19

It was darker than night when the Mexican maid brought the morning coffee to their room. But all Holgado was astir. Hoofbeats. The deep reverberations of powerful motor vehicles, the sound intensified on the thin mountain air. The hiss and drum of Spanish spoken along the corridors. The tap-tap of men’s boot heels, the clink of spurs. The scampering feet of Mexican servitude—a sound that Leslie found irksome. “They don’t walk. They run. On their heels. I should think it would shatter their gizzards.” But the other Texas morning sounds she loved…. Sí sí señor…Momento señora…Las botas, sí…Hace mucho frío…

Bick emerged from the bathroom fully dressed. Tiptoeing. He peered toward her bed, the bathroom light behind him.

“I’m awake.”

“Vashti’s complaining about the cold.”

“It’s heaven.”

Last night’s quarrel was cast aside like a soiled garment discarded in the fresh new day. “If we’re going to make that fool sunrise breakfast of Bawley’s. Even you girls can’t make the sun wait while you dress.”

She threw aside the covers, sat a moment hugging her shoulders. “I’ll be dressed in fifteen minutes. I must say I’d like sunrises just as well if they could run them later in the morning.”

“I don’t know—is this ride up the trail good for you now? How about you girls taking a car instead? We boys can get a head start riding.”

“The first time I met you you bragged that your mother practically produced you on horseback.”

“She was a Texan.”

“Even for Texans the equipment is, I believe, standard.”

He grinned. “See you later. I’m going down to the corral. I’ll pick a gentled one for you.”

She was still slim and almost boyish in her riding clothes. As she came along the veranda she could hear Uncle Bawley’s voice from the direction of the dining room, there was a sharp edge to his usual tone of almost caressing gentleness. “No, I don’t want any cook along, I’m going to do the cooking myself. How about a couple dozen those Mexican quail, I’ll rig up an asador over the fire, they’ll make good breakfast eating, with bacon.”

Vashti and Adarene were not yet down. It was still dark, the lights shone everywhere about the place. In her hand she carried the book on Spanish land grants, she had finished it and now she would tuck it back into the sparse shelf in the gun room just off the patio. She opened the door, peered into the grim unlighted room, her hand groping for the electric switch. A sound, a little quick startled sound. She hesitated. Waited. Silence. But there was a sense of presence there, of a something that held its breath and waited. Oh, pooh, a mouse. Her fingers found the light, flicked it on.

A boy, dark ragged shaking, was flattened against the whitewashed wall, the palms of his hands were spread against it like one crucified, the emaciated body was trying to press into the wall itself. The black eyes, fixed in a frantic stare, became imploring as the eyelids relaxed a trifle and caught breath lifted the rags on his breast. Before she darted out and shut the door, before she lifted her voice to call, in that split second her inner voice said, That was Fear you just saw that wasn’t flesh and blood that was blind naked Fear in the form of a man. Then she called, a note of hysteria in her voice. “Uncle Bawley! Uncle Bawley! Uncle Bawley!”

He was there with incredible swiftness, speeded by the urgency in her voice, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders. “What’s wrong! Leslie!”

“In there. There’s a—somebody hiding in there.”

He flung open the gun-room door. The boy was on the floor, a heap on the floor like a mop like a rag. Speaking in Spanish Uncle Bawley said, “Get up!” The boy did not move. Uncle Bawley picked him up as you would a wet dog, gingerly, by the neck and shoulders and half carried half dragged him along the floor of the patio.

“No,” Leslie whispered. “No. Don’t——”

“It’s all right. Happens every day.” Uncle Bawley looked enormous above the little heap of rags on the floor. “Nobody’s going to hurt him. He’s just a wetback.”

“A what?”

“Wetback. Swum or waded the river between Mexico and here, must have walked a hundred miles and more.”

Foolishly she stammered, “What river?”

“Now Leslie! Rio Grande of course. They do it all the time.” Now he leaned over the boy, he spoke to him in Spanish, Leslie caught a word here and there. In Uncle Bawley’s voice there was something that caused the bundle of rags to raise its head. Leslie’s Spanish lessons bore fruit now. A familiar Spanish word, the inflection of Uncle Bawley’s voice, her own instinct combined to give her the sense of what was being said. Come come, boy, stand up! You have waded the Rio Grande you have walked the long miles, that takes the courage of a man. Don’t crouch there like a dog. No one will hurt you. Stand up! You are a man! He stirred the bundle with the toe of his shining boot.

The rags moved, the thing got to its feet, the face was a mask of abject terror and glimmering hope mingled. Seventeen, perhaps. A skeleton.

“How long have you been in there?”

