Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  All Sabra’s pleasurable anticipation in the church meeting had fled. “How could you give a gun to a child like that! You’ll be giving one to Cim, here, next. Alone in the house, with a gun.”

  “It isn’t loaded. Come on, honey. We’re late.”

  For the first time in their married life she doubted his word absolutely. He strode along toward the tent. She hurried at his side. Cim trotted to keep up with her, his hand in hers.

  “What did you mean when you said there were people who would set fire to the house? I never heard of such … Did you really mean that someone … or was it an excuse to send Isaiah back because of the way he looked?”

  “That was it.”

  For the second time she doubted him. “I don’t believe you. There’s something going on—something you haven’t told me. Yancey, tell me.”

  “I haven’t time now. Don’t be foolish. I just don’t like the complexion of—I just thought that maybe this meeting was the idea of somebody who isn’t altogether inspired by a desire for a closer communion with God. Just occurred to me. I don’t know why. Good joke on me, if it’s true.”

  “I’m not going to the meeting. I’m going back to the house.” She was desperate. Her house was burning up, Isaiah was being murdered. Her linen, the silver in the DeGrasse pattern, the cake dish, the green nun’s veiling.

  “You’re coming with me.” He rarely used this tone toward her.

  “Yancey! Yancey, I’m afraid to have you stand up there, before all those people. I’m afraid. Let’s go back. Tell them you’re sick. Tell them I’m sick. Tell them—”

  They had reached the tent. The flap was open. A roar of talk came to them from within. The entrance was packed with lean figures smoking and spitting. “Hi, Yancey! How’s the preacher? Where’s your Bible, Yancey?”

  “Right here, boys.” And Yancey reached into the capacious skirt of his Prince Albert to produce in triumph the Word of God. “Come in or stay out, boys. No loafing in the doorway.” With Sabra on his arm he marched through the close-packed tent. “They’ve saved two seats for you and Cim down front—or should have. Yes, there they are.”

  Sabra felt faint. She had seen the foxlike face of Lon Yountis in the doorway. “That man,” she whispered to Yancey. “He was there. He looked at you as you passed by—he looked at you so——”

  “That’s fine, honey. Better than I hoped for. Nothing I like better than to have members of my flock right under my eye.”

  9

  Ranged along the rear of the tent were the Indians. Osages, Poncas, Cherokees, Creeks. They had come from miles around. The Osages wore their blankets, striped orange, purple, green, scarlet, blue. The bucks wore hats—battered and dirty sombreros set high up on their heads. The thin snaky braids of their long black hair hung like wire ropes over their shoulders and down their breasts. Though they wore, for the most part, the checked gingham shirt of the white man there was always about them the gleam of metal, the flash of some brightly dyed fabric, the pattern of colored beads. The older women were shapeless bundles, with the exception of those of the Osage tribe. The Osage alone had never intermarried with the negro. Except for intermingled white blood, the tribe was pure. The Indian children tumbled all about. The savages viewed the proceedings impassively, their faces bronze masks in which only the eyes moved. Later, on their reservations, with no white man to see and hear, they would gossip like fishwives; they would shake with laughter; they would retail this or that absurdity which, with their own eyes, they had seen the white man perform. They would slap their knees and rock with mirth.

  “Great jokers, the Indians,” Yancey had once said, offhand, to Sabra. She had felt sure that he was mistaken. They were sullen, taciturn, grave. They did not speak; they grunted. They never laughed.

