But beware of Wylie Prescott when he would come into an area to “develop” it. “I’m going to make three million by time I’m thirty,” he told people. And by God, he had, and some more. At thirty-three he had developed all the burnt-out timberland in the Thicket north of Rose, result of an accidental fire which he quenched by donning his old asbestos suit that had made him famous as “Firedevil Prescott” and going into the flames to the very heart of the fire and there fighting it at its heart as though it was Satan himself. He named it Prescott Clearing.
At twenty-two Wylie Prescott became the fabulous daredevil fighter of oilwell fires in the boom oilfields of East Texas. People came from far and near to watch the firefighter, fantastic quencher, go into the blaze and fight at the flames like a flame himself. He was the hero of the oilfields. He conquered many an oil fire and saved many an oilwell. Oilmen would pay him anything to rescue their oil; and saving millions for others, he got some for himself and so became a rich man. He emerged from the fiery depths of the golden opening in the earth that was like the throat of a large bloom that spewed forth mud, rock, salt water, and shining leathery black oil, demanding a percentage of what he had rescued. Thus he rose up out of burning holes to become a man of power and wealth, a handsome, clean-cut young man who knew exactly what he wanted. It was clear that he was going to be a leader of his fellow men. He seemed to have been born out of a molten oil hole. Having gone alone into the very throat of the golden mouth that curled out a livid tongue of gold, Wylie Prescott was initiated into the mysteries of oil and fire. He knew burning, combustion, what kindles, explodes, and bursts into blaze. So much at the very fountainhead of the natural resource of oil, he felt a primitive and mystical kinship to it; he felt as if, almost, he had created it, for he was at the source, seminal to it. Because of this mysterious alliance with oil afire, he felt somewhat divine.
Firedevil Prescott began to look for his own oil. He clawed in seeps with his fingernails after smelling oil, and behold, he pulled out oily fingers. He bought some rigging and bored his own hole in the Thicket. Oil shot up, mixed with mud and rock, and devastated an acre. Wylie rolled with joy in the oil mud. There was a fire which Wylie, in his asbestos suit with the Devil on its back, went into and calmed; this time he was saving his own oil. Already he didn’t need anybody, and he was only twenty-three; he could do everything for himself. He had his secrets, his mysteries, his hunches. He would keep his mouth shut and get what was his—power, money. And he would fuck anybody who got in his way.
He became the first independent oil-well driller in East Texas. He leased land and he bought out leases. He now knew oil as he knew fire. He had gone after fire with his very hands, fondling it; he physically handled it, in hand-to-hand intimacy, like a snake handler, a broncobuster, a lion tamer, a crocodile wrestler. Now he went after oil with the same sensuality. Once in combat with a furious conflagration in Daisetta, there rose such a blast of hot gas and boiling water from some deep Hell’s lake sizzling brimstone under earth, that he was blasted, ignescent, into the air, a shaft of flame. In his burning oilsoaked asbestos, his great cloudlike feet seemed to float him upright. He hung at a glowing standstill for a moment, then, winged orange flame flashing in the light like a flaming angel out of the gray sky, he landed on a henhouse twelve miles away. Crashing into the latticework and straw, he set it afire, including the White Leghorns, and flaming hens shot through the air like meteors and roosters fanned the fire with flaming wings in the holocaust. The farmer was aghast but came after this demon with a rake. But the demon was fighting the very fire he’d caused and so the farmer helped him. Wylie Prescott put out the fire and then, his suit still burning, ran aglow into the pond, where the water burnt. He sank in the mud to his shoulders and steam and flame surrounded him. The geese and turkeys became fiendish, gargling their insane sounds like the damned. The odor of burnt egg and chickenflesh was awful.
When Wylie Prescott walked away from the burnt farm he was ready for another kind of power. He entered the Thicket and began to develop it. In the Thicket at first he put out fires which were accidental fires, and with the natural clearing left by burnouts, Wylie Prescott then began his development operations. He built a log house in the clearing and offered it for sale—to anybody who wished to five in the woods, rustic, on weekends out of the city of Houston. A whole subdivision followed. This was the beginning of Prescott Clearing.
In Prescott Clearing, Wylie Prescott cut down green faster than a plague of locusts. He put the Indians and Mexicans and Negroes to work at fifty cents a day and meals—corn-bread and Razorback pork and greens—served at a commissary set up in the Thicket. At first his crew lived in tent camps in the woods, but soon he built shacks for the families. Some organizers tried to get in but were driven away. One or two were caught and cut; their parts were found hanging in trees. Buzzards pecked at them. Wylie Prescott came to be widely respected among the colored people. They brought their babies to him, yellow, black and red. He had a Cushata woman for some time and everyone knew it. Her name was Columbia, and one day she was found floating in the log pond like an odd boat with a corncob mast sticking out of it.
