‘I trust you, Rusk. I have to. We’re partners.’
When reports of the notorious Sunday School trial at Waxahachie circulated through Texas, accompanied by sardonic laughter, the voters began to realize that in Laurel Cobb, son of the famous post-Reconstruction senator, they had a man of common sense and uncommon courage, and a movement was launched to send him to Washington to assume the seat once held by his father. Said one editorial, recalling the older man’s dignified performance in the chaotic 1870s: ‘He restored honor to the fair name of Texas.’
Prior to 1913, Laurel would have had little chance to win the seat, for in those years United States senators were elected by their respective state legislatures and he would have enlisted only minor support, for he was more liberal than the Democratic leadership. In fact, his father had been acceptable in 1874 only because Texas wanted to show the rest of the nation that it was not ashamed of how it had conducted itself during the War Between the States: ‘Damnit, we want a man who held high rank in the army of the Confederacy, and if the rest of the nation don’t like it, the rest of the nation can go to hell.’ However, the men who sent him to Congress on those terms were often embarrassed by how he acted when he got there, and it would have been impossible for their sons to accept Laurel.
But with adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, senators were elected by popular ballot, and the general public wanted Cobb, so a serious campaign was launched in his behalf. It was Adolf Lakarz, the fighting little fellow who had defended him in the Sunday School trial, who persuaded Cobb to run, using this argument: ‘If you fight for justice in a church, you can do the same in a nation.’ As soon as Cobb accepted this challenge, he began contesting the Democratic primary in earnest, and this took him to Saldana County and the machinations of Horace Vigil and his dexterous assistant Héctor Garza.
Cobb, aware of Vigil’s unsavory reputation, had balked at paying court to the old patrón, but Lakarz had quickly put an end to such revolt: ‘Laurel, you’re one of four good Democrats who want this Senate seat, and the other three will do anything short of murder to grab it from you. The competition will be especially tough for those easy votes that Vigil keeps in his pocket. We need them, and if you have to kiss ass to get them, start bending down.’
‘How does one man control so much?’
‘Because he still has that good old Precinct 37.’
‘I should think the government would take it away.’
Lakarz laughed: ‘Texas tried to, many times. Federals try to every time there’s a Republican administration, but old Horace holds on.’
‘Sounds illegal,’ Cobb said, but Lakarz corrected him: ‘Sounds Texan.’
So Cobb and Lakarz drove from Waxahachie along what might be called the spine of settled Texas: Waco on the Brazos, with its rich agricultural land; Temple, with its proud high school football team; Austin, with its handsome buildings and growing university; Luling and Beeville, in the sun; Falfurrias, with its multitude of flowers; and then that shocking emptiness which had been the stalking ground of Ranger Macnab and the bandit Benito Garza.
‘It can be hot down here,’ Cobb groaned as the temperature rose to a hundred and stayed there.
“Oooooh, Mr. Candidate, never say that! Down here they call a day like this bracing, and if you want their votes, you better call it bracing, too.”
‘I imagine it could be glorious in winter.’
‘Say that to everyone you meet, and you’ll win.’
When Cobb thought he could begin to smell the river, Lakarz told him: ‘This land up here used to be attached to Saldana County, but about 1911 huge chunks were lopped off the old counties to form new ones. But what’s left is still big enough to carry a lot of weight.’
‘What advice on handling Horace Vigil?’
‘Easy. Let him know you’re a loyal Democrat. If you’re thinking of opening a saloon, buy your beer from him. And always speak well of his Mexicans. For without their support, you will never go to Washington.’
As they approached the outskirts of Bravo, Cobb saw an astonishing sight: ‘Are those palm trees?’ For mile after mile the tall swaying trees baked in the sun, as if standing on the banks of the Nile, and sometimes in their shade would rest acres of experimental orange or grapefruit trees. In the blazing heat a new industry was quietly expanding into Texas, and some of the farmers who had pioneered it were becoming richer than their neighbors in other parts of the state who had oil wells.
