by Edna Ferber
“Stop this bellering I say or I’ll arrest the lot of you and I can do it. I’m a State Ranger and I’m supposed to keep law and order and I’m going to…. Sit down!…Now then. I’m sorry, Jurden, but we got to put this to a vote. And what the vote says, goes. That’s the law. That’s the rule of this family and always has been…. Roady, pass those slips…. Bowie, you’ll collect…. You all get out your big gold fountain pens and I hope they leak all over you for a bunch of stampeding maverick Benedicts. Now vote!”
The vote stood two to twenty-five. That night Uncle Bawley took off for Holgado and the high clear mountain air. Within three days there was not one Benedict left in the cavernous walls of the Big House.
Leslie Benedict found herself in the fantastic position of a wife who tries to convince her husband that a few million dollars cannot injure him.
“You’ll go on with your own work just the same. Better. It won’t affect the actual ranch. You’ll be free of their complaints now.”
“Rink.” Bitterness twisted his mouth as he spoke the name. “Jett Rink owning rights to Reata.”
“He doesn’t. He just holds a lease on a tiny bit of it. Besides you’ve told me yourself the Azabache Company isn’t only Jett Rink. It’s a lot of other people. Some of them are people you know well.”
“He controls it.”
“You’ll never need to deal with him. Think of the things you can do now!” She paused a moment. “I don’t mean only the things you’re interested in. They’re wonderful but I mean—couldn’t we use some of it maybe for things like—necessary things, I mean, like new houses for the ranch people and perhaps the start of a decent hospital and even a school where they’re not separated—a school that isn’t just Mexican or just——Oh, Jordan, how exciting that would be!”
He was not listening, he did not even consciously hear her.
“Nobody’s ever set foot on Benedict land except to produce better stock and more of it. You’re not a Texan. You’re not a Benedict. You don’t understand.”
“I’m not a Texan and I’m not a Benedict except by marriage. I do understand because I love you. It embarrasses you to hear me say that after all these years. I’m trying to tell you that if there’s got to be all that crazy money then use some of it for the good of the world. And I don’t mean only your world. Reata.”
“Uh-huh. You won’t be so smug when you see Benedict swarming with a pack of greasy tool dressers and drillers and swampers and truckers. It’s going to be hell. Pinky Snyth was talking about it last night. Vashti’s leased a piece of the Double B to Azabache.”
“Well, there you are! You needn’t feel so upset.”
“The whole country’s going to stink of oil. Do you know what else Pinky said! He and Vashti are talking of building in town—Viento or even Hermoso—moving to town and the family only coming out to the ranch week ends and holidays. Like some damned Long Island setup.”
“Vashti might like that. I’m sure the twins would.”
“Yes. Maybe you would too. H’m? Nice slick house in town? Azalea garden, nice little back yard, people in for cocktails and Patroness of the Hermoso Symphony and the Little Theatre in the Round—Square—Zigzag—or whatever the goddamned fashion is. We could use these two three million acres for picnic grounds and so on.”
“Jordan my darling. Jordan. Don’t be like that.”
She hesitated a moment. She took a deep breath. Now for it. “You know, we don’t exactly have to have millions of acres in order to live—you and the children and I. It’s killing you—I mean it’s too much. Why can’t we have a few thousand acres—how Texas that sounds! But anyway—why can’t we have a ranch of our own, smallish, where you could breed your own wonderful——”
The blue eyes were agate. “I’ve lived on Reata all my life. I’m going to live here till I die. Nothing on it is going to change.”
“Everything in the world changes every minute.”
“Reata’s just going to improve. Not change.”
So now the stink of oil hung heavy in the Texas air. It penetrated the houses the gardens the motorcars the trains passing through towns and cities. It hung over the plains the desert the range; the Mexican shacks the Negro cabins. It haunted Reata. Giant rigs straddled the Gulf of Mexico waters. Platoons of metal and wood marched like Martians down the coast across the plateaus through the brush country. Only when you were soaring in an airplane fifteen thousand feet above the oil-soaked earth were your nostrils free of it. Azabache oil money poured into Reata. Reata produced two commodities for which the whole world was screaming. Beef. Oil. Beef. Oil. Only steel was lacking. Too bad we haven’t got steel, Texas said. But then, after that Sunday morning in December even the voice of the most voracious was somewhat quieted.
