Giant

by Edna Ferber

  Now at sight of her guest Leslie’s rather set smile of greeting became one of warmth and affection.

  “Vashti! What a nice surprise!”

  “Thought you’d all gone off and died.”

  “Where’s Pinky?”

  “In the car there. We’re so hot we’re spittin’ cotton.”

  The contrast between the two voices was startling; the one low, vibrant; the other high, strident.

  “I thought it was the others from the Big House. Come in, come in! Something cold to drink?”

  “Hot coffee I’d druther if it’s handy.”

  “Of course. After twenty years and more in Texas wouldn’t you think I’d know it’s always hot coffee?” She called in Spanish to someone unseen within the house. She went to the veranda entrance. “Pinky! Come in!”

  “Where at’s Bick?”

  “He’ll be here any minute. Come in out of the sun.”

  Vashti, sunk in the depths of a cool chartreuse chair, fanned her flushed face with an unavailing handkerchief. Her inward eye on her own expanse of beige silk, her outward eye on Leslie’s slim grey-blue shantung, she voiced the self-doubt that tormented her.

  “Look, Les, does this look too fussy? Traveling, I mean. Light beige?”

  “Well—beige is—is good in Texas. The dust.” The soft dark eyes kind, friendly.

  “I don’t know,” Vashti panted unhappily. She narrowed her baby-blue eyes to contemplate the entire effect of Leslie’s costume. “Now, take you, piece by piece—shoes and stockings and dress and everything, why you’re just right, every single thing. But to look at you quick you don’t look like anything.”

  At the startled glance and then the quick flashing smile of the other woman Vashti’s customary high color took on the scarlet of embarrassment. “Oh, Leslie, I didn’t mean it mean! I just meant no matter what you’ve got on it doesn’t hit you in the eye the first thing, but take you apart, why, everything is perfect. Just perfect.”

  On her way to greet Mott Snyth Leslie Benedict’s hand rested a moment on the shoulder of her guest’s moist and crumpled bulk. “Dear Vashti, that’s the nicest thing any woman ever said to another woman.”

  “Coffee, Pinky?” she called to him. “Don’t sit there under glass.”

  The little man, a Watteau figure in Western masquerade, emerged from the big car. Legs actually slightly bowed like those of a cowboy in a Grade B movie; the unvenerable white head was a dot beneath the great brimmed Stetson. “Me and Vashti got to mosey along, all that way to drive.” This was a cunning opening wedge. “Where’s Bick?”

  “Out since five this morning. You know Jordan. He’s probably down at the hangar now. He’s always fussy about the big plane, I don’t know why. You can fall just as far from a little one as a big one, but he’s always casual about the little ones.”

  “Mott’s the same way.” Vashti had taken off one tiny beige slipper and was wriggling her toes ecstatically. “Climbs into the little Piper Cub, kind of flips his foot and shoves off like he was in a kiddiekar. Years back, when we first got a flock of planes and Mott used to fly the kids to school mornings—mmm, coffee!”

  Delfina, soft-stepping, concealing her shyness with a childish insolence of bearing. As she placed the coffee tray on the glass-topped table she stared at the two women with the steady disconcerting gaze of a four-year-old, the bright dark eyes making leisurely appraisal from foot to throat encompassing their clothes. Their faces did not interest her. Masses of vital black hair hung about her shoulders, her blouse was low-cut, her stockingless feet shuffled in huaraches.

  “Thank you, Delfina,” Mrs. Benedict said—a shade too nicely—in English. Her eyes met Vashti’s as the girl disappeared.

  “New?” inquired Vashti over the scalding rim of her coffee cup.

  “Alvaro’s granddaughter. I can’t do a thing about her hair! She copies the girls in the movies and the dime store in town. She’s been working as elevator operator at the Hake. You must have seen her. Her cousin is a bellboy there. Raul Salazar. Alvaro asked Jordan to bring her back here to work in the house, she’d got into trouble——”

  “Oh well, if you and Bick are going to look after all of old Alvaro’s sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all that patriarchal Texas stuff.”

  Pinky choked over his coffee. “Listen at who’s talking! Vashti’s always up to her hocks in a Mexican wedding or a borning or a family ruckus. Takes enormous cantle off her life. How’s old Alvaro, anyway? Must be pushing a hundred.”

