Fire in beulah, p.33
Fire in Beulah, page 33
“Hunh!” Japheth spat. “Saved by an Indian on the day I was born. That’s funny, isn’t it? Ugh. Meat. Bread.” He gazed at his sister; his finely arched eyebrows, the feature that most declared his kinship to her, lifted in elegant contempt. “You remember them kids?”
“What do you want?” Althea rasped
“There’s that blame question again. Well, I’ll tell you. I want my share, that’s all. Just my fair share. Now, a few weeks ago I was in for a third. Of course, that was before your husband here ran out of money and got in such a greedy big hurry, had to bring Murphy in to get hold of some capital.” Japheth crooked his neck to peer up the eighty-foot derrick. “But Murphy’s built us a pretty little rig here, hadn’t he, Dedmeyer? I’m a reasonable man.” His gaze passed slowly from one to another. “I’m willing to talk.”
He started toward the Ford, but stopped abruptly, snapped his fingers. “Oh, you know, Brother, I been thinking. Hadn’t you better let them know you never found that old niggerwoman? It’s a shame to put all this money into a lease that’s never been filed.” His emollient voice rose in the clearing as he grinned up at Logan and Murphy. “Y’all don’t believe me, go to the courthouse like I did and check.” He clanged the car door shut, stuck his head out the open window. “Now, y’all please don’t kill yourselves trying to sort out this mess of lies. I got some business to go see about.” He tipped the filthy derby, started the motor; his eyes were on his sister when he called out over the noise of the motor, “After that, I’ll be back.”
Japheth drove away exulting, his insides raw with glee. He’d triumphed for an instant, and he suffered a kind of gnawing joy, but the winning wasn’t complete. Its pleasures only whetted his hunger. The day was bright and cold, and he couldn’t abide the thought of sitting alone in the thicket of brambles and riverwillows at his campsite. He drove on to Bristow, to a gin mill on the eastside, ordered a shot of white mule, stood at the bar eyeing the other drinkers as he savored the memory of the stunned, frightened faces on the derrick. He longed to have someone see how he’d beat them, his victory craved an audience, but the strangers at the bar couldn’t bear witness; they didn’t know what he’d been through. Japheth’s mind turned to the final vanquishment. A dozen ways he dreamed it, and in every vision it was his own sly machinations that destroyed his enemies. He left his drink on the splintered wood, walked out blinking into the sunlight, got back into the murdered line-rider’s Model T.
For the fourth time since September, he followed the rutted wagon road to Iron Post. The old woman was the last piece. As soon as he found her, he would have them all bested, completely. All of them.
The triumph was so real to him that he expected to see smoke rising from the rock chimney when he rounded the last bend. He was furious to find the old woman’s cabin still empty. He sat in the car, thinking of the ways he would make her pay when he found her. She’d messed up his plans from the beginning, and his first plan had been so artful, so easy, because the driller had played right into it. Logan had blown the lease money almost as soon as Dedmeyer gave it to him, spent the whole two hundred on casing like an old sot on whiskey, and Japheth had been able to jump in, offer to fix it with the old woman. The plan, of course, was to claim the lease himself, but he’d been willing to bide his time, wait for the drilling to progress, because Japheth was no idiot: he was glad to let Delo foot the bill. For over a week he’d had Logan in his palm, would have had that horse’s ass Dedmeyer, and so, finally, Sister herself, just exactly where he wanted, but the old niggerwoman showed up in a wagon with a dirty Indian, so that Logan started asking questions. Japheth had had to come out with the damn Delo lease, try to get her to sign it, in order to make the driller shut up—and the old woman had sat in her chair and stared at him, her nigger face closed; there’d been cunning in her, he thought, and stubbornness—but no submission, no fear. He was livid, he could have killed her right then, but he was too smart.
Instead, he came back the next night with a few sticks of dynamite for persuasion. When the bitch cur started toward him, growling and snapping, he blew a gratifying hole in her belly with Koop’s twelve-gauge, and the other dogs yelped and took off. He crawled under the cabin and set the dynamite charges, and then went to hide in a nearby oak thicket till the old nigger should come home. It had poured rain all night, but he’d kept waiting, until dawn, until noon, until he knew she wasn’t coming, and the hunger and fury and wet misery had driven him out of the timber, back to the Deep Fork, and as he bumped and slogged along the muddy road in Logan’s tin lizzie, he’d promised himself that, when she did come, he would kill her.
