by Edna Ferber
“Did you understand about the grape jell, Ruby? To let it get thoroughly cool before you pour on the wax?”
Ruby would majestically incline her fine head, large, like a man’s head. The word sinister came into Sabra’s mind. Still, Sabra argued, she was good to the children, fed them well, never complained about the work. Sometimes—on rare occasions—she would dig a little pit in the back yard and build a slow hot smothered fire by some secret Indian process, and there, to the intense delight of young Cim, she would roast meats deliciously in the Indian fashion, crisp and sweet, skewered with little shafts of wood that she herself whittled down. Donna refused to touch the meat, as did Sabra. Donna shared her mother’s dislike of the Indians—or perhaps she had early been impressed with her mother’s feeling about them. Sometimes Donna, the spoiled, the pampered, the imperious (every inch her grandmother Felice Venable), would feel Ruby Big Elk’s eye on her—that expressionless, dead black Indian eye. Yet back of its deadness, its utter lack of expression, there still seemed to lurk a cold contempt.
“What are you staring at, Ruby?” Donna would cry, pettishly. Ruby would walk out of the room with her slow scuffling step, her body erect, her head regal, her eyes looking straight ahead. She said nothing. “Miserable squaw!” Donna would hiss under her breath. “Gives herself the airs of a princess because her greasy old father runs the tribe or something.”
Ruby’s father, Big Elk, had in fact been Chief of the Osage tribe by election for ten years, and though he no longer held this highest office, was a man much looked up to in the Osage Nation. He had sent his six children and actually his fat wife to the Indian school, but he himself steadfastly refused to speak a word of English, though he knew enough of the language. He conversed in Osage, and when necessary used an interpreter. It was a kind of stubborn Indian pride in him. It was his enduring challenge to the white man. “You have not defeated me.”
His pride did not, however, extend to more material things, and Sabra was frequently annoyed by the sight of the entire Big Elk family, the old ex-Chief, his squaw, and the five brothers and sisters, squatting in her kitchen doorway enjoying such juicy bits as Ruby saw fit to bestow upon them from the Cravat larder. When Sabra would have put a stop to this, Yancey intervened.
“He’s a wise old man. If he had a little white blood in him he’d be as great as Quanah Parker was, or Sequoyah. Everything he says is wisdom. I like to talk with him. Leave him alone.”
This did not serve to lessen Sabra’s irritation. Often she returned home to find Yancey squatting on the ground with old Big Elk, smoking and conversing in a mixture of Osage and English, for Big Elk did not refuse to understand the English language, even though he would not speak it. Yancey had some knowledge of Osage. Sabra, coming upon the two grunting and muttering and smoking and staring ahead into nothingness or (worse still) cracking some Indian joke and shaking with silent laughter, Indian fashion, was filled with fury. Nothing so maddened her.
It slowly dawned on Sabra that young Cim was always to be found lolling in the kitchen, talking to Ruby. Ruby, she discovered to her horror, was teaching Cim to speak Osage. A difficult language to the white, he seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She came upon them, their heads close together over the kitchen table, laughing and talking and singing. Rather, Ruby Big Elk was singing a song with a curious rhythm, and (to Sabra’s ear, at least) no melody. There was a pulsation of the girl’s voice on sustained notes such as is sometimes produced on a violin when the same note is sounded several times during a single bow stroke. Cim was trying to follow the strange gutturals, slurs, and accents, his eyes fixed on Ruby’s face, his own expression utterly absorbed, rapt.
“What are you doing? What is this?”
The Indian girl’s face took on its customary expression of proud disdain. She rose. “Teach um song,” she said; which was queer, for she spoke English perfectly.
“Well, I must say, Cimarron Cravat! When you know your father is expecting you down at the office——” She stopped. Her quick eye had leaped to the table where lay the little round peyote disk or mescal button which is the hashish of the Indian.
