Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “Heard where the Mullins gang rode in there this morning and cleaned up the town—both banks—eleven thousand in one and nineteen thousand in the other, and when they come out it looked like the whole county’d rallied against ’em.…”

  “Say, he’s a bad hombre, that fella. Got a poisoned tongue, like a rattlesnake.… Spades trump?”

  “No, hearts. Say, I would of known how to handle him. One time we was campin’ on Amarillo Creek …”

  A loud knock at the door opposite Sabra’s room. The knock repeated. Then a woman’s voice, metallic, high. “Quien es? Quien es?” The impatient rattle of a door knob, and a man’s gruff voice.

  A long-drawn wail in the street below, “Oh, Joe! He-e-e-ere’s your mule!” followed by a burst of laughter.

  Yet somehow she had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion, only to be awakened by pistol shots, a series of blood-curdling yells, the crash and tinkle of broken glass. Then came screams of women, the sound of horses galloping. She lay there, cowering. Cim stirred in his bed, sighed deeply, slept again. She was too terrified to go to the window. Her shivering seemed to shake the bed. She wanted to waken the child for comfort, for company. She summoned courage to go to the window; peered fearfully out into the dim street below. Nothing. No one in the street. Yancey’s bleeding body was not lying in the road; no masked men. Nothing again but the clink of glasses and plates; the tinny piano, the slap of cards.

  She longed with unutterable longing, not for the sweet security of her bed back in Wichita—that seemed unreal now—but for those nights in the wagon on the prairie with no sound but the rustle of the scrub oaks, the occasional stamp of horses’ hoofs on dry clay, the rippling of a near-by stream. She looked at her little gold watch, all engraved with a bird and a branch and a waterfall and a church spire. It was only nine.

  It was midnight when Yancey came in. She sat up in bed in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown. Her eyes, in her white face, were two black holes burned in a piece of paper.

  “What was it? What was it?”

  “What was what? Why aren’t you asleep, sugar?”

  “Those shots. And the screaming. And the men hollering.”

  “Shots?” He was unstrapping his broad leather belt with its twin six-shooters whose menacing heads peered just above their holsters. He wore it always now. It came, in time, to represent for her a sinister symbol of all the terrors, all the perils that lay waiting for them in this new existence. “Why, sugar, I don’t recollect hearing any——Oh—that!” He threw back his great head and laughed. “That was just a cowboy, feeling high, shooting out the lights over in Strap Turket’s saloon. On his way home and having a little fun with the boys. Scare you, did it?”

  He came over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged away from him, furious. She pressed her hand frantically to her forehead. It was cold and wet. She was panting a little. “I won’t bring my boy up in a town like this. I won’t. I’m going back. I’m going back home, I tell you.”

  “Wait till morning, anyhow, won’t you, honey?” he said, and took her in his arms.

  Next morning was, somehow, magically, next morning, with the terrors of the night vanished quite. The sun was shining. For a moment Sabra had the illusion that she was again at home in her own bed at Wichita. Then she realized that this was because she had been awakened by a familiar sound. It was the sound of Isaiah’s voice somewhere below in the dusty yard. He was polishing Yancey’s boots, spitting on them industriously and singing as he rubbed. His husky sweet voice came up to her as she lay there.

  Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

  Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

  Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

  Ah wanta go to heab’n when ah die.

  Come on, sister, wid yo’ ups an’ downs,

  Wanta go to heab’n when ah die,

  De angels waitin’ fo’ to gib yo’ a crown,

  Wanta go to heab’n when ah die.

  Lugubrious though the words were, Sabra knew he was utterly happy.

  There was much to be done—a dwelling to be got somehow—a place in which to house the newspaper plant. If necessary, Yancey said, they could live in the rear and set up the printing and law office in the front. Almost everyone who conducted a business in the town did this. “Houses are mighty scarce,” Yancey said, making a great masculine snorting and snuffling at the wash bowl as they dressed. “It’s take what you can get or live in a tent. I heard last night that Doc Nisbett’s got a good house. Five rooms, and he’ll furnish us with water. There’s a dozen families after it, and Doc’s as independent as a hog on ice.”

