Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “That there’s the church, they call it a cathedral, I got to laugh.” Jett Rink had assumed the air of official—though scornful—guide. “They don’t do anything different from what they did a hundred years ago. Sundays you know what they do? They walk. And Saturday night. The band plays and they act like they never heard of America. The girls walk up on one side of the walk in the park here, and the boys they walk down on the other side and they ain’t allowed to talk to each other. They just look at each other, they can’t talk alone, they say it’s just like in Spain…. American? I got to laugh.”

  A priest in his black strode across the plaza and disappeared within the neat limestone house beside the church. A little velvet-eyed girl ran through the quiet street, she glanced shyly at the car parked there at the plaza’s edge. A rickety cart trundled by, a cask on wheels, it was the cart that sold water to the Mexican households in this dry land…. Dim wineshops. The C.O.D. café. Garza’s Place…Rutted roads of white shell…Dusty footpaths leading to the church.

  “They ain’t changed, those dopes, the way they eat and live and all. They make their cinches of horse manes, by hand, like they did a hundred years ago, and reatas of rawhide and they got their own way of tanning buckskin. They stick together and can’t even talk English, half of ’em. Go around solemn-looking on the outside, but boy! when they get together! Dancing and singing their corridos telling about everything they do, like a bunch of kids.”

  “People do that, you know. They cling together when they feel frightened or unsafe.”

  EMILIO HAWKINS said a sign tacked crazily outside a grocery.

  “There! Is that one of your two Americans?”

  “Half-and-half.”

  A dapper figure emerged from Garza’s Place. Glistening black hair, sideburns, a roving wet eye, brilliant yellow boots, an incongruous dark cloth suit such as a businessman might wear in the North. His Stetson was smooth and pale and fine.

  “Hi, Fidel!” yelled Jett. “Hi, Coyote!”

  The man bared his teeth and spat on the ground. Then he saw Leslie, he stared and wet his lips and his great hat came off as he bent in a low bow on the dusty street. He made as though to come toward them but Jett stepped on the accelerator, they darted forward, Jett laughed a high sardonic laugh of triumph.

  “He seen you, he knew who you was, all right.”

  “What of it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you call him? Coyote? Is that his name? How queer.”

  “Ha, that’s good—coyote a name! They call him Coyote, his name is Fidel Gomez, he runs the Mexicans he’s the richest man in town. He’s got a nice house—I’ll show it to you—no ’dobe stuff but concrete whitewashed and a tree in front and a bathroom and a dining-room set and a bedroom set and a parlor set and a Chevy and he married the swellest-looking Mexican girl in town, she was brought up real strict, she can’t speak a word of English, he keeps her dumb all right. Everybody in the county knows Gomez. He makes out like he’s the poor Mexicans’ friend.”

  She glanced back. The man was still standing there gazing after them. “I want you to turn around,” she said. “I want to speak to him.”

  “Say, you can’t do that.”

  “Turn around, boy.”

  “Bick’d give me hell if he found out. I ain’t going to turn.”

  Suddenly she was trembling with anger. “You’ll do as I say. You’ll take me back to where that man is standing. Don’t you dare to tell me what I can or can’t do!”

  He looked at her, a sidewise almost comical look of surprise.

  “Okay. Está bien.” He spun the wheel, he turned with a shrieking of rubber on shell and brought up before the man at the edge of the dusty footpath. Astonishment was plain on the man’s face, his eyes his mouth were ovals of apprehension.

  “How do you do, Mr. Gomez,” said Leslie with a formality which the man did not seem to find absurd. “I am Mrs. Jordan Benedict.”

  Again the man’s hat was swept off with a gesture that belonged to another century. He bowed elaborately from the waist.

  “La señora es muy simpática.”

  “I am sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”

  A gesture of his hand made nothing of this. “You need no language. Ma’am.” The dark eyes rolled. “I say you are very charming.”

  Well, perhaps Jett Rink had been right, after all. “Uh—I—I’m told you are a very important citizen here in Nopal. I am just having a look at your interesting little town.”

  His glance at Jett Rink was pure venom. His mouth was smiling.

