Another Larkin man had a much different name for the little excavators. Ransom Rusk, principal heir and sole operator of the Rusk holdings in the Larkin Field, had a fierce desire to obliterate memories of his unfortunate ancestry: the grand fool Earnshaw Rusk; the wife with the wooden nose; his own obscenely obese father; his fat, foolish mother. He wanted to forget them all. He was a tall, lean man, quite handsome, totally unlike his father, and at forty-five he was at the height of his powers. He had married a Wellesley graduate from New England, and it was amusing that her mother, wishing to dissociate herself from her cotton-mill ancestry, had named her daughter Fleurette, trusting that something of French gentility would brush off.
Fleurette and Ransom Rusk, fed up with the modest house in whose kitchen Floyd had maintained his oil office till he died, had employed an architect from Boston to build them a mansion, and he had suggested an innovation which would distinguish their place from others in the region: ‘It is very fashionable, in the better estates of England, to have a bowling green. It could also be used for croquet, should you prefer,’ and Fleurette had applauded the idea.
It was now her pleasure to entertain at what she called ‘a pleasant afternoon of bowls,’ and she did indeed make it pleasant. Not many of the local millionaires—and there were now some two dozen in the Larkin district, thanks to those reliable wells which never produced much more than a hundred barrels a day, rarely less—knew how to play bowls, but they had fun at the variations they devised.
Ransom Rusk, as the man who dominated the Larkin Field, was not spectacularly rich by Texas standards, whose categories were popularly defined: one to twenty million, comfortable; twenty to fifty million, well-to-do; fifty to five hundred million, rich; five hundred million to one billion, big rich; one to five billion, Texas rich. By virtue of his other oil holdings in various parts of the state, and his prudent investments in Fort Worth ventures, he was now rich, but in the lowest ranks of that middle division. His attitudes toward wealth were contradictory, for obviously he had a driving ambition to acquire and exercise power in its various manifestations, and in pursuit of this, he strove to multiply his wealth. But he remained indifferent to its mathematical level, often spending an entire year without knowing his balances or even an approximation of them. Impelled by an urge to control billions, he did not care to count them. On the other hand, he had inherited his father’s shrewd judgment regarding oil and had extended it to the field of general financing, and he always sought new opportunities and knew how to apply leverage when he found them.
He was brooding about his Fort Worth adventures one morning when he heard Fleurette scream: ‘Oh my God!’ Thinking that she had fallen, he rushed into the bedroom to find her standing by the window, pointing wordlessly at the havoc which had been wreaked upon her bowling green.
‘Looks like an atomic bomb!’ Ransom said. ‘It’s those damned armadillos,’ but Fleurette did not hear his explanation, for she was wailing as if she had lost three children.
‘Shut up!’ Ransom cried. ‘I’ll take care of those little bastards.’
He slammed out of the house, inspected the chopped-up bowling lawn, and summoned the gardeners: ‘Can this be fixed?’
‘We can resod it like new, Mr. Rusk,’ they assured him, ‘but you’ll have to keep them armadillos out.’
‘I’ll take care of them. I’ll shoot them.’ In pursuit of this plan, he went to the hardware store to buy a stack of ammo for his .22 rifle, but while there, he happened to stand beside Mr. Kramer at the check-out counter, and the retired oilman, who had worked for Rusk, asked: ‘What are the bullets for?’ and unfortunately, Ransom said: ‘Armadillos.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t do that! Those are precious creatures. You should be protecting them, not killing them.’
‘They tore up my wife’s lawn last night.’
‘Her bowling green? I’ve heard it’s beautiful.’
‘Cost God knows how much, and it’s in shreds.’
‘A minor difficulty,’ Kramer said lightly, since he did not have to pay for the repairs. And before Ransom could get away, the enthusiastic nature lover had drawn him to the drugstore, where they shared Dr. Peppers.
‘Did you know, Ransom, that we have highly accurate maps showing the progress north of the armadillo? Maybe the only record of its kind?’
‘I wish they’d stayed where they came from.’
‘They came from Mexico.’
