Texas

by James A. Michener

  The Allerkamps labored like lackeys, all of them, and it was a long time before they had enough to live with any sense of ease. The two Cobb families from Carolina and Georgia had real slaves, a thriving gin and a lumber mill, but their Jefferson neighbors did not. Of a hundred Cobb slaves, the ninety field hands lived in poverty; they had enough food but not a decent house or proper clothes. And during the Civil War and the Reconstruction, even the white folks in the plantation mansions knew real deprivation.

  When Fort Garner folded, Emma Larkin and her husband, Earnshaw Rusk, owned a fine set of stone buildings and thousands of acres, but they had no money with which to operate; they spent carefully, but because they could not save up even a few dollars in ready cash, they almost lost their holdings.

  That was the condition of Texas: plenty of land, a niggardly existence, a dream of better days. However, with the 1901 discovery of limitless petroleum deposits at Spindletop near Beaumont, some Texans began to accumulate tremendous riches, and by the 1920s even families as far west as the Rusks in Larkin County shared in the bonanza. In Texas one could leap from land-poor to oil-rich in one generation … or one weekend.

  Now the perpetual poverty of Texas was obscured by the conspicuous display of wealth, and the history of the state began to be told in dollar signs followed by big numbers, and some could be very big, because here and there certain lucky Texans became billionaires. To the rest of the nation it sometimes looked as if the dollar sign governed the state.

  For example, as the decade of the 1980s opened, the whole state seemed to be on what gamblers called a roll, with each throw of the dice producing a winning seven or eleven. Everything looked so promising that enthusiasts started voicing the old boast: ‘This can go on forever.’

  There was solid reason for believing that Texas was certain to achieve national leadership, for the census then under way would show that the state had gained so much population—3,009,728 in ten years—it would gain three new seats in Congress, while the less fortunate states in the cold Northeast would lose twice that number.

  As always, oil was the harbinger of good fortune and when, with help from the Arab states, it soared to thirty-six dollars a barrel, Ransom Rusk’s bank in Midland told its depositors: ‘Oil has got to go to sixty, expand now,’ and funds were provided for this next round of extraordinary gambling.

  Airlines with a strong Texas base, like Braniff and Continental, freed at last from the petty regulations of the Civil Aeronautics Board, were flying into scores of new cities and picking up astronomical profits, while TexTek, the computer sensation based in Dallas, was, as its shareholders boasted, ‘soaring right off the top of that Big Board they run in Wall Street.’ More than two dozen millionaires had been created through ownership of this stock, with three or four early investors, like Rusk, garnering nearly five hundred million each.

  The sensation of the Texas scene, however, was Houston real estate, for it had no discernible upward limit. Farmers who owned land to the north and west of the city could demand almost any price an acre—$50,000, $100,000—and there were many takers who knew that with just a little break, they could peddle it off at a million an acre. Investors from West Germany and Saudi Arabia were hungry for Houston real estate, but the major profits came from those Mexican politicians who had stolen their country blind and were now stashing their fortunes in the security provided by Houston hotels and condominiums. Anyone who could build anything in Houston could sell it: office space, hotels, condominiums, private homes. And if real estate ever did lag, the city could rely upon its oil industry. ‘Houston is the hottest ticket in the world,’ its boosters said.

  The aspect of Texas life which seemed to give its noisier citizens the greatest boost was the Dallas Cowboys football team. Dubbed by an enthusiastic publicist ‘America’s Team,’ it caught the nation’s fancy, and year after year its stalwarts appeared in the play-offs and Bowl games. At the same time, in obedience to the sage precepts established by Friday night high school football, young women were enrolled in the madness, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders becoming famous for the skimpiest costumes and the sexiest routines. A Cowboys’ home game became a ritual at which devout Texans worshipped, for the players on the field were heroic and the cheerleaders along the sidelines irresistible. Boasted one partisan: ‘Our football girls make those in New York and Denver look like dogs.’ Just as the Larkin Fighting Antelopes had consolidated public enthusiasm in that small Texas town, so the Dallas Cowboys solidified enthusiasm and loyalty across Texas and in many other parts of the nation.

