Titans

by Leila Meacham

  Nathan reached Rebecca’s side on the short platform, ready to catch her arm if she should topple over in one of her uncoordinated moments of enthusiasm. “There,” she said, pointing.

  “There?” Nathan said.

  “There!” She pointed at a large rock jutting up from the water by the bank.

  “What about it, Rebecca?” Nathan asked quietly.

  “That’s where it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “My uncle drowned.”

  Nathan’s flesh crawled. He gently pulled the little girl away from the dock’s edge and took her by the shoulders. “You saw your uncle drown, Rebecca? From here? What were you doing on the dock? Was anyone else here?”

  She spun away from him and pointed to the rock. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” Rebecca turned to Nathan again. “That’s what he said,” she declared.

  Nathan strained to understand. “Who said? Your uncle?” The child’s eyes were bright with hope that he would believe her—lucid, transparent, unmistakable hope. Again Nathan felt his skin move. But as suddenly, the brightness dimmed. A cast dropped over her sight, and the moment of truth was lost. Rebecca turned away to look toward the river. “And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking,” she chanted.

  Nathan listened in awe to the singsong cadence of the complicated lines, riveted by the sense of a hidden meaning in them. What was she saying to him? Had she truly seen Jordan Waverling drown? Had she been alone or with someone? She would have been nine years old and even more closely guarded than she was now. He offered her his hand. “Come, Rebecca. Let’s go back. Your grandmother is waiting on us for tea,” he said.

  Rebecca refused his hand and skipped ahead, Zak bounding alongside her. Nathan shook his head in amazement as Rebecca recited in a merry voice in step with her bounce: “Her china cup is white and thin; A thousand times her heart has been / Made merry at its scalloped brink; / And in the bottom, painted pink, / A dragon greets her with a grin.”

  Chapter Thirty

  On Friday, the twenty-second day of June, Nathan boarded the train to Gainesville. The plans for his visit had been set forth in a letter from Leon. He would meet Nathan at the station and take him to the new family home into which they were now nicely settled. They would attend commencement exercises on Saturday morning, the luncheon afterward, and it would be up to him if he wanted to attend the graduates’ dinner and dance that evening. Nathan was relieved that he would not have to go back to the old home place.

  As expected, Leon was eagerly waiting for him outside the station house when the train pulled in. He greeted and embraced him with tears in his eyes. “Thanks for comin’, Nathan. We’re all mighty glad you did.”

  “I’m glad I came, too,” Nathan said. He couldn’t have said those words when he first received the invitation to Randolph’s graduation. How would he feel when he saw for what his mother had sacrificed the farm? The finer house, better clothes for Lily and Randolph, maybe even one of those horseless carriages the New York Times called an automobile. Would it even make a difference to his family if he showed up or not? But then he’d reflected that Randolph was Leon’s son, and he would be so proud to see him walk across the stage wearing the gold mantle of the class valedictorian. Randolph had earned that honor. Nathan had then decided it would make a difference to him personally to pass up this opportunity to be with his family. This was perhaps the final time they’d all be together.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it, for sure,” Nathan said to reassure Leon that he was glad he’d come. His stepfather looked older, but the deeper creases around his eyes and across his forehead had more to do with sorrow than age, Nathan perceived. Neither was dressed as they’d last seen the other. Both wore business suits and striped shirts with tall, stiff collars turned down to form wings that anchored their neckties. Nathan had gone straight to the train station from Waverling Tools, where he wore such garb every day, and he had not had time to change into more comfortable traveling clothes. Leon wore a straw boater and Nathan a soft derby.

  “Aren’t we the dudes?” Leon laughed.

  “We are. I brought along one of my old shirts and a pair of jeans to kick around in,” Nathan said.

  “I’m gettin’ into my overalls the minute we walk into the house. Millicent doesn’t like me to be seen runnin’ around town in them. As if anybody would notice, and who in hell would care if they did? Have you had your supper?”

