Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “Your Honor!”

  Towering above the crowd, forging his way through like some relentless force of nature, came the great buffalo head, the romantic Rough Rider hat with its turned-up brim caught by the crossed sabers; the massive khaki-clad figure. It was dramatic, it was melodramatic, it was ridiculous. It was superb. The fish faces turned their staring eyes and their gasping mouths away from the white-faced woman and upon him. Here was the kind of situation that the Southwest loved and craved; here was action, here was blood-and-thunder, here was adventure. Here, in a word, was Cimarron.

  He stood before the shoddy judge. He swept off his hat with a gesture that invested it with plumes. “If it please Your Honor, I represent the defendant, Dixie Lee.”

  No Territorial judge, denying Yancey Cravat, would have dared to face that crowd. He cast another glance round—a helpless, baffled one, this time—waved the approaching Gwin Larkin back with a feeble gesture, and prepared to proceed with the case according to the laws of the Territory. Certainly the look that he turned on Sabra Cravat as she entered a scant ten minutes later, white faced, resolute, and took her place as representative of the press, was one of such mingled bewilderment and reproach as would have embarrassed anyone less utterly preoccupied than the editor and publisher of the Oklahoma Wigwam.

  Objection on the part of the slick Pat Leary. Overruled, perforce, by the Judge. A shout from the crowd. Order! Bang! Another shout. Law in a lawless community not yet ten years old; a community made up, for the most part, of people whose very presence there meant impatience with the old order, defiance of the conventions. Ten minutes earlier they had been all for the cocky little Leary, erstwhile station agent; eager to cast the first stone at the woman in the temple. Now, with the inexplicable fickleness of the mob, the electric current of sympathy flowed out from them to the woman to be tried, to the man who would defend her. Hot and swift and plenty of action—that was the way the Southwest liked its justice.

  Pat Leary. Irish, ambitious, fiery. His temper, none too even at best, had been lost before he ever rose. The thought of Yancey ahead of him, the purity brigade behind him, spurred him to his frantic, his disorderly charge.

  His years as section hand on the railroad had equipped him with a vocabulary well suited to scourge this woman in black who sat so quietly, so white faced, before him, for all the crowd to see. Adjective on adjective; vituperation; words which are considered obscenity outside the Bible and the courtroom.

  “… all the vicious influences, your Honor, with which our glorious Territory is infested, can be laid at this woman’s leprous door.… A refuge for the evil, for the diseased, for the criminal … waxed fat and sleek in her foul trade, on the money that should have been spent to help build up, to ennoble this fair Southwest land of ours … scavenger … vilest of humans … disgrace to the fair name of woman.…” Names, then, that writhed from his tongue like snakes.

  A curious embarrassment seized the crowd. There were many in the packed room who had known the easy hospitality of Dixie’s ménage; who had eaten at her board, who had been broken in Grat Gotch’s gambling place and had borrowed money from Dixie to save themselves from rough frontier revenge. She had plied her trade and taken the town’s money and given it out again with the other merchants of the town. The banker could testify to that; the mayor; this committee; that committee. Put Dixie Lee’s name down for a thousand. Part of the order of that disorderly, haphazard town.

  Names. Names. Names. The dull red of resentment deepened the natural red of their sunburned faces. The jurors shifted in their places. A low mutter, ominous, like a growl, sounded its distant thunder. Blunt. Sharp. Ruthless. Younger than Yancey, less experienced, he still should have known better. These men of the inadequate jury, these men in the courtroom crowd, had come of a frontier background, had lived in the frontier atmosphere. In their rough youth, and now, women were scarce, with the scarcity that the hard life predicated. And because they were scarce they were precious. No woman so plain, so hard, so undesirable that she did not take on, by the very fact of her sex, a value far beyond her deserts. The attitude of a whole nation had been touched by this sentimental fact which was, after all, largely geographic. For a full century the countries of Europe, bewildered by it, unable to account for it, had laughed at this adolescent reverence of the American man for the American woman.

  Here was Pat Leary, jumping excitedly about, mouthing execrations, when he himself, working on the railroads ten years before, had married an Indian girl out of the scarcity of girls in the Oklahoma country. Out of the corner of his eye, as he harangued, he saw the great lolling figure of Yancey Cravat. The huge head was sunk on the breast; the eyelids were lowered. Beaten, Pat Leary thought. Defeated, and he knows it. Cravat, the windbag, the wife deserter. He finished in a burst of oratory so ruthless, so brutal that he had the satisfaction of seeing the painful, unaccustomed red surge thickly over Dixie Lee’s pale face from her brow down to where the ladylike white turnover of her high collar met the line of her throat.

