by Edna Ferber
“… rubber boots to parties, often, because when it rains we wade up to our ankles in mud. We carry lanterns when we go to the church sociables.… Mrs. Buckner’s sister came to visit her from St. Joseph, Missouri, and she remarked that she had noticed that the one pattern of table silver seemed to be such a favorite. She had seen it at all the little tea parties that had been given for her during her visit. Of course it was my set that had been the rounds. Everybody borrowed it. We borrow each other’s lamps, too, and china, and even linen.”
At this the Venables and Marcys and Vians and Goforths looked not only shocked but stricken. Chests of lavender-scented linen, sideboards flashing with stately silver, had always been part of the Venable and Marcy tradition.
Then the children. The visiting Venables insisted on calling Cim by his full name—Cimarron. Sabra had heard it so rarely since the day of his birth that she now realized, for the first time, how foolish she had been to yield to Yancey’s whim in the naming of the boy. Cimarron. Spanish: wild, or unruly. The boy had made such an obstreperous entrance into the world, and Yancey had shouted, in delight, “Look at him! See him kick with his feet and strike out with his fists! He’s a wild one. Heh, Cimarron! Peceno Gitano.”
Cousin Jouett Goforth or Cousin Dabney Venable said, pompously, “And now, Cimarron, my little man, tell us about the big red Indians. Did you ever fight Indians, eh, Cimarron?” The boy surveyed them from beneath his long lashes, his head lowered, looking for all the world like his father.
Cimarron was almost eight now. If it is possible for a boy of eight to be romantic in aspect, Cimarron Cravat was that. His head was not large, like Yancey’s, but long and fine, like Sabra’s—a Venable head. His eyes were Sabra’s, too, dark and large, but they had the ardent look of Yancey’s gray ones, and he had Yancey’s absurdly long and curling lashes, like a beautiful girl’s. His mannerisms—the head held down, the rare upward glance that cut you like a sword thrust when he turned it full on you—the swing of his walk, the way he gestured with his delicate hands—all these were Yancey in startling miniature.
His speech was strangely adult. This, perhaps, because of his close association with his elders in those first formative years in Osage. Yancey had delighted in talking to the boy; in taking him on rides and drives about the broad burning countryside. His skin was bronzed the color of his father’s. He looked like a little patrician Spaniard or perhaps (the Venables thought privately) part Indian. Then, too, there had been few children of his age in the town’s beginning. Sabra had been, at first, too suspicious of such as there were. He would, probably, have seemed a rather unpleasant and priggish little boy if his voice and manner had not been endowed miraculously with all the charm and magnetism that his father possessed in such disarming degree.
He now surveyed his middle-aged cousins with the concentrated and disconcerting gaze of the precocious child.
“Indians,” he answered, with great distinctness, “don’t fight white men any more. They can’t. Their—uh—spirit is broken.” Cousin Dabney Venable, who still affected black stocks (modified), now looked slightly apoplectic. “They only fought in the first place because the white men took their buff’loes away from them that they lived on and ate and traded the skins and that was all they had; and their land away from them.”
“Well,” exclaimed Cousin Jouett Goforth, of the Louisiana Goforths, “this is quite a little Redskin you have here, Cousin Sabra.”
“And,” continued Cimarron, warming to his subject, “look at the Osage Indians where my father took me to visit the reservation near where we live. The white people made them move out of Missouri to Kansas because they wanted their land, and from there to another place—I forget—and then they wanted that, too, and they said, ‘Look, you go and live in the Indian Territory where we tell you,’ and it’s all bare there, and nothing grows in that place—it’s called the Bad Lands—unless you work and slave and the Osages they were used to hunting and fishing not farming, so they are just starving to death and my father says some day they will get their revenge on the white——”
Felice Venable turned her flashing dark gaze on her daughter.
“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth.
Cousin Dabney Venable, still the disgruntled suitor, brought malicious eyes to bear on Sabra. “Well, well, Cousin Sabra! Look out that you don’t have a Pocahontas for a daughter-in-law some fine day.”
