by Edna Ferber
He rose from the crowded table, and Leslie with him. Angel, the bridegroom, and Marita, the bride, seeing their guests of honor about to leave started toward them in smiling farewell.
It was then that Jordy Benedict stood up, too, and to the amazement of the wedding guests he put his arm about the girl Juana’s shoulder. He was very pale and his dark eyes seemed enormous.
He spoke formally in Spanish. “Ladies and gentlemen! My mother and my father! Friends! I have not spoken until now because I did not want to intrude on the festivities of this wedding of my friends Angel Obregon and Marita Rivas. But now I can tell you that yesterday morning Juana and I were married in the rectory of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Nopal. We are husband and wife.”
He spoke without his usual stammer. No one noticed this. Though perhaps somewhere in his mother’s stunned mind it registered.
28
Sprawled comfortably on a veranda chair, Bick was deep in talk with Judge Whiteside and Gabe Target and Pinky Snyth and Uncle Bawley. Cattle, oil, politics were the primary subjects of discussion as always in a group of Texas males. Wars and the end of wars; nations and the fall of nations; human lives and the shattering of human lives; all these were secondary.
“My family and I just live the way we’ve always lived here at Reata. All that black grease in the far lot,” Bick said contemptuously, “hasn’t made a mite of difference. Plainer, in fact. Look at the Big House where I was brought up, compared to this little shack.”
“That’s right,” Pinky Snyth agreed. A gleam of malice danced in the seemingly guileless blue eyes. “Just like in the old-timey days, that’s you, Bick. Nature is all. God sure was good to you Benedicts to hand you a seventy-five-foot reinforced concrete swimming pool set down in the brush right in your own front yard.”
Bick good-humoredly joined in the laughter. “Well, now, it’s a health measure. Leslie’s in and out like a seal. And the young folks. We’d have had that pool in time, oil or no oil.”
Gabe Target was a realist. “Like hell you would! That twenty-seven and a half percent exemption on oil fetched all the little knick-knacks around your country here like swimming pools and airplanes and Caddys and whole herds of fifty-thousand-dollar critters. And that goes for the rest of the state, too.”
“Depreciation,” Pinky Snyth mused. “It’s wonderful.”
Judge Whiteside spoke pontifically. “One of the finest laws ever passed in Washington, that oil-well depreciation.”
There was the sound of light laughter from the shadow of the vines at the rear of the veranda. The heads of the five men turned sharply. “That you, Leslie?” Bick called.
Her voice, a lovely sound, came to them though they could not see her. “I get starved for male conversation. I’m in the harem section pretending not to be here.”
“Whyn’t you move down here where we can look at your pretty face, not only hear you,” suggested that ancient charmer, Uncle Bawley.
She came out of the vine shadows then and stood a moment, waving them back to their chairs. “No, I’m not staying. Relax. I was just wondering about depreciation in first-class brains. My father, for example. He’s way over seventy now, he’s given his life to saving other men’s lives. He’s a weary old gentleman now, and not well. What about depreciation exemption there?”
Gabe Target, bland and benevolent, undertook to clear this feminine unreason. “Oil is a commodity, and valuable. How you going to measure the value of a man’s brains!”
“By his record.” Her voice was crisp now. “When a country considers oil more important than the spirit of man, it’s a lost country.”
“Now Leslie.” Bick’s tone was fond, but a trifle irritated too. “Get down off that stump. Someday a short-tempered Texian is going to take a shot at you.”
“All right. I’m off.” Her voice was gay but her eyes were serious.
“Where you going, hot of the day like this?” Pinky asked.
“Stay here,” Uncle Bawley pleaded. “It rests my eyes just to look at you.”
“Gentlemen, I’ll tell you this privately,” Bick announced, “old Bawley’s always been in love with my wife.”
“Who hasn’t!” The heavily gallant Judge Whiteside.
Straight and slim as she had been more than twenty years ago. A misting of white in the abundant black of her hair. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but I’ve promised. Luz and I are driving Juana and little Jordan over to Bob Dietz’s new place. Bob’s got a new lamb to show Jordan, he’s never seen a lamb.”