‘Vigil doesn’t need to bother with votes. He has a paradise here,’ Cobb said, but Lakarz warned: ‘Horace always bothers with votes.’
They found Vigil in the adobe-walled building from which he ran his beer distributorship. He was an old man now, white-haired and in his late sixties. He was markedly stooped, but no one could doubt that he was still the shrewd dictator of his county; as always when meeting strangers he spoke in near-whispers: ‘Never met your daddy, but they tell me he was first rate. I heard about him trackin’ down that gunman who shot his two niggers. In those days that took courage.’
He sat surrounded by his usual cadre of young men, sons of the functionaries who had served him in the past; they fetched his cigarettes, instructed the judge as to the cases in which Mr. Vigil had a special interest, supervised the counting of ballots, and distributed alms to the needy. Little had changed politically. Vigil was still the patrón, dispensing his rude justice, and to the citizens of Saldana County he was still Señor Vee-heel.
The old man coughed: ‘Mr. Cobb, of the four Democrats runnin’ for the Senate, I prefer you. Now tell me, what can I do to help you win?’
Cobb liked this old dictator; he felt the man’s warmth and respected his authority: ‘No, you tell me.’
‘That’s reasonable, because I know this territory. Not as big as it once was, but more voters, more leverage.’ He turned away from Cobb and called to his principal assistant: ‘Héctor, I want you to meet the man we’re sendin’ to Washington to take his daddy’s place.’ And the four laid plans for nailing down the primary.
But as Cobb toured other sections of the state he became aware that one of his opponents was taking his own bold steps to steal the election, and this embittered Adolf Lakarz, who reminded Cobb: ‘We’ve got to get a huge majority in Saldana County, because, as the papers keep saying, “in Texas winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to election.” ’
‘You ever think about that word, Adolf? It’s one of those curious cases in which a perfectly good word has been restricted to only one use. You never hear “A hot dog is tantamount to a sausage.” ’ Lakarz, irritated that his candidate was wasting his time on such nonpolitical reflection, warned: ‘You better hope this primary is tantamount to your election.’
The campaign in Saldana had only begun when one of those political events which perplexed outsiders took place. Horace Vigil, who had fought the Republican customs officer Tim Coke for decades, learned that his old nemesis was leaving the Bravo-Escandón Bridge for a better job in New York, so he organized a gala farewell to which he contributed a new Chevrolet in which the Cokes could drive to their new post. In his speech of thanks, Coke said: ‘I hate to leave Saldana just as the Democrats are preparing to tear themselves apart in their primary. I’d like to see my old friend Horace get his nose busted. But I say this here and now. I want all my Republicans to cross party lines and get into the polling booths one way or another. And you’re to vote for Vigil’s man, Laurel Cobb, and vote three or four times, like you always did for me. Because in thirty years of fighting that sumbitch Vigil, I always had respect for him. I never knew what infamous or criminal thing he was going to hit me with next, but the battles were fun. I look forward with relief to fighting those Democratic hoodlums in Tammany Hall. They’re the worst snakes ever got thrown out of Ireland. But these damn Democrats in Texas, they’re rattlesnakes.’
Three days before the election Lakarz slipped back into Bravo for a strategy meeting, and what he learned was ominous. Vigil himself outlined the
sorry details: ‘Reformers in Washington, bunch of Republicans, they’re comin’ down to take control of Precinct 37.’
‘We’ve got to have those votes.’
‘We’ll be allowed to count them and report whatever totals we need. Texas law demands that, but as soon as the countin’ ends, we have to deliver the ballot boxes to the federals.’
‘What do you think they’ll do?’
‘Send me to jail, if they can prove anything.’ Lakarz could see that this possibility frightened the old man, who said quietly: ‘Jail I do not seek, but if it’s the only way we can win this election, jail it will have to be.’
‘Our friends will never let that happen.’
The old warrior was not so confident, but he did not lament his problems; he had one more election to win, and he would speak only of it: ‘When the boxes reach Bravo, they’ll recount the votes in the presence of a federal judge. We could be in a lot of trouble.’
‘Have you a plan for getting out of this?’
