Excavations

The son of a Texas ranching dynasty returns from the battlefields of 1918 France to develop newly discovered oil wells on his inheritance, and discovers that his home is irrevocably changed… as is he.

**Content Warning: This episode touches upon themes of combat-related PTSD, substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.**

Transcript

Before today’s episode, I’d like to take a moment to thank the show’s most recent supporters. To the wise and generous Brian Lillie: thank you. May you sojourn safely across these darkling plains, its restless residents pacified by your offering. And my heartfelt appreciation to the enigmatic Bird Foot. Hmm, what sort of bird, I wonder… corvid, shrike, or, most terrible of all, the turkey?

Thank you so much. Your support is vital to Darker Pastures, and it means the world to me that you deem the show worthy of it.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Episode Forty-three: Excavations.

[Darker Pastures Theme – Intro continues]

NARRATOR

From the flat and sepia-toned Panhandle prairie, the wooden oil derrick looms like some primeval beast, newly awakened from unguessable dreams. And now the beast begins to roar, its bellowing wrath making the very earth tremble, and the men of the oilfield begin to shout and scatter. The earth ruptures and black ichor spurts over a hundred feet skyward, the concussive blast deafening those who did not put enough distance between themselves and the well. Thick dark rain spatters as the wooden derrick twists and collapses, and four of the men who have fallen to the earth will never rise again.

Malcolm Caldwell watches all of this from the saddle, as his dun Morgan gelding whinnies and shies at the disturbance. The rider, too, seems distressed, his eyes distant as though not seeing the scene before him at all. His mind has returned to the shattered forest of Argonne, to the blasts of artillery and the cries of ruined men.

Returning to the present, Malcolm spurs his horse forward, crying commands to his workers, though the titanic hissing and spluttering of the gusher drowns out his voice. And despite the horror that courses through his veins at the sight of this devastation, there is mingled with it a deep satisfaction at the sheer wealth that flows up from beneath the land over which his father and grandfather once drove cattle.

Sluggish rivulets of dark crude mingle with the blood of the fallen, and with the sere dust of the churned prairie earth.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When Malcolm returns home late in the evening, he finds his father, Phineas, sitting still in his wheelchair at the dining table. The lean older man looks up unsteadily, speaking through lips still half paralyzed by the stroke he suffered while his son and heir was in Europe.

He asks Malcolm what kept him so long, and Malcolm sighs heavily and sits to the now-cold dinner of steak and potatoes. After chewing through two joyless mouthfuls, he tells his father ponderously about the afternoon’s gusher and the ensuing damage. The joy he felt earlier at the discovery of the black bounty beneath their land has soured over the course of the day, ruined by the sight of the workmen’s bodies. One of them had been mostly decapitated by the flying drill string, and another was horribly crushed under the collapsed derrick, his face so swollen and lacerated as to no longer be recognizable.

And looking down at the oil-coated corpses, it felt like he stood again in those muddy Argonne ditches, surrounded by comrades chewed up by machine gun fire and mortar blasts, ripped open by razor wire and bayonets.

All through the rest of the day, he was unable to shake that feeling, and only now in the large ranch house his grandfather built does he begin to feel back home again. And yet somehow it seems smaller than it did before Europe, and the frail, wheelchair-bound figure of his father looks so withered, so aged, that even now the sense of alienation lingers.

Phineas regards his son in his stoic way, his expression made even more unreadable by the laxness on the left side of his face. After a long while, he says that blood is always the price of wealth, and always has been.

 Malcolm falls silent then, chews a few more mouthfuls of cold, tough steak without appetite. What he thinks, but does not say, is that it seems that those who profit and those who pay are seldom the same.

Apparently satisfied now that he has heard the tidings of the day, Phineas turns and wheels himself out of the room, calling for the maid to come and help him into bed. Malcolm sits at the table for a few more moments, staring into space, and then he rises, abandoning all attempt to clear his plate. He dims the three kerosene lamps in the room, then takes the smallest of them and carries it to the front door and out onto the veranda. Staring out into the darkness, he can just make out the outline of the ruined derrick, and the small outbuilding housing the hoist engine, and the plume of oil that still spews skyward. From this distance, the gusher sounds merely like a persistent, sibilant whisper.

Blinded by the light in his hands, Malcolm lowers the wick until the flame is extinguished, and waits for his eyes to adjust to the night. And presently, he begins to perceive movement in the darkness around the derrick. Without understanding exactly why, a sudden thrill of alert excitement floods his body, his eyes widening and his spine stiffening.

Peering harder still into the deep, country dark, his conscious thought catches up with his more perceptive subconscious: the movement is that of large, living things, quick and furtive. Telling himself it is only hunting coyotes, or maybe even the prairie wolves so rarely seen now. And yet there is something damnably human about the shapes and their motion, like hunched soldiers keeping low to the earth to avoid exposure.