  “…muy bondadosa,” he murmured.

  “I will tell my husband we met.” She sounded, she thought, like an exercise in a child’s copybook. “Good-bye.”

  Again the business with the hat. The bow. The baffled look. As before he stood looking after them as they drove off.

  “But why do they call him Coyote?” She had to know.

  “That’s a name for hombres like him, it’s a name the Mexicans call a chiseler, a crook. He lives off of them he sneaks them across the border from Mexico to work as pickers and then when they’re here time he’s through with them they don’t have nothing left when they get through working in the Valley crops. And he rounds up the Mexican voters and does a lot of dirty jobs.”

  “I can’t listen to talk like that.”

  “There you go again. You ask me, and then when I tell you you get sore.”

  Primly she said only, “It’s getting rather late. Drive me home now, please—but not as fast as you drove here.” Suddenly she was tired with an overpowering weariness.

  “What’s the hurry?” She did not reply. “You’re grown up, ain’t you? Your ma won’t whup you when you get back, will she?” As she still disdained to answer, “We’re only about fifteen minutes from Benedict, you said you wanted to walk around there and there’s something there I wanted to show you, you’ll be mighty interested.”

  “Some other time.”

  He rounds up the voters and does a lot of dirty jobs. In silence they drove into the town of Benedict. She wondered now why she had found it so fascinating that day of her arrival. Three days ago. Perhaps now it seemed commonplace in contrast with the old-world town she had just glimpsed. She saw it now as a neat enough little Southwest town squatting there in the sun and dust of a late spring afternoon; living in its little heat-baked houses and selling its groceries over its decent counters and handing its tidily stacked bills out of the bank teller’s window. Drinking its soda pop and Coca-cola and eating its chili and enchiladas at the lunch counter and riding in its Ford.

  “It’s good and hot. You want to get out and walk, like you said?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing to see in Benedict. Viento, that’s different, that’s a town. Or Hermoso. You ever been to Hermoso?”

  “No.”

  “Corpus Christi?”

  “No.”

  “Houston? They got stores there bigger than New York.”

  Bigger. Biggest ranch. Biggest steer. Biggest houses. Biggest hat. Biggest state. A mania for bigness. What littleness did it hide? Her eyes were lacklustre as she now surveyed the main street and the side streets that ended in the open prairie. There were neat street signs here and she saw that the names had been nostalgically bestowed by people who long ago had crossed the endless plains all the weary way from the green moist Atlantic seaboard, from the woods and streams and fields of the Middle West. Ohio Street. Connecticut Avenue. Indiana Street. Iowa Street. Somewhere in their background, far back among the family photographs, was the inherited memory of Northern sounds and sights; the crunch of wagon wheels on snow, the crack of clapboards in sudden frost, rocking chairs on shady front porches, ancient wine glass elms dappling August streets.

  Now they still lived like Northerners with the blood of the North in their veins. They lived against the climate in unconscious defiance of this tropical land. They built their houses with front porches on which they never could sit, with front
yards forever grassless, they planted Northern trees that perished under the sun and drought, they planted lilacs and peonies and larkspur and roses and stock and lilies-of-the-valley and these died at birth. Arrogantly, in defiance of their Mexican compatriots, they wore Northern clothes, these good solid citizens, the men sweating in good cloth pants and coats, the women corseted, high-heeled, marcelled, hatted. We’re the white Americans, we’re the big men, we eat the beef and drink the bourbon, we don’t take siestas, we don’t feel the sun, the heat or the cold, the wind or the rain, we’re Texans. So they drank gallons of coffee and stayed awake while the Mexican Americans quietly rested in the shade, their hats pulled down over their eyes; and the Negroes vanished from the streets.

  So the big men strode the streets, red of face, shirt-sleeved, determined. Their kind had sprung from the Iowa farms, the barren New England fields, from Tennessee. Their ancestors had found the land too big, too lonely, it had filled them with a nameless fear and a sense of apartness, so they set out to conquer it and the people whose land it was. And these, too, they must overcome and keep conquered, they were a constant menace, they kept surging back to it. All right, let them work for us, let them work for a quarter a day till the work is done, then kick them back across the border where they belong.

