“BY THE WAY,” SAL SAID, as she began stacking dishes. “Next time I introduce you to somebody, don't wear that hat. You look like a darn fool with it on.” My cheeks burning, I tossed my Lone Ranger hat onto the table. At that moment, Little Louie came in with a tray of coffee cups. We went to the window and watched the prisoners climb into the hospital van. The teenage boy got in first; the other men filed on next, while Sib and Jordie Coverdale stood talking to John. In his dapper raccoon coat and chocolate-brown Fedora, he looked every inch Gentleman Jack, and I thought uneasily of the way he had glanced around our living room. Maybe he thought we didn't deserve our home. Or maybe he didn't mind, because Morley's family came from the wrong side of the tracks like the Pilkies so he was just damn glad that somebody like my father had made a success of things. While Little Louie and I watched, he grabbed Sib's cigarette out of his mouth and flung it into the air. He laughed as the burning tip of the cigarette plummeted downwards. Jordie laughed, too. Turning our way, John spotted Little Louie and me by the window. He waved. I didn't move a muscle. Then he waved again, so I waved back. Beside me, Little Louie made a soft, astonished noise in her throat as he leapt up into the bus, taking the steps three at a time.
7
I WAS TOO SHY TO TELL JOHN HOW MUCH I IDENTIFIED WITH Mac Vidal, who had been born an orphan in Vergennes, Vermont, and was brought up by relatives in a canal boat on Lake Champlain. Before he struck oil and found his long-lost father, my great-grandfather had a pretty hard time of things, which made me feel that he would understand my situation. Not just with Hindrance, but with Morley. It was my intention to borrow hope from Old Mac's success.
The oil boom had started before my great-grandfather arrived in Oil Springs. By the late 1850s, settlers realized that money could be made from oil seeping out of the gum beds in Enniskillen swamp. They drilled for oil to make kerosene, which provided good reading light. Before then, everyone used candles except for the rich, who could afford whale oil. But after a Canadian geologist, Abraham Gesner, found a way to refine kerosene from oil, people began using kerosene lamps, which burned at the rate of a quarter cent an hour. Soon men from all over the eastern United States and Canada came to Enniskillen County hoping to strike it rich.
My great-grandfather was one of those men, although he didn't start out looking for oil. As I'd told John, Mac Vidal stumbled by accident onto the boom in Southwestern Ontario. In 1862, he had come north looking for his father and he was crewing on a lumber scow on Lake St. Clair when an oil gusher blew on the Canadian side. The oil poured down the streams and rivers faster than the men could store it. Old Mac forgot about his father and followed the oil to its source in Enniskillen County, where he began drilling for oil himself. He was helped by his aunt, Old Louie, who brought along her meagre life savings, which came in handy when Mac Vidal owed $291 to another oilman. Old Louie auctioned off her things, including the mahogany cabinet that her Huguenot ancestors had brought over from England, and my great-grandfather paid off his debt and went back to drilling. When his oil gusher came in, he bought back Old Louie's things and they moved from their shanty in Oil Springs to the mansion he built in Petrolia.
After the mansion was finished, he called it The Great House and brought his father to live with old Louie and himself.
In my composition, I had been trying to describe the extraordinary details of old Mac's early life. Little Louie was encouraging me â or pretending to, that is. I couldn't help thinking my aunt wished she were back writing newspaper stories instead of researching our family history. She considered Big Louie's enthusiasm for our past “a bourgeois embarrassment,” and she was fond of reminding my grandmother that Leon Trotsky said North American workers would rise up one day, and families like the Vidals, who considered themselves members of the educated upper class, would become social democrats like my aunt and her friends.
THE MORNING AFTER JOHN PILKIE came for tea, I overheard my aunt and grandmother arguing in the guest bedroom. I crept across the hall and peeked through the crack between the wall and the door. My aunt was in bed in her pyjamas, peering at a letter through a small magnifying glass. Newspaper pages lay scattered on the floor along with three apple cores, an empty box of Tampax, and a half-full package of Sweet Caps.
“Look at this mess, Little Louie. When will you grow up?” Big Louie picked up the apple cores and dumped them into a wastebasket, and then she started in on the newspapers. I waited for her to pick up the empty box of Tampax, but my grandmother ignored it, maybe because it shocked her. Sal hid her boxes of sanitary napkins in the towel cupboard and she would have died of shame if anyone found them.
