by Edna Ferber
“He’ll never change, Papa. You might as well ask the Gulf wind to be quiet, or a norther tearing in from the sky. What shall I do!”
“Twenty years from now, when he’s pushing those middle fifties, make him rein in. Now it’s a matter of not taking things so emotionally and not doing everything himself. Why doesn’t he go out on the range occasionally in a car instead of on a horse? I see others doing it.”
“Yes, he’s modern about everything but himself. He’s an engine. He’s a power plant. He’s a dynamo.”
“So is the heart.”
“I’ll never know a moment’s peace again.”
“Yes you will. Human beings can adapt to almost anything. Just hold onto his coat sleeve now and then, if he’s going too fast. Leslie, I’ll tell him if you want me to.”
“He’d only go faster, in defiance. He is like that.”
When the family left Reata—the Lynntons and the Karfreys to the east, Uncle Bawley to the west—a new peace seemed to settle down upon the Main House, upon the ranch, even upon the town of Benedict. Nancy Lynnton, departing, had flung a final shower of admonition at her daughter. “…and watch that cook he’ll poison you yet…hardly more than a baby and putting him on that huge horse…get a good rich skin cream and pat it in night and morning…children…Mexicans…sun…wind…dust…”
“Mama’s marvelous,” Leslie remarked, feeling strangely gay and released. “In those last ten minutes she covered everything in the heavens and the earth beneath.”
“Families are fine,” Bick announced. “But they should be exposed to each other one member at a time. That goes for my family too, so don’t get your feathers up.”
“But Jordan, I couldn’t agree with you more. It was wonderful to have them and to see them here——”
“And to see them go.”
For the first time since her coming to Texas she felt something that was almost contentment. She had seen her old home and her friends in Virginia; her family had seen her new home. There, she thought. That’s that. Now then. Jordan. Jordy. Luz.
Suddenly, as she looked at herself in the mirror there in the intimate quiet of their room—the guests gone, the children asleep, the world their own—she had a disquieting thought. She turned to stare at her husband.
“Jordan! We’re the older generation, aren’t we? Suddenly.”
“Not me,” he said firmly. “Maybe you, old girl.”
“No, but I mean it. Jordy and Luz are the next generation we’re always talking about. How did that happen? What’s become of ours? We were the next generation until just a minute ago.”
“It’s always the next generation. I never could understand why they were always the generation that mattered—the next generation. They’re always supposed to be better or smarter or more important. And we’re supposed to sacrifice for them. So perhaps you’re right, we are the older generation all of a sudden. Gosh! And I was feeling right romantic a minute ago.”
“Jordan, would you sacrifice for Jordy? And Luz?”
“Sacrifice what?”
“Anything. Beginning with life itself.”
“Let’s not get dramatic, honey. I’ve had a hard day in the salt mines.”
“But I mean. Just suppose—for example, I mean—that Jordy should want to do something different, be something beside a Benedict of Reata. What would you say to that?”
“Jordy’s going to be a cowman. I’m not going to live forever.”
“Yes, but suppose when he’s eighteen or twenty he says he wants to be—oh, an engineer or a poet or a doctor or President of the United States or an actor or a lawyer.”
“Well, he won’t be.”
“You don’t mean you’d try to stop him, like a father out of Samuel Butler!”
“Who?”
“The Way of All Flesh—oh, never mind that—I mean you wouldn’t actually stop him!”
“The hell I wouldn’t.”
24
Jordy grew tall and slim. Jordy grew handsome and shy. Jordy was possessed of quiet charm and looked like his mother and walked in the footsteps of his father and loathed the daily deadly grinding business of roping and branding and castrating and feeding and breeding and line-riding and fence-building and dipping and shipping.
“I want you to know everything,” Bick said again and again. “A Benedict ought to be able to do anything on Reata that any hand can do, white or Mexican. I could, at your age. Maybe as a kid I wasn’t as good as the older men. But good enough. That’s the way I was brought up.”
