Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  Eric nodded in agreement “And if I don’t start right away, I might be lost. Horace has turned down Rockefeller’s bid to buy control of the leases in this area…as if they were Horace’s to buy and sell! We must immediately organize the farmers here, call in men from the north who know how to set up oil rigs, engage barrel makers, begin negotiations with the Pennsylvania Railroad…”

  “And prepare to face Horace and Representative Creed-more in court”

  “And that.”

  “And the refinery. What will you do? Merely market the crude or try to control the whole process, from production through refining to market, as Rockefeller is attempting to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Those are decisions we are going to have to make as we go along. But, riding down here from Harrisburg, I had an idea. Reckless, perhaps. But worth a try.”

  “What’s that?” Phil Phettle asked.

  “I’m going to Pittsburgh to see Benjamin Horace. To beard the bear, as it were.”

  “I doubt it will do much good. He sees vast sums at his fingertips. Nothing you say will move him.”

  “Yet he thought enough of me to have a delegation meet my train in Boston, didn’t he? Hardly the mark of a man who is totally secure.”

  “But definitely the mark of a man who is dangerous.”

  Eric took Phil Phettle around to the neighboring farmers, beneath whose land the oil was believed by the surveyors to lie. He introduced the intense but easy-mannered young lawyer to Fritz Renner, Abner Fensterwald, Rupert Ordway, Wilbur Cleanland, and numerous others, and left him to explain the Creedmore Reservation, and the need for unity to fight that clause in court. Eric himself prepared to go out to Pittsburgh.

  “Must you?” asked Elaine, as they lay in bed on the night prior to his departure. “First you went away to Harrisburg, then to New York. Now you’re off to—”

  “Elaine, I have to. Don’t you see? It’s for you, and Elizabeth. It’s for all of us who live in this territory. My whole life has been a struggle to have something, to really achieve something. And now we are on the verge of it.”

  “But it seems you’ll never be home. A lawyer is here now. There is talk about dangerous men and court battles. Eric, I…I don’t understand. Why can’t we just have had a quiet peaceful life, and love each other?”

  “Elaine,” he said, taking her into his arms, “Elaine, if one is threatened in life, if what one has is taken away, there can be no peace. Everything is taken away, and nothing remains.”

  She fought against an impulse to sob. “But all I want is a farm and a husband and children.”

  “You can have that. And more, too.”

  “But I don’t want more!”

  “Come, come.”

  “Don’t touch me. I don’t want to be soothed just now.”

  “Well, let me explain.”

  “Don’t talk. You’ll wake the baby. You’ll wake your lawyer friend.” Phil Phettle was sleeping in a half-loft on one side of the chimney.

  “It doesn’t matter. This is important. Anything that troubles you is important.”

  Elaine was quiet for a while, then: “You saw her in New York, didn’t you?” Before Eric had a chance to answer, she continued. “Oh, I could tell. You were…different. Preoccupied. And it wasn’t only about this oil business, either, was it?”

  Now she began to cry in earnest, and turned away from him. He slid over behind her and tried to put his arms abound her shaking shoulders.

  “Just tell me the truth. You saw her, didn’t you?” sobbed Elaine.

  “It was not what you think.”

  “You love her, and you hate me, don’t you? Because I tore up your letters. Because you think I trapped you with…Elizabeth.”

  “No, of course not. I wanted you. And Elizabeth is so darling.”

  This was true. Eric could sit holding the child for hours, loving the soft feel of her tiny fist around his finger, watching her eyes as she studied him.

  “You must never think those things. I promised I would always love you, and always take care of you, and I always will.”

  He meant it, and Elaine could not doubt his sincerity, although the existence of another woman, no matter how remote, was not something she thought that she would ever fully accept.

  “Why did you see her?” she asked, in a whispery voice.

  “To see how she fared. Isn’t that natural?”

  Elaine wasn’t sure that it was. “And how does she fare?”

  “Well. She has a child, too.”

  “Oh?” exclaimed Elaine, pleased. That seemed to make everything more permanent, if not intractable. “Well, at least you don’t know anyone in Pittsburgh,” she said.

