Second, she didn’t always feel like she fit in with the other wives. “In some ways I’m very proud of what my husband does—he’s out there doing a hard job and taking care of our family. But some things I see with oil field wives don’t resonate with me.” Some wives acted “obnoxious and spoiled,” she said. Others seemed catty and immature. “Some of them are bitching and complaining and acting really trashy. I wasn’t raised like that. I don’t come from a family like that,” Chelsea said. She saw one wife seek help with depression, which Chelsea also struggles with, on the Oil Field Wives Facebook page. But the commenters told the woman to “suck it up” and “get off her pity pot.” The attitude angered her.
We pulled into the parking lot of Will’s school. A kid about age 9 or 10 chopped wood behind a building. Kids darted past him shrieking and playing. The younger children were inside a building called the Kinderhouse. They peeled layers of knitted clothing off their tiny bodies. Chelsea had Litha strapped to her chest and she waved good-bye to Will. “Bye, sweetie, I love you!” she said. We treaded across muddy wood chips and past playground equipment as we made our way back to the car.
Most parents at the Waldorf school were wealthy, liberal, and highly educated. There were a few moms Chelsea could see herself becoming friends with, but so far they were mostly acquaintances. And no one at the school had met Jacob yet. When people asked her about Jacob’s job, she replied, “He works in North Dakota,” and left it at that. She often wondered what people thought about the situation. “I’m afraid to tell them what Jacob does,” she said. “They’re going to look at me funny. Or we’re going to get into a fight about fracking. They just don’t get it.” Seeing Will excel in school, however, made whatever uncomfortable conversations she had to endure worth it. “He’s really changed and become more outgoing,” she said. “It’s been the best thing for him.”
On the drive home, Litha made spitting noises in her car seat. Chelsea yawned. “Mommy is sleepy,” she told Litha, watching her from the rearview mirror. “I know I’m not the best parent in the world,” Chelsea said. “I don’t have a lot of patience because I’m always having to parent. I never get a break. It’s hard to give them both the attention they need.” Lately Will seemed to ask about his dad every day. “The last few weeks have been really hard on him. He used to hardly ever tell me ‘I miss my dad.’ But lately it’s been every day. ‘I miss my dad,’ ‘I miss my dad.’”
* * *
Back at the house, Chelsea nursed Litha. We looked through her wedding photos on her laptop. Litha pulled on the computer’s power cord and chewed it. Chelsea took the cord out of Litha’s mouth and held her close. The laptop teetered on Chelsea’s knees as she clicked through photos. She explained one reason she and Jacob decided to marry was so they could get health insurance through Jacob’s company, DuCon. But Jacob switched jobs soon after. Now Chelsea and the kids had health insurance through Obamacare. “We’d been talking about it anyway, so we just said, ‘Let’s finally go ahead and get married.’ People ask us where and we’re like, ‘We got married in Deadwood, South Dakota!’” She laughed. “It’s kind of a neat little curiosity.”
She moved her face closer to the baby’s. “And you were conceived that night,” Chelsea said in a high pitch.
Litha smiled and cooed.
“Yep, you were a wedding night baby,” Chelsea said, looking down at Litha. “You sure were. We talked about having another baby, but we just didn’t expect it to happen right then.” Chelsea laughed. “Surprise!”
Chelsea set Litha down on the living room carpet. The baby crawled over to a dog toy and chewed on it.
Chelsea picked up Litha and rocked her. She fell asleep on Chelsea’s lap. “The last time I slept six straight hours was the day she was born,” said Chelsea, shaking her head. “I remember it fondly.” It was easier when Will was a baby, she said. Jacob carried him around the house or rocked him on the porch to give her a break. They took turns waking up in the middle of the night to soothe Will. “When one of us would get tired, you could just hand him off,” said Chelsea. “Now there’s no relief. It’s been really hard.”
Jacob came home for Christmas but could only stay a week. Chelsea worried Litha wouldn’t remember her father, but the baby seemed to recognize him immediately. “He was the first person she saw when she was born, so he’s printed on her in some way,” she said. Litha’s first “words” were “da da da,” which pleased Jacob.
