by Edna Ferber
They rode headlong into the herd, they seemed not even to touch the reins, they swung slightly in the saddle as the horse wove in and out like a fluid thing. You saw how this weaving movement of man and horse separated the bawling calf from its mother, the high plaintive blatting becoming more anguished as the animal sought frantically to return to the seething mass. Wide-eyed, breathless, Leslie watched this ancient process, unchanged for centuries. These men leaped off their horses, threw the struggling calf and roped him, were on the horse again in a swift single leap and off into the surging herd. As they rode you heard them calling softly, tenderly, quieting the milling frantic sea of cattle. Woo woo woo vaca! Woo woo woo no-villo. Woo vaca. Woo woo woo! Like a mother humming to her restless child.
To Leslie it was a legendary scene, incredibly remote from the world she had always known. A welter of noise, confusion; the stench of singeing hair and burned flesh. Perched on the corral fence with Tomaso as bodyguard, her heels hooked on a lower rail, she began slowly to comprehend that in this gigantic melee of rounding-up, separating, branding, castrating there was order; and in that order exquisite timing and actually a kind of art. Here, working with what seemed to her unbelievable courage and expertness, were men riding running leaping; wrestling with huge animals ten times their size; men slim heavy tall short young old bronze copper tan lemon black white. Here was a craft that had in it comedy and tragedy; that had endured for centuries and changed but little in those centuries.
Bick had said, just before he left her with Tomaso, “This is going to be pretty rough, Leslie. I don’t want to see you keeling off that fence.”
“I promise you I won’t do that again. I’m a big girl now.”
She saw Bick Benedict—her own husband Jordan Benedict, she told herself with mixed feelings of pride and resentment as she watched him—working in this inferno of heaving flesh and choking dust and noise and movement and daring and danger and brutal beauty. Working like any one of the vaqueros amidst hoofs and flanks and horns.
A ballet, she said to herself. A violent beautiful ballet of America.
Idiotically she turned to Tomaso. “Couldn’t it be done some other way? Without all this danger and I mean not so many—thousands and thousands——”
“Yo no comprendo, señora,” said Tomaso, sorrowfully.
She thought she recognized two or three of the men as among those who had been drawn up so proudly in line at the gates as she and Bick had entered Reata—when was it?—yesterday? The day before? A week a month ago? It seemed something far in the past. It was easy to recognize Polo with his air of authority, his unique elegance, the white teeth in that dark fine-boned face. This was, Leslie thought, a henchman such as a king would have. The night of their arrival she had happened to speak again of Polo and his dramatic vaqueros and Bick had said, “Old Polo’s practically part of the family. When he was a boy he used to sleep outside my father’s door.”
Startled, she had said, “How do you mean—outside his door?”
“On the floor in the hall.”
“Good heavens, why!”
“I don’t know. They do. His son slept outside my door when I was a kid. For that matter, they still do, I suppose. Tomaso or one of the boys around the house.”
“Now!” She was aghast.
“They’re not there when I come in and they’re gone when I get up. It’s been going on for a century. I think it’s pretty damned foolish, myself.”
“Foolish! It’s feudal! It’s uncivi——”
“Now, now, honey!”
“Sorry.”
“You should see the look on your face. I’d give anything to know what you’re thinking, Yanqui.”
“I was just reassuring myself by thinking of awfully American things. Like pork and beans. And Fourth of July. And Vermont. And pumpkin pie. And Fords. And Sunday school. And cocky Midwestern hired girls in Ohio, when I was a child.”
“This is what I call American,” he had said.
In a far comer out of the dust of battle old Rosendo had set up a tarpaulin, the chuck wagon was backed handily at its edge. The wind wafted the scent of his cooking to the scene of feverish activity but it was lost in the stench of the branding. Calves bawled, cows bellowed, men yelled, hoofs pounded, gates slammed, flesh burned, irons clanged, dust swirled, sun glared. Leslie Benedict clung to the fence rail and knew why Texans paid fifty dollars for great cool sheltering ten-gallon Stetson hats.
Up clattered Bick, his teeth gleaming startlingly white in his dust-grimed scarlet face.
“All right, honey?”
“Fine. I want to ask questions.”
“I was afraid of that.” He pulled his horse up beside her there at the fence. “Hungry?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No.”
“You will be when you get to the camp. Old Rosendo’s part Mexican part Negro part Indian, he’s a real cook, we’d have him up at the house kitchen but he won’t work indoors.”
“What can he cook under that little pocket handkerchief of a tent?”
“You wait. You’ll see.”
“Everybody talks Spanish. Tell me, that’s Polo, isn’t it, who was so splendid and dressy to welcome us.”
“Yes. Polo’s caporal. Foreman.”
“What’s he doing? He and the others. It looks cruel but I suppose it isn’t.”