  “A sandwich on the train.”

  “Millicent has apple pie and ice cream waitin’.” Leon put his arm around Nathan’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “Missed you, son.”

  “Same here, Dad,” Nathan said. Saying his name for Leon squeezed his throat. Would he ever use it with the same feeling for Trevor Waverling?

  They shared a silence thick with the sadness of irremediable loss as Leon led him to a spanking new six-seat surrey that sported a body of exquisite woods, fine leather seats, polished brass trim, and folding top. A fine-looking horse stood in its traces. “Just got the two a few days ago, or I would have warned you not to expect me to pick you up in ol’ Betsy,” Leon said to explain the vehicle and animal that had replaced their rickety old buckboard and aging mare. “Millicent thinks we should go about in style now that we’re city folks. I said I’d never ride in the damn thing if she chucked our old Lizzy Belle. The buckboard will be sold soon, as I no longer need it to go back and forth to the farm. Naturally, Randolph hopes his mother will eventually buy him one of those expensive-as-all-get-out horseless carriages they’re turning out in Detroit.”

  “Will she, you think?” Nathan asked, a spur of resentment nicking the pleasure of his homecoming.

  Leon flicked the reins over the back of the daintily stepping filly. “She’s going a little crazy with all that money she got, but I think she’ll draw the line on buyin’ one of them newfangled driving machines. They’re too dangerous. Tell me how it’s goin’ in Dallas. How’s Zak settlin’ to the city and what about that little girl, Rebecca? She takin’ to you all right? How are you gettin’ along with Trevor, and are they feedin’ you well?”

  On the ten-minute drive, Nathan answered his stepfather’s questions, embellishing his answers a bit to relieve him of his concerns for his well-being. He would always miss the country, no doubt about it, he told Leon, but he was adjusting to living with an indoor bathroom, electric lights, running water, and a telephone. He was becoming accustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of the city, the convenience and ease of living close to where you could buy things before you ran out of them. “You will, too, Dad,” Nathan assured him.

  “As long as I don’t get soft,” Leon said.

  He was afraid of that, too, Nathan said, but he saw a solution to the problem. Trevor had been an amateur pugilist and gone on the middleweight circuit for a time but now was too old for competition. He still practiced his skills religiously, though, and had finally invited Nathan to go with him to his gym where he might decide to put on the mitts if only to learn the sport.

  Nathan, a boxer? Leon said. Well, he had the build for it. They’d missed his muscles during harvest, which—wouldn’t you know?—was turning out to be the best in years. They still had a couple weeks of harvest left, and it looked like they’d have a bumper crop. So far, they’d gotten a better-than-fair price for the wheat sold. Leon had seen to it that some of the money was set aside for the wage Nathan had earned. They had buyers lined up for the plow, tools, tack, and livestock when it was time to let them go. Millicent would give Leon his share, which he’d add to his secret store. It would give him enough of a stake to start over if he ever needed it. He’d heard of good land going begging in Kansas.

  Hearing this, Nathan regarded him in surprise. “Does that mean you’d leave Mother?” he said.

  “Nah,” Leon said, “but i
t’s a comfort knowin’ I could. I’m with your mother until death do us part, Nathan. I love her, always have, always will. Couldn’t tell you why. I’m done tryin’ to figure out what makes a person love another despite their wicked ways and why love’s withheld from those deservin’ of it. There is no rhyme nor reason to love, as you’ll find out someday, though I hope you’ll never know the confusin’ side of it. And if it’s a comfort to you, son, I believe that deep down your mother loves me. She wouldn’t know what to do if I left her once the children are gone.”

  “Sounds a lot like need to me,” Nathan said.

  “Ah, well, yes, there’s a good bit of that in her feelin’ for me, too, and often it’s been enough when the deeper stuff’s missin’.”