“This morning only. I walked all night and the night before and the night before and before. By day I lay where I could, hiding.”

“Food?”

The shoulders came up, the bony hands spread.

“Have you seen Immigration Officers or Rangers these past nights?”

“Once men passed near me as I lay in a ditch. I prayed I pressed deep into the ground I pushed myself into the desert I was the desert I prayed to the Miraculous Christ and to the Señor de Chalma and to the Virgin of Guadalupe and they heard and my prayers were answered.”

“I bet,” said Uncle Bawley.

The boy was still talking, a stream of words poured out in relief and hysteria and hope.

“Tell me,” Leslie said. “I only catch a word here and there.”

“It’s nothing, Leslie. Happens all the time I tell you. About fifty sixty thousand of these wetbacks slip out of Mexico every year, swim or wade the Rio Grande where it’s shallow, travel by night and hole up by day. The Border Patrol and the Immigration boys and Rangers and all, they can’t keep all of them out. Sometimes they make it, a lot of ’em are caught and thrown back. Sometimes they’re shot by mistake, sometimes they wander around and starve. This skin-and-bones says he’s been eating rats.”

“No!” She was stiff with horror.

“But he ought’ve come in with the regular Mexican labor lot. Thousands of them brought across legally here to Texas. Pick the cotton and the crops, fruit and vegetables in the Valley, and so on. He says he tried to make it, they were full up.”

“I’m going to call Jordan.”

Instantly Uncle Bawley raised his hand. “Nope. Jordan’s against it. He’d call the Immigration boys come and get him.”

“He wouldn’t!”

Uncle Bawley glanced over his shoulder. “If Bick comes along now and sees the boy he’ll turn him in. He’s set against it I tell you.”

She stared at him. “If I don’t call Jordan what will you do?”

“Feed him give him some decent rags turn him loose tonight.”

She stared now at the boy, the black eyes were fixed on her, they shifted then to the great booted towering figure. “Do that,” she said. “Do that.” Her lips felt stiff.

Uncle Bawley turned to the boy. He spoke again in Spanish, he pointed to his own shabby house on the hillock behind the main ranch house. “Has anyone else seen you?” The boy shook his head. “That house. Run there now. No. Wait. I’ll take you.”

Leslie stood in the patio. She watched the two quickly ascend the little slope, Uncle Bawley’s huge bulk just behind the shadowy figure, screening him. She stood there, waiting peering into the dark. She was there, outlined against the patio light, when Uncle Bawley emerged and joined her.

“What are you getting upset about, Leslie? Immigration fellas come along looking for hide-outs the way they sometimes do, why, they wouldn’t dast go near my house up there, they well know nobody’s allowed, I’d take their jobs away from them if they did.”

She was completely bewildered. She thought, What a statement! “I’m so mixed up,” she stammered.

“What you so upset about, Leslie?” In that soft strangely musical voice. “He’s mostly Mexican Indian, that boy, he’s used to traveling hundreds of miles afoot.” A tiny door in a corner of her memory opened and a handful of words flashed out. Walk! You can’t walk.

Nobody walks in Texas, only the Mexicans. “Anyway,” Uncle Bawley went on, “he’ll have a regular fiesta today, sleep in a corner all day up there. I’ll fetch him up coffee now and a lot of good grub, give him pants and a shirt and shoes—he’ll sell the shoes first off——”

“How do you know Jordan would have turned him back! I don’t believe it. He isn’t like that. In the Valley…I saw…there’s a horrid man named Gomez…”

He came to her, his great hand on her shoulder, he looked down at her. “Now now Leslie girl, nothing to go to bawling about, just another Mexican Indian coming back to Tejas, you might almost say. It’s only that Bick’s made a rule against it here at Holgado, so near the border, and all over Reata. And he’s right. Texas can’t take in all of Mexico’s misfits. It’s illegal, it makes big trouble. If they come in with the seasonal labor migration, that’s different that’s in the law. Haul ’em in, pay ’em a couple of dollars, haul ’em back, well and good. But a kid crawls in, starving like that one, I pay Bick no mind. Only let’s keep this just between us, you and me. H’m?”

“Yes, Uncle Bawley, I wish I could get it all straight in my mind. They use them. Cheap. And then throw them back, like old rags. A century of it but it’s never really worked out right, has it?”

Evasively, “Where’s the rest of the boys and girls, I wonder, haven’t heard a peep out of the Moreys or the——” His voice trailed off. He faced Leslie squarely. “Strictly speaking—which hardly anybody does—why, what with picking the cotton and the fruit and now the Valley is all planted with vegetables, a big new industry, and the old railroad building days and all, why you might say the whole of Texas was built on the backs of boys like that one. On the bent backs of Mexicans. Don’t let on to Bick I said that.”

