Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “I’m going to call Jordan.”

  Instantly Uncle Bawley raised his hand. “Nope. Jordan’s against it. He’d call the Immigration boys come and get him.”

  “He wouldn’t!”

  Uncle Bawley glanced over his shoulder. “If Bick comes along now and sees the boy he’ll turn him in. He’s set against it I tell you.”

  She stared at him. “If I don’t call Jordan what will you do?”

  “Feed him give him some decent rags turn him loose tonight.”

  She stared now at the boy, the black eyes were fixed on her, they shifted then to the great booted towering figure. “Do that,” she said. “Do that.” Her lips felt stiff.

  Uncle Bawley turned to the boy. He spoke again in Spanish, he pointed to his own shabby house on the hillock behind the main ranch house. “Has anyone else seen you?” The boy shook his head. “That house. Run there now. No. Wait. I’ll take you.”

  Leslie stood in the patio. She watched the two quickly ascend the little slope, Uncle Bawley’s huge bulk just behind the shadowy figure, screening him. She stood there, waiting peering into the dark. She was there, outlined against the patio light, when Uncle Bawley emerged and joined her.

  “What are you getting upset about, Leslie? Immigration fellas come along looking for hide-outs the way they sometimes do, why, they wouldn’t dast go near my house up there, they well know nobody’s allowed, I’d take their jobs away from them if they did.”

  She was completely bewildered. She thought, What a statement! “I’m so mixed up,” she stammered.

  “What you so upset about, Leslie?” In that soft strangely musical voice. “He’s mostly Mexican Indian, that boy, he’s used to traveling hundreds of miles afoot.” A tiny door in a corner of her memory opened and a handful of words flashed out. Walk! You can’t walk.

  Nobody walks in Texas, only the Mexicans. “Anyway,” Uncle Bawley went on, “he’ll have a regular fiesta today, sleep in a corner all day up there. I’ll fetch him up coffee now and a lot of good grub, give him pants and a shirt and shoes—he’ll sell the shoes first off——”

  “How do you know Jordan would have turned him back! I don’t believe it. He isn’t like that. In the Valley…I saw…there’s a horrid man named Gomez…”

  He came to her, his great hand on her shoulder, he looked down at her. “Now now Leslie girl, nothing to go to bawling about, just another Mexican Indian coming back to Tejas, you might almost say. It’s only that Bick’s made a rule against it here at Holgado, so near the border, and all over Reata. And he’s right. Texas can’t take in all of Mexico’s misfits. It’s illegal, it makes big trouble. If they come in with the seasonal labor migration, that’s different that’s in the law. Haul ’em in, pay ’em a couple of dollars, haul ’em back, well and good. But a kid crawls in, starving like that one, I pay Bick no mind. Only let’s keep this just between us, you and me. H’m?”

  “Yes, Uncle Bawley, I wish I could get it all straight in my mind. They use them. Cheap. And then throw them back, like old rags. A century of it but it’s never really worked out right, has it?”

  Evasively, “Where’s the rest of the boys and girls, I wonder, haven’t heard a peep out of the Moreys or the——” His voice trailed off. He faced Leslie squarely. “Strictly speaking—which hardly anybody does—why, what with picking the cotton and the fruit and now the Valley is all planted with vegetables, a big new industry, and the old railroad building days and all, why you might say the whole of Texas was built on the backs of boys like that one. On the bent backs of Mexicans. Don’t let on to Bick I said that.”

  Through her tears she looked up at him and the blur wiped the lines from the face, the little sag from the shoulders. With a gesture utterly unpremeditated, wanton, overpowering, she threw her arms about his neck she brought the fine old head down to hers, she kissed him full on the lips, long hard lasting.

  Horrified. “Forgive me. What is the matter with me! Uncle Bawley!”

  He stood a moment, his arms hanging at his sides. “My, that was nice,” he said quietly. “But you ever get a notion to do that again, Leslie, I’ll turn you over my knee and spank you good. Hear me.”

  “Yes, Uncle Bawley.”

  Vashti’s voice high and shrill from the direction of the guest rooms. “Adarene! Leslie! Where’s everybody got to!”

  Uncle Bawley turned and walked into the house.

  Adarene’s voice, “I’m coming. We overslept.”

