“I began to think I was dreaming. Dreaming that I was in Montana. Dreaming that I was in that huge, that enormous structure, waiting to see Jack Dempsey fight a young man from my hometown and the hometown of my brother Jerry Malone, as it happens.” She gestured magnanimously toward Jerry.
“This sense of dreaming, I believe it was because I was seriously dehydrated at the time and didn’t know it. You cannot sit four hours in one hundred degrees of heat and keep one hundred percent of your wits about you.
“And do you know, there were people who became—well, I call it rabid. Whether from the heat or not, I do not know. One young man in particular, I seem to remember. I heard a pounding behind me in the higher bleachers and turned to see this particular young man running down the bleachers in huge leaps. There were not very many people in the bleachers except in the sections nearest the ring. He seemed to have started at the very top, and he came running, leaping down those wooden seats, scarcely slowing to leap through people sitting on the seats—I know because he leaped right past me, leaving a distinct dirty footprint on the edge of my skirt—and he leaped right down to the front row where all the reporters were, most of them from New York City, did you happen to know that? And do you know what he did?
“He stood right in front of them and he yelled, ‘Saps!’ Shaking his fist right in their noses! ‘Saps!’ he yelled. And once more—this time to the rest of us, it seemed—‘Saps!’ And then he walked off very quickly and I never saw him again in my entire life.
“And of course I was nearly crushed to death when the gates were crashed by all those men, and I lost part of my vision as a result, though I didn’t know I was going to at the time.” She paused to remember something else. “One of the men who crashed the gate was a professional gate crasher from back East named One-Eyed Connolly. He was famous. The newspapermen all knew him.”
“Well!” she said briskly. “That isn’t what I wanted to talk about, of course.” She raised her gloved hand dramatically. It looked floppy, as if a child were playing dress-up. It was a rather long pause. Little coughs in the audience.
“The soldier and the song,” Jerry called out.
“I know,” she snapped at him. “I was just collecting myself so that I get it right.”
“This young soldier,” she began, “this blind soldier from the Great War, was from Sunburst, Montana. He wore blue sunglasses, dark round ones, and he sang through a megaphone. I remember thinking, What must it be like to sing for an audience if you are sightless?
“I thought it must be, in some way, like being a blind dancer I heard about. You cannot see what you look like, in a mirror or in the faces of an audience. You just have to send your gift out—your voice—on faith. Try, simply, to make a beautiful sound.” Her fingers fluttered a little; lifted in the air.
“Well, that young man succeeded, I am here to say. Even through a megaphone. He had a clear true tenor, a high Irish tenor, and he sang an old ballad you don’t hear that much anymore.
“The words I recall as if hearing them yesterday. It is called ‘A Piper.’” She began to sing in a high warble.
“A piper in the streets today / Set up and tuned, and started to play, / And away, away, away, away, / On the tide of his music we started away. / The doors and windows were open’d wide; / And all went dancing on music’s tide.”
Amelia’s voice had the appropriate sad lilt. She sang frankly and without haste, and closed her eyes at the end of the verse. At this point, the audience began to clap eagerly. But Amelia was not finished. She lifted her floppy gloved fingers delicately, held them in a gesture for silence, and went on.
“The men left down their work and came; / And women with petticoats color’d like flame, / And little bare feet that were blue with cold / Went dancing back to the age of gold; / And all the world went gay, went gay, / For half an hour in the street today.”
Now the old-timers were bending their heads slightly, or cocking them as if trying to hear better. Their eyes were not on her or each other or anything physically present.
When she was finished, she nervously clapped a few claps for herself, then stepped to the side of the podium and did a long low curtsy that must have hurt her twisted ankle, because it threw a grimace of surprise across her face.
Michael Cage jumped up and swept his arm toward her, clapped frantically, then lifted the whole room to its feet with twitches of his fingers, and they all clapped, a standing ovation, and Amelia inclined her head, pleased and unsurprised, and walked carefully back to her chair.