  Nowhere was Texas optimism more obvious than in Larkin, where Ransom Rusk judged the week beginning 2 November 1980 to be the finest he had ever known. He was fifty-seven years old and resigned to the fact that the rest of his days would be spent in convenient bachelorhood; his mansion in Larkin was now staffed exclusively by illegal Mexican immigrants who performed well and taught him Spanish; the bowling lawn, which had dominated his life during his married years, was now a pleasant grassland, kept reasonably neat by a gang mower that shaved it twice a month.

  One could say that he spent Sunday of this week with his beasts, for as his relations with other human beings, starting with his divorce from Fleurette, diminished, his reliance upon animal friends increased. Early morning was dedicated to his armadillos, a mother, father and four males this time; they had dug themselves into both his garden and his heart and had learned to come for vegetable roots when he whistled, their golden bodies shimmering in the dawn.

  At about ten in the morning he rode out to his ranch, also run exclusively by Mexicans, none legal residents, and a more pleasant day he could not recall. Some seven years back he had gotten rid of his white-face Herefords, the breed introduced by his grandfather Earnshaw, and had started raising Texas Longhorns, whose strain had been kept alive by his grandmother, Emma Larkin Rusk. He had purified his herd until it contained only the MM/BB strain, animals descended from Mean Moses and Bathtub Bertha.

  On Sunday mornings he liked to observe a ritual that re-created the grandeur of the vanishing Texas frontier: throwing a heavy paper sack in his Jeep, he would drive down the lane leading away from his ranch house and into a large fenced-in field at whose far end stood a beautifully scattered grove of trees. There, on a rise, he would halt the Jeep, blow the horn three times, and stand in the open, rustling his stiff paper bag.

  On this Sunday, he did so for at least ten minutes, accomplishing nothing, and then slowly from distant trees shadowy forms began to emerge, hesitant, cautious, for they were wily animals. But as the sound of possible feed reached them they became more daring, and big Longhorn steers, handsomely mottled in gray and brown and white, began walking tentatively toward Rusk.

  Another appeared and then another, until more than thirty had left the trees, and when they were in the open, reassured that no danger awaited them, they broke into a quiet lope that soon turned into a run. On they came, these wonderful animals out of the past whose survival had been made possible only because some Texans loved them, and as they drew closer, Rusk could see once more the tremendous horns these selected steers carried, great rocking chairs set on their heads. When they were nearly upon him, hungry for the food he promised, he studied them as if they were his children, and jumbled thoughts raced through his head:

  No plotting man framed your character. Nature built you, alone on the prairies. Storm killed off your weaklings. Drought slaughtered those that had no will to survive. In years of hunger, you learned to eat almost anything, to forage off the moss of rocks. Through merciless selection, you learned to produce very small calves with a fantastic determination to grow into big adults. I don’t waste money on veterinarians when I raise you Longhorns. You animals raise yourselves, just like us Texans.

  When the first steers were eating all about him, so close that he could reach out and touch them, a huge old animal emerged from the woods and started walking in stately steps toward the feast, and when he approached, the others moved asid
e. He was Montezuma, self-appointed lord of the herd, and he maintained his noble advance until he stood nose-to-nose with Rusk, demanding to be fed by hand. For a moment these two survivors, gamblers of the plain, stood together, the great horns of Montezuma practically encircling Rusk.

  Of all the cattle in the world, only you Longhorns produce a steer worth saving. Steers of all other strains are sent off to the butcher at age two, but you live on because men prize you, and want to see you sharing their land, for you remind them of the cleaner days. It’s good to see you, Montezuma.

  As he stood there surrounded by these incredible beasts, he could not escape, as a businessman, making a calculation: After the War Between the States, when Texas hadn’t a nickel, our grandfathers herded ten million Longhorns to cowtowns like Dodge. At forty dollars a head, that meant four hundred million dollars pumped into the Texas economy when scarcely a dime was reaching it from other sources … Montezuma, you Longhorns rebuilt this state.