“All these Jordans around here,” Gabe Target said, “I should think you’d get mixed up.”
“His name isn’t really Jordan, you know. Jordy and Juana named him Polo, after his grandfather. But Jordan began to call him Jordan—” Laughing, she gave it up.
“Dietz’s place,” Bick said, and shuffled his feet a little. “That’s a far piece for the kid to go, day like this.”
“He’s tough.”
Bick’s frown cleared and he wagged his head. “He sure is. I sat him up front of me on my horse yesterday, just to see what he’d do, and when I took him down he began to bellow to be put back up again. Kicked me.”
“Well, real Mexican—” Pinky began. Then he stopped abruptly.
Brightly, but looking them over with a clear cool gaze, Leslie said her polite farewells. “I’ll be back by six. You know the way Luz drives. Won’t you all stay for supper? And tell me what you’ve talked about while I’m away. If you dare. Just what are you five evil men up to now, I wonder. And don’t you know you’ll have to pay for it in the end?”
She vanished into the house. The five men looked at each other.
“Leslie’s always been real sharp talking,” Judge Whiteside said, and his tone was not altogether admiring.
Uneasily Bick dismissed the criticism. “Leslie doesn’t mean it. When she gets going I just come back at her with some mild questions about the South and Tammany in New York and a few things like that.”
The men sat quietly a moment. Reata Ranch sounds came to them on the hot Gulf wind—humming metallic sounds now, different from the sounds of a quarter century ago. The men pondered this, too, as they sat seemingly relaxed but actually tense with a kind of terrible Texas tenseness born of the fierce sun and the diet of beef and the runaway pace of prosperity.
“Don’t hardly ever hear a horse nowdays,” Gabe Target observed.
“Do when I’m moving around,” Bick said.
Pinky eyed him keenly. “Thought you didn’t gallop around as much as you used to.”
“Leslie’s always after me to take it easy, but I pay it no mind.”
“Everything and everybody taking it easy now,” Gabe Target mused. “Reach in the deep freeze for food. Lunch counter right in your own kitchen like a café—pie, coffee, sandwiches. Bump gates, touch ’em with the nose of your car, out they open and bingo they close. Bulldozers. Stingers. Jeeps. Planes in the back lot like Fords.”
“My twins,” Pinky said, “they went zooming down to Houston yesterday, and back—slacks and their hair in curlers—said they had to get them some lobsters, they had the girls coming for a card party they’d set their hearts on these lobsters Luggen’s store just flew in special from up in Maine. They thought nothing of the trip, three four hundred miles each way, like running to the corner grocery.”
Uncle Bawley often sat with his eyes shut, listening. His fingers tapped a tuneless rhythm on the chair arm. Now he opened his crepey lids and surveyed the younger men. “Oil! What do folks use it for! In the war they were flying around shooting up towns of women and children. Now it’s lobsters from Maine. Got to have lobsters. And streaking hell-bent in automobiles a hundred miles an hour, going nowheres, killing people like chickens by the roadside. Pushing ships across the ocean in four five days. There hasn’t been a really good boatload of folks since the Mayflower crowd.”
“You don’t get around enough, Bawley,” Gabe Target argued. “Look what it’s done for the st
ate! Look what it’s done for Houston and Dallas and Hermoso and Corpus and a hundred more. Look at the people there!”
“Yep. Look at ’em. The girls all got three mink coats and no place to wear ’em. And emeralds the size of avocados. The men-folks, they got Cadillacs like locomotives and planes the size of ocean liners, and their offices done up in teakwood and cork and plexiglas. And what happens! The women get bored and go to raising pretty flowers for prize shows like their grammaws did and the men go back to raising cattle just like their grampappies did a long time ago. Next thing you know mustard greens and corn bread’ll be fashionable amongst ’em, instead of bragging about how they eat at the Pavilion Café and the Twenty-One Club when they go to New York. My opinon, they’re tired of everything, and everybody’s kind of tired of them. They made the full circle.”
“Well, anyway, Uncle Bawley,” Pinky Snyth protested, grinning, “you can’t object to the breed of beef cattle that oil money has raised up here on Reata.”
