Gone at 3-17

by David M. Brown

  Bill Griggs, a fifth grader, jumped at the chance to do an errand for his teacher. Asked to empty a trash can, Bill complied gladly. He grabbed the can and headed to a trash bin out back. The chore gave him an early sampling of the bright afternoon, perfumed with the smell of spring, just outside the school’s doors.7

  Lillian Anderson, a seventh grader, hurried toward the high school. She and other girls were playing softball on the practice diamond behind the school during their physical education class. As the afternoon sun bore down, heating the air and the dirt across the open field, Lillian’s throat became parched. She had decided to slip away from the practice long enough to get a drink of water. It was almost time, anyway, for her to meet her sister, Allene, a sixth grader, when classes let out. Lillian was fourteen and had the job of shepherding Allene and Billie, their first-grade sister, onto the school bus each afternoon. A big, wide field of stubble grass and knee-high brush lay between the bus stop and their house, and their mother insisted that Lillian always accompany the younger girls across the lonesome meadow.

  Billie Anderson had just gotten out of class in the grammar school and was heading toward the high school to meet her sisters. A friend caught up with her and asked Billie to play a game of jacks. Billie, six, figured there was time at least for one game, but afterward she would need to hurry. Her mother was strict about rules. If Billie failed to meet Lillian and Allene on time, they had orders to come looking for her, and they might all miss the bus.

  “Just a quick game,” Billie told her friend, and they both dropped to their knees and scattered jacks on the concrete walkway.

  Allene Anderson sat in her classroom longing for the bell to ring. The day was so pretty she couldn’t wait to get outside. None of the sisters had wanted to catch the bus that morning. When they learned their mother was planning to go shopping at Montgomery Ward in Tyler, the three girls begged her to let them skip school and accompany her to the city. Going to Tyler was always an adventure. Lola Anderson, their mother, smiled at the silly question. School came first. She reminded the older girls to watch after Billie when they were crossing the long field. She kissed them good-bye.

  Now Billie scooped up the last of the jacks when the ball bounced high. “I won! Got to go.” But her friend squealed that quitting after just one game wasn’t fair. She pleaded with Billie to give her one more chance.

  In a fifth-grade classroom, Zana Jo Curry recited her book report on Rip Van Winkle. Her copper-colored hair lay in a half-bowl shape around her soft features and oval face. Zana had been nervous, as always, having to speak in front of her classmates. It didn’t matter how well prepared she was, apprehension swelled in her chest until Zana felt her heart pounding at the base of her throat and her temples flushing with heat. She had carefully written the report and practiced it over and over, before the mirror in her bedroom at home and several more times in front of her mother, who was very active in the PTA. Her mother praised the work and told Zana she would do an excellent job reciting it. And sure enough, as soon as the child opened her mouth and the first few words fluttered out, the anxiety popped like a balloon, leaving Zana perfectly calm. Now the words flowed as smoothly as a stream trickling over a stone. “Rip Van Winkle was a quaint man who lived in a quaint time, and one afternoon he fell fast asleep, thinking it was just a nap.”8

  Students in a nearby classroom were finishing a test on Treasure Island, the adventure story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Another class discussed the life of poet and storyteller Edgar Allan Poe.

  Girls in home economics class baked cookies, cut cloth, and threaded needles. Boys in the manual training shop sawed planks, hammered nails, and stained nearly finished cabinets. One of them needed the electric sander.

  Second-grader Marie Beard slipped into the empty hallway and stepped toward her sister’s class. Her footfalls sounded amplified and hollowed by smooth walls and right angles. She and Helen had permission to leave school a few minutes early. The sisters were planning to walk out together.9

  The typing room ticked softly. Absent was the clack and clatter of a roomful of students hammering upon every machine. Only a few pupils, pecking gingerly at the keys, remained in the room. Most of the class and the teacher, Miss Hazel Shaw, the superintendent’s daughter, had already made the journey to Henderson High School to compete in the contest’s early rounds.

  Carroll Freeman Evans had finished teaching his last class for the day. He had lingered a while after the bell, talking with Willie Tate, who used the same classroom for teaching the final-period science class. Evans gave Tate a couple of pointers about covering a lesson on phases of the moon in an entertaining way. Evans, the school’s former football and basketball coach, had confiscated six basketballs and shaded them with white paint to represent various moon phases. The all-white ball was the full moon. The unpainted one was the new moon. The others were shaded with waxing and waning phases. Tate thanked Evans for the demonstration, and Evans headed home.