Sabra was furious, though she tried in her pride to conceal it. “Oh, Cim has just heard the talk of the men around the newspaper office—the Indian agent, Mr. Heeney, sometimes drops in on his trips to Osage—they’re talking now of having the Indian Agent’s office transferred to Osage, though Oklahoma City is fighting for it—Yancey has always been very much stirred by the wretched Indians—Cim has heard him talking.”
Cim sensed that he had not made his desired effect on his listeners. “My father says,” he announced, suddenly, striding up and down the room in absurd and unconscious imitation of his idol—one could almost see the Prince Albert coat tails switching—“my father says that some day an Indian will be President of the United States, and then you bet you’ll all be sorry you were such dirty skunks to ’em.”
The eyes of the visiting Venables swung, as one orb, from the truculent figure of the boy to the agitated face of the mother.
“My poor child!” came from Felice Venable in accents of rage rather than pity. She was addressing Sabra.
Sabra took refuge in hauteur. “You wouldn’t understand. Our life there is so different from yours here. Yancey’s Indian editorials in the Wigwam have made a sensation. They were spoken of in the Senate at Washington.” Felice dismissed all Yancey’s written works with a wave of her hand. “In fact,” Sabra went on—she who hated Indians and all their ways—“in fact, his editorials on the subject have been so fearless and free that he has been in danger of his life from the people who have been cheating the Indians. It has been even more dangerous than when he tracked down the murderer of Pegler.”
“Pegler,” repeated the Venables, disdainfully, and without the slightest curiosity in their voices.
Sabra gave it up. “You don’t understand. The only thing you care about is whether the duck runs red or not.”
Even little Donna was not much of a success. The baby was an eerie little elf, as plain as the boy was handsome. She resembled her grandmother, Felice Venable, without a trace of that redoubtable matron’s former beauty. But she had that almost indefinable thing known as style. At the age of two she wore with undeniable chic the rather clumsy little garments that Sabra had so painstakingly made for her; and when she was dressed, for the first time, in one of the exquisitely hemstitched, tucked and embroidered white frocks that her grandmother had wrought for her, that gifted though reluctant needlewomen said, tartly, “Thank God, she’s got style, at least. She’ll have to make out with that.”
All in all, Sabra found herself joyously returning to the barren burning country to which, four years earlier, she had gone in such dread and terror. She resented her mother’s do-this, do-that. She saw Felice Venable now, no longer as a power, an authority in all matters of importance, but as a sallow old lady who tottered on heels that were too high and who, as she sat talking, pleated and unpleated with tremulous fingers the many ruffles of her white dimity wrapper. The matriarch had lost her crown. Sabra was matriarch now of her own little kingdom; and already she was planning to extend that realm beyond and beyond its present confines into who knows what vastness of demesne.
She decided that she must take the children more than ever in hand. No more of this talk of Indians, of freedom, or equality of man. She did not realize (it being long before the day of psychology as applied so glibly to the training of children) that she was, so far as Cim was concerned, years too late. At eight his character was formed. She had taught him the things that Felice Venable had taught her—stand up straight; eat your bread and butter; wash your hands; say how do you do to the lady; one and one are two; some
body has been eating my porridge, said the little wee bear. But Yancey had taught him poetry far beyond his years, and accustomed his ears to the superb cadences of the Bible; Yancey had told him, bit by bit, and all unconsciously, the saga of the settling of the great Southwest.
“Cowboys wear big sombreros to shield their faces from the rain and the sun when they’re riding the range, and the snow from dripping down their backs. He wears a handkerchief knotted at the back of the neck and hanging down in front so that he can wipe the sweat and dust from his face with it, and then there it is, open, drying in the wind; and in a dust storm he pulls it over his mouth and nose, and in a blizzard it keeps his nose and chin from freezing. He wears chaps, with the hairy side out, to keep his legs warm in winter and to protect them from being torn by chaparral and cactus thorns in summer. His boots are high heeled to keep his feet from slipping in the stirrups when he has to work standing in the saddle, and because he can sink them in the sod when he’s off his horse and roping a plunging bronc. He totes a six-shooter to keep the other fellow from shooting.”