Through her tears she looked up at him and the blur wiped the lines from the face, the little sag from the shoulders. With a gesture utterly unpremeditated, wanton, overpowering, she threw her arms about his neck she brought the fine old head down to hers, she kissed him full on the lips, long hard lasting.

Horrified. “Forgive me. What is the matter with me! Uncle Bawley!”

He stood a moment, his arms hanging at his sides. “My, that was nice,” he said quietly. “But you ever get a notion to do that again, Leslie, I’ll turn you over my knee and spank you good. Hear me.”

“Yes, Uncle Bawley.”

Vashti’s voice high and shrill from the direction of the guest rooms. “Adarene! Leslie! Where’s everybody got to!”

Uncle Bawley turned and walked into the house.

Adarene’s voice, “I’m coming. We overslept.”

Pinky skipping along the gallery toward the patio. “Now Vash, don’t you go to eating before breakfast.”

“Why don’t we get going, then! I’m starved.”

“All right. Cup of coffee.”

Fifteen minutes later they clattered out in the cool scented darkness, Bick keeping close to Leslie. Adarene sat very straight in the saddle. “Rides like a Yankee,” Lucius Morey commented. “Adarene never got over that school she went to, up the Hudson.”

Vashti, an imposing mound of flesh looming ahead in the first faint dawn, rode cowboy fashion, one vast hip slipped to the side, one arm hanging loose or waving in the air, she kept up with the men and greeted the dawn like a Comanche on the warpath. The hills loomed grey then brown then rose then burst into scarlet. The plains, green and gold, ran to meet them.

“Oh, Jordan!”

“Not bad, huh?”

“The light, the curious light. Not like anything in America. It’s Egypt—with the Alps thrown in.”

“Egypt and Alps hell! It’s Texas.”

A streak of gold-beige, like a flash of smoky sunlight, shot across the nearby brush and vanished behind a hillock.

“Antelope,” said Bick.

He was riding at Leslie’s left, Uncle Bawley was at her right. “Uncle Bawley, you told me that there are more cattle than people in Texas,” Leslie said. “But I never see any. Look. Miles and miles and miles, but not a four-footed thing.”

“They like the brush,” Uncle Bawley explained. “And the quiet places away from the roads and highways. Maybe the old wild Longhorn strain ain’t all bred out of them. Like me.”

“And cowboys. Where do you keep them? I saw more cowboys in the movies at home. Those strong silent handsome males were all over the place—in the pictures. My sister Lacey writes and asks me——”

“Strong silent clabbermouths! Cow hands talk all the time, they’re lonely people, they’ll talk to anybody. If they can’t talk they sing to themselves or to the cows.”

“Movies!” scoffed Bick. “Movies and those rodeos at Madison Square Garden and around, they give people the impression that a cow hand goes out and throws a steer every morning before breakfast, just for exercise. It’s a technique, like any other profession, you have to have a gift for it, you have to spend years learning it, it’s something you have to have handed down from father to son. I did, and my father did, and my son’s going to.”

“That’s right,” said Uncle Bawley. “They write to Bick all the time, and they write to me and the big ranches around, college kids that want to be cowboys. They say they can ride a horse, they ride on the farm in Vermont or Kansas or someplace, and they ride in Central Park in New York, they say they want to learn to be cowboys. Well, say, I wouldn’t have them free, they ain’t worth picking up off the ground after the horse has threw them.”

Suddenly, “Look, Leslie,” Bick said, and pointed to a small herd gloomily regarding the riders from the range fence.

Leslie stared at the animals, they returned her stare glumly, hunched near the fence, their shaggy heads and bald faces, their humped backs and short-haired hides giving them the aspect of monsters in a nightmare. “What are they! They’re frightening!”

“Now, Bick, don’t you go making me out a fool, front of Leslie.”

Bick was laughing, and the riders ahead were pointing and grinning back at Uncle Bawley. “They’re called cattlo. Tell her, Bawley.”

Ruefully Uncle Bawley eyed the weird creatures so mournfully returning his gaze as the little cavalcade rode by. “That’s right—cattlo. It’s a word made up out of cattle and buffalo and that’s what those critters are, they’re bred up out of cattle and buffalo, bred years back to see if we couldn’t fetch something the heat and the ticks wouldn’t get to.”

“You got something sure enough,” Bick grinned.

“I don’t know’s they’re much meaner-looking than those critters you’re talking so big about, Herefords bred to those old humpy sloe-eyed beasts you’re always yapping about. Kashmirs! And Brahmans. Camels with an underslung chassis, that’s what they are. Cows with humps on their backs. It ain’t in nature!”