  At a small white house, only a short distance from the school’s rear, Evans now stood beside the clothesline on his lawn and looked for his toddler. The schoolteacher spotted him playing nearby, between the wooden home and the school’s beige brick wall. Evans stepped back inside, to the ironing board, and tapped the iron’s metal with the tip of his middle finger to test its heat. He looked out the window once more and watched his son for a long moment. Worried the boy would totter inside without anyone noticing, Evans pulled the iron’s cord out of the wall so his child would not be burned.10

  Music teacher Mattie Queen Price was explaining a piano recital piece to one of her pupils and the child’s mother. The trio stood just outside the door of Miss Price’s classroom, while several of her piano students worked through a lesson inside the room.

  Queen, as she was known to everyone, had hoped to finish a few minutes early and drive the four miles to her apartment in Overton before her brother Bud got there. Bud Price managed the Overton Chamber of Commerce. When he and Queen met for breakfast that morning at an Overton café, she asked him to drop by the apartment in the afternoon. She had something important to tell him—a surprise. She wouldn’t give him even a hint at the café.11 Queen told Bud she expected to arrive home early because of the PTA meeting. Classes usually were dismissed an hour early on the afternoon the PTA met. But today the school administration decided to hold the students for the full school day because of the long weekend to come. Now it looked as though Queen wouldn’t be able to leave until at least 3:30, and she hoped Bud hadn’t already come and gone.

  As she chatted with Mrs. Euda Alice Walker and her daughter, Lucille, about the recital, the music teacher was surprised to see Eddie Herman Gauthreaux padding through the hall toward her. The third grader was one of Queen’s special students. Eddie stuttered at times. Queen’s training as a voice teacher included methods to help children overcome stammering. Queen had finished a lesson with Eddie during the last period, and she was puzzled to see him back at her class. The boy explained that he had forgotten his jacket. Miss Price told Eddie to get the jacket. “Hurry so you don’t miss your ride,” she said.

  On the lower level of the school, shop teacher Lemmie Butler plugged in an electric sander. He lifted the power switch. Metal neared charged metal. A blue spark flashed.12

  Part I. Calm

  2

  Daybreak, March 18

  Jolted to consciousness by a dream, Joseph Wheeler Davidson awoke in the dark stillness well before dawn. He stared at his bedroom ceiling, its white paint reflecting midnight blue, and drew in a deep breath.

  Sweat had moistened the bottom sheet, and it clung to the curve of his back, a warm dampness against his skin and muscle. He remained still, hoping not to wake his wife. The bedroom doors of their oil-patch home all were open, and he heard one of his four children stir, then sink back into rest. In these solitary moments, his nightmare continued to flash its vivid menace. He had dreamed of the oil field, of one of his men, of death.

  He
had envisioned a young man perched high on a drilling derrick. His crew’s derrick man, Dewey Deer, was clinging to the wooden tower with one gloved hand, while his other hand coiled wire cables to keep them clear of the churning machinery as another slimy section of drill stem rose from the well. Deer slipped and seemed for a moment to hang suspended in the air. Gravity took hold. Momentum followed. The big, rawboned country boy, accelerating as he fell, arms and legs swinging awkwardly in every direction, twisted in space as his hat shot away from his head. In the final moment, he seemed little more than a blur. Davidson watched the body slam against the wood planks at the derrick’s base and heard the sickening cracks.1

  The derrick was a dangerous place with a dangerous history. The very structure borrowed its name from Thomas Derrick, an Elizabethan-era hangman who invented a more efficient gallows that relied on crane-like wooden beams and pulleys rather than the crude setup of a rope tossed over a plank or branch. Everything had a past and a purpose, and Davidson, a man of reason above all else, believed reality governed every step a man was fated to take. He counted on no stories from a book to elevate his life to heaven, and hell was all around in the chaos of the natural world. The wolf lurking in the storybook forest can hurt no one; the real beast has sharper teeth, keener eyes. Red Riding Hood never had a chance. For Davidson, mystery did not succumb to mysticism. His hard shell had shielded him through the Great War and the Great Depression to New London, an oil boomtown churning inside a bent and muddied country.2

  On this morning, though, logic offered no solace. The ethereal vision of tragedy gripped him, yet lying in his bed he himself could find nothing of which to take hold. Inaction was a palpable fear; better to keep a grip on a 10-pound pipe wrench. Davidson found this feeling unfamiliar, and the unfamiliarity added to his anxiety. He was haunted by the vague whisper of death.

