by Edna Ferber
“…Well say, Bick, I sure was throwed when I heard the news…”
“…As representative of the Great Commonwealth of Texas I wish to extend in the name of my fellow citizens…”
“…Mi estimado amigo, lo siento mucho…”
Leslie, with a scant week of Texas experience to guide her, moved among the mourners trying hard to remember Texas names, Texas faces, Texas customs. The Placers, that was easy; and Bowie and his wife and Roady and his wife and even a niece or two and a couple of nephews. But the others, millions of others. Let me remember…Uh, Mrs. Jennings…Somebody Beezer…Ila Something Motten…Mrs. Jakes…Kling.
Vashti Snyth insisted that food was the panacea for grief. She kept plucking at Bick’s sleeve, she grasped Leslie’s arm, she motioned in the direction of the dining room from which came a sustained clatter accompanied by rich and heavy scents.
“You got to eat if you’re going to keep your strength up. How you going to expect to go through tomorrow if you don’t eat! Leslie, Bick looks terrible. Bick, Leslie looks real ganted. Pa tried to get over and couldn’t. He’ll be next, mark my words. He’s down sick, I ought to be there right now looking after him, he don’t even beller at Mott any more, just lays there so pitiful, course he ain’t been real rugged for a year and more, yesterday he said to me, Vashti, he said, it won’t be long now, and when it comes you promise to put me away like I want to be put, no tie and my leather brush jacket…. Bick, whyn’t you eat something, you look real peaked. Leslie, come on have a cup of coffee and a cake.”
Adarene Morey came close to Leslie, her voice low in the midst of the clamor. “Relax. Bick’s all right. It’s good for him to have all these people around. Don’t work so hard. Let them do the work. They’re curious about you, you know. Even more than they are about seeing Luz, and how Bick behaves.”
“Why?”
“The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen! If she can take it.”
“I can take it.”
There was a stir at the doorway, there was an acceleration of sound. “What’s that? Who’s that?”
Uncle Bawley’s arrival was something of an event. Uncle Bawley who kinged it alone in splendid squalor at the Holgado Division, Uncle Bawley who had ignored Bick’s wedding except for the sending of a monolithic silver edifice that resembled a cenotaph. Its purpose, whether for use or ornament, Leslie—and even Mrs. Lynnton—never had been able to fathom.
Now, as he strode through the welter of relatives, guests, neighbors and officials, Leslie was shocked. His eyes were streaming with tears, they washed down his cheeks and dropped off his chin. This was all the more startling because Uncle Bawley towered even above these Texas men who seemed to fill the rooms to bursting with their great shoulders, their pyramidal necks, their leather-colored faces, their leather-colored clothes, their enormous hats, their high-heeled boots, their overpowering maleness.
Yet there was about this gigantic man a grace, an air of elegance. He was wearing a dark suit and black boots and Leslie’s knowing eye was quick to see that these garments had been born of the needle and shears of a New York tailor or even perhaps of a London magician of men’s clothes. They almost hid the slight bulge that, at nearly seventy, was just beginning to mar his waistline.
Leslie felt she could not bear to face this giant with the streaming eyes. Those eyes were a faded blue, and the lids crinkled so that lines, etched by the sun and the wind, radiated from them fanwise at the temples. She knew he had been a Ranger in his youth, with gun notches and all the rest of the fabulous fanfare that went with stories of pioneer Texas times. Even now, in spite of his city suit, he was startingly like a figure in the romantic fables of the region.
He came across the room, threading his way toward Bick, making slow progress because of the outstretched hands and the spoken greetings, muted but hearty with affection. She knew that he had arrived and that he had refused to stay at the Big House or at the old Main House. He was quartered in one of the nearby line houses. Later, when she knew him better, she had remonstrated at his uncomfortable quarters. “You should be staying here, in the Big House.”
“Me here! Like to choke to death living in this pile. Just as soon sleep in the Egyptian pyramids.”
At a gesture from Bick he turned to face Leslie. His eyes narrowed, then widened.
There was no escaping him, his gaze was upon her and now as he came toward her Leslie was dismayed to see that he mopped his eyes with his handkerchief and she marveled that his features were so composed under this fountain of tears. He stood beside her, he took her hand in his and looked down at her from his towering height.
