by Edna Ferber
“Look,” he began truculently, “I didn’t know he was buying them like a surprise for you, how would I——”
“It doesn’t concern you at all,” Leslie said in her best Lynnton manner. “I am rather tired. It has been a long day. Thank you for showing me the little Mexican town. I would like to sit quietly now, and not talk.”
Across the little town then, past the mournful steer in his glass case, out to where Reata could be seen hazily like a mirage shimmering in the heat against the flat Texan plain and the searing Texas sky.
I just drove around with this boy—around and around—because I didn’t want to go back to the house. And to Luz. I didn’t want to go back to my home. But that’s terrible, not to want to go home even when you’re as tired and hot and thirsty and stiff as I am. You can’t go on behaving like this, you know, Leslie my girl, she told herself.
“…girl like you before.”
Jett Rink was saying something. She hadn’t quite heard. He seemed to be driving very slowly, for him. “What? What did you say?”
The knuckles of his hands on the wheel showed white. “I says——” He cleared his throat. “I says I never seen a girl—a woman—like you before. You sure are different.”
She was rigid with resentment. Then she relaxed. Now don’t be silly, this is an ignorant ranch hand, poor kid he’s never been taught anything, he’s never known anything but poverty. So now she laughed a prim little artificial laugh and said, “Yes, the East and the West are different here in the United States, even though we say we are one big family.”
He faced straight ahead. “I ain’t talking about no United States geography. I’m talking about you. I never seen a girl like you. You ain’t afraid of nothing. I’ve seen a lot of women. I been going with Cora Dart—the teacher—since she give up hoping she could hook Bick. She’s got education and all, but I never seen anybody like you, that’s for sure.”
They were nearing the gates now. She’d never need to be with him again. “Well, that’s a very nice compliment, Jett. I’ll tell my husband you said so.”
Boldly, deliberately, he turned to face her. “No you won’t,” he jibed.
She turned her head away in disgust. How could Jordan have dreamed of letting her go about with this dirty little boy. If Jordan didn’t know someone should tell him. She would.
There was quite a cluster of cars parked in the drive as she came up. She had not yet learned to distinguish the Reata cars from others. Horses, too. She wished that one of these could be Jordan’s and that he might be home to greet her. But that was impossible. Still, it was after five, surprisingly enough. Late, really. She had been up and about twelve hours. Tired. She opened the car door, stepped out without a word or a backward glance. Slowly she ascended the steps. This was the first time she had walked alone up these imposing front steps. She enjoyed it, it gave her a sense of belonging. She glanced about her with a spacious feeling. She was after all coming home; tired and hot, she was coming home. Now she noticed a glass-doored gun cabinet just inside the doorway, vaguely she recalled having seen it before out of the tail of her eye and having perhaps subconsciously dismissed it as improbable. But there it was, a neat row of guns hanging handily behind the glass doors of the case, long-barreled and shining and ominous. One, curiously enough, was outside the case, leaning negligently against a panel.
This somehow annoyed her. Guns. Whoever heard of a woman having to enter her house past a row of guns! These weren’t Indian days—pioneer scalping days. Don’t forget to ask Jordan. Anyway, it was a relief to be back after the long difficult day. A bath and a change. And after all, guns in the hall are kind of romantic. They’re probably the Texas version of front hall clutter, like our tennis racquets and golf clubs and fishing rods back home.
Quite a hubbub of voices from the big room, Jordan’s voice. “Yoo-hoo!” she called and felt a great surge of happiness. He was there, he would be waiting for her.
Bick came swiftly toward her across the great hall, the light from the doorway was on him, she thought, Why, he looks sort of strange and wild.
“Where the hell have you been!”
“Been?” she echoed foolishly.
“Where the hell did you get to!”
“Why, darling, you look all hot and haggard. Is anything wrong?”
Now it was he who repeated. “Wrong!” he yelled.
“I had a lovely time seeing Texas, we went to Nopal, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it, it’s like a foreign village——”
But he was shouting again. “Nopal! Nopal! That locoed drunken burn took you to Nopal! Leslie, Leslie!”
