Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “He doesn’t speak English. Look, Leslie, I’m not Simon Legree, you know.” He turned to the man. “The little filly you exercised yesterday,” he said in Spanish, “is a great favorite of the señora. The horse is her own. She has great feeling for the horse.”

  The man’s face flashed into sudden radiance, he began to speak, the words rolling out with a great drumming of Spanish Rs. “He says she is a miracle of a horse, that she is swifter than any horse in Texas but she is not happy, he says perhaps she longs for her home.”

  A little involuntary cry came from Leslie. “Oh, Jordan, I must see her. She’s homesick for Virginia. I want to put my arms around her neck and comfort her.”

  “Yes,” said Bick stiffly. Obregon was speaking again, his hat was in his hand, he was speaking directly to Leslie in a flood of Spanish, the dark eyes glowing down upon her.

  Helplessly she smiled up at the ardent face, then she recalled the words with which Tomaso had expressed his own inability to understand her, “No comprendo,” she said triumphantly.

  Bick stood up. “He is thanking you for being so kind to his wife yesterday. He says you have worked a miracle, his wife is much improved, his infant son—say what is all this, anyway! I can’t have you messing around with——”

  But she sprang up, impulsively she laid her hand on the man’s arm. “Oh, I’m so glad. Tell her I’ll be in to see her again. I’ll bring her some delicious things and something for the baby.”

  “The hell you will!…That is all, Obregon. To work now.” The man turned away, was off, he mounted his horse for the afternoon’s work with the others. The siesta was finished.

  The man and woman stared at each other. “Not again,” Leslie said.

  He came close to her. “You just don’t understand. There isn’t a ranch in the whole Southwest looks after its people better than we do. But you don’t know these people. They’re full of superstitions and legends. They believe in the evil eye and witchcraft and every damn thing.”

  “But he didn’t say my eye was evil.”

  “It was just luck he didn’t. If the child or the girl had turned sicker instead of better it would have been because you looked at them. They’ve got a whole lingo about pregnant women and newborn babies and all that Mexican stuff. You just don’t know, honey. Look, the Hake ranch uses some vaqueros. Ask Vashti next time you see her, if you think Luz and I are—feudal, wasn’t it?”

  A dot had been scurrying like a bug across the prairie. Now it came closer, it spun around in a spiral of dust, it stopped with a yip and a grinding of brakes. The calves ran bleating and scattering. The cattle leaped in terror, the horses reared, the vaqueros muttered imprecations.

  “Damn that lout!” Bick said. “If he ever runs down one of those calves I’ll beat him up myself.”

  Jett Rink leaped out and yelled to the world in general, “You et?”

  “Sí.”

  “I ain’t.”

  He heaped a plate with beans stew rice bread and squatting on his haunches he ate the boiling-hot mess in the boiling-hot sun.

  “You’re late,” Bick said.

  “It ain’t me. I had to catch that horse for Madama.”

  “What horse?”

  “That new one. My Mistake. She wanted to ride her.”

  “She can’t,” Leslie cried, and there was outrage in her voice. “She can’t! My Mistake’s a race horse.”

  “She’s riding her,” Jett said coolly, and heaped his plate again with the steaming stew. “She sure hated to put on that Western saddle, that little filly did. Took two of us to get it on her. But Madama, she could ride a bat outa hell.”

  A trifle worriedly Bick said, “It’s all right, Leslie. Luz can ride any four-legged thing.” Abruptly he turned to Rink. “Eat your dinner and get going. I want Mrs. Benedict out of this heat.”

  Jett shoveled the food into his mouth, he gulped and swallowed and wiped his face with his sleeve. He coughed and choked a little. He burst into laughter. “Wait till you see her.”

  Bick turned back, stared. “See her! See who?”

  “Madama. She’s riding My Mistake way here. She darned near kept up with me in the car, there for a stretch.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “I ain’t the one.” Jett laughed again. “You know what else she done? She rigged herself out in a old hoop skirt she got out of the attic, she said her grammaw could ride and rope in a hoop skirt and by God she’s got herself rigged out in that outfit, rope and all, and she’s riding hell-bent this way, last I saw of her. I’m surprised she ain’t here aready. Said not to tell you. Said she’d show you. Acted like she was mad at something, the way she does.”

