by Edna Ferber
“Well, now, Vash,” Pinky drawled in mild remonstrance, “maybe that’s a little bitty overspoken. But did seem every second one who got a medal was a Texan.”
Leslie tried to cover the hurt. “I didn’t mean—Jordan, I didn’t mean——”
“That’s all right,” Bick said stiffly. “My father was a sick man. I was twenty-two. He died just a little after. I guess he figured it might be better in the end to raise a few hundred thousand head of beef cattle to feed the world than for me to kill a couple of Germans. Maybe he was wrong.”
“Practically he was right,” Leslie said quietly. “But for you he was wrong.”
Now it was Adarene Morey who tried to guide the talk into impersonal paths. “Everything’s changed since the war. I don’t know. As if something was lost. Even old San Antonio is all changed.”
“It’ll be just one big flying field, the whole town, the way they’re headed,” Pinky predicted morosely. “We thought it was something big, time they put down Kelly Field. Now they’re starting in on this new Randolph Field, they say it’s going to set us back better than ten million dollars, just to lay it down. Keep on, pretty soon San Antonio can’t see the sky for the wings.”
“That’s all right,” Lew Morey said. “That’s just Texas making sure they can’t ever start another World War on us.”
“Who’d be fool enough to start it!” scoffed Bick.
Clink-clank went the little iron gate. Quite a parade of starched white aprons and starched white coats and alert black faces beneath precarious trays. At the head of this procession, like a commanding officer, marched the dining-car steward (white). Well, Mr. Benedict, it’s mighty nice to have you traveling with us again…. Haven’t seen you this way in a long time, Mr. Morey…. Miss Hake…uh…
“I’m Mrs. Mott Snyth now. This is my husband Mr. Mott Snyth.”
Hope everything’s going to suit you all right I tended to it myself personally if you find anything wrong why just send word, why, thanks now if you folks going to want breakfast it might be a good idea give us your order now, well, coffee anyway, I always say a cup of coffee first off and you can face anything….
It was not a gay meal. The little side tables had been hooked ingeniously into the wall, the couples sat two by two before the over-abundant food. Pitchers of cream, mounds of rolls, bowls of iced butter in the true tradition of North American waste. The repast finished, the six sat replete, somewhat uncomfortable, and silent. Even Vashti was strangely quiet.
“We’re due in at daybreak,” Bick said.
“Everything in Texas starts at daybreak,” Adarene Morey complained. “Pioneer stuff.” Leslie smiled at her across the aisle. Dear Adarene. Dear oasis.
Bick stood up, yawned, stretched, peered through a window at the Texas night. “I don’t know how the rest of you folks feel but I’m all for letting the scenery go by until morning.”
The Benedicts had the drawing room, the Moreys and the Snyths a compartment each. “Just roughing it,” Pinky grinned. “But anyway it’s better than on the ground like I’ve done a million times, with my saddle for a pillow.”
Mumblemumble whisperwhisper! They all knew better than to talk aloud in those connecting cubicles.
“Jordan darling, I didn’t mean it that way. I just remembered that we’d never talked about the war, I suddenly thought——”
Vashti expressed herself in whispers to Pinky. “Sometimes she says the meanest things and doesn’t mean them, that I ever heard spoken.”
Lucius Morey ran an investigating thumb over his chin as he stared at his reflection in the mirror of the little bedroom. “She’ll be all right as soon as she gets the hang of Texas.”
“She’s all right now,” Adarene retorted very sotto voce from the depths of her lower berth. “It’s just Bick that never will be really in love with anything but Reata.”
Next morning at dawn Leslie saw in the distance something that broke at last the limitless horizon. There, blue against the golden plain, were the mountains. She felt a lift, a lightness in the air. And there at the little station was Uncle Bawley towering yet blending into the landscape like the mountains themselves.
Leslie walked toward Uncle Bawley, she did not extend her hand to him she kept on walking and quite naturally walked into his arms and stayed there a moment with a feeling of having come home to someone she had known for a long long time.
“Weil, there’s something Holgado never saw before,” Bick said.
“You better look alive, Bick!” Pinky yelled. “Uncle Bawley’s going to cut you out!”
