“This place is surreal,” Helen sighed quietly.
Andrea walked over to an antique hall table and began looking at some old books which had been left on the table within the hallway. The books were covered in dust and seemed to be the only thing in the house, thus far, which hadn’t been stowed away neatly, they were just laying on the table at random.
“…I read this book once, ‘Little Women’ Andrea said to no one in particular.
Andrea set the book down and then picked up someone’s hand drawing of a kitty cat on a piece of thick paper and, blowing the dust off of it, examined it carefully.
“Do you think I could have this?” Andrea asked, looking at Kendall and holding up the picture.
Kendall looked at Andrea quizzically for several seconds and then replied “…Are you serious?”
“…Yes, but if we’re not supposed to take anything then I’ll leave it here” Andrea answered, suddenly a bit uneasy with Kendall’s change in demeanor.
“…It’s your house, take anything you want.” Kendall finally said.
“WHAT!!!???” Helen, Andrea, and I all asked at once in unison.
We were now met with a long moment of silence. Other than Kendall’s chirping belt-mounted two-way radio, there was no other sound within the house.
Andrea, Helen, and I just stared at Kendall…
“Wh-wh- what did you say, Kendall?” I asked again, shaking my head with disbelief.
“…You mean you didn’t know?…That guy, Danny Wickersham, willed the entire house and land to the three of you…” Kendall replied quietly.
“I don’t fuckin’ believe this!” Andrea said as she grabbed her forehead and quickly walked to the hand railing of the foyer as she closed her eyes and firmly grasped the railing with her other hand.
“DANNY WICKERSHAM!!!” Andrea now bellowed into the open foyer at the top of her lungs, followed by an angry echo.
It almost sounded as if Andrea were yelling at a seven-year-old boy who’d broken a window and then gone into hiding for fear of his mother’s wrath…
…I’d never seen my wife so genuinely angry before.
Andrea now did two things, she seemed to go into a kind of melt-down, and at the same time begin a litany of profanity that would have far surpassed that of any United States Marine with ease. Danny Wickersham was not my wife’s favorite person during this intense litany, that much was very apparent. I’d never known Andrea was capable of such horrific language and it was, to be honest, a bit shocking to me.
She then abruptly hung her head over the hand railing and threw up.
I walked over to my wife and placed my hand on her back, Andrea was leaning on the rail now with her head drooped and eyes closed.
“I should have seen this coming, knowing Danny the way I did, but we walked right into this whole mess just like a bunch of dupes. Now it makes sense why Earl Billingsly was so interested in talking with us, the oil company must want us to sell this parcel of land to them…” Andrea murmured.
“I’m sorry, Andrea, I thought the three of you knew this place had been willed to you,” Kendall said quietly, looking at Helen.
Neither Helen nor Anndrea appeared to hear Kendall.
“Tim, I’m not going to be able to make it on the plane tonight, you go, and I’ll sort out this fuckin’ mess, however long it takes me… I’m so sorry I drug you into all this, honey” Andrea said, clutching her forehead with her eyes still closed.
I gently took my wife’s hand and brought her toward me in an embrace. She smelled of vomit now and holding her felt like holding a limp doll. She was also physically shaking with anger and emotion. This scenario was exactly the opposite of just a day ago; when we’d discovered that we were on the front page of The International Monitor and I’d been the one to lose my subway sandwich while my wife had comforted me.
Andrea leaned her head into my chest and began to weep quietly.
“Baby, we’ll get through this too, you and I, and Helen. -Hell, there must be four or five hundred thousand dollars worth of gold doorknobs in this fuckin’ place. Just think how many issues of The International Monitor we could buy with that!” I laughed with feigned bravado.
Andrea didn’t laugh at my childish analogy, nor did Kendall or Helen either.
…There probably was four or five hundred thousand dollars worth of gold-plated doorknobs in the place.
Now, with my wife’s tears, the aura of the house suddenly seemed to transition from a day’s epic adventure of opulent Victorian grandeur to that of an extreme example of someone’s over self-indulgence of blatant arrogance. The mansion had now become extremely mentally taxing, overbearing, and emotionally draining. The place was so over-the-top in every imaginable way that it was difficult to comprehend its massive size and extreme excesses in every detail. The house was completely overwhelming and we’d probably only seen one-fifteenth of it so far.
Even the mansion’s name “Prominent House” seemed to scream arrogance at us.
It almost felt as though we’d spent too much time in some cheap traveling carnival’s funhouse to the point of adnausium, like some warped episode of the Twilight Zone where clowns suddenly became haunting gargoyles of mental fatigue and fear.
It wasn’t fun anymore.
I picked up the kitty cat picture off of the floor and slid it into Andrea’s purse.
“Kendall, we’re ready to go now, we’ll need a day or two to sort things out between ourselves, we’ll be in touch,” I said definitively.
With my arm around Andrea, we led the other two ladies back down the staircase.
“I totally understand, Tim” Kendall replied.
…
I pulled down the passenger’s sun visor and squinted into the setting sun.
“…I’ve been thinking, I would calculate that the price of constructing that mansion would have equaled the cost of building Olympic and Titanic both,” I said as I looked out the passenger’s window at all the pumping oil wells in the setting Texas sun.
I was now in the front seat of the yellow pick-up truck with Kendall, while Andrea and Helen sat in the rear seat, wearily leaning against each other.
“With the money spent to construct that house, you could have built Olympic, Titanic, and half of their sister ship, Britannic, Tim. I’m not joking” Andrea responded with a tired yet serious expression on her face.
“Unbelievable,” I said, in reference to the house.
“My God, you could move the whole neighborhood into that place and not see anyone for a freakin’ week, it’s so big” Helen exaggerated slightly.
…The four of us became silent for several minutes as we rode along the dusty dirt road. The house had literally drained us, it’d been so overwhelming.
Kendall now pointed toward a row of pumpjacks that were motionless.
“That wellhead, with the row of pumps, is called ‘Prominence.’ We still run those pumps several days out of each month and that well is still producing oil. The old man that built the house, sunk that well in eighteen-eighty-nine” Kendall said evenly.
“…My God,” I said aloud in awe, trying to mentally calculate the wealth which had come from the one single wellhead alone.
“I don’t think the old man ever once batted an eyelid at the cost of that house, back yonder,” Kendall said as we turned back onto the main dirt road leading toward the office building, which was still several miles away.