Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “Oh—you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional Marcy, and head-held-high in spite of a bum of a husband.”

  “Donna Cravat, if you ever again dare to speak like that of your father I shall punish you, big as you are.”

  “Sabra darling, how can you punish a grown woman? You might slap me, and I wouldn’t slap you back, of course. But I’d be terribly embarrassed for you. As for Father—he is a museum piece. You know it.”

  “Your father is one of the greatest figures the Southwest has ever produced.”

  “Mm. Well, he’s picturesque enough, I suppose. But I wish he hadn’t worked so hard at it. And Cim! There’s a brother! A great help to me in my career, the men folks of this quaint family.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you were planning a career,” Sabra retorted, very much in the manner of Felice Venable. “Unless getting up at noon, slopping around in a kimono most of the day, and lying in the hammock reading is called a career by Dignum graduates. If it is, you’re the outstanding success of your class.”

  “Darling, I adore you when you get viperish and Venable like that. Perhaps you influenced me in my early youth. That’s the new psychology, you know. You used to tell me about Grandma trailing around in her white ruffled dimity wrappers and her high heels, never lifting a lily hand.”

  “At least your grandmother didn’t consider it a career.”

  “Neither do I. This lovely flower-like head isn’t so empty as you think, lolling in the front porch hammock. I know it’s no use counting on Father, even when he’s not off on one of his mysterious jaunts. What is he doing, anyway? Living with some squaw? … Forgive me, Mother darling. I didn’t mean to hurt you.… Cim’s just as bad, and worse, because he’s weak and hasn’t even Dad’s phony ideals. You’re busy with the paper. That’s all right. I’m not blaming you. If it weren’t for you we’d all be on the town—or back in Wichita living on Grandma in genteel poverty. I think you’re wonderful, and I ought to try to be like you. But I don’t want to be a girl reporter. Describing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sunflowers at one of Cassandra Sipes’ parties.”

  Goaded by curiosity and a kind of wonder at this unnatural creature, Sabra must put her question: “What do you want to do, then?”

  “I want to marry the richest man in Oklahoma, and build a palace that I’ll hardly ever live in, and travel like royalty, and clank with emeralds. With my skin and hair they’re my stone.”

  “Oh, emeralds, by all means,” Sabra agreed, cuttingly. “Diamonds are so ordinary. And the gentleman that you consider honoring—let me see. From your requirements that would have to be Tracy Wyatt, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” replied Donna, calmly.

  “You’ve probably overlooked Mrs. Wyatt. Of course, Tracy’s only fifty-one, and you being nineteen, there’s plenty of time if you’ll just be patient.” She was too amused to be really disturbed.

  “I don’t intend to be patient, Mamma darling.”

  Something in her hard, ruthless tone startled Sabra. “Donna Cravat, don’t you start any of your monkey business. I saw you cooing and ah-ing at him the other day when we went over the Wyatts’ new house. And I heard you saying some drivel about his being a man that craved beauty in his life, and that he should have it; and sneering politely at the new house until I could see him beginning to doubt everything in it, poor fellow. He had been so proud to show it. But I thought you were just talking that New York talk of yours.”

  “I wasn’t. I was talking business.”

  Sabra was revolted, alarmed, and distressed, all at once. She gained reassurance by telling herself that this was just one of Donna’s queer jokes—part of the streak in her that Sabra had never understood and that corresponded to the practical joker in Yancey. That, too, had always bewildered her. Absorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper, Sabra let the conversation fade to a dim and almost unimportant memory.

  Sabra was sufficiently shrewd and level headed to take Sol Levy’s sound advice. “You settle down to running your paper, Sabra, and you won’t need any oil wells. You can have the best-paying paper and the most powerful in the Southwest. Bigger than Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. Because Osage is going to be bigger and richer than any of them. You mark what I say. Hardly any oil in the town of Osage, but billions of barrels of oil all around it. This town won’t be torn to pieces, then. It’ll grow and grow. Five years from now it’ll look like Chicago.”

  “Oh, Sol, how can that be?”

  “You’ll see. There where the gambling tent stood with a mud hole in front of it a few years ago you’ll see in another five years a skyscraper like those in New York.”