She had heard about it; knew how prevalent among the Indian tribes from Nebraska down to Mexico had become the habit of eating this little buttonlike top of a Mexican cactus plant. In shape a disk about an inch and a half in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick, the mescal or peyote gave the eater a strange feeling of lightness, dispelled pain and fatigue, caused visions of marvelous beauty and grandeur. The use of it had become an Indian religious rite.
Like a fury Sabra advanced to the table, snatched up the little round button of soft green.
“Peyote!” She whirled on Cim. “What are you doing with this thing?”
Cim’s eyes were cast down sullenly. His hands in his pockets, he leaned against the wall, very limp, very bored, very infuriating and insolent.
“Ruby was just teaching me one of the Mescal Ceremony songs. Darned interesting. It’s the last song. They sing it at sunrise when they’re just about all in. Goes like this.”
To Sabra’s horror he began an eerie song as he stood there leaning against the kitchen wall, his eyes half closed.
“Stop it!” screamed Sabra. With the gesture of a tragedy queen she motioned him out of the kitchen. He obeyed with very bad grace, his going more annoying, in its manner, than his staying. Sabra followed him, silently. Suddenly she realized she hated his walk, and knew why. He walked with a queer little springing gait, on the very soles of his feet. It came over her that it always had annoyed her. She remembered that someone had laughingly told her what Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian scout, lounging on his street corner, had said about young Cim:
“Every time I see that young Cimarron Cravat a-comin’ down the street I expect to hear a twig snap. Walks like a story-book Injun.”
In the privacy of the sitting room Sabra confronted her son, the bit of peyote still crushed in her hand.
“So you’ve come to this! I’m ashamed of you!”
“Come to what?”
She opened her hand to show the button of pulpy green crushed in her palm. “Peyote. A son of mine. I’d rather see you dead——”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom, don’t get Biblical, like Dad. To hear you a person would think you’d found me drugged in a Chinese opium den.”
“I think I’d almost rather.”
“It’s nothing but a miserable little piece of cactus. And what was I doing but sitting in the kitchen listening to Ruby tell how her father——”
“I should think a man of almost eighteen could find something better to do than sit in a kitchen in the middle of the day talking to an Indian hired girl. Where’s your pride!”
Cim’s eyes were still cast down. He still lounged insolently, his hands in his pockets. “How about these stories you’ve told me all your life about the love you Southerners had for your servants and how old Angie was like a second mother to you?”
“Niggers are different. They know their place.”
He raised the heavy eyelids then and lifted his fine head with the menacing look that she knew so well in his father. “You’re right. They are different. In the first place, Ruby isn’t an Indian hired girl. She is the daughter of an Osage chief.”
“Osage fiddlesticks! What of it!”
“Ruby Big Elk is just as important a person in the Osage Nation as Alice Roosevelt is in Washington.”
“Now, listen here, Cimarron Cravat! I’ve heard about enough. A lot of dirty Indians! Just you march yourself down to the Wigwam office, young man, and don’t you ever again let me catch you talking in that disrespectful manner about the daughter of the President of the United States. And if I ever hear that you’ve eaten a bite of this miserable stuff”—she held out her hand, shaking a little, the mescal button crushed in her palm—“I’ll have your father thrash you within an inch of your life, big as you are. As it is, he shall hear of this.”
But Yancey, on being told, only look
ed thoughtful and a little sad. “It’s your own fault, Sabra. You’re bound that the boy shall live the life you’ve planned for him instead of the one he wants. So he’s trying to escape into a dream life. Like the Indians. It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you know, either.”
“The Indians started to eat peyote after the whites had taken their religious and spiritual and decent physical life away from them. They had owned the plains and the prairies for centuries. The whites took those. The whites killed off the buffalo, whose flesh had been the Indians’ food, and whose skins had been their shelter, and gave them bacon and tumbledown wooden houses in their place. The whites told them that the gods they had worshiped were commonplace things. The Sun was a dying planet—the Stars lumps of hot metal—the Rain a thing that could be regulated by tree planting—the Wind just a current of air that a man in Washington knew all about and whose travels he could prophesy by looking at a piece of machinery.”