“Not if America wants to eat. They’re roping. And branding. Only the foreman and the bosses and the best of the ropers do that. The others—the men who are throwing the calves—they’re called tumbadores. It’s a great trick, throwing a calf, there’s less to it than meets the eye, really. It looks like a feat of strength but they’re not really lifting those calves. You squeeze the calf’s ear, it jumps, you pull him sideways and he falls flat on his right side with his left side up, ready for branding. Over there’s the branding fire. And those fellows who run the brands, they’re really specialists. Marcadores, they’re called.”
“Marcadores. A lovely word. For such a nasty job. What’s it mean?”
“Figure it for yourself, really. Marcar means to mark—to stamp—to brand. Marcadores—markers, branders. It’s tricky work. Those irons are red-hot. It’s the Reata brand, of course. If they press too hard the calves get a burn sore. If they don’t press hard enough the brand won’t be clear. They’re dehorning too, those other fellows.”
“It seems horrible but perhaps it isn’t. What are those boys doing? The ones with the sticks and the buckets?”
“They’re atoleros. Atole—well, mush. They’ve got a kind of lime past in those buckets, they have rags wrapped around those sticks and they smear the lime on the fresh burns to heal them…. Well, you wanted to come.”
“Don’t you worry about me. I’m tougher than I was yesterday. I’m a tough Texan. Go on.”
He grinned. “Well, brace yourself. You won’t like what comes next.”
“The one who’s doing something to their ears and——”
“And castrating the male calves. He’s the capador. He castrates the males and that makes them steers. And he nicks a piece off the end of the left ear of male and female and sticks it in his pocket, and he marks the right ear with a hole and a slit, for identification. At the end of the day he adds up, and the number of pieces of ear in his pocket shows the number of calves we’ve branded.”
“Jordan Benedict, I’ll never eat roast beef again as long as I live.”
“Oh, yes you will.”
“Don’t tell me that’s what you’ve planned for lunch!”
“No. Rest easy. It’s chicken and Rosendo’s apple pie.”
“It just may be I’ll never eat anything again…. Look, there’s a darling little boy putting something in a bucket. Gathering up and putting—why, he can’t be more than ten years old. What’s he bringing to the fire in the bucket?”
Matter-of-factly Bick said, “That’s little Bobby Dietz, his father is ranch boss on Number One.”
“But what’s he doing?”
“Well,
you might as well have it straight, you’ll be here the rest of your life. He’s picking up the testicles of the castrated calves. The tumbadores roast them on the coals, they burst open and they eat them as you’d eat a roast oyster, they’re very tasty really and the vaqueros think they make you potent and strong as a bull. They’re considered quite a dainty…. Come on, honey, it’s time for lunch. Here’s Tomaso with your horse. And listen—there’s Rosendo’s bell.”
“Why don’t the men stop working? I should think they’d be famished.”
“They’ll eat after we’ve finished.”
On their way to the dinner camp they passed the fire of hot embers and she averted her eyes and then forced herself to look, and to smile. And at Bick’s call the little lad came running to their horses, he came shyly, a handsome boy with very blue eyes bluer in contrast with the sun-browned face.
“Hello, Bobby?”
“Howdy, Mr. Bick.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He went back there in the draw, he says there’s a bunch there the boys missed.”
“Does, eh?” Bick looked at Leslie. “This kid comes of good stuff. He’ll make a wonderful hand when he grows up. What are you going to be when you get to be a man, Bobby? A cowboy?”
“I’m going to be a Ranger, and shoot people.”
“Not me!”
“No. Bad people.”
“Bobby, this is Mrs. Benedict. This is the new señora.”
The deep blue eyes were turned on her like searchlights. “What she wearing them funny clothes for?”
Bick grinned. “She hasn’t had time to get some Texas clothes.”
And away they cantered from the little boy and his macabre task, but not so far after all, they were to discover twenty-five years later.
Though ten minutes before she had been repelled by the thought of any sort of food under any circumstances, Leslie now found herself eating Rosendo’s food with relish, not to say gusto. Having polished off chicken, string beans, apple pie and half a disk of skillet bread she inspected the chuck wagon with its orderly compartments for spices, flour, beans, rice, cutlery, tinware. She complimented the gifted Rosendo and was enchanted with the benign and wrinkled face beneath the vast straw sombrero. She felt well and buoyant of spirits.
“Let me stay this afternoon and come home with you. I’m not tired.”
“Two more hours of sun and you’d wish you hadn’t.”
“I could steal a nap here under the canvas.”
“Even a Mexican couldn’t sleep under this canvas at noon.”
In the burning sun the men were sitting on the ground scooping up their beans and red rice, spooning up molasses and wiping their plates with hunks of bread torn from the great disks stacked on the tent table. Certainly they seemed much less dramatic now squatting before their food, eating wordlessly and concentratedly like the animals they tended.
Sitting there with her husband under the scrap of unavailing canvas the gently bred girl was trying to arrange in her mind a pattern that would bring order into the kaleidoscope of these past three days.