“Mom, take it easy. I have to help Mouse with Old Mac's letters, remember?” Little Louie waved her cigarette at the bundle of papers on the bed. My grandmother said in a softer tone: “Well, I'm glad to hear that, Louisa. It's time you stopped thinking about yourself. Mary needs you.”
“Mom, Mary seems pretty grown-up to me.”
“Nonsense. She's under the influence of that woman.”
“You mean the next Mrs. Morley Bradford?
“He'll never marry Sal. She's his ex-nurse,” my grandmother said.
“I wouldn't be so sure. You didn't send me up here to look after Mary and you know it. You want to keep me from seeing Max. Mom, that girl tricked him. She told him she was pregnant when she wasn't.”
“Well, she's married to him now, isn't she, Louisa?”
“It's not Max's fault. She lied to him.”
“Dearie, we've been over this a hundred times and I'm as sorry as you are about the situation. But you'll have to move on. You need somebody solid, who can give you a comfortable life.”
“I don't want somebody like that. They're boring,” Little Louie shouted.
“Lower your voice, dear. Little pitchers have big ears.” Big Louie started for the door. “I have to go now and see about lunch.” I flattened myself against the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her saunter down the hall, her silk kimono floating behind her like a kite tail. When the coast was clear, I stared again through the crack in the door; this time, a faint, flowery smell tickled my nose. “I thought I heard you outside,” Little Louie whispered on the other side. “Look, don't pay any attention to what Mom and I said. It was just girl talk. Do you want to read old Mac's letters?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. There was no point explaining that Morley was too busy for a romance with Sal. Or asking my aunt about Max Falkowski and his shotgun wedding. I'd heard Sal call a girlfriend's baby “premature” when it was born seven months after the wedding ceremony, but what Little Louie said about Max's wife was something new: women pretending to be pregnant so men would marry them. It was unspeakable business, so for once, I tactfully avoided a dangerous subject, and accepted the letter my aunt handed me. It had been sent to Old Louie, my great-great aunt, and there was no doubt about its author. You could tell it was my great-grandfather by his bred-in-the-bone optimism. It tainted our family history with myth, a propensity (and yes, I knew I was using the word properly), a propensity I was guilty of myself. For instance, when he was an old man, my great-grandfather claimed it had been a beautiful, hot June afternoon when his ship floundered in the oil slick. This was one of Old Mac's exaggerations; in 1862, June on the Upper Lakes had been sunless and cold. He also claimed that the oil danced with iridescent lights. Crude oil is dark green as it spurts from the ground and it only sparkles if the oil is thinly spread, but according to the letters he wrote as a young man, that afternoon the oil lay as thick on the water as black mud.
8
June 30, 1862,
Oil Springs, Canada West
Dear Aunt Louisa:
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Thank you for giving me the letter Father sent Mother in which he stated that she was to forward her letters to him via Fort Gratiot, Michigan. I believe circumstances beyond Father's control were the reason he failed to contact us after Mother died in childbirth. I hope Father won't hold it against me that I was baptized a Vidal and not a Davenport.
Will you believe me if I say I have profited from seeing the waters of Lethe first hand? It happened after we left Detroit. The evening before, the lake was clear of oil; but, the next morning, it was overcast and cold and the frost had froze off the tails of cows on the American side. Soon the reason for the gloom became apparent. A half hour out of port, our scow ran into an oil slick. It covered the surface of the lake for miles with a black and vile-smelling pitch.
The smell of rotten eggs was overpowering. I could hardly breathe in the stench. My eyes burned and all of us in the crew cried like whipped spaniels. In no time the smelly pitch coated the hull of our ship from bow to stern; it is no exaggeration to say we resembled a bark from the underworld.
The oil was from geysers in a hamlet called Oil Springs and it stopped shipping on the Upper Lakes. A single spark from a ship's boiler room would have set the oily waters ablaze. So we were obliged to head for Mitchell's Bay on the Canadian shore along with all of the Mackinaw fishing fleet.
After the lakes cleared, we ran into oil again in the marshlands below Wallaceburg, where the filthy stuff had finished off most creatures. The tall grasses along the riverbanks were flattened by oil, and we saw helpless sandpipers and crows flopping in the ooze. Strange to think this place is called “The Venice of America.” In the marsh, we used pike poles to kill off the rattlesnakes, which crawled on board to escape the oil. A tug came and towed us up river, and that is when my fortunes changed. I hope you will not think poorly of me for jumping ship in Wilkesport, a real boomtown, very rough-and-ready. I felt compelled to see what had unleashed such a catastrophe.
