by Edna Ferber
“The wind!” Sabra moaned. “The wind! The wind! Make it stop.” She was a little delirious. “Yancey! With your gun. Shoot it. Seven notches. I don’t care. Only stop it.”
She was tended, during her accouchement, by the best doctor in the county and certainly the most picturesque man of medicine in the whole Southwest, Dr. Don Valliant. Like thousands of others living in this new country, his past was his own secret. He rode to his calls on horseback, in a black velveteen coat and velveteen trousers tucked into fancy leather boots. His soft black hat, rivaling Yancey’s white one, intensified the black of his eyes and hair. It was known that he often vanished for days, leaving the sick to get on as best they could. He would reappear as inexplicably as he had vanished; and it was noticed then that he was worn looking and his horse was jaded. It was no secret that he was often called to attend the bandits when one of their number, wounded in some outlaw raid, had taken to their hiding place in the Hills. He was tender and deft with Sabra, though between them he and Yancey consumed an incredible quantity of whisky during the racking hours of her confinement. At the end he held up a caterwauling morsel of flesh torn from Sabra’s flesh—a thing perfect of its kind, with an astonishing mop of black hair.
“This is a Spanish beauty you have for a daughter, Yancey. I present to you Señorita Doña Cravat.”
And Donna Cravat she remained. The town, somewhat scandalized, thought she had been named after Dr. Don himself. Besides, they did not consider Donna a name at all. The other women of the community fed their hunger for romance by endowing their girl children with such florid names as they could conjure up out of their imagination or from the novels they read between dish washings. The result was likely to range from the pathetic to the ridiculous. Czarina McKee; Emmeretta Folsom; Gazelle Slaughter; Maurine Turket; Cassandra Sipes; Jewel Riggs.
The neighborhood wives showered the Cravat household with the customary cakes, pies, meat loaves, and bowls of broth. Black Isaiah was touching, was wonderful. He washed dishes, he mopped floors, he actually cooked as though he had inherited the art from Angie, his vast black mother, left behind in Wichita. One of Sabra’s gingham kitchen aprons, checked blue and white, was always hitched up under his arms, and beneath this utilitarian yet coquettish garment his great bare feet slapped in and out as he did the work of the household. He was utterly fascinated by the new baby. “Looka dat! She know me! Hi, who yo’ rollin’ yo’ eyes at, makin’ faces!” He danced for her, he sang negro songs to her, he rocked her to sleep. He was, as Donna grew older, her nursemaid, pushing her baby buggy up and down the dusty street, and later still her playmate as well as Cim’s.
When Sabra Cravat arose from that bed something in her had crystallized. Perhaps it was that, for the first time in a year, she had had hours in which to rest her tired limbs; perhaps the ordeal itself worked a psychic as well as a physical change in her; it might have been that she realized she must cut a new pattern in this Oklahoma life of theirs. The boy Cim might surmount it; the girl Donna never. During the hours through which she had lain in her bed in the stifling wooden shack, mists seemed to have rolled away from before her eyes. She saw clearly. She felt light and terribly capable—so much so that she made the mistake of getting up, dizzily donning slippers and wrapper, and tottering into the newspaper office where Yancey was writing an editorial and shouting choice passages of it into the inattentive ear of Jesse Rickey, who was setting type in the printing shop.
“… the most stupendous farce ever conceived by the mind of man in a civilized country.…”
He looked up to see in the doorway a wraith, all eyes and long black braids. “Why, sugar! What’s this? You can’t get up!”
She smiled rather feebly. “I’m up. I felt so light, so——”
“I should think you would. All that physic.”
“I feel so strong. I’m going to do so many things. You’ll see. I’m going to paper the whole house. Rosebuds in the bedroom. I’m going to plant two trees in the front. I’m going to start another club—not like the Philomathean—I think that’s silly now—but one to make this town … no saloons … women like that Dixie Lee … going to have a real hired girl as soon as the newspaper begins to … feel so queer … Yancey …”
As she began to topple, Yancey caught the Osage Joan of Arc in his arms.
