Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “Stop dreaming!” Sabra said to him, often and often. “What are you dreaming about?”

  She had grown to love the atmosphere of the newspaper office and resented the boy’s indifference to it. She loved the very smell of it—the mixed odor of hot metal, printer’s ink, dust, white paper, acid, corncob pipe, and cats.

  “Stop dreaming!” Yancey hearing her thus admonishing Cim, whirled on her in one of his rare moments of utter rage. “God a’mighty, Sabra! That’s what Ann Hathaway said to Shakespeare. Don’t you women know that ‘Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming’? Leave the boy alone! Let him dream! Let him dream!”

  “One starry dreamer in a family is enough,” Sabra retorted, tartly.

  Five years had gone by—six years since Yancey’s return. Yet, strangely enough, Sabra never had a feeling of security. She never forgot what he had said about Wichita. “Almost five years in one place. That’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey.” Five years. And this was well into the sixth. He had plunged head first into the statehood fight, into the Indian Territory situation. The anti-Indian faction was bitterly opposed to the plan for combining the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory under the single state of Oklahoma. Their slogan was The White Man’s State for the White Man.

  “Who brought the Indian here to the Oklahoma country in the first place?” shouted Yancey in the editorial columns of the Wigwam. “White men. They hounded them from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which they now live in squalor and misery. It isn’t fit for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now. Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the country that has taken their country away from them. Give them at least the right to become citizens of the state of Oklahoma.”

  He was obsessed by it. He traveled to Washington in the hope of lobbying for it, and made quite a stir in that formal capital with his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his Texas star boots, his great buffalo head, his charm, his grace, his manner. Roosevelt was characteristically cordial to his old campaign comrade. Washington ladies were captivated by the flowery speeches of this romantic this story-book swaggerer out of the Southwest.

  It was rumored on good authority that he was to be appointed the next Governor of the Oklahoma Territory.

  “Oh, Yancey,” Sabra said, “do be careful. Governor of the Territory! It would mean so much. It would help Cim in the future. Donna, too. Their father a governor.” She thought, “Perhaps everything will be all right now. Perhaps all that I’ve gone through in the last ten years will be worth it, now. Perhaps it was for this. He’ll settle down.… Mamma can’t say now … and all the Venables and the Vians and the Goforths and the Greenwoods.…” She had had to endure their pity, even from a distance, all these years.

  The rumor took on substance. My husband, Yancey Cravat, Governor of the Territory of Oklahoma. And then, when statehood came, as it must in the next few years, perhaps Governor of the state of Oklahoma. Why not!

  At which point Yancey blasted any possibility of his appointment to the governorship by hurling a red-hot editorial into the columns of the Wigwam. The gist of it was that the hundreds of thousands of Indians now living on reservations throughout the United States should be allowed to live where they pleased, at liberty. The whites of the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory, with an Indian population of about one hundred and twenty thousand of various tribes—Poncas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Osages, Kiowas, Comanches, Kaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and a score of others—read, emitted a roar of rage, and brandishing the paper ran screaming into the streets, cursing the name of Yancey Cravat.

  Sabra had caught the editorial in the wet proof sheet. Her eye leaped down its lines.

  Herded like sheep in a corral—no, like wild animals in a cage—they are left to rot on their reservations by a government that has taken first their land, then their self-respect, then their liberty from them. The land of the free! When the very people who first dwelt on it are prisoners! Slaves, but slaves deprived of the solace of work. What hope have they, what ambition, what object in living! Their spirit is broken. Their pride is gone. Slothful, yes. Why not? Each month he receives his dole, his pittance. Look at the Osage Nation, now dwindled to a wretched two thousand souls. The men are still handsome, strong, vital; the women beautiful, dignified, often intelligent. Yet there they huddle in their miserable shanties like beaten animals eating the food that is thrown them by a great—a munificent—government. The government of these United States! Let them be free. Let the Red Man live a free man as the White Man lives.…

  Much that he wrote was true, perhaps. Yet the plight of the Indian was not as pitiable as Yancey painted it. He cast over them the glamour of his own romantic nature. The truth was that they themselves cared little—except a few of their tribal leaders, more intelligent than the rest. They hunted a little, fished, slept, visited from tribe to tribe, the Poncas visiting the Osages, the Osages the Poncas, gossiping, eating, holding powwows. The men were great poker players, having learned the game from the white man, and spent hours at it.

  They passed through the town of Osage in their brilliant striped blankets, sometimes walking, sometimes on sorry nags, sometimes in rickety wagons laden with pots, poles, rags, papooses, hounds. The townspeople hastily removed such articles as might please the pilfering fancy.

  Sabra picked up the proof sheet, still damp from the press, and walked into Yancey’s office. Her face was white, set.

  “You’re going to run this, Yancey?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll never be Governor of the Territory.”

  “Never.”

  She stood a moment, her face working. She crushed the galley proof in her hand so that her knuckles stood out, white.

