Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “A woman!” Cousin Arminta Greenwood (of the Georgia Greenwoods). And Sabra Cravat echoed the words in a shocked whisper.

  “You wouldn’t believe, would you, that women would go it alone in a fracas like that. But they did. They were there with their husbands, some of them, but there were women who made the Run alone.”

  “What kind of women?” Felice Venable’s tone was not one of inquiry but of condemnation.

  “Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home. Pioneer women.”

  From Aunt Cassandra Venable’s end of the table there came a word that sounded like, “Hussies!”

  Yancey Cravat caught the word beneath his teeth and spat it back. “Hussies, heh! The one behind me in the line was a woman of forty—or looked it—in a calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had driven across the prairies all the way from the north of Arkansas in a springless wagon. She was like the women who crossed the continent to California in ’49. A gaunt woman, with a weather-beaten face; the terribly neglected skin”—he glanced at Sabra with her creamy coloring—“that means alkali water and sun and dust and wind. Rough hair, and unlovely hands, and boots with the mud caked on them. It’s women like her who’ve made this country what it is. You can’t read the history of the United States, my friends” (all this he later used in an Oklahoma Fourth of July speech when they tried to make him Governor) “without learning the great story of those thousands of unnamed women—women like this one I’ve described—women in mud-caked boots and calico dresses and sunbonnets, crossing the prairie and the desert and the mountains enduring hardship and privation. Good women, with a terrible and rigid goodness that comes of work and self-denial. Nothing picturesque or romantic about them, I suppose—though occasionally one of them flashes—Belle Starr the outlaw—Rose of the Cimarron—Jeannette Daisy who jumped from a moving Santa Fé train to stake her claim—but the others—no, their story’s never really been told. But it’s there, just the same. And if it’s ever told straight you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.”

  “Talking nonsense,” drawled Felice Venable.

  Yancey whirled on his high heels to face her, his fine eyes blazing. “You’re one of them. You came up from the South with your husband to make a new home in this Kansas——”

  “I am not!” retorted Felice Venable, with enormous dignity. “And I’ll thank you not to say any such thing. Sunbonnet indeed! I’ve never worn a sunbonnet in my life. And as for my skin and hair and hands, they were the toast of the South, as I can prove by anyone here, all the way from Louisiana to Tennessee. And feet so small my slippers had to be made to order. Calico and muddy boots indeed!”

  “Oh, Mamma, Yancey didn’t mean—he meant courage to leave your home in the South and come up—he wasn’t thinking of—Yancey, do get on with your story of the Run. You got a drink of water for a dollar—dear me!—and shared it with the woman in the calico and the sunbonnet …”

  He looked a little sheepish. “Well, matter of fact, it turned out she didn’t have a dollar to spare, or anywhere near it, but even if she had it wouldn’t have done her any good. The fellow selling it was a rat-faced hombre with one eye and Mexican pants. The trigger finger of his right hand had been shot away in some fracas or other, so he ladled out water with that hand and toted his gun in his left. Bunged up he was, plenty. A scar on his nose, healed up, but showing the marks of where human teeth had bit him in a fight, as neat and clear as a dentist’s signboard. By the time I got to him there was one cup of water left in the bucket. He tipped it while I held the dipper, and it trickled out, just an even dipperful. The last cup of water on the Border. The crowd waiting in line behind me gave a kind of sound between a groan and a moan. The sound you hear a herd of cow animals give, out on the prairie, when their tongues are hanging out for water in the dry spell. I tipped up the dipper and had down a big mouthful—filthy tasting stuff it was, too. Gyp water. You could feel the alkali cake on your tongue. Well, my head went back as I drank, and I got one look at that woman’s face. Her eyes were on me—on my throat, where the Adam’s apple had just given that one big gulp after the first swallow. All bloodshot the whites of her eyes, and a look in them like a dying man looks at a light. Her mouth was open, and her lips were all split with the heat and the dust and the sun, and dry and flaky as ashes. And then she shut her lips a little and tried to swallow nothing, and couldn’t. There wasn’t any spit in her mouth. I couldn’t down another mouthful, parching as I was. I’d have seen her terrible face to the last day of my life. So I righted it, and held it out to her and said, ‘Here, sister, take the rest of it. I’m through.’ ”

  Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little joke. “Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and weather-beaten? And that about her hair and boots and hands?”

  Cravat, standing behind his wife’s chair, looked down at her; at the fine white line that marked the parting of her thick black hair. With one forefinger he touched her cheek, gently. He allowed the finger to slip down the creamy surface of her skin, from cheek bone to chin. “Dead sure, Jouett. I left out one thing, though.” Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. “Her teeth,” Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. “Broken and discolored like those of a woman of seventy. And most of them gone at the side.”