  “Oh, who cares about who’s pushing a hundred!” Vashti, now miraculously refreshed by the strong hot coffee, led up to the purpose of her visit. She peered through the vine leaves, her gaze squinting skyward. “Nice flying weather.”

  Quite as though she cared about the weather, about flying, about anything that had to do with this hideous day Leslie Benedict took her cue as hostess, she said smoothly, “Do you think so? What do you think, Pinky? Some of those fat black clouds look like rain.”

  “Rain!” Pinky scoffed. “Can easy tell you’ve only been twenty-five years in Texas. No rain in those clouds. They’re just empties coming back from California. Come on now, Vashti. We got to get going. Vashti says she’s got to pick up a new fur piece in Hermoso. White mink cape or some such doodad.”

  “How does it happen you’re not flying?”

  Hastily Pinky raised a protesting hand. “We better not go into that. Well, I didn’t want to haul out the big plane, Vashti wouldn’t hear to the little one.” The rosy face crinkled in a grin. “They used to be a saying, in Texas a man is no better than his horse, and a man on foot is no man at all. Nowadays a fella without an airplane has got no rating, might as well be a Mexican.”

  At last. “Don’t you want to leave the car here and fly down with us?”

  “Oh, Leslie!” Vashti’s tone of astonishment would not have deceived an amoeba.

  “Well, say, if you’re sure it wouldn’t crowd you none——”

  Quickly Vashti cinched it. “Love it! Just purely love it, and thank you kindly. Who all’s going? Who’s over at the Big House, h’m?”

  As Leslie Benedict answered there was a half-smile on her lips, a rueful little smile. She thought, This is ludicrous I suppose. Twenty-five years ago Pd have said it was too fantastic to be true. When I introduce Pinky and Vashti, these good and kind people, there are no terms in which I can define them. They are of a world unknown outside Texas. Even as she answered Vashti she was seeing these two with the eye of one who would always be an outsider in this land. Pinky. As unlike the cowboy of the motion picture and the Western novel as one could be in the likeness of a man. Small, his bone structure as delicate as a woman’s. His feet in their high-heeled ornately tooled cowboy boots were arched and slim as a girl’s. Pink cheeks, pansy-blue eyes, white hair that waved in thick clusters of curls. In the dust-clouded past he had come to Texas from nowhere. They had deviled him and ridiculed him with their rough jokes and rougher horseplay. He must compensate for his miniature frame and his innocent blue eyes and pink cheeks. So he had been tougher, more daring than the biggest and most daredevil cow hand in the brush country. He used big words whose meaning they did not always understand, he spoke softly but at times his tongue was a whiplash. The small hands were steel-strong, there was no horse he could not gentle. He had come to the Hake ranch—the vast Double B—possessed of nothing but the saddle he carried under his arm—his ridin’ riggin’ in the ranch idiom. And Vashti Hake actually had married him on the rebound—this big booming woman who had been a big awkward girl—this daughter of old Cliff Hake, now long dead. Two million acres of ranch land, oil wells, cattle, millions.

  “Who all’s going, Les? Who’s over at the Big House, h’m?”

  Leslie walked to the veranda screen door, she listened a moment. “The cars went out to call for them.”

  “Yeh, but who, Les?”

  “Well—uh—there’s Cal Otter the cowboy movie star. You know—with the whit
e hat and white buckskin chaps and white horse and all those white teeth. And the King and Queen of Sargovia and Joe Glotch the ex-heavyweight champion and Lona Lane that new movie girl and her husband and my sister Lady Karfrey——”

  “She here! When’d she come?” Vashti interrupted.

  “Leigh flew over from London on Tuesday and flew on here next day. And Jordan’s brother Bowie and his sister from Buffalo——”

  “Uh-uh! Trouble. And who else?”

  “Well—the Moreys are here from Dallas, and Congressman Bale Clinch, and Gabe Target stopped on his way down and Judge Whiteside and a South American ex-Presidente who’s Ambassador now—I’ve forgotten which country—and Tara Tarova and some others—and Cal Otter’s taking his white horse.” The absurd list gave her a mischievous pleasure.

  “On the plane?” Vashti asked somewhat nervously.