  The minute they drew up before the handsome two-story dormered structure of the Holloways’ new home, the door flew open. “Nathan!” Lily shrieked dramatically and rushed joyfully down the steps to throw her arms around him. A more sedate but smiling Randolph followed and then his mother, fashionably coiffed and attired in the latest pigeon-breasted shirtwaist and floor-clearing skirt. The bun, calico dress, and apron from the farm were memories of the past.

  He was touched by their warmth, but it did not dissipate the feeling of being tossed from the nest as he was embraced and led into the unfamiliar house that was now the family home. His mother brushed off a smudge of dust from his bowler before hanging it on the hat rack in the foyer, and Lily gushed compliments over his appearance, exclaiming how handsome he looked in his city clothes. Randolph’s grip was strong and sincere, and he expressed genuine pleasure at Nathan’s graduation gift of a Waterman fountain pen, a vast improvement over the writing quills he was accustomed to using. “I figured you’d have a hard time chasing down a goose at Columbia,” Nathan joked, causing a hilarious recounting of Randolph’s attempts at the farm to snare unwilling donors to satisfy his constant need for quills.

  The feeling of alienation settled in the pit of his stomach all through the apple pie and ice cream as he tried to adjust to the new faces of his mother and siblings at the dining room table, their clothes and manners and speech. He’d been gone a little under two months, but they’d all changed—assimilated to this new world that money had bought. Nathan had thought he might find them shy, self-conscious, even a little ashamed of their advanced status considering how it had all come about. Within the first hour of their reunion, he judged them well suited to the station in life they assumed they shared with the well-to-do and marveled at how out of place they had been in the rural setting of a farm. His little sister had gotten prettier and knew it. She spoke and gestured with the full awareness of her beauty, telling Nathan she had several beaus “of considerable means” wrapped around her little finger—“Oil and cotton, you know”—and that she’d be finishing her last year in school at a private academy in Denton where she could mix with those of “our own kind.”

  The Holloways’ flush of wealth had added another layer of snobbery to Randolph’s self-importance, which his superior intellect and imperial good looks had already bred. He had plans to go into politics when he finished law school, he said. He was thinking of putting up his shingle in the Oklahoma Territory. It was bound to become a state, and he would be in place when it happened. In sharing this goal around the table, he had grinned at Millicent. “How would you like to become the mother of the governor of the state of Oklahoma?” he said.

  Millicent had bestowed upon him a fond, proud smile. Nathan found her the most changed of all. His brother and sister had just become what they’d always hoped to be, but he realized that his mother had become more of what she’d always been. The light of her true self had been hidden by a bun and an apron over a calico dress. Nathan had always thought her a beautiful woman, neat, orderly, and feminine, but a prairie pigeon in contrast to the elegant swan she was now. She’d resumed the mien particular to her privileged class as a girl, one she’d had to surrender as the wife of a humble farmer, and in her stylish clothes with her remarkable hair done up in a fashionable pompadour, pearls at her ears and throat, she looked the society matron she was meant to become, at home in any drawing room in the state.

  At bedtime, they all trooped up the stairs to their rooms, Nathan to have one of his own. “A guest room! Can you imagine, Nathan!” Lily had enthused, clapping her hands as if in applause. “No more putting visitors into a loft.”

  “Quite a bunch, ain’t they?” Leon remarked when they’d all said their good nights and he saw Nathan to his assigned door.

  “They are,” Nathan agreed. “I wish them… everything that they expect and hope for from the sale of the farm and the move to the city.”

  “Spoken like you, sure enough,” Leon said.

  “Any chance of Mother running through the money?”

  “She’s too smart for that. She knows how to make a buck look like five once she establishes the impression that she’s rich. She ain’t, but the appearance of it is just as good. Nathan…” Leon worked his lips a moment to arrange his words. “Going back to what I was speaking of earlier… about love, that is. Whatever a prick your brother may sometimes be, or a butterfly with syrup for brains your sister is, they have love for you. Little comes with it, I’m afraid. Randolph and Lily are too self-absorbed to have interest in anyone but themselves, but your brother and sister do care for you, Nathan. I want you to know that.”

