The Oilman's Daughter (6 page)

Early on the morning before I was
scheduled to leave Carthage, I awoke at the Best Western to the
sound of my phone ringing. It was Judith, calling to make sure I
had directions to get over to the police station, where I had an
appointment to catch up with a sergeant there. As always, a brief
call turned into a longer one, and she told me that she’d finally
decided that she needed to get out of town. There were just too
many bad memories here. Her adoptive sister had been in the
hospital for years, unable to communicate after a brain aneurism.
Her adoptive father, now 95, didn’t really even speak to her
anymore. He’d remarried, and his wife didn’t want Judith to have
anything to do with him since she’d dissolved her adoption. “I want
out of here so bad, I can’t stand it,” she said.

She still had her sons, at least. Twenty-year-old Ryan was
getting ready to move out of the house; he was doing well in his a
job as a legal clerk and going to school part-time at a local
college. But beyond that, she had few connections, just friends
like Violet who’d backed her through the ordeal. “People like you,
people like lawyers became my family,” she said. Over the course of
a decade of lawsuits, Judith had managed to lose both her old
family and her new one.

I remembered something Jeff Zimmerman had said when the three of
us were sitting in Judith’s living room one evening more than two
years earlier. “I think the moral of this story is that if you are
curious about something, be careful,” he’d said. “I’ve told Judith
several times, ‘You know, you might have been happier never knowing
this.’” The danger of putting your life into the legal system,
Zimmerman always warned his clients, is that “it requires you to
live your present in your past.”

Judith didn’t deny that she might have been better off if she’d
never responded to that first entreaty from her mother. But
something had steeled her resolve. “I’ve got some pictures in my
room that I’m going to show you,” she said. “When you see this,
you’ll understand.” For a long time she’d seen photographs of M. A.
Wright only in his later years, as president of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce or giving corporate speeches for Exxon: an older man with
thinning hair, standing at a dais in a boxy suit. But a few years
ago, one of her investigators had found a photo of him as a young
man, just after he graduated from Oklahoma State.

“Ryan always had this look of his own,” Judith told me. “I could
see me in him, but he kind of had a look of his own. And when I got
that picture of my dad—oh, my God. I went around the house for, I
don’t know, a good month off and on and all I did was cry. I saw my
son. There was my innocent little boy, and I thought how innocent
my father was of all of this also.”

Judith had blown up a photocopy of one of the pictures and hung
it on her bedroom wall. Looking out from the wood frame was a
relaxed and confident young man, with his prominent ears and his
hair swept across his head. His mouth was set in a line, with just
a hint of a smile reflected in his eyes. Below it was a framed
picture of Ryan in high school, his lips pursed in the same way,
his eyes displaying the same look of assured intensity. The more I
stared at them, the more the two men seemed to resemble each
other. 

The
Oilman’s Daughter, 
by Evan Ratliff, is Issue No. 26 of 
The
Atavist,
 published June 2013.

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Author:
 Evan
Ratliff

Evan Ratliff is the editor of 
The Atavist.
His writing
appears in 
Wired,
where he is a contributing
editor,
 The New Yorker,
 
National Geographic
, and
other publications. He is also the story editor of Pop-Up Magazine,
a live event.

Editor:
 Charles
Homans

Producers: 
Olivia
Koski, Gray Beltran

Audio
Production: 
Nadia Wilson

Research and
Production:
 Vonecia Carswell, Lila Selim

Music:
Jefferson
Rabb

Copy Editor:
 Sean Cooper

© 2013 Atavist Inc.