Malcolm gathers breath into his lungs, ready to call out a challenge, but he checks himself. Surely it is only a few of his workmen, calculating the damage and the necessary labor of the days ahead to cap the well and retrieve what oil they can from the blowout. Now doubt his men will work through the night, offering up the tax of sweat and blood which he, as a scion of the Caldwell ranching dynasty, is spared. Once again his father’s words, callous and harsh, run through his mind, and the paltry bit of cold steak in his stomach roils greasily.

He turns and walks back into the house, ready too for his own bed, but afraid that it will prove another night of troubled and broken sleep.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Malcolm wanders the blasted woods, the world obscured by drizzle and fog and the drifting smoke and debris of artillery bursts. Screams and the intermittent chatter of Hotchkiss and Chauchat machine guns and of German MG 08s assail his ears, and yet he sees not another living soul in the gloom and filth of the war-torn Argonne. His trench boots sink into puddles of dark crimson, and indistinct shapes lie partially concealed under blankets of grey-brown mud, and yet he feels horribly, impossibly alone.

And yet,  it is so much worse when the mud begins to shift and churn, and the tarry shapes beneath emerge to gurgle and reach for him.

He wakes all at once, reaching in vain for the Springfield rifle that he will never hold again. Cold sweat coats his body, making his pajamas cling to his flesh, and the bedsheets tangle around him disorientingly.

It is only after he has freed himself from these latter that he remembers where he is, and that the war is ended.

He rubs a hand over his face, breathing out hard. Rising and slipping a housecoat over his long johns, he moves toward his bedroom window and parts the curtains, gazing out toward the shadowed ruin of the derrick. The large gibbous moon has emerged now, palely illuminating the broken wooden skeleton and the outhouses.

And instantly, he stiffens, the cold sweat popping out once more from his pores. For in the stark moonlight, shapes like those from his dreams crawl and writhe, wormlike, in the oil-stained earth. He blinks hard, and strains his eyes to peer through the interceding murk, trying to convince himself that he is only imagining things in the darkness.

The squirming shapes on the earth remain, and now he perceives something new – the hints of trails worn into the soil behind them.

Malcolm shuts the curtains again, and moves toward the dresser beside his bed. Drawing out first a bottle of potassium bromide tablets, and then a bottle of whiskey. It is not the first night that he has resorted to this blend to gift himself oblivion, when the nightmares become too strong and bleed into waking.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is past eight o’clock when he wakes, and pale daylight slashes in through the narrow gap of the window curtains. His head pounds, his throat feels dry and scratchy, and even now that he is awake, he cannot bring himself to leave his bed.

A rolling creak in the hallway tells him that his father is moving slowly toward his room. After a few moments, Phineas calls out for Malcolm to stop burning daylight when there’s work to be done. For a moment, a flash of anger surges in Malcolm as he stares up at the ceiling, thinking how his father still treats him like the boy that left.

But within an instant, that anger drains away, and all that is left is the exhaustion that preceded it.

Sure, Pa, he calls back, then waits to hear the wheelchair move away again. And as Phineas retreats, Malcolm lies there, feeling like the room is spinning around him, feeling like he will never be able to rise again.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is four days before the men manage to cap the well. By some miracle, they managed to avoid igniting the hundreds of gallons of oil spewed over the ground, even with the men working by lanternlight through the night.

Malcolm has stopped looking out his window at night, afraid of what he might see. As soon as darkness falls, he goes to his bedroom and washes down the sedative tablets with a healthy gulp of whiskey, and lies on the bed until he falls into oblivion.

And even through this addled haze, he dreams often of the wriggling shapes in the mud, whom he has mentally dubbed the worm-men. Every morning, prizing himself from the bed seems a little harder.

On Thursday, it is nearly noon when he wakes, to the slightly garbled calls of Phineas outside his door, telling him to get his lazy ass out of bed. Without thinking, he reaches for the .44 Remington Model 1888 revolver he has taken to keeping on his bedside dresser while he sleeps, the polished ivory of the pistol grip somehow soothing, even seductive.

His father pounds a fist on the bedroom door, repeating his earlier demand. Malcolm’s temper flares, and he shouts back for his father to see to the day’s work himself, if he is so damn impatient.

There is a moment of silence from the other side of the door, which Malcolm can only imagine as shocked silence – it is the first time he has ever spoken so roughly to his father, who has always seemed to him like a king of the Caldwell ranch. Then there is the sound of the wheelchair retreating down the hallway, and Phineas’ own bedroom door opening and closing.

Feeling a little ashamed of himself,  Malcolm finally manages to pull himself to his feet and listlessly dress himself for the day. Leaving his room and walking down the hallway, he feels suddenly light-headed, and by the time he reaches the dining room, he has no choice but to sit down, resting his head on the tabletop.

