by Edna Ferber
She got out a plaid silk tie for Cim. “Church meeting!” she exclaimed, joyously. Here, at last, was something familiar; something on which she could get a firm foothold in this quagmire. Yancey temporarily abandoned his journalistic mission in order to make proper arrangements for Sunday’s meeting. There was, certainly, no building large enough to hold the thousands who, surprisingly enough, made up this settlement spawned overnight on the prairie. Yancey, born entrepreneur, took hold with the enthusiasm that he always displayed in the first spurt of a new enterprise. Already news of the prospective meeting had spread by the mysterious means common to isolated settlements. Nesters, homesteaders, rangers, cowboys for miles around somehow got wind of it. Saddles were polished, harnesses shined, calicoes washed and ironed, faces scrubbed. Church meeting.
Yancey turned quite naturally to the one shelter in the town adequate to the size of the crowd expected. It was the gambling tent that stood at the far north end of Pawhuska Avenue, flags waving gayly from its top in the brisk Oklahoma wind. For the men it was the social center of Osage. Faro, stud poker, chuckaluck diverted their minds from the stern business of citizenship and saved them the trouble of counting their ready cash on Saturday night. Sunday was, of course, the great day in the gambling tent. Rangers, cowboys, a generous sprinkling of professional bad men from the near-by hills and plains, and all the town women who were not respectable flocked to the tent on Sunday for recreation, society, and excitement. Shouts, the tinkle of glass, the sound of a tubercular piano playing Champagne Charley assailed the ears of the passers-by. The great canvas dome, measuring ninety by one hundred and fifty feet, was decorated with flags and bunting; cheerful, bright, gay.
It was a question whether the owner and dealer would be willing to sacrifice any portion of Sunday’s brisk trade for the furtherance of the Lord’s business, even though the goodwill of the townspeople were to be gained thereby. After all, he might argue, it was not this element that kept a faro game going.
Yancey, because of his professional position and his well-known power to charm, was delegated to confer with that citizen du monde, Mr. Grat Gotch, better known as Arkansas Grat, proprietor and dealer of the gambling tent. Mr. Gotch was in. Not only that, it being midafternoon and a slack hour for business, he was superintending the placing of a work of art recently purchased by him and just arrived via the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, familiarly known throughout the Territory, by a natural process of elision, as the Katy. The newly acquired treasure was a picture, done in oils, of a robust and very pink lady of full habit who, apparently having expended all her energy upon the arrangement of her elaborate and highly modern coiffure, was temporarily unable to proceed further with her toilette until fortified by refreshment and repose. To this end she had flung herself in a complete state of nature (barring the hairpins) down on a convenient couch where she lolled at ease, her lips parted to receive a pair of ripe red cherries which she held dangling between thumb and forefinger of a hand whose little finger was elegantly crooked. Her eyes were not on the cherries but on the beholder, of whom she was, plainly, all unaware.
As a tent naturally boasts no walls, it was impossible properly to hang this objet d’art, and it was being suspended by guy ropes from the tent top so that it dangled just in front of the bar, as it properly should, flanked by mirrors. Arkansas Grat had pursued his profession in the bonanza days of Denver, San Francisco, White Oaks, and Dodge City. In these precocious cities his artistic tastes had been developed. He knew that the eye, as well as the gullet, must have refreshment in hours of ease. A little plump man, Grat, with a round and smiling countenance, strangely unlined. He looked like an old baby.
He now, at Yancey’s entrance, called his attention to the newly acquired treasure, expressing at the same time his admiration for it.
“Ain’t she,” he demanded, “a lalapaloosa!”
Yancey surveyed the bright pink lady. He had come to ask a favor of Grat, but he would not sell his artistic soul for this mess of pottage.
“It’s a calumny,” he announced, with some vehemence, “on nature’s fairest achievement.”
The word was not contained in Mr. Gotch’s vocabulary. He mistook Yancey’s warmth of tone for enthusiasm. “That’s right,” he agreed, in triumphant satisfaction. “I was sayin’ to the boys only this morning when she come.”