“And they ought to be grateful for it. The government’s given them food and clothes and homes and land. They’re a shiftless good-for-nothing lot and won’t work. They won’t plant crops.”
“ ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ He has got to have dreams, or life is unendurable. So the Indian turned to the peyote. He finds peace and comfort and beauty in his dreams.”
A horrible suspicion darted through Sabra. “Yancey Cravat, have you ever——”
He nodded his magnificent head slowly, sadly. “Many times. Many times.”
19
Cim was nineteen, Donna fifteen. And now Sabra lived quite alone in the new house on Kihekah Street, except for a colored woman servant sent from Kansas. She ran the paper alone, as she wished it run. She ordered the house as she wished it. She very nearly ran the town of Osage. She was a power in the Territory. And Yancey was gone, Cim was gone, Donna was gone. Sabra had refused to compromise with life, and life had take matters out of her hands.
Donna was away at an Eastern finishing school—Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson. Yancey had opposed that, of course. It had been Sabra’s idea to send Donna east to school.
“East?” Yancey had said. “Kansas City?”
“Certainly not.”
“Oh—Chicago.”
“I mean New York.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I didn’t expect you to approve. I suppose you’d like her to go to an Indian school. Donna’s an unusual girl. She’s not a beauty and never will be, but she’s brilliant, that’s what she is. Brilliant. I don’t mean intellectual. You needn’t smile. I mean that she’s got the ambition and the insight and the foresight, too, of a woman of twice her age.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m not. She’s like Mamma in many ways, only she’s got intelligence and drive. She doesn’t get along with the girls here—Maurine Turket and Gazelle Slaughter and Jewel Riggs and Czarina McKee, and those. She’s different. They go switching up and down Pawhuska Avenue. They’ll marry one of these tobacco-chewing loafers and settle down like vegetables. Well, she won’t. I’ll see to that.”
“Going to marry her off to an Eastern potentate—at fifteen?”
“You wait. You’ll see. She knows what she wants. She’ll get it, too.”
“Sure it isn’t you who know what you want her to want?”
But Sabra had sent her off to Miss Dignum’s on a diet of prunes and prisms that even her high-and-mighty old grandmother Felice Venable approved.
Cim, walking the prairies beyond Osage with that peculiar light step of his, his eyes cast down; prowling the draws and sprawling upon the clay banks of the rivers that ran so red through the Red Man’s Territory, said that he wanted to be a geologist. He spoke of the Colorado School of Mines. He worked in the Wigwam office and hated it. He could pi a case of type more quickly and completely than a drunken tramp printer. The familiar “shrdlu etaoin” was likely to appear in any column in which he had a hand. Even Jesse Rickey, his mournful mustaches more drooping than ever, protested to Yancey.
“She can’t make a newspaper man out of that kid,” he said. “Not in a million years. Newspaper men are born, not made. Cim, he just naturally hates news, let alone a newspaper office. He was born without a nose for news, like a fellow that’s born without an arm, or something. You can’t grow it if you haven’t got it.”
“I know it,” said Yancey, wearily. “He’ll find a way out.”
For the first time a rival newspaper flourished in the town of Osage. The town was scarcely large enough to support two daily papers, but Yancey’s political attitude so often was at variance with the feeling of the Territory politicians that the new daily, slipshod and dishonest though it was, and owned body and soul by Territorial interests, achieved a degree of popularity.
Sabra, unable to dictate the policy of the Wigwam with Yancey at its head, had to content herself with the management of its mechanical workings and with its increasingly important social and club columns. Osage swarmed with meetings, committees, lodges, Knights of This and Sisters of That. The Philomathean and the Twentieth Century clubs began to go in for Civic Betterment, and no Osage merchant or professional man was safe from cajoling and unattractive females in shirtwaists and skirts and eyeglasses demanding his name signed to this or that petition (with a contribution. Whatever you feel that you can give, Mr. Hefner. Of course, as a leading business man …).