  The pompous little Irishman seated himself, chest out, head high, eye roving the crowd and the bench, lips open with self-satisfaction. A few more cases like this and maybe they’d see there was material for a Territory governor right here in Osage.

  The crowd shifted, murmured, gabbled. Yancey still sat sunk in his chair as though lost in thought. The gabble rose, soared. “He’s given it up,” thought Sabra, exulting. “He sees how it is.”

  The eyes of the crowd so close packed in that suffocating little courtroom were concentrated on the inert figure lolling so limply in its chair. Perhaps they were going to be cheated of their show after all.

  Slowly the big head lifted, the powerful shoulders straightened, he rose, he seemed to rise endlessly, he walked to Judge Sipes’s crude desk with his light, graceful stride. The lids were still cast down over the lightning eyes. He stood a moment, that singularly sweet and winning smile wreathing his lips. He began to speak. The vibrant voice, after Leary’s shouts, was so low pitched that the crowd held its breath in order to hear.

  “Your Honor. Gentlemen of the Jury. I am the first to bow to achievement. Recognition where recognition is due—this, gentlemen, has ever been my way. May I, then, before I begin my poor plea in defense of this lady, my client, most respectfully call your attention to that which, in my humble opinion, has never before been achieved, much less duplicated, in the whole of the Southwest. Turn your eye to the figure which has so recently and so deservedly held your attention. Gaze once more upon him. Regard him well. You will not look upon his like again. For, gentlemen, in my opinion this gifted person, Mr. Patrick Leary, is the only man in the Oklahoma Territory—in the Indian Territory—in the whole of the brilliant and glorious Southwest—nay, I may even go so far as to say the only man in this magnificent country, the United States of America!—of whom it actually can be said that he is able to strut sitting down.”

  The puffed little figure in the chair collapsed, then bounded to its feet, red faced, gesticulating. “Your Honor! I object!”

  But the rest was lost in the gigantic roar of the delighted crowd.

  “Go it, Yancey!”

  “That’s the stuff, Cimarron!”

  Here was what they had come for. Doggone, there was nobody like him, damn if they was!

  Even to-day, though more than a quarter of a century has gone by, there still are people in Oklahoma who have kept a copy, typed neatly now from records made by hand, of the speech made that day by Yancey Cravat in defense of the town woman, Dixie Lee. Yancey Cravat’s Plea for a Fallen Woman, it is called; and never was speech more sentimental, windy, false, and utterly moving. The slang words hokum and bunk were not then in use, but even had they been they never would have been applied, by that appreciative crowd, at least, to the flowery and impassioned oratory of the Southwest Silver Tongue, Yancey Cravat.

  Cheap, melodramatic, gorgeous, impassioned. A quart of whisky in him; an enthralled audience behind him; a white-faced
woman with hopeless eyes to spur him on; the cry of his wronged and righteous wife still sounding in his ears—Booth himself, in his heyday, never gave a more brilliant, a more false performance.