  Eric did not answer, thinking of Joan Leeds.

  The man upon whom Eric Gunnarson called in Pittsburgh could not recall a time when he had not been fighting for something. He could remember neither mother nor father, but he did recall himself as a small child of not much more than two or three—stumbling alone along the Allegheny River. Where he had come from, with what people he had spent his early days, he did not know. Where he was headed, he did not know, either. Exhausted, he fell into the river, and would have drowned, save for the chance passing of a farm wagon. The farmer, one Ebenezer Horace, jumped in, and pulled the boy out. Since he was sonless, and had land to work, his discovery of an unclaimed but apparently able-bodied child was like the fortuitous bequeathment of a slave. He gave the boy a name, a bed, food, and, over the years, plenty of work to do. Benjamin Horace, however, grew to care little for backbreaking, virtually profitless labor on the soil, even as he grew tall and wiry and steel strong. The discovery of iron ore on the Horace farm outside Pittsburgh seemed to promise a pleasant change. Instead of following the rear end of a horse from one end of a field to another, Benjamin might spend ready money on beer and whiskey and girls in nearby Moon Run, at the saloon old man Horace had forbade him ever to enter, but which he already knew as intimately as he knew some of the girls there. But old man Horace would not sell his eighty acres. He and his wizened old wife, who had bored Benjamin for years by saying rosaries and making novenas and muttering incantations, wanted to live out their days on the farm. That would not have been too bad, except that they wanted Benjamin to do the same. He was only seventeen when the farmhouse caught fire one night, killing the two old Horaces and destroying the rope by which they had been bound to their bed. Benjamin was very fortunate in burning only a couple of fingers on his right hand, with which he had held the torch a little too long.

  He got a good price for the farm from the Carnegie people, and moved into Pittsburgh. He had money, ambition, a taste for pleasure and for gaudy accoutrements, whether of clothing or carriage or carnality.

  The man Eric Gunnarson asked to see, outside the big bronze double-doors of the executive office in the Monongahela Trust and Holding Company was or had been boss of the Allegheny County Democratic Party, boss of the Allegheny County Republican Party, secretary, treasurer, president and board chairman of Monongahela Trust and Holding, owner and operator of sundry hotels and restaurants, a tool company, a livery, a rendering works, and various temporary businesses not too numerous to mention but too difficult to trace.

  “Mr. Horace is not in at the moment,” Eric was told, by a brisk, snippy young man in a pince-nez, who was one of the great man’s secretaries.

  “Then where is he?”

  “What’s your business?”

  “Oil. Near Gettysburg.”

  The expression of bored superiority disappeared from the secretary’s face, and his pince-nez almost fell off.

  “You’ll find him at the House of the Good Shepherd,” offered the man. “He’s going over accounts with Mrs. Horace.”

  “The House of the Good Shepherd?”

  “Half-mile down, on your right. Don’t let the red lantern over the door put you off. Mr. Horace holds it to be of great sentimental value. In that house he met his wife.”

  No one answered his
knock at the House of the Good Shepherd, a large, elaborate clapboard hotel, surrounded by a wide, pillared porch. It was painted yellow, and Eric recalled that the Leeds house in New York had also been yellow. Knocking again to no reply, he tried the door and found it open. It was quiet inside, and dark, with heavy curtains drawn over the windows. When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Eric discerned a bar, a piano, and a number of tables around an open floor. The odor of dead cigars hung in the air, along with the sickly-sweet smell of cheap wine.

  “Anyone in? Mr. Horace?”

  He thought he heard, from some place far back in the house, the sound of voices. Making his slow way across the darkened room, he passed through a curtained doorway, and to his right a wide staircase rose to upper floors.

  A young woman wearing nothing but a cotton wrap was coming down those stairs, yawning and stretching. She saw him at the same moment he saw her. He did not cry out, but she did.

  After a stunned silence, someone else shrieked. Eric attempted to explain himself. The woman in the cotton wrap scrambled back upstairs. There was the sound of running. Eric felt himself grabbed and slammed against the wall next to the staircase. He looked into a dark, cruel, mustachioed face, and large, angry eyes.

