Through Fields of Gold

This week, we're publishing creative work produced by L8th students for their extended projects. Today's extract is introduced by its author, Zack McGuire.

The following is a section from my EPQ story Through Fields of Gold, which I wrote in the style of Cormac McCarthy - the author most famously of No Country for Old Men. At this point in the story, which is set in the 1930s, the protagonist, a teenage boy, is working on an oil field on the plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Chapter 8

    The boy got up early next morning to gunshots. Men hastily dressed all around him though he had stayed in his clothes overnight and he walked out into the stiff cold of dawn. The old man followed him.
He had not slept the night previous and he had stayed awake listening to the silence of the old man. Once he had spoken but there was no reply and he returned to listening. Even now the old man stood silent.
The three men were standing out front of the huts in the middle of the road and they separated the workers into groups so as to each work on one drill and they called up men who would be the leaders of each group and the old man was one of them. The boy was put to work in the group with the old man on an old teeter-totter drill. Two other workers joined him and they walked off together towards the far end of the field where the older drills lay.
    Who’s gonna pay us.
    I figured we’d get paid in oil.
    Doesn’t matter to me how.
It transpired that the two workers were brothers. Both small and dark-haired they were distinguishable through their facial hair.
The boy had never worked on a drill before and he watched the old man as he lowered the tools into the hole and began to drill. The seesaw creaking as it went in its slow motion. The well had already been opened and the casing set though they had not hit oil. The old man held the thick knotted rope as it rose and dropped with his gloved hands and he watched it intently. The brothers stood behind him by a great wheel of rope and they kept the slack as the drill bit deeper.
After some time, the man gestured to the boy to come over and he did and he followed the old man’s pointed finger and he peered into the well where he saw the rope endless and dark.
    That’s about a thousand feet down.
    How far we gotta go to get oil.
    About a thousand.
The old man smiled at him and the kid nodded and moved back to where he had been standing and looked at a wooden strut below him and sat.
    Do you always hit oil?
    Not always.
    Is it dangerous?
    Depends how much there is.
The old man went back to his rope and the kid to his watching and the brothers to their wheel. The wind whistling through the derrick and the metal rattling at the top. Harsh and consuming and the kid was lost in his thoughts and he watched the old man raise the rope up and down and heard the drill sway and he did not hear the rumbling from below. The rope began to shake in the old man’s hand, and he struggled to hold on.

    Go.

The boy got up and ran outside the derrick and looked back and saw the old man lying on the floor. Blood seeped from a gash on his head where the metal head of the cable had cut him on its sudden ascent. The roaring in his ears now impenetrable and though the kid shouted he knew it was worthless and he could but watch as gas exploded from the well and it rose up gray and driving and it burst through the derrick and sent scaffolding flying outwards and he lost sight of the old man. He turned and ran as the gas turned to oil and it splayed onto the ground all around him. A sudden burst of heat and he ran cloaked in flame. The well behind him burning and the sky filled with smoke dark and twisting. The wind still buffeting and the flames licking out as they bore upwards into the darkening sky. Men in overalls ran towards him and they called out to him but still he ran past them and the flames behind him carried on the wind over the wooden huts. Wider still the flames and thicker the smoke and when he looked back the workers now followed him and they ran wild and staring and retching. Oil covered and drenched in sweat he ran on. He could not stop else the smoke would catch him as it had caught the men behind him who ran now shrouded in gray and coughing and gasping for air. They would not make it out. The smoke dense and noxious and they drowned in the swirling clouds. Face down in the ashen dust.

The old man had been blown from his place on the floor by the gas leak but the spurt of fire towering above him woke him and he rose instantly and he thought only of the boy. His face covered in his own blood and eyes stinging in the gathering smoke. He heard shouts from behind him and he turned to see the brothers feral and brown from oil and they waved at him and gestured for him to come back.
    The boy, he answered. He’s in the fire.
    You’ll die.

    So will he.

He turned away from the men as they shook their heads and limped away with hunched backs and legs crooked. Already the smoke had reached him and it stretched out towards him and he pulled his shirt over his mouth and he continued. Tears drawn from his eyes by the smoke traced lines pale down his darkened face. Flames darted all around him and the roaring so intense there was no sound but it. He could not see and he fell to the floor in a fit of coughing and he didn’t rise up again. He knew that he would die but he had always known that. Maybe he thought of God in those last seconds as he lay prostrate on the floor. Crazed by pain he ripped off his burning shirt and batted it around him to ward off the flames. His legs swung wildly and his naked torso blistered and cracked. His head wound cauterized now and what blood there was mixed in with the oil. His mouth worked noiselessly and his legs swinging.
He died alone in the holocaust and no one came back for him. There was nothing to come back for. He lay discarded and forgotten. The fire took him as it had taken the rest of the oil fields. Merciless and unrepentant. The only offering the eternal flame of the well stretching high into the sky above. Flickering above the massed smoke an idol it delighted in its destruction. The wind strong and the smoke churning but the flame burnt straight and bright and its light echoed over the plains and on the mountains to the North and when night came still it burnt and the orange glow perpetual. Its redness cast deep into the cold black of the night and where it went the air shimmered to its touch. Flames dancing across the plains and they threw no shadow. They stood monuments to a broken world and at their heart there was silence.