by Edna Ferber
“Arita! Here. Come. Lie down. I’ll send for your father—your mother.” Her father was Big Knee, well known and something of a power in the Osage tribe. Of the tribal officers he was one of the eight members of the Council and as such was part of the tribe’s governing body.
Dreadful as the look on Arita Red Feather’s face had been, it was now contorted almost beyond recognition. “No! No!” She broke into a storm of pleading in her own tongue. Her eyes were black pools of agony. Sabra had never thought that one of pure Indian blood would thus give way to any emotion before a white person.
She put the girl to bed. She sent Isaiah for Dr. Valliant, who luckily was in town and sober. He went to work quietly, efficiently, aided by Sabra, making the best of such crude and hasty necessities as came to hand. The girl made no outcry. Her eyes were a dull, dead black; her face was rigid. Sabra, passing from the kitchen to the girl’s bedroom with hot water, cloths, blankets, saw Isaiah crouched in a corner by the wood box. He looked up at her mutely. His face was a curious ash gray. As Sabra looked at him she knew.
The child was a boy. His hair was coarse and kinky. His nose was wide. His lips were thick. He was a Negro child. Doc Valliant looked at him as Sabra held the writhing red-purple bundle in her arms.
“This is a bad business.”
“I’ll send for her parents. I’ll speak to Isaiah. They can marry.”
“Marry! Don’t you know?”
Something in his voice startled her. “What?”
“The Osages don’t marry Negroes. It’s forbidden.”
“Why, lots of them have. You see Negroes who are Indians every day. On the street.”
“Not Osages. Seminoles, yes. And Creeks, and Choctaws, and even Chickasaws. But the Osages, except for intermarriage with whites, have kept the tribe pure.”
This information seemed to Sabra to be unimportant and slightly silly. Purity of the tribe, indeed! Osages! She resolved to be matter of fact and sensible now that the shocking event was at hand, waiting to be dealt with. She herself felt guilty, for this thing had happened in her own house. She should have foreseen danger and avoided it. Isaiah had been a faithful black child in her mind, whereas he was, in reality, a man grown.
Dr. Valliant had finished his work. The girl lay on the bed, her dull black eyes fixed on them; silent, watchful, hopeless. Isaiah crouched in the kitchen. The child lay now in Sabra’s arms. Donna and Cim were, fortunately, asleep, for it was now long past midnight. The tense excitement past, the whole affair seemed to Sabra sordid, dreadful. What would the town say? What would the members of the Philomathean Club and the Twentieth Century Culture Club think?
Doc Valliant came over to her and looked down at the queer shriveled morsel in her arms. “We must let his father see him.”
Sabra shrank. “Oh, no!”
He took the baby from her and turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll do it. Let me have a drink of whisky, will you, Sabra? I’m dead tired.”
She went past him into the dining room, without a glance at the Negro boy cowering in the kitchen. Doc Valliant followed her. As she poured a drink of Yancey’s store of whisky, almost untouched since he had left, she heard Valliant’s voice, very gentle, and then the sound of Isaiah’s blubbering. All the primness in her was outraged. Her firm mouth took on a still straighter line. Valliant took the child back to the Indian girl’s bed and placed it by her side. He stumbled with weariness as he entered the dining room where Sabra stood at the table. As he reached for the drink Sabra saw that his hand shook a little as Yancey’s used to do in that same gesture. She must not think of that. She must not think of that.
“There’s no use talking now, Doctor, about what the Osages do or don’t do that you say is so pure. The baby’s born. I shall send for the old man—what’s his name?—Big Knee. As soon as Arita can be moved he must take her home. As for Isaiah, I’ve a notion to send him back to Kansas, as I wanted to do years ago, only he begged so to stay, and Yancey let him. And now this.”
Doc Valliant had swallowed the whisky at a gulp—had thrown it down his throat as one takes medicine to relieve pain. He poured another glass. His face was tired and drawn. It was late. His nerves were not what they had been, what with drink, overwork, and countless nights without sleep as he rode the country on his black horse, his handsome figure grown a little soft and sagging now. But he still was a dashing sight when he sat the saddle in his black corduroys and his soft-brimmed black hat.