Bick grinned. “I’ve seen history made. Uncle Bawley with his arms around a girl.”
“If I’d knowed it was so easy,” Uncle Bawley said ruefully, “I’d of started earlier.”
They piled into the waiting car, a glittering costly thing, elegant and sleek as Uncle Bawley’s boots, but even the women recognized it as a model of vintage make.
Bick surveyed this conveyance, opulent and stuffy as a dowager in black satin. “You still pushing this ice wagon, Uncle Bawley!”
“I never drive the thing myself, I keep it for visiting royalty, like you folks. Nothing the matter with it, it sits there in the garage, the boys have to take it out and exercise it every week to keep it from going stale on me, like a horse.”
Over the roads at a fearsome Texas speed. The air seemed a visible opalescent shimmer, there was about it a heady coolness, dry and bracing as a martini.
Leslie gazed about her. “I don’t wish to seem too annoying, but I am going to take a number of very deep breaths.” In the middle of one of these she stopped and pointed dramatically as they sped along. “They’re real mountains!”
“What did you think they were? Cream puffs?” Bick said.
“I mean they’re high. They’re really mountains.”
Bick produced statistics. “Baldy’s over seven thousand feet. Saw-tooth’s almost eight. That right, Uncle Bawley?”
“Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight,” Uncle Bawley said. “Only reason I remember is I always wondered why the fella that measured it couldn’t have throwed in the extra two feet, made it an even eight. Sounds higher that way. But no, he had to go and be honest.”
Seen from the road as they approached it from a far distance Holgado seemed a village in itself, a collection of adobe houses, whitewashed, squatting on the plain. But presently the main house took on dimensions, sprawling like the old Main House at Benedict in a series of rooms and patios. Here were the offices, the bedrooms, the dining room, the big living room whose waxed and shining tiles were strewn with Mexican rugs and the skins of mountain lions.
Though here, as at Benedict, stuffed animal heads complete with horns manes fangs and ferocious eyes glared down from the walls upon the beholder, Leslie could regard them impersonally. They seemed to suit this house and region. They made a proper background for this giant in the canvas working clothes of a rancher.
“You have some coffee on the train?” Uncle Bawley asked. “Breakfast is ready any time you are. You folks probably want to go to your rooms first—you girls specially.”
The thick-walled house was incredibly cool, no sunlight penetrated the deep window embrasures. Neat white bedrooms opened off a neat white gallery; neat white bathrooms, a haphazard Mexican chambermaid a precarious Mexican waitress, a neat black male cook in a very starched white apron and towering chef’s cap.
“Well!” Leslie exclaimed coming into the cool dining room and feeling strangely fresh and gay considering the journey and the hour. “You pioneer Benedicts certainly rough it. What’s that heavenly smell?”
“Ham and eggs and biscuits and steak and fried potatoes is my guess,” Bick said, “if I know Uncle Bawley. And probably sausage and pancakes and maybe chicken.”
“No, I mean an outside smell. I got it as I came along the veranda. A lovely scent, fresh and sweet.”
“We had mountain showers,” Uncle Bawley said. “That’s the smell of wet greasewood a
nd piñon and grass, it’s a nicer smell than any French perfume.”
In came the steaming breakfast dishes in fantastic profusion, they were ranged on the long side table against the dining-room wall.
“Oh, how lovely and lavish!” Leslie said. “That’s the way we serve breakfast at home.”
Vashti looked up from her plate. “You do! For just you and Bick!”
“Oh. I meant at home in Virginia.” A little too brightly she turned in confusion to meet Uncle Bawley’s eyes. “Do you think it’s the altitude makes me feel so gay?”
“Let’s say it’s that and the company,” Bick suggested. “And maybe Uncle Bawley’s coffee, it’s notorious, they say a pound to a cup is his rule.”
“No such thing, it only tastes like that because up here folks are already pepped up with the air,” Uncle Bawley said. “Down in the brush country you got to hop yourself up with coffee every few minutes to keep going.”
“By now, Leslie,” Adarene Morey explained, “you’ve probably noticed that West Texans look down on East Texans, and South Texans think nothing of the Panhandle crowd up north. Central Texas snoots the whole four corners, and the only time they all get together is when an outsider belittles the entire darned state.”
