Titans (16 page)

A
fter 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 that 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 at 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.

Nathan reached Rebecca's side on the short platform, ready to catch her arm if she should topple over in one of her uncoordinated moments of enthusiasm. “There,” she said, pointing.

“There?” Nathan said.

“There!” She pointed at a large rock jutting up from the water by the bank.

“What about it, Rebecca?” Nathan asked quietly.

“That's where it happened.”

“What happened?”

“My uncle drowned.”

Nathan's flesh crawled. He gently pulled the little girl away from the dock's edge and took her by the shoulders. “You saw your uncle drown, Rebecca? From here? What were you doing on the dock? Was anyone else here?”

She spun away from him and pointed to the rock. “
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.
” Rebecca turned to Nathan again. “That's what he said,” she declared.

Nathan strained to understand. “Who said? Your uncle?” The child's eyes were bright with hope that he would believe her—lucid, transparent, unmistakable hope. Again Nathan felt his skin move. But as suddenly, the brightness dimmed. A cast dropped over her sight, and the moment of truth was lost. Rebecca turned away to look toward the river. “
And the wheel
'
s kick and the wind
'
s song and the white sail
'
s shaking, / And a grey mist on the sea
'
s face, and a grey dawn breaking
,” she chanted.

Nathan listened in awe to the singsong cadence of the complicated lines, riveted by the sense of a hidden meaning in them. What was she saying to him? Had she truly seen Jordan Waverling drown? Had she been alone or with someone? She would have been nine years old and even more closely guarded than she was now. He offered her his hand. “Come, Rebecca. Let's go back. Your grandmother is waiting on us for tea,” he said.

Rebecca refused his hand and skipped ahead, Zak bounding alongside her. Nathan shook his head in amazement as Rebecca recited in a merry voice in step with her bounce: “
Her china cup is white and thin; A thousand times her heart has been / Made
merry at its scalloped brink; / And in the bottom, painted pink, / A dragon greets her with a grin.
”

O
n Friday, the twenty-second day of June, Nathan boarded the train to Gainesville. The plans for his visit had been set forth in a letter from Leon. He would meet Nathan at the station and take him to the new family home into which they were now nicely settled. They would attend commencement exercises on Saturday morning, the luncheon afterward, and it would be up to him if he wanted to attend the graduates' dinner and dance that evening. Nathan was relieved that he would not have to go back to the old home place.

As expected, Leon was eagerly waiting for him outside the station house when the train pulled in. He greeted and embraced him with tears in his eyes. “Thanks for comin', Nathan. We're all mighty glad you did.”

“I'm glad I came, too,” Nathan said. He couldn't have said those words when he first received the invitation to Randolph's graduation. How would he feel when he saw for what his mother had sacrificed the farm? The finer house, better clothes for Lily and Randolph, maybe even one of those horseless carriages the
New York Times
called an automobile. Would it even make a difference to his family if he showed up or not? But then he'd reflected that Randolph was Leon's son, and he would be so proud to see him walk across the stage wearing the gold mantle of the class valedictorian. Randolph had earned that honor. Nathan had then decided it would make a difference to him personally to pass up this opportunity to be with his family. This was perhaps the final time they'd all be together.

“I wouldn't have missed it, for sure,” Nathan said to reassure Leon that he was glad he'd come. His stepfather looked older, but the deeper creases around his eyes and across his forehead had more to do with sorrow than age, Nathan perceived. Neither was dressed as they'd last seen the other. Both wore business suits and striped shirts with tall, stiff collars turned down to form wings that anchored their neckties. Nathan had gone straight to the train station from Waverling Tools, where he wore such garb every day, and he had not had time to change into more comfortable traveling clothes. Leon wore a straw boater and Nathan a soft derby.

“Aren't we the dudes?” Leon laughed.

“We are. I brought along one of my old shirts and a pair of jeans to kick around in,” Nathan said.

“I'm gettin' into my overalls the minute we walk into the house. Millicent doesn't like me to be seen runnin' around town in them. As if anybody would notice, and who in hell would care if they did? Have you had your supper?”

“A sandwich on the train.”

“Millicent has apple pie and ice cream waitin'.” Leon put his arm around Nathan's shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “Missed you, son.”

“Same here, Dad,” Nathan said. Saying his name for Leon squeezed his throat. Would he ever use it with the same feeling for Trevor Waverling?