  She laughed at that.

  Just as she had known that Yancey had again left her on that night of the Mescal ceremony, so now she sensed that he would come back in the midst of this new insanity that had seized all Oklahoma. And come back he did, from God knows where, on the very crest of the oil wave, and bringing with him news that overshadowed his return. He entered as he had left, with no word of explanation, and, as always, his entrance was so dramatic, so bizarre as to cause everything else to fade into the background.

  He came riding, as always, but it was a sorry enough nag that he bestrode this time; and his white sombrero was grimed and battered, the Prince Albert coat was spotted, the linen frayed, the whole figure covered with the heavy red dust of the trampled road. He must have ridden like an avenging angel, for his long black locks were damp, his eyes red rimmed. And when she saw this Don Quixote, so sullied, so shabby, her blood turned to water within her veins for pity.

  She thought, it will always be like this as long as he lives, and each time he will be a little more broken, older, less and less the figure of splendor I married, until at last …

  She only said, “Yancey,” quietly.

  He was roaring, he was reeling with Jovian laughter as he strode into the Wigwam office where she sat at her neat orderly desk just as she had sat on that day years before. For a dreadful moment she thought that he was drunk or mad. He flung his soiled white sombrero to the desk top, he swept her into his arms, he set her down.

  “Sabra! Here’s news for you. Jesse! Heh, Jesse! Where’s that rum-soaked son of a printer’s devil? Jesse! Come in here! God, I’ve been laughing so that I almost rolled off my horse.” He was striding up and down as of old, his shabby coat tails spreading with the vigor of his movements, the beautiful hands gesticulating, the fine eyes—bloodshot now—still flashing with the fire that would burn until it consumed him.

  “Oil, my children! More oil than anybody ever thought there was in any one spot in the world. And where! Where! On the Osage Indian Reservation. It came in an hour ago, like the ocean. It makes every other field look like the Sahara. There never was such a joke! It’s cosmic—it’s terrible. How the gods must be roaring. ‘Laughter unquenchable among the blessed gods!’ ”

  “Yancey dear, we’re used to oil out here. It’s an old story. Come now. Come home and have a hot bath and clean clothes.” In her mind’s eye she saw those fine white linen shirts of his all neatly stacked in the drawer as he had left them.

  For answer he reached out with one great arm and swept a pile of exchanges, copy paper, galley proofs, and clippings off the desk, while with the other hand he seized the typewriter by its steel bar and plumped it to the floor with a force that wrung a protesting whine and zing from its startled insides. He had always scorned to use a typewriter. The black swathes of his herculean pencil bit deeper into the paper’s surface than any typewriter’s metal teeth.

  “Hot bath! Hot hell, honey! Do you realize what this means? Do you understand that two thousand Osage Indians, squatting in their rags in front of their miserable shanties, are now the richest nation in the world? In the world, I tell you. They were given that land—the barest, meanest desert land in the whole of the Oklahoma country. And the government of these United States said, ‘There, you red dogs, take that and live on it. And if you can’t l
ive on it, then die on it.’ God A’mighty, I could die myself with laughing. Millions and millions of dollars. They’re spattering, I tell you, all over the Osage Reservation. There’s no stopping that flow. Every buck and squaw on the Osage Reservation is a millionaire. They own that land, and, by God, I’m going to see that no one takes it away from them!”

  “Oh, Yancey, be careful.”

  He was driving his pencil across the paper. “Send this out A.P. They tried to keep it dark when the flow came, but I’ll show them. Sabra, kill your editorial lead, whatever it was. I’ll write it. Make this your news lead, too. Listen. ‘The gaudiest star-spangled cosmic joke that ever was played on a double-dealing government burst into fireworks to-day when, with a roar that could be heard for miles around, thousands of barrels of oil shot into the air on the miserable desert land known as the Osage Indian Reservation and occupied by those duped and wretched——!”

  “We can’t use that, I tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “This isn’t the Cimarron. It’s the state of Oklahoma. That’s treason—that’s anarchy——”

  “It’s the truth. It’s history. I can prove it. They’ll be down on those Osages like a pack of wolves. At least I’ll let them know they’re expected. I’ll run the story, by God, as I want it run, and they can shoot me for it.”

