Titans

by Leila Meacham

  As Nathan became acquainted with the pattern of Trevor Waverling’s daily schedule (every Wednesday after work, for instance, he took off for his gym), he realized his father had not bought the horse to avoid close contact with him in the coach but to give him the freedom to come and go without having to depend on him for transportation. Trevor actually tried to arrange his meetings and activities to give them a chance to ride together so they could talk business.

  Nathan had to admit that in the three weeks he’d lived under his father’s roof—his grandmother’s roof—there was not much about his new life that he did not enjoy other than his natural reservation about becoming too trusting of it. He was especially enjoying his budding friendship with Benjy, whose residence in the carriage house apartment gave them opportunities to spend time together.

  “How did you and my father meet?” he asked the Irishman one day.

  “Well, now, me lad, therein lies a story.”

  “I’m interested in hearing it,” Nathan said.

  August twelfth, 1890, it was, Benjy said. He, an immigrant, had hopped a train from New York down to Texas without benefit of a ticket. New York City was dirty, crowded, polluted, and unkind to Irish Catholics. He wanted to live where there was space and clean air and a bloke could get a good start in life without people looking down their noses at him, and Texas was the place, so he’d heard. He didn’t know to what city the train was headed. He just knew that when it got to Texas, he’d jump off at a stop that looked like it offered good job possibilities. That spot happened to be thirty yards from the front door of Waverling Tools, only he didn’t have time to notice because he was jumped by two railroad peelers twice his size wielding billy clubs. He fought back but he was overpowered, and he figured he’d be meeting his mam and da in the great hereafter if the knacking went on much longer. Then all of a sudden the blighters were off him, and he was looking up through a film of blood and snot and tears into the face of Trevor Waverling. The man offered a hand. Help you up? he said and pulled him to his feet.

  “I could hardly stand, and me head rung like a bell, and for a few seconds I thought I had died and gone someplace where men were clean-shaven and dressed in nice suits like Mr. Waverling was wearing,” Benjy told Nathan. “But no, he was real and I was alive, and the peelers were out cold. ‘Better get out of here before they come to,’ he says to me, and I look around as if a place might exist where I could disappear. That’s when Mr. Waverling told me to follow him, and I’ve been doing it ever since—wherever he wants to go.”

  “Quite a story,” Nathan had said. “I guess the peelers met his boxer’s fists.”

  “Aye. The man is a formidable fighter. You should see him in the ring.”

  “Does he still fight?”

  “Not in competitions anymore, but that don’t mean his hobnails are not in good order. I owe the man me life, me livelihood, me home, and… me family, Nathan. I’d do anything for your da and his mam and his little inion. Have not a doubt about that.”

  Nathan didn’t. Benjy’s loyalty to Trevor Waverling was rock solid. The Irishman had filled in one picture for Nathan, but it wasn’t likely he’d answer the question he most wanted to ask. Did Benjy know how, where, and why Jordan Waverling had died, and did he believe that his father had a hand in his death?

  Nathan bit into his sandwich and, with his usual amusement, observed Benjy carefully remove the ham from his two slices of bread, lay it on the tinfoil wrapper, and place the bread, lettuce, cheese, and pickles in a row beside it. Next he set out in order a boiled egg, an apple, and a cookie.

  “Nay, lad, this is not for you,” the coachman said to Zak, whose nose was sniffing closer to the ceremonial layout. “Now, don’t bother me.” He pushed the dog away and began to eat, first the ham and lettuce, then the bread; afterward, the pickles and boiled egg, followed by the apple and cheese, with the cookie as the finish to the meal. “Sandwiches go farther if you take them apart and eat the fillings separately as courses,” Benjy maintained. “They stretch further that way than if you eat them as a package.”

  “I guess that works if your stomach doesn’t mind waiting,” Nathan said.

  A tall, well-muscled man with a dashing air about him approached carrying a lunch pail. Nathan recognized him as the ironmonger his father had recently hired. He usually ate his sandwich while fiddling at his drafting table. No one knew much about him except that he was a bachelor and a wizard with metals. The man kept to himself and did not socialize, so Nathan had heard, much to the chagrin of the secretary when she wasn’t flirting with him. “Mind sharing your spot?” the newcomer said.

