by Edna Ferber
“What could be more exciting! As long as you’re fascinated and as long as you keep on fighting the things you think are wrong, you’re living. It isn’t the evil people in the world who do the most harm. It’s the sweet do-nothings that can destroy us. Dolce far niente. That’s the thing to avoid in this terrible and wonderful world. Gangrene. The sweet sickening smell of rotting flesh.”
Bick Benedict, when he arrived, seemed by his very buoyance to make all this talk mere academic babble. He was a mass of charm and high spirits. Virile handsome actually boyish, Leslie thought she never had seen him so pleased with himself and the world. His arms about her, Jordy and Luz flung themselves at him. In the first flush of their reunion she thought it was herself and the children that gave him this vibrating aura of well-being and elation. But she began to detect something within himself that was the source of this bubbling.
Surveying him with a wifely gaze, “What makes you so full of beans? This glitter in your eye can’t be just wife and children.”
“Purely spiritual, honey. It’s just the result of that high-minded talk down there in Washington. They’ve voted to continue the twenty-seven percent tax allowance on oil. Clear.”
“But you haven’t any oil. Have you? You’ve always said you hated the stinking oil wells.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“But I’m right petted on oil—off my land. I don’t mind others having it because from now on the whole world is going to be yelling for oil. Texas is booming. The rest of the country is flat.”
“Is that good?”
“Only good enough to make us the richest state in the whole country. We’re a country within a country.”
“Again!”
“Oil and beef and cotton. You can’t stop it, you can’t top it.” He breathed deeply, for a moment she thought she saw a strained look in his eye. He gazed around and about the Virginia landscape and he laughed.
“God, it looks little! The fields. And the sky. Are you ready to come back with your old man, honey?”
“Jordan, I’m no different from what I was when I left.”
“I don’t want you different. We Texians like a little vinegar on our greens. Gives it flavor. Come on, let’s go home.”
22
On the journey homeward Leslie said, “If you had told me, on our honeymoon, that the next time we made this trip I’d be traveling with you and masses of our children and hundreds of nurses and millions of bags and bottles and toys and stuff!”
“You’d have made it anyway.”
“You’re so pleased with yourself I think this is the time to tell you that Leigh meant it when she said she and Karfrey want to visit Reata.”
“Why not!” Bick demanded, largely. “Penned up on that little island all their lives! Do ’em good to have to hunt for the horizon. Anyway, it’ll be worth it just to see Karfrey in a ten-gallon hat.”
“I wish Papa and Mama would come down at the same time. And Lacey too. Just to take the curse off the Karfreys.”
His well-being encompassed this without a sign of strain. “That’s a fine idea. Folks down here are beginning to think you’re an orphan. Look, I’m going to send them all a telegram at the next stop.”
Down they came to Reata, the lot of them.
“Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Mrs. Lynnton, “that I am not going to be allowed to sleep under the same roof with my daughter and my grandchildren!”
“Mama dear, you’re staying in the Big House because there isn’t room here in our house. You’d go simply crazy here, and I don’t like to shush the children. Over there it’s bigger and quieter and more restful for you.”
“Restful! The place is full of utter strangers stamping and jingling through the halls all hours of the day and night. Nobody even knows who they are. I asked one of those Mexican girls. She just shook her head and jabbered something in Spanish. Spanish!”
“They’re business acquaintances of Jordan. People he has to see. Or they come to see the ranch. They come from everywhere.”
“What are you running? A hotel! God knows we’re hospitable in Virginia. But this!”
“Mama, this isn’t just a ranch. It’s a scientific laboratory too. And a kind of show place for the whole ranching world. Reata and the King ranch and the Hakes’ Double B and a few others are sort of famous, you know. People come to see and learn. Jordan loves it. He’s breeding a new kind of cattle.”
“If God had meant to have men create new cattle He’d have given them the job in the first place, with all He had to do.”