Incredibly enough, she actually did paper the entire house, aided by Isaiah and Jesse Rickey. Isaiah’s ebony countenance splashed with the white paste mixture made a bizarre effect, a trifle startling to anyone coming upon the scene unawares. Also Jesse Rickey’s inebriate eye, which so often resulted in many grotesque pied print lines appearing in unexpected and inconvenient places in the Oklahoma Wigwam columns, was none too dependable in the matching of rosebud patterns. The result, in spots, was Burbankian, with roses grafted on leaves and tendrils emerging from petals. Still, the effect was gay, even luxurious. The Philomathean Club, as one woman, fell upon wall paper and paste pot, as they had upon the covered jars in Sabra’s earlier effort at decoration. Within a month Louie Hefner was compelled to install a full line of wall paper to satisfy the local demand.
Slowly, slowly, the life of the community, in the beginning so wild, so unrelated in its parts, began to weave in and out, warp and woof, to make a pattern. It was at first faint, almost undiscernible. But presently the eye could trace here a motif, there a figure, here a motif, there a figure. The shuttle swept back, forward, back, forward.
“It’s almost time for the Jew,” Sabra would say, looking up from her sewing. “I need some number forty sewing-machine needles.”
And then perhaps next day, or the day after, Cim, playing in the yard, would see a familiar figure, bent almost double, gnomelike and grotesque, against the western sky. It was Sol Levy, the peddler, the Alsatian Jew. Cim would come running into the house, Donna, perhaps, trotting at his heels. “Mom, here comes the Jew!”
Sabra would fold up her work, brush the threads from her apron; or if her hands were in the dough she would hastily mold and crimp her pie crust so as to be ready for his visit.
Sol Levy had come over an immigrant in the noisome bowels of some dreadful ship. His hair was blue-black and very thick, and his face was white in spite of the burning Southwest sun. A black stubble of beard intensified this pallor. He had delicate blue-veined hands and narrow arched feet. His face was delicate, too, and narrow, and his eyes slanted ever so little at the outer corners, so that he had the faintly Oriental look sometimes seen in the student type of his race. He belonged in crowded places, in populous places, in the color and glow and swift drama of the bazaars. God knows how he had found his way to this vast wilderness. Perhaps in Chicago, or in Kansas City, or Omaha he had heard of this new country and the rush of thousands for its land. And he had bummed his way on foot. He had started to peddle with an oilcloth-covered pack on his back. Through the little hot Western towns in summer. Through the bitter cold Western towns in winter. They turned the dogs on him. The children cried, “Jew! Jew!” He was only a boy, disguised with that stubble of beard. He would enter the yard of a farmhouse or a dwelling in a town such as Osage. A wary eye on the dog. Nice Fido. Nice doggie. Down, down! Pins, sewing-machine needles, rolls of gingham and calico, and last, craftily, his Hamburg lace. Hamburg lace for the little girls’ petticoats, for the aprons of the lady of the house; the white muslin apron edged with Hamburg lace, to be donned after the midday dinner dishes were done, the house set to rights, her hair tidied with a wet comb, the basket of mending got out, or the roll of strips for the rag rug, to be plaited in the precious hours between three and five. He brought news, too.
“The bridge is out below Gray Horse.… The Osages are having a powwow at Hominy. All night they kept me awake with their drums, those savages.… The Kid and his gang held up the Santa Fé near Wetoka and got thirty-five thousand dollars; but one of them will never hold up a train again. A shot in the head. Verdigris Bob, they call him. A name! They say the posse almost caught the Kid himself because this Ver
digris Bob when he finds he is dying he begs the others to leave him and go on, but first they must stop to take his boots off. His boots he wants to have off, that murderer, to die a respectable man! The Kid stops to oblige him, and the posse in ten more minutes would have caught him, too. A feather in that sheriff’s cap, to catch the Kid! … A country! My forefathers should have lived to see me here!”
His beautiful, civilized face, mobile as an actor’s, was at once expressive of despair and bitter amusement. His long slender hands were spread in a gesture of wondering resignation.
Later he bought a horse—a quadruped possessed unbelievably of the power of locomotion—a thing rheumy-eyed, cadaverous, high rumped, like a cloth horse in a pantomime. Sol Levy was always a little afraid of it; timorous of those great square white teeth, like gravestones. He came of a race of scholars and traders. Horses had been no part of their experience. He had to nerve himself to wait on it, to give it the feed bag, an occasional apple or lump of sugar. With the horse and rickety wagon he now added kitchenware to his stock, coarse china, too; bolts of woollen cloth; and, slyly, bright colored silks and muslin flowers and ribbons. Dixie Lee and her girls fell upon these with feverish fingers and shrill cries, like children. He spread his wares for them silently. Sometimes they teased him, those pretty morons; they hung on his meager shoulders, stroked his beard. He regarded them remotely, almost sadly.