The maid asks him if he would like anything to eat, and he shakes his head. The very idea of food makes him ill, and even the faint lingering smell of the coffee that has by now no doubt grown cold nauseates him.

Gently, she reminds him that he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast yesterday, and only half a biscuit then. At once he realizes this is true, and knows that he should force himself to partake of something, and yet the colorless and oppressive mood that has overtaken him prevents him from acting on this knowledge. He waves her away, and unsteadily rises to his feet, making his way to the front door.

On the veranda, he leans against a post, staring across the sun-bleached, torn prairie toward the black stain of the blowout. Having at last stopped the gout, the men have begun constructing the work camp for the new workers set to arrive next week from Amarillo. The skeletal timber frames and the pale canvas tents are hatefully familiar to Malcolm, altogether too like slapdash frontline headquarters.

Slowly, he makes his way toward the workmen, waving to the foreman, a man named Gibbson. Gibbson comes to meet him, wiping sweat from his broad, tanned brow and scratching at his honey-brown beard, streaked sparsely with white.

In his gruff and direct way, Gibbson fills him in on the state of the work. There are three further sites they hope to drill within the next six months, with the help of the new workmen from Amarillo, and they managed to salvage over a thousand barrels of oil even before the gusher was capped. If even one of the new wells pans out, he says, they will see substantial profits before next Christmas.

Malcolm nods, unable to summon much cheer even at this good news. His eye keeps being drawn, against his volition, toward the oil-saturated earth at their feet. It is a mad thought, he knows, but he keeps expecting to see something moving beneath it, threatening to emerge into the daylight.

Nevertheless, the sun and the fresh air seem to restore some of his lost vitality, and Malcolm remains with the men through the rest of the afternoon, only returning to the house when the sun lowers toward the razorlike edge of the western horizon and the men break off for their evening meals, and then their beds.

Reaching the veranda, Malcolm glances back toward the nascent work camp. And there he sees, backlit by the ruddy evening glow, dark figures rising from the unfinished latrine, far from the cookfires where the men have gathered, talking and singing and eating.

He stands there, frozen and trembling, until the falling night obscures those other figures from his view.

(Unsettling music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Phineas lingers in the hallway, uncertain – a feeling unfamiliar to him. Something is happening to his son, something he does not understand, and he does not know how to help him. His natural impulse is to take a firm hand, as he did when Malcolm was a boy, and as Phineas’ father did with him, but that has done nothing so far.

Instead, he has watched his boy spiral into drink and indolence, each firm word seeming to drive him deeper into the bottle. And he senses a resentment that he never before saw in his son, as if he thinks that he has grown beyond the scope of Phineas’ knowledge.

What troubles him most about this latter is that Phineas himself wonders if this is true. Already he is but a shadow of the man he was, brought low by the ravages of age, and sometimes he cannot help but envy his son and their workmen their youth, their thoughtless confidence in the adequacy of their own bodies.

Within his bedroom, Malcolm stirs, crying out in his sleep. Phineas cannot make out the words, but he can hear the distress in them. Reaching out with his good hand, he turns the doorknob and opens the door, and rolls into the room. There is a faint, nauseous, slightly sweet odor within, and he cannot help but wrinkle his nose.

Coming close to the bedside, he reaches out gently to touch his son’s twitching hand.

My boy, he says, as gently as he is able, it’s only a dream.

As their hands meet, Malcolm sits upright, awake and wild-eyed, but seeming not to see the room around him at all. Fumblingly, Malcolm reaches for the revolver beside the bed, and a surge of animal panic jolts Phineas’ innards.

What the hell is wrong with you, boy? he roars. Be a man, goddamn it!

Malcolm’s hand settles on the revolver’s grip, and only then does awareness enter his features.

Smacking his lips and coughing, Malcolm asks what Phineas is doing in his room. There is a hardness, even malice, in his eyes that Phineas has never seen before, and which frightens him, and he cannot stop the words that tumble out of his mouth: You ain’t the boy I raised.

Malcolm gazes dully at his father for a moment, then offers a frigid smile in reply.

No, he says, no I ain’t.

The grating, mirthless laughter that follows drives Phineas out of the room, his lips trembling and his eyes moist. He wheels himself to the dining room, eating very little of the lunch set before him, and for the first time glad, if guiltily so, of his son’s absence from the table.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Malcolm no longer speaks with the workmen. He has taken the Winchester ’73 rifle, the same one both his father and grandfather used during their working days, and holed himself up his room, staring out at the work camp through the gap in the curtains.

Now unwilling to sleep, as he has so foolishly indulged himself previously, he has thrown out the bottles of whiskey and bromide tablets. The dreams, he has realized, are what feed the worm-men. They work in the night hours, and it is they who are changing the camp, digging the trenches and tunnels.