Inadequately Leslie murmured, “I know what she must have meant to you—your eldest niece. I am so terribly sorry for you and for Jordan and for—”
He dabbed at his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t pay this no mind,” he said, and his voice was gentle and low and almost caressing. “I ain’t bawling. This is what they call an allergy. Took me better than forty years to find out about it.”
“Allergy!” she repeated after him, stunned.
“That’s right. I’m allergic to cattle. Makes my eyes water quarts.”
She smiled wanly and dutifully, scenting one of these regional jokes she did not understand. She played up to it. “Tell me the rest.”
“The smart new doctors found it out after I’d been snuffling and bawling around for forty years and better. All my life a cowman and the whole Benedict family first and last for a hundred years or nearly. And then a kid at Johns Hopkins finds out I’m allergic to cows.”
Leslie was utterly fascinated. She forgot about Luz and mourning etiquette and bereaved relatives-by-marriage. Temporarily she even forgot about Jordan. With a hand tucked in Uncle Bawley’s arm she maneuvered him toward a quiet corner of the vast room, away from the tight groups that seemed to prefer to stand in the center of the room, talking talking talking. A huge couch whose overstuffed arms were the size of an average chair was angled away from the room proper, by some mistaken whim of a decorator—or perhaps of Luz. One corner of this engulfed Leslie though she sat with one leg crossed under her.
“This is wonderful,” she said, and looked up, up at his towering height. “I’m—well—I know now what my mother meant when she used to say I-haven’t-sat-down-today.”
“Nothing can beat you out quicker than a houseful of people come for a funeral, especially if they’re choused up like this. And you’re new to it here. Bad enough if you’re a Texian.” His shoulders relaxed against the back of the vast couch, his long legs sprawled across the polished floor, his feet turned toes up, slim and arched in the beautifully hand-tooled high-heeled black boots. Leslie regarded him with anticipatory relish.
“I must tell my father all about you. He’ll be enchanted.”
“Enchanted with me?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“He here?”
“No. No, he’s home. I mean he’s in Virginia where we—where he lives. He’ll be so interested. Please tell me a little more about it. The allergy, I mean. And about you. Do you mind if I call you Uncle Bawley—though I must say it doesn’t suit you.”
“I’d just purely love for you to do that. Leslie? I don’t know as that suits you either. Usual thing I go slow with Yankees using their given names. They’re touchy.”
“That’s funny. I think Texans are touchy.”
“They’re just vain,” Uncle Bawley said in his soft almost musing voice. “Vain as peacocks and always making out like they’re modest. Acting all the time, most of them. Playing Texas.”
She stared at him, fascinated, she broke into a laugh, then checked herself, horrified. She inched her way across the hummocks of the couch so that she sat now just beside him and facing him, her back to the room. “How refreshing you are! I hope you don’t mind my saying that, Uncle Bawley. Jordan told me about you, but not enough. Why didn’t you come to our wedding?”
“I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get marri
ed a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings, white and Mexican. But a funeral, that’s different. You only die once.”
She lied politely. “You sent us a magnificent wedding present, even though you didn’t come.”
“Was it? I never did rightly know what they sent. I just wrote to Tiffany’s and I said for them to send a silver piece looked like a wedding present ought to look.”
“They did,” Leslie murmured, wondering when the packing boxes containing all those wedding gifts would arrive from Virginia, and where she could possibly place Uncle Bawley’s cenotaph even in this gargantuan house with its outsize rooms. Mischievously she decided to try a Texasism. “They sure did.” Gently she led him back to the original fascinating subject. “You must find it very trying—the allergy I mean. In your—uh—business.”
“It’s mean as all hell, pardon me, but up in the high country where I live, mountainous and the air clear, why sometimes I hardly notice it. It all but stops except for a few weeks maybe in the hot of summer if we don’t get the seasonal rains we should. Down here, though, in the brush, the minute I set foot it starts like a fountain. The dust and the wind and the cow clasps and the hair hides all together they set these springs to working. If the folks around here was smart they’d pay me just to walk around sprinkling this brush country. Course the dust’s the worst down here. That and the wind.”