  “Your Honor! Gentlemen of the Jury! You have heard with what cruelty the prosecution has referred to the sins of this woman, as if her condition was of her own preference. A dreadful—a vicious—a revolting picture has been painted for you of her life and surroundings. Tell me—tell me—do you really think that she willingly embraced a life so repellent, so horrible? No, gentlemen! A thousand times, no! This girl was bred in such luxury, such refinement, as few of us have known. And just as the young girl was budding into womanhood, cruel fate snatched all this from her, bereft her of her dear ones, took from her, one by one, with a terrible and fierce rapidity, those upon whom she had come to look for love and support. And then in that moment of darkest terror and loneliness, came one of our sex, gentlemen. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A fiend in the guise of a human. False promises. Lies. Deceit so palpable that it would have deceived no one but a young girl as innocent, as pure, as starry eyed as was this woman you now see white and trembling before you. One of our sex was the author of her ruin, more to blame than she. What could be more pathetic than the spectacle she presents? An immortal soul in ruin. The star of purity, once glittering on her girlish brow, has set its seal, and forever. A moment ago you heard her reviled, in the lowest terms a man can employ toward a woman, for the depths to which she has sunk, for the company she keeps, for the life she leads. Yet where can she go that her sin does not pursue her? You would drive her out. But where? Gentlemen, the very promises of God are denied her. Who was it said, ‘Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’? She is indeed heavy laden, this trampled flower of the South, but if at this instant she were to kneel down before us all and confess her Redeemer, where is the Church that would receive her, where the community that would take her in? Scorn and mockery would greet her; those she met of her own sex would gather their skirts the more closely to avoid the pollution of her touch. Our sex wrecked her once pure life. Her own sex shrinks from her as from a pestilence. Society has reared its relentless walls against her. Only in the friendly shelter of the grave can her betrayed and broken heart ever find the Redeemer’s promised rest. The gentleman who so eloquently spoke before me told you of her assumed names, of her sins, of her habits. He never, for all his eloquence, told you of her sorrows, her agonies, her hopes, her despairs. But I could tell you. I could tell you of the desperate day—the red-letter day in the banner of the great Oklahoma country—when she tried to win a home for herself where she could live in decency and quiet.… When the remembered voices of father and mother and sisters and brothers fall like music on her erring ears … who shall tell what this heavy heart, sinful though it may seem to you and to me … understanding, pity, help, like music on her erring soul … oh, gentlemen … gentlemen …”

  But by this time the gentlemen, between emotion and tobacco juice, were having such difficulty with their Adam’s apples as to make a wholesale strangling seem inevitable. The beautiful flexible voice went on, the hands wove their enchantment, the eyes held you in their spell. The pompous figure of little Pat Leary shrank, dwindled, disappeared before their mind’s eye. The harlot Dixie Lee, in her black, became a woman romantic, piteous, appealing. Sabra Cravat, her pencil flying over her paper, thought grimly:

  “It isn’t true. Don’t believe him. He is wrong. He has always been wrong. For fifteen years he has always been wrong. Don’t believe him. I shall have to print this. How lovely his voice is. It’s like a knife in my heart. I mustn’t look at his eyes. His hands—what was that he said?—I must keep my mind on … music on her erring soul … oh, my love … I ought to hate him … I do hate him.…”

  Dixie Lee’s head drooped on her ravaged breast. Even her plumed satellites had the wit to languish like crushed lilies and to wipe their eyes with filmy handkerchiefs the while they sniffled audibly.

  It was finished. Yancey walked to his seat, sat as before, the great buffalo head lowered, the lids closed over the compelling eyes, the beautiful hands folded, relaxed.

  The good men and true of the jury filed solemnly out through the crowd that made way for them. As solemnly they crossed the dusty road and repaired to draw at the roadside, where they squatted on such bits of rock or board as came to hand. Solemnly, briefly, and with utter disregard of its legal aspect, they discussed the case—if their inarticulate monosyllables could be termed discussion. The courtroom throng, scattering for refreshment, had barely time to down its drink before the jury stamped heavily across the road and into the noisome courtroom.

  “… find the defendant, Dixie Lee, not guilty.”

  18

  It was as though Osage and the whole Oklahoma country now stopped and took a deep breath. Well it might. Just ahead of it, all unknown, waited years of such clangor and strife as would make the past years seem uneventful in comparison. Ever since the day of the Run, more than fifteen years ago, it had been racing helter-skelter, devil take the hindmost; shooting into the air, prancing and yelping out of sheer vitality and cussedness. A rough roof over its head; coarse food on its table; a horse to ride; a burning drink to toss down its throat; border justice; gyp water; a girl to hug; mud roads to the edge of the sun-baked prairie, and thereafter no road; grab what you need; fight for what you want—the men who had come to the wilderness of the Oklahoma country had expected no more than this; and this they had got. A man’s country it seemed to be, ruled by men for men. The women allowed them to think so. The word feminism was unknown to the Sabra Cravats, the Mrs. Wyatts, the Mrs. Hefners, the Mesdames Turket and Folsom and Sipes. Prim, good women and courageous, banded together by their goodness and by their common resolve to tame the wilderness. Their power was the more tremendous because they did not know they had it. They never once said, during those fifteen years, “We women will do this. We women will change that.” Quietly, indomitably, relentlessly, without even a furtive glance of understanding exchanged between them, but secure in their common knowledge of the sentimental American male, they went ahead with their plans.

