Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “Now you be keerful, ma’am,” grinned a local character in Poughkeepsie, hoping to frighten her, “they’s Injuns all along this route that’d love a golden scalp like yours.”

  “And wouldn’t you, too?” she shot back, laughing, the sharpie’s companions laughing with her, the man finally laughing, too, at how she had bested him.

  “What are you, anyway? A queen or something?” asked a bold little boy in Binghamton, after studying her for a long time.

  “No, I am a little country girl, and when I was growing up, I milked the cows just like you do.”

  “G’wan,” he said, charmed, believing and disbelieving simultaneously.

  And, when she found a group of dark-skirted farm women regarding her enviously, suspiciously, on the platform in Syracuse, Kristin walked over to them and bought what they were there to sell, milk and eggs and bread, telling them how she herself had baked the bread of Norway. “I am going with my husband to Cleveland,” she said. “What is it like there?”

  “A bad town,” they answered, liking her, not wishing that she be harmed, “a bad town, so have a care.”

  “What do you want all this garbage for?” Gustav asked disgruntledly, looking at the things she had bought.

  “If we don’t use them ourselves, we can give them away. I just wanted to see what the people of America are like.”

  “And you have found out?”

  “These were good people. As good as in Lesja.”

  “I bested the people of Lesja.” Gustav smirked. “It was but an afternoon’s work.”

  “I do not think you shall have such an easy time with Americans,” she told him. “They seem unawed, if not downright defiant”

  “There is an American saying that goes, ‘You wait and see.’ You wait and see.”

  “I am waiting.”

  She did not say for what.

  “Don’t go off the train again. I don’t wish you to mingle with the commoners.”

  “But I must have some decent companionship.”

  “Were it not for this train, on which I have paid your fare, you would never dare to come this far back into the hinterlands. You would have to walk, or go by wagon, day after day.”

  “I could do that” Kristin said. “I have lived without the finer things longer than I have had them, and—”

  “Silence. I do not wish to discuss it anymore.”

  Gustav was jumpy, preoccupied, worried. Kristin did not mind. When he was in such moods, he let her alone. The pursuit of money was a serious thing, and Gustav had no energy to embark upon pleasures of the flesh. For several nights Kristin prepared her contraceptive, just in case. But when she saw that she would not need it, she ceased to take the trouble.

  The train finally arrived in Buffalo. They spent several nervous nights at a bad hotel, bad for Gustav at any rate. The clerks and waiters did not treat him in a fawning European manner. Instead of being threatened by him, he was threatened by them! He fired off telegrams to J. D. Rockefeller in Cleveland, confirming an appointment made in New York. Rockefeller did not respond at first. Then he inquired as to the nature of Mr. Rolfson’s business.

  “He knows my business!” cried Gustav, outraged, pacing the floor in the dingy hotel room he had been forced to accept there being none grand enough for him. “I sent him three telegrams from New York, explaining exactly what I mean to do: buy his expertise in oil, and take him on as a hired hand.”

  When a final cable arrived, saying:

  FREE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES MAY 12.

  ROCKEFELLER

  Kristin thought she knew what was going on.

  “He is playing with you, husband. He is a far stronger man than you have supposed.”

  “He is nothing, the little cowherd,” Rolfson replied in a rage. “He is a nobody, a produce clerk. I can buy him and sell him. Why, do you know that his father peddled patent medicines on horseback? Do you know that his father was once suspected of horse thievery?”

  “I recall your father telling me that, in his youth, he had to sleep with animals simply for their warmth.”

  “But he did not steal animals,” Gustav shot back.

  “No,” Kristin agreed, in that tone Gustav could not bear, “no, he did not steal animals.”

  “You wait and see,” he shot back, practicing the idiom.

  Cleveland was enjoying a riot of political and martial emotions when Kristin and Gustav disembarked from the Lake Erie steamer. General Grant was poised for a major attack on the crucial, Confederate-held fortress of Vicksburg, key to the Mississippi River. President Lincoln had called for more soldiers. Men with money were seeking substitutes, and men without money were making three hundred dollars in return—quite possibly—for their lives.

