Giant

by Edna Ferber

“You’d better let me give you a brush jacket,” Bick said. “We go through mesquite some of the way. What’s your hat?”

  “Very informal. Just a little round-brimmed riding hat.”

  “That’s no good. You’ll be burned alive. Your face and the back of your neck. Luz, find her a jacket and a hat…. You know, all this stuff we wear in Texas isn’t because it looks good in the movies.”

  So she rode in a haphazard costume made up of her own pants with glittering Eastern riding boots and high-necked shirt, a Texas brush jacket and a ten-gallon hat. The moon was still in the sky as the sun came up. Moonlight and starlight and sunlight, and the dawn air cool and a little moist and the Gulf wind stirring only gently. “This is the best time of day,” Leslie found herself saying. “That’s why they get up early. Now I know. Just give me time and I’ll learn.”

  “That’s why. That, and habit and a few million head of cattle in these parts to see to.”

  The Mexican boys stood with the horses in the dim cool morning. No sound as they came down the steps but the stamp of the waiting horses’ hoofs. “I wish one of them would neigh.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Except that it would make the whole thing perfect.”

  Luz did not see them off. As they rode away Leslie found herself going over in her mind anything she might have left in her room in the way of letters, notes, memoranda. Then she was ashamed of having allowed this suspicion to enter her mind.

  It was hard riding, she was unaccustomed to this broad Western saddle, the mesquite was a hazard, their talk was disjointed. Leslie felt free and gay and new. To ride again was exhilarating after days of trains and hotels and automobiles. She was to see the purpose of these millions of acres, she was to be part of the everyday work of Reata Ranch and of every ranch in this gargantuan commonwealth. She began to sing out of sheer high spirits, whereupon her horse stopped.

  “Why did he do that?”

  “He’s a cow pony. When the cattle were restless the boys used to sing to them. Just sitting in the saddle, singing sort of slow and gentle. It quieted them. They don’t do it much any more. That was in the old days—my grandfather’s day—when they drove the big herds overland. One of the old hands must have broken in that pony of yours.”

  “It’s enough just to feel like singing. This is what I hoped it would be. I shan’t do any fainting today, Jordan. My very own Jordan. That sounds silly to you but it doesn’t to me.”

  “I didn’t say it sounded silly.”

  “A whole new life, brand new, for me. Imagine!”

  “Girls do have, don’t they, when they marry?”

  “Leigh didn’t. My sister Leigh.”

  “She married Karfrey, didn’t she? And went to England to live? And he’s a member of the English nobility. I should think that would have been——”

  “But it wasn’t. They live in Kent. In a house in the country in Kent. And people who live in a big comfortable house in Virginia have spent the last three hundred years trying to live like their English ancestors. When I visited her three years ago it was so much like Virginia, except that the English take their houses and gardens and clothes and horses more for granted. The cream was thicker, and the tweeds; and the carpets a little shabbier and the manners nicer and the women’s voices higher—— Heh, wait a minute!”

  “What?”

  “The English women’s voices. They’re rather high and shrill. And the Texas women’s voices are higher and shriller. English women have been regarded as sort of second-rate citizens for centuries. And Texas women seem to live in a kind of purdah. So they both talk in a high shrill way in order to get male attention.”

  “You’re getting too much male attention at the moment, Mrs. Benedict. We’ll get there by noon, at this rate.”

  “It’s so wonderful to be talking to you alone like this. I thought I’d never have a chance to talk to you again.”

  They rode side by side now. “Have to be careful of gopher holes here. Your horse step into one of those he can throw you—or he can break a leg.”

  “Can’t I wait for you so that we can ride back together when you’re finished?”

  “No, it’ll be too hot then. And no telling when I’ll be through. You’ll see why after you’ve sat out in the sun for a few hours. Yesterday they nooned at the creek but today there’ll be no shade. Jett will call for you and drive you home after lunch.”

  “Tell me about this Jett Rink.”

  “Jett’s all right when he behaves himself. When he drinks he goes kind of crazy. I’ve fired him a dozen times but he always seems to turn up back at the ranch, one way or another. He’s a kind of genius, Jett is.”