The child’s eyes were enormous, glowing, enthralled. Yancey told him the story of the buffalo; he talked endlessly of the Indians. He even taught him some words of Comanche, which is the court language of the Indian. He put him on a horse at the age of six. A sentimentalist and a romantic, he talked to the boy of the sunset; of Spanish gold; of the wild days of the Cimarron and the empire so nearly founded there. The boy loved his mother dutifully, and as a matter of course, as a child loves the fount of food, of tender care, of shelter. But his father he worshiped, he adored.
Sabra’s leave-taking held one regret, one pain. Mother Bridget had died two weeks before Sabra arrived in Wichita. It was not until she learned this sad news that Sabra realized how tremendously she had counted on telling her tale of Osage to the nun. She would have understood. She would have laughed at the story of the ten barrels of water; of the wild cowboy’s kiss in the road; she would have sympathized with Sabra’s terror during that Sunday church meeting. She had known that very life a half century ago, there in Kansas. Sabra, during her visit, did not go to the Mission School. She could not.
She had meant, at the last, to find occasion to inform her mother and the minor Venables that it was she who ironed Yancey’s fine white linen shirts. But she was not a spiteful woman. And she reflected that this might be construed as a criticism of her husband.
So, gladly, eagerly, Sabra went back to the wilds she once had despised.
13
Before the Katy pulled in at the Osage station (the railroad actually had been extended, true to Dixie Lee’s prediction, from Wahoo to Osage and beyond) Sabra’s eyes were searching the glaring wooden platform. Len Orson, the chatty and accommodating conductor, took Donna in his arms and stood with her at the foot of the car steps. His heavy gold plated watch chain, as broad as a cable, with its concomitant Masonic charm, elk’s tooth, gold pencil, and peach pit carved in the likeness of an ape, still held Donna enthralled, though she had snatched at it whenever he passed their seat or stood to relate the gossip of the Territory to Sabra. She was hungry for news, and Len was a notorious fishwife. Now, as she stepped off the train, Sabra’s face wore that look of radiant expectancy characteristic of the returned traveler, confident of a welcome.
“Well, I guess I know somebody’ll be pretty sorry to see you,” Len said, archly. He looked about for powerful waiting arms in which to deposit Donna. The engine bell clanged, the whistle tooted. His kindly and inquisitive blue eyes swept the station platform. He plumped Donna, perforce, into Sabra’s strangely slack arms, and planted one foot, in its square-toed easy black shoe, onto the car step in the nick of time, the other leg swinging out behind him as the train moved on.
Yancey was not there. The stark red-painted wooden station sat blistering in the sun. Yancey simply was not there. Not only that, the station platform, usually graced by a score of vacuous faces and limp figures gathered to witness the exciting event of the Katy’s daily arrival and departure, was bare. Even the familiar figure of Pat Leary, the station agent, who always ran out in his shirt sleeves to wrestle such freight or express as was left on the Osage platform, could not be seen. From within the ticket office came the sound of his telegraph instrument. Its click was busy; was frantic. It chattered unceasingly in the hot afternoon stillness.
Sabra felt sick and weak. Something was wrong. She left her boxes and bags and parcels on the platform where Len Orsen had obligingly dumped them. Half an hour before their arrival in Osage she had entrusted the children to the care of a fellow passenger while she had gone to the washroom to put on one of the new dresses made in Wichita and bearing the style cachet of Kansas City: green, with cream colored ruchings at the throat and wrists, and a leghorn hat with pink roses. She had anticipated the look in Yancey’s gray eyes at sight of it. She had made the children spotless and threatened them with dire things if they sullied their splendor before their father should see them.
And now he was not there.
