by Edna Ferber
There was no one else in the car. There was no one to meet them. The man got out of the car, he stood at the open door looking uncertainly at Bick. He did not glance at Leslie. Bick’s face was cold with anger, there was a curious underlay of white beneath his deep-coated tan, his jaw muscle swelled as he set his teeth. The two men spoke in Spanish.
“What are you doing here? Where is Jett?”
“Señorita Luz said she needed him. She sent me in his place.”
“You don’t know about a car. Here. Pile these bags in the back. Where’s the pickup? There are trunks.”
“Nothing was said about sending the pickup.”
Bick Benedict’s lips were a straight thin line, his fists were clenched.
This phenomenon Leslie surveyed with lively interest and no alarm.
“Bick, you look bursting. I must learn Spanish.”
The boy, very serious and dignified, was inexpertly piling suitcases into the rear baggage section. This accomplished, he was about to take the driver’s seat. “Out!” barked Bick. The boy paused, turned. Bick gave him the baggage checks. In Spanish he said. “You will wait here. The pickup will be sent. It may be two hours it may be midnight. You will wait here.”
The boy inclined his head. Leslie came toward him, she put out her hand. “I am Mrs. Benedict,” she said. “What is your name?”
The dark eyes met hers. Then they swung like a startled child’s to encounter Bick Benedict’s ice-blue stare. The boy bent over her hand, he did not touch it, he bowed in a curiously formal gesture, his hand over his heart, like a courtier. His eyes were cast down. “What eyelashes!” Leslie said over her shoulder to Bick. “I wish I had them!”
“Dimodeo,” the boy said in English. “I am called Dimodeo Rivas!”
“That’s a beautiful name,” Leslie said.
“Leslie! Get into the car, please. We’re leaving.” His voice was a command. She smiled at the boy, she turned leisurely, she was somewhat surprised to see her husband’s face scowling from the driver’s seat.
“Coming!” she called gaily. She looked about her as she came—at the railway station so Spanish with its Romanesque towers, its slim pillars and useless grillwork. The sun burned like a stab-wound, the hot unceasing wind gave no relief. The dark faces of the station loungers were unlike the submissive masks of the Negroes she knew so well in Virginia. No green anywhere other than the grey-green of the cactus, spiked and stark. Dust dust dust, stinging in the wind. Nothing followed the look or pattern of the life she had left behind her.
“It’s like Spain,” she called to Bick. “I’ve never been in Spain but it’s like it.” She stood a moment by the car door, hesitant, waiting for Bick to leap out. He sat looking straight ahead. The boy Dimodeo ran to her, he opened the Packard’s half-door, she placed her hand delicately on his arm, “Thank you, Dimodeo. Uh—gracias—uh—muchas gracias! There! I can speak Spanish too. How did I happen to remember that? Ouch!” As she settled herself on the hot leather seat. “Read it somewhere I suppose.”
With a neck-cracking jerk the car leaped away. Never a timorous woman their speed now seemed to her to be maniacal. She glanced at her husband’s hands on the wheel. Nothing could go wrong when hands like that were guiding your life. He was silent, his face set and stern. Well, she knew that when men looked like that you pretended not to notice and pretty soon they forgot all about it.
“How flat it is! And big. And the horizon is—well, there just isn’t any it’s so far away. I thought there would be lots of cows. I don’t see any.”
“Cows!” he said in a tone of utter rage.
She was, after all, still one of the tart-tongued Lynnton girls. “I don’t see why you’re so put out because that boy came instead of someone else. Or the family. After all, it’s so far from the railroad.”
“Far!” In that same furious tone. “It’s only ninety miles.”
She glanced at the speedometer. It pointed to eighty-five. Well, no wonder! At this rate they’d be home in an hour or so. Home. For an engulfing moment she had a monstrous feeling of being alone with a strange man in an unknown world—a world of dust and desert and heat and glare and some indefinable thing she never before had experienced. Maybe all brides feel like this, she thought. Suddenly wanting to go home to their mother and father and their own bed.
