A highway stretched out belly flat in all four directions, straight lines and main lines across the gardens of chalk. Max Williams glanced ahead, then into his rearview mirror, and only an occasional oak or pecan tree blocked his line of sight. No derrick. No rig. No stack of pipe. No truck stained the color of crude. Surely, he thought, the reliable and unreliable sources hadn’t all been wrong or mistaken. Those unregulated rumors passed along in the cafes and bars of Frio County described a big chalk well in terms usually reserved for rainbows and pots of gold.
Were all of them talking about the same well? Was one real and one a myth? Which one had been drilled below the rocky landscape of Giddings? Or would the big chalk well turn out to be a myth, too?
The big well.
If it were as good, as predictable, as productive as the report indicated it was, the big well could change his luck and his fortune. Max Williams was sure of it. But where in hell was it? And what was the well of the world doing down in the gardens of chalk, out on a God-forsaken patch of ground that hovered above the howling innards of hell itself?
Chapter 3
Giddings looked for all the world like a ghost town that had not yet given up the ghost when Max Williams turned beside the City Meat Market and drove slowly past a row of old brick buildings, heavily weathered with age, the proud and stoic remains of an earlier century, a faded collection of brick portraits from better days when the town had a soda water bottling works, a couple of mills, a creamery, a blacksmith shop, and a processing plant that shipped out untold carloads of turkeys each year. Railroads came roaring through Giddings from all directions, but by the 1960s, they no longer had any reason to stop and left the remnants of three grand old depots decayed and dying in their wake. The downtown economy took it hard and had never quite recovered. About all the Chamber of Commerce ever dared to brag about was being the home of the oldest peanut company in Texas. Not much, perhaps. But better than nothing.
Casting a broad shadow over Giddings was the Romanesque Revival Lee County Courthouse, fashioned from red brick, laced with white sandstone, and featuring corner porches held in place by great blue granite columns. It was an architectural masterpiece of James Riely Gordon, who had acquired a growing reputation for designing grand and grandiose courthouses throughout Texas. Based on his traditional cruciform plan, it had been his intention, he said, to give the structure lines similar to those found in the New York State Capitol and in several buildings on the campus of Harvard University.
James Riely Gordon, after all, had become a man of national stature, acclaimed for his work as the supervising architect for the famed U. S. Treasury in Washington D. C. His Lee County center for county government had been created with an exceptional sense of drama and theater, critics said, even though, it was an anomaly that in no way reflected the homespun, hardscrabble character of a hard-working region that had little money and absolutely no pretense at all. In reality, the regal building had been created to replace the first courthouse, destroyed by fire in 1879 because firefighters did not have ladders tall enough to reach the upper floors of a structure engulfed by flames. They did what they could to rescue important papers from the shelves but watched as the blaze left their symbol of government in ashes. Like the original, however, the new Lee County Courthouse rose up above Giddings on the top of a divide separating the Colorado and Brazos River Basins. In its yard was the giant Courthouse live oak tree, whose limbs were used, the law said, to hang anybody who needed hanging.
The town had been named for the prosperous and influential Jabez Deming Giddings, who taught school, practiced law, served as the district clerk, established the first bank in Brenham, and was instrumental in building the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. His brother Giles had marched into battle with General Sam Houston at San Jacinto, and on the eve of the final and fateful attack, he wrote his family: I was born in a land of freedom. And rather than to be driven out of the country, I may leave my bones to bleach on the plains of Texas. If I fall, you will have the satisfaction that your son died for the rights of men … If I should see you no more, remember Giles still loves you. As the smoke of battle blackened the field, he fell mortally wounded, dying a few days later.
General Houston decreed that every soldier taking part in the route of Santa Ana’s Mexican army would receive a league of Texas land. Jabez Deming Giddings, with a heavy heart, took the league his brother had bought with blood and staked his claim on land just south of the Brazos River bottom. Around him would grow the communities of Serbin, Dime Box, Fedor, Evergreen, Lexington, and, of course, Giddings.
In time, a syndicate from Houston, headed by William Marsh Rice, who gave his name and his money to build the foundation for Rice University, purchased the entire township and methodically began selling off town lots to the pioneer Anglo-Saxon, German, Norwegian, Czech, Hispanic, African American, and Wendish Lutheran families who had fled their past of social unrest and were betting their hopes on the beckoning farmlands rolling without end on both sides of East, Middle, and West branches of Yegua Creek. The Wends even went so far as to establish a respected German-language newspaper, named Giddings Deutsches Volksblatt, and build a Serbin church that held closely to Old World traditions. Men gathered in the balcony, and women sat with their children on the downstairs pews. The pulpit, however, was located on the balcony level. Men received the full brunt of the sermon, and wives heard only those sanctified words that fell to the bottom floor.
The streets of Giddings were a hundred feet wide and lined with a Methodist Church, Masonic Lodge, a saddle and harness shop, the Granger Store, a millinery shop, and, of course, a saloon or two. The town became and remained a farming community, surrounded with cotton fields, with several gins, an opera house, a bank, and a depot built especially for the San Antonio and Arkansas Pass Railway. Freed slaves from farms and plantations had pointed their wagons to the sparse region as soon as gunfire from the War Between the States began fading from their memories. By 1915, as many as two thousand fortunate souls were basking in the glow of an electric light company, and only twenty some odd miles to the north, the town of Lexington had pinned its fragile hopes on a brick kiln, a tomato packing shed, and pickle, butter, and ice cream factories. Commerce had become just about as good as it could possibly get in Lee County.
When Max Williams drove through town in the spring of 1976, the population of Giddings still hovered near two thousand, give or take a few old soreheads, some staying, and some just drifting through. Almost forty years earlier, the first parade of wildcatters began venturing into the empty farmlands in search for oil. None of them knew anything about the cursed and defiant Austin Chalk. Most merely hoped to stumble across a salt dome because common wisdom in the oil patch, handed down for generations, said oil was seldom found anywhere else.
The country was being battered, its resources drained and emptied, by the Great Depression, the price of cotton had dropped from thirty cents to six cents a pound, and some landowners were on the verge of losing everything they had. A lot had already shuttered their windows and left, although few had any idea about where they were going or if life would be any better when they arrived. They were merely looking for a job, any job, good or bad, and the chance for employment in Lee County was as futile as the hope for rain. Men and women both earned ninety-cents a day picking cotton, and the good pickers could bring in three hundred pounds by sundown. Long lines of wagons circled the gins, and farmers were beginning to talk about re-plowing their fields with peanuts, grain sorghum, and corn. A few were even running cattle, horses, and hogs. For them, money was scarce and drying up. Rain could make a difference, but the skies had all turned dry. Trees lost their shade, and even the clouds drifted elsewhere for lack of interest.
The ground of Lee County possessed a lot of secrets. It was rumored a lead mine lay hidden in the earth, a few farmers down in Serbin did sell plenty of lead for bullets during the Civil War. Somewhere on Yegua Creek near Hranice, a Spanish pack train loaded with the gold payroll for forts and missions had been ambushed, and in the face of certain death, a few of the soldiers buried the gold. Only one survived. He never returned. An R was said to mark the revered spot where as much as ninety thousand dollars worth of gold had been left behind in a hole stained the color