Yancey ordered his drink and invited Gotch to have one with him. Arkansas Grat was not one of those abstemious characters frequently found in fiction who, being dispensers of alcoholic refreshment, never sample their own wares. Over the whisky Yancey put his case.
“Listen, Grat. The women folks have got it into their heads that there ought to be a church service Sunday, now that Osage is over a month old, with ten thousand inhabitants, and probably the metropolis of the great Southwest in another ten years. They want the thing done right. I’m chosen to conduct the meeting. There’s no building in town big enough to hold the crowd. What I want to know is, can we have the loan of your tent here for about an hour Sunday morning for the purpose of divine worship?”
Arkansas Grat set down his glass, made a sweeping gesture with his right hand that included faro tables, lolling cherry eater, bar, piano, and all else that the tent contained.
“Divine worship! Why, hell, yes, Yancey,” he replied, graciously.
They went to work early Sunday. So as not to mar the numbers they covered the faro and roulette tables with twenty-two-foot boards. Such of the prospective congregation as came early would use these for seats. There were, too, a few rude benches on which the players usually sat. The remainder must stand. The meeting was to be from eleven to twelve. As early as nine o’clock they began to arrive. They seemed to spring out of the earth. The horizon spewed up little hurrying figures, black against the brilliant Oklahoma sky. They came from lonely cabins, dugouts, tents. Ox carts, wagons, buggies, horsemen, mule teams. They were starving for company. It wasn’t religion they sought; it was the stimulation that comes of meeting their kind in the mass. They brought picnic baskets and boxes prepared for a holiday. The cowboys were gorgeous. They wore their pink and purple shirts, their five-gallon hats, their gayest neckerchiefs, their most ornate high-heeled boots. They rode up and down before the big tent, their horses curveting and stepping high. “Whoa there! Don’t crowd the cattle! … You figgerin’ on gettin’ saved, Quince? … Yessir, I’m here for the circus and I’m stayin’ for the concert and grand olio besides.… Say, you’re too late, son. Good whisky and bad women has ruined you.”
The town seemed alive with blanketed Indians.
They squatted in the shade of the wooden shacks. They walked in from their near-by reservations, or rode their mangy horses, or brought in their entire families—squaw, papoose, two or three children of assorted sizes, dogs. The family rarely was a large one. Sabra had once remarked this.
“They don’t have big families, do they? Two or three children. You’d think savages like that—I mean——”
Yancey explained. “The Indian is a cold race—passionless, or almost. I don’t know whether it’s the food they eat—their diet—or the vigorous outdoor life they’ve lived for centuries, or whether they’re a naturally sterile race. Funny. No hair on their faces—no beards. Did you ever see an Indian festival dance?”
“Oh, no! I’ve heard they——”
“They work themselves up, you know, at those dances. Insidious music, mutilations, hysteria—all kinds of orgies to get themselves up to pitch.”
Sabra had shuddered with disgust.
This Sunday morning they flocked in by the dozens, with their sorry nags and their scabrous dogs. The men were decked in all their beads and chains with metal plaques. They camped outside the town, at the end of the street.
Sabra, seeing them, told herself sternly that she must remember to have a Christian spirit, and they were all God’s children; that these red men had been converted. She didn’t believe a word of it. “They’re just where they were before Joshua,” Mother Bri
dget had said.
Rangers, storekeepers, settlers. Lean squatters with their bony wives and their bare-legged, rickety children, as untamed as little wolves.
Sabra superintended the toilettes of her men folk from Yancey to Isaiah. She herself had stayed up the night before to iron his finest shirt. Isaiah had polished his boots until they glittered. Sabra sprinkled a drop of her own cherished cologne on his handkerchief. It was as though they were making ready a bridegroom.
He chided her, laughing, “My good woman, do you realize that this is no way to titivate for the work of delivering the Word of God? Sackcloth and ashes is, I believe, the prescribed costume.” He poured and drank down three fingers of whisky, the third since breakfast.
Cim cavorted excitedly in his best suit, with the bright plaid silk tie and the buttoned shoes, tasseled at the top. The boy, Sabra thought as she dressed him, grew more and more like Yancey, except that he seemed to lack his father’s driving force, his ebullience. But he was high spirited enough now, so that she had difficulty in dressing him.