“That’s right,” Pinky agreed. “Take like my maw, she used to pick on all us kids, big and little, and we picked on each other, but let anybody outside say a word against any of us, why we were one and indivisible.”
Blandly Lew Morey inquired, “Bawley, you’re going to show Leslie and the girls your house, aren’t you?”
“You well know I ain’t.”
“But isn’t this your house?” Leslie asked.
“It’s my house. But I don’t live in it. I only visit here when I have company.”
“But where…?” Startled, she stared at him.
He pointed past the veranda to an adobe house perched on a little rise a hundred feet back from the main house. A rather shabby old structure, its veranda slightly off plumb, its windows curtainless.
“That’s the house I live in.”
“Oh, Uncle Bawley, do let me see it. You must have wonderful things in it.”
A shout went up. Bewildered, Leslie looked from one to the other. “Jordan, have I said something?”
“No, honey. I thought I’d told you that no woman has ever set foot in Uncle Bawley’s house, even to clean it.”
“Especially not to clean it,” Uncle Bawley corrected.
“But I never saw a man who looked more spick-and-span than you, Uncle Bawley,” Leslie argued.
“Only from head to foot. Not underfoot.”
She looked at the old man, she marveled at the pain which old wounds could continue to inflict.
It was more than five years later that Leslie finally saw this retreat in which old Bawley Benedict nursed his loneliness and unfulfillment; this welter of newspapers, saddles, boots, saddle soap, pipes, gourds, trophies, pans, massive silver punch bowls, empty peach tins, time-stained copies of the Breeder’s Gazette. Five years later, when Jordy was four and Luz three a female entered this sanctum. Leslie had taken the two children up to Holgado for the cool air and the altitude. The three-year-old Luz was missing one frantic afternoon. There was a galloping here and there by cowboys, a calling and a searching before they came upon her. She had trotted off in the absence of her Mexican nurse, she had made her way up the little hill to Uncle Bawley’s house, and there they found her fluttering and rummaging ecstatically amongst the heaped-up scraps and piles of waste like a sparrow in the dust of the road.
Now Leslie was never to forget these first ten days at Holgado. The clear lightness of the air exhilarated her after the humid heat of the Gulf coast country. The mountain showers seemed to bring up from the earth a sweet freshness, reticent but haunting.
“It smells like white freesias,” Leslie said. “People are always making a fuss about honeysuckle and roses and magnolias. Freesias have the most exquisite scent of all.”
“None of those around here,” Uncle Bawley said, “and I don’t know’s I’m familiar with that brand of flower. But we’ve got a blossom up here comes out in the spring. It’s called the Spanish dagger on account of the sharp spikes of the plant, they can go into you like a stiletto. It’s too late now, they’ve gone by, but the flower is white-petaled and mighty sweet. To my notion it’s about the prettiest flower there is anywhere.” He paused a moment. “If you can liken a person to a flower, why, I’d say that’s the one you’re most like.”
This compliment delighted her, she repeated it to Bick that first evening when, red-eyed and yawning, he came to their room where she already was sitting up in bed, reading. The house was bookless except for a shelf of technical volumes. These were ranged in the grim room that contained the big glass-doored gun cabinets. Shining and sinister in their ranks, these slim black-barreled items of ranch household equipment did not appear anachronistic to anyone but Leslie.
The books turned out to be gnawed-looking volumes on Spanish land grants in Texas. Intended as a baldly stated record of early land transactions in the region, they actually were, quite unconsciously, a cloak-and-dagger account of such skullduggery, adventure, and acquisitive ruthlessness as to make the reader reject the whole as mythical. Settlers, pioneers, frontiersmen used cupidity against ignorance, turned land into cash and live men into dead men with blithe ferocity. Leslie devoured them, fascinated, horrified.
“Jordan, what do you think? Uncle Bawley is turning into a ladies’ man. He told me about the Spanish dagger flower and he said he thought it was the loveliest flower in the world. And then—pardon my pointing—he said I was like the flower. How’s that for a misogynist!”