He has seen them, emerging from the cold earth when the daylight fades. Has seen them move in the shadows, like gelid oil, like snakes still thick with winter’s slumber. How the others have not noticed, Malcolm cannot understand.

He is afraid that, if he does not keep watch, they will take the workmen and change them too, remake them in their own image. And worst of all, he fears they will do the same to him. Already they have changed his father, who speaks now with their wet, strange voices.

Even now he can hear the old man below, poisoning Gibbson with his wormy words. He is sending the foreman to Amarillo to pick up the new men, pretending that it is for work, pretending that he is taking on Malcolm’s duties now. But Malcolm knows better, knows that the men are being summoned to make more of the worm-men, so that the trenches can grow and grow until they scar the whole of the earth, and all men are remade.

Gibbson, the fool, agrees with the same bluff directness as always, having no inkling of what is truly happening here, blind to the changes that Malcolm alone seems to see.

Not for long, though, Malcolm thinks to himself with a cold smile. He will not have to endure any of this for much longer, and he won’t let their wicked plan go any further. His free hand begins to play with the box of Diamond matches on his lap as he gazes at the dark oil-stain upon the land.

Downstairs, Gibbson excuses himself, and the door bangs shut. Moments later, Phineas pretends to sob lowly.

(Sorrowful music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When Gibbson returns with the workmen from Amarillo, they find the Caldwell ranch appallingly quiet and lifeless. The work camp is empty, the cookfires cold for at least a full day, and there is no sign of activity from the house.

Telling the men to wait for him in the camp, Gibbson moves toward the large ranch house, the three longhorn skulls nailed over the veranda seeming for the first time like some grim, silent omen.

There is no answer to his repeated knocking, and after a tense minute of waiting, he eases open the door and calls inside. Still there is no reply, and reluctantly, the diligent workman steps into the foyer. He moves through the parlor, calling out again, and drowning in the perfect silence.

In the dining room, he stops, staring at the askew wheelchair with a faint choking sound. Trickles of blood have dried from the two small holes above Phineas’ sightless eyes, which gaze vaguely ceilingward.

Gibbson stumbles backward out of the room, coughing. He braces himself on the back of the sofa until his shock subsides, then he searches the rest of the house with his M1903 Colt in hand, dreading that with every door and passageway he is about to stumble upon another ruined body, or the killer. 

Yet there is no sign of any other soul, living or dead, within the rest of the house.

Then, as he is searching the younger Caldwell’s bedroom, there is a distant, high scream from outside the house, one whose like he has only heard twice before in his life. The first time was when his sister-in-law found her three-year-old son had wandered into the pigpen, a hungry sow moments away from devouring him, and the second was when one of his crewmen slipped and fell from the derrick they were building.

Gun in hand, Gibbson runs downstairs and out of the house, running in the direction of the work camp, whence the cry came.

At the far edge of the camp, the men stand huddled on the edge of a long, curving ditch. Gibbson frowns, certain that there was no such excavation when he left, and seeing no purpose for it. All such thoughts leave his mind, though, when he pushes his way through the men and sees what has arrested their attention: a single hand protruding from a slight dip in the soil at the bottom of the ditch.

After staring in disbelief for a few moments, Gibbson begins to direct the men, setting them to the grim task of excavating whatever poor soul has been pulled into the earth. When they ask him how such a thing could have happened, he tells them shortly that it was a mere collapse, a sinkhole or maybe a bit of quicksand, though he doubts his own explanation.

As the men work, he explores the rest of the trench. Only about fifteen feet from the body, he finds an old Winchester rifle lying in the dirt, emptied, and over a dozen spent casings. Nearby is a box of matches, its contents spilled and scattered in the mud. Strangely, he finds no blood, and no clear sign of whatever may have been the target of so many shots… unless it is the strange, damnably human lumps rising from the soil around the trench. Yet when he and a few of the idle men take shovels and dig into these, they find only soft mud underneath.

Within a half hour, the men have prized the body from the soil’s greedy grasp. Even through the dirt that clings to it, Gibbson immediately recognizes Malcolm’s face – and the Remington pistol in his hand. Gently taking the latter, the foreman finds that all six shots have been discharged. As the men wipe away the grime, they exposed a single neat hole in the temple, which Gibbson infers is the result of the final pistol shot.

Worst of all, though, is the rictus of fear on Malcolm Caldwell’s face, twisting his features to such an extreme that they hardly seem human. And no matter how they scour the ranch, they find no sign of the missing workmen, or the household servants.

By the time that evening falls, the men have returned to the work trucks, leaving the Caldwell land for the last time and remitting responsibility for its mysteries to the law. And as their headlights cut along the road to Amarillo, fading into the distance, the earth at the bottom of the trench begins to churn and squirm.

(Creepy music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. If you’re feeling particularly generous, you can support the show on our Patreon page at patreon.com/DarkerPastures or at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com, and unlock special subscriber-only content. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]