  “He is! Why, he just seemed to me a sullen loutish kind of boy. And sort of savage, too. I don’t know. What do you mean, genius?”

  “Oh, lots of ways. Machinery. Mechanics. There’s nothing he can’t fix, nothing he can’t run that has an engine in it. That’s invaluable around a modern ranch this size.”

  “You mean he’s the only one?”

  “One! There are dozens all over the place. But not like that locoed Rink. He’s a wizard—when he’s sober. But drunk or sober he doesn’t belong on a ranch because you can’t trust him with animals.”

  “How do you mean—trust him?”

  “He’s naturally mean with them. He abuses them. Kicks horses. Hits them over the head. I’ve seen him slam a calf right——”

  “Don’t! Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. But why? That’s what I want to know.”

  “He’s got a grudge against the world.”

  “He sounds an exquisite escort for your bride.”

  “Don’t you worry. I wouldn’t let you drive back with him if I didn’t know. He knows his place when it comes to the family. A funny thing, the girls are hot for him, even the Mexican girls and you know how strict their parents are with them.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “That’s so, you don’t. Well, they are. Regular old Spanish stuff, even the poorest of them. The girls don’t go out alone with boys, sometimes they hardly have a chance to speak to the man they marry until after they’re married. At the Mexican dances their mothers sit on the side lines like the old Boston and New York dowagers before the stag line came in. You’ve got to see it. Not a peso to their names, the fathers are cotton pickers if they’re lucky, and you’d think the girls were just out of some finishing school. Of course our boys—the Reata vaqueros—they wouldn’t let Jett come within a mile of their girls.”

  They had long ago ceased really to ride. They were sitting on their horses and the horses were walking as sedately as though they were not descended from the Arab horses brought into the country by the Spaniards centuries earlier; as though they had never been broken and trained with a hackamore, a snaffle bit or a rope.

  “He sounds irresponsible and sadistic,” she said.

  “He’ll probably end up a billionaire—or in the electric chair,” Bick predicted.

  The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. It floated to the surface of her consciousness, she thrust it back. “I suppose ranches are sadistic sort of places, aren’t they? I mean they make you——”

  “Ranches are full of life and death and birth, if that’s what you mean. A couple of hundred thousand of any living thing and you’re likely to see some pretty fundamental stuff going on.”

  “I know. Give me time, darling. It’s going to take me a while.”

  In silence they rode for a moment. Only the creak of leather, the faint jingle of metal. Horses’ hoofs on sun-baked earth. Texas sounds.

  “Leslie, since we came home I’ve been up to my ears in work. Maybe you’ve felt left out of things. Look, it’s like this. I’m pulling one way—I think it’s the right way—and Luz and Maudie and Bowie and Roady and the rest of them they’re all pulling another. They want the money—all the money they can get out of the ranch. And I want to put money back into the ranch. It takes a lot. I want to raise and breed the best b
eef cattle in the world, I want to experiment with new breeds and new grasses, I’m interested in the same sort of thing that Kleberg’s interested in on the big King ranch. Years ago those fellows on the old XIT ranch had an inkling of the future but of course they hadn’t much technical knowledge, they didn’t really know modern breeding or range rehabilitation. Neither did the old Matador crowd. All the big operators. They used up the range and shipped the cattle and finished them in the East and bred the old Longhorns to Herefords, Angus, Jersey, Swiss—anything that didn’t die right off from the ticks and the worms and the heat. The only one of the family who’s with me on the program I’ve mapped out is Uncle Bawley up at the Holgado Division. Say, I’ve an idea you’ll be crazy about old Uncle Bawley. He’s a character. Nearly seventy but full of beans. We’ll have to take a trip out there, you’ll love it. It’s high country, the mountains——”

  “Mountains! In Texas!”

  “Sure mountains. There’s everything in Texas. Mountains and forest and rivers and desert and plains and valleys and heat and cold.”

  “I know. You’re in love with it.”

  He reined his horse, he looked at her, his eyes full of pain. “Maybe it’s going to be hell for you down here. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you to Texas.”

  “It’s a little late now. We’re in it, darling. You didn’t marry a Texas belle.”