  Pinky skipping along the gallery toward the patio. “Now Vash, don’t you go to eating before breakfast.”

  “Why don’t we get going, then! I’m starved.”

  “All right. Cup of coffee.”

  Fifteen minutes later they clattered out in the cool scented darkness, Bick keeping close to Leslie. Adarene sat very straight in the saddle. “Rides like a Yankee,” Lucius Morey commented. “Adarene never got over that school she went to, up the Hudson.”

  Vashti, an imposing mound of flesh looming ahead in the first faint dawn, rode cowboy fashion, one vast hip slipped to the side, one arm hanging loose or waving in the air, she kept up with the men and greeted the dawn like a Comanche on the warpath. The hills loomed grey then brown then rose then burst into scarlet. The plains, green and gold, ran to meet them.

  “Oh, Jordan!”

  “Not bad, huh?”

  “The light, the curious light. Not like anything in America. It’s Egypt—with the Alps thrown in.”

  “Egypt and Alps hell! It’s Texas.”

  A streak of gold-beige, like a flash of smoky sunlight, shot across the nearby brush and vanished behind a hillock.

  “Antelope,” said Bick.

  He was riding at Leslie’s left, Uncle Bawley was at her right. “Uncle Bawley, you told me that there are more cattle than people in Texas,” Leslie said. “But I never see any. Look. Miles and miles and miles, but not a four-footed thing.”

  “They like the brush,” Uncle Bawley explained. “And the quiet places away from the roads and highways. Maybe the old wild Longhorn strain ain’t all bred out of them. Like me.”

  “And cowboys. Where do you keep them? I saw more cowboys in the movies at home. Those strong silent handsome males were all over the place—in the pictures. My sister Lacey writes and asks me——”

  “Strong silent clabbermouths! Cow hands talk all the time, they’re lonely people, they’ll talk to anybody. If they can’t talk they sing to themselves or to the cows.”

  “Movies!” scoffed Bick. “Movies and those rodeos at Madison Square Garden and around, they give people the impression that a cow hand goes out and throws a steer every morning before breakfast, just for exercise. It’s a technique, like any other profession, you have to have a gift for it, you have to spend years learning it, it’s something you have to have handed down from father to son. I did, and my father did, and my son’s going to.”

  “That’s right,” said Uncle Bawley. “They write to Bick all the time, and they write to me and the big ranches around, college kids that want to be cowboys. They say they can ride a horse, they ride on the farm in Vermont or Kansas or someplace, and they ride in Central Park in New York, they say they want to learn to be cowboys. Well, say, I wouldn’t have them free, they ain’t worth picking up off the ground after the horse has threw them.”

  Suddenly, “Look, Leslie,” Bick said, and pointed to a small herd gloomily regarding the riders from the range fence.

  Leslie stared at the animals, they returned her stare glumly, hunched near the fence, their shaggy heads and bald faces, their humped backs and short-haired hides giving them the aspect of monsters in a nightmare. “What are they! They’re frightening!”

  “Now, Bick, don’t you go making me out a fool, front of Leslie.”

  Bick was laughing, and the riders ahead were pointing and grinning back at Uncle Bawley. “They’re called cattlo. Tell her, Bawley.”

  Ruefully Uncle Bawley eyed the weird creatures so mournfully returning his gaze as the little cava
lcade rode by. “That’s right—cattlo. It’s a word made up out of cattle and buffalo and that’s what those critters are, they’re bred up out of cattle and buffalo, bred years back to see if we couldn’t fetch something the heat and the ticks wouldn’t get to.”

  “You got something sure enough,” Bick grinned.

  “I don’t know’s they’re much meaner-looking than those critters you’re talking so big about, Herefords bred to those old humpy sloe-eyed beasts you’re always yapping about. Kashmirs! And Brahmans. Camels with an underslung chassis, that’s what they are. Cows with humps on their backs. It ain’t in nature!”

  But Bick laughed as he rode along. “Just you wait, Bawley, you’re going to see a breed that’ll make cattle history before Gill Dace and I finish with them.”

  Pinky turned in his saddle to shout back to them. “I never heard so much talking a-horseback in my whole life. Who ever heard of talking riding!”

  “It’s me,” Leslie called to him. “I have to talk to them riding because it’s the only time they ever sit down.”

