Why is the solitary track placed so that the turn occurs just at Swenson’s? Who knows? But there goes the auto, careening, sending out small shouts, the brash sun flashing off its fenders. The driver makes a strategic decision to leave the road for the grass just before the curve, and they get a grip and make the turn.
They stop, giddy, and take a break. The ladies shake out their veils, the men scrape their shoes again, and they all have a glass of cider from a big jar wrapped in a blanket against the shock of the road. Skiff sits on the running board and pulls a happy Alice onto his knee.
The latticed tower against the sky. Two figures climbing it and a crowd below, chins tipped up. Jerry and Vivian, Skiff and Alice, greet their neighbors, their acquaintances of a decade and more. Some new people here, some oil people, but not so many. Most of these people they know—the ones who came in the land rush and remained after the worst.
At the Round Lake picnic last summer, Vivian watched her children, Francis and Maudie, throw rocks in the water. They stood by a boy with a fishing pole. When the boy turned sideways, Vivian jumped a little. He is an old man, she said to herself. The boy’s chest was sunken; his shoulders were stooped. The way he held himself was closed and stoic; brutalized. He had none of the extravagant energy of a child but was already hunched and guarded. Francis skipped a rock far out onto the water. The sunken-chested boy watched it the way an old cat fastens her eyes on a jumping piece of yarn, no longer able to care.
You saw that look on others after the worst years. But not today. Not this early summer of ’22. Today it is as if these people have been dipped in something that makes them young again.
It’s a slow climb with many stops for the nuptial couple—the Donlans’ daughter, the wilder one, and a young geologist with an Oklahoma twang and oil-field stories that make you see money on trees. Eight million paid to the Osage Indians down there, for their ground, for the oil. Indians! And who’s to say this land didn’t hold the same and it wouldn’t be Indians with the bills dropping out of their pockets, it would be you, and you.
Look at Flanagan over there with his vest open. He hung on. He shot his horses and ate canned fish and rabbits and wormy flour, and Standard Oil just made him, two weeks ago, a rich man. That sorry piece of land was just a lid over what they wanted, and they paid a bundle to see the contents.
There is an excited pitch to the conversations. Laughter. A new lightness. With each long step the bride and groom take up the wooden crossbars, the spirits of the crowd lift like helium balloons. All the little clots of people in their driving costumes and muddy suits are talking excitedly. Everyone has had a blast of luck, or expects to. Someone begins to play a clarinet.
That group of men there? They were there when the Mid-Northern Howling No. 1 came in a few weeks ago, a gusher. And the story gets told all over again. Three more feet—no, two and a half—nothing really, the bit down just a notch and then, Glory! all that gas-compressed oil fuming out of the top. That second or so when it plumed against the sky, an emblem of pure release, and then the viscous black rain dropping on their hats, their faces, the palms of their outstretched hands.
They tell it over again, lovingly, in second-by-second detail. And someone chimes in with a bad British accent, mimicking a big gun with one of the companies. “Nasty business, fellows. Nasty business.” He flicks the phantom oil off his face. “A nasty business.” Then they all chime in, the line countlessly retold: “But all in the game, what!” And they laugh just as hard as they did the first time.
And then their voices move into the realm of sober delectation, secrets, reverence. The Ellis formation. The upper Ellis. The Sweetgrass Arch. The Structure. Glacial squeezings. Domes. Commercial deposits. Producing horizons. Strike and dip. Flanks. Penetration. Flow.
There are the motoring costumes and the suits, but there is also khaki. Khaki everywhere. It is the look. Even for women. Khaki breeches with laced bottoms. Here they are on some of the women. Everyone suddenly an explorer, a geologist, on safari.
That group over there talks radio with Nate Zimmerman. What else? He has the only radio receiving set for miles. Made it himself, and he says he’s going to construct a portable one that can go in an auto!
A few weeks ago, Jerry spent most of a day in Shelby, shouldering through the crowds of oilmen, land men, leasehounds; through the lines at the land office, the lines at the Gingham Café, the Log Cabin. Everything crowded, jumbled; wayward autos and someone standing out in the street once in a while to try to direct.