They shared a silence thick with the sadness of irremediable loss as Leon led him to a spanking new six-seat surrey that sported a body of exquisite woods, fine leather seats, polished brass trim, and folding top. A fine-looking horse stood in its traces. “Just got the two a few days ago, or I would have warned you not to expect me to pick you up in ol' Betsy,” Leon said to explain the vehicle and animal that had replaced their rickety old buckboard and aging mare. “Millicent thinks we should go about in style now that we're city folks. I said I'd never ride in the damn thing if she chucked our old Lizzy Belle. The buckboard will be sold soon, as I no longer need it to go back and forth to the farm. Naturally, Randolph hopes his mother will eventually buy him one of those expensive-as-all-get-out horseless carriages they're turning out in Detroit.”

“Will she, you think?” Nathan asked, a spur of resentment nicking the pleasure of his homecoming.

Leon flicked the reins over the back of the daintily stepping filly. “She's going a little crazy with all that money she got, but I think she'll draw the line on buyin' one of them newfangled driving machines. They're too dangerous. Tell me how it's goin' in Dallas. How's Zak settlin' to the city and what about that little girl, Rebecca? She takin' to you all right? How are you gettin' along with Trevor, and are they feedin' you well?”

On the ten-minute drive, Nathan answered his stepfather's questions, embellishing his answers a bit to relieve him of his concerns for his well-being. He would always miss the country, no doubt about it, he told Leon, but he was adjusting to living with an indoor bathroom, electric lights, running water, and a telephone. He was becoming accustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of the city, the convenience and ease of living close to where you could buy things before you ran out of them. “You will, too, Dad,” Nathan assured him.

“As long as I don't get soft,” Leon said.

He was afraid of that, too, Nathan said, but he saw a solution to the problem. Trevor had been an amateur pugilist and gone on the middleweight circuit for a time but now was too old for competition. He still practiced his skills religiously, though, and had finally invited Nathan to go with him to his gym where he might decide to put on the mitts if only to learn the sport.

Nathan, a boxer? Leon said. Well, he had the build for it. They'd missed his muscles during harvest, which—wouldn't you know?—was turning out to be the best in years. They still had a couple weeks of harvest left, and it looked like they'd have a bumper crop. So far, they'd gotten a better-than-fair price for the wheat sold. Leon had seen to it that some of the money was set aside for the wage Nathan had earned. They had buyers lined up for the plow, tools, tack, and livestock when it was time to let them go. Millicent would give Leon his share, which he'd add to his secret store. It would give him enough of a stake to start over if he ever needed it. He'd heard of good land going begging in Kansas.

Hearing this, Nathan regarded him in surprise. “Does that mean you'd leave Mother?” he said.

“Nah,” Leon said, “but it's a comfort knowin' I could. I'm with your mother until death do us part, Nathan. I love her, always have, always will. Couldn't tell you why. I'm done tryin' to figure out what makes a person love another despite their wicked ways and why love's withheld from those deservin' of it. There is no rhyme nor reason to love, as you'll find out someday, though I hope you'll never know the confusin' side of it. And if it's a comfort to you, son, I believe that deep down your mother loves me. She wouldn't know what to do if I left her once the children are gone.”

“Sounds a lot like need to me,” Nathan said.

“Ah, well, yes, there's a good bit of that in her feelin' for me, too, and often it's been enough when the deeper stuff's missin'.”

The minute they drew up before the handsome two-story dormered structure of the Holloways' new home, the door flew open. “
Nathan!
” Lily shrieked dramatically and rushed joyfully down the steps to throw her arms around him. A more sedate but smiling Randolph followed and then his mother, fashionably coiffed and attired in the latest pigeon-breasted shirtwaist and floor-clearing skirt. The bun, calico dress, and apron from the farm were memories of the past.

He was touched by their warmth, but it did not dissipate the feeling of being tossed from the nest as he was embraced and led into the unfamiliar house that was now the family home. His mother brushed off a smudge of dust from his bowler before hanging it on the hat rack in the foyer, and Lily gushed compliments over his appearance, exclaiming how handsome he looked in his city clothes. Randolph's grip was strong and sincere, and he expressed genuine pleasure at Nathan's graduation gift of a Waterman fountain pen, a vast improvement over the writing quills he was accustomed to using. “I figured you'd have a hard time chasing down a goose at Columbia,” Nathan joked, causing a hilarious recounting of Randolph's attempts at the farm to snare unwilling donors to satisfy his constant need for quills.

