Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“You have to see this. There’s nothing quite like it.”

We climbed the ladder onto the floor of the rig. I could smell an odor similar to rotten eggs leaking off the wellhead. The tool pusher and driller and Hershel were coming out of the doghouse. An unshaved roughneck with a beer barrel’s girth was dancing by the wellhead, joyfully pumping his loins against the air, his tin hat cocked on his head.

I could feel a vibration through the soles of my shoes, then the pipes on the wellhead began to sweat in drops that were as big and bright and wet to the touch as a bucket full of silver coins lifted from a sunken galleon. Every connector pipe was as cold as an ice tray fresh out of a freezer. The driller dipped a board into a can of turpentine and lit it and touched the burning end to a flare line that immediately erupted in flames reaching a hundred feet into the sky.

The confined eruption of oil and natural gas and salt water and sand through the wellhead created a level of pressure and structural conflict not unlike an ocean channeled through the neck of a beer bottle. The molecular composition of the steel rigging seemed to stiffen against the sky. A hammer fell from somewhere in the rigging, clanging through the spars as loudly as a cathedral bell, but no one paid any attention, even when the hammer bounced off the roof of the doghouse.

“Wahoo!” Hershel said, jumping up and down on the deck. “Wahoo!” He began singing the lyrics from a song I’d heard beer-joint bands play for years: “ ‘Ten days on, five days off, I guess my blood is crude oil now. I reckon I’ll never lose them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.’ Lord God in heaven, we’re rich, Weldon!” Then he shouted again: “Wahoo!”

He wasn’t through. He stood on his hands and walked across the deck.

“Did you ever see a happier man?” Rosita said.

“Never,” I replied.

“The private detective killed in the hit-and-run?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let his evil live beyond the grave,” she said.

THE WEEKS FOLLOWING the completion of the rig were grand. We paid down our debt to Lloyd Fincher’s insurance company and started up another pipeline in Victoria, Texas, and one in Lottie, Louisiana. Linda Gail and Hershel painted their humble house in River Oaks, and she applied for admission in the River Oaks Country Club. Rosita and I went back to Grandfather’s ranch and planted a windbreak of poplar trees on the north side of the house, and bought my mother an automobile and hired a man to teach her how to drive. We celebrated Grandfather’s ninetieth birthday with a three-layer cake that had white icing and pink candles. Among his friends at the party were old men who had been drovers on the Goodnight-Loving and the Chisholm Trail, and twins who had gone up Kettle Hill with Fighting Joe Wheeler.

I did not know how to tell Grandfather or my mother about my father’s death. My mother was not stable and never would be. My father and Grandfather had never gotten along. My father was also a Holland, but a distant cousin, one who Grandfather claimed was a woods colt and not a legitimate member of the family. He had resented my father’s drinking and blamed it for my mother’s mental and emotional problems. For many years, Grandfather had been a master at transferring his guilt onto others. But I felt he had come to accept responsibility for his wayward life and for neglecting his children, and I didn’t want to open old wounds by telling him or my mother that my father had found work but hadn’t cared enough about his family to send money home or tell us where he was.

Or maybe I couldn’t face the fact that my father’s first love was alcohol and that everything else, even his son, was secondary.

I tried. Right after Grandfather’s birthday party, he and I were sitting on the porch in the sunset, our newly planted poplars green and stiffening in the breeze, the underbelly of the rain clouds as red as a forge. He was drinking his coffee from the saucer.

I told him what I had learned of my father’s fate from McFey. He didn’t speak for a long time. “It was him in the photographs? You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I’d like to get the people who caused the accident. I’d like to get the ones who covered it up.”

“That’s not what I meant. You feel he betrayed you?”

“I don’t know if ‘betrayed’ is the right word.”

“He couldn’t call y’all collect and tell you he was okay and coming home directly? That’s not betrayal?”

“Yes, sir, I wondered why he didn’t do those things.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the chance. There’d be no reason for him not to contact you. His grievance wasn’t against you and your mother. It was against me. What’s the name of the company he was working for?”

“I don’t know. The private detective was killed by a hit-and-run driver the day after I met him.”

“That’s pretty convenient for somebody, isn’t it?” he said.

“I’d say so.”

“You cain’t do what you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Same thing you did when you put a bullet in the back of Clyde Barrow’s stolen automobile.”