The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Ken was stunned when Charlie answered the phone. “I thought you were dead,” Ken said.

  As it turned out, Ken had been half right. Memolo had been half dead. The lawyer had suffered a massive heart attack, just as Ken had heard, but he had recovered and was taking work again. That’s when the lightbulb went on for Ken. He told the lawyer that he was going to pay him the money that he owed him, and explained the source of his newfound riches. And then he offered Memolo a job.

  It was all rather dubious, and it was definitely not a matter in which Memolo had any real experience, but from what he could piece together from Ken, the quarryman about to become a millionaire had a bone to pick with Cabot over the type of drilling they were doing on his property. “I signed a contract for vertical wells,” Ken said. “I never agreed to horizontals.”

  Even though it was the horizontal well that had turned Ken from a dirt-poor quarryman into a rich country gentleman, he was now insisting that such wells violated the terms of his contract and that Cabot should be forced to renegotiate with him—and with any other landowner who was getting one of the horizontal wells. “I think every one of these is worth two million dollars” over its lifetime, Ken argued, and the landowners should see every penny of it. In lieu of that, Ken had decided, the company should be forced to shut down and some court, somewhere, should order them to pay $100 million in damages and restitution.

  The lawyer was flabbergasted. Even if there was the slightest chance that such a case could be won—and Memolo did not for a moment think that it could—he was not the man to handle it. He had no experience in gas and oil law, he pointed out, but Ken could bet that the high-priced attorneys Cabot would hire to pound that complaint into the ground would have it by the barrelful. He recommended another lawyer, a guy with a bit more experience who practiced out of Susquehanna County, and then begged off, promising Ken that he would help him any way he could. In fact, one of the ways he was going to do that was to advise Ken not to do anything rash.

  Ken fell silent when he got off the phone with Charlie, and Emmagene, sitting in front of the television, watched Ken instead of the tube. She had seen that look in his eyes before. “All right,” she finally said. “I can see the wheels turning. What are you thinking?”

  Charlie hadn’t gotten it. Ken knew that. The lawyer seemed to have honestly thought that Ken was interested in gas and was talking about money. He wasn’t. He was talking about something bigger. He was talking about right and wrong. Cabot had wronged him, and he wanted to make them pay for it. It was as simple as that. He didn’t care if he ever saw a dime from the lawsuit. He was already going to have more money than he had time left to spend it, even if he lived for another twenty years, though he figured that the diabetes and those three bouts with cancer made that kind of life expectancy pretty damned unlikely. No, this was about the here and now, and Ken had just one goal in mind: to make life tough enough on Cabot to send them a message. The fact that he could now afford to do it—that he could actually use Cabot’s own money to force them to spend bucket-loads of cash on legal fees—well, that was just the icing on the cake.

  A sly smile crossed his face as he turned and looked at Emmagene. “You know what this is all about?” he said at last. “This is all about the fact that they killed my dog and didn’t tell me for three days. This is all about Crybaby.”

  THIRTEEN

  Merry Christmas Redux

  It was a little before Christmas 2008, a frigid, star-filled night, and I was making my way to my mother’s house so that I could fetch her back to my place for the holiday. We’d have to use her car for the return trip. The heater in my old vegetable-powered Mercedes had died. So had my satellite radio—one of the few luxuries I afford myself. Both had been failing for weeks. I had planned to have both of them fixed, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t had the cash. I barely had the money to get presents for the kids and to lay out the Christmas spread that my family, over these ten years since my father had died, had come to expect.

  It was strange. Months earlier, when my family first signed its contract with Chesapeake, I had imagined that things would be different, that the sudden and spectacular injection of wealth into my family’s coffers, and into the community, would have a dramatic effect, that our fortunes and those of our neighbors were going to change overnight. But now, as I shivered alone in my car, I realized that I had been naïve.