He was speaking again in a lower tone now, but a controlled anger vibrated beneath it. “We don’t behave like that down here.”
“Behave?”
“Making a fuss over that Mexican boy. We don’t do that here in Texas.”
“But this still is the United States, isn’t it? You were being mean to him. What did he do?”
The speedometer leaped to ninety. “We have our own way of doing things. You’re a Texan now. Please remember that.”
“But I’m not anyone I wasn’t. I’m myself. What’s geography to do with it!”
“Texas isn’t geography. It’s history. It’s a world in itself.”
She said something far in advance of her day. “There is no world in itself.”
“You’ve read too damn many books.”
She began to laugh suddenly—a laugh of surprise and discovery. “We’re quarreling! Jordan, we’re having our first quarrel. Well, it’s nice to get it over with before we reach—home.”
To her horror then he brought his head down to his hands on the wheel, a gesture of utter contrition and one that might have killed them both. At her cry of alarm he straightened. His right hand reached over to cover her hands clasped so tightly in her fright. “My darling,” he said. “My darling girl.” Then, strangely, “We mustn’t quarrel. We’ve got to stand together.”
Against the brassy sky there rose like a mirage a vast edifice all towers and domes and balconies and porticoes and iron fretwork. In size and general architecture it somewhat resembled the palace known as the Alhambra, with a dash of the Missouri Pacific Railroad station which they had just left behind them.
“What’s that! Is it—are we near the ranch, Jordan?”
“We’ve been on it the last eighty miles, practically ever since we got outside Viento. That’s Reata. That’s home.”
“But you said it was a ranch! You said Reata was a ranch!”
8
And there ahead of them was the town. The town of Benedict. A huge square-lettered sign said:
WELCOME TO BENEDICT!
pop. 4739
“Is that for us, Jordan? How sweet of them!”
“No, honey. It’s just the Chamber of Commerce saying howdy to any visitors who come by.”
“Oh. Well, it’s all been so regal, and everyone has done so much forehead-bumping I thought——Oh, look! Look, Jordan.” They had flashed into town, they were streaking down the wide main street. “Please drive slower, darling. I want to see. What a wide street for such a little—I mean——”
“It’s wide because it was a cattle trail. We used to drive thousands of head of cattle to market along this trail, way up to Kansas. That was long before this was a town. Just a huddle of shacks on the prairie.”
Now the vast white mansion had vanished, obscured for the moment by the town with its Ranchers and Drovers Bank, its Red Front Grocery, its hardware store, garage, drugstore, lunch room. But even as they roared through the town Leslie felt herself in a strange exciting new land. Dark faces everywhere, but not like the ebony faces of the Virginia streets. These were Latin faces; fine-boned Spanish faces; darker heavier Mexican Indian faces. Even the store-front signs were exhilaratingly different. Boots and Saddles Hand Made…. Come to Hermoso for the Fat Stock Show…. Quarter Horses For Sale. What was a quarter horse?…A little sun-baked dry-goods store whose sign said BARATA. Bargain Sale. She knew enough Spanish for that, at least. Sallow women in black with little black shawls over their heads under the blasting sun. Dusty oleanders by the roadside. Big beef-fed men in wide-brimmed Stetsons and shirt sleeves and high-heeled boots that gave their feet a deceptive arched elegance. Dark little men squat
ting on their haunches at the street corners. Lean sunburned tall men propped up against store buildings, their stance a peculiar one; one foot on the ground, the opposite knee bent so that the other foot rested flat against the wall. Small houses baking, grassless, by the road. Dust-bitten houses grey as desert bones.
“What’s that! What in the world is that!”
In the courthouse square facing the street was a monstrous plate-glass case as large as a sizable room made of thick transparent glass on all sides. Within this, staring moodily out at a modern world, stood a stuffed and mounted Longhorn steer. A huge animal, his horn-spread was easily nine feet from tip to tip. Wrinkled ancient horns like those of some mythical monster.