  “I’ve forgiven you many, many things, God knows, in the last ten years. I’ll never forgive you for this. Never.”

  “Yes, you will, honey. Never is a long time. Not while I’m alive, maybe. But some day, a long time from now—though not so very long, maybe—you’ll be able to turn back to the old files of the Oklahoma Wigwam and lift this editorial of mine right out of it, word for word, and run it as your own.”

  “Never.… Donna … Cim …”

  “I can’t live my children’s lives for them, Sabra, honey. They’ve got to live their own. I believe what I believe. This town is rotten—the Territory—the whole country. Rotten.”

  “You’re a fine one to say what is or isn’t rotten. You with your whisky and your Indians and your women. I despise you. So does everyone in the town—in the Territory.”

  “ ‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own home.’ ” A trifle sonorously.

  She never really knew whether he had done this thing with the very purpose of making his governorship impossible. It was like him.

  Curiously enough, the editorial, while it maddened the white population of the Territory, gained the paper many readers. The Wigwam prospered. Osage blossomed. The town was still rough, crude, wide open, even dangerous. But it began to take on an aspect of permanence. It was no longer a camp; it was a town. It began to build schools, churches, halls. Arkansas Grat’s gambling tent had long ago been replaced by a solid wooden structure, just as gambling terms of the West and the Southwest had slowly been incorporated into the language of daily use. I’m keeping cases on him … standing pat … bluffing … bucking the tiger. Terms filched from the gaming table; poker and faro and keno.

  Sol Levy’s store—the Levy Mercantile Company—had two waxen ladies in the window, their features only slightly affected by the burning Southwest sun. Yancey boomed Sol Levy for mayor of Osage, but he never had a chance. It was remarkable how the Ok
lahoma Wigwam persisted, though its position in most public questions was violently unpopular. Perhaps it, like Yancey, had a vitality and a charm that no one could withstand.

  Although Sol Levy was still the town Jew, respected, prosperous, the town had never quite absorbed this Oriental. A citizen of years’ standing, he still was a stranger. He mingled little with his fellow townsmen outside business hours. He lived lonesomely at the Bixby House and ate the notoriously bad meals served by Mrs. Bixby. He was shy of the town women though the Women of the Town found him kindly, passionate, and generous. The business men liked him. They put him on committees. Occasionally Sabra or some other woman who knew him well enough would say, half playfully, half seriously, “Why don’t you get married, Sol? A nice fellow like you. You’d make some girl happy.”

  Sometimes he thought vaguely of going to Wichita or Kansas City or even Chicago to meet some nice Jewish girl there, but he never did. It never entered his head to marry a Gentile. The social life of the town was almost unknown to him. Sometimes if a big local organization—the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Sons of the Southwest—gave a benefit dance, you would glimpse him briefly, in the early part of the evening, standing shyly against the wall or leaning half hidden in the doorway, a darkling, remote, curiously Oriental figure in the midst of these robust red-faced plainsmen and ex-cowmen.

  “Come on, Sol, mix in! Grab off one of the girls and get to dancin’, why don’t you? What you scairt of?” But Sol remained aloof. He regarded the hot, sweaty, shouting dancers with a kind of interested bewilderment and wonder, much as the dancers themselves sometimes watched the Indians during one of the Festival Dances on the outlying reservations. On occasion he made himself politely agreeable to a stout matron well past middle age. They looked up at his tragic dark eyes; they noticed his slim ivory hand as it passed them a plate of cake or a cup of coffee. “He’s real nice when you get to know him,” they said. “For a Jew, that is.”

  Between him and Yancey there existed a deep sympathy and understanding. Yancey campaigned for Sol Levy in the mayoralty race—if a thing so one-sided could be called a race. The Wigwam extolled him.

  Sol Levy, the genial proprietor of the Levy Mercantile Company, is the Wigwam’s candidate for mayor. It behooves the people of Osage to do honor to one of its pioneer citizens whose career, since its early days, has been marked by industry, prosperity, generosity. He comes of a race of dreamers and doers.…

  “Why, the very idea!” snorted the redoubtable virago, Mrs. Tracy Wyatt, whose husband was the opposing candidate. “A Jew for mayor of Osage! They’ll be having an Indian mayor next. Mr. Wyatt’s folks are real Americans. They helped settle Arkansas. And as for me, why, I can trace my ancestry right back to William Whipple, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Sol Levy never had a chance for public honor. He, in fact, did practically nothing to further his own possible election. He seemed to regard the whole matter with a remoteness slightly tinged with ironic humor. Yancey dropped into Sol’s store to bring him this latest pronouncement of the bristling Mrs. Wyatt. Sol was busy in the back of the store, where he was helping the boy unpack a new invoice of china and lamps just received, for the Levy Mercantile Company had blossomed into a general store of parts. His head was in a barrel, and when he straightened and looked up at the towering Yancey there were bits of straw and excelsior clinging to his shirt sleeves and necktie and his black hair.

  “Declaration of Independence!” he exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Tell her one of my ancestors wrote the Ten Commandments. Fella name of Moses.”