  Bick took off his hat and ran his hand over his hot wet forehead. His eyes searched the endless plain.

  “Jordan, I want to stay. I want to wait till she comes. My Mistake isn’t used to this terrible—to the sun and the brush and that heavy Western saddle. I want to see if she’s all right.”

  Almost harshly he said, “You’ll go along with Jett. I’ll tend to Luz. Alone. I’ll have Angel ride My Mistake home.”

  “But she’ll have to rest first. My Mistake will have to rest. She isn’t just a riding horse. A mile—two miles—three—but not this.”

  “I know a little about horses, honey. It’ll be all right, I tell you. I’ll send over to a line house—Dietz’s place—and get some of Mrs. Dietz’s riding stuff for Luz, take that damn masquerade off her. I’ll send her home on a horse out of the remuda there. No, I’ll put her on the horse you rode here. Gentle as a cow. That’ll teach her.”

  “And when will you be home, Jordan?”

  “Oh, God, how do I know! When my work’s done.”

  Two million acres. He works like a cow hand. I’ve turned into a nagging wife asking her husband when he’ll be home. But this is all crazy. Nobody can say it isn’t crazy as a nightmare. Hoop skirts and race horses and old-maid sisters with twisted souls.

  Her eyes followed Jordan’s gaze out across the miles of open range, past the heaving backs of milling cattle and the figures of mounted horsemen. No moving thing dotted the landscape beyond.

  Fifty feet away Jett Rink got up, tossed his empty tin plate and cup into the heap, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Quietly Leslie said, “All right, Jordan.” She came close to him, she saw the sharp white ridge of the jaw muscle beneath the sunburned skin. The blue eyes were flint-grey.

  14

  Almost gratefully she had sunk into the hot dusty front seat of the car. “I want to sit up front,” she had said to Bick, “so that I can see everything on the way home.”

  Bick on his horse at the side of the car had leaned over and touched her hand. “We’ll make a real Texan of you yet, honey. At that, I don’t know any Texas woman who could take the heat and ruckus better than you did. Unless it’s Luz.”

  “Nothing to see, up front, or back,” Jett Rink said. But they were oblivious of him.

  “I’ve had a marvelous morning. This was just what I meant. Yesterday, when that nice Doctor Tom asked me.”

  “You haven’t seen anything. It’ll take you years.”

  “I know. And we’ve got years. Isn’t it lucky!”

  Bick threw a quick glance around. He leaned far off his horse so that he was standing in one stirrup, his left hand on her shoulder, she leaned toward him he bent far forward into the car, and kissed her hard on the mouth. Instinctively she sensed or saw out of the corner of her eye that Jett Rink’s foot moved to press the accelerator, then stopped, poised. She knew that he had suppressed a sudden murderous impulse to start the car with a swift leap while Jordan hung perilously half on the horse, half in the car.

  Bick straightened, he turned in his saddle to look back at her as he rode away, his hand held high in farewell. He looked handsome and vital. Suddenly Jett pressed the accelerator hard and caught up with him.

  “Look, Bick, can I take her around by the other way, the long back road? If she wants to see
things, different things.”

  Bick looked down at them, hesitating. “Oh yes, Jordan,” Leslie said. “If it’s a different way.”

  Reluctantly he said, “Well, all right. But you, Jett, don’t you get any big touring notions in that empty sheepherder’s head of yours.” He grinned. “Put him in a car and he goes road-crazy. Last December he started out to take Cora Dart—that’s the schoolteacher—to the fiesta in Viento. Ended up at the Cowboy Christmas Ball at Anson in Jones County, better than two thirds the way up across Texas.”

  Jett’s grin was sour. “Sure. Vamos por la casa. That’s me.”

  They stared hard at each other. It was, Leslie thought, as though they hated one another and yet there was a kind of understanding—almost a bond—between them.