“I’m going to church!” he shouted, his voice shrill. “Hi, Isaiah! Blessed be the name of the Lawd Amen hall’ujah glory be oh my fren’s come and be save hell fire and brimstone——”
“Cimarron Cravat, stop that this minute or you’ll have to stay home.” Evidently he and Isaiah, full of the Sunday meeting, had been playing church on Saturday afternoon. This was the result of their rehearsal.
Yancey’s sure dramatic instinct bade him delay until he could make an effective entrance. A dozen times Sabra called to him, as he sat in the front office busy with paper and pencil. This was, she decided, his sole preparation for the sermon he would be bound to deliver within the next hour. Later she found in the pocket of his sweeping Prince Albert the piece of paper on which he had made these notes. The paper was filled with those cabalistic whorls, crisscrosses, parallel lines and skulls with which the hand unconsciously gives relief to the troubled or restless mind. One word he had written on it, and then disguised it with meaningless marks—but not quite. Sabra, studying the paper after the events of the morning, made out the word “Yountis.”
At last he was ready. As they stepped into the road they saw that stragglers were still hurrying toward the tent. Sabra had put on, not her second-best black grosgrain, but her best, and the hat with the plumes, none of which splendor she had worn since that eventful first day. She and Yancey stepped sedately down the street, with Cim’s warm wriggling fingers in her own clasp. Sabra was a slimly elegant little figure in her modish black; Yancey, as always, a dashing one; Cim’s clothes were identical with those being worn, perhaps, by a million little boys all over the United States, now on their unwilling way to church. Isaiah, on being summoned from his little kennel in the back yard, had announced that his churchgoing toilette was not quite completed, urged them to proceed without him, and promised to catch up with them before they should have gone a hundred feet.
They went on their way. It occurred neither to Sabra nor to Yancey that there was anything bizarre or even unusual in their thus proceeding, three well-dressed and reasonably conventional figures, toward a gambling tent and saloon which, packed to suffocation with the worst and the best that a frontier town has to offer, was for one short hour to become a House of God.
“Are you nervous, Yancey dear?”
“No, sugar. Though I will say I’d fifty times rather plead with a jury of Texas Panhandle cattlemen for the life of a professional horse thief than stand up to preach before this gang of——” He broke off abruptly. “What’s everybody laughing at and pointing to?” Certainly passers-by were acting strangely. Instinctively Sabra and Yancey turned to look behind them. Down the street, perhaps fifty paces behind them, came Isaiah. He was strutting in an absurd and yet unmistakably recognizable imitation of Yancey’s stride and swing. Around his waist was wound a red calico sash, and over that hung a holstered leather belt so large for his small waist that it hung to his knees and bumped against them at every step. Protruding from the holsters one saw the ugly heads of what seemed at first glance to be two six-shooters, but which turned out, on investigation by the infuriated Mrs. Cravat, to be the household monkey wrench and a bar of ink-soaked iron which went to make up one of the printing shop metal forms. On his head was a battered—an unspeakable—sombrero which he must have salvaged from the backyard débris. But this was not, after all, the high point of his sartorial triumph. He had found somewhere a pair of Yancey’s discarded boots. They were high heeled, slim, star trimmed. Even in their final degradation they still had something of the elegance of cut and material that Yancey’s footgear always bore. Into these wrecks of splendor Isaiah had thrust, as far as possible, his own great bare splay feet. The high heels toppled. The arched insteps split under the pressure. Isaiah teetered, wobbled, walked now on his ankles as the treacherous heel betrayed him; now on his toes. Yet he managed, by the very power of his dramatic gift, to give to the appreciative onlooker a complete picture of Yancey Cravat in ludicrous—in grotesque miniature.
He advanced toward them, in spite of his pedestrian handicaps, with an appalling imitation of Yancey’s stride. Sabra’s face went curiously sallow, so that she was, suddenly, Felice Venable, enraged. Yancey gave a great roar of laughter, and at that Sabra’s blazing eyes turned from the ludicrous figure of the black boy to her husband. She was literally panting with fury. Her idol, her god, was being mocked.