While Jacob was away, Chelsea tried to manage with repairs on the house, but some things she needed his help with. The backyard fence was broken, and the storm door needed to be replaced, but it was too heavy for her to move by herself. Other things, such as mowing almost a half acre of lawn, were simply too labor-intensive to do with two kids in tow. She hired outside help instead. “My priorities tend to be elsewhere,” said Chelsea. “God help me if I ever had a husband who wanted to come home to a clean house.”
Chelsea sometimes worried about crime in the neighborhood. She installed a security system for the house and adopted another dog, Maddock, for extra protection, since their Great Pyrenees was with Jacob in North Dakota. She also kept her .38 revolver in the house. “I’ve got a gun, a dog, and an alarm system. If they get past the dog and the alarm, they’ll meet angry momma,” she said. But she still felt uneasy. Many people cut through her backyard on their way to a bus stop nearby. One night as she nursed Litha in bed, she heard a voice directly outside her window. It sounded like a man, or maybe two men. Terrified, she called the police. As she waited for them to arrive, she heard the front doorknob rattle—someone was attempting to break in. Maddock barked and barked and barked. Chelsea took her children and the dog into the bedroom, locked the door, loaded her gun, and stayed on the phone with the police. Finally, they arrived. It turned out to be a woman from down the street with Alzheimer’s who had escaped from her home. Chelsea worried what might’ve happened if the woman had succeeded in breaking in—she hoped she would’ve recognized that the intruder was an elderly woman before shooting, but she wasn’t positive. “In this house by myself with my children—if you come through that door, chances are I’m not going to ask questions. It could’ve been bad.”
* * *
At 1 p.m., we drove back to the Waldorf school to pick up Will. NPR played softly on the radio, and Litha cried and cried in her car seat. At the school, chickens clucked and pecked at the ground. We walked into the kindergarten building and saw Will collecting his belongings.
“Hi, girls!” Will said when he saw us. “I have a dirty sock,” he told Chelsea, holding up a muddy sock.
Chelsea nodded. “Let’s focus on getting ready.”
Will dumped dried mud out of his rain boots and slid them on.
Chelsea needed to run a few errands on the way home. She stopped by a drive-through ATM to retrieve cash. She leaned out the window and tapped buttons on the screen. “Your father has not cleaned out our bank account. That’s good,” she announced.
“Why?” Will asked from the backseat.
“Because your father cannot be trusted with money,” she said.
We pulled into the driveway of their house. Chelsea turned off the engine and massaged the area between her right shoulder and her neck. She had strained her shoulder one night while maneuvering around Litha in bed. “Man, I could go for a margarita right now,” she said.
We entered the house and Maddock leapt at us, panting excitedly. Chelsea set Litha down on the living room floor and went into her bedroom to change. Litha sat with her chubby legs facing forward and watched her family quietly. Maddock rolled around on the carpet. Will pulled out a small trampoline from the spare bedroom and jumped on it in the kitchen.
Chelsea returned wearing a loose sweater that fell off one shoulder. She plopped down on the chair in the living room and applied Icy Hot balm to her shoulder. The pungent menthol smell wafted through the room. She read the news on her phone. “Ugh. More layoffs. Halliburton, Schlumberger, and now BP are all cutt
ing jobs,” she said, sighing loudly. “That is not the news I wanted to hear.”
As Chelsea prepped dinner in the kitchen, Will stood with one foot in each of Maddock’s empty dog bowls and talked to his mom. “Mommy, I really wish I had gummy bears,” he said.
I asked Will if he liked living in North Dakota.
“No, it was disgusting,” Will said, contorting his face. “The trailer was disgusting. I hated it.”
Chelsea stopped chopping an onion and turned to him. “I didn’t think you hated it. What about the rock museum?” she said. A museum with a farmer’s 1930s rock collection was within walking distance of their trailer park in Parshall. “And the dinosaur place in Dickinson?”