‘One hell of a lot comes from Mexico—wetbacks, boll weevils …’
‘A follower of the great Audubon first recorded them in Texas, down along the Rio Grande, in 1854. They had reached San Antonio by 1880, Austin by 1914, Jefferson in the east by 1945. They were slower reaching our dryer area. They were reported in Dallas in 1953, but they didn’t reach us till this year. Remarkable march.’
‘Should have kept them in Mexico,’ Rusk said, fingering his box of shells.
‘They’re in Florida too. Three pairs escaped from a zoo in 1922. And people transported them as pets. They liked Florida, so now they move east from Texas and west from Florida. They’ll occupy the entire Gulf area before this century is out.’
‘They aren’t going to occupy my place much longer,’ Ransom said, and that was the beginning of the hilarious adventure, because Mr. Kramer persuaded him, almost tearfully, not to shoot the armadillos but to keep them away from the bowling green by building protection around it: ‘These are unique creatures, relics of the past, and they do an infinite amount of good.’
The first thing Rusk did was to enclose his wife’s resodded bowling green within a stout tennis-court-type fence, but two nights after it was in place, at considerable expense, the bowling green was chewed up again, and when Mr. Kramer was consulted he showed the Rusks how the world’s foremost excavators had simply burrowed under the fence to get at the succulent roots.
‘What you have to do is dig a footing around your green, six feet deep, and fill it with concrete. Sink your fence poles in that.’ ‘Do you know how much that would cost?’
‘They tell me you have the money,’ Kramer said easily, and so the fence was taken down, backhoes were brought in, and the deep trench was dug, enclosing the green. Then trucks dumped a huge amount of cement into the gaping holes, and the fence was reerected. Eight feet into the air, six feet underground, and the armadillos were boxed off.
But four days after the job was finished, Fleurette Rusk let out another wail, and when Ransom ran to her room he bellowed: ‘Is it those damned armadillos again?’ It was, and when he and Mr. Kramer studied the new disaster the situation became clear, as the enthusiastic naturalist explained: ‘Look at that hole! Ransom, they dug right under the concrete barrier and up the other side. Probably took them half an hour, no more.’
The scientific manner in which Kramer diagnosed the case, and the obvious pleasure he took in the engineering skill of his armadillos, infuriated Rusk, and once more he threatened to shoot his tormentors, but Kramer prevailed upon him to try one more experiment: ‘What we must do, Ransom, is drive a palisade below the concrete footing.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘Simple, you get a hydraulic ram and it drives down metal stakes. Twenty feet deep. But they’ll have to be close together.’
When this job was completed, Rusk calculated that he had $218,000 invested in that bowling green, but to his grim satisfaction, the sunken palisade did stop the predators he had named ‘Lady Macbeth and Her Four Witches.’ The spikes of the palisade went too deep for her to risk a hole so far below the surface.
But she was not stopped for long, because one morning Ransom was summoned by a new scream: ‘Ransom, look at those scoundrels!’ and when he looked, he saw that the mother, frustrated by the palisade but still hungry for the tender grass roots, had succeeded in climbing her side of the fence, straight up, and then descending straight down, and she was in the process of teaching her daughters to do the same.
For some minutes Rusk stood at the window, watchin
g the odd procession of armadillos climbing up his expensive fence, and when one daughter repeatedly fell back, unable to learn, he broke into laughter.
‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ his wife cried, and he explained: ‘Look at the dumb little creature. She can’t use her front claws to hold on to the cross wires,’ and his wife exploded: ‘You seem to be cheering her on,’ and it suddenly became clear to Rusk that he was doing just that. He was responding to his wife’s constant nagging: ‘Don’t wear that big cowboy hat in winter, makes you look like a real hick.’ ‘Don’t wear those boots to a dance, makes you look real Texan.’ She had a score of other don’ts, and now Ransom realized that in this fight of Fleurette versus the lady armadillos, he was cheering for the animals.
