chapter 18
Friday, September 7, 7:00 a.m.
Philip rocked slowly back and forth on the veranda in William McGowan’s favorite pine rocker as he read yesterday’s edition of the Galveston News. He stopped to stretch his stiff legs and rest them on top of his two packed suitcases.
In the distance, the sky was hidden in dusk like night made visible and the air was thick and sweet with the wafting scent of oleanders.
He looked up at the overcast morning sky and took a sip of his drink. A heavy swell rolling in from the southeast. Part of that trouble they had down in the Keys, no doubt.
Philip took another sip of the McGowan’s best Napoleon brandy, savoring the slow liquid flame of the liquor sliding down to warm his insides and fortify his resolve. He had been up most of the night, dozing only for minutes at a time, hoping to meet Bret when he returned.
Miss Caldwell was right. Bret was in the grip of something evil. He took another sip of the brandy.
So what would Bret gain if he told him?
Lorena lost her husband and he lost his sweet Janeen. If one word had crept out, he would have been lynched. Could still happen if some of these folks ever knew.
He tapped the side of his glass.
Lorena was a good, Christian woman. She lived the Lord’s word the best she could and loved him as a man under the eyes of God. He loved her as his wife and that troubled boy was the closest he’d ever have to a son of his own.
Philip put the glass down on the veranda table. He slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and touched the top of the small vial. He prayed Miss Caldwell was right because this was the last decent thing he could do to help Lorena’s only child.
He opened the palms of his coarse, weathered hands and puzzled for a few seconds over the new indentations added to the years of patchwork lines already there. They were from his fingernails.
No matter. Bret is the only one left now and he’s got to know before he runs off and does something foolish with that Armstrong girl. That bastard Hellreich’s family and the McGowan’s bound together? Not while there was a breath still in this body. No sir! I won’t bow to that son-of-a-bitch ever again.
Philip jerked to his right at the ricocheting backfire of the approaching automobile. He stood and watched Bret turn the vehicle around the corner and weave its way up the street toward the house. The mechanical carriage fired another volley of black smoke as it bounced over the pavement stones from the road to the lane way leading up to the garage.
Instead of driving into the garage as he usually did, Bret made a sharp left turn on the lane way and drove straight up to the front of the veranda. The clanging and clattering of the contraption only stopped after Philip repeatedly yelled and pointed at the motor.
Bret stepped down from the front seat and stumbled, catching his balance, but still wavered on his feet. He took hold of the handrail and took slow, heavy steps up the stairs. “How thoughtful. I hope you weren’t waiting up all night jus’ for l’il ol’—” He coughed until tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He frantically felt around the pockets of his jacket until he found what he was looking for.
Bret pulled out the brown bottle of cough remedy from his inside pocket, unscrewed the cap, and tipped the mouth of the bottle up to his lips. “Goddamn it!” He shook the bottle and tried again. “Just a taste! All I need is a taste until—” He turned and threw the bottle onto the grass of the front yard.
“Here, Sir.” Philip held out the blue vial in his hand. “I always put some aside in case of emergencies.”
“Good, dependable Philip.” He snapped the vial out of Philip’s hand. “How would mother and I have ever survived without you?” Bret pulled the cork stopper with his teeth and spat it into the palm of his hand. “So why didn’t you leave after the war? You were a free man.”
Philip looked away. What do you want me to say, Bret? That I loved your mother? That Lorena and I lived like man and wife in secrecy while you were away in boarding school or out gallivanting for months on end? Or that you were both the closest I ever had to a real family after my Janeen died?
Philip smiled. “Well, sir, I guess you could say that after all those years I got used the Gulf climate around here. This weather agrees with me and my old bones.”
Bret tilted his head back and took a quick sip, then another. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his hand. After a few seconds, he opened his bloodshot eyes again and put the stopper back into the vial.
“Better now, Mr. McGowan?”
He nodded and put the vial in the pocket of his suit coat. Stepping up onto the veranda, Bret looked down at Philip’s shoes. “A little late in the season for a summer vacation don’t you think, Philip?”
“Trains run out of Houston pretty much the same no matter what time of year it is.”
