Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  Sabra waited for no more. She turned. And as she turned she saw coming down the road in a cloud of dust a grotesque scarecrow, all shanks and teeth and rolling eyes. Black Isaiah.

  “No’m, Miss Sabra, he ain’t hurt—not what yo’ rightly call hurt. No, ma’am. Jes’ a nip in de arm, and he got it slung in a black silk hank’chief and looks right sma’t handsome. They wouldn’t let him alone noways. Ev’ybody in town they shakin’ his hand caze he shoot that shot dat kill de Kid. An’ you know what he do then, Miss Sabra? He kneel down an’ he cry like a baby.… Le’ me tote dis yere valise. Ah kin tote Miss Donna, too. My, she sho’ growed!”

  The newspaper office, the print shop, her parlor, her kitchen, her bedroom, were packed with men in boots, spurs, sombreros; men in overalls; with women; with children. Mrs. Wyatt was there—the Philomatheans as one woman were there; Dixie Lee actually; everyone but—sinisterly—Louie Hefner.

  “Well, Mis’ Cravat, I guess you must be pretty proud of him! … This is a big day for Osage. I guess Oklahoma City knows this town’s on the map now, all right.… You missed the shootin’, Mis’ Cravat, but you’re in time to help Yancey celebrate.… Say, the Santa Fé alone offered five thousand dollars for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive. Yancey gets it, all right. And the Katy done the same. And they’s a government price on his head, and the Citizens’ National is making up a purse. You’ll be ridin’ in your own carriage, settin’ in silks, from now.”

  Yancey was standing at his desk in the Wigwam office. His back was against the desk, as though he were holding this crowd at bay instead of welcoming them as congratulatory guests. His long locks hung limp on his shoulders. His face was white beneath the tan, like silver under lacquer. His great head lolled on his chest. His left arm lay in a black and scarlet silk sling made of one of his more piratical handkerchiefs.

  He looked up as she came in, and at the look in his face she forgave him his neglect of her; forgave him the house full of what Felice Venable would term riffraff and worse; his faithlessness to the Wigwam. Donna, tired and frightened, had set up a wail. Cim, bewildered, had gone on a rampage. But as Yancey took a stumbling step toward her she had only one child, and that one needed her. She thrust Donna again into Isaiah’s arms; left Cim whirling among the throng; ran toward him. She was in his great arms, but it was her arms that seemed to sustain him.

  “Sabra. Sugar. Send them away. I’m so tired. Oh, God, I’m so tired.”

  Next day they exhibited the body of the Kid in the new plate glass show window of Hefner’s Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlors. All Osage came to view him, all the county came to view him; they rode in on trains, on horses, in wagons, in ox carts for miles and miles around. The Kid. The boy who, in his early twenties, had sent no one knew how many men to their death—whose name was the symbol for terror and daring and merciless marauding throughout the Southwest. Even in the East—in New York—the name of the Kid was known. Stories had been written about him. He was, long before his death, a mythical figure. And now he, together with Clay McNulty, his lieutenant, lay side by side, quite still, quite passive. The crowd was so dense that it threatened Louie Hefner’s window. He had to put up rope barriers to protect it and when the mob surged through these he stationed guards with six-shooters, and there was talk of calling out the militia from Fort Tipton. Sabra said it was disgusting, uncivilized. She forbade Cim to go within five hundred yards of the place—kept him, in fact, virtually a prisoner in the yard. Isaiah she could not hold. His lean black body could be seen squirming in and out of the crowds; his ebony face, its eyes popping, was always in the front row of the throng gloating before Hefner’s window. He became, in fact, a sort of guide and unofficial lecturer, holding forth upon the Kid, his life, his desperate record, the battle in which he met his death in front of the bank he had meant to despoil.

  “Well, you got to hand it to him,” the men said, gazing their fill. “He wasn’t no piker. When he held up a train or robbed a bank or shot up a posse it was always in broad daylight, by God. Middle of the day he’d come riding into town. No nitro-glycerin for him, or shootin’ behind fence posts and trees in the dark. Nosiree! Out in the open, and takin’ a bigger chance than them that was robbed. Ride! Say, you couldn’t tell which was him and which was horse. They was one piece. And shoot! It wa’n’t shootin’. It was magic. They say he’s got half a million in gold cached away up in the Hills.”

