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Continent's Edge
by Niven Busch
Part I
Chapter 1
A Family Gathering
We lived, then, in an age of heroes. One war had just ended and another stirred its muscles, over the horizon, but in this space between the two we turned for assurance to the doers of great deeds, we pelted them with flowers and money, we asked of them only that they confirm, with so much in flux, the notion that the individual could still prevail. We needed them, we needed them a lot, and for the citizens of Altemira, California — a pleasant northern country seat which no one had ever heard of — the Kinsales fulfilled that need. They had come through. They had put themselves among the odd, hypnotic myths which enchanted us at that time — Lindbergh and Ederle, Valentino and Dempsey, Fitzgerald and Harlow and Hemingway. Mind, the Kinsales were not sporting or literary figures — by no means, although Kyle, the most dashing of them, admitted to some sport proclivities. The Kinsales had their own game, but it was enough, indeed it was so much that an Altemiran, traveling, could identify his town to non-Californians by saying that the Kinsales came from there. They didn't really, but their headquarters ranch was only forty miles away. It wasn't much of a lie.
What seems odd now, on reflection, is not that we admired them but that we knew so little about them. We just had the hometown data. We knew which of the men were the womanizers, which the wanderers, which the stay-at-homes; we knew the family's kindnesses and meannesses, their tastes and their vices; we had gone to school with some of them; we had competed with them for girls and ridden against them in roping contests; some of us had been confirmed and taken Communion with them. That was another thing: the Kinsales were Catholics. Most of us weren't, in Altemira, but we didn't hold that against them. They did their shopping with us when they could just as easily have taken it to King City or Coalinga. We appreciated that. We liked to see their carriages and fine matched teams and later their automobiles (I'm speaking now of the first quarter of the twentieth century) moving through our streets or waiting outside our stores and banks and lawyers' offices; we enjoyed the vicarious importance of having the family members around. They were good-looking people, most all of them, except Hub: tall with a nice proportion of flesh and bone. They were dark-brown- or rufous-haired men and women (Kyle was the only black-haired one), but whether red or darkish, all had a certain glisten to them, a certain way of moving and of holding their heads, particularly when talking to each other — an angle, a slant, not superior necessarily but private — and all, without exception, had the Kinsale skin or some substance covering them which wasn't really skin but a stuff similar to it and performing the same function, only better — paler and tougher than ordinary skin and proof against the skin troubles that might affect less favored folk: sunburn and poison oak and chiggers, perhaps even heat and cold.
They were ours. At least for a long time they were ours, then at some point there was a breakthrough. We heard about the first oil well, the dramatic one, and then the winds of family change, the hurricane of money which some of them rode so dashingly, so conspicuously, onto the front pages of the world's newspapers. Not that we read newspapers all that much. (The Literary Digest or American Magazine, which praised famous people, or The American Mercury or McClure's, which ripped them up.) We read the Altemira Free Lance, but even the Free Lance mentioned these developments. Then again, some of us traveled; we took note, along the great pale highways, of the neat green-and-gold KinOil stations and their newfangled glasswindowed pumps, and we filled up with KinOil gas, partly out of loyalty and partly because it was the best gas going and the price was right. Gabe Evans, the saddlemaker (he had turned out handcrafted rigs for three generations of Kinsales), sold his shop when he was ready to retire and he and the wife took a trip to Chicago and brought back word about the KinOil Building there, sixty stories on State Street. There was another, smaller building on Bush, in San Francisco.
We saw the start of it, the Kinsale legend. We had no real idea of how far, how fast it had moved, though we were given hints from time to time. One such — of an unusual kind — occurred at the end of the thirties when a team of Secret Service men arrived in town. They inspected the railroad station and conferred with a Southern Pacific maintenance detail as to the condition of the tracks from the S.P. station in Altemira out to the Kinsale ranch. The S.P. had recently acquired that line but for many years it had been a private holding. Calvin Kinsale, the founding grandfather, had built it before the turn of the century. He'd wanted a way to ship his cattle to market without taking weight off them. (To any Kinsale, taking weight off cattle was the worst thing you could do.) One wonders how much of an economy the railroad had proved to be; still, there was something grand about it — and about a family that owned a railroad line, no matter how short, no matter in what condition.
