by Edna Ferber
“That’s mighty kind of you,” Clay Hodgins said with great earnestness. “But we got to mosey along. You know how it is this time of year.”
As they stood the men were enormously tall and quietly powerful and graceful, too, in a monolithic way, Leslie thought. The girl was rangy, she seemed to have too many bones around the elbows, the hips and the shoulders. Leslie, in her mind’s eye, tried various dresses on the lank frame, did her hair over, corseted her, shod her, and gave it up. “Good-bye,” she said. “Do drop in again soon.”
The older man’s face crinkled good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t rightly promise soon, ma’am. Maybe a year from now we might be down this way, I wouldn’t say for sure.”
They clattered out, the men with their great hats in their great hands, their walk leisurely almost cautious, as though this were an unaccustomed form of locomotion.
The two women, left alone, regarded each other warily. “They’re sweet,” Leslie said. “Are they great friends of Jordan’s—and yours?”
“Hodgins? Don’t scarcely know ’em. They just dropped by. They got a little place up in the Panhandle.”
“Little!”
“But they sure had a run of luck,” Luz went on, resentment in her tone. “They had a little bitty no-account piece up near Luling and a gusher came in on their land last year, must bring in a million.”
“A million gallons!” Leslie exclaimed, fascinated.
“Dollars.”
“A million dollars in one year!”
Luz Benedict looked at her pityingly. “A million a month.”
“How terrible!”
Luz ignored this. “My, you sure look dolled up in all that silk dress and citified shoes and all. You must of got up before breakfast to get all that on, as we say here.”
Leslie laughed, but not very merrily. “I was just going to say that you look as fresh as if you’d slept twelve hours. But I heard you and Jordan—it was you, wasn’t it?—talking at six this morning.”
“Sure was Bick and me, we have our coffee and talkee every morning of our lives at five, sit and talk and get things rounded up for the day. Any other way we’d never get a head start.”
Leslie stood at the long table’s edge, her smile sweet, her eyes steady. “I know. There must be such a lot to do on an enormous ranch like this. And this house. Now I’ll be able to take a lot of the household duties off your hands. I thought we might have a little talk perhaps this morning——”
“Now don’t you go getting yourself beat out.” Luz sat smiling up at her from the chair into which she had dropped at the table. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the massive pot, she slopped a great dollop of cream into it and two heaping teaspoons of sugar. “You look real ganted I was saying to Bick. Not real strong. We want for you to get a little meat on your bones, and have a nice time.”
Leslie felt the color rush into her face. Careful now, she heard her father’s voice say. Slow now. This is new country for you, this is that Texas I told you about, remember? “That’s so good of you, Luz. But I’m just naturally slim, we all are, but I’m really very strong and well. I’m never ill.”
“Me too,” Luz agreed, her manner all amiability. “Never sick a day in my life. Course you don’t count being throwed by a horse and tromped by a man——”
“But you were ill. You had the grippe and couldn’t come to the wedding.” And could have bitten her tongue for having yielded to an impulse so childish.
Luz laughed a great hearty guffaw. “That’s so, I guess I didn’t want to let on I remembered ever being sick. The Benedicts are that way, always bragging on their health. When Pa died he made us promise he wouldn’t have any slow funeral, solemn and slow wasn’t his way. I want for you to promise you’ll gallop the horses all the way, Pa said, as if I was riding, and I will be. You never saw such a funeral, streaking down the highway and across the prairie to our family cemetery, the family and the boys and the chuck wagon and all, like he wanted it, all going like possessed, and we promised him we’d eat out there off the chuck wagon, his last roundup, and so we did. No automobiles, Pa said. Horses. The family and the vaqueros and the neighbors and half the county. It was better than a movie. Poor Pa.”
Leslie was entranced. “All this is so new and exciting to me.” She hesitated a moment. “I hope you won’t mind if I seem a little strange at first. I’ve never been West before—really West, I mean. I’ll soon learn Texas ways. And in a little while I’ll be able to run the house too.” She must know. It was unthinkable that she could go on like a guest in her husband’s house. Better to settle things definitely and at once.