  “You’re on that again, h’m? I will say Luz tried to shoo off most of them but she was hell-bent on my marrying Vashti and the reason was that one end of the Hake ranch touches ours, it’s like the old plot in the mellerdrama.”

  “Jordan, did it ever strike you that Luz is a little—melodramatic herself?”

  “Luz! She’s just a bossy old maid who wants to be everybody’s mother. She feeds the world—or would if it came near her kitchen, she knows everybody’s business and thinks she runs Reata.”

  “And you.”

  “Funny thing, you know years ago she was supposed to marry old Cliff Hake. He wasn’t old then, he was a handsome young heller, they tell me, big beefy fellow, but she didn’t want to go to the Double B to live, she wanted to combine the two ranches and bring the whole thing under Reata. Of course Cliff wouldn’t hear of it and they split up. Would you believe it!”

  “Yes, I’d believe it. And so you were to marry Vashti in her place, all these years and years later. And now Vashti is married to that little pink man all because of you. Or really because of Luz.”

  “I meant to marry. Not Vashti, but I meant to marry, God knows there were plenty of girls around. I’m saying that without meaning to be a stinker. But I wasn’t in love with any of them. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I was in love with cattle.”

  “And power.”

  “How do you mean—power?”

  “Papa says——”

  “You set great store by your father, don’t you?”

  “I suppose I was in love with him in my own way just as you——”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk. It’s ugly.”

  “Why no, dear. I’m just talking—uh—scientifically.”

  “Women have no call to be scientific.”

  “Not even Madame Curie?”

  “What the hell has she got to do with it!”

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t believe you do either.”

  “I do this time. I don’t think Texas is free at all. Free, the way you said it was. I’ve been here two days and every natural thing I’ve said and done has been forbidden. I’m not reproaching you. I’m just stating a fact that astonishes me. Speaking to the employees as if they were human beings like myself. Wanting to wear pretty clothes in my home. Not liking to eat out of skulls. There are—I’m warning you—certain things I’m going to do, Luz or no Luz.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I told you yesterday.”

  “I don’t know that I can see my way clear to prettifying the house. Pa spent enough on that big pile and Ma never even lived to enjoy it. Anyway, the ranch comes first, every time, always. I put all the money I can scrape together into new projects. We’re working on a new dozer for clearing the mesquite. If it works it’s a human monster. We’re setting up a testing station for grasses. Gill Dace and I are working on the new breed of cattle. The Herefords can’t take this climate, they get the pinkeye and worms, and the fleas and worms together eat the calves alive. It cost me plenty to learn that. You should have heard the family at the last yearly meeting! You’d think I was embezzling the funds.”

  “Then why don’t you let them do it?”

  “It’s for me to do. They’re just a lot of money-eaters. Maudie Lou and that husband of hers, they like yachts. Yachts! For a girl born and brought up in Texas.”

  She gazed about her at the flat endless burning plain.

  “Rebellion,” she said.

  But he went on, he seemed not to have heard. “If we can breed up just one animal that will start a new race of cows. The tough old Longhorns could stand the heat and the tick but their meat was like rawhide.”

  Still is, she thought privately.

  “Wait till you see the Kashmirs! Humped like camels, grey-greenish velvet coats, there’s an oil in their skins that repels the fleas. If we can combine the Hereford meat and the Shorthorn strength and the Kashmir resistance! I’m willing to spend the next twenty years of my life in bringing the perfect Kashmir bull to the perfect Hereford-Shorthorn cow and if I do it’s going to be the most important mating, by God, since Adam and Eve.”

  “If that’s what you want to do more than anything in the world why do you need millions of acres to do it in? A few thousand would do, wouldn’t they? We could live in a six-room house and one car and no minions and be free. Free!” She stared about her. “How did you get all these millions of acres, anyway?”

  “Never mind how we got it.”

  “I’m going to read up on it. There must be a book about it somewhere. In the Public Library at Benedict.”

  “There isn’t a public library.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know why not. You’re worse than a kid—why why whywhy! All the time. We bought the land. We got it through purchase—my grandfather did. A hundred years ago. We swapped for it. We got it through Spanish land grants. And using our brains. It was my father’s and my grandfather’s and it’s going to be my son’s——”

  “No one in the whole United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don’t care how they came by it.”