The third time had been the day after he strangled Nona. The bitch dog’s carcass, rotted and half eaten in the yard, spoke to him before he got out of the car. He could see the old redbone on the porch, lying flat, its ribs showing. The hound whined a little, thumped its tail once when Japheth climbed the steps, but the dog was too weak with starvation to stand up. Japheth shot the redbone, not to put it out of its misery but out of spitting frustration, and he tore up the inside of the cabin for a warning, though his heart wasn’t in it. Even then he’d had a feeling she wouldn’t be back.
Now he sat in the stolen Ford and glared at the cabin, its very presence an affront to him. The bones of the bitch cur gleamed in the yard, white in the afternoon sun, scattered, the skull dragged off somewhere. Beneath the shade of the porch roof he could see matted red hide flattened against the porch slats, as if the redbone’s liquefied flesh had melted into the wood. No, the old niggerwoman had not been here. She defied him, still. He climbed the cabin steps; the stench of animal decay, the odors of disintegration were like musk to him as he pushed open the door. The one dark room was in chaos, chairs broken, crockery smashed, how he’d left it, only covered now in cobwebs. The thought flitted that she might in fact be dead, as Dedmeyer was gambling on. No. Japheth wouldn’t allow that Iola Tiger could be dead. It didn’t fit his plans. He seized a coal-oil lantern from the mantel, broke the globe, sprinkled the kerosene, but there were only a few drops left in the reservoir, and so he went back outside and fetched the gasoline can from the turtlehull, and when he sloshed the fuel on the puncheon floor the scent of petroleum mixed with the other smells and rose up in a kind of intoxicating fume of power inside the cabin. He paused in the doorway, inhaled deeply, tossed a lit match, and ran.
He was standing in the yard, watching fire lick the log walls through the broken window, when the explosion came. The concussion thrust him back, a satisfying blow against his chest, surprising—he’d forgotten the dynamite charge under the house—and though the log cabin was too strong to be blown apart by such a small blast, the force of it opened holes in the floor and ceiling, and the wind rushed in and fed the fire. Japheth watched, arms folded, leaning against the Model T at a safe, thrilling distance, as the logs went up like tinder; he wished he’d set more than three sticks of dynamite under the cabin. He wished the old woman was still inside.
After a few minutes he took a pistol from under the front seat and hid in the blackjacks east of the burning cabin with a mind to pick off a few nigger neighbors when they showed up to put out the fire. But no one came, even though the smoke billowed black in the November sky, signaling over the treetops. Nothing happened. The flames roared a while, and then the fuel was used up, and the fire began to wane. Japheth grew bored, grew empty. There weren’t even any dogs to kill. He got in the Model T, drove back to his campsite.
But something had changed. No longer could he bear to conceal himself in the brush, weaving plans. Sons of bitches didn’t do what his mind dreamed they’d do anyhow. He tried to keep his thoughts focused, but inside Japheth two forces pulled against each other: one called him to his old pleasures of sly, scornful scheming; the other, birthed by the beating on the Murphys’ moonlit lawn, rushing into him from the oilsoaked sands of the river, swelling as he’d squeezed the life from Nona’s slim neck, called him to pure destruction.
The next morning he drove to Sapulpa, to the Creek County Courthouse, and found that Dedmeyer had already filed a forged lease. His mind boiled with outrage. A damn forged lease, of course it was forged, and Japheth would prove it to them, prove it to the courts—as soon as he’d tracked down the old freedwoman, got her to sign over to him every last lying drop. He would need her alive for that. He’d have to put his mind on where to find her. As he perused the record of filed leases, Japheth realized for the first time that Gypsy Oil, not Delo Petroleum, owned the leases on the abutting allotments. How had Dedmeyer let a thing like that slip past? Japheth smiled. A new plan began to unwind itself.