  Saluting his treasures, he drove back to a remarkable new building adjoining his mansion, and there, as his Mexican butler served cold drinks, he watched his favorites, the Dallas Cowboys, play at St. Louis. Had the game been in Dallas, he would have occupied his private box, entertaining, as usual, twelve or fourteen business acquaintances. He cheered when Wolfgang Macnab, a linebacker he had sent to the University of Texas on a football scholarship, mowed down St. Louis like an avenging scythe: ‘Tear ’em apart, Wolfman. I knew back then you were headed for greatness.’

  The building in which he sat was named the African Hall, for it resembled a stone lodge he had seen in South Africa’s famed Kruger Park. He had built the place in his loneliness after his divorce when he had associated himself with a group of bachelors in similar circumstances who took safaris to Kenya, where in the splendor of its animal parks they shot kudu and giraffe and lion, bringing the heads home to be displayed on Texas walls. Rusk’s hall was one of the best, and to sit surrounded by his handsome trophies while his Cowboys rampaged on the TV screen was a delight.

  On Monday, when he drove to his office in Fort Worth, his two accountants asked if they might see him, and he expected trouble, for they rarely approached with good news, but this time was different: ‘Mr. Rusk, a singular development in Mid-Continent Gas has produced a situation in which you may be interested.’

  At the mention of this name, Rusk had to smile, one of his thin, sardonic smiles, because he was thinking of the time when the Carpenter Field roared in with an almost unlimited supply of natural gas: ‘Remember how my stupidity made me miss that bonanza completely?’

  But the field had been operating only briefly when he saw an opportunity for a gamble of staggering dimension: ‘The owners had no way of getting their gas to market. So I organized Mid-Continent and guaranteed them thirty-two cents a thousand cubic feet for all they could produce for the next forty years. They jumped, thinking they’d stuck me with gas I wouldn’t be able to market, either.’

  ‘I worked on that pipeline you bulldogged through the hills,’ the chief accountant recalled. ‘Nobody believed you could do it, including me. That was one hell of a job, Mr. Rusk.’

  Against professional advice, against prodigious odds, Rusk had driven his pipeline across sixty-seven miles of rolling hell, and when he was through he found an insatiable market for his gas: ‘I bought it at thirty-two cents, sold it for a dollar ten and thought I was making a fortune. But when it went to three dollars and twenty-two cents, I did make a fortune. A thousand-percent profit. And for the past two years, we’ve sold it for nine dollars and eighteen cents. That’s a nearly three-thousand-percent profit, and all because we took those insurmountable chances.’

  ‘That’s what we wanted to show you,’ the accountants said, and on a pristine sheet as neat as a tennis court they presented him with two figures:

  New estimated value Mid-Continent Gas at present prices $448,000,000

  New estimated value your total holdings $1,060,000,000

  When Rusk looked briefly at the figures, he realized that he was now officially Texas rich. It was in large part due to the antics of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which had so increased the value of his oil holdings that he had accumulated some ninety million dollars which he had not known about.

  Rusk had never been heard to say a bad word about OPEC, his standard comment among his friends being: ‘Maybe those Arabs are extortionists, but they do our work for us.’ If oil still brought ten dollars a barrel, he would not be a billionaire, but when the price soared to nearly forty, he became one.

  ‘It will go to sixty,’ he predicted, and based on this hope, he doubled his stable of rigs and drilling crews. He also believed that the northeast section of the United States must accustom itself to much higher prices for Texas gas, of which he was now a major supplier: ‘For too long they’ve had a free ride at our expense. I don’t want to gouge them, but I do want them to pay their share of the freight.’

  To arguments, advanced by some, that such talk represented an economic holdup and a conscious drive to steal the leadership of the United States away from New York and Boston and into the so-called Sun Belt, he replied: ‘The leadership of this nation rests with those of us who see its future clearly and who use creatively whatever leverage God has given us. The future must lie with those parts of the nation which have our remarkable mix. Oil, brains and courage.’