  “That is disgusting,” Kristin pronounced, after a prosperous but desperate young man had approached Gustav hoping to buy him as a substitute in the Union army. “A real man fights his own battles.”

  Rolfson just laughed. “That may be true, but a smart man gets others to fight for him.”

  You ought to know, Kristin thought. Gustav’s scar was as obnoxious as ever, and his nose flat and broad now at base as well as bridge.

  A decrepit horse-drawn cab took them from the waterfront to the address Rockefeller had given in early correspondence. It turned out to be an unprepossessing warehouse of unpainted clapboard. Union army wagons were being loaded with crates of vegetables at a dozen docks, and there was an air of vitality and enterprise in spite of the appearance of the place.

  Gustav told the driver to wait, helped Kristin down from the cab, and they entered the warehouse. On a high stool, working over a bench, hunched a thin, pale young man. He was carefully entering figures into a thick ledger^ painstakingly blotting after every entry.

  “Make haste, lad, and fetch me Mr. Rockefeller,” Gustav ordered. “I am Rolfson, and I have an appointment with him.”

  “For fifteen minutes,” said the young man.

  Gustav frowned, irritated and impatient.

  The young man put down his quill, but did not move from the stool. Gustav ignored him. Kristin watched him, though. He was colorless, and did not look at all vital. He seemed a pale body with a pale soul inside, quiet and timid and obsequious. His eyes were wary, but opaque. She could not see behind their shining surfaces.

  “Well?” prodded Gustav. “Are you a dunce, or what? I want to talk to Mr. Rockefeller. Time is money.”

  “I know that,” said the clerk, “and you have already wasted a minute. I am John D. Rockefeller.”

  Kristin was taken aback, and Gustav the more so.

  “Well, why did you not say so?” Gustav boomed heartily. He was displeased at Rockefeller’s apparent subterfuge, but he thought he could use him, and wanted no trouble.

  “I just wondered how you would treat a simple clerk,” Rockefeller said, holding out a limp hand. There was very little in it to shake. Gustav made the best of it. Kristin was reminded of a snake with a steel wire inside it.

  “Young fellow like you, how come you’re not in the army?” asked Gustav, trying to make small talk.

  “I bought a substitute,” Rockefeller explained, without inflection or emotion.

  Kristin recalled her husband’s words: A smart man gets others to fight for him.

  “But God has seen fit to send me my duty,” the clerk continued. “I have a contract to provide produce to the Union army. That is how I serve.”

  “And make money too, eh?” Gustav laughed, as if Rockefeller had told a good joke.

  “If I receive money, it comes from God,” the young clerk replied, soberly, again without inflection.

  Sweet Jesus! Gustav was thinking, a Godster! He would bargain the very trousers off this naive, pious young fellow. Not that he wanted the trousers: they were colorless, threadbare, and patched at the knees.

  “Three minutes gone,” Rockefeller said, drawing a cheap watch from his vest pocket and examining it.

  The man was not jesting! All right, Gustav coul
d be tough, too. “I have a lot of money to invest in the oil business,” he said. “I have it on good authority that you have been studying possibilities—commercial possibilities—with regard to oil, and I think we can help each other.”

  “How?” asked Rockefeller, as if Gustav had just asserted that he had it in his power to fly to the moon.

  “Tell me about the situation around the oil wells at Titusville. How do you interpret events and prospects there?”

  “Why should I?” Rockefeller asked.

  “What? See here, young fellow. I have come all the way from—”

  “I am not especially concerned how far you have come, nor from where. I am a businessman, sir. Yes, I have been to Titusville, and have some knowledge of how I think the oil business ought to progress in America. That is my capital, so to speak. I would advise you to go down to the oil fields on your own, learn what you can, and then perhaps I will think of borrowing money from you. It is true, as you may have heard, that I already know more about oil than anyone in America. It is also true that I will need vast sums to develop the business along suitable lines.”