  For weeks, for months, the hills were honeycombed with prowlers in search for this buried treasure.

  Sabra did a strange, a terrible thing. Yancey would not go near the grisly window. Sabra upheld him; denounced the gaping crowd as scavengers and ghouls. Then, suddenly, at the last minute, as the sun was setting blood red across the prairie, she walked out of the house, down the road, as if impelled, as if in a trance, like a sleep walker, and stood before Hefner’s window. The crowd made way for her respectfully. They knew her. This was the wife of Yancey Cravat, the man whose name appeared in headlines in every newspaper throughout the United States, and even beyond the ocean.

  They had dressed the two bandits in new cheap black suits of store clothes, square in cut, clumsy, so that they stood woodenly away from the lean hard bodies. Clay McNulty’s face had a faintly surprised look. His long sandy mustaches drooped over a mouth singularly sweet and resigned. But the face of the boy was fixed in a smile that brought the lips in a sardonic snarl away from the wolf-like teeth. He looked older in death than he had in life, for his years had been too few for lines such as death’s fingers usually erase; and the eyes, whose lightning glance had pierced you through and through like one of the bullets from his own dreaded six-shooters, now were extinguished forever behind the waxen shades of his eyelids.

  It was at the boy that Sabra looked; and having looked she turned and walked back to the house.

  They gave them a decent funeral and a burial with everything in proper order, and when the minister refused to read the service over these two sinners Yancey consented to do it and did, standing there with the fresh-turned mounds of red Oklahoma clay sullying his fine high-heeled boots, and the sun blazing down upon the curling locks of his uncovered head.

  “ ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.… His hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.… The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart.… Fools make mock at sin.…’ ”

  They put up two rough wooden slabs, marking the graves. But souvenir hunters with little bright knives soon made short work of those. The two mounds sank lower, lower. Soon nothing marked this spot on the prairie to differentiate it from the red clay that stretched for miles all about it.

  They sent to Yancey, by mail, in checks, and through solemn committees in store clothes and white collars, the substantial money rewards that, for almost five years, had been offered by the Santa Fé road, the M.K. & T., the government itself, and various banks, for the capture of the Kid, dead or alive.

  Yancey refused every penny of it. The committees, the townspeople, the county, were shocked and even offended. Sabra, tight lipped, at last broke out in protest.

  “We could have a decent house—a new printing press—Cim’s education—Donna——”

  “I don’t take money for killing a man,” Yancey repeated, to each offer of money. The committees and the checks went back as they had come.

  14

  Sabra noticed that Yancey’s hand shook with a perceptible palsy before breakfast, and that this was more than ever noticeable as that hand approached the first drink of whisky which he always swallowed before he ate a morsel. He tossed it down as one who, seeking relief from pain, takes medicine. When he returned the glass to the table he drew a deep breath. His hand was, miraculously, quite steady.

  More and more he neglected the news and business details of the Wigwam. He was restless, moody, distrait. Sabra remembered with a pang of dismay something that he had said on first coming to Osage. “God, when I think of those y
ears in Wichita! Almost five years in one place—that’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done.”

  The newspaper was prospering, for Sabra gave more and more time to it. But Yancey seemed to have lost interest, as he did in any venture once it got under way. It was now a matter of getting advertisements, taking personal and local items, recording the events in legal, real estate, commercial, and social circles. Mr. and Mrs. Abel Dagley spent Sunday in Chuckmubbee. The Rev. McAlestar Couch is riding the Doakville circuit.