On the way back to Bristow he stopped at a juke joint near Kellyville, and throughout the afternoon he leaned on the bar, sipping choc beer, plotting, but he couldn’t keep his mind on his plans. The more he drank of the thick, milky liquor, the more he kept seeing his sister’s features, her black, scornful eyes and haughty sneer, or, in his mind’s eye, he’d watch the driller’s scowling face turn away from him, dismissing him in contempt. Japheth drank in silence, glaring now and then at some white man or Indian whose glance caught his attention; he dreamed a dark, unfocused vengeance, on the old niggerwoman who’d defied him, the toolie who’d held a shotgun on him, the two pompous husbands who’d tried to bully him. But the sweetest depths of his hatred centered on the one who’d beaten him bloody on the moonlit lawn, and on the other, the sister who had tried to smash his head in before a time he could remember.
By nightfall Japheth was back at the Deep Fork, hiding in the brush, watching. They were all still here, except Sister. The men stood in a small circle, warming themselves by a campfire. At first Japheth felt a kind of dull, half-drunken pleasure, seeing that Dedmeyer hadn’t gone home with Aletha, but then he realized that his brother-in-law stayed, not because of Japheth’s triumphant accusations, but because he expected the well to drill-in any moment. They all expected it. No one was willing to leave the rig, even to sleep.
Just after daylight, Japheth watched in impotent fury as Logan and Koop screwed on the control head, fit the Christmas tree. When the rumbling started in the earth’s bowels and a spray of gas and oil began to sizzle around the drilling line, there was only hushed excitement on the derrick floor. The control head vibrated mightily, and the driller opened a valve, slowly, and a stream of oil shot into the tank. Carefully, excruciatingly slowly, Logan opened all the valves on the Christmas tree, but within minutes he was shouting at Koop, “Shut her in! Shut her in!” The five-hundred-barrel tank had filled in less than twenty minutes.
On the rig the men were weirdly quiet, eyeing one another, eyeing the woods, as if they expected the very blackjacks to betray them, proclaim their unprotected strike to the world.
They shut the well in till they got hold of more tankage, turned the oil into the line so fast an outsider could believe nothing had happened—but it was already too late. Within an hour of the strike Japheth was sitting in Gypsy Oil’s front office in Bristow, suggesting they might want to send a scout to the Delo location at Section 35-T, 16-N, R8E, on the Deep Fork. The next morning Gypsy recommenced drilling on the Yargee lease, a half-mile west of the Delo location; this time they were making hole right on the line.
Logan and his crew had to pull tools and rush over to where the two Creek allotments joined one another; they had to start drilling offset wells immediately, fifty yards across the line, because the law of capture said oil belonged to whichever company pulled it up from the ground. Gypsy Oil could siphon every drop from under Iola Tiger’s allotment if Delo didn’t match each hole Gypsy drilled, rig for rig.
By week’s end, Gypsy was spudding in their fifth well, and Dedmeyer and Murphy had hired four new crews, and the drilling went on furiously along the line, day and night.
Japheth hated to lose that amount of oil to Gypsy, but it was worth it, his mind told him, to get Delo away from the original location. Fools might hunt uselessly in the hidden places forever, but Japheth knew—had known as he watched the first greenish-black spewings around the drilling line—where the old niggerwoman would finally show up.
An old hen will steal her nest out, won’t she? Lay her eggs in the hay meadow, way up in the barn rafters, anywhere she think that farmer can’t find them. Her mind say, Them’s my eggs, I’m going to hide my eggs till my little chicks come. Un huh. That is just what I done. I couldn’t steal the Lord’s earth out from under them whitemens, so what am I going to do but steal out myself? For a long time after the dark one leave that morning, I just sit on my porch, thinking. Afterwhile I gets up and walks off from that house where I lived with Bluford in all our time together, my own Bluford, leave the dogs whining in the yard, just step off the porch and walk away. I wasn’t afraid. I know how whitemens will set dynamite, knock a person in the head, do whatever they want to get hold of lease rights, but fear is not how come me to leave. The greed-devil got hold of me, that’s what.