“But it’s all right, Jordan. What’s so terrible about that!”
There in the big living-room doorway she saw Vashti Snyth and Cora Dart, they became part of a confused and bewildering picture. “Why hello! How nice to see you,” she began, very socially, and moved toward them. Over her shoulder she added, in the direction of the purpling Bick, “It was your idea to have him call for me.”
She was embarrassed, she was angry, she was mystified. So she erred rather on the stately side. Her code condemned family exhibitions of temper. She went smiling to the two women in the doorway, she took Vashti’s hand in greeting, she had to pick up the limp and unresponsive hand of the schoolteacher but she managed it well enough. “D’you know, there’s really more protocol in Texas than there is in Washington—or at the Court of St. James’s for that matter. But I’ll learn.” She thought they were looking at her too strangely. “How nice to find you here. Uh, Miss Dart, I’ve had a wonderful idea; could you give me Spanish lessons—out of your school hours I mean—if you could——” Then she saw Luz. She was lying on the big couch in a curious stuffed-doll fashion, her mouth was open, her eyes were shut and her breathing was a snore, but more horrible than a snore.
Leslie turned her head then to stare at the two women watching her so intently. “What?”
“The horse,” Vashti said inadequately.
Bick came up behind her, his face was a curious grey beneath the russet now, and rigid. “It’s our fault. She wanted to go with us. My Mistake. She can ride anything. The Western saddle—the horse stepped in a gopher hole, deep.”
“What is it?”
“Concussion. Or worse. Fracture, maybe.”
“Doctor Tom. Doctor Tom Walker.”
“He’s here. He’s telephoning.”
“Hospital in Benedict.”
“There is no hospital in Benedict.”
“That other—that Viento place.”
“No hospital in Viento.”
Cora Dart spoke for the first time. “She’s dying.” As though she found satisfaction in saying it she repeated it. “Dying.”
Hurriedly then Vashti became conversational. “He broke his leg, the horse. When he stumbled and threw her. Luz’s head came up against a mesquite stump. They had to shoot him. Bick had to shoot him.”
Crazily Leslie thought, My Mistake will never have to wear that silly saddle. That will teach you not to ride in hoop skirts, Luz Benedict.
“Look out!” yelled Vashti Snyth. “She’s going to faint again. Bick!”
With a tremendous effort of will Leslie Benedict pulled the swirling world into steadiness. “Oh, no I’m not,” she said. “I’m never going to faint again.”
15
Everybody came to the funeral. Fortunately the actual basic Benedict family was small. A closed corporation. But Texas converged from every point of the compass. Friends, enemies, employees, business connections; ranchers, governors, vaqueros, merchants, senators, cowboys, millionaires, politicians, housewives. The President of the United States sent a message of condolence. There had been no such Texas funeral since the death of Jordan Benedict Second.
Luz Benedict had become a legendary figure though no one actually knew her in her deepest darkest depths except, oddly enough, outsiders such as Jett Rink and Cora Dart and Leslie Lynnton Benedict. Perhaps Doctor Tom Walker. Bick Benedict, her baby brother, knew
her least of all; or if he knew, refused to face the knowledge. Bick Benedict, whom she had deviled and ruled and loved, whose life she had twisted and so nearly ruined; toward whom she had behaved like an adoring and possessive mother wife sister combined in one frustrated human being. The world of Texas knew her as the Benedict family matriarch. Sometimes they wondered why a patriarch, in the person of Uncle Bawley Benedict, ruler of the vast Holgado Division, and older than his niece by fifteen years, did not head the clan. To this the wise ones made answer.
“Bawley! Why, say, he wouldn’t have it a gift. That ol’ Bawley, he’s a maverick. If he had his druthers he wouldn’t see a Benedict one year’s end to the next. He’s smarter than any of ’em; than Bick, even. If he put his mind to it he could make the whole passel come up to the lick log. But he sets back like he’s done for years, smiling and hushed, and lets Bick run Reata and Luz run Bick.”
