That Old Ace in the Hole

by Annie Proulx

  The rancher, Archie Frass, took shortcuts when he could. He had found some used pipe and jury-rigged a tower by sticking sections into wet concrete and welding cross-members for a base, spot-welding minimal points to hold the forty-foot tower together, not bothering to construct a proper base section, nor putting up guy wires nor checking to see if the tower was level. The pipe sections were hollow and Archie did not think to cap them. Rainwater gradually got in and, because of the concrete pad, the pipe legs could not drain. In the winter, hard freezes weakened and even burst some pipe sections. The tower developed a slight list to the southeast. After several years the windmill head wore out and had to be replaced. Frass and his unwilling son tried to haul up the new wind generator using a gin pole and pulley system, but neglected to run the gin cable to a pulley at the base of the tower, fastening it instead to Frass’s truck with the son as driver, Frass on the tower as top man. As the cable came off the gin pole the son drove the truck forward and Frass, expecting the generator to rise up to him, shouted “Whoa!” in horrified amazement when the tower buckled, the rusted and weakened pipe legs folding. Frass, the windmill, the gin pole, the truck, the wind generator and the son all came together in a tangle of flesh and steel pipe red with blood.

  “He done everything wrong,” said Habakuk van Melkebeek with the satisfaction of a man who does everything right. “Comes to anchor your legs in concrete I’ll show you a little trick. You got to be sure the tower is level before you fasten it down.”

  He went to the truck and got his coyote-shooting rifle. Ace, wondering, watched Habakuk rest the rifle on the truck hood and take aim at the tower, squinting through the scope.

  “Your cross-strut got to line up with the horizontal crosshair, and the pump rod got to line up with the vertical. It’s a quick way you can tell if the tower is level.”

  In 1938, after five years of working the Cutaway windmills, Habakuk made Ace Crouch a business proposition. They both sat on upturned fruit boxes drinking cocoa, Ace’s specialty, for he made it with double-condensed milk and white sugar and topped each cup with a marshmallow. When the marshmallows became stale and stiff, Ace threw them into the bunkhouse stove or the campfire, where they charred into a graphite-colored mass like coal clinkers.

  “Goed,” said Habakuk, sucking the sweet froth off the top. “Ace, I had ideas since I started working for the Cutaway. Mr. Slike is a good man and I get along with him O.K., but since I come on this ranch I want my own business, not work for nobody. I thought first I come to this country and I go back again, but I change my mind. I like the panhandle. I like Texas where it’s flat. I like flat. Another thing, the water table she sinks beneath us. I come here the wells was twenty, thirty feet deep. Now we got to set pipe deeper and some wells down to eighty, a hundred feet. Windmill can’t lift water that deep so we got to put in a pump. Water table is dropping. Remember that number forty-three in the north pasture? One hundred twenty-two feet. I bet you we’ll go deeper. And it’s all over the panhandle—now everybody has to go way down for the water. My idea is get off the Cutaway and make a business that does well-drilling, puts up the mills and does repairs. Work for myself. I save my money a long time now and I got enough for a good drill rig.”

  It was true that Habakuk spent much time adding columns on the backs of envelopes, figuring, scratching out the numbers, writing new ones down. Though he had left school, he said, when he was eight years old, he was a dab hand at adding and subtracting. Of decimals and fractions he knew little and did not care, for who needed them? Accumulation and loss were the great math processes.

  “I like you be my partner. We be van Melkebeek and Crouch. We make a lot more money that way. Pretty soon I have my own ranch. Or maybe you want to stay here and Mr. Slike will give you my job, seventy-five a month. What you think? Stay with Slike or come with me? You come with me, you won’t be sorry.”

  Ace Crouch said yes to Habakuk because he couldn’t imagine himself staying on the Cutaway alone, wrestling with the windmills by himself or with some reluctant cowboy for a helper. The idea of an economic adventure pulled at him. How about that, in just a few years he had come from drinking root coffee out of a tin can and dodging the old man’s fists to being a young businessman with a partner; he was advancing.

  At the same time cowboy Rope Butt felt he was in retreat. Nothing went well. The range was chopped up into barbwire rectangles and farmers were taking over ranch land, plowing pasture. He disliked the food they served him at one ranch or the other, he hated the bad horses that came his way, he took no joy in frolic. Only drink, betting on horses and fighting cocks, and his poetry interested him. He had two ex-wives in different counties, several children by each. All he could do was quit and move to another outfit, work a while, quit again and move on.

