Giant by Edna Ferber

Author:Edna Ferber [Ferber, Edna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

15

Everybody came to the funeral. Fortunately the actual basic Benedict family was small. A closed corporation. But Texas converged from every point of the compass. Friends, enemies, employees, business connections; ranchers, governors, vaqueros, merchants, senators, cowboys, millionaires, politicians, housewives. The President of the United States sent a message of condolence. There had been no such Texas funeral since the death of Jordan Benedict Second.

Luz Benedict had become a legendary figure though no one actually knew her in her deepest darkest depths except, oddly enough, outsiders such as Jett Rink and Cora Dart and Leslie Lynnton Benedict. Perhaps Doctor Tom Walker. Bick Benedict, her baby brother, knew her least of all; or if he knew, refused to face the knowledge. Bick Benedict, whom she had deviled and ruled and loved, whose life she had twisted and so nearly ruined; toward whom she had behaved like an adoring and possessive mother wife sister combined in one frustrated human being. The world of Texas knew her as the Benedict family matriarch. Sometimes they wondered why a patriarch, in the person of Uncle Bawley Benedict, ruler of the vast Holgado Division, and older than his niece by fifteen years, did not head the clan. To this the wise ones made answer.

“Bawley! Why, say, he wouldn’t have it a gift. That ol’ Bawley, he’s a maverick. If he had his druthers he wouldn’t see a Benedict one year’s end to the next. He’s smarter than any of ’em; than Bick, even. If he put his mind to it he could make the whole passel come up to the lick log. But he sets back like he’s done for years, smiling and hushed, and lets Bick run Reata and Luz run Bick.”

Everybody who was anybody in Texas came to the funeral. They came, not to mourn the violent exit of Miss Luz Benedict, spinster, aged fifty, but to pay tribute to a Texas institution known as the Benedicts of Reata Ranch. Almost a century of Texas was contained in the small and resentful arrangement of human clay now so strangely passive in the bronze and silver box.

Mortuary artifice had been powerless to erase entirely the furious frown that furrowed her brow. The lips were unresigned, the jaw pugnacious. Luz Benedict, tricked by sly and sudden death, could almost be said to bristle in her coffin. You, Death! You can’t do this to me! This is Luz Benedict of Reata, this is my house this is my ranch this is my Texas this is my world.

Familiar faces, bent over her for a last good-bye, could well say that she looked natural. Power was depicted there, arrogance, and the Benedict will to rule and triumph. You can’t do this to me, I do as I please, all the Benedicts do as they please, I am a Benedict of Reata I am Texas.

Every bedroom in the Big House was filled, guests were sleeping in the bookless library, in the mute music room. Even the old unused adobe Main House

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