Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “Little drink would go good,” Pinky suggested.

  Everything had been conducted in the approved fashion. Like the concocting of a well-made Texas barbecue sandwich. The preliminary conversational chitchat was the blandly buttered under slice of bread. Then the quick hot spiced filling of meat and burning sauce. And now the layer of pleasant aimless talk again. The top slice of bread.

  Bick reached for the little bell on the table at his side. Almost before its tinkle had died away on the hot restless air the two Mexican girls appeared, one with the tray of bourbon and ice and water, the other with the coffee.

  Solemnly the men drank, the talk was more desultory now, their voices as always low, pleasant, almost musical. Gabe looked at Bick Benedict, he thought the man’s russet coloring was now like a lacquer over a foundation of grey. “Bick, how’s Jordy working out as a doctor?”

  Bick hesitated a moment before answering. When he spoke it was with a wry lightness. “Oh, you know young folks today. Jordy takes after Leslie’s side of the family, more. Her father.”

  Blunderingly, Judge Whiteside must satisfy his own curiosity, now that Gabe Target had inserted the entering wedge in a topic that the Benedicts’ social circle considered closed to discussion. “I suppose this Guerra’s office he’s in—I suppose Jordy’s starting off using the Mexicans like a clinic, more. For experience—observation—so forth.”

  Bick did not reply.

  “I can’t get the right of it,” the Judge persisted. A thick unctuous layer of virtue was spread to conceal his sadism. “Only son and all. Where’s his feeling about Reata! To say nothing of his pa and ma!”

  The little crooked smile on Bick’s lips did not deceive the four keen-eyed men. “Oh well, Judge, you can’t tie a kid to a horse. His talents lie another way, that’s all. I’ll make out. I’m not quite through—yet.”

  Judge Whiteside blustered reassuringly. “You! Why, Bick boy, you’re good for another fifty years hard riding. Look at old Bawley here! A thousand, ain’t you, Bawley! And spry as a gopher.”

  Gabe Target’s cool measured tones cut through this persiflage.

  “Bick, you ought to get you a good smart solid young fella, now the war’s over, knows stock and range and feed and all. Modern—” hastily—“like yourself. Train him into manager to do the routine hard over-all work. College type but with his feet on the ground. And I mean Texas ground.”

  Pinky Snyth spoke up. “That’s Bob Dietz. Say, I tried my best to steal him off you, Bick, years ago to work the Double B. He wasn’t hardly more than a kid then. Wouldn’t come.”

  Bick’s gaze went out and out, past the veranda and screening, on and on to the distant line where the dome of the sky met the golden-tan curve of the earth. “I offered him the job. He wasn’t interested. He as much as said I was old-fashioned. Said this was the time for pioneering in advanced range management techniques. That’s what he said. Said he was interested in ranching as a way of life for the many, and not to make big money. He said people who wanted big money ought to try the stock market or the oil industry or most anything but agriculture and stock.”

  A stunned silence followed this recital of heresy.

  Judge Whiteside cleared his throat. “I don’t aim to appear nosy, but I heard around that this Dietz and your Luz were running together a good deal. Dietz isn’t invited to parties and places, but a lot in her plane and his car and hamburger joints talking, and so on.”

  Bick shrugged in an effort at carelessness, but his brow was thunderous. “Oh, kid stuff. Dietz is smart enough, but he’s one of those know-it-all kids. Luz is a real rancher, she’ll talk to anybody who’ll teach her something new. The Dietz kid—or anybody.”

  “He’s no kid,” Uncle Bawley announced, suddenly awake, wide-eyed. “He’s getting along.”

  The guffaw that this brought forth lightened the heavy resentment of Bick’s tone. “Well, anyway, this ancient Bob Dietz, he says the big ranch is doomed. The feudal system he calls it. That’s you and me, Pinky. Says that with artificial insemination and modern long-term reseeding, pretty soon you won’t need to feed your stock a pound of hay or cake. You’d think to hear him talk he was the one first discovered Lehman’s love grass and yellow bluestem and sideoats grama and blue grama and all. He’s got a piece about twenty sections now, down near the Valley, he calls it a trial range unit, he says he——”

  “How about water?” scoffed Judge Whiteside. “He got water fixed to eat out of his hand too?”