Bret looked at Philip as if forcing his red, squinting eyes open to let in the light. “Lord, but it’s hot so early in the morning.” He completely unfastened his loose, hanging tie and dropped it on the veranda.
He stumbled past Philip and dropped down into his father’s pine rocker. Bret rolled his head to one side and stared at the bottle on the rosewood veranda table. “Father’s best,” he said, picking up Philip’s glass. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything . . . but I didn’t get an invitation to your bon voyage party.”
Philip glanced at his shoes.
Bret raised the glass. “Well, cheers, happy trails, Godspeed, don’t forget to write, and all that.” He tilted his head back and finished the brandy.
Philip walked across the creaking floor planks and placed his hands on the top railing. “There was a time I would have taken that as a compliment, Mr. McGowan.” He looked out at the passing carriages on the street.
“What’s that?”
Philip dug his nails into the wood handrail and turned to face Bret again. “Being your father’s best. Yes sir, there was a time, but those times are long gone now, like your father and your mother, and soon . . .”
He glanced down at the freshly filled brandy glass in Bret’s hand. The liquor seemed to burn with an orange flame when the sunlight caught the glass. “Sometimes a man just lets himself get swallowed up, like when he swims out too far in the Gulf and the warm waves wash over him, putting him to sleep as they drag him under.”
“Mother always told me you should have been a preacher.” Bret raised the brandy glass again. “To His Most Reverend, Philip Harper.” He took a drink. “Ministering only to Galveston’s finest families before, during, and after their fall.”
He held the glass out to Philip. “Won’t you toast yourself, my good man? Lord knows you deserve it, or won’t you share this last refreshing libation with the bad blood son of your ol’ massa?”
Philip stared at Bret, locking the drunken man’s bloodshot eyes with the unwavering cold glare of his. It pained him to see this once proud young man turning into a tarnished imitation of himself, eaten from the inside by the corrosion and storms of his past.
Philip stepped across the squeaking boards and stood silently in front of Bret. He snatched the glass out of the young man’s outstretched hand and threw back the rest of the brandy in one gulp. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, dropped the glass on the veranda, and ground the shattered fragments into the boards with the sole of his shoe.
“Yes sir, and there’s one more thing ol’ Philip will share with his dead massa’s boy, before you ruin what’s left of the good in your family’s name and property.”
He bent down, grabbed hold of the wood armrests, and looked Bret straight in the face. “How does it feel to be wanting to mix your blood with the kin folk of a man who helped to spill yours?”
Bret puckered his brow. “Take it easy on me, old man, it’s been a long night, Miss Armstrong and I danced—”
Philip started clapping his hands and whistling as if kicking up his heels at an old-fashioned barn dance. “That’s it boy, you keep dancing and skirt chasing your life away until all the money’s gone. Then who you going to turn to when the oil well keeps coming up dry? Your new wife and her family?”
He stopped clapping and rubbed his hands to soothe the strain. “Wasn’t it enough for respectable folks to hang your father like that and get away with it, but then turn on your mother too?”
“What the hell you going on about, you crazy ol’ coot?” Bret pushed Philip away. He stumbled back but retained his stance. “You know how to take liberties, Philip.” Bret reached down and raised the uncorked bottle to his lips. “But this time,” he took a short sip, still keeping the bottle near his lips. “I think you’re drunker than I am.”
Philip looked down at Bret’s dusty shoes. “I wish, sir, I could say that was true.” He raised his head slowly, and was struck by the furrowed strain on Bret’s face.
Bret lowered his father’s brandy bottle and leaned back against the wall of his house. “All those years ago . . . I was just a boy . . . eight or nine. How can anyone remember anything for sure?”
“I can, Mr. McGowan, because I had to stay behind. I remember up north in Gainesville like it was yesterday.”
Bret lurched out of the rocker and leaned against the wall for support. Straightening his posture, his ruddy face seemed to bleach bone white, the flushed color draining down somewhere inside his body. He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“All this talk about ancient, evil days. It’s enough to split a man’s head trying to recollect. All I know is . . . mother said father insisted we stay home before—” He shook his head again and raised his arms in a hopeless gesture. “This is ridiculous. I can barely remember what I did thirty-hours ago let alone thirty-eight years.”