  “And I say you won’t. You can’t come in here like that. I’m editor of this paper.”

  He turned quietly and looked at her, the great head jutting out, the eyes like cold steel. “Who is?”

  “I am.”

  Without a word he grasped her wrist and led her out, across the old porch, down the steps and into the street. There, on Pawhuska Avenue, in the full glare of noonday, he pointed to the weatherworn sign that he himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, had hung there almost twenty years before. She had had it painted and repainted. She had had it repaired. She had never replaced it with another.

  THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM YANCEY CRAVAT PROP. AND EDITOR.

  “When you take that down, Sabra honey, and paint your own name up in my place, you’ll be the editor of this newspaper. Until you do that, I am.”

  As they stood there, she in her neat blue serge, he in his crumpled and shabby attire, she knew that she never would do it.

  21

  Young Cim came home from Colorado for the summer vacation, was caught up in the oil flood, and never went back. With his geological knowledge, slight as it was, and his familiarity with the region, he was shuttled back and forth from one end of the state to the other. Curiously enough Cim, like his father, was more an onlooker than a participant in this fantastic spectacle. The quality of business acumen seemed to be lacking in both these men; or perhaps a certain mad fastidiousness in them kept them from taking part in the feverish fight. A hint of oil in this corner, a trace of oil in that, and the thousands were upon it, pushing, scrambling, nose to the ground, down on all-fours like pigs in a trough. A hundred times Yancey could have bought an oil lease share for a song. Head lolling on his breast, lids lowered over the lightning eyes, he shrugged indifferent shoulders.

  “I don’t want the filthy muck,” he said. “It stinks. Let the Indians have it. It’s theirs. And the Big Boys from the East—let them sweat and scheme for it. They know where Oklahoma is now, all right.”

  His comings and goings had ceased to cause Sabra the keen agony of earlier days. She knew now that their existence, so long as Yancey lived, would always be made up of just such unexplained absences and melodramatic homecomings. She had made up her mind to accept the inevitable.

  She did not mind that Yancey spent much time on the old fields. He knew the men he called the Big Boys from the East, and they often sought him out for his company, which they found amusing, and for a certain regional wisdom that they considered valuable. He despised them and spent more of his time with the pumpers and roustabouts, drillers and tool dressers and shooters—a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-fighting crew. In his white sombrero and his outdated Prince Albert and his high-heeled boots he was known as a picturesque character. Years of heavy drinking were taking their toll of the magnificent body and mind. The long locks showed streaks of gray.

  Local townsmen who once had feared and admired him began to patronize him or to laugh at him, tolerantly. Many of them were rich now, counting their riches not in thousands but in millions. They had owned a piece of Oklahoma dirt, or a piece of a piece of dirt—and suddenly, through no act of theirs, it was worth its weight in diamonds. Pat Leary, the pugnacious little Irish lawyer who had once been a section hand in the early days of the building of the Santa Fé road, was now so rich through his vast oil holdings that his Indian wife, Crook Nose, was considered a quaint and picturesque note by the wives of Eastern operators who came down on oil business.

  After the first shrill excitement of it Sabra Cravat relinquished the hope of making sudden millions as other luckier ones had done. Her land had yielded no oil; she owned no oil leases. It was a curious fact that Sabra still queened it in Osage and had actually become a power in the state. The paper was read, respected, and feared throughout the Southwest. It was said with pride by Osage’s civic minded that no oil was rich enough to stain the pages of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Though few realized it, and though Sabra herself never admitted it, it was Yancey who had made this true. He neglected it for years together, but he always turned up in a crisis, whether political, economic, or social, to hurl his barbed editorials at the heads of the offenders, to sting with the poison of his ridicule. He championed the Indians, he denounced the oil kings, he laughed at the money grabbers, he exposed the land thieves. He was afraid of nothing. He would absent himself for six months. The Wigwam would run along smoothly, placidly. He would return, torch in hand, again set fire to the paper until the town, the county, the state were ablaze. The Osages came to him with their legal problems, and he advised them soundly and took a minimum fee. He seemed always to sense an important happening from afar and to emerge, growling like an old lion, from his hidden jungle lair, broken, mangy, but fighting, the fine eyes still alight, the magnificent head still as menacing as that of a buffalo charging. He had, on one occasion, come back just in time to learn of Dixie Lee’s death.