In the choking dust the boy learned to cut out a calf a cow a steer from the vast herd. He would ride in amongst the bellowing animals, he handled his cutting horse with dexterity, zigzagging this way and that in pursuit of the desired quarry. Bick, mounted on his own horse, would stand watching near by, immobile as an equestrian statue.
“Get that white-faced boneyard. How did an esqueleto like that get in…That runty red there…” Grudgingly, at the end of a long burning day of grinding work he might say, “You did pretty well, son.”
“Thanks, Papa.” The boy did not raise his eyelids to look at his father. Leslie always said those long silky lashes were wasted on a boy. “Thanks, Papa.” He looked down at his leather-bitten hands.
Leslie called Bick’s attention to a little defect in speech that somehow seemed more pronounced as the boy grew older. At first it had seemed a childish trick, rather endearing. “Jordan, have you noticed that Jordy stutters quite a lot? Especially when he’s upset.”
“He’ll outgrow it.”
“But it’s worse than it was. A real stammer.”
“Lots of kids do that. Their ideas come faster than they can talk.”
“Jordy isn’t really a little boy any more. And Luz wears lipstick as automatically as Levis. Let’s face it. They’re almost grownups.”
No one needed to say do-this do-that to Luz. She had taken to horses as other little girls demand dolls and lollipops. By the time she was twelve she could cling like a cat to an unsaddled horse’s back. Riding slow she could stay plastered to the side of a quarter horse running through the brush, a wilderness of thorns and branches, the twining arms of one mesquite interlocked with the arms of the next and the next so that they formed a bristling barrier.
Bick’s admonitions to his daughter were the reverse of the orders he issued to his son. “You’re not to ride alone in the brush. Hear me!…Keep away from that stallion, you crazy!”
Now her physical resemblance to her father was startling. The sunburned blonde hair, the blue eyes that gazed unsquinting almost straight into the glaring sun. She stood as he stood, she spoke with his inflections. Headstrong. Direct. Somewhat insensitive. When the Snyth twins, arrayed in identical pink, were bound for this or that festivity, Luz, in pants and shirt, would be down in the corral or sprawled, grease-grimed, over a balky Ford.
“Luz, the Snyth twins have been on the telephone for hours. They say you promised to pick them up. Scrape that grease off and hustle into your clothes. It’s a seventy-mile drive it’ll take you at least—”
“Why don’t they take themselves! I’m tired of those cow-belles hanging around my neck.”
The Reata vaqueros worshiped the girl. In the non-Mexican line-house families she was as accustomed as their own members, she was as likely to be found eating with them as at home. To the Dietz family she was as casual as one of their own sons or daughters. From Bob Dietz, eleven years her senior, she unconsciously received a fundamental education in the sciences embracing soil, seeding, feeding, breeding. During his summer vacations from Texas University and, later, from Cornell he worked as a matter of course on Reata. Whenever he permitted her Luz rode with him or drove with him, a wide-eyed child in pigtails, her mind absorbent as a thirsty desert plant. She was twelve. Fourteen. Fifteen.
Leslie took this up with her husband. “Jordan, Luz spends all her time with that Dietz boy.”
“I wish Jordy did. Bob Dietz knows more about modern ranching than a
ny man on the place. Of course, some of his ideas are cuckoo. I’m all for modern methods but some of this stuff they give them at college!”
“Yes, but I mean Luz isn’t a child any more. Bob’s a nice boy, and smart—”
“I’ll tell you how smart I think he is. Someday that kid’s going to be General Manager of Reata unless Jordy pulls up his socks and gets going. That would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it! A Benedict just a kind of figurehead on Reata.”
“I’m talking about Luz. She’s down at the corral or galloping around with Bob Dietz the minute he’s home.”
Bick waggled his head in admiration. “Gill Dace says she knows more about the stock than his boys do. He says the first time he used that fifty-thousand-dollar Kashmir bull on the new prize heifer Luz was down there telling him about the advantages of artificial insemination.”
