The Sons of Adam (54 page)

Rumours of their failure spread across Henderson and Overton and Kilgore and Longview. The well was a bust, just like everyone had always known.

The news even reached Rebecca, still living alone down south. She didn’t cry, or at least not until Mitch was all tucked in for the night and soundly asleep. And then she did. Non-stop for three hours, in the house that had once been a home.

She was sure in her heart she would never let Tom back again.

Meantime Harrelson was busy. He went from farm to farm begging to lease new land for further wildcats. The farmers knew of Harrelson’s failure. They laughed at him for dreaming, but he was offering good cash up front for their signatures on a contract. They signed up and they signed up cheap. On land that was drier than dust, any cash at all was better than nothing. Because of Tom’s foresight in killing news of their discovery, Harrelson was able to buy the drilling rights to a block totalling almost seventeen thousand acres.

They spent their last cent.

‘The car,’ said Tom.

‘Aw – Jeez – how can I get around without I have –’

‘Sell it.’

So Harrelson sold his car and used the proceeds to acquire rights to a further four thousand acres.

‘OK,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s do it.’

They made their announcement. They went to the Overton village general store and told the storekeeper they’d struck oil. They told the guys over at Henderson. They told farmers and cowpokes and people they met on the street.

Word spread.

At the failed old rig, a crowd gathered. Harrelson begged firewood and firewood appeared as if by magic. The same cowpokes who had walked away a few weeks earlier returned. Although the rig was the same clapped-out old rig it had always been, although the cowpokes were just as stupid, although the well hadn’t produced a single teaspoon of oil – there was something new in the air, something different, something a little brighter than sunshine.

Tom fished the broken clutter from the hole and began to ream the sides of the well. When the sides of the well were solid, he bored down another seventy-five feet. If he drilled too shallow, the oil would still be below the bit. If he drilled too deep, he might go clean through the oil to salt water, and ruin his chances of bringing the well home. It was the sort of moment that called for every ounce of Tom’s hard-won experience.

He lifted the drill and lowered a recently invented drill stem tester. The device was like a core barrel, only it was intended to collect liquids, not solids. He lowered the tube. On its way down, the device struck a bulge on the side of the well and opened early. Tom was desperately anxious. He wanted to pump like crazy. He wanted to drill until oil spurted from the wellhead. But reason fought with instinct for control – and won.

Tom reamed the well a second time to smooth out its sides, then lowered the tester once again. The tester descended to the bottom of the well, opened on cue, and filled with liquid.

It was time to lift the tube.

They began to raise the pipe, but long before the bottom rose into view, a smell of gas came rushing up. On and on it came. Stinking of mud and sulphur, the gas belched from the ground. As the smell filtered down into the crowd, there was a burst of cheers and clapping. With an old oilman’s superstitiousness, Tom felt a jolt of anger. How dare a bunch of farmers’ boys bring bad luck by clapping too soon? He almost wanted to drive them away, but nobody was going to be driven anywhere and once again Tom’s brain had to fight his impulses.

Then the tester appeared.

Tom made ready to open the tube but, even as he did so, the well began to show its hand. A deep vibration rose from far underground. The equipment on the derrick floor began to shake. The tall structure began to quiver with life. The heavy machinery was forced against the massive timber sills that held it in place, till every timber and bar of steel was taut with effort. The crowd, sensing something big was about to happen, drew back with an indrawn breath of wonder. Tom braced himself against one of the juddering timbers and cracked open the tester. Water and mud poured out over his feet, but the water and mud were shot through with oil.

Tom rose with a shout of triumph –
‘Yes!’
– when the well delivered its own unmistakable verdict.

With a single violent burst, the rush of gas suddenly exploded upwards. Mud, water and oil were flung high into the derrick. There was a moment’s deafening silence. Then another smaller bang, another eruption of oil-rich mud, then silence returned, except for the thin hiss of still escaping gas. High up in the rafters of the derrick, oil and mud and water began to drip down onto the ground.

The silence lasted a moment longer, and then the seventy-five people who’d been watching broke into spontaneous applause. Tom and his fellow riggers danced with glee. One of them scooped up a big pile of oily mud in his cap, waved it in the air, then dunked it down on his head, splattering himself from top to toe.

Tom, too, drank in the moment.
Oil.
He’d struck
oil.
The dream, so long held, with such difficulty abandoned, had finally come true. He hardly believed the truth of the black and stinking mud that still slopped down from the derrick.

There was still plenty of work to be done and Tom did what he had to do. But as he continued to work, he found himself oddly subdued. For one thing he remembered the Duster’s dictum: ‘If you ain’t got oil at the wellhead, you ain’t got squat.’ And it was true. If the oil pressure was too low, you might never be able to coax the precious fluid half a mile vertically up to the surface. It wasn’t just a theoretical risk; Tom, like the Duster, had seen it happen. So he was cautious.