The family visitors adapted themselves to the climate, the environment and the customs with astonishing ease. Lacey was off on a horse from morning until night, she was more at home in the stables than the house. The vaqueros adopted her as one of themselves, they explained in Spanish and she understood in English. Even old Polo demonstrated to her the value of the new breed of fleet-footed creatures whose swift quarter-mile spurting powers were invaluable in the roundup and on the range. Quarter horses, they were called.
Mrs. Lynnton took alarm. She sought out Bick. “Lacey spends all her time with those Mexican men, no one knows where she is the day through and half the night. I’ve spoken and spoken to Horace about it but he’s as bad as she is.”
Bick grinned, he pretended to misunderstand. “No! You mean the Doctor’s galloping around on quarter horses!”
“You know perfectly well he’s down at that laboratory of yours with that vet, or poking into the wretched shacks around here, looking for local diseases, they’re worse than any slave quarters in the old Virginia days I can tell you.”
He could not be angry with her, actually, though he thought privately that he would like nothing better than to drive her out to really good rattlesnake country some hot bright afternoon.
Reata was a country in itself to which each visitor could adapt according to his or her taste. Luxury or hardship, leisure or work. Lacey ate her midday meal out on the range with the vaqueros. In the evening she reported on her day, to the horror of Mrs. Lynnton.
“For lunch we had some rather awful stuff looked like entrails. And beans of course. Don’t they ever tire of beans!”
Mischievously Bick said, “I must ask the boys to fix you up with a tasty dish of magueys.”
“Magueys?”
“It’s quite a Mexican delicacy. White maguey worms fried crisp. Elegant eating.”
A squawking sound from Mrs. Lynnton. Sir Alfred took a more world-wise view. “Why not? All foreigners eat certain beastly messes. Look at the French with their snails!”
“True, true,” agreed Horace Lynnton. “And is there anything more repulsive-looking than a succulent Baltimore soft-shell crab? Or, for that matter, a nicely aged English plover’s egg or a properly disintegrated woodcock.”
Lacey, full of her day’s doings, rattled on. “I rode miles and miles today and ended up at the Dietzes’ place, that little Bobby Dietz is the smartest little boy I ever saw. Not smarty smart like Eastern kids but wise smart. He knows about soil and cattle and feed and horses. The Dietzes say they’re going to send him to Texas U., but he says he wants the husbandry course at Cornell. If he were ten years older I’d ditch my beau and marry him. What a kid!…Look, Bick, there was a fellow in the camp today he came rushing in sort of wild-looking and covered with grease and driving the worst broken-down Ford I ever saw. He gulped down his lunch red hot though I must say the Mexican boys didn’t seem very glad to see him. When he found out who I was he was really rather nervy. I mean not like the cowboys and vaqueros I’ve met, I think he’d been drinking. He wanted to know all about you, Leslie.”
Bick stopped her. “What was his name?”
“Something that sounded like Jeb——”
Bick pushed back his chair and stood up. “By God I’ve told them that if he ever sets foot on my land they’re to shoot him.”
Lacey giggled a little at this. “Yes, they told him—at least I gathe
red they told him—— Do you know I can understand quite a lot of Spanish now——”
“Oh, they told him.”
“And he just said sort of ‘pffft!’ as if he were spitting through his teeth—he was, really—and jabbered something I couldn’t get in Spanish, I must say it didn’t sound too complimentary——”
“Now, Jordan,” Leslie said quietly. “Sit down and finish your dinner.”
“I’ve finished. Excuse me, folks. I’ve got some business to tend to.” You heard him a moment later talking on his office telephone, the Spanish words drumming.
Leslie pretended to make nothing of this. “Ranch business again. Oh dear! And we’re having the most lovely dessert.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Leslie,” Lacey said. “I was just talking, I didn’t dream there was anything important about this really crummy-looking man.”
Mrs. Lynnton eyed her youngest daughter disapprovingly. “Lacey, how many times have I told you not to chatter? Men don’t like women who talk so much.”
At the shout of laughter that went up she looked about her in vague surprise.
After dinner Doctor Horace took Leslie aside. “Tell me something about this fellow Lacey was talking about. I don’t like to see a big full-blooded man like Bick go as white as that.”