  Now they shot off at terrific speed over the vast bare terrain. But once the camp had dwindled in the distance they slowed down, Jett was driving at the merest horse-and-buggy jog.

  “You want to go round Benedict way, seeing you didn’t make it walking yesterday?”

  “How did you know I started to walk to town?”

  “Like I told you, everybody knows everything anybody does around here.”

  Enough of that. “Where is the road—the highway? You said you were taking the long road back.”

  “This here is it.”

  “But this is just a little wider than the one we took this morning with the horses. It isn’t really a public road, is it?”

  “No road. No road like that. I guess you don’t know how big this outfit is. The roads around Reata are Reata. Anybody tries to cut across here that don’t belong, why, they turn up missing. Anybody wants to drive from here to yonder, why they damn well got to go about a hundred miles out of their way to get there.”

  “Who says they must?”

  “Bick Benedict, that’s who says.”

  She decided not to pursue the subject with this strangely angry young man. His eyes actually were bulging a little and his mouth muscles were drawn back in a snarl like that of the stuffed catamount’s head on the wall in the great hall. She began to regret the drive, she decided to ask no questions of this boor, since every utterance seemed to send him into a rage. They went along in silence, their speed now was frightening. He began to speak again, he spat out the words.

  “How’d they come by it! Millions of acres. Who gets hold of millions of acres without they took it off somebody!”

  Here at last was Leslie’s chance to make use of that knowledge gained from books of Southwest lore over which she had so eagerly pored. She darted about in her mind for remembered facts, statistics.

  “In those days Spanish land grants could be bought by anyone who had the money. It was just like a deal in real estate. The settlers bought it from——”

  “Bought it—hell! Took it off a ignorant bunch of Mexicans didn’t have the brains or guts to hang onto it. Lawyers come in and finagled around and lawsuits lasted a hundred years and by the time they got through the Americans had the land and the greasers was out on their ears.”

  “That’s not true—at least, not always,” Leslie retorted, a trifle surprised to find herself suddenly on the other side of the argument. “They often bought it and paid for it.”

  “Yeah. Five cents a acre. Say, you’re Bick’s wife, you ain’t supposed to go against a Benedict.”

  “I would if I thought they were wrong.”

  “Look, someday I’m going to have more money than any Benedict ever laid hands on. Everybody in Texas is going to hear about me. I ain’t sitting here sleeping with my eyes open. I’m going to be a millionaire and I ain’t kidding. I’m going to have a million dollars. I’m going to have a billion. I’m going to have a zillion.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Leslie said soothingly. She really must talk to Jordan about him. He was dangerous. That movement of his foot toward the accelerator. But perhaps she had only imagined it.

  “You’re not exactly loyal to your employer, are you, Jett?” She saw his head turn on that thick pugnacious neck as he stared at her. She went on, lightly, conversationally, a polite half-smile of interest on her lips. “You talk so interestingly about other people’s background. Tell me a little about your own, will you? Your childhood and your father and mother. Unless you’d rather not.”

  “Why wouldn’t I!” he yelled belligerently. “They was here in Texas enough years ago to be rich, too, only they wasn’t foxy. It sure tells good. Ma, she’s been dead since I was about two years old, I don’t remember her even, they was seven of us kids, I don’t know where they’re at, most of ’em. Pa, he went in one day around here with his gun to get him some birds for us kids to eat, I guess. Strictly not allowed. Private, those birds, and the air they fly in is private. He never come out. He never turned up again after he went in there with his gun.”

  “Maybe he went away. Sometimes people do that—they don’t mean to but the responsibility is too much for them, their minds just—”

  Now he turned squarely to look at her, his laugh was a short sharp yelp. “You sure got a lot to learn about Texas.”

  “I want to learn. I want to know about you and all the others on Reata.”

  “Yeh, well, we’re all doing great. Me and all the others and the Mexicans specially. If they don’t like it they can go back to Mexico and starve. I’m real petted. Bick, he give me a few acres out Viento way. Real lovely. You couldn’t feed a three-legged calf off it.”