With terrible suddenness young male faces vanished from the streets of Benedict. White faces black faces brown faces. Bob Dietz was off. The kids in the Red Front Market. The Beezer boys. High. Low. Rich. Poor. The Mexican boys around Garza’s in Nopal and the slim sleek boys at the Hake in Viento and even the shifting population that moved with the crops and the seasons—all, all became units in a new world of canvas. Texas was used to khaki-colored clothes, but these garments were not the tan canvas and the high-heeled boots and the brush jackets of the range and plains. This was khaki with a difference.
Young Jordy Benedict at Harvard was summoned home to Reata.
“You’re needed here on Reata,” Bick said tersely. “Beef to feed the world. That’s the important thing.”
“I can’t stay here now.”
“Yes you will. Any one of ten million kids can sit at a desk in Washington. Or shoot a German. Producing beef here on Reata is the constructive patriotic thing for you to do. You’re just being hysterical.”
“I’ll go back to school. Or I’ll be drafted. I won’t stay here.”
“No draft board will take you. I can fix that all right anywhere. And I won’t send you a cent if you go back to Harvard.”
The two men were talking in Bick’s office. The boy quiet, pale. The older man glaring, red-faced. Casually, Leslie strolled in and sat down.
Brusquely Bick said, “We’re talking.”
“I’m listening. I’ve been listening outside the door so I may as well come in.” Jordy glanced at her and smiled a little. It made a startling change in the somber young face. “Jordy, you look more like your Grandpa Lynnton every day.”
As if this were a cue Jordy relaxed in his chair, his eyes as he looked at his father now were steady. “When I’m through at Harvard I’m going on to Columbia P. and S.”
“P. and S.?” Bick repeated dully.
“Physicians and Surgeons. School. We need doctors as much as beef. That’s why I’m going on instead of in. I haven’t used any of the money you’ve sent me all this time. And thanks, Papa. Your money is all in the bank there in Boston, waiting for you. I couldn’t use it because you didn’t know about me.”
Bick Benedict turned with a curiously slow movement of his head to look at his wife. “Then you must have been sending him your money.”
“Jordan dear, don’t go on like a father in a melodrama. I haven’t any money. You know that. Everyone on Reata is short of money except the cows.”
“Who then?” He stood up. “Who then?” A dreadful suspicion showed in his face. “Not…!”
She came to him. “It’s Uncle Bawley. And I asked him. So don’t blame him for it.”
Slowly he said, “That old turtle.” Then, “The three of you, huh?”
Jordy stood up. “Papa, you know I never was any good around here. I never will be. Any man on Reata can do the job better than I ever could.”
“That’s right,” Jordan said. “You never were any good. You never will be. You’re all alike, you kids today, white and Mexican, you or Angel Obregon. No damn good.”
“Angel’s fine,” Leslie said matter-of-factly. “I saw him today in Benedict, he looked wonderful in his uniform. Jordy, Angel’s going to be married Tuesday
. Did you know that?”
“Yes. I’m staying for the wedding.”
“Oh, you’re staying for the wedding?” Bick repeated, cruelly mimicking his son just a little, even to the stammer. “Well, that’s big of you! That’s a concession to Reata, all right.” He turned the cold contemptuous eyes on Leslie. “You’ve been years at this. Twenty years. Satisfied?”
Her tone her manner were as matter-of-fact and good-natured as his aspect was tragic. “Watch that arithmetic. Jordy going to be twenty-one pretty soon.”
Bick had been standing. Now he sat again rather heavily at his desk. He did not look at them. “That’s right. We were going to have a party. Big party.”
“Not in wartime, Jordan.”
He looked up at his son. “I hadn’t forgotten, it just slipped my mind. You’ll be coming into your Reata shares. You don’t mind living off Reata even if you don’t want to live on it, huh?”