“Come on, Solly!” they said. “Why don’t you smile? Don’t you never have no fun? I bet you’re rich. Jews is all rich. Ain’t that the truth, Maude?”
His deep-sunk eyes looked at them. Schicksas. They grew uncomfortable under his gaze, then sullen, then angry. “Go on, get the hell out of here! You got your money, ain’t you? Get, sheeny!”
He sometimes talked to Dixie Lee. There existed between these two a strange relation of understanding and something resembling respect. Outcasts, both of them, he because of his race, she because of her calling. “A smart girl like you, what do you want in such a business?”
“I’ve got to live, Solly. God knows why!”
“You come from a good family. You are young yet, you are smart. There are other ways.”
“Ye-e-e-s? I guess I’ll take up school teaching. Tell a lot of snotty-nosed brats that two and two make four and get handed eleven dollars at the end of the month for it. I tried a couple of things. Nix, nix!”
In a year or two he opened a little store in Osage. It was, at first, only a wooden shack containing two or three rough pine tables on which his wares were spread. He was the town Jew. He was a person apart. Sometimes the cowboys deviled him; or the saloon loungers and professional bad men. They looked upon him as fair game. He thought of them as savages. Yancey came to his rescue one day in the spectacular fashion he enjoyed. Seated at his desk in the Wigwam office Yancey heard hoots, howls, catcalls, and then the crack and rat-a-tat-tat of a fusillade. The porch of the Sunny Southwest Saloon was filled with grinning faces beneath sombreros. In the middle of the dusty road, his back against a Howe scale, stood Sol Levy. They had tried to force him to drink a great glass of whisky straight. He had struggled, coughed, sputtered; had succeeded in spitting out the burning stuff. They had got another. They were holding it up from their vantage point on the porch. Their six-shooters were in their hands. And they were shooting at him—at his feet, at his head, at his hands, expertly, devilishly, miraculously, never hitting him but always careful to come within a fraction of an inch. He had no weapon. He would not have known how to use it if he had possessed one. He was not of a race of fighters.
“Drink it!” the yells were high and less than human. “You’re a dead Jew if you don’t. Dance, gol darn you! Dance for your drink!”
The bullets spat all about him, sang past his ears, whipped up the dust about his feet. He did not run. He stood there, facing them, frozen with fear. His arms hung at his sides. His face was deathly white. They had shot off his hat. He was bareheaded. His eyes were sunken, suffering, stricken. His head lolled a little on one side. His thick black locks hung dank on his forehead. At that first instant of seeing him as he rushed out of his office, Yancey thought, subconsciously, “He looks like—like——” But the resemblance eluded him then. It was only later, after the sickening incident had ended, that he realized of Whom it was that the Jew had reminded him as he stood there, crucified against the scale.
Yancey ran into the road. It is impossible to say how he escaped being killed by one of the bullets. He seemed to leap into the thick of them like a charmed thing. As he ran he whipped out his ivory-handled guns, and at that half the crowd on the saloon porch made a dash for the door and were caught in it and fell sprawling, and picked themselves up, and crawled or ran again until they were inside. Yancey stood beside Sol Levy, the terrible look in his eyes, the great head thrust forward and down, like a buffalo charging. Here was a scene to his liking.
“I’ll drill the first son of a bitch that fires another shot. I will, so help me God! Go on, fire now, you dirty dogs. You filthy loafers. You stinking spawn of a rattlesnake!”
He was, by now, a person in the community—he was, in fact, the person in the town. The porch loafers looked sheepish. They sheathed their weapons, or twirled them, sulkily.
“Aw, Yancey, we was foolin’!”
“We was only kiddin’ the Jew.… Lookit him, the white-livered son of a gun. Lookit—Holy Doggie, look at him! He’s floppin’.”
With a little sigh Sol Levy slid to the dust of the road and lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the Howe scale. It was at that moment, so curiously does the human mind work, that Yancey caught that elusive resemblance. Now he picked the man up and flung him over his great shoulder as he would a sack of meal.
“Yah!” hooted the jokesters, perhaps a little shame-faced now.
Yancey, on his way to his own house so near by, made first a small detour that brought him to the foot of the tobacco-stained saloon porch steps. His eyes were like two sword blades flashing in the sun.