  “Jett. I find I’m more tired than I thought. I’d like to go straight home.”

  “You said you want to go see Benedict.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Say, I didn’t go for to make you mad. You asked me and I told you straight out. If you didn’t want to know you got no call to ask me. You want everything prettified up, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

  Stunned, the impact of this truth silenced her. They tore along the landscape, it seemed to Leslie that movement was reversed in some nightmarish way and that it was the car that stood still, the flat glaring plain that whirled past them like a monotonous changeless cyclorama.

  Far, far in the distance against the flat tin sky was etched the outline of Reata. “No!” she said to her own astonishment. “No, let’s not go home just yet.”

  “The town?”

  “Yes.”

  “The other side of Benedict—that’s why I come this way—is Nopal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Only Mexicans. It’s Benedict only they call it Nopal like it’s another town. It’s like real Mexico, I don’t guess there’s two white people living there.”

  “White. You mean—but the Mexicans aren’t——”

  “They sure ain’t white, for my money. Two Americans then. Maybe you like that better.”

  “Jordan told me—my husband told me that some of the Mexicans had been there—their families, I mean—hundreds of years. Haven’t you read your Texas history! They were here long before you, or the Benedicts, or Reata, or anything that’s here now. They belong here. They’re more American than you are!”

  “God damn it to hell!” he yelled. “You—if you was a man I’d kill you for that.” His foot jammed down hard on the floorboard, they were tearing crazily along the ribbon of road. We are going to be killed, she thought. We must surely be killed. She sat quietly while the past day—the past week—this past strange changeful month of her life marched in orderly array through her mind. It was like reviewing some sort of noisy over-colorful and crowded party from which she was about to take leave as decently as possible. I must go, she said to an imaginary hostess. It’s been so interesting. Thanks for letting me come.

  They entered a down-at-the-heel little town, they had flashed past a broken road sign that said NOPAL. The car slid and bumped to a jolting halt in front of the dusty little plaza. Leslie lurched forward, slammed back, brakes screeched, tires squealed. The boy looked at her. Blandly he said, “Nopal means a pickly-pear tree, it’s a kind of cactus.”
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  She began to laugh a little hysterically. Then she stopped abruptly and sat silent a moment, her hands covering her eyes. When she brought her hands down they were fists. She pretended to look about her, she was conquering an almost overwhelming impulse to hit hard that heavy-jowled young face with the hard blue eyes set so close together.

  “Aint you feeling good, ma’am? You like a drink or something, Miz Benedict?”

  Furious, she said, “You drove like a maniac. If my husband knew you drove like that! You’re out of your senses!”

  “I didn’t go for to scare you. That’s the way we drive in Texas. Everybody.”

  “I’m going to get out and walk,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, humbly for him. “But whyn’t you wait and drive around a little first, it’s just a dump of a town, nothing to see. Anyway, you don’t want to walk, do you, in them clothes? What you always wanting to walk for?”

  She glanced down at herself. Riding pants made by a Washington tailor. She looked about her. The plaza, the streets were deserted except for a woman in black ascending the church steps, a black rebozo covering her head.

  “I want to telephone.”

  “I bet they ain’t a telephone in town only the priest’s house and maybe one two places you wouldn’t go into.” He hesitated a moment. “Say, don’t be sore, Miz Benedict. I get mad easy. Uh—don’t get sore.”

  For a moment she thought he was going to blubber. Well, the boy was a lout and something of a brute, but here she was and being here it was silly not to see something of this bit of Mexico in the United States. Here was another civilization, a strange land within her own familiar land. Streets of shanties on stumps, or flat on the dirt ground. The dwellings pitted and seared and scoured by wind and sand and heat and sudden northers. Dusty oleanders like weeds by the roadside. Broken sidewalks, crazily leaning balconies, sagging porches.

  They were moving now, slowly, inching their way around the little bare plaza with the paintless bandstand in the center. Yet there was something about the town—a kind of decayed beauty. The church stood richly facing the plaza, its limestone and brick and stained-glass windows in startling contrast to the rest of the dilapidated little town.