  “Hiya, Murch!”

  “Howdy, Dub!”

  So there it was, the neat little town, squatting in the sun and dust and trying to look like Emporia Kansas and Lucas Ohio. And Leslie Lynnton, with the romantic and terrible and gallant and bloody pages of a score of Texas history books fresh in her mind, thought of its violent past; it marched before her eyes. The Spanish conquistadores in their plumes and coats of mail marching through this wilderness. The savage Karankawa Indians. Coronado, seeking the fabulous Gran Quivira. Sieur de La Salle in the tiny ship Amiable wrecked in Matagorda Bay. Fort St. Louis on Garcitas Creek, a rude stockade with six little huts clustered about it. The Jesuit priests; the Spanish Missions, with their brown-robed sandaled monks living their orderly routine in this desert wilderness, and the bells in the chapel towers ringing across a thousand miles of nothing…Moses Austin, the middle-aged St. Louis banker who, by trying to establish three hundred American families in the Texas wilderness, thought to retrieve his fortune lost in the panic of 1819…Stephen Austin, his son, the calm, the dignified, the elegant, and what was he doing in Texas, he sadly asked himself as he wrestled with his dead father’s gigantic problem…. Sam Houston, the mysterious swashbuckling hero of a thousand tales…Santa Anna the glib and tough and crooked little Mexican general…Bowie the lion-hearted…Travis the war-minded…Davy Crockett the great fellow from Tennessee…the magnificent hopeless defense of the Alamo…Texas the Spanish…Texas the French…Texas the Mexican…Texas the Republic…Texas the Confederate…Texas the Commonwealth of the United States of America…Commonwealth…common wealth…

  “Say, I bet you’d like to see what Ildefonso’s making for you in there.”

  She stared at Jett. “What? What did you say?”

  “That there’s Ildefonso’s place, he makes leather stuff for Reata—boots and saddles and straps and every kind of leather on the place, he gets fifty dollars for a pair of boots and more. And he can get any amount for one of his real tooled saddles and that’s what he doing for you. Want to see it? Looka these boots I got on, I saved up ten months for them.”

  The smell of leather, rich and oily, came to you even before you entered the shop of Ildefonso Mezo. And there in the front of the shop was the ancient Mexican saddle tooled over all in an intricate pattern of flowers and serpents, the classic scrolls and leaves and patterns of ancient Spain and Mexico. Not an inch of it that was not embossed or embroidered, and stirrups pommel bridle reins shining with silver engraved in a hundred designs.

  Jett Rink swaggered in, there was no one to be seen, he walked behind the glass case that held the boots of every size and degree of ornamentation—boots for a child of three, boots for a six-foot man, stitched and scrolled, high-heeled, pointed of toe. A whirring and a tapping and a clinking came from the long dim back room. “Hi, Ildefonso! Here’s Miz Benedict come to see her new ridin’ riggin’.”

  And here was Ildefonso Mezo, as much an artist of the leather of the Southwest as Cellini had been master of the silver-worker’s craft in Italy. A little brown-faced man with bright black eyes and grizzled hair, and hands that might have been made of the leather which he artificed.

  Standing before Leslie, the man bowed with the utmost formality. “Buenas tardes, señora. Entre. Ildefonso Mezo at your orders, I am honored.”

  What could she do, what could she say? “Gracias—uh—muchas gracias.”

  Then she laughed a little helplessly and Ildefonso laughed to keep her company and because he thought she was not so bad-looking and because she was Señora Benedict.

  “Show us the saddle,” yelled Jett Rink. “And the boots and the belt and the whole outfit.”

  “It is still in the work. I must ask Señora Benedict to come to the workshop.”

  Leslie, standing before the sumptuous old Spanish saddle, was tracing its design with her forefinger, feeling the great weight of the leather encrusted with embossed silver. It seemed enough to weigh down a stalwart horse to say nothing of his burden of rider and accoutrements.

  “But this one—first tell me about this one. Did they actually use this!”