“The wind,” she repeated after him. “The wind the wind. Doesn’t it ever stop? Don’t tell Jordan—but the wind makes me nervous. Blowing blowing day and night.”
“Don’t pay it no mind,” he said soothingly. “Texas folks are all nervous and jumpy. Don’t appear to be, being so big and high-powered, but they are. You notice they laugh a lot? Nervous people do, as a general rule. Easy laughers, but yet not what you’d call real gay by nature. Up in the Panhandle they’re even jumpier than they are down here in the brush. Up there the wind blows all the time, never stops blowing, even the cattle are kind of loco up there. But where I live in the Davis Mountains, it’s just about perfect.”
He took from his coat pocket a folded handkerchief, white and fine, and as he wiped his brimming lids Leslie caught the pricking scent of eau de cologne. She sniffed the tangy scent now and beamed upon her new-found relative. This giant of the leathery skin, the gentle voice, the fine linen, the glove-fitting boots, was something of a dandy.
Now he glanced at her, a sharp sidewise look. “Maybe you think it’s funny, a cowman getting himself all smelled up pretty.”
“No, I like it. I like fastidious men.”
“It’s made me a heap of trouble. First off, my real name’s Baldwin—Baldwin Benedict—that’s what they named me. Then along come this crying and that cinched it. I was Bawley Benedict.”
“Oh, Uncle Bawley, I’m so sorry. What would you like me to call you?”
“That’s all right, I’m used to it. But I had to fist-fight my way through school and college. The Mexicans hereabouts call me Iloro-no—The Weepy. At Harvard I was fullback and heavyweight boxer just in self-defense. I was a heavier build then. Puppy fat. I like to wore out my knuckles proving I wasn’t a sissy. I have to laugh when I think of it now.”
“Harvard?”
“We all go a couple of years, didn’t Bick tell you? And a trip to Europe young. The girls go to some school in the East.” His tone, his diction took on a complete change. “Just to prove to the world and ourselves that we aren’t provincial.”
She leaned toward him. “Please don’t think I’m rude. But you talk—I mean Harvard and Europe and everything—and just now you—but most of the time you talk—well, the only ones who don’t are Jordan, and Maudie Lou. And now you—when you weren’t looking.”
“I know. Sometimes we forget to talk Texas.”
“But Uncle Bawley, it’s regional, isn’t it? A kind of dialect just as the Boston people speak one way and the deep South another and the Middle Westerners another.”
He had not mopped his eyes for a full five minutes, the tears had ceased to flow. “Partly. That’s right. Down here it’s a mixture of Spanish and Mexican and Nigrahs and French and German and folks from all over the whole country. It settled into a kind of jargon, but we play it up. Like when I was a young squirt visiting New York there was a girl named Anna Held a French actress. She was all the rage, milk baths and pearls and so on, by that time she could speak English as good as you and me, but there she was a-zissin’ and a-zattin’ because it was good publicity and cute. That’s us. Mostly, we know better. But we talk Texas because it’s good publicity and cute.”
“Uncle Bawley,” she said earnestly, “I love talking to you.”
He blushed like a girl. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“I hardly ever talk to a woman. I got out of the habit. No women up to the Holgado Division, hardly, except two three of the section bosses live in the line houses with their wives and kids. But most of the cow hands are single, we don’t use vaqueros up there, too near to the border. Course there’s all the Mexican families in Montaraz, that’s the town just outside the ranch.”
The town outside the ranch. She smiled.
“What you smiling at?” he demanded. “What’d I say made you smile like that and kind of shake your head?”
“I just thought how very Texan. The town outside the ranch. Most people would say, the ranch outside the town, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe so. If it wasn’t for Holgado there wouldn’t be any town. Handful of Mexicans, maybe.”
She hesitated a moment, but only a moment. The habit of wanting to know was too strong. “But didn’t you ever marry? Why?”
“What girl would have a man who stands there bawling with tears running down his face while’s he’s asking her to marry him!”
Leslie was staring at him, she was scurrying about in her mind, putting together bits and pieces as her years with her father had taught her to do. “Cows!”
“How’s that?”
“Allergic to cows.”
“That’s right.”