  “Not at all,” Nathan said, moving over to give the man room in the shade of the oak tree. He held out his hand. “We’ve only met once, Daniel. In case you don’t remember, I’m Nathan Holloway.”

  “Oh, I remember.” The newcomer shook his hand. “Holloway? I thought you were the boss’s son?”

  “I am. I go by my stepfather’s name.”

  Daniel Lane nodded. “I had one of those, but I wasn’t too keen to hold on to his name. I shed it quick as I shed him. I go by my mother’s, not that it was much better to be proud of.”

  “You know Benjy?” Nathan said. The man was remarkably handsome, but there was a hard bitterness about him. Nathan put him roughly in his late twenties.

  “The boss’s driver,” Daniel clarified Benjy’s place in the hierarchy. “Not had the pleasure. How’d do.”

  “How’d do,” Benjy said. “Where do ye hail from?”

  “Everywhere, but Fort Worth most recently. I quit my job as a smithy’s helper over there. Atmosphere got a little… stifling.”

  Nathan bit into his apple. “How do you find the atmosphere here?”

  “More to my liking. It’s nice to be appreciated and paid what I deserve, not to mention respected.”

  “Sounds like ye got an ax to grind, if ye’ll forgive the observation and the pun,” Benjy said.

  A grin at Benjy’s humor improved the resentful slope of Daniel’s mouth. “You could say that. I just need time and a little luck to get my own back.”

  “And what would your own be, if you don’t mind my asking,” Nathan said.

  “I don’t, since I brought up the subject,” Daniel replied. “A woman. My own is a woman taken away from me because her brother didn’t think I was good enough to be in her company. I intend to change his opinion about that.”

  “Well, good luck to you,” Nathan said, packing away tinfoil and apple cores. “Let’s hope she’ll be waiting should you succeed.”

  “Oh, she’ll be waiting,” Daniel said.

  “How can ye be so sure?” Benjy asked.

  “Because nobody else will have her,” Daniel answered. “Well, there’s the gong. I better get back to work. I got a project I’m working on that I hope will impress the boss. Nice meeting you gents. See you around.”

  As Daniel walked away, Benjy mused, “For somebody known for hardly saying a word to anybody, me thinks that man talks too much.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After two weeks, the advertisement of the farm for sale near Gainesville no longer appeared in the Dallas Herald. The last of April, Nathan received a letter from Leon telling him that Millicent had put the farm on the market right after he left and that it had sold almost immediately. They would be moving to Gainesville during May and be settled in when Randolph graduated from high school in June. Leon knew the news would be as heartbreaking for Nathan as it was for him. He had no idea what he would do as an idle city dweller. The new owner would take possession of the farm at the end of June, but not entirely to grow wheat, a fact that wasn’t known until after Millicent had signed the contract.

  Here he had to pause, Leon said, to give his mother just due. Early on, Millicent had been approached by a landman who wanted to lease a number of acres to drill for petroleum, but thank God his mutton-headed wife had refused. She didn’t want her acres destroyed like other cropland in the Oklahoma Territory th
at had been leased to oil companies. She owed that to her folks and to her husband and to Nathan. Yes, Nathan, she included you, Leon wrote. Along came Mr. Burton (the new owner) and offered her twice the asking price if she included the mineral rights. Leon had insisted that Millicent keep them, but the offer was too tempting and his mother was eager to sell, especially after the man sweet-talked her into believing that he was a farmer first and foremost. It was only after she’d signed the sale papers that they learned he was a representative of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Part of the agreement, Leon went on, was that the Holloways would remain on the homestead until the end of June so they could bring in a final harvest and have time to sell off their equipment. Millicent had already bought them a place in Gainesville, the big, white-columned, two-story house she’d always admired. Leon didn’t doubt that her decision to sell the farm was made when the owner of the house—a prominent lawyer—died and his home came on the market. Nathan was not to worry about Daisy’s fate. She’d have a good home with their neighbor, who had agreed to buy her. Would Nathan be coming to Randolph’s high school graduation the end of June? His brother had been named valedictorian of his class.