“When Jordan’s sister died I didn’t write you and Mama all the queer details because you’d have been upset. I was. Horribly. I don’t yet quite understand the whole gruesome business.”
She told him, speaking rapidly and very low, meanwhile smiling and nodding reassuringly across the room at her mother. “What are you two whispering about?” that lady demanded. As Leslie talked and her father listened she began to feel strangely relieved as from a burden. “You see, he’s just an ignorant crude lout. But tough. He has some sort of crazy plan in his head, I suppose. But I can’t understand,” she concluded, “why Jordan takes him so seriously. He’s nothing, really.”
“Nobody’s nothing,” Doctor Lynnton said. “You can’t cancel out any living human being. Sometimes they surprise you. This boy has a deep grudge. Not only against Bick, I’d say, but against the world. If he’s strong enough and carries it long enough he might do quite a lot of damage.”
“I don’t see how. He never can touch us, that’s sure.”
Doctor Lynnton, during this visit, covered a great deal of scientific ground so unobtrusively that he seemed scarcely to move at all. He ambled. He spoke to everyone he encountered—vaqueros, merchants, servants, ranchers, any Mexicans within reach. He himself talked little, they seemed always to hold forth while he listened and nodded his head gently and said I see I see. His conduct was, in a more orderly and intensified way, based on the pattern his daughter had followed when first she had come, a stranger, to Texas.
“Well, Papa,” Leslie said, at the end of the first week, “do you get the idea?”
“Somewhat. Somewhat. Very complicated, beneath the surface. But fascinating beyond my expectations. This is a civilization psychologically different from any other part of the United States. The South is a problem, certainly; and the Eastern seaboard. The West Coast is faced with its peculiar difficulties, and even the Middle West isn’t as serene as it seems. But this! Bigness can be a curse, you know, too. Texas is very big. Reata is very big. Your Bick is very powerful. People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus. There’s a phrase for that—one of those nice descriptive American sayings. ‘Throwing your weight around,’ we say.”
The visitors met and were entertained by the neighbors for hundreds of miles around. “Con Layditch telephoned,” Bick would announce casually, “wants us all to come over, they’ve finished their new house, they’re having a barbecue and square dance to celebrate.” At an anguished look from Leslie, “No, honey. Steaks.”
The visitors would find themselves whirled two hundred miles for dinner.
“All these foreigners,” Sir Alfred remarked as they scuddled through the little towns, as they watched the vaqueros at round-up, as they were served their food. “These Mexicans everywhere. I should think they’d be quite a problem, what?”
“Yes,” Doctor Horace agreed. “And imagine the problem we were to them when we came swarming in a hundred years ago. We were the foreigners then.”
“Room enough for everybody now, I must say,” Mrs. Lynnton announced, looking about her largely. “Miles and miles and miles of nothing. Scares you. Makes me want to holler.”
Doctor Horace pounced on this. “It does!” Thoughtfully.
Leslie had dreaded the inevitable meeting between Vashti Snyth and Lady Karfrey. They came together with a clashing of broadswords. After the first encounter Leslie found herself defending the people and customs she herself had so recently criticized.
“Vashti is a college graduate. She’s traveled quite a lot in Europe. They go East every year. She speaks French very well.”
“It hasn’t touched her,” Lady Karfrey asserted. “She’s a Texas national monument like the Alamo or that cow you showed us in the glass case in the village. Neither college nor Europe or time or tide will ever change her. I hope.”
Conversations between Vashti Snyth and Leigh Karfrey were brisk and bristling.
“My, I should think it would feel wonderful for you to get where you can really draw your breath,” Vashti said with that tactlessness which was, perversely enough, a rather endearing quality in her. “That little bitty old England, you can’t take a good long walk without you fall over the cliffs into the ocean. I liked to choke to death there in my cramped-up fog. And then the mutton. Mutton! My.”
“You imported all our beautiful English Hereford. And immediately they arrived they fell heir to your cattle diseases—pink-eye, and ticks, and worms!”