  Holding Cim’s hand tightly in her own, Sabra, escorted by Yancey, found that two chairs had been placed for them. Other fortunate ones sat perched on the saloon bar, on the gambling tables, on the benches, on upturned barrels. The rest of the congregation stood. Sabra glanced shyly about her. Men—hundreds of men. They were strangely alike, all those faces; young-old, weather-beaten, deeply seamed, and, for the most part, beardless. The Plains had taken them early, had scorched them with her sun, parched them with her drought, buffeted them with her wind, stung them with her dust. Sabra had grown accustomed to these faces during the past two weeks. But the women—she was not prepared for the women. Calico and sunbonnets there were in plenty; but the wives of Osage’s citizenry had taken this first opportunity to show what they had in the way of finery; dresses that they had brought with them from Kansas, from Texas, from Arkansas, from Colorado, carefully laid away in layers of papers which in turn were smoothed into pasteboard boxes or into trunks. Headgear trembled with wired roses. Cheviot and lady’s-cloth and henrietta graced shoulders that had known only cotton this month past. Near her, and occupying one of the seats evidently reserved for persons of distinction, was a woman who must be, Sabra thought, about her own age; perhaps twenty or twenty-one, fair, blue eyed, almost childlike in her girlish slimness and purity of contour. She was very well dressed in a wine-color silk-warp henrietta, bustled, very tightly basqued, and elaborate with fluting on sleeves and collar. Dress and bonnet were city made and very modish. From Denver, Sabra thought, or Kansas City, or even Chicago. Sabra further decided, with feminine unreason, that her nose was the most exquisite feature of the kind she had ever seen; that her fair skin could not long endure this burning, wind-deviled climate and that the man beside her, who looked old enough to be her father, must be, after all, her husband. It was in the way he spoke to her, gazed at her, touched her. Yancey had pointed him out one day. She remembered his name because it had amused her at the time: Waltz, Evergreen Waltz. He was a notorious Southwest gambler, earned his living by the cards, and was supposed to be the errant son of the former governor of some state or other—she thought it was Texas. The girl looked unhappy; and beneath that, rebellious.

  Still, the sight of this lovely face, and of the other feminine faces looking out from at least fairly modish and decent straw bonnets and toques, gave Sabra a glow of reassurance. Immediately this was quenched at the late, showy, and dramatic entrance, just before Yancey took his place, of a group of women of whom Sabra had actually been unaware. As a matter of fact, the leader of this spectacular group, whose appearance caused a buzz and stir throughout the tent, had arrived in Osage only the day before, accompanied by a bevy of six young ladies. The group had stepped off the passenger coach of the Katy at the town of Wahoo arrayed in such cinder-strewn splendor as to cause the depot loafers to reel. The Katy had not yet been brought as far as Osage. It terminated at Wahoo, twenty-two miles away. The vision, in her purple grosgrain silk, with a parasol to match, and two purple plumes in her hat, with her six gayly bedecked companions had mounted a buckboard amid much shrill clamor and many giggles and a striking display of ankle. In this crude vehicle, their silks outspread, their astounding parasols unfurled, they had bumped their way over the prairie to the town. Osage, since that first mad day of its beginning, had had its quota of shady ladies, but these had been raddled creatures, driftwood from this or that deserted mining camp or abandoned town site, middle aged, unsavory, and doubtless slightly subnormal mentally.

  These were different. The leader, a handsome black-haired woman of not more than twenty-two or -three, had taken for herself and her companions such rooms as they could get in the town. Osage gazed on the parasols, bedazzled. Within an hour it was known that the woman claimed the name of Dixie Lee. That she was a descendant of decayed Southern aristocracy. That her blooming companions boasted such fancy nomenclature as Cherry de St. Maurice, Carmen Brown, Belle Mansero, and the like. That the woman, shrewd as a man and sharp as a knife, had driven a bargain whereby she was to come into possession, at a stiff price, of the building known as the Elite Rooming House and Café, situated at the far end of Pawhuska Avenue, near the gambling tent; and that she contemplated building a house of her
own, planned for her own peculiar needs, if business warranted. Finally, she brought the news, gained God knows how or where, that the Katy was to be extended to Osage and perhaps beyond it. Thus harlotry, heretofore a sordid enough slut in a wrapper and curling pins, came to Osage in silks and plumes, with a brain behind it and a promise of prosperity in its gaudy train.