  And now, a lifetime later, driving along the highway and looking back through the deep channel of time past, he was amazed all over again by his own bad luck and Habakuk van Melkebeek’s good fortune. What or who decided where gold would shower and where cactus thorns would pierce? Sixty years later he still could not understand why the Dutchman had fallen into the land of plenty while he, Rope Butt, had nothing but a few roosters and arthritis.

  Then, as he had known it would, a closing line for his poem came to him: “Time that he went up the spout.”

  13

  HABAKUK’S LUCK

  Habakuk and Ace had more work than they could handle and eventually hired and trained two field crews. They were all over the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and into New Mexico. More and more Habakuk handled the paperwork at the office in Woolybucket while Ace worked with both crews in every sandy, cactus-studded pasture for a hundred miles around, sleeping on the ground or the front seat of the truck, stirring up rattlers, half-frozen in the icy northers that roared down, packing up when lightning threatened, for millers died on steel towers. Habakuk resisted putting up wooden towers even when ranchers claimed wood was their dearest wish, for a wooden tower was slow, heavy work and they rotted out and threw off splinters like a sapwood fire throws sparks.

  Two events shifted local opinion toward steel towers. An itinerant windmiller, Daisy Boy Pocock, tried to increase his business by setting wooden towers afire. Then a plague of grasshoppers in whirring, rustling flight settled on two old wood mills on the Seven Range and ate them to beanpoles.

  Increasingly the work was with deep wells and gasoline pumps. Still, money came in and by 1939 Habakuk, who was of a saving disposition, had salted enough away to buy land for his dream ranch. He knew the panhandle intimately, knew every ranch pinched by hard times and drought. One morning, when Ace was in town to pick up pipe, he stuck his head into the warehouse and called to him, “Kom binnen.”

  Ace came into the office where every paper was neatly aligned, the windowsills sandless and gleaming. Habakuk was fussing with a coffee pot on the hotplate. “Wil je koffie of iets sterkers? I’ve got some gin. If you like.”

  “Coffee for me. I can’t drink in the mornin. You know it’s no good go up on a mill half-lit.”

  But Habakuk could and he chased his black coffee with a small tumbler of neat gin, said “Ahh!” with a sound like a steam engine.

  “So, the Wilcox job O.K.? We had trouble with him last year. The gate.”

  “Yeah. The gates was locked, all five a them. I went up the house and he weren’t around, nobody around but the missus. She said, ‘Do what you have to do, them cows need water.’ So we cut the locks.”

  “Ja, cut the locks, but when you finish the job weld the gates shut. That one, Wilcox, never paid us for the work last year.”

  “Jesus,” said Ace, picturing the Wilcox place with its shambles of low buildings and rutted approach, the broiling sun that heated truck fenders like frying pans. “That’s a little harsh, weld a man’s gates. Could be he don’t have no money. I hear their place is for sale. Anyway, when I was out there it was hot enough to loosen the bristles on a wild hog and Mrs. Wilcox give me a glass a cold buttermilk. Best thi
ng I ever drank. So I don’t want a give them trouble.”

  “He gets a good lesson,” said Habakuk complacently. “And he asks too much for that place. I been looking at land. For my ranch. Good time to buy land. Plenty of land for sale. I will get Roughbug land cheap enough, I think,” he remarked to Ace. “I ask down the land record office and they say whole town belongs to one family, only one left of a broke syndicate in Ohio. They had the land since 1885, failed in the cattle business after a hard winter. I wrote the people a letter saying ‘how much?’ Waiting to hear. So, you go back to Wilcox, fix his cows with water. Fix his gates with welding.”

  But when Ace went out he decided to make a last try for the key and pulled up at the Wilcox shack. Before he could climb the porch steps he heard a yoo-hoo from above and there, on the platform of the mill that pumped the house water, sat Mrs. Wilcox, knitting something blue. He couldn’t imagine how she had climbed up the bent rerod angles that served the mill instead of a ladder. It was a sorry mill, the ash sucker rod lashed onto what looked like an old bed rail.

  “What are you doin up there, Mrs. Wilcox?”