He swallowed his second drink. His face seemed less drawn, his hand steadier, his whole bearing more alert. “Now listen, Sabra. You don’t understand. You don’t understand the Osages. This is serious.”
Sabra interrupted quickly. “Don’t think I’m hard. I’m not condemning her altogether, or Isaiah, either. I’m partly to blame. I should have seen. But I am so busy. Anyway, I can’t have her here now, can I? With Isaiah. Even you …”
He filled his glass. She wished he would stop drinking; go home. She would sit up the night with the Indian girl. And in the morning—well, she must get someone in to help. They would know, sooner or later.
He was repeating rather listlessly what he had said. “The Osages have kept the tribe absolutely free of Negro blood. This is a bad business.”
Her patience was at an end. “What of it? And how do you know? How do you know?”
“Because they remove any member of the tribe that has had to do with a Negro.”
“Remove!”
“Kill. By torture.”
She stared at him. He was drunk, of course. “You’re talking nonsense,” she said crisply. She was very angry.
“Don’t let this get around. They might blame you. The Osages. They might——I’ll just go and take another look at her.”
The girl was sleeping. Sabra felt a pang of pity as she gazed down at her. “Go to bed—off with you,” said Doc Valliant to Isaiah. The boy’s face was wet, pulpy with tears and sweat and fright. He walked slackly, as though exhausted.
“Wait.” Sabra cut him some bread from the loaf, sliced a piece of meat left from supper. “Here. Eat this. Everything will be all right in the morning.”
The news got round. Perhaps Doc Valliant talked in drink. Doubtless the girl who came in to help her. Perhaps Isaiah, who after a night’s exhausted sleep had suddenly become proudly paternal and boasted loudly about the house (and no doubt out of it) of the size, beauty, and intelligence of the little lump of dusky flesh that lay beside Arita Red Feather’s bed in the very cradle that had held Donna when an infant. Arita Red Feather was frantic to get up. They had to keep her in bed by main force. She had not spoken a dozen words since the birth of the child.
On the fourth day following the child’s birth Sabra came into Arita Red Feather’s room early in the morning and she was not there. The infant was not there. Their beds had been slept in and now were empty. She ran straight into the yard where Isaiah’s little hut stood. He was not there. She questioned the girl who now helped with the housework and who slept on a couch in the dining room. She had heard nothing, seen nothing. The three had vanished in the night.
Well, Sabra thought, philosophically, they have gone off. Isaiah can make out, somehow. Perhaps he can even get a job as a printer somewhere. He was handy, quick, bright. He had some money, for she had given him, in these later years, a little weekly wage, and he had earned a quarter here, a half dollar there. Enough, perhaps, to take them by train back to Kansas. Certainly they had not gone to Arita’s people, for Big Knee, questioned, denied all knowledge of his daughter, of her child, of the black boy. He behaved like an Indian in a Cooper novel. He grunted, looked blank, folded his arms, stared with dead black, expressionless eyes. They could make nothing of him. His squaw, stout, silent, only shook her head; pretended that she neither spoke nor understood English.
Then the rumor rose, spread, received credence. It was started by Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian guide and plainsman who sometimes lived with the Indians for months at a time on their reservations, who went
with them on their visiting jaunts, hunted, fished, ate with them, who was married to a Cherokee, and who had even been adopted into the Cherokee tribe. He had got the story from a Cherokee who in turn had had it from an Osage. The Osage, having managed to lay hands on some whisky, and becoming very drunk, now told the grisly tale for the first time.
There had been an Osage meeting of the Principal Chief, old Howling Wolf; the Assistant Chief; the eight members of the Council, which included Big Knee, Arita’s father. There the news of the girl’s dereliction had been discussed, her punishment gravely decided upon, and that of Isaiah.
