Oil people, p.13
Oil People, page 13
Dorothy winked. One eye seemed blue, the other green. She set the pamphlet on the crude-carved stump they kept beside the stove: Distinguished University Lecturer Discusses Geological Implications of Evolution. Beneath it, a drawing of a terrifying reptilian beast, jaws stretched wide.
“Lifespans,” Dorothy said, wide-eyed. “Darwin thinks the Weald has been denuding for 300 million years. Imagine.”
Dorothy said the word again, breathily. “Imagine.” Lise thought of her mother sitting under the shade of the black walnut, pointing out shapes in the clouds. A whale, a heart. Her mother with streaks of blond in her red hair, girlish cheeks and a double chin that was her great shame. Lise thought of rocks, of seas, of cliffs, of the ocean she’d never seen and would like to. She thought of her baby. How it might be a girl, and then she would have a baby too, and all of them would go see the ocean together, swim out and out knowing there were whales there in those same seas, whales that might even then be watching the kicks of their pale feet. She thought of 300 million years and tried to wring some meaning from that but found she couldn’t. Dorothy kicked her boots off, peeled her cloak over her shoulders to reveal a new striped merino gown, saying how even now they were digging in New Jersey, digging on in Copper Creek where Foulke had discovered the Hadrosaurus.
The dilemma swam in her tongue, her stomach. Dorothy’s proposal. She should be good. She would be good.
“That one’s a baby,” Dorothy said.
“So you’ve said.”
“Am I that dull?”
“Not at all. You’re passionate.”
“You’ve been reading too much.”
“This distinguished lecturer should grace this town with some much-needed controversy,” Dorothy said, opening the cast iron to stir the bones. She looked up, bright-eyed, took some broth on her pinky and tasted it. “Here’s to vulgarity.” Dorothy closed the lid and moved across the carpet, her footfall soundless as she approached with a look Lise recognized. Dorothy set her fingers in the neckline of Lise’s gown. “What do you want, anyway?”
Lise cast her eyes down. “A stone foundation. A Waterloo stove.”
Dorothy laughed, leaned in. “You want a baby.” Close. Closer. “He’s impotent, and he’s squandering your money.”
“Not impotent. Fallow.” Lise closed her eyes. “This has to stop.”
“Of course.” Dorothy grinned. “It’s terrible.”
“No,” Lise said, pulling back. “I’m genuine.”
“Haven’t you missed me?”
“Yes.”
“You’re still ailing?”
“Not that.”
Dorothy played at her buttons. “Then?”
Lise shrugged, glanced away.
Dorothy gasped, went playful: “No, God no, not that.”
Lise chuckled. “What?”
“A conscience?”
Lise turned away, cleared some dishes that didn’t need clearing. She made a point not to laugh. Dorothy crossed the kitchen, peeling off her stockings. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s awful. We can’t.”
“I’m serious,” Lise said, but she was smiling, seeing clouds and rocks, oceans and seas, the years lulling by in their millions. She was seeing dinosaurs, long-necked lizards who turned to look at her, curious to behold this pale ape.
They were on the sheepskin, the cold air on her skin, the heat of a mouth, of a fire, Dorothy’s tongue flicking gentle and tender and the world gone molten, gone sea.
Afterwards, Dorothy pulled Lise’s hand in, guided it up the rise of her belly, the knotted lump of her navel. There was no kicking inside, but it wouldn’t be long. As her hand roamed over that stretched hemisphere, Lise felt her whole self as a kind of deflation, a concavity. Ridiculous, she knew, but a human being is a ridiculous thing. She knew a baby might not fix this feeling, or even change it. She knew there were a million ways to be a woman, but that is the thing about knowing: it does not change how we feel.
Dorothy must have sensed what she wanted. “I can help you,” she said simply. “We can help you.” Lise had looked at her friend, her bedmate. Dorothy’s eyes: wild as jewels, as forests, green then blue then brown. A noodle of sweat-damp hair on her brow.
“Arlyss,” Dorothy announced. His name hung between them. “He’s very potent.”