“Oh, Jordan!”
“This is Reata, honey. Luz knows by this time that the stork doesn’t bring our calves.”
“Oh well, she’ll be going away to school next year.”
Luz, the outspoken, ranging the countryside in the saddle or at the wheel, came home with bits and pieces of gossip and information which she dispensed perhaps not as artlessly as one might think. Mealtime frequently was enlivened by her free-association chatter.
“They say Aunt Luz was always trying to keep people from getting married, she couldn’t bear the thought…. Papa, they say when you brought Mama home you were more scared than if you’d been a horse thief. They say Aunt Luz took to her bed with a fever so she wouldn’t have to go to the wedding when you were married, and she actually did have a fever, isn’t it wonderful! Of course in those days they didn’t understand about psychosomatic illness. And they say——”
“Hold on! Who’s this They?” Bick demanded.
“Oh, around. I forget who.”
“Well, you just forget all the rest of it then, will you! The whole driveling pack of lies.”
She would regard her father with the disconcerting gaze of the young and merciless. “Is it true, Bick honeh, that every woman in Texas tried to get you? They say there wasn’t a prize catch like you since before Sam Houston got married.”
“I’m sure it’s true,” Leslie agreed briskly. “It took me two whole days to land him. And in Virginia that’s considered overtime.”
“They say there was a schoolteacher named Cora Dart at the ranch school and there was some hanky-panky going on between her and you, Papa, and then—”
Angrily, “Who’s been telling you this stuff?”
“I don’t remember. Somebody at the Beezers’ barbecue. I wish people were as romantic as that now. It sounds like a movie. They said Cora Dart tried like everything to marry you. She’s the one that crazy Jett Rink married and divorced, isn’t she? The first one. And when Papa married you Cora Dart took up with this horrible Jett—you should just hear the stories about him!—and when Aunt Luz learned what was going on she said Cora Dart would have to leave. And then she got killed. Aunt Luz, I mean, and they say Aunt Luz was really in love with Jett Rink herself even if she was old enough to be his mother, really it all sounds so fascinating and uncouth I just wish—”
The hot red of fury suffused Bick’s face.
“Now Jordan!” came Leslie’s voice, cool and calm. “Now Jordan, don’t get upset over nonsense. You know it’s not good for—for anyone.”
Like twin scenes in a somewhat clumsy comedy the boy and the girl privately confided each in the parent who was sympathetic.
“Look, Mama,” Jordy said, “I wish you’d speak to Papa.”
“You’re a big hulking boy now, Jordy. Isn’t it time you did your own speaking? And time you stopped this calling us Papa and Mama?”
“He says that’s what he called his parents. When it comes to human beings everything has got to be done around here just as it was a hundred years ago. Reata without end, amen! Of course cattle that’s different. It’s no good my trying to talk to him. He acts as if I were ten years old and feeble-minded.”
Jordy’s entire aspect changed when he talked to his mother. He was a man, assertive, rebellious, almost confident. In his father’s company he dwindled to a timorous hesitant boy.
“What is it you want me to speak to him about?”
“Harvard. That’s part of the old pattern. But it happens that that’s what I want to do more than anything in the world.”
“You do!”
“Yes. But not for his reason. They’ve got the best pre-med course in the country. And after that I want Columbia University P. and S.”
“Now wait a minute. Being a doctor’s daughter I know what pre-med means——”
“That’s right. Pre-medical. Biology chemistry physics. And Columbia’s Physicians and Surgeons has got it all over the others. Besides, the New York hospitals give you a better chance at material than any city in the world except maybe London.”
She stared at him. “You want to be a doctor.”
“I’m going to be.”
