Burke and I had worked together in Iowa for a spell, years back. I wasn’t nothing but an amateur geologist. I’d delivered the mail, ’fore I ruint my leg, and I’d taught a bit of school. I had a wife and two girls back in Iowa, but there weren’t no work for a man like me in those days anywhere but in the fields, so the fields was where I worked. And when Burke called for me, I came because the money was good and I knew him for a man I could put my back against.
I lived in the shacks, like most everyone else who worked the fields. As field geologist, I had one to myself, but it still weren’t much more’n four walls and a bed. There was a desk against the wall, under the one window, and I sat there and wrote letters to Matilda and the girls when I could.
Burke worked the men hard but fair. He strode about the field, barking orders and working with ’em side-by-side. He was as tall and rudely constructed as a derrick hisself, and his hair and beard were as bristly and red as an oil fire. He was missing two-and-a-half fingers on his right hand, lost to one of the walking boards. His left ear was gone and half his face a mess of scars, owing to a mishap with some nitroglycerine.
He’d been married back when I knew him, but his wife had since passed and left him with a pretty little dark-eyed girl who, I gathered, lived with some spinster aunt at the hotel in town. Whenever I rode in with Burke on one errand or another, he’d always insist we stop by the hotel so he could buy her a root beer or an ice cream, and pick her up in his long arms and spin her above his head. It was a sweet sight, seeing how he doted on her. The only thing it made me regret was my own girls being so far away, and how I was missing watching them grow up.
* * *
I’d been at the field three weeks when Burke rode up with a pair of horses, told me to mount up and follow him. We rode out past the edge of the field, past the last of the derricks, to a spot where a copse of trees once stood, ’fore they were all dragged down and sawed up for timber. The ground was swept as smooth and flat as if it was the floor of some fella’s house.
“This here,” Burke said, “is what I bought this land fer. There was somethin’ here when I come out, a wheel a stones like them the Injuns set aside, though I could’n find nobody from ’round here could say which tribe mighta put ’em up. I come out ’fore the men, moved them stones myself, by hand. Didn’ want nobody gettin’ spooked off. They’s a wild mix a folks works th’ fields, as you well know, an’ some of ’em are too superstitious fer their own good. But look here; I don’ think this was no burial ground nor nothin’ of th’ sort. I think them Injuns, whichever ones they was, knowed they was somethin’ unner this ground an’ they marked th’ spot.”
“You mean oil?” I asked. I knew some folks believed oil was medicinal, that they’d set up shacks and stagecoach stops around tar springs and drunk the black stuff that bubbled up to cure everything from gout to infertility. And I knew the Indians were better geologists than anybody’d ever given ’em credit for, better able to find the flow of underground rivers and stratas of good rock than they’d any right to be. So, I didn’t suppose it was unreasonable to think they mighta known there was oil down there, or marked the place to find it.
Burke just shrugged at me, didn’t answer my question straight. Instead, he said, “Gonna build me a derrick here. Gonna dig deep, deeper’n any well we dug so far. I want you on it, ’cause I know I kin count by you.”
And I didn’t think nothing more of it, save that I was proud to be trusted, to be depended on. The next day, we started digging.
* * *
The digging didn’t go easy. It seemed like every day, there was something new went wrong. A storm come up and dropped bucketfuls of hail on the whole field, blew a derrick over. Two of the men got into it over something, and one pulled a knife and killed the other. Three of the men took sick and couldn’t work. Four more vanished over the course of a week and weren’t never found. And, through it all, the pipe went down and down and down.
We passed over several promising-looking strikes, ’cause they weren’t whatever Burke was looking for, and the men working the towers got restless. Still we went down and down, until finally we hit something else.
There was a sound come up from the hole, like a gasp. The men figured we’d hit a pocket of gas and everyone backed off in case it was like to burn. Then the derrick shook all the way up and the ground seemed to slide a little under our feet. There come a noise from the hole like I ain’t never heard the ground make in all my years. When I was a boy, my pa’d known a man who worked a whaling ship and he said that whales sang to one another. He’d put his hands together over his mouth and blown a call that he said was as close as he could do to what they sounded like. This sounded like that call.
All the men went back another pace, not knowing if maybe we’d hit a sinkhole, or God knows what. There was another groan, then an old cave stink, and then the black stuff started coming up around the pipe like a tide. I’d seen gushers in my day, the pressurized wells that blew the tops off the derricks, but this weren’t the same. This weren’t no geyser; this were a flood, the oil pouring up from under the ground like a barrel that’s been overturned. Everybody was silent for another minute and then the men gathered ’round all cheered, ’cause they knowed we’d finally hit whatever it was we’d been aiming at.
* * *
I’d expected Burke to be blown over by our success, but when he come out to look at the well, his smile didn’t touch his eyes none.
That night, he invited me to eat dinner with him in his shack, which weren’t really much better’n mine, though it had a coupla rooms. I remembered his wife and little girl had lived in it with him when he started the field, back before his wife got carried off by whatever it was carried her off.
Burke served me a dinner of baked beans and set out a bottle of whiskey on the table between us. He seemed distracted, thoughtful. “Pensive,” as they say. He told me I’d done a good job on the well, but didn’t seem to want to talk much more about it.
“I got no need ta tell you what oil is,” he finally said, after we’d drained most of the bottle. “Dead stuff. Rotted a thousand years, pressed down by th’ dirt. You know who th’ first wildcatters in this country consulted ’fore diggin’? Not geologists. Mediums. Spiritualists. They knowed, even then. Hell, mebbe they knowed better. Mebbe it’s us has forgot.”
He stopped and raised his glass, only to find it empty. He sat it back down and continued, without refilling it, “Somethin’ dies an’ you put it down in th’ dirt; it’ don’ disappear. It stays, forever. They’s not a place on this earth somethin’ ain’t died, where somethin’ don’ lay buried. All this world’s a boneyard an’ us just ghouls crouched on top, breakin’ open tombs. I made my peace wi’ it. A man does, ta live th’ life we live. But here…” He reached over to a sideboard and took up an old, worn black Bible and opened it up. From the back, he took out a scrap of paper, brown and worn smooth by years of handling, and passed it to me. “Kin you read that?” he asked.
I could, but only just. The handwriting was careful but uneven, like it’d been copied down slow by a palsied hand. It was just one line: THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE.
“Took that off a feller came ta shut down th’ field,” Burke said. “Fancied hisself some kinda preacher, though nota-th’ Word a God. He said all sortsa things, crazy things, ’bout there bein’ somethin’ underneath us, somethin’ that dreamed though it was dead. He had a gun. Managed to light a buncha th’ place on fire. Took an ax ta one-a-th’ derricks, ’fore I shot him wi’ my rifle. He had that in his pocket. Can’t rightly say why I kept it, but I thought about it a lot since. An’ damned if it ain’t right, just a bit. Oil, right? It’s dead, jus’ dead stuff crammed down there in its tomb, but it can lay there forever, cain’t it? An’ when we dig it up, there it is, waitin’ to come out, fulla heat an’ fire an’ life. What does that tell ya?”