They had come in the night and got them—the black boy, the Indian girl, the infant—by what means no one knew. Arita Red Feather and her child had been bound together, placed in an untanned and uncured steer hide, the hide was securely fastened, they were carried then to the open, sun-baked, and deserted prairie and left there, with a guard. The hide shrank and shrank and shrank in the burning sun, closer and closer, day by day, until soon there was no movement within it.
Isaiah, already half dead with fright, was at noonday securely bound and fastened to a stake. Near by, but not near enough quite to touch him, was a rattlesnake so caught by a leather thong that, strike and coil and strike as it might, it could not quite reach, with its venomous head, the writhing, gibbering thing that lay staring with eyes that protruded out of all semblance to human features. But as dusk came on the dew fell, and the leather thong stretched a little with the wet. And as twilight deepened and the dew grew heavier the leather thong holding the horrible reptile stretched more and more. Presently it was long enough.
16
“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” You read this inflaming sentiment on posters and banners and on little white buttons pinned to coat lapels or dress fronts. There were other buttons and pennants bearing the likeness of an elderly gentleman with a mild face disguised behind a martial white mustache; and thousands of male children born within the United States in 1898 grew up under the slight handicap of the christened name of Dewey. The Oklahoma Wigwam bristled with new words: Manila Bay—Hobson—Philippines. Throughout the Southwest sombreros suddenly became dust-colored army hats with broad, flat brims and peaked crowns. People who, if they had thought of Spain at all, saw it in the romantic terms of the early Southwest explorers—Coronado, De Soto, Moscoso—and, with admiration for these intrepid and mistaken seekers after gold, now were told that they must hate Spain and the Spanish and kill as many little brown men living in the place called the Philippines as possible. This was done as dutifully as could be, but with less than complete enthusiasm.
Rough Riders! That was another matter. Here was something that the Oklahoma country knew and understood—tall, lean, hard young men who had practically been born with a horse under them and a gun in hand; riders, hunters, dead shots; sunburned, keen eyed, daredevil. Their uniforms, worn with a swagger, had about them a dashing something that the other regiments lacked. Their hat crowns were dented, not peaked, and the brims were turned romantically up at one side and caught with the insignia of the Regiment—the crossed sabers. And their lieutenant-colonel and leader was that energetic, toothy young fellow who was making something of a stir in New York State—Roosevelt, his name was. Theodore Roosevelt.
Osage was shaken by chills and fever; the hot spasms of patriotism, the cold rigors of virtue. One day the good wives of the community would have a meeting at which they arranged for a home-cooked supper, with coffee, to be served to this or that regiment. Their features would soften with sentiment, their bosoms heave with patriotic pride. Next day, eyes narrowed, lips forming a straight line, they met to condemn Dixie Lee and her ilk, and to discuss ways and means for ridding the town of their contaminating presence.
The existence of this woman in the town had always been a festering sore to Sabra. Dixie Lee, the saloons that still lined Pawhuska Avenue, the gambling houses, all the paraphernalia of vice, were anathema lumped together in the minds of the redoubtable sunbonnets. A new political group had sprung up, ostensibly on the platform of civic virtue. In reality they were tired of seeing all the plums dropping into the laps of the early-day crew, made up of such strong-arm politicians as had been the first to shake the Territorial tree. In the righteous ladies of the Wyatt type they saw their chance for a strong ally. The saloons and the gamblers were too firmly intrenched to be moved by the reform element: they had tried it. Sabra had been urged to help. In the columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam she had unwisely essayed to conduct a campaign against Wick Mongold’s saloon, in whose particularly lawless back room it was known that the young boys of the community were in the habit of meeting. With Cim’s future in mind (and as an excuse) she wrote a stirring editorial in which she said bold things about shielding criminals and protecting the Flower of our Southwest’s Manhood. Two days later a passer-by at seven in the morning saw brisk flames licking the foundations of the Oklahoma Wigwam office and the Cravat dwelling behind it. The whole had been nicely soaked in coal oil. But for the chance passer-by, Sabra, Cim, Donna, newspaper plant, and house would have been charred beyond recognition. As the town fire protection was still of the scantiest, the alarmed neighbors beat out the fire with blankets wet in the near-by horse trough. It was learned that a Mexican had been hired to do the job for twenty dollars. Mongold skipped out.