15
LATE SUMMER of 1922, and Shelby still had the sound and feel of a town that never slept. At night, headlights ran in a stream from town, north to the field. Men wandered the streets far after midnight, some of them waiting for the bed they shared, in shifts, with others.
The hammers knocked all day and into the night. The big steamers shrieked, pulled into the station, thrummed in place, and a dozen men, maybe more, stepped off with their valises, their orders, their hunches.
New women came too. With the bands that played jazz in the raw new dance halls. With the men. Some were camp followers and looked it. Others were harder to place—so modern and smart and watchful.
A pair of low-cut city shoes, sunk in the mud. A dropped waistline and an eye-hiding hat. A cigarette in a thin black holder.
His name was Sergei Stepov, and he was known as Sam. His English was hissing and heavy. In all seasons except high summer he wore a worsted wool cape that reached nearly to his ankles. Long hair the color of cigar ash combed straight back from a lean morose face. A monocle that wavered in the sun.
No one knew any absolute facts about his past or why exactly they had come to think he was a dispossessed Russian count. But his appearance—his thin imperious nose, his stalking gait, the cape—made the rumor seem true enough. He had a farm east of Shelby, but farming did not seem to be an interest. Most of the time he was in town, leaving his wife and her silent brother to work the place.
Jerry was in Shelby now, every chance he got. He left the girls to mind the treasurer’s office in Cut Bank and got on the train or the skidoo and flew to Shelby to be near the feel of oil.
One day in the Red Onion he struck up a conversation with Stepov about Wells’s Outline of History. Jerry happened to be reading the last few pages over his coffee, and Stepov had, by coincidence, just finished it. A bright blue day with a chill on the edge and Stepov in his cape, even in the indoors.
The Red Onion that day was loud with the boots of men tromping in and out, with shouted greetings and the heavy whine of the door each time a customer came or went. The smoke of cigars and cigarettes floated lazily toward the low ceiling. The thick china clanged.
Soon enough their conversation got around to oil—all conversations in Shelby, that year, got around to oil—and they discovered that they were both familiar with Hager’s Practical Oil Geology. They could both discuss the field in the language of scientists and mappers, not mere gamblers or speculators. They shared a love of the very idea of oil, its physicality and origins and tendencies, even apart from the question of whether it could be brought up from the ground to fuel motorcars and make fortunes.
Devonian, Silurian, Ordovician, Cambrian, they murmured over their coffee. The Morrison, the Ellis. Anticline, syncline, fault, contact, seepage. Cretaceous, Jurassic, Carboniferous. Virgelle sandstone, pebble band, Colorado shale, blackleaf sandy member, Kootenai, Madison limestone, Jefferson limestone, anhydrite. Producing horizons. Pay zones. Closure.
Stepov was a pure aficionado. He watched the play as he would watch a chess tournament, evaluating the moves, second-guessing the players. He was not part of the scramble, only fascinated, utterly fascinated, by its cerebral nature—the way an idea, an insubstantiality, could create such a fervor. He had seen it before in Russia.
Jerry would put a problem to Stepov. Let’s say a fellow could not afford the property just west of the new well, the Mid-Northern Howling, let’s say—pointin
g at the map. This fellow has to move away from it in some direction and get himself a cheaper parcel or a lease somewhere else. Where would you go? Where would you put your rubles, Sam Stepov?
The Russian pondered the map, chin on knuckles. He squinted. Turned the map a degree to the west, a degree to the east. Thought. Tapped the checkered oilcloth with a tobacco-colored fingernail. Put the fingernail on the map and moved it like a Ouija pointer, wanderingly, and then with sudden decision in a crisp circle. These half sections, he said. Somewhere in here. Long chance, but possible. Possible.
Not these? Jerry would ask happily, circling an area to the north and west. Wouldn’t this be more likely? More likely maybe, said Stepov. But not more cheap. You want cheap and likely. And close enough to the play that the big boys will figure you might be onto something and buy it off you just to hedge their bets, eh?