So I followed an Indian trail along Black Creek and found myself standing on a vast floodplain when I came out of the oak forest. Not a single tree had been left standing. Tall, three-legged structures covered the plain, which resounded with the click-click of metal drills. I counted 200 oil derricks. Possibly there are a great many more. On the plain, men were making bungholes in barrels and others were engaged in filling them. Still others waded through puddles of oil to stack a wagon with the barrels. On a ridge, men stood stirring huge smoking kettles.
I was looking at the aftermath of the Bradley gusher, which had coated our ship with oil. From the mouth of the Bradley Well, where oil bubbles up in every direction, there is a perpendicular tube some sixteen feet high and four inches in diameter from which the oil is conducted into six or seven large storage tanks. A great deal of oil spills over and is lost. A stopcock has been inserted into the top of the tube to prevent waste but even so it overflows. Imagine, if you can! When it blew, this well produced 5,000 barrels of oil a day.
Alas, I had no cash to lease a rig so I am back at canalling again, dragging a stone boat stacked with oil barrels fifteen miles through the swamp to the Wyoming railroad station. In answer to your question, I am too busy to find Father, although I have heard that a man with Father's name was living at Maxwell, a Utopian Community on Lake Huron, near Port Sarnia. When I strike oil, I will build a big, warm house in Petrolia and bring Father home. No relative of mine, be he named “Vidal” or “Davenport” shall find himself in need of food and shelter as long as I live.
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I remain your faithful nephew,
Mac
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I finished the letter as Sal called us for lunch.
“It's sad, isn't it?” Little Louie said, tucking the letters away. “The way Old Mac wanted to find his father?”
“Well, he found his father and struck it rich.”
“Oh, is that what you think?” Little Louie asked.
“Big Louie told me Old Mac had his cake and ate it too. She says he crawled out of the sea mud and discovered gold in the muck he sprang from.”
“Mom should have been a poet.” Little Louie started to laugh. “She has a way of putting things.”
DOWNSTAIRS, SAL HAD SET OUT a platter of egg salad sandwiches and brightly red, green, and yellow Jell-O desserts, which quivered in their bowls when we sat down.
“I hear you told Mary that Old Mac found his father,” Little Louie said.
“Yes, he did; and that's enough out of you, Dearie. Father had a bad start in life, but he turned things around for himself. He was a great hero, a man for his time.”
“Spare us the sermon, Mom,” Little Louie said, rolling her eyes at me. I smiled timidly back. I hated getting caught between them.
“Old Mac's letters are historical relics. You'll see, Louisa,” my grandmother retorted. “One day, they'll be enshrined in a museum.”
Beside me, my aunt drew a noisy breath, and the three of us concentrated on finishing our Jell-O. It was true that Big Louie believed in continuity the way other people worshipped God, even though none of the Vidals had taken church seriously since my great-grandfather. My grandmother was fond of telling us that the tiny sea creatures in ancient Lake Michigan were the missing link in our family history. The story of the primeval fish was a Biblical parable as far as she was concerned.
According to my grandmother, over six hundred million years ago, when the planet was just four billion years old, these poor martyred sea creatures died for the Vidals and their tiny carcasses dropped to the bottom of the ancient lake. Two hundred million years later, the shellfish were crushed by Beekmantown limestone pressing down on the sea floor. And fifty thousand years later, the glaciers dumped clay sediments that pushed our shellfish deeper into the earth, turning them into the black gold that gave Old Mac his fortune.
Every time Big Louie told us this story, my aunt almost died laughing. Died laughing was one of the things that grown-ups said if they were having fun. Sometimes they said, “I laughed my head off.” But when kids like me said somebody laughed his head off, it usually meant he was laughing at our expense. And that was how my aunt laughed at my grandmother's stories.
“Do Old Mac's letters mention the Pilkies?” I asked.
“Now why would they do that?” my grandmother asked.
“John Pilkie has relatives in Petrolia.”
“I wouldn't take his connection to Petrolia seriously if I were you,” Big Louie replied. “Put that man out of your head, Mary.”
But I didn't put him out of my head. Not then, or later. I imagined the thrill of showing him my great-grandfather's letters. It amazed me that he and I had ancestors who drilled for oil in the same unlikely place, although I knew it wouldn't be right to let somebody like him see our family papers.
After lunch, I found myself having one of my useless conversations with Hindrance. Per usual, I tried not to listen, because Hindrance sounded like Sal blowing hot air.