‘Normally we’d bribe the judge, but this time he’s a federal. I’ll think of somethin’.’
A council of war occupied Saturday afternoon, and it was Héctor Garza, a little taller, a little bolder than his predecessors, who devised the winning strategy: ‘We must have absolute secrecy. So that when the federals come after us, we can honestly swear: “We don’t know.” ’
‘You think they will come?’ Vigil asked in a whisper, and Garza said: ‘For sure. The Republicans will see to that. But I know a way to hold them off.’
Sharing his intricate plan with no one, not even Vigil, he orchestrated a strategy in which no one except he and the person performing one small part of the job knew what anyone else was doing. On the eve of the election he said to Vigil and Lakarz with confidence: ‘As soon as the votes have been counted across the state, tell me how many votes we’ll need to win.’
Late on election night Vigil telephoned Garza, standing watch at Precinct 37: ‘We’ve got to have more than four hundred and ten,’ and an hour later the three officials at the precinct certified the vote to have been 422 to 7.
When the men from Washington, waiting in Bravo, heard this, they exulted: ‘Now we have them! Impossible for a vote to be so lopsided.’ And almost hungrily they waited to get their hands on the incriminating box: ‘This time Vigil goes behind bars, and not in some half-baked county jail. The federal pen.’
But now a singular thing happened. The ballot box disappeared. Yes, on its way down FM-117 it disappeared, and since the elections officials had legally reported their results, those results had to stand. The preposterous 422 to 7 stood, enabling Laurel Cobb to win the election by a twenty-seven-vote margin.
How could an object as big as a ballot box disappear? It was never fully explained. It had been handed by the judges to a Mr. Hernández, who passed it along to a Mr. Robles, who gave a receipt for it, and he gave it to a Mr. Solórzano, and that was where it disappeared, because Mr. Solórzano could prove that he had been in San Antonio when all this happened.
Texas newspapers, which had supported one or another of Cobb’s opponents, screamed for an investigation, while the more impartial journals in New York and Washington editorialized that the time had come to cleanse American politics of the stigma of Saldana County. However, the case became somewhat more complicated when it was revealed that the mysterious Mr. Solórzano had been in the employ of the Washington men.
Héctor Garza revealed to no one his role in this legerdemain, but Horace Vigil, in a show of righteous morality, did issue a pious statement deploring the carelessness of the men, whose ineptness had allowed aspersions to be cast upon the fine officials of Precinct 37: ‘I personally regret the loss of that box because had its contents been counted by the federal judge, the results would have proved what I have always claimed. The election officials of Precinct 37 are honest. They’re just a mite slow.’
This time their tardiness enabled a good man to go to Washington.
On a gray morning in October 1922, schoolboys sitting near the window cried: ‘Look at what’s comin’!’ and their classmates ran to see three large trucks moving down the Jacksboro road. They carried long lengths of timber, piles of pipe, and ten of the toughest-looking men Larkin County had seen in a long time. Two lads who had been reading science magazines shouted: ‘Oil rig!’ and in that joyous, frenzied cry the Larkin boom was born.
The trucks rolled into Courthouse Square, pulled up before the sheriff’s office, and asked where Larkin Tank was. Then, consulting the maps they had been given, they headed north toward the land whose surface was owned by the Yeagers but whose mineral rights were still controlled by Floyd Rusk.
No sooner had the three trucks left town than Rusk appeared in his pickup, accompanied by Dewey Kimbro, and when the new newspaper editor shouted: ‘What’s up?’ Rusk cried back: ‘We’re spudding in an oil well.’
Much of the town followed the trucks out to a marked depression east of the tank where Rusk #1 was to be dug, and what they saw became the topic of conversation for many days, because when Paul Yeager, forty-nine years old and soft-spoken, saw the three men on the lead truck preparing to open his gate and drive onto his land, he ran forward to protest: ‘This is Yeager land. Keep off.’
‘We know it’s Yeager land. We’ve been lookin’ for it,’ and the truck started to roll toward the opened gate.
‘I warned you to stop!’ Yeager cried, his voice rising.