  “Oh sure. He says no reason why water can’t be harnessed and led across the continent. In the future. Says the Tennessee Valley showed us a little something. Says they’ll find a way to take the salt out of salt water and hitch the whole Gulf of Mexico to Texas. That’s in the future too. He says.”

  “If they ever get water into Texas,” Gabe Target said, “God knows what’ll happen.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Uncle Bawley announced in his gentle musing voice. “The youngsters will cut Reata into pie slices and raise up a steer to the acre.”

  29

  Even after all these years Leslie Benedict always felt a distinct shock as she came out of the dim cool rooms of the Main House to meet the full blast of the Texas sun. The Big House hummed with air conditioners but here at the Main House the family relied on the massive old walls for protection. Leslie often had suggested a cooling unit for Bick’s bedroom but he said he’d as soon sleep with a woman who snored as that thing. He even refused to have one in his office.

  “Let the barbecue shacks have them,” he said, “and the Houston and Hermoso zillionaires, and Neiman-Marcus and the Hake Hotel. I was brought up on Texas heat. Sun and sweat have made Texas.”

  Luz said, pertly, that he was beginning to sound like Uncle Bawley.

  Now Luz and Leslie in the front seat, Juana and little Jordan in the back, the four were off for Bob Dietz’s ranch in the Valley.

  Leslie cast an anxious eye toward the child. “It’ll be cooler as soon as we begin to move.”

  “And we’re really going to move,” Luz threatened as she released the brake and they were off.

  “Now Luz, no stunts. It’s two hours out and two back, even at your speed…. Juana, you don’t think it’s going to be too much for Polo, do you?”

  Juana glanced down at the child beside her. “He loves it. He was so excited this morning he wouldn’t eat his breakfast.” Juana’s English was spoken with precision. Her voice was soft and low and leisurely, unlike the strident tone of many Mexican-American women. Old Polo stemmed from Spanish blood and his granddaughter’s skin had a creamy pallor, the dark eyes were soft and the black hair was fine and abundant. About her throat she always wore a strand of pearls that Leslie had given her—Benedict family pearls—and the luminous quality of these seemed reflected in her skin. But the child Polo had the café-au-lait coloring of his Mexican grandmother and great-grandmother; and their Mexican hair and eyes.

  Now the car rounded the curve in the long driveway and passed the Big House. Three or four people were descending the broad stone steps and there were cars waiting in the drive. Almost automatically Leslie bowed and waved and smiled, though she knew only vaguely who the guests were this week or this particular day.

  “It seems to me,” Luz remarked, “that our visiting strangers get stranger and stranger. Who’s that lot?”

  “I don’t know, really. Not very important. Two of the boys have been delegated to take them around. But next week!”

  “I hear it’s a king and queen. Doesn’t it sound silly!”

  “Yes, poor darlings. And a swarm of other people. It’s a weird list. Somebody must have slipped up on it—Jordan’s secretary or somebody. They can’t all be interested in cattle.”

  “Who?”

  “You won’t believe it, even for Reata. Uh, let’s see—there’s a prize fighter and a Russian dancer and a South American Ambassador. And a movie queen who’s bought a ranch in California and wants to stock it. And her husband. I don’t reme
mber who else. And I’m afraid your Aunt Maudie and your Aunt Leigh are descending.”

  “I may suddenly be called away.”

  “Now Luz! Anyway, they’re all invited to that big thing at Jett Rink’s new airport.”

  “Oh, that! I may hop over for a look at it but I wouldn’t be found dead at the idiotic howling dinner.”

  “Your father would like you to show up, and Jordy, too, and all of us.”

  “That’s ridiculous! What for?”

  “Because everybody is going to be there, and if we stay away it will look queer. Anyway, there’s a political reason of some kind. He doesn’t like it any better than you do. But Roady asked specially that we all go—you and Jordy and Maudie——”

  “Me!” asked the child’s eager voice from the back seat.

  Leslie turned, she held out her hand to the child and smiled at him. “No, you don’t have to be political, my darling. Not yet.”