But as a good sport he did telephone Mr. Kramer and ask: ‘Those crazy armadillos can climb the fence. What do we do?’ Mr. Kramer noted the significant difference; always before it had been ‘those damned armadillos,’ or worse. When a man started calling them crazy, he was beginning to fall in love with them.
‘Tell you what, Ransom. We call in the fence people and have them add a projection around the upper edge, so that when the armadillos reach the top of the fence, they’ll run into this screen curving back at them and fall off.’
‘Will it hurt them?’
‘Six weeks ago you wanted to shoot them. Now you ask if it’ll hurt them. Ransom, you’re learning.’
‘You know, Kramer, everything you advise me to do costs money.’
‘You have it to spend.’
So the fence builders were brought in, and yes, they could bring a flange out parallel to the ground that no armadillo could negotiate, and when this was done Rusk would sit on his porch at night with a powerful beam flashlight and watch as the mother tried to climb the fence, with her daughters trailing, and he would break into audible laughter as the determined little creatures clawed their way to the top, encountered the barrier, and tumbled back to earth. Again and again they tried, and always they fell back. Ransom Rusk had defeated the armadillos, at a cost of $238,000 total.
‘What are you guffawing at in the dark?’ Fleurette demanded, and he said, ‘At the armadillos trying to get into your bowling green.’
‘You should have shot them months ago,’ she snapped, and he replied, ‘They’re trying so hard, I was thinking about going down and letting them in.’
‘You do,’ she said, ‘and I’m walking out.’
That was the beginning of the sensational Rusk divorce case, though of course many problems more serious than armadillos were involved, and most of them centered upon the husband. He had wanted the social cachet of an Eastern bride, but he had also wanted to remain a Texan. He had wanted to forget his noseless grandmother, his strange Quaker grandfather and especially his obese and ridiculous parents, but Fleurette often dragged them into conversation, especially when strangers were present. And although he had wanted a wife and had courted Fleurette arduously, he also wanted to be left alone with his multitude of projects. Had he married a woman of divine patience and sublime understanding, he might have made a success of his marriage, but Fleurette had proved increasingly giddy and insubstantial. A wiser woman would never have inflated armadillos into a cause célèbre, but once it reached that status, there was no turning back.
She charged him with numerous cruelties and more insensitivities. She swore, in her affidavit, that life with such a brute had become quite impossible, and when the case was well launched, she did the one thing that was calculated to ensure her victory: she hired Fleabait Moomer from Dallas to press her claim for a financial settlement in the Larkin County court.
Ransom’s lawyer almost shuddered when he learned that Fleabait was coming into the case: ‘Ransom, we’re in deep trouble.’
‘Why?’
‘Fleabait tears a case apart. When he’s in the courtroom anything can happen. Do you really want to go ahead with this?’ And when Rusk replied: ‘I sure as hell do, I want to get rid of that millstone,’ the lawyer felt he had better explain Fleabait Moomer:
‘He’s a country genius. Very bright, no morals at all. He’ll do anything to win, and I warn you right now that with a case like this, he’ll probably win.
‘He gets his name from his habit of scratching himself like a yokel while he’s pleading. Scratch here. Scratch there. But twice in each case he stops, looks at the jury, crosses his arms, and scratches with both hands. The jury expects this, and they lean forward with special attention because they know he’s going to make an important point. And God help you when he scratches with both hands, because that’s when you’re going to be crucified.
‘He’ll charge you with sodomy, with theft of public funds, with the corruption of juveniles, with murder, with surreptitious dealing with the enemy, anything to make you the hideous focus of the case and not your poor, wronged wife. Are you strong enough to go up against Fleabait?’
Ransom said he thought he was, and the notorious trial began. It was held in that majestic room designed seventy years earlier by James Riely Gordon, and when the disputants began their inflamed accusations, an observer might have wished that the dignified hall of justice had been reserved for worthier cases.
The judge was a serious jurist, aware of the sensational nature of the trial he was conducting, but he was powerless against the antics of Fleabait Moomer, who told the jury: ‘My client, that beautiful and distressed woman you see over there, all she claims in this divorce proceeding is twenty-two million dollars. Now, that might seem a lot to you, especially if you have to work as hard for your money as I do.’ And here he wiped his brow, his wrists and his fingers. ‘But it will be my duty to prove that the defendant, that slinkin’ man over there—’
‘I object, your Honor!’