  “It’s all right. In the forward compartment. He’s used to flying. We’ll be up only an hour or two, Jordan wants to show the King and Queen something of the ranch from the air, they’re thinking of buying a few thousand acres up north in the Panhandle. They spent a day or two at the King ranch. Jordan says they bought some of Bob Kleberg’s prize Brahman bulls.”

  “Kind of nice selling foreign royalty a bill of goods for a change. They been taking us for a couple hundred years. They better watch out or Jett Rink’ll be unloading one of his dusters on ’em.”

  “That’s a funny thing for them to do, go to ranching,” Vashti commented. “A real king and queen like that.”

  “Nothing so funny about it,” Pinky said. “The Prince of Wales—Duke of Windsor he is now—he owns a big country up in Canada, don’t he!” He ruminated a moment. “Don’t know’s I ever met a king and queen. Socially, I mean. Course, they’re out of business now, those two, you might say. But what do you call them, talking to them I mean?”

  But before Pinky could benefit by an elementary lesson in the etiquette of royalty a battered jeep crunched to a jolting stop in the driveway as though it had been lassoed and a gaunt girl in boots, jeans and a fifty-dollar shirt swung long legs around the side. “Hi!” she said. She was hatless, her sun-bleached hair was tied back into a sort of horse’s tail. She entered the veranda, she went through a routine that was the perfection of pretty manners. So-and-so Mrs. Snyth…this-and-that Pinky…sec you at the party it sounds horrible doesn’t it…where’s Dad…I’m off…

  “Luz, they’ll all be here in a minute. Why don’t you go with us in the big plane?”

  “Oh, Ma! That hearse!”

  “Amador’s packing the lunch. We’re eating on the plane. Don’t you want something before you go?”

  “How you going?” Pinky asked, though he knew well enough.

  “I’m flying the little Snazzy. I’ll stop on my way to the field and grab a hamburger at Jerky’s place.”

  Pinky wagged his head knowingly. “You taking any passengers in that footbath?”

  “Don’t be roguish, Pinky.”

  “He ain’t going to the rumpus, for God’s sake!”

  “He wouldn’t be seen dead at it.”

  “He sure would if he went,” Pinky asserted, quite solemnly.

  She was off with a neat little clatter of scuffed boots. Pinky called after her. “I am informed that Jerky’s hamburgers are made of horse meat. Old beat-up quarter horses shot for their hides.”

  She stuck her head out of the jeep. “Plenty of onions and barbecue sauce, it’ll be better than tough Texas beef.” To the shouts of remonstrance at this heresy the jeep scuttled off like a frightened bug.

  The eyes of the three followed her out of sight. They looked at each other. Silence hung momentarily between them. Vashti was not given to silences.

  “Honey, she ain’t serious about that dirt farmer, is she?”

  But before Leslie could answer Pinky cut in, deftly.

  “Now, Vashti, look who’s talking. You married a low-down cow hand, didn’t you?”

  “Cow hand is different. This fella works afoot. Telling everybody, going around lecturing at Grange halls about this grass and that, blue grama—yella bluestem—side-oats grama—telling Texans been ranching all their life and their fathers and grandfathers how to run things. He don’t even act like a Texan. Cornell University! Texas U. ain’t good enough.”

  “What you think of Bob Dietz, Leslie?” Pinky asked baldly. “Might as well ask out, now Vashti’s been and choused things up. Me, I got the opinion that boy is an unexception.”

  Very quietly Leslie Benedict said, “I think Bob Dietz may change the whole face of Texas—its system and its politics and its future.”

  Vashti Snyth gave a little yelp of shock. “Why Leslie Benedict, he ain’t got five hundred dollars cash to his name!”

  “I’d have said a hundred,” Leslie replied quietly.

  Now there came an acceleration of sound and movement from within the house and without. It was like the quickening of the tempo in a discordant modern symphony. From the dim interior of one of the rooms along the veranda emerged young Jordy Benedict with the Mexican girl who was his wife. They were hand in hand, like children afraid. There was between them a resemblance so marked that they might have been brother and sister. His hair was black but hers was blacker. He had inherited his from Leslie, his mother; she from centuries of Spanish forebears. Her skin was camellia-white, the Texas sun had hurled its red rays in vain. In their bearing, too, this young pair had a strange diffidence in common. Withdrawn, these two, as though alien to this familiar group. So young, so beautiful, they bore themselves with a shy uncertainty. Nothing about them of the confidence with which Luz had come and gone. The girl was dressed in black, very simple in cut, a strand of small pearls at her throat; and that throat and the face above it seemed almost translucent, as though a light were glowing behind them.