  Even then, if I had been honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was ambivalent about it all. I certainly knew that the landscape would change, and that not all of those changes would, at least in the short run, be welcome, or even beneficial. And I also knew that the money—millions upon millions of dollars of it—would alter the face of this place, and not always for the better. The extent of those changes, and our ability to adjust to them, I was coming to realize, was going to be a test of our character.

  That had been driven home to me by Marshall Casale back in May. The Chesapeake landman who so aggressively wooed and ultimately won my family over had always tried to sound soothing when he spoke to my mother. But I had always sensed a bizarre mixture of ambition and ambivalence pulsing through him. I had made arrangements to meet with him on his turf, in part to size him up, but also to get a sense of what guys like him were like in their natural habitat. I was not disappointed.

  He had asked me to meet him in the motel room that served as both his office and his temporary home in the old coal mining town of Dickson City, and I had chuckled to myself when he gave me the address. I knew the place. Ninety years ago, when my grandfather was a child, he had worked as a door tender and a mule handler in the anthracite pits that honeycombed the ground beneath that motel, and years later, when the land above was developed into malls and restaurants and motels, he refused to go anywhere near it. It was only a matter of time, he figured, before the earth just opened up and sucked everything down. He was wrong, as it turned out. And yet his wariness was actually well placed. While the mines may not have literally undermined the land, they hadn’t done the region any lasting favors, either.

  I FOUND CASALE SITTING at a makeshift desk that he’d set up in the kitchenette of his by-the-week efficiency apartment, cleaning his high-powered rifle and chatting amiably on the phone with a monsignor from the local Catholic diocese who was due to receive a fat check after leasing a 400-acre summer camp.

  Surrounded by stacks of maps and contracts, Casale had waved me in. With his close-cropped hair and his broad chest, he looked a bit like a Green Beret, but there was something playful and boyish in the way he talked to the priest, a tone suggesting that he was engrossed in some wonderful game.

  It was a game, he told me then. The rules were simple: “Whoever has the most acreage wins.” And by those standards, Casale had racked up an impressive score. In just a couple of months, he had leased more than 7,500 acres and was about to add my mother’s hundred acres to his tally. He pointed the barrel of his rifle at a map of the county, on which the areas colored in orange showed his wins.

  Back when things started, just showing up was often enough, he said. All a landman really had to do was make an offer. But things had changed. The landowners had become savvier.

  A few days before our meeting, for instance, he was summoned to a remote farm in northern Wyoming County, where the landowner demanded to hear Casale’s best offer. It was then up to $2,500 an acre and 15 percent royalties. But the landowner wanted more. Ten times as much. Casale wouldn’t budge. But all the same, he knew he was going to get the lease. He was sure of it. “I’ll wait a month, drop in. If it takes six months, I’ll get him,” he says. “Everybody has a price. I’m sitting here cleaning my freaking rifle, and I hate to use this term, but I’m a sniper, man. I’m in there, one meeting, sometimes two, and there’s a deal.”

  It was at that meeting that Casale, in a moment of stunning frankness, said to me what he would not say to his young trainee that afternoon in the county courthouse: “I’m killing this county,” he said.<
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  Back then, I found the comment odd. Now I was beginning to suspect that it might have been prescient, his way of warning me that the Marcellus was going to be a double-edged sword.

  It wasn’t just the money, though that was clearly an issue, that was driving a wedge between some of the Haves and the Have Nots. You didn’t need a degree in rural sociology to see that. All you needed to do was listen closely to the deft way my mother, when she was talking to her friends, would change the subject whenever the conversation turned to the Marcellus, in part because she didn’t want to embarrass those who had gotten less or even nothing from the boom, and in part because, in some bizarre Irish Catholic way, she was embarrassed by the good fortune that had come her way, really through nothing but sheer luck.

  I had in fact suspected that my mother’s ambivalence about the money—more so even than her occasional lapses into absent-mindedness—had been the root of one of the most spectacularly comical incidents that occurred after we signed with Chesapeake.

