Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 6

Giddings looked for all the world like a ghost town that had not yet given up the ghost when Max Williams turned beside the City Meat Market and drove slowly past a row of old brick buildings, heavily weathered with age, the proud and stoic remains of an earlier century, a faded collection of brick portraits from better days when the town had a soda water bottling works, a couple of mills, a creamery, a blacksmith shop, and a processing plant that shipped out untold carloads of turkeys each year. Railroads came roaring through Giddings from all directions, but by the 1960s, they no longer had any reason to stop and left the remnants of three grand old depots decayed and dying in their wake. The downtown economy took it hard and had never quite recovered. About all the Chamber of Commerce ever dared to brag about was being the home of the oldest peanut company in Texas. Not much, perhaps. But better than nothing.

Casting a broad shadow over Giddings was the Romanesque Revival Lee County Courthouse, fashioned from red brick, laced with white sandstone, and featuring corner porches held in place by great blue granite columns. It was an architectural masterpiece of James Riely Gordon, who had acquired a growing reputation for designing grand and grandiose courthouses throughout Texas. Based on his traditional cruciform plan, it had been his intention, he said, to give the structure lines similar to those found in the New York State Capitol and in several buildings on the campus of Harvard University.

James Riely Gordon, after all, had become a man of national stature, acclaimed for his work as the supervising architect for the famed U. S. Treasury in Washington D. C. His Lee County center for county government had been created with an exceptional sense of drama and theater, critics said, even though, it was an anomaly that in no way reflected the homespun, hardscrabble character of a hard-working region that had little money and absolutely no pretense at all. In reality, the regal building had been created to replace the first courthouse, destroyed by fire in 1879 because firefighters did not have ladders tall enough to reach the upper floors of a structure engulfed by flames. They did what they could to rescue important papers from the shelves but watched as the blaze left their symbol of government in ashes. Like the original, however, the new Lee County Courthouse rose up above Giddings on the top of a divide separating the Colorado and Brazos River Basins. In its yard was the giant Courthouse live oak tree, whose limbs were used, the law said, to hang anybody who needed hanging.

The town had been named for the prosperous and influential Jabez Deming Giddings, who taught school, practiced law, served as the district clerk, established the first bank in Brenham, and was instrumental in building the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. His brother Giles had marched into battle with General Sam Houston at San Jacinto, and on the eve of the final and fateful attack, he wrote his family: I was born in a land of freedom. And rather than to be driven out of the country, I may leave my bones to bleach on the plains of Texas. If I fall, you will have the satisfaction that your son died for the rights of men … If I should see you no more, remember Giles still loves you. As the smoke of battle blackened the field, he fell mortally wounded, dying a few days later.

General Houston decreed that every soldier taking part in the route of Santa Ana’s Mexican army would receive a league of Texas land. Jabez Deming Giddings, with a heavy heart, took the league his brother had bought with blood and staked his claim on land just south of the Brazos River bottom. Around him would grow the communities of Serbin, Dime Box, Fedor, Evergreen, Lexington, and, of course, Giddings.

In time, a syndicate from Houston, headed by William Marsh Rice, who gave his name and his money to build the foundation for Rice University, purchased the entire township and methodically began selling off town lots to the pioneer Anglo-Saxon, German, Norwegian, Czech, Hispanic, African American, and Wendish Lutheran families who had fled their past of social unrest and were betting their hopes on the beckoning farmlands rolling without end on both sides of East, Middle, and West branches of Yegua Creek. The Wends even went so far as to establish a respected German-language newspaper, named Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt, and build a Serbin church that held closely to Old World traditions. Men gathered in the balcony, and women sat with their children on the downstairs pews. The pulpit, however, was located on the balcony level. Men received the full brunt of the sermon, and wives heard only those sanctified words that fell to the bottom floor.

The streets of Giddings were a hundred feet wide and lined with a Methodist Church, Masonic Lodge, a saddle and harness shop, the Granger Store, a millinery shop, and, of course, a saloon or two. The town became and remained a farming community, surrounded with cotton fields, with several gins, an opera house, a bank, and a depot built especially for the San Antonio and Arkansas Pass Railway. Freed slaves from farms and plantations had pointed their wagons to the sparse region as soon as gunfire from the War Between the States began fading from their memories. By 1915, as many as two thousand fortunate souls were basking in the glow of an electric light company, and only twenty some odd miles to the north, the town of Lexington had pinned its fragile hopes on a brick kiln, a tomato packing shed, and pickle, butter, and ice cream factories. Commerce had become just about as good as it could possibly get in Lee County.

When Max Williams drove through town in the spring of 1976, the population of Giddings still hovered near two thousand, give or take a few old soreheads, some staying, and some just drifting through. Almost forty years earlier, the first parade of wildcatters began venturing into the empty farmlands in search for oil. None of them knew anything about the cursed and defiant Austin Chalk. Most merely hoped to stumble across a salt dome because common wisdom in the oil patch, handed down for generations, said oil was seldom found anywhere else.

The country was being battered, its resources drained and emptied, by the Great Depression, the price of cotton had dropped from thirty cents to six cents a pound, and some landowners were on the verge of losing everything they had. A lot had already shuttered their windows and left, although few had any idea about where they were going or if life would be any better when they arrived. They were merely looking for a job, any job, good or bad, and the chance for employment in Lee County was as futile as the hope for rain. Men and women both earned ninety-cents a day picking cotton, and the good pickers could bring in three hundred pounds by sundown. Long lines of wagons circled the gins, and farmers were beginning to talk about re-plowing their fields with peanuts, grain sorghum, and corn. A few were even running cattle, horses, and hogs. For them, money was scarce and drying up. Rain could make a difference, but the skies had all turned dry. Trees lost their shade, and even the clouds drifted elsewhere for lack of interest.