Potent. It made her think of the earth all around her, the weary soil. The sounds of hammers and smiths clanged out from the fields. “I couldn’t,” Lise pleaded.
“You’ve considered it.”
“I have.”
Dorothy ran her knuckles along Lise’s collarbone, followed the swoop of it lower, lower. “I’ll facilitate,” she said, her fingers pinching Lise’s chin. “We’ll call it magic.”
“We’ll call it nothing,” Lise said, brushing the hand aside.
“We’ll call it magic.” Dorothy grinned. A cloud passed over the window, and the shadow took her face. “Because that’s what it will be.”
* * *
Clyde leapt in the January snow, his breath steaming, a medallion moon rising through the dim evening sky. The cold in his teeth, his numb feet, the old pain in his jaw. He was with his father, in the end. His father who had died inside the belly of a horse, lost in the canal in February. A snowstorm. He’d brought a barrel up—much easier in winter, on the sleds, than with wheels in the muck. He’d sold it for a dollar and stayed at the Whole Hog until the dollar was gone. The horse, Cassandra, had crashed on the oil ice under the snow—the stuff freezes at all the wrong temperatures. She’d snapped her leg under the hock and Gareth had elected to cut her open. Slit her throat first and then pulled the intestines out and crawled inside, sunk into that momentary warmth. Either he hadn’t known or he didn’t care that she would freeze, the horse. Ice over on the outside and leave him locked in that equine womb. In the morning Clyde had gone with the Methodist and the postman, dragged a few barrels of muskeg and kerosene up and set the whole mess aflame, warmed their hands on the burning carcass, a smouldering soup of flesh and oil, horse and man.
Now he leapt through the cold. Leapt and stomped on the plank, watched the rig tremble and smash, heard the good thunk of the drill bit working far below. It was soon. It was coming. He would never sell, though Lise wanted him to, though her trust was dwindling. Mayweather and his proposition and the pies he had brought for Christmas, which of course he must have known was an imposition, he must have known no man likes a kitchen piled with pies because a gift is always a debt. The man was relentless, saying resources resources resources, but how dare he, it was always no, was never going to be anything but no, even when all Clyde had to his name was a single lot. Clyde thought of the man’s talk about steam engines and the Pennsylvanian engineer saying you had to drill closer to the creek, Mayweather insisting resources this and that, planning stills and plank roads, planning to light the streets with gas. The engineer had said there was no point going this deep, said more wells not deeper. They thought he was a fool, everyone thought he was a fool. But he knew. They would see. He would never sell and Lise would have the baby and the land would provide, the land would crack and tremble, give and give and give. The solution was in the deeps. They would be happy, once it spilled. It would open all at once.
One night, while Lise read geology pamphlets, told him about limestone, wasn’t it wonderful that life really did turn to stone, he thought of his mother, how she’d loved the book of Job, and pulled out his King James. Lay in the loft poring over the tiny characters, their ornate architecture. Regal letters, printed to look like castles, and he found that Lise was right, that if life could turn to stone, so too could it turn back. And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.
After this, each morning, he washed his rig in butter they could by no means afford. Yet he spread the fresh, dense yellow over the treadle and the chains, the spring pole and whatever fresh casings he put in. Lise shrivelled at the waste of it—she had hardly any butter for the dough. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Soon you can wash your very flesh with butter.”
The snowflakes swivelled and swirled and Clyde brushed them half-melted from his hair, watched the Pennsylvanian struggle across the fields, trying to walk on the crust. Every three or four strides he tumbled, jerkily, up to the hips. Thompson, one of Mayweather’s drillers, came by talking about men tied to a hitching post. More men branded, Union skedaddlers trying to wait out the winter, trying not to catch lice or worse in the encampments. The two armies not even bothering to fight anymore, just trying to survive when diseases killed more men than battles. All this the driller recounted to Clyde as a figure stooped low through the fringe of the trees.
