned five French songs, five arias and a group of English songs. I am taking a test tomorrow for church work and will probably have that as a settled thing. Sang for a church in New Jersey a week ago because a girl became ill with the grippe and got $5 and expenses and could have had another church if I wanted it. I expect to learn the score of six operas this year. If you think English is hard to memorize, imagine memorizing a whole opera in Italian! Quite a task, believe me.