The actual physical town was still just a scramble along the tracks, a scattering up on the hill. But it had taken on the roiling quality of a carnival midway. Shouts. Men in suits flying out of meeting rooms, the “card and soft drink” room at the Sullivan. A deal done, a hot tip, these men running down the street to the land office to file.
Groups of men fresh in from the fields, dust-covered, huddled over maps.
A day of that, then a few hours to kill before the skidoo back to Cut Bank. And so he joined a couple of others at Nate’s for a demonstration of the crystal set. They said he had caught radio waves from Los Angeles and, on one splendid night, a phonograph concert from Denver.
This night it was KDYS from Great Falls, just new through the air to Zimmerman’s rectangular box with all the wires sprouting out of it. Black steel plates on it with knobs and dials, three electric light bulbs, a group of big batteries, and, on his rooftop, silly-looking wires stretched between a couple of poles.
They had a drink of good Canadian Scotch brought over by the Williams kid and sat in a half circle around the box while Rachel Zimmerman made them sandwiches and cast long patient looks at the thing and at her husband, whose face was absolutely alive. They heard Eddie’s K.O. Orchestra come wavering through the air and two xylophone numbers by an eight-year-old named Harold Nichols, who played “Homesick” and “Thru the Night.” Then Miss Gladys Spooner sang “Smile Through Your Tears” and “For You Alone,” and a man came on to read a paper titled “The History and Uses of Copper.”
Jerry had to leave before the copper man was finished talking, and he did so quietly. He left the three men, and now Rachel too, with their heads dipped toward the receiving set, their faces touched by the small steady electric light of the bulbs, mesmerized. They murmured good-byes but kept their eyes on the sound.
And what did he think about as he rode the skidoo back through the night to Cut Bank? Was it some sense that he had been surrounded by something—voices, people, ghosts—all this time and they had just been invisible and now they could be pulled out of the air?
Did he feel intruded upon by all those voices in the air? Too crowded? No. Not then and not for quite a long time.
As he flew through the cool June night, he felt that the presence of the radio confirmed, somehow, the presence of oil. The thought came clear and gave him a trickle of joy.
One couldn’t just believe in the surfaces, whether it was a section of scrub grass or air that looked empty or even the way another person seemed to be. There was something below, within, that could, with luck, be coaxed to reveal itself. He heard again the man’s ponderous voice, moving in, moving out to the edge of hearing, pushing its way back through a roar of static—“copper-bearing conglomerates or gravels which occur near disseminated or porphyry copper deposits”—and, earlier, the same frail here-now-gone presence of Miss Spooner singing something about bravery and smiles. He thought about all of it and felt like a child who has opened a new cupboard.
Nate is telling Jerry and Norgaard and several others about going back East to New Jersey and how he heard the first radio broadcast of a boxing match. Not just any match, either, but Dempsey and Carpentier at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, and he heard it—it, the sounds of the blows themselves—more than ninety miles away at the Metropole Theater in Morristown. The sounds came floating out of tulip speakers strung across the stage. Every seat full. It was wonderful, all of it. Straining for the crackling announcer’s voice; joking th
at he was probably tricking them from the wings. And then the unmistakable sound of an audience, a crowd, thousands and thousands of voices cheering and booing. It was as if the air itself cheered. And then human fighting sounds too. The slap of leather on skin, a body hitting the floor, breath expelled in a grunt, a reverberating bell.
His face lights up again as he remembers it, and he is patient with the questions, the doubts. What was the point? Didn’t he feel like a blind man at a prizefight? No, he says, he felt like a kid who had snuck in, had sandwiched himself down there among tall obscuring adults where he couldn’t really see. But actually at the fight. There. Purely thrilled.
That’s the last time Dempsey looked like anything, someone says. Hollywood. He’s gone soft. Lost the hound in the belly.
Nate tells them the cities are sprouting radio towers. They poke up into the sky everywhere. Like this, and he flings his arm at the wooden derrick and the two figures clinging to the crisscrossed beams.