I come down to Boley and stay awhile with my daddy, but you think I tell my own daddy what I’m about? No sir. I don’t tell a breathing soul. I do not tell God. That’s how the spirit will do when it’s been corrupted, and here is the full power of corruption: you don’t have to have them little eggs in your hand, you only got to dream them, your mind say, They mine. Seven times seven days I lived in that narrow twisted greed place, look like this in my soul: burnt up, hungry, twisty pig trails going around and around in the same tracks, saying Mine, saying Now, saying, Give me, saying, They, They, They, saying Hate and More and Too Late. I quit doing the work the Lord have set for me. How am I going to help a child come in the world when my whole brain is eat up with lies? My mind telling me like this, say, That’s my land, allotted to me by the U.S. federal government, what’s in it and on it and under it supposed to be mine. Mind say, They haven’t got my mark on the white piece of paper, let’s just wait now. We going to bide our time, hide out in Boley and wait on them. When that oil come spouting out the ground they going to wish they did bring me my money, because we fixing to go right back there with our own piece of paper, see what kind of smile these whitemens got for theyself. Who’s this we I’m talking about? Me and the greed-devil, I believe.
Weather turn cold finally, and my mind say, They bound to have got it by now, and I prepares myself to go. How? By right doing and right thinking and right praying? No ma’am. By calling on the Lord’s power, how He have given it in medicine, in tobacco and cedar smoke and prayer? Never cross my mind to think about purification. All I’m thinking is how to get me a lawyer. A lawyer, child, that is what I got my crazy mind on. Quick as I get a good look at that oil, I’m going to go up to Tulsa, find me a colored lawyer knows just how to work whiteman’s law. My mind whispering, Hurry. Go yonder and see what they doing. Hurry. Catch them stealing your oil out from your native earth.
So. I proceed on back to the Deep Fork, and this time everything change. I come alone, come walking. I taken the train up from Boley, because nobody’s going to notice a lone colored woman riding in the colored car, and I think at Bristow I’ll hire a buggy to carry me out to that place on the river. But when I climb down off the train I see that Bristow town is just wild with the greed-hunger, whitemens everywhere, noisy, rushing, they all in a fearsome hurry, seem like any direction I look is a danger. Seem like every person I see, colored, white, or Indian, is scheming to steal my oil money. You see how the greed-devil got me? I ought to been afraid of so many things, all I’m scared of is somebody going to take from me. I never once question how I get to thinking so strange. That day’s a cold, gray day, look like it’s fixing to sleet or spit rain or something, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get yonder, but I don’t want to join up with nobody. Nobody. My mind say, All right, we going to walk.
Trucks and wagons pass me, carrying pipes and lumber and big machine tools, they all going the same way I’m going, headed south. My mind say, See now, they carrying these things yonder to steal what rightfully belong to you, and I walk faster, choking in the cold dust from them trucks. Way down past the Little Deep, I come off the road, set out across the prairie. I don’t aim to go by Iron Post, just go quiet around it, like you’d sneak past a sleeping yard dog. My mind won’t let me think on Bluford, won’t let me think on my house. Rain come finally, a cold fretsome rain, spitting needles at my face, I go in a empty barn shack, stay there all night listening to that freezing rain peck the tin roof. I am cold, I’m wet, hungry, miserable, miserable—but you look at the power of that force: next morning I go right back to that frozen mud-rutted road, set my face toward the Deep Fork again.
Late next day is when I come to the place where the road divide. Me and Istidji never seen no fork such as that one; these whitemens have cut a new road, and the many stumps are still raw where the trees have been hacked down. Off somewhere at the end of it is that terrible bang bang bang bang, and not one but many, yes, Lord, many, many, layered over each other like a great thunder. The old fork is the one that twist down to the river, where Istidji carried me that long time back. That’s the road I take. Night is coming, and I am far from my peoples, far from home, far, far from my Lord. Let me tell you something, God have made no more haunted place on His earth than the Deep Fork bottoms at nightfall, but I keep walking on.
By the time I reach the water, the sky is darkening purple, the woods are turning black, but I can see a timber ladder rising like it want to climb up to heaven. It is no Jacob’s ladder, though, I know that for true. The wheel-in-a-wheel is gone. That pounding sound is still booming soft through the treetops, way off west, but the clearing is quiet—not ordinary cold winter quiet, but more like something have gone out of the world. I stand back, just looking. Nobody around. Whitemens can’t find it. That’s what my mind say. They have quit pounding here because there’s no oil under my earth. And, oh, the grief come on me, a terrible, unnatural grief.