But Bick laughed as he rode along. “Just you wait, Bawley, you’re going to see a breed that’ll make cattle history before Gill Dace and I finish with them.”

Pinky turned in his saddle to shout back to them. “I never heard so much talking a-horseback in my whole life. Who ever heard of talking riding!”

“It’s me,” Leslie called to him. “I have to talk to them riding because it’s the only time they ever sit down.”

“I’ll go along ahead,” Uncle Bawley said, “get a fire going and the skillet on.” He was off with a clatter and a whoosh. The other horses tried to follow but the big man on the powerful horse outdistanced them.

“That horse of Bawley’s,” Bick explained, as he eyed Leslie with some concern after their spurt of sudden speed, “is the fastest thing in Jeff Davis County and maybe in Texas. For riding, that is. And look at the build of him! A regular galon for size.”

“He’d have to be huge to carry around that mountain of a man. Uh, sorry, dear, but I feel a question coming on. Galon? What’s a galon?”

As they jogged along with the rose of sunrise reflected in their faces, “Well, let’s see. I just used the word unconsciously. The Mexicans call a big horse a galon, it’s a horse they used to have for hauling, not for riding. Before machinery did the work. They say that in the war for Texas Independence the Mexicans would hear the American teamsters yelling at those big square pudding-footed horses going through the Texas sand and mud and clay, hauling the heavy stuff of war. The teamsters would yell to the horses, ‘G’long! G’long!’ Get along, get along, see? So the Mexicans thought a heavy horse was a galon.”

“True?”

“True enough. Anyway, it’s fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who’s hearing Cinderella for the first time.”

“Antelopes and galons and cattlos and sunrise and quail for breakfast——”

“And me.”

And you.

“And Vashti.”

“Jordan, we’re quite near the Mexican border, aren’t we?”

“Not far.”

“If we were to meet a wetback now—just one poor miserable Mexican wetback—what would you do?”

“Dear little Yankee, do you think wetbacks go dripping along the road in daylight carrying a printed sign that says I Am a Wetback?”

“No, but if you did see one, there in the ditch, hiding. What would you do? Would you pass him by, would you help him, would you turn him in?”

“You know what happens to little girls who play with matches, don’t you? They get burned.”

“Oh, Jordan, I’m just trying to get things straight in my mind. It’s all so new to me and some of it’s fascinating and some of it’s horrible. Labor, almost like slaves, but that’s legal. Wetbacks, but that isn’t legal. You all use the Mexican vote in Benedict and the whole country——”

“Uh-huh. Like your Negro vote in the South.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make it right.”

“Honey, if I’d known you were going to turn into a Do-Gooder I’d have married any nice comfortable Texas girl and damned well let you wrestle with Red Coat and his dandy little Principality. I’ll bet you’d have had a fine time straightening out the Labor Situation in the Schleppenhausen or wherever it is he rules…. Come on, they’re all miles ahead of us. Let’s really ride before they send back a search party for us.”

Clattering down the main road, then off on a dirt side road and up the narrow trail with the smoke of Uncle Bawley’s fire pointing the way and the scent of Uncle Bawley’s coffee and quail and bacon. He was squatting Mexican fashion in front of the fire of mesquite, the plump quail were roasting on an improvised spit and the bacon was slowly sizzling in the pan. The others already were sipping burning-hot black coffee as they stood about the fire.

“Mm, smells divine!” Leslie said.

“Let me warn you, Yankee,” Bick said. “Before you begin to complain. Texas quail are tough as golf balls.”

“Let me help, Uncle Bawley,” Leslie offered. “I’ll baste them. That’ll make them tender.”

“He’ll never let you,” Vashti said. “Uncle Bawley is a real batch, he likes to do things his own way. Texas way.”

“No different from anybody else,” Uncle Bawley argued. “Cooking over an open fire is cooking over an open fire, no matter where.” He was lifting the crisp strips of dripping bacon out of the pan as they curled and sizzled, he looked about him for an absorbent receptacle on which to place them to drain until the quail should be golden brown. His wandering gaze—the eye of the practiced rancher and camper—fell on a nearby clop of old sun-dried cow dung; porous, dehydrated as a sponge or a blotter. Delicately, methodically, he placed the first strip of bacon, and the second and third, on top of this natural draining surface. “No different from anybody else,” Uncle Bawley repeated. “Texans aren’t, only maybe some little ways.”

Leslie began to laugh, peal after peal, helplessly. The others stared at her, surprised, vaguely resentful but scrupulously polite.