With Donna in her arms and Cim at her heels she hurried toward the sound of the clicking. And as she went her eyes still scanned the dusty red road that led to the station, for sight of a great figure in a white sombrero, its coat tails swooping as it came.
She peered in at the station window. Pat Leary was bent over his telegraph key. A smart tight little Irishman who had come to the Territory with the railroad section crew when the Katy was being built. Station agent now, and studying law at night.
“Mr. Leary! Mr. Leary! Have you seen Yancey?” He looked up at her absently, his hand still on the key. Click … click … clickclickclickety—clicketyclickclick.
“Wha’ say?”
“I’m Mrs. Cravat. I just got off the Katy. Where’s my husband? Where’s Yancey?”
He clicked on a moment longer; then wiped his wet forehead with his forearm protected by the black sateen sleevelet. “Ain’t you heard?”
“No,” whispered Sabra, with stiff lips that seemed no part of her. Then, in a voice rising to a scream, “No! No! No! What? Is he dead?”
The Irishman came over to her then, as she crouched at the window. “Oh, no, ma’am. Yancey’s all right. He ain’t hurt to speak of. Just a nick in the arm—and left arm at that.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Don’t take on. You goin’ to faint or——?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I been so busy.… Yancey got the Kid, you know. Killed him. The whole town’s gone crazy. Pitched battle right there on Pawhuska Avenue in front of the bank, and bodies layin’ around like a battlefield. I’m sending it out. I ain’t got much time, but I’ll give you an idea. Biggest thing that’s happened in the history of the Territory—or the whole Southwest, for that matter. Shouldn’t wonder if they’d make Yancey President. Governor, anyway. Seems Yancey was out hunting up in the Hills last Thursday——”
“Thursday! But that’s the day the paper comes out.”
“Well, the Wigwam ain’t been so regular since you been away.” She allowed that to pass without comment. “Up in the Hills he stumbles on Doc Valliant, drunk, but not so drunk he don’t recognize Yancey. Funny thing about Doc Valliant. He can be drunker’n a fool, but one part of his brain stays clear as a diamond. I seen him take a bullet out of Luke Slaughter once and sew him up when he was so drunk he didn’t know his right hand from his left, or where he was at, but he done it. What? Oh, yeh—well, he tells Yancey, drunk as he is, that he’s right in the camp where the Kid and his gang is hiding out. One of them was hurt bad in that last Santa Fé hold-up at Cimarron. Like to died, only they sent for Doc, and he came and saved him. They got close to thirty thousand that trick, and it kind of went to their head. Valliant overheard them planning to ride in here to Osage, like to-day, and hold up the Citizens’ National in broad daylight like the Kid always does. They was already started. Well, Yancey off on his horse to warn the town, and knows he’s got to detour or he’ll come on the gang and they’ll smell a rat. W
ell, say, he actually did meet ’em. Came on ’em, accidental. The Kid sees him and grins that wolf grin of his and sings out, ‘Yancey, you still runnin’ that paper of yourn down at Osage?’ Yancey says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, say,’ he says, ‘how much is it?’ Yancey says a dollar a year. The Kid reaches down and throws Yancey a shot sack with ten silver dollars in it. ‘Send me the paper for ten years,’ he says. ‘Where to?’ Yancey asks him. Well, say, the Kid laughs that wolf laugh of his again and he says, ‘I never thought of that. I’ll have to leave you know later.’ Well, Yancey, looking as meek and mealy-mouthed as a baby, he rides his way, he’s got a little book of poems in his hand and he’s reading as he rides, or pretending to, but first chance he sees he cuts across the Hills, puts his horse through the gullies and into the draws and across the scrub oaks like he was a circus horse or a centipede or something. He gets into Osage, dead tired and his horse in a lather, ten minutes before the Kid and his gang sweeps down Pawhuska Avenue, their six-shooters barking like a regiment was coming, and makes a rush for the bank. But the town is expecting them. Say! Blood!”