  It happened when my mother’s bonus check showed up. It had arrived in midsummer, three months to the day since she had inked her name on the contract, just as Casale had promised it would. My mother claimed that she had been expecting the check to come via registered mail. Instead, it came by regular mail, and when she walked down the hill to her mailbox and found the nondescript envelope mixed in with her Lillian Vernon catalogue and come-ons from credit card and reverse mortgage companies, she automatically assumed that it was just another piece of junk mail. She was halfway through ripping it in two when she realized that the envelope actually contained her $250,000 windfall. In a panic she called both my sister and me and, as her periodic sobs played a syncopated counterpoint to the cheery warbling of her clocks, we alternately walked her through the delicate process of Scotch taping her shredded fortune back together. It took my poor mother a day and a half to stop hyperventilating. In fact, she only calmed down when the teller at her bank convinced her that the check was still good, and kindly though maybe not completely truthfully assured her that “this sort of thing happens all the time.”

  Though she insisted the whole incident was the result of the fact that she had been caught unawares by the prosaic appearance of the envelope, and that perhaps she might also have been having a senior moment, I always suspected that somewhere in the deepest part of her tortured Gaelic soul, my mother secretly feared that this unearned wealth would come with an unexpected cost.

  Already there were nagging questions, questions larger and more complex than she or I were prepared to answer. We could discuss the risks posed to the environment by the drilling, we could debate the question of whether we as a family, as a community—hell, whether we as a nation were up to the challenge of policing such a sweeping and monumental operation. We could discuss what it meant that even by Christmas week of 2008, it was already becoming clear that the federal agencies charged with overseeing the gas industry had all but abdicated their responsibilities, and there were grave questions about whether the state had the will or the means to take up the slack.

  We could also, with typical Irish enthusiasm, explore the philosophical and political question of whether, in the absence of any kind of comprehensive national energy policy, we would be able—as a nation or as a community—to see the vast rich gas field of the Marcellus for what it was: a temporary lifeline, something that would help meet our energy needs until something better was developed. We both knew that no less an advocate of the Marcellus than Terry Engelder, the man who had described the riches of the gas beneath our feet as a kind of Christmas promise to an energy-starved and desperate nation, had once said in a moment of stunning candor of his own, “If we’re still burning this stuff in forty years, we’re in trouble.”

  But the truth was that even in those matters, the question of money and the effect it might have on our character underpinned it all. And that was too frightening to discuss. That night, as I drove toward my mother’s house, I felt it as sharply as the cold in the car. When we had first signed on with Chesapeake, I was certain that I shared my mother’s ambivalence about the money, that I, too, had scruples that would prevent me from becoming attached to money I hadn’t earned. In fact, when she had finally received her bonus payment in the mail, and made us a gift of $10,000 that more than covered my kids’ tuition to private school, I even toyed with the idea of turning it down, finally telling myself that I was accepting it only for the good of my children, and maybe also so that my mother could, as the nuns who had taught her growing up had told her, “increase her treasure in heaven.”

  But now, as the frigid cold and silence in my car gave me a chance to do some deeper soul searching, I was beginning to wonder whether I was really more mercenary than I had thought. Had I pushed my mother to sell out the future of the farm for a few pieces of silver? Had I compromised my principles, my concerns about the environment, my image of myself as a man who could stand on his own? And this quivering that I was a feeling deep inside—was it just the cold? Or was I starting to feel the pangs of envy? Was I starting to look at the money that people like Rosemarie Greenwood and Cleo Teel and Ken Ely had coming, and was I starting to think why them and not me, and when will it be my family’s turn? When will it be mine? A few days after receiving that check from my mother, I paid my kids’ tuition. And then I drove to town, to the sporting goods shop where I had hocked my flintlock a year earlier so I could afford to send my daughter on a class trip. It was still there, still in the gun rack. As I wrote the man behind the counter a check for the gun, I couldn’t say whether I felt a greater sense of shame when I had to hock the gun in the first place to cover the cost of my own failure, or when I bought it back with the proceeds of a windfall that wasn’t my own. I still can’t say.