Jerry slaps a bill of sale onto the oilcloth next to Stepov’s gaunt fingers. Cash!
The thrill of a new discovery this week—a gusher—from a horizon nobody ever thought would pan out, and now everything has to be looked at differently. The possibilities expand fast, and there is a quick fast burst of frantic buying and leasing. People like Jerry go home with new money in their pockets. Things aren’t what they seemed yesterday.
And then they can’t help saying to themselves, This is just the beginning. This is how luck feels. This is the verge. It is the perfect thought, the perfect feeling—that you are on the verge, on the brink. It is where we all want to be. Not the moment of deliverance, but the moment just before.
This is the verge. The biggest is yet to come. Say that to yourself enough times and everything that was a question becomes a possibility.
They are sure to boom the field in the spring.
For a while, that is the talk. The real action, the huge boom, is still to come. The rest of the country will hear about this place and come flocking. That is the refrain that thrums among the khakis and smoke and traffic. That winds among the hammers hacking, through the raw young frames of new buildings, houses, dance halls, and the mud and the horses jumping sideways at the pop of car exhausts. Between the lines at the restaurants and the latrines. Across the tired faces of men who spend the days deal-talking, then sleep a few hours in their autos.
Oil, oil, oil. And the best is yet to come.
Jerry spent the money on a sturdy new Hupmobile so that he could tour the oil field without breaking down.
He quit his job at the treasurer’s office. He sold three more parcels of land and bought a farmhouse to move onto a lot in Shelby that he had been smart enough to buy a year earlier.
He got ready to move Vivian and the children from Cut Bank to Shelby, twenty-five miles closer to the field. The action.
The all-out boom was coming in the spring. Everyone said it.
Up at 5 a.m. to tour field. Good prospects.
They sent the kids to Clemons’s farm for a few days, and he and Vivian took a breather before the move. Took the train through the reservation and up into the mountains.
They pitched the big canvas tent on the shore of Two Medicine Lake. Their low voices around the fire. Heady pine. Cold molten lake. The first frail star. A single big blanket around their shoulders.
In the early light of the next day, they cut walking sticks and climbed Mount Henry. Up and up the long flank, through the baking sap smell, the air still cool at noon on the very edges, and then out of the trees and up, up, above the last scrubby greens to the top. Their hard breathing. Silent resting. Their sweat. Two steps a breath. And finally the top and all those peaks at their feet like a frozen choppy sea. Their names in a logbook inside a tin box. A shared apple and a blanket.
They moved the farmhouse in from the country and set it on a new-poured foundation in Shelby, a few blocks from the school. Blankets on the windows yet. No running water. But they had money from the sale of the Cut Bank house—it sold in two days—and Vivian bought geraniums and a crateful of fuzzy baby chicks for the kids to tend.
The hail came in the night, glass stones as large as English walnuts. They ricocheted off the town roofs and swept in razoring sheets across acres and acres of wheat that had just begun to become gold. The first decent crop in five years was pelted to mulch.
In Shelby, there was the sound of breaking glass in the dark, the sickening knock of pelted rocks.
The hailstones were precisely the size of a baby chicken’s head. They flew into the small dirt yard outside the house; hit with a deafening racket on the piece of frail tin nailed to a set of posts to keep the chicken feed dry. They battered the tin sheet onto the ground, where it changed in shape so that it seemed to writhe.
The children peered out the window into the bullet-filled dark. Maudie began to wail and little Tip joined in. Jerry and Vivian urged them all back to bed, wincing at the hammer knocks on the roof. The chickens, the little chicks, will be all right, they said. They have probably found a hiding place.
The sun came up and winked off the balls of ice scattered across the dirt yard. They looked like the aftermath of a celebration, forlorn as day-old confetti.
The chicks were huddled behind the cellar door, some of them. Twenty or so of them quivered silently together, a hummock of gauze. But eleven were further into the yard, lying motionless at strangely even intervals; toppled in their tracks.
