Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Do y’all have to do that now?” Linda Gail said.

“Yeah, we do, Linda Gail,” I said.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Please be candid in your response, too. Where would you be without Hershel’s welding machines?”

“Sweetheart, don’t be saying something like that,” Hershel said.

“I would appreciate your not telling me what to say and what not to say,” she replied.

I should have left. But business was business, and principle was principle. “How about I buy y’all some ice cream?” I said.

“I’ll be in the house, packing,” she said. “Jack will be here in twenty minutes with the van. Try to be of some help, would you, please, Hershel?”

She went into the house, a brick one-story bungalow covered with English ivy, and flowerbeds filled with roses and blue and pink hydrangeas. Hershel got into the car with me. I didn’t start the engine. “This won’t take long,” I said. “We can probably get the contract for that well going in the south of Calcasieu Parish. We can also get in on the drilling.”

“I don’t know, Weldon. We got burned pretty bad at New Roads.”

“I’ve talked to the geologist. I went to school with him. I trust him. He says the odds are one in three we’ll punch into a dome.”

“You call it.”

“Nope. Dixie Belle is a partnership.”

“I’m not thinking too clear right now. I thought this house in River Oaks might make Linda Gail happy. But nothing makes her happy. She’s always mad about something.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“What do you reckon it might be?”

I shook my head and didn’t reply.

“We went to the public pool, and she told me to wear canvas shoes till I got in the water. I asked if she didn’t like being seen in public with a man missing three of his toes. She said she was concerned for the children at the pool.”

I looked through the windshield at a rainbow that seemed to dip into the pasture. Clouds that resembled lavender horsetails were scattered against the sun’s afterglow. What a perfect evening, I thought, wondering why we often substitute pain for the fruits of heaven and earth. Cruelty comes in many forms, but the level of injury in Hershel’s eyes was one I’ll never forget. “You should have received the Silver Star instead of me,” I said. “You’re the best line sergeant I ever knew, and one of the best human beings.”

“Maybe she was telling the truth. Kids get shocked easily. My right foot looks like the flipper on a seal.”

“You want to go in on the well?”

“Hell yeah, I do,” he replied. He patted his hands up and down on his knees. “Weldon?”

“What is it?”

I knew what was coming. I wanted to get out of the automobile and begin walking back to the Heights before he said it. But I was trapped in my car with no way to exit the situation. I could see the neon-lit tower of the movie theater against the paleness of the sky, like a beacon telling us of the promise that awaited us in America’s Babylon by the sea. “You think Linda Gail is having an affair?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t have any way of knowing something like that,” I said. “I recommend getting those thoughts out of your head.”

A few minutes later, the documentary-maker named Jack Valentine arrived with a moving van and three workmen, and the Pines began moving their furniture out of the bungalow on Hawthorne in preparation for their new life in a sprawling oak-canopied green arbor across town, one where moat and castle were norms and even moth and rust and decay were given short shrift.

THE HARDEST AND dirtiest work in the oil patch is done by the crews who cut right-of-ways and build board roads in swampy terrain. Imagine walking in a flooded woods dense with mosquitoes in hundred-degree heat, hacking your way through air vines and cypress and gum and willow trees, always watching for a cottonmouth moccasin that might drop from a branch on your neck or sink its fangs in your wrist when you reach down to move a log. Your boots are encased in mud up to the ankles; your clothes are sopping with sweat; gnats get in your nose and mouth; leeches attach themselves to your calves; your eyes burn. If you drink all the water in the canteen, you’re out of luck. Your face feels poached, out of round from all the mosquito bites. The air smells of humus and carrion and water grown stagnant inside the mud; there is a rawness to it that is like the odor of birth or fish roe or leakage from a sewer line. Through the trees, you can see waves smacking against a sandbar out on the bay, but there is no wind inside the woods, no breath of fresh air, no movement of any kind, and the hottest part of the day is ahead.

We were cutting a right-of-way through the southern tip of Calcasieu Parish when an old yellow school bus with Texas plates lumbered along the levee and stopped just above a dry spot that our brush gang and board road crew were using as a staging area. A man dressed in a cowboy shirt and straw hat and khaki pants stuffed inside rubber boots swung off the bus and approached me, the string and tab of a Bull Durham tobacco sack hanging out of his shirt pocket. The bus was packed from stem to stern with dark-skinned Mexicans. Not one of them got up from his seat to stretch or get a drink from the water can or relieve himself in the bushes.

“Well, we made it,” the man said, extending his hand. “Tell me where you want them at.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I got thirty-two men waiting to clear brush and lay board road.”