  IF KEN ELY OR CLEO TEEL or any of the other old-timers up there had such concerns about their own character, they never spoke about them out loud, at least not where anyone outside the family could hear.

  The way they had been raised, a man’s vices were best confessed softly and only to his creator, and whatever virtues a man might have were best demonstrated quietly as well.

  It was perhaps for that reason that few people around there knew that their character had already been tested and was, at least to that point, up to the challenges that they were facing. Some had not simply resisted the temptation to gild their lifestyle with the riches that had started to come their way, but had given substantial sums to charity. They never bragged about it.

  Ken was a case in point. Even before his riches started to roll in, he had not only made a point of paying off all his debts but had given away a fairly substantial amount as well. And it wasn’t only through officially sanctioned or tax-deductible methods, either.

  Not long after he learned he was going to be a rich man, he had taken Emmagene on a trip to Florida to visit family. The trip lasted longer than the wardrobe they had packed, and so on one sweltering winter night in Florida, Ken and Emmagene found themselves holed up in a local Laundromat. They had been chatting with a young single mother, a woman who had worked all day and now was caring for her young children in the stifling heat generated by the dozen or so whirling dryers, when Ken decided that he needed to step outside for some air. He hadn’t gotten two paces from the door when he was accosted by a ragged panhandler, who asked him for a dollar. Ken didn’t think twice. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a buck, and handed it to the young man.

  Through the window of the Laundromat he could feel the young mother’s eyes boring into the back of his neck, and when Ken stepped back inside, she unloaded on him.

  “That guy’s here every day begging for money,” she spat through clenched teeth. “It’s not right. I couldn’t do that. I work, I work hard for my kids, and I don’t ask anybody for anything. My kids go without. I can’t even pay my phone bill. I can’t remember the last time I could afford to take them to McDonald’s, but I don’t ask for anything.”

  In his heart, Ken believed that
he had done the right thing by giving a dollar to a guy who needed it, but he also knew, in the way that only a guy could know who had worked his whole life and up until chance had taken a hand had never had anything to show for it, that the young woman was right, too. The way Ken saw the world, people who had nothing deserved something. But people who worked hard and still had nothing deserved more.

  At first he made no reply to the young woman. He just cast a glance toward Emmagene, who was placing the last of their fresh laundry in her basket. And Emmagene had been reading such glances from Ken for long enough to know what it meant. She followed him outside.

  “Should I?” he asked.

  Emmagene didn’t need any further explanation. She knew exactly what Ken was thinking. “If he wasn’t thinking it, he wouldn’t be Ken,” she figured. Emmagene simply nodded, and without another word, Ken went back inside. He walked up to the young woman, pulled out his wallet, and fished a crisp new $100 bill from a stack of them in there. “Here,” he said, forcing the bill into the young woman’s hand. “Pay your phone bill. And take the kids to McDonald’s.”

  He didn’t wait for her to thank him. That was also Ken’s way, Emmagene thought.

  Ken never mentioned it. It wouldn’t be until months later that I heard of Ken’s quiet act of charity in that Florida Laundromat, and when I finally did it struck me as typical of him, and of the kind of people that Ken called friends, and of Emmagene. That aspect of his nature had always been evident, even back when he was running the service station and his generous impulses were far stronger than his business sense.

  By the time I learned about that simple act of kindness in Florida, Ken’s character and that of almost everyone in the community had been tested in a way that no could have anticipated.

  In fact, on that frigid night right before Christmas, the events that would test Ken Ely and the people of Dimock were already beginning to stir, fifteen hundred feet underground, not far from the spot where Cabot had gotten its drill bit stuck in the loose gravel a few months earlier, and closer still to the spot where Norma Fiorentino, one of the locals overlooked by the promise of the Marcellus, lived.