Quietly Jordy said, “They’ll see me through. I’ve thought about that. I’ve got as much right to them as Roady’s kids, or Bowie’s or Aunt Maudie’s.”
Bick Benedict picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk, shuffled them, put them down. “Doctor, h’m? New York, I suppose.”
“Now Jordan!” Leslie protested. “You know Jordy loves Texas as much as you do. In another way, perhaps.”
“You coming on putting old Doctor Tom out of business, maybe.”
“I think I’m going to have a chance to work with Guerra in Vientecito when the war’s over. If he’s lucky enough to come back in one piece.”
“Guerra! You don’t mean—why, he’s——”
“Rubén Guerra. His practice is all Mexican, of course. Uh—look. There’s something else I’d like to talk to you and Mama about. I’m afraid you won’t like this either.”
“I’ve had about enough for just now,” Bick said, and turned back to his desk and the aimless shuffling of papers. “Tell your life plans to your buddies, why don’t you! Doctor Guerra——”
“He’s busy in Europe just now.”
“Well, Angel Obregon. Or Polo.” He was racked with bitterness and disappointment.
“All right, Papa. I will.”
27
Young Angel Obregon did indeed look fine in his uniform. Uniforms were nothing novel to Angel after his tenure in the skin-tight mess jacket and the slim pants, the braid and gold buttons of the Hake Hotel bellboy. But this uniform he wore with a difference. His movements about the vast marble columns of the Hake lobby had been devious and slithering as a seal’s. Now, in the plain khaki of a private, he swaggered. Months of camp training had filled him out, he was broader in the shoulder, bigger across the chest. He always had had, like his forebears, the slim flanks and the small waist of the horseman.
“One of those Pacific places,” he said. “I bet. That’s where they’re shipping all us Mex—all us Latin Americans, they say we’re used to the hot climate, they’re nuts. Vince Castenado came home with malaria, he says it’s all jungle.”
Half of Benedict and practically all of Nopal were invited to the wedding. Angel was marrying Marita Rivas, one of the daughters of Dimodeo. A middle-aged husband and father now Dimodeo Rivas, head of the clipping, snipping, nurturing, spraying, watering, planting group of men who tended the flowers, the precarious lawns, the rare transplanted trees, the walks the roads, the new swimming pool—the whole of the landscaping around the Big House and the Main House.
Of course young Angel had furnished the trousseau according to custom. The importance of Marita’s marriage would be gauged by the display of her gowns and her bridal dress, at the boda—the wedding feast.
“We’ll have to go,” Bick said heavily, grumpily. “Angel’s son. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t. I’m only going because of his father.”
“Why Jordan, I wouldn’t miss it! Angel! He was the first Reata baby I saw. The morning after I came here. He wet all over one of my trousseau dresses. And now we’ll see the trousseau dresses he’s got for his bride. I have to laugh when I think of those long black braids he used to wear.”
“You don’t see him wearing any hair ribbons now.”
Everyone was there, from the Benedicts of Reata to Fidel Gomez the coyote from Nopal. Fidel was a personage now, he no longer needed to bother about exploiting his own people. Fidel Gomez, too, had been touched by the magic wand of the good fairy, Oil. His run-down patch of mesquite land outside Nopal now hummed and thumped with the activities of the men and machinery that brought the rich black liquid out of the earth.
There was the bridal ceremony, full of pomp and ritual, and the bride in white satin with pearl beads and wax orange blossoms. The dress was later to be hung properly in the best room for all to see, and never to be worn again. A high platform had been built outside Dimodeo’s house. After the church ceremony the bride appeared on this in each of the seven dresses of her bridal trousseau, so that all should see what a fine and openhanded husband her Angel Obregon was. The girls eyed her with envy and the men looked at her and at the proud Angel and thought, Well, a lot of good those dresses and that pretty little chavala will do you when you are sweating in the islands of the South Pacific. What a tontería! But Marita walked proudly along the platform.
Leslie had seen all this before at many ranch weddings but she was as gay and exhilarated as though she never before had known the ceremony of the boda.
“This is the kind of thing I love about Texas. Everyone here and everyone happy and everyone neighbors. It’s perfect.” She squeezed Bick’s arm, she smiled, she met a hundred outstretched hands.