  “What do you consider suitable?”

  “That is also a part of my capital.”

  “And you will not discuss it?”

  “Not now.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “You wished to see me, and to invest in my business. I am a busy man, sir. The fifteen minutes are drawing to a close.”

  “Why you…” began Gustav, in a state of raspy indignation, “why…from what I can gather you do not yet have an oil business, and yet you are sitting here and making terms, setting conditions. Why, this is intolerable!”

  “As you say.”

  “I shall go to Titusville myself.”

  “I think that would be wise of you,” said Rockefeller. “Good day, sir.”

  “Good day! And I doubt that we shall meet again.”

  “I must differ with you on that, as well.”

  Again he offered his oddly strong, oddly limp hand to Gustav, who shrank a bit, but shook it anyway. Rockefeller gave Kristin a small bow, barely civil, and regarded her with those cold, bright, opaque eyes. Something had bothered her about him from the moment of first sight, and now she knew what it was: He did not see her as a woman at all. Kristin had seen, in the eyes of almost every man she had never known, a special, instinctive recognition of her presence, her womanhood, her beauty. John D. Rockefeller did not manifest such a response; to him, she felt, she was simply another human being, to be labeled, categorized, and entered on some vast, impersonal ledger in his mind. To him there was only profit and loss; any given person could aid him, and thus be entered in the profit column, or harm him, in which case an entry would be made under “loss.” A colder human being she had never met, nor one as potentially dangerous. Compared to Rockefeller, bold, irascible Gustav was but a troll beneath a child’s story bridge.

  “God be with you,” called the young clerk piously, as Kristin and Gustav left the warehouse.

  “If that wasn’t the strangest man I ever met, I’ll eat my hat,” Gustav said, climbing back into the hired coach. Lately he had taken to using American slang, and although Kristin was mystified as to why anyone would wish to ingest a headpiece, she had to admit it was a colorful expression.

  “What will you do now, husband?”

  “I shall go down to Titusville. It is only a hundred-odd miles east of here. Young Rockefeller may know a lot about oil, but I am a fast learner. Also, I am the one with money to be lent. He needs me; I don’t need him. When I finish, he will not know what hit him.”

  “I am not so sure about that, husband,” said Kristin, who had seen, beneath the faceless clerk’s impersonal manner and bizarre piety, a deeper reality that was like a serpent fashioned from spring steel, implacable ambition, and ice.

  Titusville, a little farm town in the rough country of northwestern Pennsylvania, was rude and unprepossessing. One road led into it, rutted and bleak, and also a rickety new spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The importance of transportation was not lost on Gustav; oil was of little use to anyone if it remained in Titusville. It had to be moved out in order to reach the big markets in the cities, and before it reached market, it had to be refined. Refining the crude required manpower, and he knew that the surrounding agricultural communities did not have enough available men to service the kind of enterprise he hoped to establish.

  There were other problems, too. After he and Kristin checked into the town’s one inn, nothing more than a big, warm country house with a sign in the window that said “Free Mashed Potatoes with Every Meal,” Gustav explained the obstacles to his wife. Normally he would have burdened his coterie of sycophants with such complexities, but he had not taken them with him because he did not want them to learn too much about oil. It was harmless, he felt, for Kristin to hear of such matters. He liked to hear himself talk, but she was only a woman, and any concrete information would head and roll off her brain like water on oilcloth.