“We’re trying to breed out all the Hereford strain in our stock. We don’t really need to haul anything in here. We got everything. We got cattle in plenty. And cotton. And wool and mules and grapefruit and horses and wheat and turkeys. And Mott, my husband, says we got sulphur and coal and copper and lead and a thing called helium—I don’t rightly know what that is, but anyway it’s good stuff to have around—and lumber he says and limestone and vegetables in the Valley, and pecans. And a course all this oil now. We got just everything in Texas.”
Lady Karfrey cleared her throat.
“I have been gathering a few facts, dear Mrs. Snyth, since I arrived in your state. Everything you say is true.”
“Sure, it’s true,” repeated the unsuspecting Vashti.
“As you say, of all the states Texas is first in cotton—but last in pellagra control. First in beef—and forty-fifty in infant mortality. First in wool—and thirty-eighth in its school system. First in mules—and forty-seventh in library service. First in turkeys—and its rural church facilities are deplorable. First in oil—and your hospitals are practically nonexis——”
Magenta surged into Vashti’s indignant face. “I been in England. I never saw such poor runty beat-up looking people in my born days as you got in what you call the East End. And poor teeth and bad complexions, drinking tea all the time and nobody in the whole country gets milk and oranges and he says the roast beef of old England is a non-existent, Mott says.”
Strangely enough it was Karfrey, the Englishman, who said, “How right you are, Mrs. Snyth. But then you must remember that you could put all of England down in one corner of Texas and never find it, really.”
Mrs. Lynnton, in her own insecure way, struggled for a foothold of understanding. The food, the storerooms, the swarms of servants inside and out, the vastness, the lavish scale on which the Big House and the Main House were run, bewildered and irritated her.
“When I get back home I’m going to send Mitty down. You remember Mitty, Caroline’s daughter? She’s every bit as good a cook now as Caroline and in some ways better.”
“No, Mama. It wouldn’t do.”
“You owe it to your children. I saw Jordy yesterday with that weird little Mexican gir
l he’s always playing with, they were both eating tortillas as if it were bread and butter.”
“So it is, in a way.”
The visiting Lynntons and Karfreys usually drove over from the Big House before dinner there to lounge in comparative coolness on the Main House veranda. There were always tall iced drinks, the Gulf breeze filtered through vines and screens, the voices of the children came pleasantly from the far end of the veranda. It was the most relaxed hour of the day, it was the time Leslie liked best. Bick was always at his most charming. Lacey was full of her day’s doings. Her father and mother had learned to accept for her this strange life of hardship and fantastic luxury. The Karfreys were frankly having the time of their lives.
“Besides,” Leslie now said, continuing her conversation with her mother, “that weird little Mexican girl isn’t a girl at all. She’s a boy.”
Mrs. Lynnton turned to stare at the distant children.
“I don’t believe it.”
Bick called to them. “Jordy! Angel! Ven acá!”
The two came reluctantly, Jordy to stand at his mother’s side, her hand on his shoulder; the other child stopping short of the group. Weird, Nancy Lynnton had said. Now the group of adults gazed at the dark small Mexican child and the child stared back at them poised lightly, like a tiny fawn, as though ready to dart off at a sound, a hostile glance. Fawnlike three-cornered eyes, due to a slight lift or pinch in the center of the upper eyelid. The little figure was bony of shank, flat of chest, the hands strong and big-boned sticking out of the stuff of the sleeves. A small boy’s hands, a small boy’s legs, a small boy’s chest and eyes; and the bones of the alert face and the well-shaped head were those of a boy. But the dress with its Mexican ruffles and its petticoats and the red hair ribbons—all this was the garb of a girl. And the long black hair was neatly brushed and braided, it shone with brushing and with unguents, unlike the thick careless locks of other small Mexican ranch children.
“This is Angel Obregon,” Leslie said, and smiled at the boy, “the son of Angel Obregon, who is a vaquero here at Reata.” And she held out her hand to him as she spoke, as though to draw him to her side with Jordy, her own son. But the boy only looked at her and did not move.