If you were a raven on the bottom branch of the snow-cloaked pine, you might have seen Dorothy. Might have seen Clyde leap and wipe his bold brow, massage the hinge where his neck met his jaw, housed the old ache. You might have seen Dorothy peek at him as she passed the apple tree, coming up to the house the long way, via the creek. You might have seen her pause and watch Clyde as he listened, making sure he did not turn. You might have seen her wait for the moment when he was just about to jump, again, on the kickboard and, sure that his attention was elsewhere, scoot into the house without a knock. Dorothy in her cloak, without a lantern. As she passed inside, as she turned into a shadow, another shadow there to greet her. Perhaps a finger searched a lip. Shh. Perhaps two women huddled briefly, their soft tongues breeding schemes, Dorothy whispering of a vial, saying be ready, saying tonight.
Arlyss Mayweather appeared at the side of the spring-pole rig, crowned in rabbit fur, his yellow eyebrows dusted with snow. His nose was frost-nipped, dark purple. Wind bustled about the evening sky. The derrick creaked and leaned. Mayweather watched Clyde, stroked his yellow moustache, wrung his fishy hands. All winter he had worn his ridiculous denim trousers despite the cold. When Clyde paused for water, Mayweather told him to give in. It was cold; he was concerned. “You’d be better off,” the blond man said.
“I smell it,” Clyde said, shaking his head. “She’s swollen. Long overdue.”
Mayweather chuckled. “And when do you expect she’ll be labouring?”
“Today.”
“Said that yesterday.”
“Saying it again.”
“Look at your wife,” Mayweather said, pointing to the house. “She’s concerned.”
Clyde spat, leapt. “You’re welcome to help with the drilling,” he said.
“She says you’re buttering the gears now. No wood for the stove.”
“I’ll mind my wife.”
Mayweather picked the snuff from his teeth, eyed his neighbour. “Will you?”
Clyde shook off the comment. Drank and shivered and leapt. Mayweather watched him, a reluctant admiration creeping into his eyes. He opened his snuff tin and cleared his throat. “For years,” Mayweather said, “I saw my daddy drowned.”
Clyde stopped to stare at Mayweather, who held his gaze and went on. “He died on a boat,” Mayweather said. “Vessel full of doctors. Some sort of meeting and he’d been cooking for them. Cooking succotash for codfish aristocrats who wanted to tour the Potomac. Dropped dead one day and someone shouted for a doctor and six or seven men rushed over and set their fingers on his neck, named him dead instantaneous.”
Clyde leapt, panted, leapt. Steam rose from his mouth. “What’s your meaning?”
“He didn’t drown,” Mayweather continued, a twitch in his frostbitten nose. “But that was how I dreamt him. Over the side of the boat. I was always clinging to a ladder, reaching down.”
The rigging wheezed and groaned. Clyde panted, breath misting in the chill air. He waited a moment and leapt again, the bit grinding far below. He thought of the rock, down there, the rock all around them.
“He was right there,” Mayweather said. “And I could never reach him. Not for the life of me.” He stopped speaking. Looked out over the darkening fields—a quiet oil fire burned in the distance, the smoke blowing sideways in the wind, the smell of it almost sweet.
Mayweather smiled soft, a wince in his eye. “And there was something else in the water. Some huge thing I could not see. Big as a ship, oblong. But I could only see the form of it in the sludge. I longed to trap that beast, to contain it, but whenever I reached, my hand would slip through, water through my fingers.”
Mayweather paused, stuck his tongue out like a child, the flakes landing there and melting. The sky above them had gone dark, but there was a kind of silvery glow from the snow and the moon. Clyde straightened his back with a series of crackles, raised his arms to the sky for some relief. “That it?” Clyde asked.
Mayweather grinned. “You require an exegesis?”
Clyde shook his head. “Another syllable would impair my digestion.”
Mayweather laughed as Clyde leapt, panted, crashed down on the board that sent the limb teetering, pounding. In the unseen beneath, steel bit into stubborn rock and it seemed to Clyde that this was, somehow, the essence of life.
Then, at last.
The world broke, gave. The sound was an old friend, an accomplice—Clyde had always known it. Mayweather shouted, screamed, walked a panicked circle in surprise and confusion and glee. But Clyde just watched it, sure and calm. There you are.
