Every August for the nearly thirty years she taught English, in an overheated classroom filled with farm boys and cheerleaders and roughneck wannabes reeking of aftershave, Corrine would spot the name of at least one misfit or dreamer on her fall roster. In a good year, there might be two or three of them—the outcasts and weirdoes, the cellists and geniuses and acne-ridden tuba players, the poets, the boys whose asthma precluded a high school football career and the girls who hadn’t learned to hide their smarts. Stories save lives, Corrine said to those students. To the rest of them she said, I’ll wake you when it’s over.

While a box fan, together with the small, cell-like window that she cracked open every morning, labored heroically to clear the sweat and bubblegum and malice out of the classroom air, Corrine let her gaze wander, gauging the reactions of her various misfits. Invariably, some little shit would pop his gum or belch, or fart, but one or two of those kids would remember her words forever. They would graduate and get the hell out of Dodge, sending her letters from UT or Tech or the army and once, from India. And for most of Corrine’s teaching career, that had been enough. When I say stories, she told those tormented souls, I also mean poems and hymns, birdsong and wind in the trees. I mean the hue and cry, the call and response, and the silence in between. I mean memory. So hang on to that, next time someone’s beating the shit out of you after school.

Stories can save your life. This, Corrine still believes, even if she hasn’t been able to focus on a book since Potter died. And memory wanders, sometimes a capful of wind on a treeless plain, sometimes a twister in late spring. Nights, she sits on the front porch and lets those stories keep her alive for a little while longer.

There have been plenty of months and years in Corrine’s life so unremarkable or so unpleasant that she can call to mind almost nothing about them. She does not, for example, remember the birth of her daughter in the winter of 1946, or much about the month afterward, but she remembers every detail of September 25, 1945, the day Potter came home from Japan, intact, if you didn’t count the night terrors and his new aversion to flying. Three years in the cockpit of a B-29 was plenty, he told Corrine, I won’t ever step foot in another airplane. It’s been five months since Potter died, and his voice is still as sharp and clear to Corrine as a crack of thunder.

*

He is home on a three-day leave and they have made love for the first time in the back seat of her daddy’s Ford. The two of them sit facing each other, grinning and bloody and sore as hell. Well, that was just terrible, Corrine says. Potter laughs and promises her something better, next time around. He kisses her freckled shoulder and begins to sing. What a beautiful thought I am thinking, concerning that great speckled bird . . . and to know my name is written in her holy book.

*

Corrine is ten years old and sitting in the front row at her grandmother’s funeral. When her father starts crying so hard he has to hand off the eulogy to the minister, she finally understands the enormity of their loss.

She is eleven and watching a calf being born for the first time, all unsteady legs and pitiful bawls, and she thinks how much her granny would have loved seeing this.

She is twelve and her daddy comes home from a rig with a bottle of moonshine and two fingers missing. Don’t cry, baby girl, he tells her. I didn’t even need those two fingers. Now if it were these—he holds up his other hand and waggles his fingers, and they both fall out laughing, but she is remembering what her grandmother said the first time they saw an oil well come in. Lord, help us all.

She is twenty-eight years old and a foreman calls to tell her there has been an explosion at the Stanton well. She drives to the hospital with Alice sleeping next to her on the front seat, convinced Potter is already dead, trying to figure out how the hell she is going to move through this life without him. But there he is, sitting up in bed with a shit-eating grin on his face. Ugly flash burns stain his face and neck. Honey, he says, I fell off the platform right before it blew. And the smile dies on his face. Some of the other guys didn’t, though.

It is October 1929 and Corrine’s father is home for lunch. A man who generally hates idle conversation—nattering, he calls it—today he can hardly stop talking for long enough to chew his sandwich. The Penn’s well has come in, a surface blowout so powerful that pieces of drill pipe, caliche, and rock were blown fifty feet into the air. The well blew at nine o’clock that morning, and it is still spewing crude oil. Who knows how many barrels are flowing across the desert? The drill operator has no idea when he’ll be able to cap it. This here’s a historic day, Prestige tells Corrine and her grandmother, Viola Tillman. This is going to put Odessa on the map.

Corrine and Viola are already gathering up their hats and gloves when Prestige shakes his head and stuffs the last of his fried egg sandwich into his mouth. An oil well ain’t no place for little girls or—he looks at Viola—old ladies. Y’all stay home. I mean it.

Corrine is tall for her age, but she still has to sit all the way at the edge of the driver’s to reach the starter pedal on her father’s Model T. They careen across the Llano Estacado, the little girl and old woman bouncing madly on the car seat while some of Prestige’s Herefords look on, their jaws working, working. The Penn’s Well is still a mile away when the sky turns black and the ground beneath the car starts to tremble. The air fills with so much debris they have to cover their mouths with handkerchiefs. Lord help us all, Viola says.

As it falls back to earth, the oil spills out across the land and covers everything in its path—the purple sage and the blue grama grass that Viola loves, the bluestems and buffalo grasses that come nearly to Corrine’s waist. A prairie dog family stands some thirty yards from the growing hole in the ground, their faces lifted as they bark at one another. A small female scutters to the edge of a burrow and peers inside, and Corrine imagines every hidey hole and den within five miles filled with confused little creatures who will never know what hit them. But the fifty or so men and boys who stand around the site aren’t looking at the grass or the critters, or the earth. They are looking at the sky, their faces rapt. It’s going to kill every living thing, Viola says.

Corrine frowns and sniffs the air while her grandmother sags against the passenger door. Viola’s face is pale, her eyes cloudy. She coughs and holds her hand over her mouth and nose. That smell, she says. It’s like every cow in West Texas farted at the same time. And our trees, she cries, spotting now a stand of young pecan trees in the direct path of a river of oil. What about them?

But it’s going to put West Texas on the map, Corrine says, and Daddy says this land’s not worth a tinker’s damn anyway. Viola Tillman stares at her granddaughter as if she has never seen her before in her life. The Llano Estacado might not be good for anything except stars and space and quiet, the winter songbirds and the sharp smell of post cedars, after even a little rain, but she loves it. Together, the old woman and little girl have steered their horses through dry arroyos and creosote forests, then sat quietly and watched a family of javelina forage through a patch of prickly pear. Together, they found and named the largest tree on their property—Galloping Ghost, for the shaggy bark that resembles Red Grange’s raccoon coat. Now Viola’s face is the color of cold embers, and her hands are trembling. Take me home, she tells her granddaughter.

Yes, ma’am, Corrine says.

Can you drive me back to Georgia?

In three months Viola will be dead and by then, her granddaughter will have seen enough of an oil boom to loathe every one of them for the rest of her life.

For three days the Penn’s well spews an uncontrolled stream of crude oil into the air. A house-sized pool forms in a matter of hours and then quickly breaches the sides, destroying everything in its path. More than thirty thousand barrels of oil spill out across the earth before the men get control of the well. And when they finally do, the men stand on the slick platform, their hands and faces stained black. They shout and shake hands and slap each other on the back. We capped her, they tell each other. We got her.

*

Since Potter died, Corrine knows the night sky the way she knew the contours of his face. Tonight on Larkspur Lane, the crescent moon crawls toward the center of the sky where it will remain for an hour or two before starting its long slide toward the western edge of the earth. Only a smattering of stars remains—The night boils with eleven stars—and the bars have been closed for two hours. The street is dark, except for Mary Rose’s house, which is lit up like a drilling platform in the middle of a black sea.