  “How else!” Ildefonso assured her. He was plainly enchanted by her interest. “I could show the señora silver horseshoes that were used, silver was nothing it was everywhere. The Spaniards came to Mexico and they found silver in the mines and they covered everything with silver—their clothes and their furnishings and their saddles and harnesses. Until the Spaniards came there were no horses in Mexico but soon the Mexicans became the most daring riders—more daring even than the Spaniards. And so they still are.”

  “Come on! Come on!” bawled Jett. “Okay, the Mexicans are big shots, show us that saddle you’re cutting will you!”

  Still smiling, but not mirthfully, Ildefonso shook his head. “Gato montés. Wildcat,” he said. He led the way to the work-room doorway, he stood aside then so that Leslie should enter before him. Jett Rink swaggered after him. And now Ildefonso was the artist in his studio. Along the wall beneath the windows were the worktables and the dark heads were bent over these and the keen little tools made delicate intricate marks on leather yellow and brown and cream and tan and black. Wooden horses held saddles in every state of construction and ornamentation. Leather straps and belts hung in rows like curtains, there were boots in the making, reatas, hatbands, bridles, every manner of leather thing needed on the vast ranch.

  Ildefonso led the way to his own worktable. And there were Leslie’s saddle and her boots and belt and her reata and her bridle and her hatband together with straps and thongs and coils of leather whose use she did not even know.

  “Weeks!” Ildefonso assured her earnestly. “Weeks ago they were commanded. But work such as this needs many weeks. A pair of such boots alone they need many days. From Virginia weeks ago the señora’s shoes was sent to me. You did not know.”

  So that was where the old brown boots had got to. Leslie looked at all this artfully tooled trousseau of leather, stamped and patterned so intricately by hand with the coils and twists of the Benedict brand. And between these twisted coils were her initials—her new initials squirming over everything: L L B. She looked at the heavy ornate saddle and she loathed it. In a museum, yes. Beautiful to look at. But to use? No. She liked all things neat and reticent. A well-made English saddle, so clean-cut and economical in its lines, had always seemed to her as lovely as a sonnet. She thought how shocked her sister Leigh Karfrey would be if ever she saw this; and Lacey, who looked upon a horse and a saddle as other girls regard a jewel of exquisite depth and cut. And My Mistake, that fleet and lovely lady, she must never be forced to carry this ornate waffle on her slim back.

  Ildefonso Mezo looked at her, triumph in his eyes. Waiting
.

  Leslie overdid it. “It’s—it’s wonderful. It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She decided to think of all the polysyllabic adjectives she knew and add an O at the end of them. “Magnifico! Uh—marvelouso! Extraordinario!”

  Ildefonso, under extreme emotion, then gratefully expressed himself in Spanish. “What you say is true, señora. This is no common work of art this is art of the highest kind in leather, in all of Texas there is no one who can do this work to equal Ildefonso.”

  She understood not a word but his meaning was unmistakable. She found herself falling into his own pattern of stilted English. “Sí,” she agreed genially. “Sí sí sí. I shall go home now and thank my husband for all this. He told me nothing about it.”

  A look of horror transformed Ildefonso’s beaming face.

  “It was to be a surprise for the señora. How did you know if he did not tell you? I thought when you came in——”

  She looked at Jett Rink.

  Under her accusing gaze and Ildefonso’s Jett’s expression was one of utterly unconvincing innocence. “He don’t tell me what he’s doing, does he! Anybody can come into this here shop, can’t they, and look around!”

  Abruptly Leslie turned away.

  “Thank you for letting me see the beautiful saddle, Ildefonso, and all the other—I must go now, I am very late.”

  Ildefonso bowed, his expression his manner were correct. But as she turned he managed to catch Jett’s sleeve for just a second and his swarthy face was close to the ruddy hard-featured one. A whisper only. “Cochino. Piojo!”

  “Spig,” said Jett Rink briefly. And clattered out to the car on those high-heeled boots for which he had paid fifty dollars.

  Leslie was already seated in the car, she was rather bored now with the whole business, she thought, Well, I suppose I’ve done something again that I shouldn’t have. But what? Sight-seeing, driven by a kind of oafish hired man. What’s wrong with that!