Excerpts from the Fifth Codicil to the Last Will and
Testament of Michael L. Benedum
Bridgeport, West Virginia
I.
How time
and heat
and pressure,
these unchanging
elements of
the earth,
press the
little ones
long dead—
algae, plankton,
minute creatures
of the sea—
into machine
elixir, making
crude money
for wildcatters
finding hiding
places under
capstones,
tapping their
flush stores
for more
heat and
more pressure,
pushing forward
the engine of
industry
fueled by
unquenchable
lust and greed.
II.
When Claude
was twenty,
his parents
proud, and he
at work
fiddling with
invisible bonds
for visible war,
the Spanish Flu
unhinged his
intricate
chemistry,
and he, like
the ancient
fossils of fuel,
lay down in
the sediment
and, too,
fed a slow-
burn contagion
of fire.
III.
Michael Late
was forty nine
at the time
he lost his son,
and in the top
one hundred
of American
money elite.
His fertile basin,
where virtue
slumbered, a
sprouting seed,
yielded up
a reservoir,
his rich reserves
under Providence-
pressure looking
for relief.
Good conscience
drilled a gusher
that pooled slick
upon the rung
below—West Virginia’s
sick and poor—
before the coming
of the common
leveler of
mankind,
stern and cold,
irresistibly
reunited son
and father,
pressed together
where once there
was, but now no
more, a sea.
NOTES
1-Michael Late Benedum was born in Bridgeport, West Virginia in 1869. He amassed a fortune in the oil drilling business, starting out as a “wildcatter’, one who explores for new oil reservoirs. He started the Benedum-Trees Oil Company which owned multiple oil leases in West Virginia and went on to discover the vast Yates Oil Field in Texas. By 1957 Benedum appeared on a list of the 75 wealthiest Americans. Benedum’s son Claude died from the Spanish Flu in 1918 at the young age of 20 while working for the US Army on chemical warfare projects. In 1944 Benedum founded the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to provide philanthropic grants in West Virginia and Pittsburgh, his native and adopted home areas. Through 2009 the Foundation had awarded approximately $365 million dollars in grants. At the end of 2014 the Foundation had assets of $367 million.
2-All words in italics indicate words or phrases taken directly from Michael Benedum’s final will written in 1957, two years before his death in 1959. See https://benedum.org/about-us/mr-benedums-will/
3-Crude oil comes from a process wherein ancient marine life, both plants and animals, die and sink into sediment where they are covered over and remain trapped until they are eventually baked and pressed into oil and gas over a slow process of millions of years, which eventually starts rising up through porous layers of earth until finally gathering in reservoirs under impassable shale-capstones, both in its liquid (oil/petroleum) and gaseous (natural gas) states.
4-Now no more a sea. See Revelation 21:1 in the Bible.