  Dixie had struck oil and had retired, a rich woman. She had closed her house and gone to Oklahoma City, and there she bought a house in a decent neighborhood and adopted a baby girl. She had gone to Kansas City for it, and though she had engaged a capable and somewhat bewildered nurse on that trip, Dixie herself carried the child home in her arms, its head close against the expansive satin bosom.

  No one knew what means she had used to pull the wool over the eyes of the Kansas City authorities. She never could have done it in Oklahoma. She had had the child almost a year when the women of Osage got wind of it. They say she took it out herself in its perambulator daily, and perhaps someone recognized her on the street, though she looked like any plump and respectable matron now, in her rich, quiet dress and her pince nez, a little gray showing in the black, abundant hair.

  Sabra Cravat heard of it. Mrs. Wyatt. Mrs. Doc Nisbett. Mrs. Pack.

  They took the child away from her by law. Six months later Dixie Lee died; the sentimental said of a broken heart. It was Yancey Cravat who wrote her obituary:

  Dixie Lee, for years one of the most prominent citizens of Osage and a pioneer in the early days of Oklahoma, having made the Run in ’89, one of the few women who had the courage to enter that historic and terrible race, is dead.

  She was murdered by the good women of Osage.…

  The story was a nine-days’ wonder, even in that melodramatic state. Sabra read it, white faced. The circulation of the Wigwam took another bound upward.

  “Some day,” said Osage, over its afternoon paper, “somebody is going to come along and shoot old Cimarron.”

  “I should think his wife would save them the trouble,” someone suggested.

  If Yancey’s sporadic contributions increased the paper’s circulation it was S
abra’s steady drive that maintained it. It was a gigantic task to keep up with the changes that were sweeping over Osage and all of Oklahoma. Yet the columns of the Wigwam recorded these changes in its news columns, in its editorial pages, in its personal and local items and its advertisements, as faithfully as on that day of its first issue when Yancey had told them who killed Pegler. Perhaps it was because Sabra, even during Yancey’s many absences, felt that the paper must be prepared any day to meet his scathing eye.

  Strange items began to appear daily in the paper’s columns—strange to the eye not interested in oil; but there was no such eye in Oklahoma, nor, for that matter, in the whole Southwest. Cryptic though these items might be to dwellers in other parts of the United States, they were of more absorbing interest to Oklahomans than front-page stories of war, romance, intrigue, royalty, crime.

  Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company swabbed 42 barrels in its No. 3 Lizzie in the northwest corner of the southwest of the northwest of 11-8-6 after having plugged back to 4,268 feet, and shooting with 52 quarts.

  The wildcat test of McComb two miles north of Kewoka which is No. 1 Sutton in the southwest corner of the southeast of the northeast of 35-2-9 was given a shot of 105 quarts in the sand from 1,867 feet and hole bridged. As it stands it is estimated good for 450 barrels daily.

  The paper’s ads reflected the change. The old livery stable, with its buggies and phaëtons, its plugs to be hired, its tobacco-chewing loungers, its odor of straw, manure, and axle grease, was swept away, and in its place was Fink’s Garage and Auto Livery. Repairs of All Kinds. Buy a Stimson Salient Six. The smell of gasoline, the hiss of the hose, lean young lads with grease-grimed fingers, engine wise.

  Come to the Chamber of Commerce Dinner. The Oklahoma City College Glee Club will sing.

  Osage began to travel, to see the world. Their wanderings were no longer local. Where, two years ago, you read that Dr. and Mrs. Horace McGill are up from Concho to do their Christmas buying, you now saw that Mr. and Mrs. W. Fletcher Busby have left for a trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. You know that old Wick Busby had made his pile in oil and that Nettie Busby was out to see the world.