Corrine and Viola are already gathering up their hats and gloves when Prestige shakes his head and stuffs the last of his fried egg sandwich into his mouth. An oil well ain’t no place for little girls or—he looks at Viola—old ladies. Y’all stay home. I mean it.
Corrine is tall for her age, but she still has to sit all the way at the edge of the driver’s to reach the starter pedal on her father’s Model T. They careen across the Llano Estacado, the little girl and old woman bouncing madly on the car seat while some of Prestige’s Herefords look on, their jaws working, working. The Penn’s Well is still a mile away when the sky turns black and the ground beneath the car starts to tremble. The air fills with so much debris they have to cover their mouths with handkerchiefs. Lord help us all, Viola says.
As it falls back to earth, the oil spills out across the land and covers everything in its path—the purple sage and the blue grama grass that Viola loves, the bluestems and buffalo grasses that come nearly to Corrine’s waist. A prairie dog family stands some thirty yards from the growing hole in the ground, their faces lifted as they bark at one another. A small female scutters to the edge of a burrow and peers inside, and Corrine imagines every hidey hole and den within five miles filled with confused little creatures who will never know what hit them. But the fifty or so men and boys who stand around the site aren’t looking at the grass or the critters, or the earth. They are looking at the sky, their faces rapt. It’s going to kill every living thing, Viola says.
Corrine frowns and sniffs the air while her grandmother sags against the passenger door. Viola’s face is pale, her eyes cloudy. She coughs and holds her hand over her mouth and nose. That smell, she says. It’s like every cow in West Texas farted at the same time. And our trees, she cries, spotting now a stand of young pecan trees in the direct path of a river of oil. What about them?
But it’s going to put West Texas on the map, Corrine says, and Daddy says this land’s not worth a tinker’s damn anyway. Viola Tillman stares at her granddaughter as if she has never seen her before in her life. The Llano Estacado might not be good for anything except stars and space and quiet, the winter songbirds and the sharp smell of post cedars, after even a little rain, but she loves it. Together, the old woman and little girl have steered their horses through dry arroyos and creosote forests, then sat quietly and watched a family of javelina forage through a patch of prickly pear. Together, they found and named the largest tree on their property—Galloping Ghost, for the shaggy bark that resembles Red Grange’s raccoon coat. Now Viola’s face is the color of cold embers, and her hands are trembling. Take me home, she tells her granddaughter.
Yes, ma’am, Corrine says.
Can you drive me back to Georgia?
In three months Viola will be dead and by then, her granddaughter will have seen enough of an oil boom to loathe every one of them for the rest of her life.
For three days the Penn’s well spews an uncontrolled stream of crude oil into the air. A house-sized pool forms in a matter of hours and then quickly breaches the sides, destroying everything in its path. More than thirty thousand barrels of oil spill out across the earth before the men get control of the well. And when they finally do, the men stand on the slick platform, their hands and faces stained black. They shout and shake hands and slap each other on the back. We capped her, they tell each other. We got her.
* * *
Since Potter died, Corrine knows the night sky the way she knew the contours of his face. Tonight on Larkspur Lane, the crescent moon crawls toward the center of the sky where it will remain for an hour or two before starting its long slide toward the western edge of the earth. Only a smattering of stars remains—The night boils with eleven stars—and the bars have been closed for two hours. The street is dark, except for Mary Rose’s house, which is lit up like a drilling platform in the middle of a black sea.