  He was never arrogant about his beliefs, advancing them quietly but with irresistible force. When truckdrivers employed by his companies to move oil pasted insulting bumper stickers on their vehicles—LET THOSE BASTARDS UP THERE FREEZE—he made them scrape them off, but he did allow them to keep others that came close to representing his thoughts—YANKEES OUT OF GOD’S COUNTRY—and he positively chuckled over the brilliance of the beer advertising which proclaimed that Lone Star was THE NATIONAL BEER OF TEXAS.

  ‘We are our own nation,’ he told his friends, ‘and it’s our duty to see that our ideas prevail throughout the friendly nation which lies to the north.’ He was not speaking of Canada.

  It would be a mistake to visualize Rusk as some wizened gnome, evil in purpose, huddling in his vault at night, counting his wealth. He was tall, straight, beetle-browed, good-looking, and easily able to smile when not furiously pursuing some special interest. But more than a year could pass without his being more than vaguely aware of the value of his holdings; he certainly never brooded about it. He knew it was tremendous and he intended keeping it that way, as his daring support of Pierre Soult’s Texas Technologies proved. TexTek had not merely been a good idea; it had been stupendous, and under the inspired leadership of the Frenchman, had often swept the field before competitors even guessed what the company had in its long-range plans. Office-sized computers, word processors, software, superb merchandising, TexTek had pioneered them all, and in doing so, had multiplied Rusk’s impulsive investment many times.

  This enabled him to operate rather boldly in fields which concerned him, such as the disciplining of labor and the expulsion from public life of woolly-headed liberals like many of the Northern senators, but he never thought of himself as reactionary: ‘I represent the Texas experience. The land, always the land. My grandmother had no nose, no ears, but she did have this glorious land we sit on. My grandfather, that crazy Quaker, was a dreamer who stocked their land with those great bulls from England. My father probed the land for oil. And because I was working the land with seismology, I stumbled into TexTek. We never had any nefarious designs, no special tricks. We stayed close to the land and accumulated power, which I am obligated to use sagaciously.’

  But it was not the placid Sunday in the country or the startling financial news on Monday which made this week so memorable. Tuesday was Election Day, the culmination of Rusk’s effort to bring this nation back to its senses, and he rose early in his frugal Fort Worth apartment and drove out to Larkin to cast his vote. He rarely used one of his Mexicans as a chauffeur, because he loved the feel of a big car eating up
the superb Texas highways, and on this exciting day, when he had lots of time, he opted for a road that was only slightly longer than the direct route through Jacksboro. He preferred this more southerly road, for it took him through Mineral Wells, where he liked to stop at the edge of town and contemplate an enormous building that dominated the skyline: Fifty years ago it was one of the supreme hotels in America. Hollywood stars, New York bankers, everybody came here to take the waters. How many rooms? How much glory? And now a rotting shell. On three different occasions excited investors had come to him with plans for revitalizing the great spa, and always he had told them: ‘It was a fine idea in its day. Well, that day has gone. Look at it standing there empty, a ghost of Texas grandeur. And look at the little motel at its feet, filled all the time, You change with the times, or the times steamroller you.’

  From Mineral Wells he headed for Graham, where he controlled a dozen wells, and then on to Larkin, where the ten o’clock crowd of women voters filled the polling places. He cast his ballot in the basement of the handsome courthouse, then went to his home to make and receive telephone calls.

  Six years earlier he and a handful of other Texas oilmen had quietly assembled to discuss the future of their state and their nation, in that order, and he had warned them: ‘God and the American way have allowed us to accumulate tremendous power in this Republic and we would be craven if we did not apply it intelligently. That means that we must defeat communists in office, regardless of what state they operate from, and replace them with decent Americans.’

  ‘Have we the right to interfere in other states?’ a timid man from Dallas asked, and he snapped: ‘When McGovern casts his South Dakota vote in the Senate against our interests, he becomes a Texas senator, and I say: “Kick him the hell out of South Dakota.” We’ve got to protect South Dakota from its own errors.’