  Sabra rather welcomed this idea of combining office and home. She would be near him all day. As soon as breakfast was over she and Yancey fared forth, leaving Cim in Isaiah’s care (under many and detailed instructions from Sabra). She had put on her black grosgrain silk with the three box pleats on each side, trimmed with the passementerie and jet buttons—somewhat wrinkled from its long stay in the trunk—and her modish hat with the five ostrich plumes and the pink roses that had cost twelve dollars and fifty cents in Wichita, and her best black buttoned kid shoes and her black kid gloves. In the tightly basqued black silk she was nineteen inches round the waist and very proud of it. Her dark eyes, slightly shadowed now, what with weariness, excitement, and loss of sleep, were enormous beneath the brim of the romantic black plumed hat.

  Yancey, seeing her thus attired in splendor after almost a fortnight of the gray cheviot, struck an attitude of dazzlement. Blank verse leaped to his ready lips. “ ‘But who is this, what thing of sea or land,—female of sex it seems—that so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, comes this way sailing, like a stately ship of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles of Javan or Gadire, with all her bravery on.…’ ”

  “Oh, now, Yancey, don’t talk nonsense. It’s only my second-best black grosgrain.”

  “You’re right, my darling. Even Milton has no words for such beauty.”

  “Do hurry, dear. We’ve so much to do.”

  With his curling locks, his broad-brimmed white sombrero, his high-heeled boots, his fine white shirt, the ample skirts of his Prince Albert spreading and swooping with the vigor of his movements, Yancey was an equally striking figure, though perhaps not so unusual as she, in this day and place.

  The little haphazard town lay broiling in the summer sun. The sky that Sabra was to know so well hung flat and glaring, a gray-blue metal disk, over the prairie.

  “Well, Sabra honey, this isn’t so bad!” exclaimed Yancey, and looked about him largely. “ ‘Now Morning saffron-robed arose from the streams of Ocean to bring light to gods and men.’ ”

  “Ocean!” echoed Sabra, the literal. “Mighty little water I’ve seen around here—unless you call that desert prairie the ocean.”

  “And so it is, my pet. That’s very poetic of you. The prairie’s an ocean of land.” He seemed enormously elated—jubilant, almost. His coat tails switched; he stepped high in his fine Texas star boots. She tucked her hand in her handsome husband’s arm. The air was sweet, and they were young, and it was morning. Perhaps it was not going to be so dreadful, after all.

  Somehow, she had yet no feeling that she, Sabra Cravat, was part of this thing. She was an onlooker. The first thing she noticed, as she stepped into the dust of the street in her modish dress and hat, caused her heart to sink. The few women to be seen scuttling about wore sunbonnets and calico—the kind of garments in which Sabra had seen the women back home in Wichita hanging up the Monday wash to dry on the line in the back yard. Here they came out of butcher’s shop or grocery store with the day’s provisions in their arms; a packet of meat, tins of tomatoes or peaches, unwrapped. After sharp furtive glances at Sabra, they vanished into this little pine shack or that. Immediately afterward there was great agitation among the prim coarse window curtains in those dwellings boasting such elegance.

  “But the others—the other kind of women——” Sabra faltered.

  Yancey mis
understood. “Plenty of the other kind in a town like this, but they aren’t stirring this time of day.”

  “Don’t be coarse, Yancey. I mean ladies like myself—that I can talk to—who’ll come calling—that is——”

  He waved a hand this way and that. “Why, you just saw some women folks, didn’t you?”

  “Those!”

  “Well, now, honey, you can’t expect those ladies to be wearing their best bib and tucker mornings to do the housework in. Besides, most of the men came without their women folks. They’ll send for them, and then you’ll have plenty of company. It isn’t every woman who’d have the courage you showed, roughing it out here. You’re the stuff that Rachel was made of, and the mother of the Gracchi.”

  Rachel was, she knew, out of the Bible; she was a little hazy about the Gracchi, but basked serene in the knowledge that a compliment was intended.