“Oh, Jordy! Your grandpa will be so happy to know——”
“Yeh, that’s fine, but I don’t want to slide along on his reputation. He’s in all the encyclopedias and medical books and everybody knows about him. Horace Lynnton’s grandson, he’d better be good. I don’t want that. When I’m through I want to work right here in Texas. A Mexican with tuberculosis here hasn’t got a chance. There’s a Doctor Guerra in Vientecito, he’s got a clinic I’d give anything to——”
“Your father takes the most wonderful care of the people on Reata. You know that. Free medical attention and all that.”
“Uh-huh. The cattle too.”
“Your father probably will be delighted. You’ll have use for all that medical knowledge right here on Reata.”
“I don’t want to use it here on Reata. I want to be free to work where I want to work.”
She knew she must tell him. “Jordy, your father isn’t as strong as he seems. It’s a heart thing. The arteries that feed it——”
“Yes, I know.”
“You do!”
“I’ve learned a lot about the human body down at the lab with Gill and out on the range doctoring the stock with him and the boys. It isn’t the same, of course. But there are quite a few hearts and lungs and livers and lights in a Reata herd.”
“Your father expects you to take his place someday.” She must know if he was strong enough to reject this.
He stood up. “I’d die for Papa if it was a quick choice between his life and mine. But I won’t live for him.”
“He won’t consent to it, Jordy. Even if we’re both for it.”
He saw, then, that she was with him. The boy’s brooding face came alive. “I haven’t any money, Jordy. You know how it is on Reata. Millions, but nobody’s got ready cash.”
“Don’t I know it!” Jordy agreed ruefully.
Quietly she said, “Uncle Bawley will do it if your father won’t.”
“Old Bawley! What makes you think so?”
“He will. I know.”
Luz used the more direct approach in her talk with her father.
“I’m not going to Wellesley.”
“What does your mother say to that?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“The Benedict girls always go to Wellesley.”
“No girlie school for this one.”
“Oh, I suppose Yale, huh? Or maybe Harvard with Jordy.” He laughed at his own joke, not very heartily.
“You’re warm. Cornell.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You go to college to learn something. Cornell has got the really scientific husbandry course.”
“You’ve got a little-girl crush on Bob Dietz. If he took a course in dressmaking in Paris that’s probably what you’d want to do all of a sudden.”
She faced him angrily. “You wouldn’t say that to Jordy.”
“Your mother says you’ve concentrated too much on cows already. She thinks a year or so in one of tho
se schools in Switzerland.”
Elaborately casual, Bick and Leslie approached the subject, each testing the other. Until almost eleven that night he had been working in his office that adjoined the Main House dining room. Now it was time for that last cup of coffee in the Texas coffee ritual. Leslie had brought the tray to him and she had said, “Jordan, all this coffee so late at night, it can’t be good for you, anyway you don’t get enough sleep, up at——” when she stopped. She put the tray down on his desk, he leaned back in his chair and looked up at her.
“What’s the matter?”
“It just came to me that I was saying something I’ve said five thousand times. I must be getting old.”
“If it weren’t so late at night I’d make you a hell of a gallant speech about that, honey. But anyway I realized today we’ve got a couple of grown-up kids.”
“Just today?”
“Know what Luz said? Of course she’s too young to know what she really wants. But she said she won’t go to Wellesley or even to that school in Switzerland you’re so stuck on.”
“What then?”
“Says—get this—says she wants to go to Cornell and take the husbandry course.”
“No!” But even as she uttered this monosyllable of rejection she thought, Well, perhaps we can make a bargain. Perhaps now is the time to tell him.
“We’ve hatched a couple of odd fledglings, darling. Jordy says he wants to be a doctor.”
Bick shrugged this off. “Over my dead body.”
“I feel the same about Luz.”
Almost warily they eyed each other like fighters in their corners.
“Anyway, Jordy’s going to start his first year at Harvard, just as we always have.”
“Don’t you think that’s a sort of outworn family tradition now? Unless he’s going to learn something really valuable and practical? You Benedict boys were sent East for—what was it?—a polish. Jordy doesn’t need it.”
“He’s going.”
“It takes seven years of medical school to learn to be a doctor.”