They planted shrubs about the cinder-strewn environs of the Santa Fé and the Katy depots. They agitated for the immediate paving of Pawhuska Avenue (it wasn’t done). The Ladies of the Eastern Star. The Venus Lodge. Sisters of Rebekah. Daughters of the Southwest. They came into the Wigwam office with notices to be printed about lodge suppers and church sociables. Strangely enough, they were likely to stay longer and to chat more freely if Yancey and not Sabra were there to receive them. Sabra was polite but businesslike to her own sex encountered in office hours. But Yancey made himself utterly charming. He could no more help it than he could help breathing. It was almost functional with him. He made the stout, commonplace, middle-aged women feel that they were royal—and seductive. He flattered them with his fine eyes; he bowed them to the door; their eyeglasses quivered. He was likely, on their departure, to crumple their carefully worded notice and throw it on the floor. Sabra, though she made short work of the visiting Venuses and Rebekahs, ran their notice and, if necessary, carefully rewrote it.
“God A’mighty!” he would groan at noonday dinner. “The office was full of Wenuses this morning. Like a swarm of overstuffed locusts.”
Sabra was at the head of many of these Betterment movements. Also if there could be said to be anything so formal as society in Osage, Sabra Cravat was the leader of it. She was the first to electrify the ladies of the Twentieth Century Culture Club by serving them Waldorf salad—that abominable mixture of apple cubes, chopped nuts, whipped cream, and mayonnaise. The club fell upon it with little cries and murmurs. Thereafter it was served at club meetings until Osage husbands, returning home to supper after a day’s work, and being offered this salvage from the feast, would push it aside with masculine contempt for its contents and roar, “I can’t eat this stuff. Fix me some bacon and eggs.”
From this culinary and social triumph Sabra proceeded to pineapple and marshmallow salad, the recipe for which had been sent her by Donna in the East. Its indirect effects were fatal.
When it again became her turn to act as hostess to the members of the club she made her preparations for the afternoon meeting, held at the grisly hour of half-past two. Refreshments were invariably served at four. With all arrangements made, she was confronted by Ruby Big Elk with the astounding statement that this was a great Indian Festival day (September, and the corn dances were on) and that she must go to the Reservation in time for the Mescal Ceremony.
“You can’t go,” said Sabra, flatly. Midday dinner was over. Yancey had returned to the office. Cim was lounging in the hammock on the por
ch. For answer Ruby turned and walked with her stately, irritating step into her own room just off the kitchen and closed the door.
“Well,” shouted Sabra in the tones of Felice Venable herself, “if you do go you needn’t come back.” She marched out to the front porch, where the sight of the lounging Cim only aggravated her annoyance.
“This ends it. That girl has got to leave.”
“What girl?”
“Ruby. Twenty women this afternoon, and she says she’s going to the Reservation. They’ll be here at half-past two.” It was rather incoherent, but Cim, surprisingly enough, seemed to understand.
“But she told you a month ago.”
“Told me what? How do you know?”
“Because she told me she told you, ever so long ago.”
“Maybe she did. She never mentioned it again. I can’t be expected to remember every time the Indians have one of their powwows. I told her she couldn’t go. She’s in there getting ready. Well, this ends it. She needn’t come back.”
She flounced into the kitchen. There stood a mild-mannered young Indian girl unknown to her.
“What do you want?”
“I am here,” the girl answered, composedly, “to take Ruby Big Elk’s place this afternoon. I am Cherokee. She told me to come.” She plucked Ruby’s blue and white checked gingham apron off the hook behind the door and tied it around her waist.
“Well!” gasped Sabra, relieved, but still angry. Through the kitchen window she saw Cim hitching up the two pintos to the racy little yellow phaëton that Yancey had bought. She must run out and tell him before he left. He had seemed disturbed. She was glad he was clearing out. She liked having the men folks out of the way when afternoon company was due.