  “Would they, if they knew I was only their half sibling?”

  “I’m hopin’ they never learn that fact. It might give them the illusion they don’t need you as much. No matter on what rung up the ladder their feet might land, they’ll always look up to you. They’ll need you in their lives for that reason alone, because they ain’t goin’ to be meetin’ many of your caliber in the places they hope to wind up. I want ’em always to know they have a brother that stands head and shoulders above the best of ’em, a brother they can count on to stay true to the image they have of him. They’re not so stuck on themselves that they can’t see that.”

  “What do they need me for when they have you, Dad?”

  A pink flush glowed through the fringe of Leon’s whiskers. “Aw, to them I’m just a dumb ol’ farmer.”

  “Their misjudgment,” Nathan said, thinking his brother and sister’s miscalculation of their father would probably be among the many they would make about people along the way. He understood what Leon was asking of him. “I’ll be around for them if ever they need me,” Nathan promised. “And speaking of love…” He cleared his throat.

  Leon cuffed his shoulder. “No need to say nothin’ more about it. I hear what’s in your heart. You get on to bed. We all got to be smart and lively tomorrow mornin’ to watch Randolph strut his stuff. Sleep good, my boy.”

  “You, too,” Nathan said.

  He watched Leon walk down the wide, electric-lighted hall to the spacious bedroom he shared with his wife. He had not changed into his overalls out of his “monkey suit,” as his stepfather referred to it. Oh, Leon, not for eating pie in the dining room! his mother had protested when he’d expressed his intention, so husband and son had remained in their suits to eat from the china plates. A spasm of sympathy for his stepfather caught at Nathan’s heart. What would Leon do with his days now that he had no land to farm? They would have little time between social events to discuss it. After the dance tomorrow night, Nathan planned to catch the midnight train to Dallas to be home in the early hours of Sunday morning. He would leave with the question unanswered. He had finally accepted the unalterable, and he would go home with his heart easy for every member of his Gainesville family but for Leon. Nathan paused with his hand on the doorknob. It struck him that twice in the last minute, he had referred to Dallas as home.

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Friday morning, four days after her return to Fort Worth from Gainesville, Mildred Swift answered the doorbell of her mistress’s town house to find the farmer on the porch who weekly peddled his produce in the neighborhood. Today
, a special treat. He had figs to sell—“bursting with their syrup,” he said. “Sweeter than they’ve been in years.” Mildred was in charge of the grocery budget, the larder, and the cookie jar where her monthly food allowance was stored. She thought overripe a better word to describe the figs and hesitated at buying a basket. They were expensive compared to other items she could get for the same money, and these figs would perish quickly, but Estelle loved them, and those she didn’t eat would be made into preserves. Mildred decided on a full basket.

  In the culture of her captivity, the Comanche acknowledged no divine personage, so Mildred had been brought up ignorant of the abstractions and fantasies of the invisible and had never been won to a religious faith. That morning, however, when the mail was delivered, she thanked whatever gods there might be for the postman showing up on the peddler’s heels before she could return to the kitchen. A letter was put into her hand addressed to Miss Samantha Gordon. The sender was Eleanor Tolman Brewster.

  Oh, my God, thought Mildred, recognizing the name and significance of Tolman and sure that her mistress would, too. She heard Estelle, always alert for the delivery of the mail, come down the stairs to take it from her. Quickly, Mildred stowed Samantha’s letter in her apron pocket. For the rest of that day and until early Saturday afternoon, she thought hard about how to get Eleanor Tolman Brewster’s message to Samantha. Her mistress’s daughter was not due back to Fort Worth until the next weekend.

  “Mrs. Gordon,” she said after an idea had struck, “I was wondering if it would be all right to go visit my aunt for a few hours this afternoon. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, and I could go on down the road and take Miss Sam some of the figs I bought yesterday before they rot. You know how she loves them.”