  There was the absurdly wide street—surely fifty feet wide—in this little one-street town. Here and there a straggling house or so branched off it. But the life of Osage seemed to be concentrated just here. There were tents still to be seen serving as dwellings. Houses and stores were built of unpainted wood. They looked as if they had been run up overnight, as indeed they had. They stared starkly out into the wide-rutted red clay road, and the muddy road glared back at them, and the brazen sky burned with fierce intensity down on both, with never a tree or bit of green to cheer the spirit or rest the eye. Tied to the crude hitching posts driven well into the ground were all sorts of vehicles: buckboards, crazy carts, dilapidated wagons, mule drawn; here and there a top buggy covered with the dust of the prairie; and everywhere, lording it, those four-footed kings without which life in this remote place could not have been sustained—horses of every size and type and color and degree. Indian ponies, pintos, pack horses, lean long-legged range horses, and occasionally a flashing-eyed creature who spurned the red clay with the disdainful hoof of one whose ancestors have known the mesas of Spain. Direct descendants, these, of the equine patricians who, almost four hundred years before, had been brought across the ocean by Coronado or Moscosco to the land of the Seven Cities of Gold.

  There were the sounds of the hammer and the saw, the rattle of chains, the thud of hoofs, all very sharp and distinct, as though this mushroom town were pulling itself out of the red clay of the prairie by its own boot straps before one’s very eyes. Crude and ugly though the scene was that now spread itself before Sabra and Yancey, it still was not squalid. It had vitality. You sensed that behind those bare boards people were planning and stirring mightily. There was life in the feel of it. The very names tacked up over the store fronts had bite and sting. Sam Pack. Mott Bixler. Strap Buckner. Ike Hawes. Clint Hopper. Jim Click.

  Though they had come to town but the night before, it seemed to her that a surprising number of people knew Yancey and greeted him as they passed down the street. “H’are you, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.” Loungers in doorways stared at them curiously. Cowboys loping by gave her a long hard look that still had in it something of shyness—a boyish look, much like that with which the outlaws had greeted her down in the draw on the prairie when they learned that she was Cim’s mother.

  It struck Sabra suddenly with a little shock of discovery that the men really were doing nothing. They lounged in doorways and against hitching posts and talked; you heard their voices in animated conversation within saloon and store and office; they cantered by gracefully, and wheeled and whirled and cantered back again. She was to learn that many of these men were not builders but scavengers. The indomitable old ’49ers were no kin of these. They were, frequently, soft, cruel, furtive, and avaricious. They had gathered here to pick up what they could and move on. Some were cowmen, full of resentment against a government that had taken the free range away from them and given it over to the homesteaders. Deprived of their only occupation, many of these became outlaws. Equipped with six-shooters, a deadly aim, and horsemanship that amounted to the miraculous, they took to the Gyp Hills, or the Osage, swooping down from their hidden haunts to terrorize a town, shoot up a bank, hold up a train, and dash out again, leaving blood behind them. They risked their lives for a few hundred dollars. Here was a vast domain without written laws, without precedent, without the customs of civilization; part of a great country, yet no part of its government. Here a horse was more valuable than a human life. A horse thief, caught, was summarily hanged to the nearest tree; the killer of a man often went free.

  Down the street these two stepped in their finery, the man swaggering a little as a man should in a white sombrero and with a pretty woman on his arm; the woman looking about her interestedly, terrified at what she saw and determined not to show it. If two can be said to make a procession, then Yancey and Sabra Cravat formed quite a parade as they walked down Pawhuska Avenue in the blaze of the morning sun. Certainly they seemed to be causing a stir. Lean rangers in buckboards turned to stare. Loungers in doorways nudged each other, yawping. Cowboys clattering by whooped a greeting. It was unreal, absurd, grotesque.

  “Hi, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.”

  Past the Red Dog Saloon. A group in chairs tilted up against the wall or standing about in high-heeled boots and sombreros greeted Yancey now with a familiarity that astonished Sabra. “Howdy, Cim! Hello, Yancey!”

  “He called you Cim!”