The children cupped the silent ones in their hands and placed them in a wicker basket. They are gone, Vivian told them gently. We can bury them in a corner of the yard. No, they didn’t feel the huge glass stones break their heads. It was too fast. It was like a bolt of lightning. No, she said, not souls like humans. Maybe some other kind of soul, though. A little chicken soul.
And then one of the chicks opened an eye. And the mourning that the children were easing into, the beginnings of acceptance, shamed them—shamed Vivian too—like a small slap. They had given up too soon.
Even though the eye quickly closed again and resumed its permanent look of death, it was now a mask, that eye. A wink. A joke. And so all the little corpses were placed in the basket, their bodies spaced apart for potential breathing room. They were placed by the stove.
Jerry had to leave. He had business. He had a letter in his pocket he would post to Carlton, urging him to go in with half a dozen other Minneapolis businessmen on a new hotel in Shelby. It was a surefire win, Jerry assured him. They’ll be turning people away when they really boom the field in the spring.
When he left the house, his children were huddled around the chickens and didn’t even lift their heads as he said good-bye. He walked out into the hammers and the autos and the shouts.
The chick that had opened its eye opened it again an hour later, and the other eye with it. It was late morning now. The hailstones had melted away or shrunk to the size of marbles and peas. The house was very warm. Everyone’s forehead began to sweat.
And then the chickens began to stir, all together. An eye opened, and another, and a beak. A small wing poked up. Miniature claws contracted leisurely, like a hand in sleep.
The children screamed with delight. They jumped up and ran around, and Francis made an Indian war cry, his hand fluttering against his mouth. A chick peeped. And another. They’re peeping! the children screamed. Vivian came over and peered curiously into the basket. They all began to peep, all but two of the chicks, and those were not stirring at all.
This was now eight hours after the hail. The chickens were frantic for food. The children laughed and shrieked. Francis had a fit of unstoppable giggles and rolled around on the floor, grabbing his stomach, kicking his boots. Maudie ran out to the yard and brought back a tin plate with chicken feed. The chicks were on their feet now, most of them, and they jostled for the grain. They ruffled themselves as if they’d been drenched in water or buried in sand. They poked their tiny beaks into their fuzzy little feathers, officious and brisk.
The sun was high now and the hail was gone. Vivian told the children to put the chicks back into the yard and go out
side themselves to play. Before they carried the big basket outdoors, they all gathered for another look at the brood. Two of the chicks still didn’t move.
They each ran an index finger over the fuzzy heads of the ones that hadn’t made it. Then they placed them gently, matter-of-factly, in the big trash can by the cellar door.
Forever after, Jerry would associate the slowdown, the lag, the beginning of the end of his tallest hopes, with the sound of a wheeze in his own breath: the tightness he thought had left him years earlier.
He thought at first it might be something in the new house. Maybe the chicks. But leaving the house all day changed nothing. The panic-making tightness seemed to be coming back.
Vivian looked at him with deep surprise—it was like a former marriage, this presence. He was familiar with it and she wasn’t. He made himself mullein tea, steeped long the way his mother used to do it, but it didn’t seem to help.
The end of the summer of 1922. That’s when the action began to taper off for good, but no one wanted to see it. That’s when deals became almost-deals. Three men instead of eight or nine getting off the train. The signs so slight, Jerry didn’t even see them with his eyes or his mind. Only his lungs knew what was starting to happen.
And then, to cap it, his old friend betrayed him.
It was a half section of unturned ground due east of Sunburst—a piece of land that lit up like an electric light in Jerry’s mind the minute Stone, the geologist, showed him a new map, a redrawing of the field.
The map, to someone like Jerry who could read it, who could compare it instantly with past versions, showed a small, significant shift of the dome to the east. Nothing huge, but enough to attract the attention, soon enough, of people who knew what they were looking for.
The property was a relinquishment. Jerry could get the surface and mineral rights for almost nothing if he could clear up a few problems with the title at the government land office in Great Falls.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 18