“You’ve just got to stop. I must see him.”
“You’ll have the rest of your life to see him.”
“I can’t believe it. A—a cow stuffed and put into a glass case on the street.”
He touched her flushed cheek tenderly and laughed a little.
“You’re in Texas, honey. Anyway, they have lions outside the New York Public Library, don’t they?”
“But this is real.”
“Everything’s real in Texas.”
“What’s it for? Do they worship it, or something?”
“He’s a Longhorn—the last of the Reata Longhorn herd. They roamed the range wild a hundred years ago. Now they’re as extinct as the buffalo, or more. Way back in the days of the Spanish Missions in the 1600s the Spanish brought the first livestock with them. When the Missions were abandoned the stock was left behind and pretty soon there were thousands and thousands of head covering the whole country. Tough mean animals. Hoofs and horns and hide like iron and the meat like leather. That’s what we used to call beef, not so many years ago. And now there’s the last Longhorn a museum piece in a glass case.”
“Who’d have thought a cow could be so romantic! What are they like now—the Reata cows? And where are they? I haven’t seen any. I don’t believe you really have any. You’ve dragged me down here under false pretenses.”
He laughed wholeheartedly and the sound delighted her. She was not used to morose faces, the Virginia house had been a gay lighthearted place. “Oh, we’ve still got one or two,” he said airily, “hiding out in the mesquite and around. Wait till you see the new breed. We’ve been ten years experimenting and I think now we’ve just about got it. We brought Herefords from England and bred them to the best of the native stock. And now I’m breeding the cream of that to the big Kashmirs. Oriental stock. They can take the heat and they’ve got a body oil that discourages ticks and fleas. The King ranch crowd and some of the other boys are experimenting with Brahmans but I’m the Kashmir Kid. Wait till you see some of those Kashmir-Hereford bulls. They look like a house on legs. There’s never been anything like them in the world. In the world!”
His face was brilliant with life, the silent man of an hour ago was a young eager boy. Some deep inner instinct pinched her heart sharply. That is his real love, it said. Reata and its past and its future are his life. You are just an incident, you are a figure in a pattern you don’t even understand.
Now the town was behind them, they were again in the open country. Again and again, in the past hour, she had seen pools of water in the road ahead. But once the spot was reached the pool had vanished and another glinted a hundred yards beyond the speeding car.
“The water. The little pools of water in the middle of the road. And then they’re not there.”
“A mirage. Texas is full of mirages.”
She looked at him quickly, smiling, but his face was serious. He was merely stating a fact. Now again she saw the house, its great bulk against the brassy sky, its walls shimmering in the heat. She stared at it in a sort of panic but she asked quietly enough, “Did you build it?”
“The Big House. God, no! My father built it. He said he built it for Ma but I reckon he really built it to show the cotton crowd that he wasn’t just a big high-powered cattle man. He wanted to show them that he was in high cotton too.”
“High cotton?”
“Here in Texas the cotton rich always snooted the cattle rich. And now if this oil keeps coming into Texas the old cattle crowd will look down their noses at the oil upstarts. You know, like the old New York De Peysters snooting the Vanderbilts and the Vanderbilts cutting the Astors.” He pointed with his left hand. “See that low greyish building about half a mile from the Big House? That’s the old ranch house. That’s where I was born. It’s always been called the Main House.”
She stared for a long minute at the low rambling outlines of the old house, so small and colorless in comparison with the magnificence and ornamentation of the great mansion. She leaned toward him gently, her arm pressed his arm. “I like it. It looks like a house to be born in.” He was silent again. She glanced sidewise at him. “Who lives in it now? Your sister Luz, does she—will she live there?”
“Luz lives with me,” he said. “With us. In the Big House. She’s run it ever since Ma died twenty-five years ago.” He laughed a short mirthless little laugh. “Some say she runs the ranch.”
“It will all be strange to me at first. Of course at first I’ll have to learn how things are done here. I hope she won’t—mind.”
