"Portions of this book have appeared in Texas Monthly in slightly different form."-- Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

"In Texas, blood is bond and oil is king. In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. He eventually settles the raw and open country. He eventually settles in the small town of Big Spring, where quick fortunes are being made from its vast reserves of oil. For decades, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweeds. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against despair, but for young Bobby Mealer, the author's father, religion is only an agent for rebellion. In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question: 'How'd you like to be a millionaire?' Twenty-seven, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now big Spring's streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and vice. Boom chasers pour in from the bust factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise along the pastures, and poor men become wealthy overnight. Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But as Bobby soon discovers, he return to Big Spring is a backslider's journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life."-- Back cover.