  “I’ll go along ahead,” Uncle Bawley said, “get a fire going and the skillet on.” He was off with a clatter and a whoosh. The other horses tried to follow but the big man on the powerful horse outdistanced them.

  “That horse of Bawley’s,” Bick explained, as he eyed Leslie with some concern after their spurt of sudden speed, “is the fastest thing in Jeff Davis County and maybe in Texas. For riding, that is. And look at the build of him! A regular galon for size.”

  “He’d have to be huge to carry around that mountain of a man. Uh, sorry, dear, but I feel a question coming on. Galon? What’s a galon?”

  As they jogged along with the rose of sunrise reflected in their faces, “Well, let’s see. I just used the word unconsciously. The Mexicans call a big horse a galon, it’s a horse they used to have for hauling, not for riding. Before machinery did the work. They say that in the war for Texas Independence the Mexicans would hear the American teamsters yelling at those big square pudding-footed horses going through the Texas sand and mud and clay, hauling the heavy stuff of war. The teamsters would yell to the horses, ‘G’long! G’long!’ Get along, get along, see? So the Mexicans thought a heavy horse was a galon.”

  “True?”

  “True enough. Anyway, it’s fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who’s hearing Cinderella for the first time.”

  “Antelopes and galons and cattlos and sunrise and quail for breakfast——”

  “And me.”

  And you.

  “And Vashti.”

  “Jordan, we’re quite near the Mexican border, aren’t we?”

  “Not far.”

  “If we were to meet a wetback now—just one poor miserable Mexican wetback—what would you do?”

  “Dear little Yankee, do you think wetbacks go dripping along the road in daylight carrying a printed sign that says I Am a Wetback?”

  “No, but if you did see one, there in the ditch, hiding. What would you do? Would you pass him by, would you help him, would you turn him in?”

  “You know what happens to little girls who play with matches, don’t you? They get burned.”

  “Oh, Jordan, I’m just trying to get things straight in my mind. It’s all so new to me and some of it’s fascinating and some of it’s horrible. Labor, almost like slaves, but that’s legal. Wetbacks, but that isn’t legal. You all use the Mexican vote in Benedict and the whole country——”

  “Uh-huh. Like your Negro vote in the South.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t make it right.”

  “Honey, if I’d known you were going to turn into a Do-Gooder I’d have married any nice comfortable Texas girl and damned well let you wrestle with Red Coat and his dandy little Principality. I’ll bet you’d have had a fine time straightening out the Labor Situation in the Schleppenhausen or wherever it is he rules…. Come on, they’re all miles ahead of us. Let’s really ride before they send back a search party for us.”

  Clattering down the main road, then off on a dirt side road and up the narrow trail with the smoke of Uncle Bawley’s fire pointing the way and the scent of Uncle Bawley’s coffee and quail and bacon. He was squatting Mexican fashion in front of the fire of mesquite, the plump quail were roasting on an improvised spit and the bacon was slowly sizzling in the pan. The others already were sipping burning-hot black coffee as they stood about the fire.

  “Mm, smells divine!” Leslie said.

  “Let me warn you, Yankee,” Bick said. “Before you begin to complain. Texas quail are tough as golf balls.”

  “Let me help, Uncle Bawley,” Leslie offered. “I’ll baste them. That’ll make them tender.”

  “He’ll never let you,” Vashti said. “Uncle Bawley is a real batch, he likes to do things his own way. Texas way.”

  “No different from anybody else,” Uncle Bawley argued. “Cooking over an open fire is cooking over an open fire, no matter where.” He was lifting the crisp strips of dripping bacon out of the pan as they curled and sizzled, he looked about him for an absorbent receptacle on which to place them to drain until the quail should be golden brown. His wandering gaze—the eye of the practiced rancher and camper—fell on a nearby clop of old sun-dried cow dung; porous, dehydrated as a sponge or a blotter. Delicately, methodically, he placed the first strip of bacon, and the second and third, on top of this natural draining surface. “No different from anybody else,” Uncle Bawley repeated. “Texans aren’t, only maybe some little ways.”

  Leslie began to laugh, peal after peal, helplessly. The others stared at her, surprised, vaguely resentful but scrupulously polite.