She was looking into his face with the most utter concentration. “Uncle Bawley, did you want to be a cowman? Did you want to be head of Holgado and a big Benedict rancher and all that?”
“Hell no, honey.”
“What did you want to be?”
“Funny you should ask me that. I haven’t thought about it in years. What I wanted to be was, I wanted to be a musician. Pianist.” Leslie’s head turned toward him as if it had been jerked on wires. But the big pink face was bland, almost dreamy. “There’s always been music in the family, one way or another, but the minute it shows its head it gets stepped on.”
“Uncle Bawley, do you mean you wanted the piano to be your career?”
“Well, I don’t know’s I looked at it square in the face, like that. But when I got to Europe I studied there with Levenov till they made me come home. Big rumpus, there was. The whole family. You’d thought I wanted to run a faro wheel or marry a Mexican. Young men were younger then, I guess, than they are now when they’re young. Pa got after me. Bick’s Pa too. My brother, named like Bick, Jordan. They got me out roping and branding and one thing another. Nothing spoils your hands quicker than that. For piano, I mean. Time they got through with me I was lucky if I could play chopsticks. About that time Brahms was just beginning to catch on, I was crazy about his—well, you know, you can’t fool around with anything like that, I sat there at the piano looking at my fingers, it was like they were tied on with wires. That was when I quit.”
“Oh, Uncle Bawley dear!” She was terribly afraid she was going to cry. She looked down at his great sunburned hands, splotched with the vague brown spots of the aging.
He looked at her and smiled his teeth were brownish and somewhat broken, the great round face was beginning to be a bit crumpled, he was a monumental structure he was almost three times Leslie’s age, she wanted to take h
is hands in hers and press her lips to them as a mother comforts a child who has been hurt. He must have sensed something of this as he looked at her. Apologetically he hurried on. “How’d we get onto that! Well, there was Holgado to run and I was picked to run it. Now when I look back on it, it’s kind of crazy. Benedicts and big Texas ranch folks, they act like they were royalty or something. Old-fashioned stuff.” He leaned toward her. “Let me tell you something, Leslie. If your kids get a real notion they want to do something, you see to it they do it.”
“I will, Uncle Bawley. I promise I will.”
“You get Bick to bring you out to Holgado for a nice visit. In the spring it’s real pretty. When the Spanish dagger is out, and summers, after the seasonal rains it’s right green, places.”
“Is it a success? Does Jordan—do you and Jordan think it’s successful?”
“Holgado! Why, say, it’s the money-maker of the whole outfit. Even Maudie Lou and Placer and Bowie don’t complain about its being unfinancial. Course I don’t stock all the newfangled stuff Bick goes in for here at Reata. Not that I don’t think Bick’s a smart boy. There’s nothing he don’t know about a ranch—horn hide and hair.” He smiled at her, a singularly sweet and childlike smile. “I ain’t talked this much to a woman in years.”
“You’re just fascinating,” Leslie said. “You’re wonderful. I love you.”
From behind her shoulder came Maudie Lou Placer’s high hard voice, she was leaning a little over the back of the huge couch.
“There are people coming in all the time, they are asking for you, naturally. Elly Mae and I are doing all we can, and Roady and Lira of course, but Bick is worn out and it seems to me that you and Uncle Bawley—well——’
Leslie sprang up. “Oh, Maudie Lou, I am so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Billy!” said Maudie Lou in her best borrowed Eastern accent.
The big room was now so densely packed that just to elbow a way through it was a physical effort. Nowhere in all this vast desert could one find an oasis of peace and quiet. A clamor of talk here, a rumble of sound from the adjoining rooms and the great hall. The huge dining room was all too small. The modest twenty places habitually had swollen to sixty—seventy—and now there were three rows of tables and there was never a gap in the places. People drifted in as though it were a restaurant, they sat and ate and left and others took their places, the food flowed out of the kitchen an avalanche borne on a flood of coffee. The air was heavy with the odors of cooking, grey with cigarette smoke. A dozen—twenty—Mexicans manned the cooking and serving. Steaming plates platters bowls. Back and forth back and forth. Siéntese, señor…Traígame el café solo…. Crema…. Heh, Domingo! Traígame otro…Sí señor, si señora.