  The child looked at her solemnly, the great dark eyes almost mournful. “I’m hungry.”

  “There!” Juana said. “Because you didn’t eat your breakfast.”

  “I want my breakfast now.”

  “Listen, Snooks,” Luz called to the child, “wait till we get out of Benedict and past Nopal.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “In a little minute, mi vida,” Juana said to the child. “Near the Valley where it is quiet. You will have milk and we will drink coffee. And we will have lunch at Bob Dietz’s house.”

  “And I will see a baby lamb!”

  They had whirled through the streets of Benedict. The old main street had become a business section that branched in all directions. Plate-glass windows reflected, glitter for glitter, the dazzling aluminum and white enamel objects within. Vast refrigerators, protean washing machines, the most acquisitive of vacuum cleaners. There were three five-and-dime stores and the dime had burgeoned into a dollar. All day long in these stores mechanical music droned a whining tune sung by a bereft crooner. Why do you make me feel so blue? he complained. Don’t you want me as I want you? Mexican women with four small children, the woman always pregnant, wandered up and down the crowded aisles, fingering the gaudy wares piled in tempting profusion. The children touched everything with slim caressing dark fingers. Plastic things, paper things, rayon things. Gadgets. Pink panties marked 59 cents. Machine embroidery on these depicted a lewdly winking yellow sun with He Loves Me stitched in pink and blue around its rays.

  The leather shop of Ildefonso Mezo was little more than tourist bait now, for Ildefonso was gone. Tourists from Iowa and New York and Missouri stopped to buy stitched high-heeled cowboy boots in which their offspring hobbled back into the waiting family car.

  The moth-eaten Longhorn steer still stood in his glass case morosely staring out at the procession of motorcars streaming along the road which in his lifetime had known only the quick clatter of horses’ hoofs and the bellow and shuffle and thud of moving cattle.

  As the Benedict car flashed through the town and out Leslie’s quick glance darted this way and that. “How it changes! Almost from day to day. You should have seen it when I came here a bride, before any of you were born.”

  “Well, I hope so, madam!” Luz exclaimed virtuously.

  “That first week! I’ll never forget it. I rejected just about everything—except your father. The—the vaqueros’ horrible little shacks were worse than the Negro cabins in my Virginia. Texas food was steak and the steak was sole leather.”

  “Still is,” Luz observed.

  “But not at our house. And there are all those modern houses in the barrios now. And they’re talking about a new hospital here in Benedict and a new school.”

  Juana’s voice was very low, for the child had fallen asleep against his mother’s side. “The school for the Latin American children is a disgrace.”

  Leslie turned in her seat to face her daughter-in-law there at the rear of the car with her lovely sleeping child. “I know, Juana darling. We must keep on working.”

  Their speed on this flat endless road would have been terrifying to anyone not a Texan. Past the fine new house of Fidel Gomez in Nopal. Fidel Gomez, wallowing in oil, scarcely bothered now to manage the business of bringing the Mexican migratory workers, men women and children, into the Valley for the seasonal crop picking at twenty-five cents an hour.

  Nopal was changing, too. TORTILLA FACTORY a sign read in the town where once the pat-pat of women’s hands had sounded from every little dwelling. The dry-goods store was a department store now, it boasted a plate-glass expanse of its own and in the window a large printed sign announced LADY CASTLEMERE SHEETS! ADVERTISED IN LIFE! And staring into the window a black-garbed Mexican woman with four children tugging at her skirts, and it was plain to see that she never had lain between such sheets, nor would; and that Life as she knew it had always been lower case. There were motion picture theatres offering Westerns. Border Bad Man. Wagon Wheels West. Coals to Newcastle, Leslie thought as the great car swept through the small towns and out again into the open road.

  “There isn’t any open road any more,” she announced. “Just the other day I read that a hundred years ago—less than a hundred—Congress voted money for camels to be sent to Texas. They came from Syria and Alexandria and Constantinople with the camel drivers, to be used in the United States Army. Imagine some Texas pioneer woman looking out of the door of her little shack and suddenly seeing a camel chewing its cud in the open prairie under the Texas stars.”

  “I want to see a camel!” little Polo demanded.