  “Why, I heard a terrible growlin a while back, some wild animal, I don’t know what, black panther or worse, sounded like it was in the house, so I come up here where it couldn’t git me. Wait until Mr. Wilcox gits home and he can shoot it.”

  “You want me to look in the house?”

  “Thank you kindly, Ace. I would sure appreciate it. And take your gun. It might be in the back room. The door is open because I was airin it out.”

  He expected to find nothing, but there was a large and irritable badger with a mousetrap on one toe backed into a corner and ripping at the wallpaper. He prodded it outside and shot it, brought it to the windmill for her to see.

  She started down with her knitting bag slung around her neck, breathless and sunburned. He stood below, looking up her dress, seeing her pale legs, her pink rayon panties descend.

  “You deserve a reward,” said Mrs. Wilcox. “Would you rather have a glass a buttermilk or go in the bedroom?”

  “Both,” said Ace, who took his rewards where he found them.

  A letter came to Habakuk from a lawyer in Chillicothe representing the interests of Mrs. Gladys Armenonville. Mrs. Armenonville, he wrote, would let Habakuk van Melkebeek have the 17,000 acres that made up her Roughbug holdings at fifty cents an acre, cash in hand only. Habakuk caught the train to Ohio the next morning and clinched the deal.

  He named the ranch Kampen after his old hometown, and, in a play on words, registered a triangular tent shape for the brand.

  “See?” he said. “‘Kampen’ out in the tent.” He dragged two abandoned houses from the outskirts of Woolybucket to his land and, after renovation and many coats of paint (renewed twice a year, as the wind scoured paint away nearly as fast as it went on), referred to one as headquarters and the other as a slaapverblijs. He hired five luckless cowboys who, though glad to have the paycheck, disliked being called boerenknechten and made to stand clean-shirt inspection every morning. He put them to work constructing stock tanks at each tower site. There were no cows, for water came first. The cowboys learned that they would help drill wells, and, with the field crew, put up windmills over the next months, ten of them, all steel, all the best mills. When they protested that they were not mill monkeys Habakuk glared at them and said, “You will do this or you are unemployed.” Only one man walked, but Habakuk no longer trusted those who stayed, for they were afraid of heights, their claims to be tough hands hollow when it came to high platforms and slippery steel ladders. He replaced the deserter with a good fencing man, for there was barbwire to be strung, miles of it.

  But worse was to come in his labor relations with ranch hands. Habakuk’s cousin, Martin Eeckhout, and his wife, Margriet, came from Java for a visit, bringing boxes and hampers of viands and schnapps, curry powder, mango chutney, Bombay duck, coconuts and bananas, almonds and rice and a hundred other necessaries to make a twenty-boy rijstafel. Margriet would do the cooking, but what of the serving, the line of boys in sarongs with fragrant platters on their heads?

  “The boerenknechten,” said Habakuk.

  And so the feast was served by furious cowboys defiantly dressed in chaps and spurred boots, cowboys who stuck their grimy thumbs into the prairie chicken curry, who scowled and made retching sounds as they shoved the serving dishes (washbasins purchased hastily from Steddy’s store in Woolybucket) in front of the diners. Ace Crouch, who had eaten Habakuk’s fare now for several years, tucked in with relish, heaping his plate with rice and then adorning it with curry and spoonfuls of side dishes. One of the cowboys said audibly that he would as lief eat skunk turds.

  “Possible a certain boerenknecht will be looking for the new job tomorrow,” said Habakuk darkly. There were muttered threats and insults when the servers learned that their own supper was to consist of the leftovers. And yet all the food was eaten, the chutney jar interiors wiped clean by cowboy fingers, and no one quit. The feast passed into local legend as “damn good Dutch pepper-belly grub.” A few days later Margriet Eeckhout made ranch culinary history with a sambal so cruel it swelled the diners’ lips. The regular cook sidled up to her and, in a low voice, asked for the recipe, which she wrote out in a spidery European hand, promising to send him certain fiery chiles. Within a few months tins of curry powder and jars of mango chutney appeared on the shelf behind the counter at Steddy’s store and several ranch cooks made it their business to use both liberally, the beginnings of the famed Woolybucket curry chile, always served at the Barbwire Festival, the recipe jealously guarded.