But there was another bigger reason for his low-key reaction. He was older than he’d been at Signal Hill: older and wiser. He had a family: Mighty Mitch and wonderful Rebecca. His happiness depended on them now. Depended utterly.

And oil or no oil, he didn’t know if he’d ever see them again.

Christmas Eve.

By four o’clock, a huge red sun was plunging below the horizon. Beech trees tangled bare branches against the bloody light and the footpaths were slippery with black leaves. In the field by the lane, something must have startled a group of horses, who began to gallop round the muddy pasture, throwing up divots of sodden turf.

Alan ran.

Twice his boots skidded badly. Twice he stayed upright only by grabbing at outstretched branches or a handful of wet grass. In the big house behind him, electric light blazed from the downstairs windows. The cottages he was heading for had no electric light and their windows were dingy and dark.

He approached the last cottage of the row: Jack Creeley’s former home. How well Alan remembered it! It had been here that Jack had patiently taught his two eager pupils how to lay a trap for rabbits, how to hook or tickle trout from the stream, how to set bottles in the river as traps for crayfish. This same cottage had been Alan and Tom’s entry into the real world of the village, infinitely far removed from the goings on at Whitcombe House. When there’d been something to celebrate – May Day, a wedding, somebody’s return from the navy – Alan and Tom had climbed from their bedroom windows, down a drainpipe, over the kitchen roofs and down to the ground. Then they’d headed off to Jack Creeley’s place and drunk a glass of beer with him before going on with him to the party. And what parties they’d been! Wild affairs of strong beer, fiddlers, dancing, a couple of oil lamps swinging from the rafters and nobody enquiring too much who kissed who by their smoky light. Tom had always been the leader of those night-time expeditions, but Jack Creeley had always been every bit as welcoming to Alan as he had been to his own son.

The pull of the past was strong now and Alan was in its grip. He put his hand to the door and knocked.

Maybe there are some businesses where luck doesn’t play a part. Maybe there are some businessmen who can look themselves in the mirror aged sixty and swear that they got where they got through one hundred per cent skill and a lifetime of effort. Maybe there are businesses so dull – gravy-making, cotton-reels, fork-handles – that luck just doesn’t come into it at all.

But oil wasn’t like that and oil isn’t like that and oil will never be like that. And if by any miracle the oil business changes, and the geologists and the computer guys and the hydraulic engineers and all the rest of them ever take the luck out of the industry – then the real oilmen will quit. The industry will still go on hauling oil, but its soul will be dead, its life ended.

From that first violent belch of oil into the sky, it had taken Tom and his crew one month, working solidly, to bring the well home. It had to be cased off using second-hand casing supplied under loan by the Standard Pipe and Supply Company. They had to bring in storage tanks – only three because they only had cash for three – and a proper wellhead control system to take the place of the junk that was there already. Tom moved cautiously and expertly, but the crowd that watched him grew by the day, humming with excitement. First there were hundreds of people. Quite soon there were thousands.

When everything was ready, Tom began to swab the well. Swabbing was a little like using a household plunger. The apparatus used a simple vacuum to suck water and mud up from the well. When the suction got strong enough, the oil would flow.

That was the theory.

Tom swabbed and swabbed, and brought up nothing but mud – but Tom was patient. He continued to work and one golden day his patience was rewarded. The well sounded a deep note, like a trombone playing in a bass register almost out of hearing. It was like a cry from the furthest reaches of the earth. Then the sound finished and a deep rushing began.

They extinguished the boiler and waited, but they didn’t have to wait for long.

With a last violent motion, the well hurled a cap of mud and water into the air, followed by gushings and gushings of oil. The crowd went wild. One of the crewmen pulled a revolver from his pocket and began firing like a crazy man. Tom had to jump on the man and tear the gun from his hand, for fear the shooting would ignite the gas and blow the whole rig higher than heaven.

The oil continued to spew upwards.

It was a glorious sight.

Titch Harrelson should have been pleased – and of course he was – but for him, the oil strike was a dangerous blessing. He’d sold more interests than there were interests. One particular lease he’d managed to sell in its entirety eleven times over. ‘I guess I was kind of enthusiastic,’ he admitted unhappily. In the days when Tom used to work for him, Harrelson had boasted of owning leases to nearly five thousand acres of neighbouring land. But, as his lawyers and everyone else’s lawyers began to dig down into the truth, it turned out that Harrelson had managed to leave himself with clear title to just two acres. The first handful of court actions began. The dreaded word ‘bankruptcy’ began to be spoken.