  “We’re closed, fella. What do you think this is?”

  The man readied a fist. Eric got set to fight back. Then, over his assailant’s shoulder, he saw another woman approaching, soft and lovely in a green silk robe, her green eyes shining, her oval face as smooth and untroubled as it had been that night in the New York tavern, years ago, and her rich red hair still lustrous as ever.

  “Hello, Eric,” Joan Leeds Horace smiled. “I always thought we’d meet again. Destiny, don’t you think?”

  “Hello, Joan.”

  “Let him go, Ben. I think this is the man you wished to see. He gave me excellent advice once, about oil and money.”

  Benjamin Horace wanted to see him? What’s going on here? Eric wondered.

  Joan was smiling that simultaneously enigmatic and omniscient smile of old, as if she not only knew vast portions of Eric’s destiny, but controlled them as well. He remembered the last night they had spent together, in the Madison Hotel in New York.

  Tomorrow we’ll begin planning in earnest, he could hear her whispering, lying beside him in their bed of profane love.

  Joan, I cannot, he had said.

  He remembered how she had waited before answering, studying him, then: You will have to learn the hard way that I am right about how life is.

  Was she? Joan was apparently happy, and wealthy, and matched with a powerful man. So was she right about how life is? She thought so.

  “So we meet again, Eric,” she said, smiling. “You and I and all the time between.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Benjamin Horace demanded.

  Eric could not help but marvel. Joan was the woman who had once wanted him to pimp for her; now she had her own house, and probably Horace to pimp for her. He looked like a damned tough man, but as Eric measured the stony body, the powerful arms, the cruel, intelligent eyes, he decided: I can take this man.

  Eric could beat him physically, perhaps. But what about other areas of competition? Arrangements, deals, money, power: other arenas Eric had not yet fully experienced, or not experienced at all?

  I can take him there, too, Eric vowed.

  “Coffee, Eric? Or a drink? Come, Ben. Let us take our guest into the kitchen and have a nice talk.” So saying, she led the two men away toward the back of the house, even as the awakened girls of the Good Shepherd gathered to watch at the railing of the second staircase.

  “I understand your precious Kristin is rich and happy in New York,” Joan averred, motioning Eric and Ben to chairs next to the table. Ledgers and account books and sheets of paper scribbled full of numbers littered the table. Joan gathered them up and set them aside.

  “Kristin is rich,” Eric said.

  “And you are married to a sweet country girl now. How nice. It must remind you of home.”

  They certainly know all about me, Eric thought. “There are things worse than home,” he said.

  “Well, you’ve come a long way, and here you are.” She brought over a pot of coffee, cups, and a bottle of brandy. “And now it’s time to deal again.”

  “If Gunnarson’s smart enough to deal,” said Horace, who had been silent, taking his measure of Eric.

  “Here’s to our oil,” said Joan, sitting down with the men and pouring a slug of brandy into her steaming coffee.

  “It’s not your oil,” said Eric.

  “You son of a bitch.” Horace spat “I could already be the king of oil if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Benjamin…” warned Joan.

  “You’re not the king of anything,” Eric shot back, prepared to leap up if the man so much as made a move to attack, “and sending those thugs after me in Boston was an outrage.”

  “What?” demanded Joan, glancing from Eric to her husband and back again.

  In spite of his perpetually cynical smirk, Benjamin Horace looked puzzled. “What the hell are you talking about? Boston thugs? Is this some kind of cheap maneuver to catch me off guard? I know you’re getting set up with a lawyer to give me trouble over that Creedmore clause, and I paid a hell of a lot of money to put Representative Angus Creedmore in my pocket, and you’re in for the fight of your life over control of the southern oil fields, but Boston…?” Horace shook his head. “You’re talking through your hat, my friend.”

  Joan looked as puzzled at Eric’s mention of Boston as Horace had. “What happened there?” she asked.

  Eric told them of the men who had threatened him in the carriage outside the Boston railroad station.

  “I don’t know a son of a bitch east of Philadelphia,” Horace declared, genuinely perplexed.