  Here Yancey could not resist charging up and down, flirting his coat tails and generally ruining the fine flavor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping it) had been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild mêlée of the Run in the first place. Now he stood surveying these handsome futile faces, and a great impatience shook him, and a flame of rage shot through him, and a tongue of malice flicked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end.

  “I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fé train that was standing, steam up, ready to run into the Nation. But you couldn’t get on. There wasn’t room for a flea. They were hanging on the cow-catcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn’t even do that. They went twenty miles in ninety minutes. I decided I’d use my Indian pony. I knew I’d get endurance, anyway, if not speed. And that’s what counted in the end.

  “There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the Border, as near as they’d let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for miles into the Nation, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the Sooners, too, who had sneaked in and were hiding in the scrub oaks, in the draws, wherever they could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready to shoot those of us who came in, fair and square, in the Run. I knew the piece I wanted. An old freighters’ trail, out of use, but still marked with deep ruts, led almost straight to it, once you found the trail, all overgrown as it was. A little creek ran through the land, and the prairie rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around it, but on that section, because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons and cottonwoods and even a grove of pecans. I had noticed it many a time, riding the range.”

  (H’m! Riding the range! All the Venables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat’s past.)

  “Ten o’clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Hundreds of us had been followers of Payne and had gone as Boomers in the old Payne colonies, and had been driven out, and had come back again. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I’ve seen the same look exactly on the faces of men who were ravenous for food.

  “Well, eleven o’clock, and they were crowding and cursing and fighting for places near the Line. They shouted and sang and yelled and argue
d, and the sound they made wasn’t human at all, but like thousands of wild animals penned up. The sun blazed down. It was cruel. The dust hung over everything in a thick cloud, blinding you and choking you. The black dust of the burned prairie was over everything. We were like a horde of fiends with our red eyes and our cracked lips and our blackened faces. Eleven-thirty. It was a picture straight out of hell. The roar grew louder. People fought for an inch of gain on the Border. Just next to me was a girl who looked about eighteen—she turned out to be twenty-five—and a beauty she was, too—on a coal-black thoroughbred.”

  “Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth. He was the kind of man who says, “Aha.”

  “On the other side was an old fellow with a long gray beard—a plainsman, he was—a six-shooter in his belt, one wooden leg, and a flask of whisky. He took a pull out of that every minute or two. He was mounted on an Indian pony like mine. Every now and then he’d throw back his head and let out a yell that would curdle your blood, even in that chorus of fiends. As we waited we fell to talking, the three of us, though you couldn’t hear much in that uproar. The girl said she had trained her thoroughbred for the race. He was from Kentucky, and so was she. She was bound to get her husband and sixty acres, she said. She had to have it. She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask her. We were all too keyed up, anyway, to make sense. Oh, I forgot. She had on a get-up that took the attention of anyone that saw her, even in that crazy mob. The better to cut the wind, she had shortened sail and wore a short skirt, black tights, and a skullcap.”

  Here there was quite a bombardment of sound as silver spoons and knives and forks were dropped from shocked and nerveless feminine Venable fingers.

  “It turned out that the three of us, there in the front line, were headed down the old freighters’ trail toward the creek land. I said, ‘I’ll be the first in the Run to reach Little Bear.’ That was the name of the creek on the section. The girl pulled her cap down tight over her ears. ‘Follow me,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Then the old fellow with the wooden leg and the whiskers yelled out, ‘Whoop-ee! I’ll tell ’em along the Little Bear you’re both a-comin.’

  “There we were, the girl on my left, the old plainsman on my right. Eleven forty-five. Along the Border were the soldiers, their guns in one hand, their watches in the other. Those last five minutes seemed years long; and funny, they’d quieted till there wasn’t a sound. Listening. The last minute was an eternity. Twelve o’clock. There went up a roar that drowned the crack of the soldiers’ musketry as they fired in the air as the signal of noon and the start of the Run. You could see the puffs of smoke from their guns, but you couldn’t hear a sound. The thousands surged over the Line. It was like water going over a broken dam. The rush had started, and it was devil take the hindmost. We swept across the prairie in a cloud of black and red dust that covered our faces and hands in a minute, so that we looked like black demons from hell. Off we went, down the old freight trail that was two wheel ruts, a foot wide each, worn into the prairie soil. The old man on his pony kept in one rut, the girl on her thoroughbred in the other, and I on my Whitefoot on the raised place in the middle. That first half mile was almost a neck-and-neck race. The old fellow was yelling and waving one arm and hanging on somehow. He was beating his pony with the flask on his flanks. Then he began to drop behind. Next thing I heard a terrible scream and a great shouting behind me. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. The old plainsman’s pony had stumbled and fallen. His bottle smashed into bits, his six-shooter flew in another direction, and he lay sprawling full length in the rut of the trail. The next instant he was hidden in a welter of pounding hoofs and flying dirt and cinders and wagon wheels.”