Luz had set her coffee cup down with a sharp clack. “The house runs itself, honey, with me giving it a little shove and a push now and again. I know how to handle the Mexicans, I been living with ’em all my life, and my pa and ma and grampa and gramma before me. They’d be squatting on their honkers all day if I didn’t keep after them. Now you just run along and enjoy yourself.” She shoved back her chair with a grating sound.
She had boundless vitality. No, it wasn’t vitality, Leslie decided. It was energy. Luz bustled. She ran bounced hurried scurried. Energy was merely motion, wearying to witness. True vitality was a deep inner strength that sustained anyone who came in contact with it. Later, trying to describe her to her father, Leslie said, “She makes you long to sit quietly in a low chair in a dim peaceful room with your eyes shut listening to nothing, not even to a faraway string quartette.”
Leslie stood very still in the middle of the big dining room with the hot Gulf draft blowing through four doors. “I think I’ll go up and attend to my room—I mean put away——”
She was a little girl again, uncertain, talking to her domineering mother, without the understanding and sustaining protection of her father.
Luz patted her shoulder as she trotted briskly by. “The girls’ll have you all fixed up by now and prob’ly know every hook and eye on every dress, and every button and shoelace. But they never sweep the dust that’s under the bed.”
“I’m going to take a walk,” Leslie announced.
Luz turned at the door. “A what!”
“A nice long walk, perhaps into town and look around at things. Or perhaps around the—the garden—the—to see the place and poke into some of those quaint buildings——”
Luz came back into the room. Her round pink face looked sharp. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“People don’t walk in Texas. Only Mexicans. If you want to ride one of the boys’ll saddle you a nice gentled riding pony.”
“I’ll let you know,” loftily. “I’ll speak to my husband about it later in the morning.”
Luz laughed, a short little bark of a laugh. “Honey, if you think Bick’s got nothing to do only take people around the ranch. He’s been away weeks now, he’s got to catch up if he’s ever going to. Now honey, you just do some sewing or something or reading, Bick says you’re a great hand to read. H’m?”
She bustled out of the room, click-clack click-clack. Leslie felt a surge of murderous rage. She turned sharply and walked out of the room out of the great front door through which she had been carried so gaily the day before. She walked out into the blazing Texas morning.
She almost ran down the dusty roadway. The young fellow who had met them at the Vientecito station was on his knees at the edge of a small lawn of tough coarse grass. Through many years she was to see him thus coaxing green growing things and brilliant colorful flowers to thrive in spite of the withering sun and the Gulf winds that shriveled them with the heat and the sudden icy northers that blasted them with the cold.
To see him was like encountering a friend, she was dizzy with the sudden rush of gratitude as the boy’s face lighted with recognition, his eyes his smile became radiant.
“Hello!” she said. “Hello, Dimodeo!”
The boy rose from his knees in one graceful fluid motion, he bowed low. “Señora. Buenos días señora.”
“How far is it to the village?” At the blank look on his face, “You speak English, Dimodeo. You understood me yesterday.”
“Yes, señora, I speak English, certainly. I am only more in the way of Spanish…. Village?”
“Yes. The town. Benedict. How far is it to the town? I want to walk there.”
“But you cannot walk to the town.” He was genuinely shocked. He looked toward the house. “I will tell them the automobile. Or a horse. No, you are not dressed for riding. The automobile.”
“No. I want to go alone and—and just look around and see things. I don’t want to sit in an automobile. I’m sick of sitting and sitting and sitting, here’s a million miles of land and doesn’t anyone ever walk on it!”
“We walk,” he said. “The Mexicans walk.”
“Where is the schoolhouse? Yesterday we passed a schoolhouse. Down there. Is that the building? Down the road.”
“It is the school. It is the school where the children go who live on Reata Ranch. The little ones. Until they are ten or twelve and can work well.”
“How many?”
“Oh, many, señora. And many in other schools on other divisions.”