  Windmill work on Habakuk’s ranch began on a calm but cloudy morning following a sunrise like molten slag. Ace and one of the field teams arrived with the drill rig, a powerful old Model A Ford truck that could and did go anywhere and a rotary drill that gnawed its way downward. Van Melkebeek and Crouch had a second drill which they used in sandy soils, a jet type with weights that slammed down repeatedly on a T atop the pipe, driving the pipe into the ground. Inside this pipe was a smaller-diameter pipe and down it they forced water under pressure, pushing out the detritus sand and gravel which floated up to ground level. But while some of Habakuk’s ranch lay on sandy soil, many of the proposed wells were aimed at water beneath limestone and shale. As he finished each well Ace topped the pipe with a large rock that served both as a marker and a cover, moved on to the next site. They would put up the towers after the wells were drilled. Three of the more shallow well locations would take thirty-foot towers and relatively small-diameter windmills, but there were deep wells and big towers in the more remote pastures.

  The work went smoothly enough until the seventh well. The site was dry, level ground. It was to be an unusually deep pump well, perhaps two or even three hundred feet. On the fourth day of drilling a twenty-minute rush of gas, followed by stuttering gouts of oil, erupted. Ace watched the oil come out for an hour and a half and, when there was no decrease—indeed, an increase—in the amount of flow, jumped in the truck and raced for the house where Habakuk was nailing on shingles.

  “Habakuk. Your number seven’s spoutin awl. You better get a awlman out here. It looks interestin. And I don’t think cows can drink it.”

  Habakuk van Melkebeek drove out to number seven and looked at it. He was more than a little annoyed, for he wanted to start his new life as a rancher.

  “We let it run tonight. I look in the morning and see. We don’t need oilmen here. She runs in the morning we drill somewhere else.”

  “But Habakuk, awl is worth money.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Before daylight Habakuk awoke to a curious sound, the roar of many truck and car engines laboring down his sandy road. He got up and peered out the window. A string of headlights jounced and winked as the vehicles came along the rough road. Some, headlights pitching wildly, showed that their drivers had forsaken the road and were coming across the open prairie. He counted seventeen sets of headlights. Habakuk got into his pan
ts and shoes, went downstairs, rustled the stove into life and put on coffee. Then he went out on the porch to drink his coffee and smoke his morning cigar and wait for the first vehicle to come up. The eastern sky paled.

  The car stopped at the bottom step of the porch and a medium-size man got out. He saw the glow of Habakuk’s cigar and spoke.

  “Howdy do, sir. H. H. Potts, lease man for Condor Awl out a Oklahoma City. I hear you got a water well that’s spittin awl.”

  “That was last afternoon. Maybe it stopped now.”

  “Why I’m here, take a look at the situation, let the geologists and formation testers see what they think.” He waved his hand at the headlights now filling up the yard. “Soon’s we git a little light from old Sol we’ll have us a look. Funny, comin out here. So dark. Most a the panhandle’s lit up pretty good with gas flares. But it’s dark out here. We’ll fix that, maybe, eh?”

  Habakuk disliked this man, saw he had his sleeves full of tricks. The fellow was on the porch now, rocking on his heels.

  “Wouldn’t have another cup a that coffee, would you?” said H. H. Potts. “I left Oklahoma City in the middle of the night, only had a hamburger and a bottle a pop.”

  “No,” said Habakuk flatly.

  In the silence that followed something shifted subtly, but in a beat or two, as the yard filled with yawning and stretching men and the sky turned the color of watermelon juice, H. H. Potts said in a flat voice, “Well, then, let’s just go take a look. If there’s awl we can make you a lease offer.”

  Habakuk insisted on leading the caravan out to the site himself. He did not want to ride with H. H. Potts. And someone had to show the way. The well was nearly two miles from the porch, almost in the dead center of his property. The jolting headlights in his rearview mirror irked him. He had a suspicion that the peace and contemplative quiet of Kampen Ranch was being profoundly disturbed. How had this man away up in Oklahoma City found out about the oil? Why did they need all those geologists? If there was oil, there was oil. No need to guess and estimate something visible. As he went through the last gate, which Ace had left open for there were yet no livestock on the range, he could see the black silhouette of the drill rig against the pink sky and closer, the satin sheen of a lake of oil on the ground reflecting the dawn. He stopped at the edge of the oil and got out. Behind him H. H. Potts pulled up. They could both hear the escaping gas hissing through the oil.