“Can,” declared Uncle Bawley. “And do. I was thinking yesterday in that big tent Bick set up there, selling off bulls and steers. All out of that big black bull Othello, scares you to see him, a black Kashmir bull with all those greeny-white cows it’s miscegenation. Priced fifty thousand dollars, he is.”
“Sixty,” Bick said. And he thought, Oh, shut up for God’s sake will you, Uncle Bawley, I’m tired and edgy.
“Fifty—sixty—when you get up into those figgers for a he-cow what’s the difference! Like Jett Rink’s holdings. Has he got a thousand million or only a hundred million? What’s the diff? It ain’t money any more, it’s zeroes. There they stood, those critters in the auction tent, solid square, low-slung like a Mack truck, legs just stumps, all beef and more of it in all the right places than any beef animal that ever was bred up on this earth.”
“Yes, well now look, Uncle Bawley——” Bick interrupted.
“—And it put me in mind of the fat women in the circus,” the old man continued, unheeding. “Fattest Woman on Earth, the fella says, hollering about how big she is. And sure enough, there she sets, enormous, she’s all female, she’s got more of everything in the right places than any woman on earth. But who the hell wants her!”
A yelp went up. Even Bick, annoyed though he was, joined in the laughter. “You’ll eat those words along with that steak we’re going to have tonight for dinner.”
“Don’t know’s I will, at that. Looking at two three those animals yesterday that you keep aspecial for family feeding. Looked like a string of freight cars standing there. One of them had laid down with his legs kind of splayed out instead of doubled under and by golly it couldn’t get up. They finally had to buckle on ropes and chains and straps and haul the thing up standing. I’ve et steaks off those behemoths. They’ve had the flavor bred right out of them.”
“Tell you what, Uncle Bawley,” Pinky suggested. “Maybe one the boys’ll go out rustle up an old Longhorn that’s been hiding somewhere in the brush these past fifty years. Leslie’ll have you a good ole-time leather steak cut off of that.”
The calm low tones of Gabe Target’s voice undercut the talk and laughter. The cold grey eyes grew opaque, expressionless. “Now boys, this is very pleasant, sitting here gabbing and joshing in the hot of the day. But I’m due back home tonight, and this isn’t what I came down for. You want to state your situation, Bick? Not that we don’t know it. But just between us, off the record, cut down to bare bones.”
Bick Benedict hunched forward, his hands clasped in front of him between his knees, his arms resting on his thighs. “Here it is, straight. We didn’t realize, when we let out the oil leases, how many oil workers were going to swarm in on Reata. There’s a mob of them. I’ve got nothing against them, big husky fellows, work hard and spend their money. They know they have to keep away from me and I keep away from them. Well. At first it was work and sleep and eat and live in those shacks just anyhow, for them. But now the whole outfit has sort of shaken down, they’ve brought in their wives and kids and so on. At first they stuffed their houses with refrigerators and radios and gadgets. But now they’ve got together in a bunch called The Better Living Association.”
“Better living!” snorted Judge Whiteside.
“How many of them?” Gabe Target did not waste energy on emotions.
“Oh, good many hundreds by now. Swarming all over the town and county.”
“Dissident votes,” Pinky Snyth announced, like a checker of lists. “Right in this precinct.”
“They’re yelling all over the district they want what they call decent schools for their kids and a hospital for the sick and injured and so on, and homes for their families. And the oil property—about a hundred and fifty thousand acres of it—is in my precinct here. In the town of Benedict. If they vote—and they will—and carry it—and they will the way it stands now—they don’t want my—the old Commissioner. They want him voted out and a new Commissioner in. There’ll be a new tax rate on every acre of land hereabouts. That tax on a couple of million acres can just about cripple Reata. They win, and it’ll spread to your Double B, Pinky. And you know it.”
He unclasped his hands, threw them open, palms up. The lines in his forehead were deep, the eyes strained and bloodshot. Pinky Snyth, looking at him, thought irrelevantly, Vashti’s right, like she said Bick’s letting Reata eat him up alive.
Judge Whiteside cleared his throat. “You talked to the Azabache crowd about this, Bick?”