  Even in the courtroom or while addressing a meeting of townspeople Yancey sometimes would behave strangely. He would stop in the midst of a florid period. At once a creature savage and overcivilized, the flaring lamps, the hot, breathless atmosphere, the vacuous white faces looming up at him like balloons would repel him. He had been known to stalk out, leaving them staring. In the courtroom he was an alarming figure. When he was defending a local county or Territorial case they flocked from miles around to hear him, and the crude pine shack that was the courtroom would be packed to suffocation. He towered over any jury of frontiersmen—a behemoth in a Prince Albert coat and fine linen, his great shaggy buffalo’s head charging menacingly at his opponent. His was the florid hifalutin oratory of the day, full of sentiment, hyperbole, and wind. But he could be trenchant enough when needs be; and his charm, his magnetic power, were undeniable, and almost invariably he emerged from the courtroom victorious. He was not above employing tricks to win his case. On one occasion, when his client was being tried for an affair of gunplay which had ended disastrously, the jury, in spite of all that Yancey could do, turned out to be one which would be, he was certain, heavily for conviction. He deliberately worked himself up into an appearance of Brobdingnagian rage. He thundered, he roared, he stamped, he wept, he acted out the events leading up to the killing and then, while the jury’s eyes rolled and the weaker among them wiped the sweat from their brows, he suddenly whipped his two well known and deadly ivory-handled and silver six-shooters from their holsters in his belt. “And this, gentlemen, is what my client did.” He pointed them. But at that, with a concerted yelp of pure terror the jury rose as one man and leaped for the windows, the doors, and fled.

  Yancey looked around, all surprise and injured innocence. The jury had disbanded. According to the law, a new jury had to be impaneled. The case was retried. Yancey won it.

  Sabra saw more and more to the editing and to the actual printing of the Oklahoma Wigwam. She got in as general houseworker and helper an Osage Indian girl of fifteen who had been to the Indian school and who had learned some of the rudiments of household duties: cleaning, dishwashing, laundering, even some of the simpler forms of cookery. She tended Donna, as well. Her name was Arita Red Feather, a quiet gentle girl who went about the house in her calico dress and moccasins and had to be told everything over again, daily. Isaiah was beginning to be too big for these duties. He was something of a problem in the household. At the suggestion that he be sent back to Wichita he set up a howling and wailing and would not be consoled until both Sabra and Yancey assured him that he might remain with them forever. So he now helped Arita Red Feather with the heavier housework; did odd jobs about the printing shop; ran errands; saw that Donna kept from under horses’ hoofs; he could even beat up a pan of good light biscuits in a pinch. When Jesse Rickey was too drunk to stand at the type case and Yancey was off on some legal matter, he slowly and painstakingly helped Sabra to make possible the weekly issue of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Arita Red Feather’s dialect became a bewildering thing in which her native Osage, Sabra’s refined diction, and Isaiah’s Southern negro accent were rolled into an almost unintelligible jargon. “I’m gwine wash um clothes big rain water extremely nice um make um clothes white fo’ true.”

  “That’s fine!” Sabra would say. Then, an hour later, “Oh, Arita, don’t you remember I’ve told you a hundred times you put the bluing in after they’re rubbed, not before?”

  Arita’s dead black Indian eyes, utterly devoid of expression, would stare back at her.

  Names of families of mixed Indian and white blood appeared from time to time in the columns of the Wigwam, for Sabra knew by now that there were in the Territory French-Indian families who looked upon themselves as aristocrats. This was the old French St. Louis, Missouri, background cropping up in the newly opened land. The early French who had come to St. Louis, there to trade furs and hides with the Osages, had taken Indian girls as squaws. You saw, sprinkled among the commonplace nomenclature of the frontier, such proud old names as Bellieu, Revard, Revelette, Tayrien, Perrier, Chouteau; and their owners had the unmistakable coloring and the bearing of the Indian. These dark-skinned people bore, often enough, and ridiculously enough, Irish names as well, for the Irish laborers who had come out with pickax and shovel and crowbar to build the Territory railroads had wooed and married the girls of the Indian tribes. You saw little Indian Kellys and Flahertys and Riordans and Caseys.

  All this was bewildering to Sabra. But she did a man’s job with the paper, often against frightening odds, for Yancey was frequently absent now, and she had no one but the wavering Jesse Rickey to consult. There were times when he, too, failed her. Still the weekly appeared regularly, somehow.