Wylie Prescott tore great clumps of thick undergrowth, like hair, off the Thicket. He would go barehanded into a moist tender green overhang of willows, white hawthorn, cypress, grapevine and water oaks, and stare at it as if it were fire and then pull it all apart and root it up and get it away, mysterious life doused like green fire, until only hard dead earth remained. He quieted the raging green life of whole groves. People of Thicket border towns saw the trees coming through like corpses on wagons every day. He reached a new fury in himself—something beyond him. When he found a man cutting his magnolia saplings, he pared out his navel like the core of an apple and nailed it to a tree and wound the man around and around until he was bound to the tree by his intestines. He knew how to fell a tree—he understood growing wood and how to stop it—like a hunter knows his bird and how to bring it down, to “lower it,” as Wylie put it. He was accursed with the sense of destruction, marked like Cain, by the natural gift, the ancient instinct for devastation. To bring down or dig up was his natural urge. What grew he went right to, to cut down. What ran under the earth he clawed down after and sucked it up and got it out—he wanted it out and in his hands; tore up everything to get down to something; and when he had got it all, turned and took it away and left a wasteland. He was a walking Plague, a pestilence, locust, frog, grasshopper, tree moth, a devourer, worse than any chemical spray or poison, a devastator. He took away from Nature its pure self, its forces, and did not put back anything, but he added fake stuff—chemicals, preservatives, coloratives. His factories murdered rivers, spoiled freshness, soured and embittered sweetness, withered green. He was the first, the leader, the beginning of the generation that poisoned itself, that spoiled its own, that ate its own poison. Wylie Prescott left a ghost forest of burnouts, sinks from salt-water overflow, slews from oilwell drillings, junk from pipeline digging. Nothing lived in his devastation. He drilled and dug and hacked and tore up the wilderness. He opened out of the earth volcanoes of salt water that spewed hundreds of feet into the air, shot off geysers of salt and slag and crude that blackened trees and vines and encrusted acre upon acre with salt cake. He created a landscape of slews and sumps.
Wylie Prescott had became a millionaire ten times over. He had taken over the lumber railroad after laying ties and tracks into the wilderness and setting up jackleg lumber mills; and in early 1940 he sold Prescott Clearing and its mill and railroad and all his oilworks and moved into the young city of Rose. Now his chemical plants on the Bay were fiery and silvered shapes of a strange, unnatural world. The looming that throbbed and quivered over the spectral Prescott Works could be seen for miles at night. It was a world of twinkling golden lights and faery silvered spires and domes that steamed and thundered and whistled, and sent a yellow fog and a vile brownish smell over the countryside that burnt eyes and soured nostrils. It curled the leaves of trees; it pockmarked granite and brick; it lay putrid over streams and bayous. Wylie Prescott was cooking and refining something. Would he get his hands on everything? He was brewing a famous dye that would enhance the color of dull-hued food or add color where there was none, and his ghostly Works were simmering and distilling the lethal mists of a chemical spray that would save crops and ruin rivers and break the chain of life. He was suspected and accused of swindling some people, of bribing others, of outright stealing from some more. Nevertheless, he got himself land along the Bays and Bayous. He developed a whole inner city with its own shopping center, banks, and even a lavish million-dollar theater for classic plays. It was in the mid-fifties when he was mentioned emphatically as a candidate for high office in state government, but he would not run. He was already building the Prescott Mansion, with parts of it coming from Belgium and Italy. Its stone and brick battlements, tentlike peaks and towers and domes were rising like a whole town over the countryside of little frame houses. In the distance farmers could see awesome winged shapes of dragons perched on leaded peaks as if just lit there with wings half-furled.
The Prescott Mansion was made of Texas blue granite, white limestone and red sandstone, but many parts of it had come from Europe by boat to Galveston, and from there on truck. Its corners rose up in four towers topped with tiled cones from Belgium. And into it came the glass tub of Mr. de Persia, bought by the decorator from an antique shop in an old barn run by two boys from Crockett who had good taste. Wylie Prescott loved the glass tub and would lie in it for hours, hoping to cure his softness, for he wanted a son to bring to the great house. There were many chimneys, imported from France, narrow Roman bricks from Italy, vases from Venice, vases from Pisa, polished marble pillars from Siena, French mirrors, clear as water, from ceiling to floor. There were mantels and fireplaces made from Numidian marble; there were arcades of Romanesque windows, colonnades and running arcades. There were massive oak doors and flowing buoyant stairways, wide and wandering staircases; glass doors; brass, copper and tile. Walls were covered with gold satin damask with gold beading and silvery satin damask with silver beading. There was white mahogany, satinwood, bird’s-eye maple. The finials and lightning rods were alive with lion heads and flowers, cornucopias, winged things, shell shapes, glass rosettes and iron lilies, so that the whole topping of the great house seemed, in the fluttering dawn and trembling twilight, like some extravagant cake. There was a conservatory filled with ferns. And under this crowning roof there lived the man who had walked into fire and quenched it, who had cleared with his hands a piece of the Thicket, and dug oil with his fingernails, an odd, shut-up man who never entered any of the splendid rooms but one, a small ordinary back room under the stairs whose bottom, his ceiling, was shaped like the keel of a ship and where a picture of him in his firedevil suit glared blankly from the wall like a moonwalker.