  They knew their manners. Hers were quaintly old-world in their formality. She had been born in Texas, as he had been. Her father and mother, her grandfather and grandmother, her great-grandfather and great-grandmother and their forebears had been native to this land centuries before the word Texas had ever been heard. In a vortex of airplanes and bourbon and Brahman cattle and millions and little white mink capes and Cadillac cars and oil rigs and skyscrapers this girl moved and spoke in the manner of an ancient people in an ancient land.

  “Hiyah, honey!” yelled Vashti as though addressing a deaf foreigner. “My, you sure look pretty.”

  To this the girl said nothing. With grave dignity she gave her hand to Vashti Snyth, to Pinky. “Sure do,” echoed Pinky, and took her hand in his bone-crushing grip. She gave a little yelp, then she laughed like a child at sight of Jordan’s startled look. For the moment the tension that had followed their entrance was broken.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” Jordy Benedict said, laughing, and pretending to shy away from Pinky’s extended hand. “Bulldogging in a steer?” He spoke with a slight stammer—not always marked when he was at ease, but now noticeable as he negotiated the word bulldogging.

  “Hiyah, Jordan!” Pinky pronounced it Jurden, Texas fashion. “You and Juana flying down to the big blow, Doc?”

  “No,” Jordy said and turned away. He sat then on the arm of his wife’s chair and flung one arm across the back. There was something defiant, something protective about the gesture. “We’re driving—if we go.”

  Leslie put her hand lightly on the girl’s knee. “Juana doesn’t like flying. But then,” she added quickly, “neither do I, really. I never have learned to take it for granted. I guess I belong to the generation that still thinks the automobile is a wonderful invention.”

  “What you wearing black for all the time, anyway?” Vashti shrilled at the girl. “Like a Mex——” She stopped, appalled. “I mean a little bitty thing like you, whyn’t you wearing bright stuff, look at me, I got age on me but I go busting out like a rainbow.”

  Pinky shook his head in a mood of ruminant wonder. “Funny thing about women folks like Vashti here. Her young’u
ns growed up and married away, she’s got to be riding herd on everybody else’s.”

  “Mott Snyth!” The vast bosom heaved, the plump pink face crinkled like a baby’s who is about to cry. “You go to saying things like that, mean, I’ve a good mind to——”

  But at the sound of the quick drum of horse’s hoofs the infantile face cleared magically. As Bick Benedict leaped off his horse a Mexican boy sprang from nowhere to mount the brisk little animal and, wheeling, clatter off to the stables.

  There was nothing regal, certainly, in the outer aspect of this broad-shouldered figure in the everyday clothes of a Texas cowman. Yet here was the ruler of an empire. His high-heeled boots of black leather were stitched in colored thread, scuffed by hard wear, handmade, had cost perhaps sixty dollars; tight brown canvas pants tucked into the boot tops; brown shirt open at the throat; a canvas brush jacket; a Stetson, dust-stained, and rolled at the brim to make an exaggerated tricone. Every garment he wore was suited to the work and the climate of his world; and everything from his lariat to his saddle, from his boots to his hat, and had been copied from the Mexican horsemen whose land this Texas had been little more than a century ago.

  Just below the leather belt with its hand-tooled design of the reata the hard lean body was beginning to show a suspicion of a bulge. Sun wind dust had etched Bick Benedict’s face, tanned the skin to warm russet. A strangely contradictory face, benign and arrogant. Benevolent and ruthless. The smile was nervous rather than mirthful. His was a deceptive gentleness; soft-spoken, almost mild. The eyes were completely baffling; guileless, visionary; calculating, shrewd.

  Up since five, he was late, he was weary, he was beset, he had nicked his right forefinger in a magic new weighing machine they were installing down at the main corral. He threw a lot of Texas into his greeting now.