“Uh-huh. He meant spikes and all, I suppose?”
Spiritedly she said, “I hope so. Who wants to be merely white and sweet, like a blanc mange!”
The first evening after the very good dinner, and on each succeeding evening, the four men gathered into the tightest of knots in one corner of the great living room. Their talk was low-voiced but their tone had the timbre of intensity. Occasionally a word wafted itself over to the somewhat looser knot formed by the three semi-deserted women. Election…Commissioner…tax…district…oil…Congress…Gomez…precinct…
Vashti sometimes played a defeated game of solitaire through which she chattered unceasingly. “Jack on the queen ten on the jack I hope it’s a girl because they’re so cute to fix up with pink and hair ribbons where’s that nine for goodness’ sakes but a course Pa and Mott they’re yelling it’s got to be a boy whee there’s that ol’ nine——”
Adarene was doing a gros point chair tapestry, her basket of brilliant-hued wools made a gay splash of color in the fire-lighted room. After three evenings of this Leslie drifted casually across the room and sat down on the couch beside Bick.
Conversation ceased.
“Aren’t you men being a bit too cozy?”
Bick’s left ear, she noticed, was a brighter pink than usual. “This is ranch stuff, Leslie. Business.”
“How fascinating! I’ll listen. And learn a lot.”
Lew Morey leaned toward her, he patted her knee in a strangely paternal gesture for a man of his years. “Now now you don’t want to fret your head about such talk.”
Suddenly she saw him clear. The bland almost expressionless face, unlined, quiet. There leaped into her mind a line she had read in a newspaper story about a frightfully rich oil man from the East. He had come to Oklahoma in the early oil days of that fantastic commonwealth, he had made his brisk millions, he had lost them almost as briskly. “They cleaned me,” he had said in the newspaper account. “The still-faced men. They got to me.”
The still-faced men. Bland. Nerveless. Quietly genial. Lucius Morey.
“We’re fixing it so that you girls can have all those doo-dads you’re always buying,” Pinky Snyth explained, his rosy face creasing into a placating smile—a smile such as one would bestow upon an annoying and meddlesome brat. “All that stuf
f you’re getting for that new house of yours. How d’you think poor ol’ Bick’s going to pay for all that unless we figger out!”
The cow hand. The shrewd pink-cheeked curly-headed little gimlet. Turned cattle king.
Leslie settled back as for a long stay. “How right you are! I ought to know. Here I am, spending all that money without realizing how Jordan has to plan and—and devise—to get it. So now you just go on talking and I’ll listen as quiet as a mouse—though I must say I think mice are awfully noisy, squeaking and scuttering around——”
Bick’s voice was flat and hard. “This isn’t only business. It’s politics. Men’s stuff.”
“But darling, I was brought up on politics. You lads talk as if you hadn’t heard that women have the vote. To us Washington was as next-door as Benedict is here. We were in and out like whippets. And Jordan, you know our house was crammed with political talk and career men and striped trousers and national and international what not. Go on. Talk. I love it.”
They were absolutely dumb. Uncle Bawley broke the silence. “My, that’s a pretty dress you’re wearing, Leslie.”
In disappointment she looked at him. “You too, Uncle Bawley!”
The gaze of the handsome old wreck of a giant met hers and to her amazement his faded blue eyes suddenly were deeply blue-black with the burning intensity of a young male in love.
Leslie stood up. She was furious she was confused. “You men ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs and living in caves. You date back a hundred thousand years. Politics! What’s so dirty about your politics that I can’t hear it! Gomez! Jett Rink! Gill Dace! And all of you. Smiling and conniving——”
Bick Benedict rose, he seemed to tower above her. “Leslie, you’re not well——”
“I am well! I’m well in body and I’m well in mind. But mildew is going to set in. I can feel it. That slimy white sticky stuff that creeps into all the corners and closets down there unless you open the doors and windows and let the sun in.”
Feeling rather triumphant though strangely shaky she walked across the room to where the two women sat like figures, she thought, in the fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty. Vashti’s right hand was suspended in mid-air, a playing card held in her fingers. Her mouth was open, her eyes very round. Adarene’s needle was poised motionless above her embroidery frame.