Gropingly, as though thinking aloud, she said, “In Washington and in New York and in Chicago and Detroit and Columbus men get up and take a streetcar or a bus or an automobile and go to work in offices and shops and factories, they write things down, they push a lever, they go to a restaurant and eat lunch and come back to work and weigh something or add up something or sell something or dictate something, and they go home. And that is a day’s work. But this!”
“Now what? What’s the matter with this?”
“It’s incredible, that’s all. I can’t believe that men earn their living this way. It’s too difficult. Why, just look at Polo!”
“Where! What’s the matter with him!”
“Nothing, darling. I just mean—look at him on his horse, he looks like a Spanish grandee. I’ve never seen a Spanish grandee but did Polo do all these circus stunts when he was a young man?”
“He sure enough did. Top hand. That’s how he got to be caporal. He can still do them, and better than men half his age.”
“How old is he?”
“Nobody knows. I doubt that he does himself. But he’s getting too old for this job. And too old-fashioned. Would you believe he keeps his accounts in his head! Hours, wages, stock counts. They always tally, he’s never been wrong, no one’s ever been able to solve his system of mathematics, but it’s infallible. It can’t go on, though. I’ll have to retire him and put in a modern system like that in the other divisions. I’ve humored him long enough. You ought to hear Maudie Lou and Bowie and the others on the subject!”
“Why don’t they run the ranch, then?”
His head came up, his jaw set, his whole aspect changed as though he had been challenged. “I run this ranch. Don’t make any mistake about that.”
She looked at old Polo, seated so lightly on his beautiful horse. The vaqueros had finished their noonday meal, they were stretching and yawning, one of them took a mouthful of water from a tin cup and spat it out on the ground in some sort of primitive ablution.
“What will he do then?”
Bick was silent a moment. When he spoke he did not answer her question. “Polo put me on a horse when I was three. He taught us all to ride like the vaqueros, they’re the best horsemen in the world, the Mexican cowboys, they’re better than those Hungarians that used to show off in all that glitter at the Horse Show in New York. I used to hear my father say that by the time Luz was eight she could ride like a charro.”
Charro. Charro? I can’t ask questions every minute, I’ll buy a Spanish dictionary.
“Dearest, do you work like this every day?”
“Well—no. No, I don’t.”
“I mean it’s wonderful that you can do it, but it’s ghastly rough and tough.”
He actually blushed a little then beneath the russet burn, and he laughed rather sheepishly, like a boy. “Tell you the truth, honey, I was just showing off today in front of my girl. Like a kid chinning himself on the apple tree.”
The men were mounting their horses, fresh horses she saw, from a great cluster of them she had not noticed until now, grazing against the horizon.
“New horses? Are they going to start all over again?”
“Sure, new horses. Or fresh, we’d say. Every Benedict vaquero has got at least ten horses. They’ve been changing right along, you just haven’t noticed. They’ll be riding about five different horses each, today. See that bunch of horses over there? That’s called a remuda. They’re what we call cutting horses. They’re used to cut out certain animals from the herd. Trained for it. You don’t even have to touch the reins half the time. Just sway your body and your horse will turn with your weight this way or that.”
“Jordan! I forgot all about My Mistake. These two or three days have been so new and strange—different I mean. I forgot about My Mistake. Is she here? Where is she? Do you think she’ll know me? My girl friend from home in Virginny. She brought us together. She introduced us. I’d never have met you without her. I love her.”
“She’s out in pasture. Very queenly, with a canvas shade on poles in one corner if she finds Texas too hot. A six-mile pasture, if you want to know. One of the boys has been exercising her a little every day to keep her in shape after the long trip down. I meant to tell you. Obregon there—over there, that tall fellow in the straw hat—had her out yesterday he says she’s the finest little——”
“Oh, let me talk to him, will you? I’m homesick for her. Tonight when you get back let’s visit her. Or surely tomorrow. Will you? I’ll have to write Lacey all about her.”
Summoned, the man came toward them. He was noticeably taller than the average and very slim, with broad shoulders like the American cowboys Leslie had seen in Western motion pictures. His skin was a deep copper color and yet under the skin were freckles, an extraordinary thing. A chin strap held the crimped straw sombrero. His hair was cut in little dandified sideburns along his ears.
“Angel,” Bick said as the man came toward them. “Angel Obregon.”
“That’s the husband of the woman with the baby! Tell him I know his wife. Is he the one? If he has a new baby he is. Yesterday—but then you don’t know about it.”
The man stood before them. Bick acknowledged his presence with his charming smile and openhanded gesture as he said, “Un minuto, Angel.” He went on speaking to Leslie, his manner leisurely. “The Mexican Obregons stem from some long-ago Irishman named O’Brien. That’s the story, anyway. The Irish came in here in 1845, you know, section hands working on the new railroad, and a lot of them married Mexican Indian girls. Look at those shoulders. He inherited those from some pick-and-shovel grandfather named O’Brien. Three generations in Mexico made him an Obregon. Look at the Irish freckles under the copper skin.”
“Jordan, he can’t like it—standing there while you talk about him as if he were a—a—one of your bulls.”