Philip looked down at the floorboards. “Wish it was that easy for me, sir, but I couldn’t get away. I was about to go when they showed up at the door.”
The color was returning to Bret’s face. He breathed heavily, his eyes, tight and sharp, pointed into Philip’s. “Who . . . who came to our home?” He placed the brandy bottle back on the side table.
Philip raised his gaze again. “Boland, Haines, Ragget. They’re all dead now, and that decrepit old pervert Weems soon enough, God willing. Letting time heal all the old wounds. That’s the way your mother wanted it to be.” He looked out at the swooping gulls over the water. “I would take her out to every cemetery in town so she could spit on their graves.”
Bret seized Philip by both his shoulders and shook. “And after all this time you’ve said nothing? I asked you a question! Who the hell showed up at our Gainesville ranch?”
Philip stared into Bret’s livid eyes. The dead be damned now for what they’ve done. There’s nothing more either one of them could do. He’d kept his promise and now he was free of it.
He took a deep breath before he spoke. “Mr. McGowan, I’m nothing but another ol’ Uncle Tom to him now, so he doesn’t remember me, but I’ll always remember him. The youngest buck in the gang—no more than fourteen or fifteen—thought he was better and smarter too than the rest of that liquored up trash. He didn’t seem to approve of what they were doing but he was there all the same.” Philip glanced down at Bret’s hand still gripping his arm. Bret let go and looked away.
Philip stepped to the veranda railing. “All of them firing their guns in the air, hollering ‘Save Texas,’ as if doing the devil’s work was something patriotic. You’d never know him now with all his sophisticated airs and the ‘Doctor’ before his name, but that night—”
“Hell . . . Hellreich?” Bret rushed up to Philip. “Caden Hellreich was in our house?”
“They didn’t call him that then. Gus, short for Augustus, likely.” Philip leaned on the railing and looked back out to the Gulf. “You must have gotten away just before they broke into the attic. Your mother sent me for help but I’m sorry I wasn’t there to stop them.”
He looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers. “That night they were something less than men; the worst your kind can be, not even the lowest animal does that.”
Bret’s face contorted as if he had been struck from behind on the back. He shook his head again and brushed back his uncombed hair with his hand.
“Sir, there was nothing you could have done to prevent what happened.”
“The hell there wasn’t.” He rubbed his sunken eyes with the palm of his hand. “I know, I promised mother. I had to warn my father. I remember running and running until—”
Bret shuddered as if suffering a seizure. He jiggled his head and rubbed the sweaty stubble on his face. He looked past Philip as though looking at someone far in the distance. “Sometimes when I dream, there are faces and voices circling us like birds. Mother is holding me close and she screams.”
He brushed past Philip and leaned against the top rail of the veranda with his hand. “I wake up to men’s laughter ringing in my ears. Echoes of voices, but none of them are my father.” His head drooped like a condemned man and he rubbed his temples. “It was my fault. They hung my father because I couldn’t keep the promise to my mother.”
Bret turned around again and walked back, his sagging, tired eyes searching Philip’s face.
“Mr. McGowan?” Philip took a step closer and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Bret, your mother would have done anything to save your life. She did what she had to and that’s why you still had each other after the war was over. And that, sir, is why you still have me.”
“But I could have helped!”
“No sir. Your father and I both knew the home guard would be waiting. Your father arrived on the eleven o’clock a day early. They were rounding up whole families at the station but he told me to pay Captain Boland. As long as you and your mother never showed your faces Boland promised they wouldn’t hurt you or Lor—”
Philip let his words drop to the floor, wishing he could crush them under his shoe like the crystal of the brandy glass. “I didn’t tell your mother until after the war was over. She didn’t resent you, Bret, because you couldn’t keep your promise but she was angry with your father for having lied to her.” He lowered his gaze. “And that’s part of the reason she never told you. She needed someone to help her to carry the weight of sadness and pain because your father wasn’t there to do it.”
Bret opened his eyes. “Wha—what? You both knew . . . all those years and didn’t tell me?”
Philip wet his dry lips then exhaled heavily. “There was talk later. That’s how I learned their names. The Hellreich’s moved outside of Abilene after the war was over. I heard they lost their cotton fortune to the Boll Weevil a few years later.”