The feeling of alienation settled in the pit of his stomach all through the apple pie and ice cream as he tried to adjust to the new faces of his mother and siblings at the dining room table, their clothes and manners and speech. He'd been gone a little under two months, but they'd all changed—assimilated to this new world that money had bought. Nathan had thought he might find them shy, self-conscious, even a little ashamed of their advanced status considering how it had all come about. Within the first hour of their reunion, he judged them well suited to the station in life they assumed they shared with the well-to-do and marveled at how out of place they had been in the rural setting of a farm. His little sister had gotten prettier and knew it. She spoke and gestured with the full awareness of her beauty, telling Nathan she had several beaus “of considerable means” wrapped around her little finger—“Oil and cotton, you know”—and that she'd be finishing her last year in school at a private academy in Denton where she could mix with those of “our own kind.”

The Holloways' flush of wealth had added another layer of snobbery to Randolph's self-importance, which his superior intellect and imperial good looks had already bred. He had plans to go into politics when he finished law school, he said. He was thinking of putting up his shingle in the Oklahoma Territory. It was bound to become a state, and he would be in place when it happened. In sharing this goal around the table, he had grinned at Millicent. “How would you like to become the mother of the governor of the state of Oklahoma?” he said.

Millicent had bestowed upon him a fond, proud smile. Nathan found her the most changed of all. His brother and sister had just become what they'd always hoped to be, but he realized that his mother had become more of what she'd always been. The light of her true self had been hidden by a bun and an apron over a calico dress. Nathan had always thought her a beautiful woman, neat, orderly, and feminine, but a prairie pigeon in contrast to the elegant swan she was now. She'd resumed the mien particular to her privileged class as a girl, one she'd had to surrender as the wife of a humble farmer, and in her stylish clothes with her remarkable hair done up in a fashionable pompadour, pearls at her ears and throat, she looked the society matron she was meant to become, at home in any drawing room in the state.

At bedtime, they all trooped up the stairs to their rooms, Nathan to have one of his own. “A
guest
room! Can you imagine, Nathan!” Lily had enthused, clapping her hands as if in applause. “No more putting visitors into a loft.”

“Quite a bunch, ain't they?” Leon remarked when they'd all said their good nights and he saw Nathan to his assigned door.

“They are,” Nathan agreed. “I wish them… everything that they expect and hope for from the sale of the farm and the move to the city.”

“Spoken like you, sure enough,” Leon said.

“Any chance of Mother running through the money?”

“She's too smart for that. She knows how to make a buck look like five once she establishes the impression that she's rich. She ain't, but the appearance of it is just as good. Nathan…” Leon worked his lips a moment to arrange his words. “Going back to what I was speaking of earlier… about love, that is. Whatever a prick your brother may sometimes be, or a butterfly with syrup for brains your sister is, they have love for you. Little comes with it, I'm afraid. Randolph and Lily are too self-absorbed to have interest in anyone but themselves, but your brother and sister do care for you, Nathan. I want you to know that.”

“Would they, if they knew I was only their half sibling?”

“I'm hopin' they never learn that fact. It might give them the illusion they don't need you as much. No matter on what rung up the ladder their feet might land, they'll always look up to you. They'll need you in their lives for that reason alone, because they ain't goin' to be meetin' many of your caliber in the places they hope to wind up. I want 'em always to know they have a brother that stands head and shoulders above the best of 'em, a brother they can count on to stay true to the image they have of him. They're not so stuck on themselves that they can't see that.”

“What do they need me for when they have you, Dad?”

A pink flush glowed through the fringe of Leon's whiskers. “Aw, to them I'm just a dumb ol' farmer.”

“Their misjudgment,” Nathan said, thinking his brother and sister's miscalculation of their father would probably be among the many they would make about people along the way. He understood what Leon was asking of him. “I'll be around for them if ever they need me,” Nathan promised. “And speaking of love…” He cleared his throat.

Leon cuffed his shoulder. “No need to say nothin' more about it. I hear what's in your heart. You get on to bed. We all got to be smart and lively tomorrow mornin' to watch Randolph strut his stuff. Sleep good, my boy.”

“You, too,” Nathan said.

He watched Leon walk down the wide, electric-lighted hall to the spacious bedroom he shared with his wife. He had not changed into his overalls out of his “monkey suit,” as his stepfather referred to it.
Oh, Leon, not for eating pie in the dining room!
his mother had protested when he'd expressed his intention, so husband and son had remained in their suits to eat from the china plates. A spasm of sympathy for his stepfather caught at Nathan's heart. What would Leon do with his days now that he had no land to farm? They would have little time between social events to discuss it. After the dance tomorrow night, Nathan planned to catch the midnight train to Dallas to be home in the early hours of Sunday morning. He would leave with the question unanswered. He had finally accepted the unalterable, and he would go home with his heart easy for every member of his Gainesville family but for Leon. Nathan paused with his hand on the doorknob. It struck him that twice in the last minute, he had referred to Dallas as home.