Everybody who was anybody in Texas came to the funeral. They came, not to mourn the violent exit of Miss Luz Benedict, spinster, aged fifty, but to pay tribute to a Texas institution known as the Benedicts of Reata Ranch. Almost a century of Texas was contained in the small and resentful arrangement of human clay now so strangely passive in the bronze and silver box.
Mortuary artifice had been powerless to erase entirely the furious frown that furrowed her brow. The lips were unresigned, the jaw pugnacious. Luz Benedict, tricked by sly and sudden death, could almost be said to bristle in her coffin. You, Death! You can’t do this to me! This is Luz Benedict of Reata, this is my house this is my ranch this is my Texas this is my world.
Familiar faces, bent over her for a last good-bye, could well say that she looked natural. Power was depicted there, arrogance, and the Benedict will to rule and triumph. You can’t do this to me, I do as I please, all the Benedicts do as they please, I am a Benedict of Reata I am Texas.
Every bedroom in the Big House was filled, guests were sleeping in the bookless library, in the mute music room. Even the old unused adobe Main House of family tradition—the house in which Bick Benedict and the Benedicts before him had been born—was opened now and aired and made habitable for the funeral guests who swarmed from every corner of the vast commonwealth and from most of the forty-seven other comparatively negligible states of the United States of America.
Privately the family thought how like Luz to inconvenience everyone in the Benedict world and to make them do her bidding against their own plans and inclinations. Here it was late spring and Maudie Lou Placer and her polo-playing husband had been just about to sail for a summer in England and Scotland and France. Roady Benedict had secretly sneaked a holiday from his Washington job of looking after Texas interests and was game-fishing in the luxurious wilds of the Benedict Canadian camp. Mr. and Mrs. Bowie Benedict were knee-deep in the blue grass of their Kentucky racing stables. Uncle Bawley was, as always, a lone eagle in his eyrie at the Holgado Division spread amongst the mountains of the Trans-Pecos.
Assorted cousins of the first second and third degree were snatched from their oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s in New Orleans, from their suites at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, from their tennis in Long Island, from the golf links of White Sulphur, and summoned to pay last homage to their kinswoman.
Leslie moved from group to group, from room to room, from crowd to crowd. Sometimes she did not try to identify herself, sometimes she said, “I am Mrs. Benedict.”
“Which Mrs. Benedict?”
“Jordan Mrs. Jordan Benedict.”
Mystified for a moment, they would stare. Then, “Oh, Bick! Bick’s wife. Well, say! I heard. Sure pleased to meet you.”
“Do you live near here?”
“Milt K. Masters.”
“Oh. Yes. I just wondered if you lived near Reata, Mr. Masters.”
“Mr. Masters! Say, that’s a good one. My name ain’t Masters. My name’s Decker—Vern Decker.”
“I thought you said—”
“That’s the name of the town I live in, town of Milt K. Masters. Named after the fella started it.”
But she had no time then to ponder on what manner of man this Milt K. Masters had been to wish to perpetuate himself by stamping his undistinguished name on a little Texas town.
“How interesting. Of course. Named after a man. Like Houston or Kingsville or—or Benedict, for that matter.”
“Well, now, it’s just a little cow town but we think it’s just about the best little town in the whole state of Texas. Quite a piece from here, four five hundred miles. You want to come down, pay a visit. How come you ain’t been, you and Bick? I take it real unfriendly.”
“I’ve only been a few days in Texas.”
A few days. It was with a feeling of unbelief that she heard herself saying this. A few days since she had stepped off the train at Vientecito.
“Well, ma’am, you sure got a treat coming to you. You’re going to get acquainted with the greatest state in the country. Yes ma’am, and I don’t mean only size. I mean greatest everything. Crops. Cotton. Cattle. Horses. Folks.”
“Do excuse me a moment, won’t you? I think my husband is beckoning to me. He’s just over there.”
“Sure. Run right along. Say, it’s pretty lucky Bick’s got you now, keep him from being low-spirited. He’s sure going to feel Miss Luz being gone. She was more like a mother to Bick than a sister.”