“Oh, yeah,” Will said, thinking about it. “Okay. I want to go back.”
“Well, I can’t promise anything,” Chelsea said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. A lot could change. I don’t even know what’s going to happen by March.”
March was the end of the first quarter, a time when many oil field companies made financial decisions about the coming year. Chelsea figured whatever changes were coming, they’d happen then. “I really quit trying to make long-term plans, because it seems like every six months something changes. We’re here, we’re there, oil prices are up, oil prices are down. It’s hard for me because I’m a long-term planner.” Jacob had talked about heading back to the military recently, Chelsea said. He was riled up about ISIS and wanted to join Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters in Syria. The plan stalled, however, when he discovered they didn’t pay. “I never know what Jacob’s going to say or do,” said Chelsea. “Some days he’s a loose cannon.”
Jacob often missed the military, explained Chelsea. He didn’t just leave the Army—he was involuntarily discharged at 23. About a month before his Iraq training, while stationed in South Korea, Jacob went on a drinking binge. He returned to base belligerent. His officers gave him a warning, but it happened again. The third time, they kicked him out. Chelsea said he deeply regretted his behavior and felt as though he let down his Army friends, a number of whom had been deployed to Iraq and died there. “He’s got some major issues wrapped up with that,” said Chelsea. “It’s something he has never gotten over. He feels like it was his fault. But this is what he does—this is his alcoholic behavior. He’ll wait until something is about to happen and something in him will flip a switch and he fucks it up every time. I don’t know why. It’s his pattern.”
It had happened again, Chelsea said, four months ago. That September, she, Will, and two-month-old Litha planned to take a train up to Williston to live in North Dakota with Jacob for two months. Chelsea was packed and ready to go, but 24 hours before they were scheduled to leave, she checked their joint bank account and $600, most of the money in the account, was gone. She saw a charge at Skunk Bay bar, a charge at the Mandaree convenience store, and a $200 charge for a hotel in Watford City. She knew this was a bad sign and alcohol was involved—she and Jacob typically discussed any major purchases, and they needed the money to pay bills. She called Jacob’s cell phone and the hotel but couldn’t reach him. “It was terrifying,” Chelsea said later. She decided right then that she and the children wouldn’t go to North Dakota. “He beeeegged for us to come. I told him, ‘You screwed up, buddy.’” Afterward, she enrolled Will at the Waldorf school in Louisville, and she and Jacob hadn’t discussed the incident much since. “It’s come up a couple times, but we haven’t really dealt with it honestly. Not the way it needs to be dealt with. The only reason that I can even tolerate it is because I’m not there. If he tried to pull that at home, he’d be out on his ass so fast his head would spin.”
Now Chelsea worried that with oil prices low and Jacob working fewer hours, he was more likely to get himself into trouble. “It’s like, ‘What are we going to have to bail you out of this time?’” Chelsea laughed. “All his life, if he’s given free time, he gets himself in trouble. He was a great soldier but a terrible civilian. He’s good at working; he’s terrible at not working.”
I asked her if she worried an incident like that might happen again.
“It’s always in the back of my mind. I think if he was home around his children, if he was somewhere where he had support, it would be different for him—rather than out there on the cliff with no family. He can not drink around his kids. He can do that. But when he’s by himself and given too much time to think, he’s a mess.”
Jacob drank in high school, but it didn’t seem excessive at the time. Everyone drank. She figured he’d grow out of it. “He never quite did,” she said. It wasn’t until the military incident that Chelsea realized he had a problem. They had been engaged at the time. She was so angry with him that she called off the engagement. They remained apart for nearly three years and even dated other people during their separation. But one day he sent her an email out of nowhere. She received it at work and had to step away from the computer. She waited until she was home to read it. Jacob said he still loved her. “I had missed him a lot when we were apart. It was awful. Then I read it and we started talking,” said Chelsea. He was attending Indiana University in Bloomington, and Chelsea went to visit him. Five months later, he moved in with her in Louisville. Two months later, she was pregnant with Will.