‘Mister, it ain’t for you to say.’ And in the next frantic moments, with Yeager trying to halt the trucks, the people of Larkin learned a lot about Texas law.
‘Mr. Yeager,’ the man in charge of the drilling rig explained, ‘the mineral rights to this here land reside with Mr. Floyd Rusk, and he’s asked us …’
‘Here’s Rusk now. Floyd, what in hell …?’
‘Drillin’ rig, Paul. We think there may be oil under this land.’
‘You can’t come in here.’
‘Yes, we can. The law says so.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘You better check, because we’re comin’ in.’
‘You can’t bring those big trucks through my crops.’
‘Yes we can, Paul, so long as we compensate you for any damage. The law says so.’ And with that, huge Floyd Rusk gently pushed his brother-in-law aside, so that the three trucks could drive in, make a rocky path through the field, and come to a halt at the site decided upon intuitively by the creekologist Dewey Kimbro.
A lawyer hired by Yeager did come out to contest Rusk’s right to invade another man’s property and destroy some of its crop, but reference to Texas law quickly satisfied him that Rusk had every right to do just what he was doing: ‘He’s protected, Paul. Law’s clear on that.’
So the town watched as Rusk #1 was started in the hollow, and the efficiency of the crew dazzled the watchers, for the men, using an old-style system popular in the 1910s, set to work like a colony of purposeful ants, digging the foundations for the rig, lining the tanks into which the spill would be conserved for analysis, and erecting the pyramidal wooden derrick which would rise seventy feet in the air, that consoling feature of the Texas landscape which proclaimed: ‘There may be oil here.’
When the pulley sheaves were fixed atop the derrick and the cables rove through them, the men were ready to affix one end of the cable to the huge drum that raised and lowered it, the other end to the cutting bit that would be dropped downward with considerable force to dig the hole. The rig, when set, would not drill into the earth in any rotary fashion; by the sheer force of falling weight the bit would pulverize its way through rock.
And how was this repetitive fall of the two-ton bit assembly controlled? ‘See that heavy wooden beam that’s fixed at one end, free at the end over the hole? We call it the walking beam, and every time it lifts up, it raises all the heavy tools in the hole. When it releases—Bam! Down they crash, smashing the rock to bits.’
The townspeople could not visualize the force ex
erted at the end of that drop, nor the effectiveness of the tools used to crush the rock, but after the walking beam had operated for about two hours, the man in charge of the rig signaled for the cutting bit to be withdrawn from the hole, and now the ponderous process was reversed, with the cables pulling the heavy tools up out of the hole, so that the worn bit at the end which had done the smashing could be removed to be resharpened while a replacement, keen as a heavy knife, was sent down to resume the smashing.
‘What do they do with the old one?’ a garage mechanic asked, and he was shown a kind of blacksmith’s shed in which two strong men with eighteen-pound sledges heated the worn bit and hammered it back into cutting shape.
And that was the basic process which the people of Larkin studied with such awe: sharpen the bit, attach it to the string of tools, raise it high on the cable, lower it into the hole, then work the walking beam and allow the sharp edge to smash down on the rock until something gave; then undo the whole package, fit on a new bit, resharpen the old, and hammer away again.
To the newspaper editor who wanted to share with his readers the complexity of the process, the rig boss said: ‘One bit can drill thirty feet, more if it encounters shale. But when it hits really hard sandstone or compacted limestone … three feet, we have to take it out and resharpen.’
‘Where does the water come from that I see going into the tank?’
‘If we’re lucky, the hole lubricates itself. If not, we pump water in. The bottom has to be kept wet so that the bit can bite in. Besides, we have to bring up samples.’ And he showed the newsman how a clever tool called the bailer was let down into the hole from which the drilling bit had been removed: ‘It has this trick at the bottom. Push it against the bottom, and water swirls inside. Let it rise, it closes off the tube. Then pull it up on the cable and dump it into the slush pit.’ When the newsman looked at the big square hole the crew had prepared, thirty feet on a side, ten inches deep, he thought that the waste water was being discarded.