They have stopped climbing and they wave down at the crowd below, at the judge, who holds a megaphone.
He calls out their names. Their voices float back, faintly, faintly, through the sky. And Nate watches the faces around him become the same faces he saw at the Metropole. The eyes refocus on something distant. The face forgets itself. It’s the listening look that is coming onto the faces of people everywhere in the land.
The bystanders stand in a loose circle around the greasy legs of the big derrick. A small breeze puffs among them, across the patches of soaked-in oil on the ground and the clumps of heavy tools and pipes, greasy with work. The breeze brings them the June smell of sage, the smell of fresh mud, all of it infused with the ancient odor of oil.
Vivian slips her arm through Jerry’s. He covers her hand with his. They are partners, lovers, on the move again, the way they were the first couple of years. They have held on and now they are here on this good day. The land game has begun to pan out, and they have $1,000 in the bank and notes for three thousand more.
Next week, Jerry will meet with four people about leases, royalty shares. He will have a conversation with the man over there in the leather puttees, the one with the little terrier. He’s a big gun, a big field geologist with Standard, and he has looked up a place near the rim and discovered that Jerry owns it, and he wants to talk about a lease. It is on the furthest edge of the possibilities, but he is interested. And his company, of course, does not underpay.
Vicissitudes. Ups and downs. Folds. Anticlines. Up one side and down the other and the luck was in the pockets and sometimes where you’d least expect it. Jerry is permeated with the lingo. He loves it. He glances at his wife, her sweet face tipped up, her brow furrowed with listening, her shiny hair under a smart new hat.
The voices float up out of the megaphone, back down to the ground, intersecting. Would they for the rest of their lives? And they did and they would, and now a hat flies into the air from the derrick and it wafts down to the ground, where everyone is clapping.
Fried chicken and your face aching from laughing. A discreet drink out of the sight of the judge, who doesn’t care anyway. And that prompts a story from Jed McKenna, one-legged from the war. A good-humored young man with a voice made gravel by gas.
McKenna has relatives up in Edmonton; in fact, his cousin Bernie is a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Bernie let him in on a new plan to apprehend bootleggers running the border.
That means you, Williams, someone calls good-naturedly. Williams is a small, alert man in his late twenties who moved to town with his mother when they lost the place in 1919. He runs Canadian whiskey in a new Maxwell with cord tires and a motor-driven horn. The Williamses have been poor as church mice, so no one judges the young fellow’s line of work and no one begrudges him the new car it’s bought him.
Picture this, McKenna says. High-powered motorcycles with machine guns attached to them. Tear gas bombs too. War planes on the ground is basically what you have. Same stick steers the motorcycle and points the gun. Those Mounties are basically riding a gun. They just point themselves at the quarry and fire whenever they please. For backup, some of ’em have sidecars and they stick a Mountie in there with his own gun.
The men are laughing at the thought of it. Canadians! They rib McKenna. They say his memory is maybe addled by his medicines.
I saw the demonstration, he sings above the laughter. Put an old car up on the bank of the Saskatchewan River last winter, got one of those motorcycles going down the ice toward it, firing to beat the band, must have been going fifty, maybe sixty. They counted the hits. Sixty-nine out of eighty-two.
They always get their Ford, someone intones, and this brings new hilarity.
The bride and groom are on the ground. He licks the tips of his fingers and wipes a small smear of grease from her face. They roar off in a field truck toward Shelby and a party in the new dance hall, and everyone else soon follows. Four white ribbons flutter from the legs of the derrick.
Jerry, Vivian, and the Norgaards drive in to Shelby across the alkali flats. Here, a farm with sagging fence, abandoned. There, another, with a crop that will need rain in the next few weeks, and maybe it will come and maybe it won’t but that is not the thing now to hang your hat on. Not wheat, not flax. That is not the thing.
Shelby, late afternoon, late June of 1922. Still just a straggle of small buildings along a street, a branch of that street with more small buildings, a corridor of rails. No trees to speak of. No plan. No shelter. Fewer than a thousand locals still, but look at Main Street! Look at Division!