  Eric studied the man’s hard, flat eyes. Horace seemed to be telling the truth. Joan’s eyes were narrow and cool, slits of intelligent green light. “Perhaps I am beginning to understand something. Those men in Boston? You told them you thought I killed my mother in New York, didn’t you, Starbane?”

  His ancient name. Why did she address him so? Joan noted his surprise and discomfiture.

  “You know what always troubled me most about you?” she asked him. “You never seemed to grasp the fact that you are the kind of man who can have anything he wants, a man with the least of desires.”

  “I don’t have my own land yet,” Eric said.

  Benjamin Horace’s eyes went from one to the other. “Your mother? His name? Why don’t you clear this up?”

  “I received a telegram from New York a few days ago,” Joan explained. “It was unsigned, but the message it carried advised us to drop our interest in southern oil, or very shortly it would be rumored that I killed my mother in New York and an investigation might occur.”

  “I also heard that “rumor’ from Mick, when he was dying at Gettysburg,” Eric added.

  “Poor Mick,” sighed Joan, her eyes softening, “he was so sweet. So sweet and so dumb. No,” she said. “Liz died of pneumonia. During the epidemic that year.”

  Eric looked into her eyes, and tried to gauge the truth, but he saw nothing therein save his own image. He believed Joan, and he did not believe her. He knew she had taken his three hundred dollars from beneath the floorboards, and he believed she had taken her brother’s draft money. But that was all he knew or believed. Nothing else for certain, except the indisputable fact that he could not trust her. He wondered if Benjamin Horace could, or did.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that telegram?” Horace demanded of Joan.

  “I didn’t want it to enrage you,” Joan said. “You’ve got to keep a very cool head until the trial is over.”

  Horace was calculating. “Then it had to have been either Rolfson or Rockefeller who sent the telegram,” he decided, striking the table with the heel of his hand, rattling coffee cups and bouncing the brandy bottle. “Look, Gunnarson, I’ve had you investigated. Any s
mart man would, with a big trial coming up over the oil. If you had half a brain, you’d be hip-deep in my past, although spare yourself the effort, ’cause the trail is covered pretty damn good. But we got to see things as they are, and get together here. Somebody is going through a lot of trouble to heat up the differences between us. So I suggest we spite them, strike a bargain, and freeze out both Rockefeller and Rolfson.”

  “But it is not my oil to bargain away.”

  “Don’t be a dunce. For God’s sake…”

  “I’m sorry, but the oil belongs to my neighbors as well as to me and my wife.”

  “Oh, Gunnarson, for pity’s sake…”

  “Quite,” said Joan. “Eric, you do realize what this means?”

  Eric did. Horace wanted the oil fields to himself, all right. But someone else was working hard to spark a mutually destructive war betwen Eric and Horace.

  “It’s Rockefeller,” Benjamin Horace decided. “He’s been the shrewdest all along. Rolfson has access to the money supply, but Rockefeller is the fulcrum upon which everything turns, because he controls all the steps in the production process.”

  Benjamin Horace went on, explaining how he interpreted what was happening. Rockefeller, it seemed, needed the claim to the southern fields, and the income to be engendered by them, to pay off the loan Rolfson had given him. If Horace and Eric tied up the matter in court, or any other way, Rockefeller would suffer, and perhaps lose everything.

  “No, I think it’s Gustav Rolfson,” Eric said.

  “Well, we know we’re both threatened,” cooed Joan, “and we know there’s more money to be made than we’ll ever have time to spend, so let’s get down to business here, and strike a bargain with Eric on the rights to that oil he’s discovered.”

  “No,” Eric said.

  There was a long, long silence.

  “You read the son of a bitch wrong again, Joan,” Benjamin Horace hissed. “He’s the same fool he was when he got off the boat”

  “I’m not a son of a bitch,” Eric said, rising, “I’m…”

  “Still Gunnarson,” Joan Leeds Horace interrupted with a cynical smile. She stood, too, and offered her hand. “We shall see you in Harrisburg Circuit Court, in due course. It seems that is what you desire.”