  Nathan, sitting in a rocker on the front porch of his grandmother’s town house, slowly folded the letter and tightly squeezed shut his eyes to hold in his sorrow. Recently, he had gone with Trevor to check out an oil drilling site on a cotton farm located near Nacogdoches in East Texas. The independent oil driller had bought his rig and drilling equipment from Waverling Tools. They arrived just in time to hear a noise that sounded like an oncoming freight train and to witness men hurriedly scatter from the vicinity of the latticework derrick. Within minutes, a horrific explosion shook the earth, and then, bug-eyed, their hands over their ears to save their hearing, they had watched in awe as an eruption of a liquid black as tar shot out of the top of the derrick a hundred feet into the air and spewed in all directions. The crew, having barely escaped the blast with their lives, danced and hollered and congratulated themselves on “bringing in a gusher.” Trevor had looked at the escape of free-flowing oil and said, Before I get fully into the business, I’ve got to come up with a cap to prevent this kind of blowout. A damned shame to waste that much oil before the hole is plugged.

  Nathan had stood back from the celebration. He had looked at the rows of healthy, stalwart cotton plants being drowned under hundreds of barrels of oil and felt sick to his stomach. While the men were dancing under the rain of “black gold,” his heart had sunk at the fruits of the farmer’s labor ground under by roads and draft animals and freight wagon wheels, the soil contaminated by the seepage from oil tanks and cement and mud-mixing troughs and the trash of cast-off equipment left to rust where it was tossed, the air polluted by flares from steel pipes erected to burn off smelly waste gas. The offal of oil production, Nathan had termed the detritus right then and there.

  The same sickness curled his insides now as he imagined the golden acres of the Barrows farm laid to waste by a river of black crude like he’d observed flooding the fields that day, and he couldn’t bear to think of the desecration of the underground spring and destruction to livestock, wildlife, and woods if an oil rig caught fire. A drilling site required two acres. Even if oil wasn’t discovered, those two acres would be damaged beyond reclaim for at least a generation, if not forever.

  His grandmother’s two-wheeled trap came into view from up the street. Mavis had gone with Rebecca to a birthday party given for one of her granddaughter’s friends, if Rebecca could be said to have friends. They waved gaily at Nathan in his favorite reading spot on Saturday afternoons, Scat and Zak lying on the porch floor beside him. Trevor was at his gym. In the one month Nathan had lived in the house, his father had never asked him to accompany him to his boxing workouts on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In the open-topped carriage, his grandmother and sister looked like garden flowers in their party dresses, Mavis a faded rose in her pink frock, Rebecca, with her long, noodle-thin arms flailing, a spider lily in her white-and-yellow creation.

  Benjy turned the trap into the driveway, and presently “the girls,” as Trevor called them, came from around the house to join him on the porch. Benjy, of course, had driven on to put away the carriage and have his afternoon tea in the kitchen with Lenora.

  “Ah, Nathan, I see you’ve had a letter from home,” Mavis said, tapping up the curved brick steps. The floating gossamer layers of her pink frock suggested the delicacy of a china tea cup.

  “Let me see! Let me see!” Rebecca chimed, hopping up and down.

  “No, Rebecca, dear. The letter belongs to Nathan,” Mavis said. “Sit there on the swing, please.”

  “No! No! I want to see the letter!” Rebecca shrieked.

  “Zak,” Nathan ordered quietly, and the dog got up and went to nose Rebecca’s hand.

  Instantly, the little girl diverted her attention to the dog. “Zak…” she cooed, stroking the shepherd’s head. Obediently, she sat down on the swing, Zak on his haunches before her, his muzzle on her lap.

  “Extraordinary,” Mavis marveled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You and Zak are a godsend to us, Nathan. Make no mistake about that. I hope nothing was in the letter to upset you.”