“They’d be a hell of a lot better off if they’d save their dough and get married quietly now in wartime,” Bick said. “But they’re all the same. Marita’ll be pregnant tomorrow and have her first in nine months flat.”
“Like me,” said Leslie, “darling. When we were married.”
Young Angel had had a few drinks of tequila. “Fix ’em over there quick, and I come home to Marita and a little Angel—only we don’t call him Angel, that is a no-good name for a man.”
The tables were spread out of doors, long planks on wooden standards, and there was vast eating and drinking, and laughing and talking and the singing of corridos especially written for the occasion, telling of Angel’s prowess and potency and Marita’s beauty and accomplishments, and the blissful future that lay ahead of them. Luzita, away at school, would have loved it, Leslie reflected. She would write her all about it. Just look at Jordy. He seemed to be having a wonderful time, not shy and withheld as he so often was. She called Bick’s attention to Jordy.
“Look at Jordy! He’s having a high time. I was afraid he’d feel—uh—that he would be upset, seeing Angel in uniform. Going, I mean, so soon. But look at him!”
“Mm.” Bick stared down the long table at his son seated next to a pretty young Mexican girl and looking into her eyes. “He’s being a shade too gallant, isn’t he, to that little what’s-her-name—Polo’s granddaughter isn’t it?”
“Don’t be feudal. She’s a decent nice little girl and her name is Juana. Jordy’s being polite and she loves it.”
A fine feast. Barbecued beef and beans. The great wedding caque was the favorite feast cake called color de rosa. It was made of a dough tinted with pink vegetable coloring, or colored with red crepe paper soaked in water, the water mixed with the cake dough, very tasty. There was pan de polvo, little round cakes with a hole in the middle, shaped with the hand, delectably sugary and grainy. There were buñuelos, rolled paper-thin and big as the big frying pan in which they had hissed in deep fat. Delicious with the strong hot coffee. There was beer, there was tequila, there was mescal. A real boda, and no mistake.
So Angel and Marita looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and danced, and behaved like proper young Mexicans newly married. Everyone drank to Angel’s return, unharmed, to Benedict. No one knew that Angel would return from the South Pacific, sure enough, landing in California after the close of the great Second World War, and
coming straight back to Benedict. But he came home as bits and shreds of cloth and bone in a box. He came home a hero, his picture was in the papers, he had proved himself a tough hombre sure enough there in those faraway sweating islands. So tough that they had given him the highest honor a tough hombre can have—the Congressional Medal of Honor. The citation had been quite interesting. Private First Class Angel Obregon…conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity, above and beyond the call of duty…undaunted…miraculously reaching the position…climbed to the top…heroic conduct…saved the lives of many comrades…overwhelming odds…
It made fine reading. And the widowed Marita and old Angel Obregon and his wife and his ancient grandmother all knew that there must be a funeral befitting the conduct of the bits that lay heaped in the flag-draped box. But the undertaker in Benedict—Funeral Director he now was called—said that naturally he could not handle the funeral of a Mexican. Old Angel, a man of spirit, said that his son was an American; and that there had been Mexicans in Texas when Christopher Columbus landed on the continent of North America. But the Funeral Director—Waldo Shute his name was—big fellow—said Angel should take the box to Nopal, why not? Someone—there were people who said it might have been Leslie Benedict—thought this was not quite right. Talk got around, it reached a busy man who was President of the United States of America way up north in Washington, D.C. So he had the flag-draped box, weary now of its travels, brought to Washington and buried in the cemetery reserved for great heroes, at Arlington. Marita wished that it could have been nearer Benedict, so that she might visit her husband’s grave. But she was content, really. And she had named the infant Angel, after all, in spite of the other Angel’s objections that day of the wedding.
None of this the guests could know now as they laughed and danced and ate and sang, and the small children screeched and ran and darted under the tables and gobbled bits of cake.
The music of the guitarras grew louder, more resonant. “Come along home now, honey,” Bick said. “We can go now. I’ve had enough of this and so have you.”