“Hard to say what Luz will or won’t mind. Let’s just relax and be happy we’re home.”
She longed to say, But a wife runs her house, doesn’t she? A wife wants to manage her own household and plan things and decide things and be alone with her husband. Some new wisdom told her to say nothing.
He was speaking again, rather hurriedly for him, as though he felt she must have certain knowledge squarely placed. “Texians are openhanded kind of folks you know, Leslie. Hospitable. Tell you something that maybe you don’t know. Texas—the word, I mean—comes from the word Tejas, that’s an Indian word that the old confederacy of Indian tribes used to use, and it means Friend.”
“Nice,” she murmured drowsily, for she was very weary. “Nice.”
“So the Big House is usually full of folks. Every ranch is the same all through Texas, Panhandle to the Gulf. Folks drop in, sometimes two, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty. Feed ’em, bed ’em, mount ’em.”
“People you don’t even know!”
“Sometimes. Interested in ranching, or breeding, or feed crops. Open house. Old Waggoner was the same, and all of us. Tejas.”
“My goodness! And I thought Virginians were hospitable!”
A turn of his wrist, the car ground to a halt before high iron gates. A man ran out of a little gatehouse and he seemed to bow as he ran. He opened the gates, he raised his hand in salute and his teeth flashed, his face was joyous with welcome.
“Bienvenido! Bienvenido, señor, señora!” A dusky skin, the face square, the features finely cut; an ageless face, perhaps forty perhaps sixty. He had limped a little as he ran, so that between the running and the bowing and the limping he had a hobgoblin aspect, but there was dignity, too, in his bearing, you saw pride in his face.
Bick Benedict raised a hand from the wheel in greeting. “Cómo estás, Arcadio!”
“Muy bien, gracias. Gracias!” He looked at Leslie, his hand went to his forehead, he saluted gravely, ceremoniously.
“Hello, Arcadio,” Leslie called to him. She smiled and waved. As they moved on and the gates closed behind them she pinched her husband just a little nip. “Is that all right? Tell me if I do something wrong, darling. I feel as if I were in a foreign country. I’m not used to acting queenly.”
“Don’t be silly. This is Texas. Everything free and open. You’re home.”
“I shall simply burst if I don’t ask questions. Darling, is his name really Arcadio, how enchanting, and why does he limp so terribly and is the gate always closed you said everything’s free and open in Texas I don’t mean to be critical I’m just so interested I can’t wait till I write Papa——”
“It’s really Arcadio, though I don’t know why that’s enchanting. He was just twelve when they put him in th
e corrida, and so was I. They gave us old horses to ride, we were only kids. One day when he was helping hold the herd his horse stumbled and fell on him, his right leg was pinned beneath it and then the horse’s hoofs began to dig into him and tear him apart. His father was a ranchero but they were out on the range, there wasn’t a doctor within fifty miles——”
“Poor little boy,” she said. “Poor little man, limping and bobbing.”
“You can’t be sentimental on a ranch.”
She thought, I don’t even know what a corrida is.
Up the long drive. An old adobe building on this side. Another on that. Big square buildings, small squatted buildings. She longed to say what’s that what’s that what’s that? Something restrained her.
Far off across the flat land she saw what seemed to be another town made up of toy houses huddles on the prairie.
“Do you remember that first night at dinner? When Mama asked if there were any cities on the premises? Is that another town—all those little houses way off there?”
“That? That’s no town. That’s just where some of the ranch help live—some of the married ones with families. Some of the vaqueros live there and a few of the rancheros. Most of the rancheros live out on the ranchitos, they’re spread about ten or fifteen miles apart, of course.”
“Of course,” Leslie echoed solemnly. Then she giggled, what with nerves, travel-weariness, and some amusement. “Mr. Benedict, sir, your bride wouldn’t know a vaquero from a ranchero when she saw one—if she ever saw one.”
“You will.” Then, as they made a sharp turn in the drive, “You’re going to see a heap of vaqueros right now. Old Polo has put on a show for you.”