After an interval reform turned its attention to that always vulnerable objective known then as the Scarlet Woman. Here it met with less opposition. Almost five years after Yancey’s departure it looked very much as though Dixie Lee and her fine brick house and her plumed and parasoled girls would soon be routed by the spiritual broom sticks and sunbonnets of the purity squad.
It was characteristic that at this moment in Osage’s history, when the town was torn, now by martial music, now by the call of civic virtue, Yancey Cravat should have chosen to come riding home; and not that alone, but to come riding home in pull panoply of war, more dashing, more romantic, more mysterious than on the day he had ridden away.
It was eight o’clock in the morning. The case of Dixie Lee (on the charge of disorderly conduct) was due to come up at ten in the local court. Sabra had been at her desk in the Wigwam office since seven. One ear was cocked for the sounds that came from the house; the other was intent on Jesse Rickey’s erratic comings and goings in the printing shop just next the office.
“Cim! Cim Cravat! Will you stop teasing Donna and eat your breakfast. Miss Swisher’s report said you were late three times last month, and all because you dawdle while you dress, you dawdle over breakfast, you dawdle——Jesse! Oh, Jesse! The Dixie Lee case will be our news lead. Hold two columns open.…”
Horse’s hoofs at a gallop, stopping spectacularly in front of the Wigwam office in a whirl of dust. A quick, light step. That step! But it couldn’t be. Sabra sprang to her feet, one hand at her breast, one hand on the desk, to steady herself. He strode into the office. For five years she had pictured him returning to her in dramatic fashion; in his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his high-heeled boots. For five years she had known what she would say, how she would look at him, in what manner she would conduct herself toward him—toward this man who had deserted her without a word, cruelly. In an instant, at sight of him, all this left her mind, her consciousness. She was in his arms with an inarticulate cry, she was weeping, her arms were about him, the buttons of his uniform crushed her breasts. His uniform. She realized then, without surprise, that he was in the uniform of the Oklahoma Rough Riders.
It is no use saying to a man who has been gone for five years, “Where have you been?” Besides, there was not time. Next morning he was on his way to the Philippines. It was not until he had gone that she realized her failure actually to put this question that had been haunting her for half a decade.
Cim and Donna took him for granted, as children do. So did Jesse Rickey, with his mind of a child. For that matter, Yancey took his own return for granted. His manner was nonchalant, his spirits high, his exuberance infec
tious. He set the pitch. There was about him nothing of the delinquent husband.
He now strode magnificently into the room where the children were at breakfast, snatched them up, kissed them. You would have thought he had been gone a week.
Donna was shy of him. “Your daughter’s a Venable, Mrs. Cravat,” he said, and turned to the boy. Cim, slender, graceful, taller than he seemed because of that trick of lowering his fine head and gazing at you from beneath his too-long lashes, reached almost to Yancey’s broad shoulders. But he had not Yancey’s heroic bulk, his vitality. The Cravat skull structure was contradicted by the narrow Venable face. The mouth was over-sensitive, the hands and feet too exquisite, the smile almost girlish in its wistful sweetness. “ ‘Gods! How the son degenerates from the sire!’ ”
“Yancey!” cried Sabra in shocked protest. It was as though the five years had never been.
“Do you want to see my dog?” Cim asked.
“Have you got a pony?”
“Oh, no.”
“I’ll buy you one this afternoon. A pinto. Here. Look.”
He took from his pocket a little soft leathern pouch soiled and worn from much handling. It was laced through at the top with a bit of stout string. He loosed this, poured the bag’s contents onto the breakfast table; a little heap of shining yellow. The three stood looking at it. Cim touched it with one finger.
“What is it?”
Yancey scooped up a handful of it and let it trickle through his fingers. “That’s gold.” He turned to Sabra. “It’s all I’ve got to show, honey, for two years and more in Alaska.”