Bret grabbed the brandy bottle off the side table. He whirled around and threw it against the door of his automobile, splattering the glass and liquor all over the red metal surface. “I’ll kill that lying son-of-a-whore rapist!” He rung his hands in the air and lumbered toward the steps. “I bet Rebecca knows too. God damn it, she must know.”
Philip reached out and pulled Bret’s arm, stopping him before he landed on the first step. “Look at you. That’s why your mother never told you and I swore I wouldn’t either until I thought you were man enough to understand and let it be. I thought you were, but . . .” He shook his head. “Let him be now for all our sakes.”
Bret pushed Philip’s hand off his shoulder. “Why? Have I embarrassed him to death in front of polite society because I’m seducing his niece? I’ve never put a hand on that bastard, but I’ll sure as hell do more than that now.”
“If a man takes time to count his blessings, then he can take time to enjoy them. Your family was lucky. Your father had converted all his state bank notes to solid, Yankee greenbacks and transferred everything up north to New York before the war. He risked everything to save his family.”
“Bravo for dear ol’ dad.” Bret clapped his hands. “To have had the foresight to provide better for his family in death than in life.” He raised his head and narrowed his gaze down on Philip. “But that changes nothing.”
Philip squeezed Bret’s arm with all his strength. “Your mother knew you’d go off half-cocked screaming for revenge and then where would you be?” He slapped Bret across the face. “Swinging from a rope just like your daddy.”
Bret pulled back and drew his hands into fists. “How dare you ever lay a hand on a—” His creased eyes opened wide and flat with rage. For a few moments, the sound of Bret’s labored breathing filled the silence between them.
Philip looked away. So this is how it ends between us too. What were you thinking, old man? The way it’s been is the way it will always be. He heard a slight movement in the grass. He turned and caught the thin outline of a man dashing behind a sand dune.
Something about the fleeting man was familiar and unsettling. When Bret was a boy that dune at the edge of the grass above the tide had been their favorite place to watch the ships come and go.
A few months before Bret’s return, honeymooning tourists had discovered his childhood sanctuary and turned it into a lover’s retreat. Piece by piece, every little treasure of their past was being taken away, leaving only the failing memory of its possession.
Philip stared at the dune, curious to see if the swift stranger would reappear. When he did not, he turned back to face his haggard friend.
“I won’t be back from the site until late. I’ll eat dinner with the crew.” Bret turned and hurried down the veranda stairs toward his automobile.
Watching him drive away, Philip felt an embarrassing trickle on his cheek. He rubbed the corner of his eye with his palm and stared at the unfamiliar moisture on his crinkled skin.
Bret’s medicine was on the pantry table with a note on the prescribed dosage. That was the most he could promise Gabrielle. The rest was in God’s hands now.
Philip plodded back to the front door of the McGowan house and pulled out his key. When the bolt was closed tight, he slid the key through the front mail slot then picked up his suitcases. No reason to look back again because there was nothing more to see.
Nothing, anymore, but ghosts.
Bret folded his arms across his chest and ground his teeth as he watched the Spindletop drill shake and spew up nothing but more sand and clay.
The exhausted oil crew had been working the rickety old rotary drilling rig under the oven-baking heat of the Texas sun for several hours now. The greasy, sweaty men shook their heads and cursed among themselves.
Standing around the hundred-foot wood derrick, the men paused to ladle water to their parched mouths and cast condemning stares at their boss.
Bret watched the turning rotary table connected to the rusty, clattering steam engine by a steel sprocket chain with links as big as his fist. Deep in the ground he imagined the eighteen-inch bit finally cutting through at any moment and the sudden release of pressure would prove he had been right all along.
The twenty-year-old 10 HP Nagle drilling engine had struggled to keep up the pace for three days and nights as the two hired shifts worked twelve hours each.
At this rate, Bret would be spending most of his money on labor costs and without fresh investment capital he wouldn’t be able to afford the new rotary drilling rig suited for sandy terrain. He knew it and the men knew it too that without the proper rig they might never hit pay dirt.