  “You’re completely ignorant of what you’re talking about. In my grandfather’s day there was enough range grass to support a steer on two acres of land. In another five years you did mighty well if you could feed a steer on six acres. Now there are whole sections—hundreds of miles of Texas range—that won’t support even one steer to every sixty-five acres. Even on what we call good range it takes a full twenty acres to feed a steer. It’s gone to desert. And the ranchers just spend their time hoping at the sky.”

  “What made it that way, if it was all right years ago? Where did the grass go?”

  “I never saw any woman ask so many damn questions!”

  “I just want to know, darling. How else am I going to learn about Texas?”

  “Come on,” he said abruptly. “Let’s get riding. We’re headed for a roundup. Remember? That’s my business. That’s the way I earn my living.”

  “Living! How about life! You just look upon life as an annoying interruption to ranching. I stole that. It was first said in another way by a French writer named Gide—or maybe it was Proust. Pretty soon I’ll forget how to read.”

  “I told you what it was like down here. The first time I met you. Now you’ve seen the setup. You know what it is. Like it or not, this is it.”

  “Jordan, let’s not—Jordan, I’m going to love it. It’s just that——”

  “Reata takes all my time. It always will. You’ll be a neg
lected wife. Everything’s against you—climate—people—family—customs. I know. I warned you.” He looked at her, his eyes agonized, pleading. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  The two horses stood close, side by side, leather creaking on leather. They stood like good Texas cow horses while the man and woman strained toward each other there in the saddles, his knee against hers, his thigh against hers, his shoulder his lips on hers there in the brilliant wild endless Texas plain, in the early morning scent of the desert spring and the false coolness and the faint false green of the unavailing mesquite.

  She looked at him as they drew apart slowly. At no time in her life, before or after this moment, was Leslie Lynnton so nearly beautiful. They sat a moment, withdrawn, like two figures on a too highly colored Remington calendar print.

  “It’s going to be wonderful,” she said finally, “and terrible. I suppose we’re in for a stormy future. I’m going to try to change you and you’re going to be impatient when I don’t melt into all this.” She swept the vastness with her arm.

  “I’ll try not to be.”

  “Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love—or tries to.”

  The sun was up, full blast. Already it was growing hot. Bick gathered up his reins. “Yippee!” he yelled like a character in a Western movie. Without another word they streaked across the prairie mile on mile, they galloped into Number Two Camp to find it a welter of dust, thudding hoofs, color, bellowing clamor.

  “Stay here. Just here. This is Tomaso. He’ll take care of you. If you get tired you can sit on top of the high fence there. You may be better there anyway. Too bad you didn’t wear Texas boots, the heels hook in better. A million pairs at the house. Tomaso will look after you. I’ll be back. Here, take this. You’ll need it. Across your face.”

  He tossed her his handkerchief and was off into the melee, a figure of steel and iron and muscle.

  Cattle. So close-packed that it seemed you could walk on their backs for a mile—for miles as far as the eye could see. From the little sand hills, from the mesquite motts and the cactus came the living streams, a river here a river there, a river of moving flesh wherever the eye rested, and these sluggish lines were added to the great central pool until it became a Mississippi of cattle fed by its smaller tributaries. Little figures on horseback guided the course of these streams. Now Leslie understood, she saw now what Bick had meant when he had said, “She’s been the point so long she can’t get used to being the drag.” These little figures on horseback formed a triangle, and there in front was the point and there at the rear ends the drag. To the east and west and the south these tiny dots on horseback moved the rivers of red and white Herefords, the torrents of cattle with the white clown faces and the pink-rimmed eyes. The bawling of the calves, the bellowing of the cows was earsplitting. Now it was almost impossible to see through the dense clouds of dust. The men wore handkerchiefs tied in a triangle before their faces so that only their eyes were free. Leslie took the big handkerchief that Jordan had tossed to her, she tied it so that her nose and mouth were covered, a Moslem woman in riding clothes. The animals moved close-packed. Curtain on curtain of dust, the men on horseback the men running about on foot were ghostly figures in a fog of dust. Their faces were stern and intent, the riders seemed not riders at all but centaurs part horse part man, swaying with the animals as though they were one body.