  “The camel has gone away, my pet. Look at that enormous thing with all those aluminum chimneys or whatever they are. Acres of it.”

  “Lexanese plant,” Luz said.

  “They couldn’t have run it up overnight. But I don’t remember having seen it before. I must get about more. I’ll turn into a home-body if I’m not careful.”

  “If you weren’t so stubborn about letting me take you up in the little plane,” Luz reminded her, “you’d see the world.”

  “You and Jordy don’t really see the world. You’ve learned your geography from planes. You think the world is little blocks and squares with bugs wriggling over them. To you Tennessee is a red and pink checkerboard, and Louisiana is a smear of purple and black. And the Mississippi is a yellow line slithering through it all. I don’t think you ever really see anything from the angle of the ground. What with horses and planes and cars you never set foot to earth.”

  “Bob says you forgot to teach me to walk. But anyway, what I see from the air is mighty pretty, missy. Which is more than you can say down here.”

  “Tell me, what’s Bob’s new house like? Is it attractive?”

  “Attractive as a box car. You could put the whole thing in our pantry.”

  “Modern pioneer, h’m?”

  “You and Pa are a little worried about Bob Dietz, aren’t you?”

  “Well, no, not worried. I think he’s a wonderful young man. I don’t suppose you plan to marry every man who interests you.”

  “No. Only one. Bob and I have talked about it. He says he wouldn’t marry any girl who has Reata hung around her neck.” The girl’s voice was even and her eyes were on the road ahead but something intangible asked mutely for guidance.

  “Your Aunt Luz, that you were named after, thought that Reata was more important than marriage.” Luz said nothing. They drove on in silence. Luz just turned her head, then, to glance at her mother, and again her eyes came back to the road. In a tone of somewhat dry reminiscence Leslie went on. “She was in love with Cliff Hake—that was Vashti Snyth’s father—and he was in love with her. But he wouldn’t come to live at Reata and she wouldn’t go to live at the Double B, and they wouldn’t throw the two ranches into one. So she lived at Reata an old maid. And died there.”

  “I’m still young,” Luz said, her voice airy, “even if I am over twenty. Young in spirit, that’s me…. I danced with Jett Rink the other night.”

  “No, Luz!”
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  “It was only for a minute or two. He was drunk but not violent. It was last week when I went to Houston for the party. We were having dinner at the Shamrock, Glenn McCarthy came into the Emerald Room with a bunch of Big Boys and Jett Rink was one of them. He looked quite handsome in a Mississippi Gaylord Ravenal kind of way. He had the nerve to come up to our table and ask me to dance. I decided it would be better to try it than to risk his going into one of his slugging matches with one of our men.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Sort of babbled. Still mad at the Benedicts but not you and not me, as nearly as I could gather. A lot about you. And then he suggested it would be nice if I’d marry him. What an ape!”

  “I’m hungry!” Polo was wide awake now.

  Leslie turned to reassure him. “All right, my precious. We’ll stop somewhere.”

  “I want my breakfast,” the boy demanded.

  Luz called back to him, “Sweetie, there’s a kind of monotony about your conversation. Juana, there’s a nice clean new place about a mile further on. Bob and I stopped there for a sandwich the other night. They toast them. Quite good. I could do with a Coke, myself.”

  There were a dozen cars outside the little roadside lunch room. A radio whined. Trucks and passenger cars and jeeps mingled affably in the parking place. “You go along in,” Luz said. “I’ll park away from these bloodthirsty trucks.” Leslie took the boy’s hand in hers as he walked with his uncertain staggering steps. He looked proudly up into her face. She loved the feel of the velvety morsel in her palm. “Now, my pet. We’ll all have something good, but not much because Bob Dietz will want us to eat lunch at his house, he won’t like it if we’re not hungry.”

  “Won’t he let me see the little lamb?”

  “Oh yes, he’ll let you see the lamb. Now then. Up the little step.”

  A coffee counter. Metal tables with chairs upholstered in scarlet imitation leather. A harassed middle-aged woman behind the counter, a red-faced shirt-sleeved man behind the cash register; a waitress wiping a table top with a damp cloth. Truck drivers at the coffee counter, women and children eating at the tables.