“What do they care! It doesn’t affect them. They said Jett Rink heard of it, he laughed his crazy fat head off.”
Silence. The hot wind rustling the vine leaves. The drum of a powerful motor somewhere far off on the prairie. One of the nearby workboys calling in Mexican-Spanish to another busy at the pool. The five men sat eying each other. Waiting.
Smoothly, benevolently, Gabe Target broke the silence. “Well now, Bick, we don’t want anything that isn’t perfectly legal and aboveboard, of course.”
“Course,” the four echoed, and their eyes never left his face.
Silence again, brief, breathless. “I suggest—and of course I’d want the sound legal opinion of our good friend the Judge here—I suggest a very simple feasible plan, Bick. Now first I’d like to ask you a couple questions. You don’t need to answer if you don’t see fit. But my little plan kind of depends on the answers.”
Goddamned old pompous fool, Bick’s inner voice yelled. Aloud, “All right, Chief. Shoot.”
“Plainly speaking, the County Commissioner’s your man. That right?”
“Right.”
“The Mexicans on your place—vaqueros and so on—they vote right?”
“They vote—right.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“I heard some of the younger Mexican fellas since the war’s over they’ve come home and haven’t settled down right, they’ve been rabble-rousing, shooting their mouths off, getting together saying they’re American citizens without rights and that kind of stuff. They want to be called Latin Americans, not Mexicans any more. I hear they’re getting up organizations, the boys who fought in the war, and so on. Spreading all over, they say. Got some fancy names for their outfits with America in it to show how American they are.”
“Well?”
“Can you handle them?”
“I can handle them. Always have. They’ll quiet down.”
“The full vote is needed to carry your candidate. Am I correct? Without it, he’s out?”
“Out.”
Gabe Target’s eyes were flat disks of steel sunk in the caverns below his fatherly brow. “Well, my boy, you don’t want a crowded big noisy city sprung up around this beautiful Reata—”
“As fair a piece of Nature’s bounty,” Judge Whiteside intoned, by now somewhat piqued at finding himself shorn of his accustomed curls of peroration, “as there is anywhere in this Great Commonwealth, and I may say, anywhere—North America, South America, the uncharted wastes of Asia—”
“If you think Asia’s uncharted, Judge, after this last war,” Pinky Snyth interrupted somewhat pertly, “you better get set for a shock to your nervous system.”
“Boys, boys!” Gabe Target’s kindly chiding tones like those of a gentle schoolmaster.
Bick held his temper by an effort. “Let’s just hear Gabe out, will you? This is pretty important. I know a few millions don’t matter much any more in Texas. But Reata matters to me more than anything in the world.”
Pinky thought, By gosh he means it. More than anything in the world.
But Gabe was talking in that quiet reasonable voice so that everything he said sounded plausible and right and somehow beneficent.
“That’s a mighty fine sentiment, son, and it does you credit as a real Benedict and Texian. Now then. These boys in the big oil outfits—and I don’t doubt they’re good fine boys, though maybe mistaken some ways—they ought to have their own town. They’ve earned it. Hard-working boys. And keep Benedict the way it is, population and layout and nice little town government and all. And taxes. The same. Just have the precinct lines rearranged and the town line set to where it was before oil. B.O. There’s a big enough population sprung up there outside to make a fine little town of their own, the oil crowd and their wives and all. Get ’em incorporated, all fair and aboveboard—before they know where they’re at. Town line. Board. Commissioner. Everything in good order. They could call the town—for example, if they were so minded—Azabache. Or town of Jett Rink. And leave him build the schools they’re bawling for, and the hospitals and the city hall and the gymnasiums and pave the streets and put in the water. And let Jett Rink pay the taxes.”
Silence. Gabe Target’s eyelids came down over the flinty eyes, giving him that aspect of benevolence again.
Finally Bick spoke. “You really think it can be done?”
“Judge Whiteside here will bear me out I think. Won’t you, Judge? Bick wants to know if it can be done.”
Judge Whiteside cleared his throat. His voice had the finality of one who is the Law. “It’s as good as done this minute. You can forget it.”