She had hoped their three-year separation would encourage him to work through his issues with alcohol, but it didn’t. “After the military, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse,” said Chelsea. “He needs to deal with it, but he’s not going to deal with it until he’s darn well good and ready.”
Before dinner, Chelsea nursed Litha in the living room. The baby fussed and cried.
“Why you so grumpy, my baby princess?” Chelsea said, cradling her.
Will tried to sit on Chelsea’s lap, but she asked him to stop.
“I wish my dad was here,” Will said.
“I know,” Chelsea said.
Will played with a doll house in the living room. He flipped the house on its side and pretended one doll was being chased by an imaginary Godzilla.
Chelsea’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Jacob. “He says the new guys are pissed off about ‘treater’ work. I have no idea what that means,” she said. His company had recently hired three new employees from other states, and she said she didn’t understand why anyone would move to North Dakota now with current oil prices.
Chelsea asked Will to help set the table. Will yelled from the kitchen that he was stuck in the refrigerator.
Chelsea put Litha on her hip and walked to the kitchen to check on the Crock-Pot. She stood at the counter and texted Jacob.
“What are you doing?” Will asked.
“I’m trying to communicate with your father and get dinner ready at the same time,” said Chelsea. She turned to Litha and kissed her on the forehead. “Is that your da da da on the phone?”
After dinner, Will jumped on the trampoline while Chelsea put away the leftovers and washed dishes. Litha cried in her high chair. Chelsea sat down with Litha in the recliner to nurse her again, wrapping a pink fleece blanket dotted with cartoon frogs around herself and the baby. She had to feed Litha before she could manage Will’s bedtime. “Morning and bedtime are when it’s really hectic,” Chelsea said. “I want to read him a bedtime story, but she’ll be fussy.”
Chelsea said if Jacob remained employed in North Dakota by June, they’d head back and live in the camper with him over the summer.
Will heard this and threw his head down on the carpet. “No!”
“Why?” Chelsea said.
“Because North Dakota is cold!”
“Not in the summer,” she said.
“Oh,” Will said. He picked up Chelsea’s water glass and sipped it. He pretended to drown from the water, holding his throat and making choking noises.
Chelsea finished nursing and set Litha down on the carpet.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Will, don’t let your sister eat anything she shouldn’t,” Chelsea said as she walked away.
/> Will rocked in the recliner and sang a song he made up. “Godzilla! You’ll meet him in Tokyo. Godzilla! You’ll meet him in France. Godzilla! You’ll meet him in Louisville!” He ignored Litha and she crawled backward under a chair. Chelsea returned and picked up the baby. Military helicopters flew overhead—Fort Knox was nearby. After the whir of the propellers faded, there were voices from people walking down the street. Chelsea sometimes heard people rapping to themselves as they walked by the house. “It’s unnerving at first. You hear this male voice, but then when you realize what it is, it’s okay.”
“Will, go get your pajamas on,” Chelsea said.
Will hung his head and pouted.
“Do you want to watch TV tomorrow?” Chelsea asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you need to go get your jammies on.”
Will pouted and shuffled his feet in the direction of his bedroom.
He returned with his pajamas on. Chelsea told him to pick out a bedtime story. He picked The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Chelsea began reading: “‘Once there was a tree … and she loved a little boy.’”
Will hugged her as she read. He leaned on his mother then collapsed into her lap. “Can you hold me like Litha?” he asked.
“You’re too big for that,” Chelsea said. “And my shoulder hurts.”
Will squeezed next to her in the recliner. “I never want to go to sleep. Can I stay up all night?”
Chelsea ignored him and continued reading. “‘And every day the boy would come … and he would gather her leaves.’”
Will tried to lie across her again. This time, he slipped, bumping into the book as he rolled onto the ground.
“William James!” Chelsea slapped the book shut.
Will ran out of the room giggling.
“You’re about to get no TV!” she yelled, and followed him into his bedroom. Litha began to cry.
The New Wild West Page 28