The boardwalks are crammed with men in khaki, men in leather puttees, a clump of men bent over a map that’s spread on the hood of a car. Women no one has ever seen. Some of them look like city women. It’s their shoes, which aren’t made for the mud. The fashion sense of Shelby women stops at their ankles. Shoes are made for mud, for snow, for ice. Some of these new women look like respectable city women with nice shoes, but no one has ever seen them before, so what are they doing on the main street of Shelby?
Others are more decipherable. Paint on their faces, lace on their sleeves, the flimsiest shoes of all.
It’s five o’clock, and the supper lines have already started at the Log Cabin, the Gingham Café, the Sullivan. Someone dug a cesspool in the lot behind the Gingham and put up a privy, and there is a line there too. Lines, men, more autos than Shelby has ever seen, meandering, idling, roaring off.
The hack hack of hammers. This time, this particular year, will always contain the hack of hammers—energetic, earnest, then faltering, then angry—but always the sound until the day, a year and a week from now, when it is all over and everyone, everything falls silent.
The hammers are loud in the falling light of a summer day. They will go until dark. And the town will stay alive far beyond that. A new dance hall has opened and the men will be there and the women too. There is recklessness abroad.
They drop off the Norgaards, who catch the skidoo up to Cut Bank. Jerry waves to a man wearing a cape. He is said to be a Russian count.
Their friends the Iversons live in a modest porched house over by the school. Jerry and Vivian pull up to the house. A couple of kids run behind the auto, keeping up with it, just for something to do. Jerry and Vivian sit for a few moments after the machine has quit popping and talk about Main Street, the scene, who they saw. The woman in the red skirt. The count in his cape. The safari men—that’s what Vivian calls them—the oilmen, the explorers. Some of them board at the Sullivan. Some move cots into the half-finished Rainbow each night after the workmen leave. Some sleep on Pullmans their companies have leased and parked on the sidings. Some of the poorer leasehounds spend the nights in their automobiles.
The looks on the faces of people. Maybe that’s what strikes Vivian and Jerry more than the clothes, the elaborate compasses and other ferreting gizmos, the new women, the snake boots and swagger.
What is that look? Gritty-eyed. Not so much sleep for these people. But avid too. E
yes open. Heads moving around, trying to pick up the latest tip, the latest theory. There had been a museum-guard look creeping in before this boom. Patient. Ritualistic. The look of people who don’t see anything new. And now there is the exhilarating shock of all this action and hope, all these fast people with plans and contingencies and fallbacks and money. All eyes are wide open.
You try to be skeptical and well-reasoned, make your plan, but there is a headlong quality to this town now, and reason doesn’t much enter in. You look around you and get hungry and see the meal coming your way.
Ann Iverson calls them in. Instead of sitting them down in the front room, she leads them straight through it to the low-ceilinged kitchen in the back.
A stranger sits in the front room on a cot, paring his fingernails. He waves casually. There are other cots in the room, half a dozen of them, with boots on them, valises, map cases.
All six of the Iversons are in the kitchen. A couple of kids and Walter at the table, the smaller children rolling around on the floor with a kitten and a wooden top. The room beyond them, an unheated lean-to lined with shelves, has wall-to-wall bedding on the floor.
We live back here now, Ann says happily. We sleep there, all of us. The men rent the cots, get the use of the outhouse, eat down at the Log Cabin or the Gingham and pay us for the privilege.
The seven-year-old pipes up. A lot! he says. Piles and piles of gold!
They shoo him and the others outside and the adults sit around the table eating warm cherry pie with cream. The day is still lovely and warm, peach-colored now, and a beam of the sinking sun falls through the open door and across the floor.
Walter says he is thinking about going in with some other fellows on a rooming house. Move a couple of old homestead shacks to town and open for business in a couple of weeks. He is considering the advisability of it. But on the other hand, who knows how long this excitement is going to last? Who knows how accurate those boys are, out there mapping the field? They’re as susceptible to mistakes as anyone else. Still, if it keeps going until the end of the summer, this boom, why, a fellow could make some money on some shacks. Hard to know what to do.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 14