  Grandma Rosey, living eleven miles northwest of town, is very ill with the la grippe. Mrs. Rosey is quite aged and fears are entertained for her recovery.

  Preaching next Sunday morning and evening at the Presbyterian church by Rev. J. H. Canby. Come and hear the new bell.

  Mrs. Wicksley is visiting with the Judge this week.

  A movement is on foot to fill up the sink holes on Pawhuska Avenue. The street in its present state is a disgrace to the community.

  C. H. Snack and family expect to leave next week for an extended visit with Mrs. Snack’s relatives in southeastern Kansas. Mr. Snack disposed of his personal property at public sale last Monday. Our loss is Kansas’s gain.

  (A sinister paragraph this. You saw C. H. Snack, the failure, the defeated, led back to Kansas there to live the life of the nagged and unsuccessful husband tolerated by his wife’s kin.)

  Sabra, in a pinch, even tried her unaccustomed hand at an occasional editorial, though Yancey seldom failed her utterly in this department. A rival newspaper set up quarters across the street and, for two or three months, kept up a feeble pretense of existence. Yancey’s editorials, during this period, were extremely personal.

  The so-called publishers of the organ across the street have again been looking through glasses that reflect their own images. A tree is known by its fruit. The course pursued by the Dispatch does not substantiate its claim that it is a Republican paper.

  The men readers liked this sort of thing. It was Yancey who brought in such items as:

  Charles Flasher, wanted for murder, forgery, selling liquor without a license, and breaking jail at Skiatook, was captured in Oklahoma City as he was trying to board a train in the Choctaw yards.

  But it was Sabra who held the women readers with her accounts of the veal loaf, cole slaw, baked beans, and angel-food cake served at the church supper, and the somewhat touching decorations and costumes worn at the wedding of a local or county belle.

  If, in the quarter of a century that followed, every trace of the settling of the Oklahoma country had been lost, excepting only the numbers of the Oklahoma Wigwam, there still would have been left a clear and inclusive record of the lives, morals, political and social and economic workings of this bizarre community. Week by week, month by month, the reader could have noticed in its columns whatever of progress was being made in this fantastic slice of the Republic of the United States.

  It was the day of the practical joke, and Yancey was always neglecting his newspaper and his law practice to concoct, with a choice group of conspirators, some elaborate and gaudy scheme for the comic downfall of a fellow citizen or a newcomer to the region. These jokes often took weeks for their successful consummation. Frequently they were founded on the newcomer’s misapprehension concerning the Indians. If this
was the Indian Territory, he argued, not unreasonably, it was full of Indians. He had statistics. There were 200,000 Indians in the Territory. Indians meant tomahawks, scalping, burnings, raidings, and worse. When the local citizens assured him that all this was part of the dead past the tenderfoot quoted, sagely, that there was no good Indian but a dead Indian. Many of the jokes, then, hinged on the mythical bad Indian. The newcomer was told that there was a threatened uprising; the Cheyennes had been sold calico—bolts and bolts of it—with the stripes running the wrong way. This, it was explained, was a mistake most calculated to madden them. The jokesters armed themselves to the teeth. Six-shooters were put in the clammy, trembling hand of the tenderfoot. He was told that the nights were freezing cold. He was led to a near-by field that was man-high with sunflowers and cautioned not to fire unless he heard the yells of the maddened savages. There, shaking and sweating in overcoat, overshoes, mufflers, ear muffs, and leggings, he cowered for hours while all about him (at a safe distance) he heard the horrid, blood-curdling yells of the supposed Indians. His scalp, when finally he was rescued, usually was found to be almost lifted of its own accord.

  Next day, Yancey would spend hours writing a humorous account of this Indian uprising for the Thursday issue of the Wigwam. The drinks were on the newcomer. That ceremony also took hours.

  O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible,

  As a nose on a man’s face,

  or a weathercock on a steeple.

  Thus Yancey’s article would begin with a quotation from his favorite poet.