  Though Davidson spurned superstitions and myth, mysticism bore responsibility for the roughneck and his young family coming to East Texas in the first place. Not ten years before, the Louisiana-born Davidson and his wife, Mary, a Pennsylvania native, would have found no reason to venture into the farm country of this region. But for a precipitant wildcatter, a broken drilling rig, and a snake-oil geologist with lunatic methodology, the Black Giant might have remained locked two-thirds of a mile below ground in its vast, 65-million-year-old chamber. The wealth that created jobs for Davidson and his contemporaries was found in East Texas not by reason but by eccentricity and blind luck that aimed a drill into the largest oil field known then to exist.

  The last great oil boom in America originated in an Ardmore, Oklahoma, home nearly a decade before the first gusher was struck. The home belonged to Columbus Marion Joiner, a real estate prospector who had made and lost millions of dollars by selling land and mineral leases—sometimes to several people at once. On a night long before Davidson’s nightmare, Joiner had leaned over his lamp-lit table and frowned.3

  A short man, already bent at the waist from a bout of rheumatic fever, Joiner wanted a closer look at what his partner had just told him was a treasure map to their next fortune.4 Fortune. The word alone powered more of Joiner’s life than any other thing. He was among the last of the Wild West entrepreneurs, half man of confidence and half proprietor of dreams. How a person remembered him depended on how their deal worked out—and at the time it was made, rarely did the buyer or Joiner really know where it was headed. Yet even to those who despised him, he would one day become known as Dad, for being the undisputed father of the East Texas oil rush.

  Standing in his sparse dining room, early in the 1920s, Joiner found no hint of the vast wealth he was destined to find in the puzzling map his partner had unfolded on the table in front of him. In fact, the map gave no hint of anything, as far as Joiner could tell. The furrows in his brow deepened.

  The big man standing next to him uncorked a jug of corn whiskey and poured a couple of fingers into his glass. He ached to know what Joiner thought. The lamp cast both of their shadows against the wall behind them—Joiner’s stooped and narrow as he leaned over the table, A. D. “Doc” Lloyd’s bulky and bearish as he tossed back his head and downed the whiskey in a single gulp.5

  The pair had been friends for years, a yin and yang within the world of quick-money schemes. What Joiner finessed his way around, Lloyd, with 320 powerful pounds on his six-foot frame, bulldozed through with jovial explosions of energy. He would make patently absurd statements—“This scar on my head? Got it in a fight with Pancho Villa, that son of a bitch!”—in ways that made listeners want desperately to believe him. Supposedly he’d once been a physician and pharmacist in Ohio. He boasted of six marriages and innumerable children. Born Joseph Idelbert Durham, he once traveled across the South as a salesman under the guise of “Dr. Alonzo Durham’s Great Medicine Show.” Shortly thereafter he changed his name to A. D. Lloyd to avoid being found by several of his previous wives. He wore khaki clothes; tall, laced boots; and a sombrero over steel-gray hair. He had mined for gold, studied medicine, and practiced as a veterinarian with dubious credentials.6 Lately, he’d begun to fancy himself a geologist. He was a cunning self-promoter, an audacious peddler of absurdities, and—if you didn’t buy what he was selling—one hell of a good time. Joiner, a sweet talker with a calming demeanor, was much more reserved in his approach.

  Columbus Joiner was born March 12, 1860, in Lauderdale County, Alabama, not long before his father, Confederate corporal James M. Joiner, marched away from his farm to fight in the Civil War. Corporal Joiner was killed in 1864 during a battle in Mississippi. Columbus’s mother, Lucy, died when he was a little boy. It was a wonder his hardscrabble life went anywhere. After being raised by an older sister, who taught him to read by using the Bible, Joiner set out on his own at seventeen and picked cotton long enough to realize there had to be an easier way to make a living. He became a politician, studied law in Tennessee, and was elected to the state legislature. Eventually he met back up with his sister in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where she had married a Choctaw man and was living with the tribe. Joiner, who didn’t drink, smoke, or curse, became a land dealer by helping the Native Americans lease tribal property.7 He decided to try his hand as an oil wildcatter after talking it over with Doc Lloyd.