“You—laugh! … Stop.…”
She went in a kind of swoop of rage toward the now halting figure of Isaiah. Though Cim’s hand was still tightly clutched by her own she had quite forgotten that he was there so that, as she flew toward the small mimic, Cim was yanked along as a cyclone carries small objects in its trail by the very force of its own velocity. She reached him. The black face, all eyes now (and those all whites), looked up at her, startled, terrorized. She raised her hand in its neat black kid glove to cuff him smartly. But Yancey was too quick for her. Swiftly as she had swooped upon Isaiah, Yancey’s leap had been quicker. He caught her hand halfway in its descent. His fingers closed round her wrist in an iron grip.
“Let me go!” For that instant she hated him.
“If you touch him I swear before God I’ll not set foot inside the tent. Look at him!”
The black face gazed up at him. In it was worship, utter devotion. Yancey, himself a born actor, knew that in Isaiah’s grotesque costume, in his struttings and swaggerings, there had been only that sincerest of flattery, imitation of that which was adored. The eyes were those of a dog, faithful, hurt, bewildered.
Yancey released Sabra’s wrist. He turned his brilliant winning smile on Isaiah. He put out his hand, removed the mangy sombrero from the child’s head, and let his fine white hand rest a moment on the woolly poll.
Isaiah began to blubber, his fright giving way to injury. “Ah didn’t go fo’ to fret nobody. You-all was dress up fine fo’ chu’ch meetin’ so I crave to dress myself up Sunday style——”
“That’s right, Isaiah. You look finer than any of us. Now listen to me. Do you want a real suit of Sunday clothes?”
The white teeth now vied with the rolling eyes. “Sunday suit fo’ me to wear! Fo’ true!”
“Listen close, Isaiah. I want you to do something for me. Something big. I don’t want you to go to the church meeting.” Then, as the black boy’s expressive face, all smiles the instant before, became suddenly doleful: “Isaiah, listen hard. This is something important. Everybody in town’s at the church meeting. Jesse Rickey’s drunk. The house and the newspaper office are left alone. There are people in town who’d sooner set fire to the newspaper plant and the house than see the paper come out on Thursday. I want you to go back to the house and into the kitchen, where you can see the back yard and the side entrance, too. Patrol duty, that’s what I’m putting you on.”
“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey!” agreed Isaiah. “Patrol.” His dejected frame now underwent a transformation as it stiffened to fit the new martial rôle.
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“Now listen close. If anybody comes up to the house—they won’t come the front way, but at the back, probably, or the side—you take this—and shoot.” He took from beneath the Prince Albert a gun which, well on the left, under the coat, was not visible as were the two six-shooters that he always carried at his belt. It was a six-shooter of the kind known as the single action. The trigger was dead. It had been put out of commission. The dog—that part of the mechanism by which the hammer was held cocked and which was released at the pulling of the trigger—had been filed off. It was the deadliest of Southwestern weapons, a six-shooter whose hammer, when pulled back by the thumb, would fall again as soon as released. No need for Isaiah’s small forefinger to wrestle with the trigger.
“Oh, Yancey!” breathed Sabra, in horror. She made as though to put Cim behind her—to shield him with her best black grosgrain silk from sight of this latest horror of pioneer existence. “Yancey! He’s a child!” Now it was she who was protecting the black boy from Yancey. Yancey ignored her.
“You remember what I told you last week,” he went on, equably. “When we were shooting at the tin can on the fence post in the yard. Do it just as you did then—draw, aim, and shoot with the one motion.”
“Yes, suh, Mr. Yancey! I kill ’em daid.”
“You’ll have a brand-new suit of Sunday clothes next week, remember, and boots to go with it. Now, scoot!”
Isaiah turned on the crazy high-heeled boots. “Take them off!” screamed Sabra. “You’ll kill yourself. The gun. You’ll stumble!”
But he flashed a brilliant, a glorified smile at her over his shoulder and was off, a ludicrous black Don Quixote miraculously keeping his balance; the boots slapping the deep dust of the road now this way, now that.
