promising that additional cuts would be made each month until Israel again retreated back inside its 1967 border.
The cartel also implemented an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands. Oil dependent nations felt the sharp and sudden pain of an energy crisis, driving them closer to the precipice of chaos and even panic.
Texas was unshaken. But then, as an oilman said over a short glass of Chivas and ice one night, what’s best for the rest of the nation is good for Texas. The price of crude had been ratcheted up from three dollars a barrel to ten dollars a barrel, and wildcatters turned their eyes and their rigs toward great unknown reservoirs of oil which, according to rumors, were still untouched beneath the raw lands of a state that boasted a single white star in its flag.
Sure, oil had its risks. Sure, there were no guarantees. Pocket change was made from guarantees. Real wealth came from real risks. Win some. Lose some. That was their motto and, for many, the dictates of their religion. Just make sure, they said, you win a few more than you lose. It was, they knew, the difference between sipping champagne and draining a warm beer.
Max Williams gently tapped the brakes of his Blazer as he eased into downtown Giddings, dissected sharply by the crossing of Highway 290, which connected Austin to Houston, and Highway 77, which connected somewhere north with somewhere south and not much to speak of in between, including Giddings. The past had not deserted the town. The past had never left at all.
Giddings looked much as it had in the 1950s when it looked much as it had in the 1930s. Not a lot had changed except the license plates, the red light hanging above the intersection and, of course, the price of barbecued ribs. Giddings was a typical small-town Texas farming community, a down-home concoction of pickup trucks, gimme caps, cowboy hats, tobacco cans stuffed in the back pocket of patched and faded denim jeans, and frayed overalls, bleached by the sun. Stooped shoulders. Hard eyes. Square jaws. Boots shuffling along the edge of a dusty street. Backbones that were gun barrel straight. Burnt, rawboned faces that bore the unmistakable scars of long hours and hard work in the glare of the blistering heat.
Driving past them, as they walked along the sidewalk, Max Williams could not tell the rich from the poor if, perhaps, there was any difference between the two. They all looked alike and dressed alike, and a few could hit a moving cat at twenty-five paces with a well-timed spit of tobacco juice.
Giddings may not have been dying, but decay had set in, and its farmers were too worried about today to be concerned with tomorrow or, God forbid, any day beyond that. They were the salt of the earth, the roots of Lee County, the sweaters. They sweated over the price of hogs and cattle. They sweated over their peanut crops. They sweated over the lack of rain that condemned their crops and the hailstones that ruined them. They sweated over the cost of a second-hand pickup truck, a tractor that had plowed its last field and burned out its last engine, a water well gone dry, and another business closing its doors. Sweat and work. Sweat and worry. That was pretty much all they did. In Giddings, there was enough sweat to go around for them all.
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