  The Philomathean Club. The Twentieth Century Culture Club. The Eastern Star. The Daughters of Rebekah. The Venus Lodge.

  “Ha-ha!” and “Ho-ho!” roared their menfolk. “What do you girls do at these meetings of yours? Swap cooking receipts and dress patterns?”

  “Oh, yes. And we talk.”

  “I bet you do. Say, you don’t have to tell any man that. Talk! Time about ten of you women folks start gabblin’ together I bet you get the whole Territory settled—politics, Injuns, land fights, and all.”

  “Just about.”

  Yancey had come home from the Spanish-American War a hero. Other men from Osage had been in the Philippines. One had even died there (dysentery and ptomaine from bad tinned beef). But Yancey was the town’s Rough Rider. He had charged up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt. Osage, knowing Yancey and never having seen Roosevelt, assumed that Yancey Cravat—the Southwest Cimarron—had led the way, an ivory- and silver-mounted six-shooter in either hand, the great buffalo head lowered with such menace that the little brown men had fled to their jungles in terror.

  His return had been the occasion for such a celebration as the town had never known and never would know again, they assured each other, between drinks, until the day when statehood should come to the Territory. He returned a captain, unwounded, but thin and yellow, with the livery look that confirmed the stories one had heard of putrid food, typhoid, dysentery, and mosquitoes more deadly, in this semitropical country, than bullets or cannon.

  Poisoned and enfeebled though he was, his return seemed to energize the crude little town. Wherever he might be he lived in a swirl of events that drew into its eddy all that came within its radius. Hi, Yancey! Hi, Clint! He shed the khaki and the cocked hat and actually appeared again in the familiar white sombrero, Prince Albert, and high-heeled boots. Osage breathed a
sigh of satisfaction. His dereliction was forgiven, the rumors about him forgotten—or allowed to subside, at least. Again the editorial columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam blazed with hyperbole.

  It was hard for Sabra to take second place (or to appear to take second place) in the office of the Wigwam. She had so long ruled there alone. Her word had been law to the wavering Jesse Rickey and to the worshiping Cliff Means. And now to say, “You’d better ask Mr. Cravat.”

  “He says leave it to you. He’s went out.”

  Yancey did a good deal of going out. Sabra, after all, still did most of the work of the paper without having the satisfaction of dictating its policy. A linotype machine, that talented iron monster, now chattered and chittered and clanked in the composing room of the Wigwam. It was the first of its kind in the Oklahoma country. Very costly and uncannily human, Sabra never quite got over her fear of it. The long arm reached down with such leisurely assurance, snatched its handful of metal, carried it over, descended, dropped it. It opened its capacious maw to be fed bars of silvery lead which it spat forth again in the shape of neat cakes of type. Its keys were like grinning teeth. It grunted, shivered, clumped, spoke—or nearly.

  “I never come near it,” Sabra once admitted, “that I don’t expect the thing to reach down with its iron arm and clap me on the shoulder and clatter, ‘Hello, Sabra!’ ”

  She was proud of the linotype machine, for it had been her five years at the head of the Wigwam that had made it possible. It was she who had gone out after job printing contracts; who had educated the local merchants to the value of advertising. Certainly Yancey, prancing and prating, had never given a thought to these substantial foundations on which the entire business success of the paper rested. They now got out with ease the daily Wigwam for the Osage townspeople and the weekly for county subscribers. Passing the windows of the Wigwam office on Pawhuska Avenue you could hear the thump and rattle of the iron monster. Between them Jesse Rickey and Cliff Means ran the linotype. Often they labored far into the night on job work, and the late passer-by would see the little light burning in the printing shop and hear the rattle and thump of the machine. In a pinch Sabra herself could run it. Yancey never went near it, and, strangely enough, young Cim had a horror of it, as he had of most things mechanical. After one attempt at the keyboard, during which he had hopelessly jammed the machine’s delicate insides, he was forbidden ever to go near it again. For that matter, Cim had little enough taste for the newspaper business. He pied type at the case rack. He had no news sense. He had neither his father’s gift for mingling with people and winning their confidence nor his mother’s more orderly materialistic mind. He had much of Yancey Cravat’s charm, and something of the vagueness of his grandfather, old Lewis Venable (dead these two years), but combining the worst features of both.