  Dixie Lee, shrewd saleswoman, had been quick to learn of Sunday’s meeting, and quicker still to see the advantage of this opportunity for a public advertisement of her business. So now, at Osage’s first church meeting, in marched the six, with Dixie Lee at their head making a seventh. They rustled in silks. The air of the close-packed tent became as suffocating with scent as a Persian garden at sunset. Necks were craned; whispers became a buzz; seats were miraculously found for these representatives of a recognized social order, as for visiting royalty. The dazzling tent top, seeming to focus rather than disseminate the glare of the Oklahoma sun, cast its revealing spotlight upon painted cheeks and beaded lashes. The nude and lolling lady of the cherries in Grat Gotch’s newly acquired art treasure stared down at them, open-mouthed, with the look of one who is surprised and vanquished by an enemy from her own camp. The hard-working worthy wives of Osage, in their cheviots and their faded bonnets and cotton gloves, suddenly seemed sallow, scrawny, and almost spectacularly unalluring.

  All this Sabra beheld in a single glance, as did the entire congregation. Only the Indians, standing or squatting in a row at the back, like an Egyptian frieze against the white of the tent, remained unagitated, remote. Yancey, having lifted Cim into the chair next his mother, looked up at the entrance of this splendid procession.

  “God Almighty!” he said. His tone was as irreverent as the words were sacred. A dull flush suffused his face, a thing so rare in him as to startle Sabra more than the words he had uttered or the tone in which he had said them.

  “What is it? Yancey! What’s wrong?”

  “That’s the girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “That one—Dixie Lee—she’s the girl in the black tights and the skullcap … in the Run … on the thoroughbred …” he was whispering.

  “Oh, no!” cried Sabra, aloud. It was wrung from her. Those near by stared.

  So this was the church meeting toward which she had looked with such hope, such happy assurance. Harlots, pictures of nude women, Indians, heat, glare, her house probably blazing at this moment, Isaiah weltering in his own gore, Lon Yountis’s sinister face sneering in the tent entrance. And now this woman, unscrupulous, evil, who had stolen Yancey’s quarter section from him by a trick.

  Yancey made his way through the close-packed crowd, leaped to the top of the roulette table which was to be his platform, flung his broad-brimmed white sombrero dexterously to the outjutting base of a suspended oil lamp, where it spun and then clung, cocked rakishly; and, lifting the great lolling head, swept the expectant congregation with his mysterious, his magnetic eyes.

  Probably never in the history of the Christian religion had the Word of God been preached by so romantic and dashing a figure. His long black locks curled on his shoulders; the fine eyes glowed; the Prince Albert swayed with his graceful movements; his six-shooters, one on each side, bulged reassuringly in their holsters.

  His thrilling voice sounded through the tent, stilling its buzz and movement.

  “Friends and fellow citizens, I have been called on to conduct this opening meeting of the Osage First Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian Church. In the course of my career as a lawyer and an editor I have been required to speak on varied occasions and on many subjects. I have spoken in defense of my country and in criticism of it; I have been called on to defend and to convict horse thieves, harlots, murderers, samples of which professions could doubtless be found in any large gathering in the Indian Territory to-day. I name no names. I point no finger. Whether for good or for evil, the fact remains that any man or woman, for whatever purpose, found in this great Oklahoma country to-day is here because in his or her veins, actuated by motives lofty or base, there is the spirit of adventure. I ask with Shakespeare, ‘Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?’ Though I know the Bible from cover to cover, and while many of its passages and precepts are graven on my heart and in my memory, this, fellow citizens of Osage, is the first time that I have been required to speak the Word of God in His Temple.” He glanced around the gaudy, glaring tent. “For any shelter, however sordid, however humble—no offense, Grat—becomes, while His Word is spoken within it, His Temple. Suppose, then, that we unite in spirit by uniting in song. We have, you will notice, no hymn books. We will therefore open this auspicious occasion in the brief but inevitably glorious history of the city of Osage by singing—uh—what do you all know boys, anyway?”

  There was a moment’s slightly embarrassing pause. The hard-bitten faces of the motley congregation stared blankly up at Yancey. Yancey, self-possessed, vibrant, looked warmly down on them. He raised an arm in encouragement. “Come on, boys! Name it! Any suggestions, ladies and gentlemen?”