She had telegraphed to Virginia the news of this family tragedy. Her father had offered to come to her, as she knew he would. Do you want us to come, his telegram had said, Mother and I can start immediately. Don’t come, she had replied. It’s such a journey the funeral is day after tomorrow I am well Jordan is well enough but terribly shocked how strange and terrible that it should have been My Mistake.
Her husband was a stranger whom she could not reach. She was someone living in his house. It seemed to her that there was no cousin so remote but he or she yet seemed closer to Jordan Benedict than his wife. He was sodden with grief and remorse. In his stunned mind was a confusion in which Luz and Leslie and My Mistake and the morning of the roundup and his years of deep and hidden resentment against this dominating woman were inextricably blended. Leslie tried to comfort him with her arms about him, with her intelligence, with her sympathy her love her understanding of this emotional shock whose impact he himself did not grasp.
For the hundredth time. “She just wanted to ride out to the roundup with us,” he would say. “Why didn’t she? Why didn’t she come with us?” He wanted her to say it.
“We wanted to be alone. And that was right.”
“If I hadn’t bought My Mistake she’d be alive today.”
Leslie decided on stern measures. “Yes, if you hadn’t bought My Mistake your sister Luz would be alive today. And if Papa hadn’t cured the ulcers of the horse’s original owner he wouldn’t have wanted to show his gratitude by giving Papa the horse. And if Wind Wings hadn’t wandered into the wrong paddock, My Mistake never would have been born. If you want me to go on with this, if Papa hadn’t been a surgeon, and if he hadn’t married Mama and if I hadn’t been their daughter—well, you can go back as far as you like, Jordan darling, if you really want to torture yourself.”
She was shocked she was in a way frightened, when she learned that by Jordan’s orders Luz Benedict’s saddle, her boots, her Stetson, her riding clothes and even the tragic hoop skirts of family tradition were to be left untouched in her bedroom as a shrine. How he must have hated her, Leslie thought. Guilt is an awful thing, it can destroy him, I won’t let it.
So she went from group to group, from room to room, always with an eye on Bick. To anyone who had known her in the past it would have been amazing to see how she took charge of this vast household. The obsequies had assumed the proportions of a grim public ceremonial.
“We can put up another bed in this little sewing room. They can use the bath across the hall…. I know he will want to see you, he is resting just now he had no sleep last night…. A cake! How good of you I know it will be appreciat
ed they are so busy in the kitchen…. You are Jordan’s cousin Zora? Of course of course he often speaks of…”
The Girls were wonderful; and of the Girls Vashti Snyth and Adarene Morey were twin towers of strength and efficiency. They knew their Texas, they knew their Benedicts, they were the daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters of men and women who had wrestled and coped with every native manifestation from drought and rattlesnakes to Neiman-Marcus and bridge.
“I’ll do it, Leslie. Just you sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down. I can’t.”
“I know it. I don’t mean really sit down. I mean let me do this and you make out like you’re listening to all these people keep bawling at you, it’ll take all the strength you got.” This from the salty Vashti.
Adarene and Lucius Morey had arrived the day after Luz’s death. They must have driven at ninety miles an hour, hour on hour, to make the distance. They entered the Big House, they took over. Servants. Food. Telegrams. Telephones. In a bedlam of big boots and big hats and big men and a cacophony of voices male and female these two seemed pure peace—Lucius Morey of the neat dark un-Texan suit and the neat dark un-Texan shoes and the shrewd blue eyes in the bland banker’s face; Adarene of the plain countenance and the knobby forehead and the correct clothes and the direct gaze and the debunked mind.
The crowds streamed up the steps of the great front entrance, solemnly they Viewed the Remains, they swarmed in the dining room, the grounds, the drive, the outer road, the town of Benedict, the roads for miles around were alive with them. Arcadio at the gatehouse entrance could not limp fast enough to encompass the steady stream of visitors flowing through his portals. Three Mexican helpers were delegated as assistants. Besieged though they were, no one passed the gates who was not known to one or all of them, whether white black brown, from Fidel Gomez the Coyote of Nopal to the Governor with his aides, come all the way from Austin.
Bick met them all, his bloodshot eyes mutely questioning each mournful face as though hoping to find there the comforting answer to his self-reproach.