  Yancey, roaring with laughter, used this in the Wigwam, and it naturally helped as much as anything to defeat the already defeated candidate.

  Sometimes the slim, white-faced proprietor, with his friend Yancey Cravat, stood in the doorway of the store, watching the town go by. They said little. It was as though they were outsiders, looking on at a strange pageant.

  “What the hell are you doing here in this town, anyway, Sol?” Yancey would say, as though musing aloud.

  “And you?” Sol would retort. “A civilized barbarian.”

  The town went by—Indians, cowboys up from Texas, plainsmen, ranchers. They still squatted at the curb, as in the early days. They chewed tobacco and spat. The big sombrero persisted, and even the boots and spurs.

  “Howdy, Yancey! Howdy, Sol! H’are you, Cim!”

  There was talk of paving Pawhuska Avenue, but this did not come for years. The town actually boasted a waterworks. The Wigwam office still stood on Pawhuska, but it now occupied the entire house. Two years after Yancey’s return they had decided to build a home on Kihekah Street, where there actually were trees now almost ten years old.

  Sabra had built the house as she wanted it, though at first there had been a spirited argument about this. Yancey’s idea had been, of course, ridiculous, fantastic. He said he wanted the house built in native style.

  “Native! What in the world! A wickiup?”

  “Well, a house in the old Southwest Indian style—almost pueblo, I mean. Or Spanish, sort of, made of Oklahoma red clay—plaster, maybe. Not brick. And low, with a patio where you can be out of doors and yet away from the sun. And where you can have privacy.”

  Sabra made short work of that idea. Or perhaps Yancey did not persist. He withdrew his plan as suddenly as he had presented it; shrugged his great shoulders as though the house no longer interested him.

  Osage built its new houses with an attached front porch gaping socially out into the street. It sat on the front porch in its shirt sleeves and kitchen apron. It called from porch to porch, “How’s your tomato plants doing? I see the Packses got out-of-town company visiting.” It didn’t in the least want privacy.

  Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas, and scroll work. There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with bubonic plague. There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms on the second floor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace. In the parlor were brown brocade-and-velvet settee and stuffed chairs. In the sitting room was a lamp with a leaded glass shade in the shape of a strange and bloated flower—a Burbankian monstrosity, half water lily, half petunia.

  “As long as we’re building and furnishing,” Sabra said, “it might as well be the best.” She had gone about planning the house, and furnishing it, with her customary energy and capability. With it all she found time to do her work on the Wigwam—for without her the paper would have been run to the ground in six months. Osage had long since ceased to consider it queer that she, a woman, and the wife of one of its most prominent citizens, should go to work every morning like a man.

  By ten every morning she had attended to her household, seen it started for the day, had planned the meals, ordered them on her way downtown, and was at her desk in the Wigwam office, sorting mail, reading exchanges, taking ads, covering news, writing heads, pasting up. Yancey’s contributions were brilliant but spasmodic. The necessary departmental items—real estate transfers, routine court news, out-of-town district and county gleanings—bored him, though he knew well that they were necessary to the success of the paper. He left these to Sabra, among many other things.

  Sabra, in common with the other well-to-do housewives of the community, employed an Indian girl as a house servant. There was no other kind of help available. After her hideous experience with Arita Red Feather she had been careful to get Indian girls older, more settled, though this was difficult. She preferred Osage girls. These married young, often before they had finished their studies at the Indian school.

  Ruby Big Elk had been with Sabra now for three years. A curious, big, silent girl of about twenty-two—almost handsome—one of six children—a large fami
ly for an Osage. Sabra was somewhat taken aback, after the girl had been with her for some months, to learn that she already had been twice married.

  “What became of your husbands, Ruby?”

  “Died.”

  She had a manner that bordered on the insolent. Sabra put it down to Indian dignity. When she walked she scuffed her feet ever so little, and this, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to add insolence to her bearing. “Oh, do lift your feet, Ruby! Don’t scuffle when you walk.” The girl made no reply. Went on scuffling. Sabra discovered that she was lame; the left leg was slightly shorter than the right. She did not limp—or, rather, hid the tendency to limp by the irritating sliding sound. Her walk was straight, leisurely, measured. Sabra was terribly embarrassed; apologized to the Indian girl. The girl only looked at her and said nothing. Sabra repressed a little shiver. She had never got accustomed to the Indians.

  Sabra was a bustler and a driver. As she went about the house in the morning, performing a dozen household duties before leaving for the Wigwam office, her quick tapping step drummed like hail on a tin roof. It annoyed her intensely, always, to see Ruby Big Elk making up the beds with that regal manner, or moving about the kitchen with the pace and air of a Lady Macbeth. The girl’s broad, immobile face, her unspeaking eyes, her secret manner all worked a slow constant poison in Sabra. She spoke seldom; never smiled. When Sabra spoke to her about some household task she would regard her mistress with an unblinking gaze that was highly disconcerting.