‘Objection sustained. Mr. Moomer, do not cast aspersions on the defendant.’
‘That unfeeling, ungentlemanly, ungenerous and—’ ‘I object, your Honor!’
‘Objection sustained. You must not attack the defendant, Counselor Moomer.’
‘It will be my task to show you good people of the jury that Ransom Rusk, who inherited all his money from his father and never did a day’s lick of work in his life—’
‘I object, your Honor!’
‘Objection sustained. The jury will disregard everything Counselor Moomer has said regarding the defendant.’
Fleabait, who wore a string tie, suspenders, a belt, and his hair combed forward in the Julius Caesar style, scratched and mumbled and fumbled his way along, playing the role of the poor country boy doing his best to defend the interests of a wronged wife, but on the third day he stopped abruptly, crossed his arms, and scratched himself vigorously while the jury, having expected him to do this, smiled knowingly. When he finished scratching, he asked ominously: ‘Have you members of the jury considered the possibility that Ransom Rusk might have been involved with a gentleman in the neighborhood, whose name I refuse to divulge because of my innate sense of decency?’ There was a flurry of objections, stampedes to the telephones and general noise, after which the trial continued.
The second time Fleabait scratched with both hands, the jury leaned forward with almost visible delight to hear what scandalous thing was about to be revealed, and this time the lawyer said: ‘You might well ask “How did Ransom Rusk acquire his wealth?” Did he do it by ignoring every decency in the book, every law of orderly business relations between men of honor?’
The judge properly ordered this to be stricken, but the jury were as powerless to forget what had been said as they were to ensure Rusk the impartial justice to which he was entitled. Their recommendation was for the full $22,000,000, which the judge would later scale down to $15,000,000. Fleabait had told Fleurette: ‘We’ll go for twenty-two and be happy if we get twelve.’ Of the award, he would take forty percent, or $6,000,000.
On the evening of the adverse verdict, and while it still stood at twenty-two million, Ransom returned to his big house overlooking Bear Creek and watched with sa
tisfaction as the sun went down. In the darkness, Mr. Kramer stopped by to check on the new fence, and Ransom told him: ‘I’m happier tonight than I have been in years. Free of that terrible millstone.’
‘How did you happen to marry her?’ The men of Larkin had long known her to be quite impossible.
‘Worst reasons in the world. Reasons I’m ashamed of, believe me. Like a lot of Texas boys, I went north to Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey. One of the best. Strong teachers and all that. Well, they had this Father’s Day or something, and my parents came up. Filthy rich. My father weighing three hundred, my mother the cartoon version of a Texas oilman’s wife. He a slob, she ridiculous in her jewels and oil-field flamboyance. The worst three days of my life, because all the boys knew they were super-Texas, but out of decency no one said anything unkind. They just looked and laughed behind my back. When, by the grace of God, my parents finally left, I overheard one of the boys on my hall say: “She was a walking oil derrick, with the dollar bills dripping off. Poor Ransom.” ’
In the darkness he shuddered at that searing memory: ‘Right then I decided that I would never be oil Texas. I dated the most refined girls from Vassar and Weilesley. I talked art, philosophy, anything to be unlike my father and mother. That’s how I met Fleurette. I think the French name had a lot to do with it. And her determination to be so refined … so Eastern.’
‘To tell you the truth, Ransom, you picked one hell of a lemon. You’re well off, especially if you can afford the settlement.’
‘Kramer, do you have a pair of wire cutters?’
‘In the back of my truck.’ When he returned with the long-handled instrument, which had once been outlawed in these parts, he was surprised when Rusk grabbed it and marched to the wire fence protecting his former wife’s bowling green. With powerful clicks he cut a vertical path from ground to bending tip, then moved to a spot three feet away and cut another. When this was done he called for Mr. Kramer to help him knock the panel flat, trampling it on the ground.