  A dramatic pause. Black Isaiah was hanging from his perch like a monkey on a branch. His asparagus shoo-fly was limp. The faces around the table were balloons pulled by a single string. They swung this way and that with Yancey Cravat’s pace as he strode the room, his Prince Albert coat tails billowing. This way—the faces turned toward the sideboard. That way—they turned toward the windows. Yancey held the little moment of silence like a jewel in the circlet of faces. Sabra Cravat’s voice, high and sharp with suspense, cut the stillness.

  “What happened? What happened to the old man?”

  Yancey’s pliant hands flew up in a gesture of inevitability. “Oh, he was trampled to death in the mad mob that charged over him. Crazy. They couldn’t stop for a one-legged old whiskers with a quart flask.”

  Out of the well-bred murmur of horror that now arose about the Venable board there emerged the voice of Felice Venable, sharp-edged with disapproval. “And the girl. The girl with the black——” Unable to say it. Southern.

  “The girl and I—funny, I never did learn her name—were in the lead because we had stuck to the old trail, rutted though it was, rather than strike out across the prairie that by this time was beyond the burned area and was covered with a heavy growth of blue stem grass almost six feet high in places. A horse could only be forced through that at slow pace. That jungle of grass kept many a racer from winning his section that day.

  “The girl followed close behind me. That thoroughbred she rode was built for speed, not distance. A race horse, blooded. I could hear him blowing. He was trained to short bursts. My Indian pony was just getting his second wind as her horse slackened into a trot. We had come nearly sixteen miles. I was well in the lead by that time, with the girl following. She was crouched low over his neck, like a jockey, and I could hear her talking to him, low and sweet and eager, as if he were a human being. We were far in the lead now. We had left the others behind, hundreds going this way, hundreds that, scattering for miles over the prairie. Then I saw that the prairie ahead was afire. The tall grass was blazing. Only the narrow trail down which we were galloping was open. On either side of it was a wall of flame. Some skunk of a Sooner, sneaking in ahead of the Run, had set the blaze to keep the Boomers off, saving the land for himself. The dry grass burned like oiled paper. I turned around. The girl was there, her racer stumbling, breaking and going on, his head lolling now. I saw her motion with her hand. She was coming. I whipped off my hat and clapped it over Whitefoot’s eyes, gave him the spurs, crouched down low and tight, shut my own eyes, and down the trail we went into the furnace. Hot! It was hell! The crackling and snapping on either side was like a fusillade. I could smell the singed hair on the flanks of the mustang. My own hair was singeing. I could feel the flames licking my legs and back. Another hundred yards and neither the horse nor I could have come through it. But we broke out into the open choking and blinded and half suffocated. I looked down the lane of flame. The girl hung on her horse’s neck. Her skullcap was pulled down over her eyes. She was coming through game. I knew that my land—the piece that I had come through hell for—was not more than a mile ahead. I knew that hanging around here would probably get me a shot through the head, for the Sooner that started that fire must be lurking somewhere in the high grass ready to kill anybody that tried to lay claim to his land. I began to wonder, too, if that girl wasn’t headed for the same section that I was bound for. I made up my mind that, woman or no woman, this was a race and devil take the hindmost. My poor little pony was coughing and sneezing and trembling. Her racer must have been ready to drop. I wheeled and went on. I kept thinking how, when I came to Little Bear Creek, I’d bathe my little mustang’s nose and face and his poor heaving flanks, and how I mustn’t let him drink too much, once he got his muzzle in the water.

  “Just before I reached the land I was riding for I had to leave the trail and cut across the prairie. I could see a clump of elms ahead. I knew the creek was near by. But just before I got to it I came to one of those deep gullies you find in the plains country. Drought does it—a crack in the dry earth to begin with, widening with every rain until it becomes a small cañon. Almost ten feet across this one was, and deep. No way around it that I could see, and no time to look for one. I put Whitefoot to the leap and, by God, he took it, landing on the other side with hardl
y an inch to spare. I heard a wild scream behind me. I turned. The girl on her spent racer had tried to make the gulch. He had actually taken it—a thoroughbred and a gentleman, that animal—but he came down on his knees just on the farther edge, rolled, and slid down the gully side into the ditch. The girl had flung herself free. My claim was fifty yards away. So was the girl, with her dying horse. She lay there on the prairie. As I raced toward her—my own poor little mount was nearly gone by this time—she scrambled to her knees. I can see her face now, black with cinders and soot and dirt, her hair all over her shoulders, her cheek bleeding where she had struck a stone in her fall, her black tights torn, her little short skirt sagging. She sort of sat up and looked around her. Then she staggered to her feet before I reached her and stood there swaying, and pushing her hair out of her eyes like someone who’d been asleep. She pointed down the gully. The black of her face was streaked with tears.

  “ ‘Shoot him!’ she said. ‘I can’t. His two forelegs are broken. I heard them crack. Shoot him! For God’s sake!’