The imposing day-foreman, George Pike, stood by the water pump with a smaller man and pointed down at the muddy sluice flowing past their boots. He waved at Bret and made the twist-off sign with his hands. Bret had no choice but to trust George’s judgment. He signaled to the steam operator to stop the engine.
“What’s the problem, George?”
The stocky man wiped his face with his greasy, black bandana. “There’s a break for sure.” He held a muddy piece of pipe casing in his hand. “I’m surprised that old drilling pipe don’t break up even more. We still on schedule for delivery of the new rig this week?”
Bret glanced away for a moment. “How deep?”
George shrugged. “Impossible to tell, Mr. McGowan. Best we find out, though, before it gets dark.”
“How far you down?”
“A good four hundred feet.”
Bret cursed under his breath. He had no choice but to agree even though the cost of each twist-off was burning up his own money at a rate he couldn’t sustain.
He watched the crew as they began lifting out every joint of pipe, breaking out and unscrewing four joints at a time in a length called a “stand” which they stood up in the derrick. Hopefully they would find the broken piece before nightfall and replace it with a new joint so the next shift would be ready to resume drilling.
It was almost sundown when they finally found the break on a stand near the three-hundred-and-sixty-foot mark. The crew went to work “fishing” down the hole for the rest of the drill-stem.
They used a pulley and a rope with a tool at one end that reminded Bret of a gigantic pair of ice tongs. They lowered it down over the pipe, jiggling it up and down trying to catch the broken stem of pipe still lodged in the hole.
A few minutes later one of the men yelled. “I think I got something!”
George and the other crewmen pulled on the rope. The foreman glanced at Bret. “We could use a hand here, Mr. McGowan, if you’re not too busy.”
“Can’t you get it out?”
“Feels like it’s wedged. We’ll need every man.”
Bret took off his hat and jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Slipping on a pair of leather work gloves, he grabbed hold of the end of the rope and pulled with all his strength.
“Harder!” George roared.
The men strained and pulled with all their combined might. Bret could feel a weight dislodging, sliding back and up through the muddy hole. They were making ground, step by step, until suddenly, they couldn’t budge another inch.
“That’s it. Let it go,” George ordered.
The men dropped the rope and sat on the sand to catch their breath.
Bret hunched over, gasping, and looked at the rim of the two-foot wide hole. “Where is it?”
George shook his head. “The overshot didn’t do it. Feels like it jammed it in tighter. Happens sometimes. The night shift will have to lower the jar and try to shake the casing loose.”
Bret wasn’t expecting to hear the cavernous, pounding blows of the metal jar again so soon. The sound was like some ancient buried god hammering its fists against the earth. “How long before we’re back up again and working?”
“Lars and his crew will do their best. Morning if we’re lucky.”
A young freckle-faced crewman in dirty coveralls ran up to Bret. “Western Union, Mr. McGowan. Just came in across the wire.” He handed Bret the folded telegram.
Bret unfolded it and read silently to himself. Sorry for delay. Investors still not convinced. Advise closing site until tropical storm moving northward over Cuba passes. Will return next week. Higgins & Lucas.
He swore and ripped up the telegram. Close the site until a summer storm passes? We might as well close down for good then because all the money will be down that Goddamn hole in the ground!
George wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Is there a problem, Mr. McGowan?”
“No.” Bret stared at the derrick. “The morning, you say. Are you sure we’ll be up and running by then?”
“Well sir, old rigs and steam engines like this can only take so many years of hard work, in particular when you’re running ’em ’round the clock.”
George gestured toward the exhausted, grease-smeared faces of the crew, their eyes watching Bret. “That’s why the boys and me were wonderin’ which day you expect that new, heavy rotary rig and drilling engine will be delivered.”
Bret kept his attention on the now-silent derrick. “I told you . . . any day now. Higgins and Lucas are still in Boston. I can’t do anything until they get back.”
“I see, sir. Then might I ask when you and your partners plan on paying for last month’s work?”
Bret whirled around, barely able to contain his rage. “Tell your men Higgins and Lucas return next week. Every man will be paid for every hour he’s worked. If they don’t like it they can leave now.” Without waiting for the foreman’s reply, he stormed back to his automobile, passing by the hateful stares of the spitting crewmen.