The Secret Service said it was all right. They were orderly, uncommunicative men with the indoor faces of prisoners or house servants; they wore dark suits with baggy, pleated pants. After inspecting the track they took on guard duty at the ranch. They were responsible for the safety of someone coming down to the Kinsales' — the Vice President of the United States, for God's sake! And he — well, he was going to be on hand in his capacity as an official government welcomer to someone else, someone even more important, who would be there: the Emperor of Turkey! Such was the gossip at the post office until someone remembered that Turkey wasn't an empire, it was a republic. Nor was the head of it coming. That was ascertained later. Not the headman but the number two man and he not by train, it seemed, but by automobile, by three automobiles in fact, black Lincolns — what we'd once called bootleggers' cars — he riding in the middle one. The motorcade stopped at the KinOil station across from the State Theater and the number two man got out and went to the gents'. He was a stooped, no-longer-young individual with a mustache-beard, as you might call it — a ring of black hair which tightly circled his mouth. Since he was being accorded head-of-state status, one of the Secret Service men stood outside the door while the Turk relieved himself.
CONSORTIUM BACKS FOREIGN LOAN
The San Francisco Chronicle and the Altemira Free Lance both used the same studhorse head, but the Chronicle had it on the second section. The loaning entities were listed as KinOil of California, Pacific Refineries, Piru Pipe and Drilling, and the Bank of America. Pacific Refineries, a partially owned Kinsale subsidiary, distributed KinOil products nationally. Piru Pipe and Drilling was the KinOil exploration branch. The Bank of America, KinOil's "lead bank" in California, had underwritten the loan in conjunction with Lazard Fr•res of New York and Paris, an international banking house.
What the deal amounted to, behind the corporate fronts, was that the Kinsales were privately lending twenty million dollars to a foreign government. They got six percent bonds and an oil concession in return.
The New York Times felt they'd achieved a coup: the oil concession, close to the proven fields of Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, could have great value.
Twenty million dollars — well, it was a risk. A huge sum for those days (KinOil had "gone public" in 1931). What other family, above all what other California family, could deal with a needy nation as if it, the family, were another nation? That was something to think about. And not only as if it were another nation, but clearly the more powerful as well as the richer of the two, since the Kinsale nation, if it could be so called, had made the Turkish nation send its man, that pisser with the round black beard on his mouth, over land and sea, clear to the headquarters ranch to sign up for the money.
It made you proud to be neighbors with a family like that!
We have leaped way ahead. There was no sign, earlier on, of such glory in the offing. There they were with us, these extraordinary people, but how were you to tell they were extraordinary? They had seemed so long to be like any other dullish, landed California family, rooted to the earth as we to our town by birth and necessity, by taste and tradition, and above all by their stubborn, rawhide innocence.
The truth is that, but for the grace of God, they might never have made the first move, they might have missed the whole exercise — in fact, through the mouth of Hubbard W. Kinsale, titular head of the clan at that time, son of Calvin, husband of Emilia de Baca Kinsale, father of Mildred, Kyle and Troy Kinsale, they actually made the decision to do so, made it officially and passed it by resolution and read it into the minutes of the Kinsale Land and Cattle Company, the basic company of all, which is not and has never been a public company, in the course of a stockholders' meeting.
That meeting was not the first at which oil was discussed but it was the most critical.
There was a strict protocol about Kinsale Land and Cattle Company meetings. They included lunch. Some of the people had to come a hundred miles, and a few farther; they couldn't go too long without food. Hub well knew that shareholders, like other folk, were easier to deal with when they were properly fed and provided with a few shots of well-aged grog. The shareholders had been getting frisky. You could not order them around the way old Cal had done. Cal had incorporated the family business in 1910, under the laws of the state of California. He'd kept a controlling stock majority for himself, but on his death a new distribution had been made. Hub held more shares than any other single person — not enough, however, to prevail should all unite against him. So far this had never happened and to make sure it never would Hub had, on reaching sixty-five, stepped down from the presidency, handing that duty over to Kyle, his eldest son. Kyle was his favorite. They understood each other. Kyle was a well-educated person, a special person, and Hub had need, in the pressure of new ways, new times, of Kyle's education, his brilliance and charm and tact. Being so special, Kyle also had special needs, and Hub had seen that these were satisfied. A fair exchange! It would be a cold day in hell before Kyle moved against him. On the other hand, Kyle would not be at today's meeting. He was in England, riding in a point-to-point (whatever that might be!). There was a rumor that Troy had been in touch with him — that Kyle, if that could be believed, had written a letter supporting Troy's demand.
Troy himself would be on hand. That was assured, but for once the meeting started without him.
He was late.
