crude

The rain had been falling three days when they brought it in.

West worked the floor because he was good on the floor. There were men who could not read the pipe and men who could and he was of the second kind. He had come up from Texas in the spring with nothing and now he had boots and a bunk and the wages of a man whose hands were worth something. He did not think overmuch about the rest of it.

The tool pusher was a man named Coyle who had lost two fingers in the Burkburnett field and wore the hand ungloved as a kind of argument. He said the sand was showing. He said watch your feet.

Then it came.

It came up through eight hundred feet of Pennsylvanian rock and it came fast and there was a sound before the sound, a low working in the ground like something turning over in its sleep, and then the derrick began to sing in every joint and the crown block shrieked above them and the men went back off the floor with their arms up. West did not go back. He stood and watched the black come up out of the hole.

It went a hundred feet into the rain. Higher. It stood in the gray air like a thing that had been waiting in the dark since before there were eyes to see it and had come up now to look around, and it fell on them, and on the mud and the tents and the pale grass, and it fell on West with his face turned up into it.

The men were shouting. Someone was laughing. Coyle had his hat off and was beating it against his leg like a man at a revival.

West stood in it and let it come.

He was thinking of his mother’s kitchen in Nacogdoches and the lamp she kept and the smell of the oil in it and how she had said once that God had put the light in the ground for the poor and it was only the rich who thought otherwise. He was thinking he had a nephew who would eat this winter. He was thinking this was the finest thing he had ever stood inside of.

And underneath that, in a place he had no words for and would not have used them if he had, he was thinking of the buffalo.

He did not know why. He had never seen one. His father had seen them and had told it plain. How they went down in their thousands and lay there and how the men took the tongues and left the rest to swell in the sun until you could smell the country from a day’s ride off. He had been a boy at the table and had not understood what he was being told or why the old man’s voice went the way it did.

He understood it now. He did not want to and he did.

Then it passed. The way such things do.

They capped it in two days and lost the better part of a week’s flow into the mud and the creek and West worked the whole of it with his sleeves black to the shoulder. When it was done he went to the water barrel and looked at himself in it and saw nothing but the dark shape of a head against the sky.

Somebody said they were spudding in a new one on the north lease Monday.

West said he would take it.