  He ignored her surprised remark. Narrowly he was watching them as he passed. “Boys are up to something. If they try to get funny while you’re here with me …”

  Sabra, glancing at the group from beneath her shielding hat brim, did see that they were behaving much like a lot of snickering schoolboys who are preparing to let fly a bombardment of snowballs. There was nudging, there was whispering, an air of secret mischief afoot.

  “Why are they—what do you think makes them——” Sabra began, a trifle nervously.

  “Oh, they’re probably fixing up a little initiation for me,” Yancey explained, his tone light but his eye wary. “Don’t get nervous. They won’t dare try any monkey-shines while you’re with me.”

  “But who are they?” He evaded her question. She persisted. “Who are they?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But I suspect they’re the boys that did Pegler dirt.”

  “Pegler? Who is—oh, isn’t that the man—the editor—the one who was found dead—shot dead on the banks of the——Yancey! Do you mean they did it!”

  “I don’t say they did it—exactly. They know more than is comfortable, even for these parts. I was inquiring around last night, and everybody shut up like a clam. I’m going to find out who killed Pegler and print it in the first number of the Oklahoma Wigwam.”

  “Oh, Yancey! Yancey, I’m frightened!” She clung tighter to his arm. The grinning mirthless faces of the men on the saloon porch seemed to her like the fanged and snarling muzzles of wolves in a pack.

  “Nothing to be frightened of, honey. They know me. I’m no Pegler they can scare. They don’t like my white hat, that’s the truth of it. Dared me last night down at the Sunny Southwest Saloon to wear it this morning. Just to try me out. They won’t have the guts to come out in the open——”

  The sentence never was finished. Sabra heard a curious buzzing sound past her ear. Something sang—zing! Yancey’s white sombrero went spinning into the dust of the road.

  Sabra’s mouth opened as though she were screaming, but the sounds she would have made emerged, feebly, as a croak.

  “Stay where you are,” Yancey ordered, his voice low and even. “The dirty dogs.” She stood transfixed. She could not have run if she had wanted to. Her legs seemed suddenly no part of her—remote, melting beneath her, and yet pricked with a thousand pins and needles. Yancey strolled leisurely over to where the white hat lay in the dust. He stooped carelessly, his back to the crowd on the saloon porch, picked up the hat, surveyed it, and reached toward his pocket for his handkerchief. At that movement there was a rush and a scramble on the porch. Tilted chairs leaped forward, heels clattered, a door slammed. The white-a
proned proprietor who, tray in hand, had been standing idly in the doorway, vanished as though he had been blotted out by blackness. Of the group only three men remained. One of these leaned insolently against a porch post, a second stood warily behind him, and a third was edging prudently toward the closed door. There was nothing to indicate who had fired the shot that had sent Yancey’s hat spinning.

  Yancey, now half turned toward them, had taken his fine white handkerchief from his pocket, had shaken out its ample folds with a gesture of elegant leisure, and, hat in hand, was flicking the dust from his headgear. This done he surveyed the hat critically, seemed to find it little the worse for its experience unless, perhaps, one excepts the two neat round holes that were drilled, back and front, through the peak of its crown. He now placed it on his head again with a gesture almost languid, tossed the fine handkerchief into the road, and with almost the same gesture, or with another so lightning quick that Sabra’s eye never followed it, his hand went to his hip. There was the crack of a shot. The man who was edging toward the door clapped his hand to his ear and brought his hand away and looked at it, and it was darkly smeared. Yancey still stood in the road, his hand at his thigh, one slim foot, in its fine high-heeled Texas star boot, advanced carelessly. His great head was lowered menacingly. His eyes, steel gray beneath the brim of the white sombrero, looked as Sabra had never before seen them look. They were terrible eyes, merciless, cold, hypnotic. She could only think of the eyes of the rattler that Yancey had whipped to death with the wagon whip on the trip across the prairie.

  “A three-cornered piece, you’ll find it, Lon. The Cravat sheep brand.”

  “Can’t you take a joke, Yancey?” whined one of the three, his eyes on Yancey’s gun hand.

  “Joke—hell!” snarled the man who had been nicked. His hand was clapped over his ear. “God help you, Cravat.”

  “He always has,” replied Yancey, piously.