  The map Lloyd had laid on his friend’s table showed the United States. A network of carefully drawn lines overlaid its surface, crisscrossing and diverging in bizarre patterns. Where each of the lines intersected, forming an apex, a new line spun away like a strand of spider’s silk until it crossed another line and created a new apex. The web of pencil markings skewed westward across the Mississippi River and drew to a center near the eastern boundary of Texas.

  “Okay,” Joiner murmured, “what am I looking at?”

  Lloyd’s fleshy face twisted into a sly grin. He had expected Joiner to be mystified. Now he had to be delighted to see a quizzical frown appear on the old wildcatter’s face. Lloyd jabbed a long index finger at one point on the map.

  All the main lines, Lloyd explained, were drawn between the major oil discoveries in the United States. Joiner, who knew the existing terrain of oil country as well as any living person, immediately perceived what his friend had done with the map. Using a straight edge and sharp pencil, the self-proclaimed geologist had connected America’s oil fields in much the same way a child would follow the numbered dots in a picture puzzle. Only this was a puzzle without a picture. Some of the lines were short and others crossed the entire continent.8

  Edwin Drake’s famous 1859 discovery in Titusville, Pennsylvania, tied into the mammoth Seminole field of Oklahoma, which connected to Spindletop in Texas—the great gusher that on January 10, 1901, proclaimed the twentieth century the Age of Petroleum. California’s crude oil fields linked to fields in other states. The maze of pencil lines converged at a spot in East Texas, about midway between Dallas and the Louisiana state line.

  Lloyd called that spot on the map the “apex of apexes.” He told Joiner his best bet was to drill for oil precisely there. Jo
iner knew the area well. He had passed through it often. The tracings on the map suggested a spot in a piney woods region a couple of miles from the sleepy community of London, Texas. The region’s nickname was Poverty Flat.

  Joiner was skeptical. The major oil companies had explored the area and had come up empty-handed. And he knew Lloyd was no more a doctor of geology than Joiner was a guru of oil and gas. It was a gamble, but Joiner knew too that every now and then a lucky strike could send a spout of incredible wealth shooting from the earth. Joiner had spent his life, and several of his life’s fortunes, on gambles such as this. He was ready to bet everything he possessed to win the prize.

  Joiner had given up on Lloyd’s hunch once before, and it had cost him. Although Lloyd had never even taken a formal course in geology, he told Joiner, “I’ve studied the earth more, and know more about it, than any professional geologist now alive will ever know.” The surveys Lloyd furnished his friend and client through the years were so filled with mistakes that other oil-field surveyors dismissed them as works of fiction.9 Yet, had Joiner drilled eighteen feet deeper in the spot where Lloyd had told him years earlier to “punch a hole” in Oklahoma, the wildcatter would have tapped into the heart of the great Seminole oil field, which was ultimately left for others to discover. Following another tip from Lloyd, Joiner would have discovered the great Cement field in Oklahoma had he continued to drill about two hundred feet. Using his peculiar chart of circles and lines on the U.S. map, Lloyd now had pinpointed for Joiner where to drill in East Texas.

  Lloyd clapped his friend on the back and poured himself another shot. Joiner never touched the stuff. “I will never quit a well without drilling eighteen feet deeper,” Joiner quipped.10

  Despite Doc Lloyd’s boasting and Joiner’s later pleas to lease land on widows’ farmland, neither man imagined the enormity of what awaited them. In a quiet corner of a country parched of wealth, they would tap an enormous black reservoir, covering three hundred square miles and at some points as thick as seventy-five feet. With the gushing oil came a flood of roughnecks, squeezed southward by hard times into a muddy stew of prosperity. Historians described it as “the California gold rush, the Klondike, the Oklahoma land rush, and the wildest of past oil booms all rolled into one.”11 The population of Kilgore, near the heart of the Black Giant, ballooned in just days from a village of a few hundred townsfolk to a sprawling town with thousands of newcomers. As the months rolled by, villages of canvas and cardboard dwellings transformed, plot by plot, into towns called Joinerville, Pistol Hill, and New London.