  “First,” he said, “there is the matter of leasing rights to the oil. The farmers on whose land the substance has been found are, doubtless, unsophisticated and doltish, similar to those in your hometown of Lesja. I shall get leases from them as easily as father and I acquired the minerals in the Rauma Range. It would not be efficacious to refine the oil here, so it must be shipped to the nearest large city where a work force exists. That would be Cleveland. Hauling oil overland by wagon would be chancy; the roads wash out in the rain, and are all but impassable from November to March. Thus I must make arrangements for shipping the crude with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Finally I must build a refinery in Cleveland, right on the Lake Erie waterfront. From there the refined marketable products, kerosene, gasoline, and lubricants, can be shipped to cities east and west, either by boats on the Great Lakes, or by rail. Arrangements will have to be made with shipping agents. I do not think the refinery will take too long to build. On the way into Cleveland harbor I noted a fine, empty plot of land, right by the docks, that would be perfect for such a factory.”

  Kristin listened. She well knew that, in spite of his twisted personality, Gustav was a man of brutal directness. His intelligence, narrow but undeniable and tending toward bold action, was not to be underestimated. And he had access to the Soames millions, whereas Rockefeller, the clerk, could not hope, on his own, to fashion the series of arrangements necessary to market oil nationally, much less overseas.

  But something was not right. Something doesn’t fit here, Kristin thought.

  That evening they dined with other boarders at the inn: a young man clerking in the general store and reading law by night, an old couple retired from their farm, the local schoolteacher, a shy young woman who looked at no one, and the innkeeper, Mrs. Prendegast, who assumed an easy familiarity which unnerved Gustav.

  “Here on business?’’ she demanded, passing the mashed potatoes.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  Mrs. Prendegast glanced at Kristin, calculating. Rich man. Lovely young woman. What gives? She glanced at Kristin’s hand. Kristin had always worn Gustav’s diamond readily enough, though it was at present locked in a New York safe. But she had always refused to wear a gold wedding band. In her heart she was married to Eric Starbane, and she did not need a ring to remind her of that.

  “You a prizefighter, or something?” the innkeeper prodded Gustav. “I mean, look at your nose and face and all.”

  Rolfson frowned. “No,” he pronounced slowly, “I am here about the oil. I am a businessman, as you guessed.”

  “Ah, I knew it!” the woman cried, delighted with her acuity.

  “It’s about this oil discovery. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Ach! The oil again!” muttered the old farmer. “It will ruin everything. A man should be left alone to farm peacefully.”

  His wife nodded vigorously, gumming a length of pork chop.

  “I disagree,” said the store clerk and prospective lawyer. “
Oil is progress. That man Rockefeller from Cleveland. He knows. He knows where the future lies.”

  “Rockefeller?” asked Gustav, alert and suspicious.

  “Yes. A wise man, in spite of his years. He has bought up all the oil leases in the county.”

  “What?” cried Gustav, getting to his feet. “All the oil leases?”

  It could not be true.

  It was.

  The next morning, when Gustav drove out to the oil wells, little more than grimy pumps in grubby shacks, surrounded by great stacks of barrels and blasted earth from which native trees had been uprooted, he learned, to his chagrin, that the clerk had been right.

  “Nope, can’t deal with ya,” shrugged Ebenezer Tilton, farmer. “I done signed on with Mistah Rockefeller in Cleveland.”

  Herman Bellows averred that, yep, he reckoned he had signed the same deal as had Ebenezer.

  Virgil Watts was another who had seen his star with the produce clerk from Cleveland.

  “What are you doing with the oil you’re producing?” Gustav demanded.

  “Oh, we ship out a little to build up demand,” Virgil said. “Mr. Rockefeller, he said to do that. But we barrel the crude and keep it right here.”

  Gustav saw his chance. “Well, let me make you an offer. I’ll buy up everything you’ve produced, and everything you can produce, and ship it out of here on the railroad.”

  “No can do. We’ve signed leases to Mr. Rockefeller. If we renege, according to the agreement, he gets everything, land included.”

  “Land included? Why did you ever agree to anything like that?”

  “Because we’re making money, mister. For the first time in our lives. And we like the feeling.”

  “But…but…” Gustav sputtered. “Rockfeller can’t be doing that well. He isn’t even shipping any of the oil out. I can get the Pennsy Road in here, and…”