“Greasers! Scum of the Run! Monkey skulls!”
His limp burden dangling over his shoulder, he now strode through the Wigwam office, into the house, and laid him gently down on the sitting-room couch. Revived, Sol Levy stopped to midday dinner with the Cravats. He sat, very white, very still, in his chair and made delicate pretense of eating. Sabra, because Yancey asked her to, though she was mystified, had got out her DeGrasse silver and a set of her linen. His long meager fingers dwelt lingeringly on the fine hand-wrought stuff. His deep-sunk haunting eyes went from Sabra’s clear-cut features, with the bold determined brows, to Yancey’s massive head, then to the dazzling freshness of the children’s artless countenances.
“This is the first time that I have sat at such a table in two years. My mother’s table was like this, in the old country. My father—peace to his soul!—lighted the candles. My mother—sainted—spread the table with her linen and her precious thin silver. Here in this country I eat as we would not have allowed a beggar to eat that came to the door for charity.”
“This Oklahoma country’s no place for you, Sol. It’s too rough, too hard. You come of a race of dreamers.”
The melancholy eyes took on a remote—a prophetic look. There was, suddenly, a slight cast in them, as though he were turning his vision toward something the others could not see. “It will not always be like this. Wait. Those savages to-day will be myths, like the pictures of monsters you see in books of prehistoric days.”
“Don’t worry about those dirty skunks, Sol. I’ll see that they leave you alone from now on.”
Sol Levy smiled a little bitter smile. His thin shoulders lifted in a weary shrug. “Those barbarians! My ancestors were studying the Talmud and writing the laws the civilized world now lives by when theirs were swinging from tree to tree.”
12
In the three and a half years of her residence in Osage Sabra had yielded hardly an inch. It was amazing. It was heroic. She had set herself certain standards, and those she had maintained in spite o
f almost overwhelming opposition. She had been bred on tradition. If she had yielded at all it was in minor matters and because to do so was expedient. True, she could be seen of a morning on her way to the butcher’s or the grocer’s shielded from the sun by one of the gingham sunbonnets which in the beginning she had despised. Certainly one could not don a straw bonnet, velvet or flower trimmed, to dart out in a calico house dress for the purchase of a pound and a half of round steak, ten cents worth of onions, and a yeast cake.
Once only in those three years had she gone back to Wichita. At the prospect of the journey she had been in a fever of anticipation for days. She had taken with her Cim and Donna. She was so proud of them, so intent on outfitting them with a wardrobe sufficiently splendid to set off their charms, that she neglected the matter of her own costuming and found herself arriving in Wichita with a trunk containing the very clothes with which she had departed from it almost four years earlier. Prominent among these was the green nun’s veiling with the pink ruchings. She had had little enough use for it in these past years or for the wine-colored silkwarp henrietta.
“Your skin!” Felice Venable had exclaimed at sight of her daughter. “Your hands! Your hair! As dry as a bone! You look a million. What have you done to yourself?”
Sabra remembered something that Yancey once had said about Texas. Mischievously she paraphrased it in order to shock her tactless mother. “Oklahoma is fine for men and horses, but it’s hell on women and oxen.”
The visit was not a success. The very things she had expected to enjoy fell, somehow, flat. She missed the pace, the exhilarating uncertainty of the Oklahoma life. The teacup conversation of her girlhood friends seemed to lack tang and meaning. Their existence was orderly, calm, accepted. For herself and the other women of Osage there was everything still to do. There lay a city, a county, a whole vast Territory to be swept and garnished by an army of sunbonnets. Paradoxically enough, she was trying to implant in the red clay of Osage the very forms and institutions that now bored her in Wichita. Yet it was, perhaps, a very human trait. It was illustrated literally by the fact that she was, on her return, more thrilled to find that the scrawny elm, no larger than a baby’s arm, which she had planted outside the doorway in Osage, actually had found some moisture for its thirsty roots, and was now feebly vernal, than she had been at sight of the cool glossy canopy of cedar, arbor vitae, sweet locust, and crêpe myrtle that shaded the Kansas garden. She took a perverse delight in bringing the shocked look to the faces of her Wichita friends, and to all the horde of Venables and Marcys and Vians that swarmed up from the South to greet the pioneer. Curiously enough, it was not the shooting affrays and Indian yarns that ruffled them so much as her stories of the town’s social life.