  “How about Who Were You At Home? just for a starter,” called out a voice belonging to a man with a shining dome-shaped bald head and a flowing silky beard, reddish in color. He was standing near the rear of the tent. It was Shanghai Wiley, up from Texas; owner of more than one hundred thousand long-horn cattle and of the Rancho Palacios, on Tres Palacios Creek. He was the most famous cattle singer in the whole Southwest, besides being one of its richest cattle and land owners. Possessed of a remarkably high sweet tenor voice that just escaped being a clear soprano, he had been known to quiet a whole herd of restless cattle on the verge of a mad stampede. It was an art he had learned when a cowboy on the range. Many cowboys had it, but none possessed the magic soothing quality of Shanghai’s voice. It was reputed to have in it the sorcery of the superhuman. It was told of him that in a milling herd, their nostrils distended, their flanks heaving, he had been seen to leap from the back of one maddened steer to another, traveling the moving mass that was like a shifting sea, singing to them in his magic tenor, stopping them just as they were about to plunge into the Rio Grande.

  Yancey acknowledged this suggestion with a grateful wave of the hand. “That’s right, Shanghai. Thanks for speaking up. A good song, though a little secular for the occasion, perhaps. But anyway, you all know it, and that’s the main thing. Kindly favor us with the pitch, will you, Shanghai? Will the ladies kindly join in with their sweet soprano voices? Now, then, all together!”

  It was a well-known song in the Territory where, on coming to this new and wild country, so many settlers with a checkered—not to say plaid—past had found it convenient to change their names.

  The congregation took it up feelingly, almost solemnly:

  Who were you at home?

  Who were you at home?

  God alone remembers

  Ere you first began to roam.

  Jack or Jo or Bill or Pete,

  Anyone you chance to meet,

  Sure to hit it just as neat,

  Oh, who were you at home?

  “Now, all together! Again!”

  Somebody in the rear suddenly produced an accordion, and from the crowd perched on the saloon bar came the sound of a jew’s-harp. The chorus now swelled with all the fervor of song’s ecstasy. They might have been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers. Through it all, high and clear, sounded Shanghai Wiley’s piercing tenor, like brasses in a band, and sustaining it from the roulette table platform the ’cello of Yancey Cravat’s powerful, rich barytone.

  Oh, WHO were you at home?

  WHO were you at HOME?

  They had not risen to sing for the reason that most of the congregation was already standing, and the few who were seated were afraid to rise for fear that their seats would be snatched from under them.

  Sabra had joined in the singing, not at first, but later, timidly. It had seemed, somehow, to relieve her. This, s
he thought, was better. Perhaps, after all, this new community was about to make a proper beginning. Yancey, she thought, looked terribly handsome, towering there on the roulette table, his eyes alight, his slim foot, in its shining boot, keeping time to the music. She began to feel prim and good and settled at last.

  “Now, then,” said Yancey, all aglow, “the next thing in order is to take up the collection before the sermon.”

  “What for?” yelled Pete De Vargas.

  Yancey fixed him with a pitying gray eye. “Because, you Spanish infidel, part of a church service is taking up a collection. Southwest Davis, I appoint you to work this side of the house. Ike Bixler, you take that side. The collection, fellow citizens, ladies and gentlemen—and you, too, Pete—is for the new church organ.”

  “Why, hell, Yancey, we ain’t even got a church!” bawled Pete again, aggrieved.

  “That’s all right, Pete. Once we buy an organ we’ll have to build a church to put it in. Stands to reason. Members of the congregation, anybody putting in less than two bits will be thrown out of the tent by me. Indians not included.”

  The collection was taken up, in two five-gallon sombreros, the contents of which, as they passed from one hairy sunburned paw to the next, were watched with eagle eyes by Southwest Davis and Ike Bixler, and, in fact, by the entire gathering. The sombreros were then solemnly and with some hesitation brought to the roulette table pulpit for Yancey’s inspection.

  “Mr. Grat Gotch, being used to lightning calculations in the matter of coins, will kindly count the proceeds of the collection.”

  Arkansas Grat, red-faced and perspiring, elbowed his way to the pulpit and made his swift and accurate count. He muttered the result to Yancey. Yancey announced it publicly. “Fellow citizens, the sum of the first collection for the new church organ for the Osage church, whose denomination shall be nameless, is the gratifying total of one hundred and thirty-three dollars and fifty-five cents.—Heh, wait a minute, Grat! Fifty-five—did you say fifty-five cents?”