The ground of Lee County possessed a lot of secrets. It was rumored a lead mine lay hidden in the earth, a few farmers down in Serbin did sell plenty of lead for bullets during the Civil War. Somewhere on Yegua Creek near Hranice, a Spanish pack train loaded with the gold payroll for forts and missions had been ambushed, and in the face of certain death, a few of the soldiers buried the gold. Only one survived. He never returned. An R was said to mark the revered spot where as much as ninety thousand dollars worth of gold had been left behind in a hole stained the color of blood. The hard ground also held the mystery of William P. Longley’s bones. An outlaw, a highwayman, a man with a short temper and no regard for those who lived around him, he had been hanged after a jury in Giddings ruled that it did not approve of a renegade guilty of murdering thirty-two men. A crowd of four thousand expectant souls gathered on a misty morning to watch as a Catholic priest chanted a prayer, Longley ask for forgiveness, and give a loud and hardy goodbye as the black hood was slipped over his head. Some said he was buried in the chalk. Others said he had survived the fall from the gallows and ridden away. They only knew that the sheriff soon left with a pocketful of money and was murdered in Chicago.

The ground of Lee County did indeed possess a lot of secrets. Maybe a reservoir of oil was one of them. At least, that’s what the farmers thought during those harsh and unforgiving days of the 1930s. The promise was so bright that Texas Osage, founded as a cooperative royalty pool when the stock market crashed in 1929, came hard into Lee County and began buying up mineral tracts, as many as they could acquire, from the landowners. Bad times loomed on the horizon, and most farmers were willing to sell almost anything they owned for a few extra dollars. They wanted to keep their land if possible. Mineral rights on acreage that had never yielded any minerals were worthless.

Rigs were brought in. Holes were drilled, and this was not an easy drill. A little oil splashed here and there among the crop rows. But most of the holes were dry or soon dry. Wildcatters had come face to face with the Austin Chalk, and they left with a little more wisdom and a lot less money in the bank than when they rode into town to outwit the land. Hard ground. Hard times. Hard luck.

It was shortly after two o’clock in the early afternoon when Max Williams pulled into an Exxon service station. He was looking for oil, low on gas, and lost. Well, he knew where he was. He wasn’t quite sure he knew where he was going. And that’s how he met Walter Schneider. “I understand there’s a big chalk well around here,” Williams said.

Schneider nodded. “I don’t just pump gas here at the station,” he said. “I also go out and pump that big well for Chuck Alcorn.”

“I hear it’s pretty good.”

“It’s the best well we’ve got around here,” Schneider said. “Of course, it’s about the only one we have, too. Others went dry, but that old City of Giddings Well, it just keeps right on flowing and hasn’t shown any slack yet.”

“Can you tell me where it is?”

“South of town.” Schneider paused a moment, grinned, and said, “If you can wait awhile, I’ll go out there with you. Show you where it’s at.”

“How long?”

“Won’t be but a minute or two.”

Max Williams, guided by the directions of Walter Schneider, bounced across the potholes and down the old, narrow country road that led past the rusting, rotting remains of the airport. The terminal had already been torn down. The runway was latticed with dirt and scattered patches of grass, mostly weeds. Planes were landing somewhere else now, coming into a newer airport that had not been sprayed or speckled with old oil.

Through the windshield of his Blazer, Max Williams gazed for the first time at the big chalk well. He could barely hide the excitement boiling up inside of him, but he kept his feelings to himself. The well, the one-in-a-million well, wasn’t a myth after all. It was pretty much where the rumors said it would be. The scene before him was far different from the one he had imagined. Something wasn’t quite right.

Chuck Alcorn had left the tanks overturned and lying on their sides. The rusting rods and old pipes had fallen next to the pumping unit. They remained untouched and undisturbed. Chuck Alcorn had been a superstitious man. He found a fortune at the bottom of an old clunker, and he refused to tempt fate. Nothing had been removed. The well site remained unchanged on a blistered landscape, surrounded with brittle brush stands and strewn with broken collections of rock.

Walter Schneider folded his arms and leaned back in the Blazer. “I hear that she’s already made three hundred thousand barrels,” he said. “Maybe more. I have no idea how deep or wide the pool is, but that old string of pipe just keeps sitting there and bringing the oil back up. Don’t look like she’s ever gonna quit.”

“Why do you think there aren’t any more wells like it around here?” Williams wanted to know.

“It’s the chalk.” Walter Schneider laughed. “There may be a dozen or so holes in the ground, and some have been here a long time. Nothing worthwhile in any of them. If a well had as much as a thimble full of oil, it’s long gone by now.”

Max Williams frowned. The field did not make sense to him. “What makes this well so good?” Williams asked.

“Chuck Alcorn – he’s the man who figured out how it to make it work – is one lucky sonuvabitch,” Schneider said. “This field’s probably got one good well, and he’s found it. Made him a rich man, too. Well, maybe not rich, but he hasn’t been worrying about his next meal for some time.”

Walter Schneider laughed again. He felt a close and sometimes reverent kinship with the well, too. He kept it pumping, rain or shine, and it kept right on producing, night or day. The City of Giddings No. 1 had not made him a rich man either, but, on payday, it certainly helped ease the pain.

“What’s the chance of a man buying up a little lease acreage around here?” Williams asked.

“There’s plenty of it available.”

“Cheap?”

The grin on Schneider’s face broadened. “I doubt if it would cost you a lot,” he said. “I just hope you’ve got a lot of money.”

“Why?”

“The chalk’s gonna take ever last bit of it,” he said.