  His grandmother was amazingly intuitive. Nathan’s siblings had complained that he was hard to read. Impassive, Randolph had described him. If you were an Indian, your name would be Stone Face, he’d once told him. How had Mavis Waverling sensed his sadness, and how could she have known the letter was from a member of his family? But then, who else would be writing to him? Nathan did not know how much Trevor had told his grandmother of Millicent Holloway. It would have been dense of him to divulge his mother’s claim that Nathan was the product of rape. That was a card no man would lay on the table before his mother, especially one prepared to believe the worst of her son.

  “My mother has sold our farm to an oil producer,” Nathan said. “She and my stepfather are moving into town.”

  “And that upsets you?”

  “That upsets me. Acres could be ruined for years to come from the drilling, even if no oil is found.”

  “You had hoped to buy the farm someday?”

  Nathan said in surprise, “Your son told you?”

  “There’s little he hasn’t told me about you. I insisted.”

  His grandmother’s gaze held no knowing light, so Nathan assumed Trevor had allowed her to remain ignorant of his mother’s charge of rape. So far, she’d regaled him with tales of his grandfather and the early days of Dallas and introduced him to the light side of Jordan Waverling from her memories, but she had not told him the story she’d promised—or threatened—to reveal in “another private moment.” Mystery surrounds his death to this day, he remembered her saying in speaking of her late son, but Nathan thought that perhaps Mavis Waverling had changed her mind about that private moment because she did not want her grandson to think ill of his father. Since he’d come to live among them, Nathan could detect some warming toward Trevor. All that his grandmother had told Nathan about Jordan’s dark side was that his moods were subject to pendulum swings. Rebecca might have inherited a strain of her uncle’s sometimes erratic behavior, she said, but he was never violent or brutal when in the grip of a bout. No, Mavis said, Jordan’s emotional downturns took more the form of depression. That was why he loved the river so. The water soothed him. “It was ironical that the place where he was most at peace should claim his life,” she’d said. The statement was the closest his grandmother had ever come to opening up about Jordan’s death.

  Suddenly, Rebecca stood. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” she recited.

  Mavis interpreted. “That’s one of her favorite poems. John Masefield was Jordan’s favorite poet. Rebecca means she wants to go down to the riverbank. I suppose because it holds fond memories of her and her uncle. They were very close. He’d take her swimming and fishing down a
t the pier, and they’d recite poetry to each other. Her love for it comes from his passion for rhyme. Would you mind going with her, Nathan? We never let her venture down there alone.”

  Nathan felt an eerie chill. It was as if Rebecca had been reading his thoughts about her uncle. “Zak and I will be honored,” he said. He slipped the letter into the book he’d been reading and took Rebecca’s hand.

  “Don’t be gone long, Nathan,” Mavis said. “Hurry back for tea before Trevor gets home. You and I don’t often have a chance to speak alone together. And, Rebecca, take care not to soil your dress.”

  Going down the steps, Nathan wondered at the uncanny perception these relatives of his seemed to possess. Had his grandmother read his wonderings about Jordan as well? When he returned, was he to be treated to one of those “private moments” in which she would reveal at last why she suspected her younger son of killing his brother? Had she figured out that what was once a matter of curiosity had become a state of deep concern to her grandson?

  After Nathan shut the yard gate behind them, Rebecca, dark locks bouncing about her shoulders, skipped down to the bank of the wide flow of the Trinity River, Zak leaping beside her. The stretch of manicured grassland that sloped down to the water’s edge was part of his grandmother’s property and provided a place where Nathan could throw Zak a ball. High hedges on either side separated it from the neighbors’ residences. A small dock jutted out into the water. “Watch yourself, Rebecca!” Nathan called as his half sister hopped onto the wooden planks, Zak following. “Don’t get too close to the edge.”

  “I won’t,” she called back, startling Nathan. It was rare to hear a normal response from the child. She spoke in riddles and rhymes, shut tight in her own world of poetry and coloring books and dolls and make-believe friends. She seemed to desire no company but that of her grandmother, Lenora, and Benjy, and now Nathan and Zak. Occasionally, Nathan had seen her dark eyes clear of their unfocused gaze and center on what was going on around her. Such moments raised goose bumps. It was like seeing a doll suddenly spark to life.