She waved good-bye with a gaiety she did not feel, she trudged down the road in the blue silk dress and the white suede shoes. It was fearfully hot and dusty, she saw no one, nothing moved. She reached the schoolhouse, she sauntered past it and heard the drowsy bee-hum of children’s voices. Abruptly she turned up the little path that led to the white-washed adobe house. It looked very old and picturesque like pictures she had seen of missions built by the exploring Spanish priests centuries ago. Perhaps it had once been a mission, she thought.
There was a tiny whitewashed vestibule, surprisingly cool. She was to learn to appreciate the coolness of these thick-walled adobe buildings, she was to learn to stay through the day in the dim cool shelter of a house interior.
She knocked at the closed door. The humming and buzzing ceased abruptly. Silence like the listening silence of the upper hall at the Big House. She knocked again with some authority now. She had a feeling of exhilaration and discovery.
The door was opened by a woman of about thirty, a thin sallow woman in a drab dark dress. A fretful-looking woman with fine black eyes whose heavy brows met over her nose in a dark forbidding brush. She stood, the door open a few inches only, her hand on the doorknob.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I’m Mrs. Jordan Benedict,” Leslie said, smiling. And extended her hand. “Perhaps I shouldn’t disturb you. I was passing by and I couldn’t resist dropping in——” The woman was staring at her so fixedly that Leslie was puzzled, then startled. “You are the schoolteacher, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Leslie decided not to be annoyed. This was, she told herself, a gauche girl who possibly was not accustomed to visitors during school hours. The woman was looking at her with the slow appraising stare of the Mexican girls, but she was not Mexican. She looked at Leslie’s white shoes, dusty now; at the blue silk dress that now was a little damp with dark spots here and there. Leslie could feel tiny rivulets slithering wetly down her spine.
All very interesting and different and she was enjoying herself immensely. It was wonderful to say, “I am Mrs. Jordan Benedict.” She said it again because she thought the woman had not understood. It was a shock to see a look of pure hate flick into the woman’s eyes like the red darting flash of a snake’s tongue. It came to Leslie that the teacher was actually barring her way.
“I just thought I’d drop in and see the children,” she said then. “I’m out for a little walk.”
“Walk!” the woman repeated after her as the others had done, as Luz and Dimodeo had done. It was becoming slightly annoying. Leslie took a firm step forward feeling suddenly tall and dignified and very important and for one dreadful moment she thought the woman was actually going to stop her.
“What is your name!”
“Cora. Cora Dart.”
What was everyone so cross about? Leslie stepped rather too briskly into the room. A vast whitewashed room crammed with children. Children of from four to fifteen. Their eyes were fixed on her with a steady stare that combined to give the effect of a searchlight. Immediately Leslie was struck with the fanciful thought that the seated children made a pattern like that of a gigantic piano keyboard. The faces shaded from ivory to almost black, and the lighter ones seemed to occupy the front rows, the darker the back.
Cora Dart seemed to have recovered from the shock of a visitor, she placed a chair for Leslie and suddenly Leslie was frantic to be gone. The room was stifling, she felt unbearably drowsy, as though drugged.
“Go back to your work,” Cora Dart said in English. “Go back to your work,” she then said in Spanish. The battery of eyes turned briefly down to the desks, the next instant was lifted again.
“I won’t stay, really,” Leslie said hurriedly. She felt she should ask some intelligent questions, she remembered the way grownups used to behave when they had visited her childhood public school in Ohio. “Uh, are the pupils the children of people who work—who live on the ranch?” You know they are, how silly. She moved toward the door, she smiled at the children, feeling foolish, she smiled at the dour Miss Dart.
“Thank you so much, it is all so interesting, you must come up some afternoon after school or perhaps on a Saturday and have tea with me.”
“Tea!” echoed Cora Dart as one would say opium.
Leslie’s nightmarish feeling of being an interloper now drove her to the point of being unable to terminate a distasteful encounter.
“Or coffee,” she corrected herself hastily. “Coffee I’ve learned seems to be the national drink of Texas—I mean they seem to prefer it here—uh—have you been teaching here a long time?”