  20

  The boy was named Jordan. Jordan Benedict Fourth. Like royalty. Leslie had objected to no avail. It became Jordy for short in order not to confuse him with his father, Jordan Third.

  “Yes, I know there’s been a Jordan in the family for a century. Jordan First Second Third and now Fourth. But remember what happened to all those dynasty boys? Those Ptolemys and the Louis lads and the Charleses?”

  “What would you call him?”

  “David.”

  “David! What David?”

  “The boy with the slingshot. The one who killed the giant Goliath.”

  “That’s a nice bloodthirsty idea.”

  Bick Benedict’s happiness was touching to see. “But he’s no Benedict,” Bick said, regarding the black-haired dark-eyed morsel. “He’s his mother’s son. I’ve been canceled out of the whole transaction.”

  “You’re just disappointed because he didn’t turn out to be that perfect Hereford-Kashmir bull calf you’ve been trying to produce.”

  A month later Vashti Hake Snyth presented Pinky with twin daughters. Mercifully, old Cliff Hake had died just before the birth of the twins. The mammoth matron made no secret of her disappointment. “In a way I’m glad Pa went before the twins came. He was mad enough when I was born. They say he wouldn’t speak to Ma for a month after. He’d prolly have disinherited me, seeing these, or shot Mott for a Texas traitor.”

  She named the plump girl babies Yula Belle and Lula Belle. As they grew in length and width and attained young girlhood they were fated to be known to the undazzled swains for five hundred miles in every direction as the Cow Belles.

  Vashti’s plan for at least one of these stolid morsels was confided with her usual subtlety to Bick and Leslie.

  “Your Jordy’ll have to marry one of ’em, stands to reason. No crawling out of it this time, with two of them waiting.”

  “Both or nothing,” Bick said.

  To Bick Leslie said, not altogether humorously, “Vashti as my Jordy’s mother-in-law! I’d send him to Tibet, rather, and have him brought up a lama in a lamasery.”

  “Don’t you worry. Jordan Benedict Fourth is going to be a tough Texas cowman. Nobody’ll have to tell him where to head in. He’ll take care of himself.”

  Jordy Benedict was scarcely a month old when his father gave him his first r
eata, his boots, his Stetson his saddle, all initialed all stamped with the Reata Ranch brand. As he outgrew the tiny boots expressly made for him fresh ones were ordered, exquisitely soft bits of leather fashioned by the hands of the craftsman Ildefonso Mezo. When the boy was two years old Ildefonso had taken the baby foot in his brown sensitive hand. He saw that it was not high-arched like the feet of a century of booted Benedicts. Hesitantly, frowning a little, the boy’s small foot in his palm, he looked up at Bick Benedict.

  “Plana.” He ran a finger over the instep. “Flat. This is more the foot of a dancer.”

  “Dancer!” yelled Bick.

  “This is not the foot of a jinete. It is not a foot for the stirrup.”

  “It damned well will be.”

  At three, arrayed in full cowboy regalia, the boy had been lifted to the horse’s back. Bick himself had set him there, had placed the reins in the baby fingers, had remained alongside, mounted on his own horse while Leslie stood by tense with fear. The child had sat a moment in frozen silence, his eyes wide, his mouth an open oval of terror. Suddenly he broke, he began to slip off the saddle, he screamed to be taken down. Down! Down!

  Bick was disgusted. “I rode before I could walk.”

  “He’s only a baby,” Leslie said, her arms about the screaming child.

  “When I was his age I yelled to be put on a horse, not taken off. If they didn’t put me on I began to climb up his legs or tail or something. Ask anybody. Ask Polo.”

  “All right, that was very cute, but that was you. This is another person. Maybe he just doesn’t like horses. Maybe he doesn’t like riding. Maybe he’s a walker like his mother.”

  “He’s a Benedict and I’m going to make a horseman out of him if I have to tie him to do it.”

  “You’ve been playing God so long you think you run the world.”

  “I run the part of it that’s mine.”

  “He’s not yours. He’s yours and mine. And not even ours. He’s himself. Suppose he doesn’t like sitting in the saddle from morning to night! If there’s something else he wants to do I won’t care if he can’t tell a horse from a cow. There are important things in the world outside Reata. Outside Benedict. Even outside Texas!”