Earth-phlegm rattling, clearing, and then the hum of fresh gas. The ripe reek coming on thick, a great wet tongue of black licking up through the derrick. Men shouting from distant fields, hurrying over to help, to witness, the oil spitting, spitting, rising—twenty, thirty, forty feet in the air, a black fountain rushing up and holding and splashing down to stain the white snow.
What you need to know is that no one had expected it to move like this. They had dug the oil up. They had pumped it. They had found its seeps in hollows beneath the earth. They had never seen it fly. And so they stood shrieking, gasping. Rushed over wild-eyed, beholding the profane miracle, liquid wealth shooting up and up until the sky rained black.
Forty feet of stone and shrapnel and mud and ink-black gusher spewing and spitting across the snow. Globs of crude sloshing down and the flow thickening, fattening, darkening, rushing on and on and up and spitting down on the snow, forming deep seams and thick pools, exposing the dead brown grass, great wounds of muck and turf. A black river shooting the wrong way and men hitched their trousers, women stood shivering on doorsteps. Fifty feet, sixty. The snow conceding, the field gone black, gone sea.
Clyde hobbled off the treadle, lost. He walked out into the splattered snow, his boots slunk in a swamp of oil and melted snow. Rocks shot and bumbled down and the oil still rising, rushing and trembling and splatting in the snow.
There was rock and metal falling as the sable rain poured on, slathering his boots, spattering his hair. Rocks fell too, and as he watched their shrapnel he felt a sting, yanked his hand back in sudden pain. Clung to his wrist and saw a flap of flesh, blood dribbling into the snow.
“You’re leaking,” someone shouted, but the voice was worlds away. The voice was a cloud. A white haze crawled the edges of his vision and he began to walk, his feet woozy, wavering, Mayweather shouting help, barrels, drillers, horses, men, but Clyde saw only the way the oil cut through the light, the colours at its edges, the bright colours in the snow and the forms gathering in the fields, the air gone hazy and blurred figures moving about, a hubbub of men shouting and scurrying from Mayweather’s patch. He smelled something noxious. A burnt wound, but worse. Like burning metal or teeth or flesh. There was a rushing sound, as if from far below. He clung to the rig, grabbed a handful of wood and an iron ring and then, in the base below the drilling platform, he saw a cowering girl, saw that she was trembling, staring up at the sky, at him. A small, pale girl in strange undergarments, her arms bared, gooseflesh rising on the skin. She was a frail thing, on the cusp of womanhood. He called to her: “Hey! You there!” But she would not move. She was pinned, shivering. He sensed that some door had opened, that his future was contained in this trembling girl. She blinked and an anxious light twitched into the well and he saw that she had an extra pupil in her left eye. Creamy skin. An almond-shaped face. She was ugly and beautiful. He’d never seen such a fascinating face.
She was holding, he saw, a glimmering shard of metal. He shouted again, waved as wet shadows passed and he beheld the colours of her blouse, impossible colours like suspended sunsets. His hand was singing, the blood pouring, and her clothes were orange and pink and blue and all of it blending in a kind of gauze, a nausea of colour and the rushing in his ears louder, louder the oil rising spilling flooding and the red-haired girl trembling, clinging to that glint of metal and cowering on the shelf like a rock-wrought visitation, some idol of the dank.
June 1987
A school of smelt once landed on the shores of the St. Clair River, at the elbow of Lake Huron, where the water gets sucked down towards Erie. What were they seeking there? Where had they come from, upriver or down? They writhed and twitched and sidewinded onto the strand, thrilling to the refinery glare. All the operators came down onto the dark shore thinking they were looking at some huge creature, the scales hoarding the glare of the moon and the sodium light and the dull, distant stars and the workers standing in the stun of those fish. Someone announced, “Smelt,” and all the operators and the engineers turned their flashlights off and watched the fish writhing in their thousands, fish the length of spoons churning in mute pulse against the slope of gravel and eelgrass, from which rose the barbed chain-link, and as the workers watched, their minds merged in a single question: What could those fish have been searching for among the hydraulics and broilers and tail gas if not a new deity—wheezing, mutated, asthmatic—a god of gleam and gore?