“Too long for my own good,” Cora Dart said with extraordinary venom. “They’ve had about a million teachers here, first and last.”
“But that’s too bad. I should think it would be upsetting for the children—the pupils.”
The woman stared at her with the eyes of pure hate. “You’d better speak to your husband about that. Your husband is the person to speak to about that, Mrs. Jordan Benedict.”
The woman’s mad, Leslie thought as she turned abruptly to go. Stark staring mad, literally.
Outside again in the glaring heat Leslie glanced at her watch and incredulously saw that it now was ten minutes past nine. Her day was just beginning but she felt she had been up for many hours. She wondered where Jordan was, she longed to see him, she looked out and out toward the endless haze of prairie and sky. He was miles and miles off somewhere with those thousands and thousands of cows.
There was so much to learn, so much to see. She supposed she was what they called a tenderfoot, she realized now what a good and descriptive word this was. She wished that she felt more like moving briskly about and not so listless and inclined to lie down and sleep somewhere in the shade. The shade. May. May in Virginia. Cool and sunny in Virginia with a breeze from the Blue Ridge and the grass always richly green in the meadows and pastures, the apple blossoms all gone now but the late spring flowers bravely abloom. The Rivers of Virginia. Walking in the dust and glare of the Texas road, stubbornly, she thought of the Rivers of Virginia, the very sound of them was cool and fresh and clear as she said them over in a little murmur, it was like dipping her fingers in their limpid softness and laving her throbbing brow. The sound of them rippled and flowed. Shenandoah. Roanoke. Rappahannock. Potomac…And the flowers…Mountain laurel…Wisteria…Rhododendron…White alder…Wax myrtle…Trumpet flower…What were the rivers of Texas? Rio Grande. Nueces. Diablo. Brazos. Hot Spanish names. Don’t be like that, silly.
She must have taken a wrong turning, what with the heat, the glare and her weariness, for she found herself off on a smaller rougher road lined with rows of shanties, small and tumble-down. Flimsier, even, than the Negro cabins she had seen so familiarly in Virginia. These were on stilts, there were no green
or growing things about them. It was strange that there seemed to be no pleasant human hum of life from within these shacks.
A thin wailing sound. From within one of the hovels an infant crying. Leslie turned and looked about her. In her resentment and bewilderment she had come farther than she knew. There was the Big House shimmering in the heat, but it seemed terribly far away. She wondered if she should telephone and ask them to come for her. The thought of walking back under the blazing sun made her feel a little sick.
The Girls. Luz had said the Girls would be there early. A barbecue, a great hot red barbecue. Of course there wouldn’t be a telephone in any of these crazy dwellings. But perhaps someone could be sent to fetch a car…. She followed the sound of the wailing infant, she ascended the rickety steps and knocked at the doorway hung with strips of flyspecked paper. The baby cried without ceasing—a high-pitched kitten-like mewing. She knocked again.
“Entre!” A woman’s voice.
She brushed aside the paper strips, she entered the dark close-smelling room. For a moment, blinded by the transition from glaring sun to gloom, she could see nothing. She put her hand over her smarting eyes.
“I am Mrs. Benedict,” she said to no one in particular.
“Sí, sí,” said a woman’s voice, low and soft, with a note of weakness in it. “Perdóneme. Pardon me that I do not rise. I am ill.” This in Spanish. Miraculously, Leslie thought, she caught a word—two words—and translated their meaning. Perdóneme. Enferma. Now she looked about her. A woman on the bed in the little front room. A girl, really, black-haired, big-bosomed, her eyes bright with fever. The girl half sat up, she even essayed a little bow as she sat there in the disordered bed. “I have a fever,” she said in Spanish. “Fiebre.” Leslie nodded. The infant’s shrill cry came from a tiny second room at the rear; the lean-to kitchen of the shack. This front room evidently was bedroom and sitting room. In one corner an altar, all pink crepe paper and bits of ribbon and gilt and paper flowers, with a gilt cross in the center and a bright pink and blue and scarlet picture of the Christ and the Madonna, gilt-framed.
