Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  Sabra drew herself up, every inch the daughter of her mother, Felice Venable, née Marcy. “You are disgusting.”

  “Not really, if you just look at it without a lot of sentiment. I shall be happy, and Tracy, too. His wife will be unhappy, I suppose, for a while. But she isn’t happy anyway, as it is. Better one than three. It’ll work out. You’ll see. Don’t bother about me. It’s Cim that needs looking after. He’s got a streak of—of——” She looked at her mother. Did not finish the sentence. “When he comes home Saturday I wish you’d speak to him.”

  22

  But Cim did not come home on Saturday. On Saturday, at noon, when Sabra and Yancey drove from the office in their little utility car to the house on Kihekah Street for their noonday dinner they saw a great limousine drawn up at the curb. A chauffeur, vaguely familiar, lounged in front. The car was thick with the red dust of the country road.

  A vague pang of premonition stabbed at Sabra’s vitals. She clutched Yancey’s arm. “Whose car is that?”

  Yancey glanced at it indifferently. “Somebody drove Cim home, I suppose. Got enough dinner for company?”

  Donna had gone to Oklahoma City to spend the week-end. It must be Cim.

  “Cim!” Sabra called, as she entered the front door. “Cim!” But there was no answer. She went straight to the sitting room. Empty. But in the stiff little parlor, so seldom used, sat two massive, silent figures. With the Indian sense of ceremony and formality old Big Elk and his squaw had known the proper room to use for an occasion such as this.

  “Why—Big Elk!”

  “How!” replied Big Elk, and held up his palm in the gesture of greeting.

  “Yancey!” cried Sabra suddenly, in a terrible voice. The two pairs of black Indian eyes stared at her. Sabra saw that their dress was elaborate; the formal dress reserved for great occasions. The woman wore a dark skirt and a bright cerise satin blouse, ample and shaped like a dressing sacque. Over her shoulders was the fine bright-hued blanket. Her hair was neatly braided and wound about her hatless head. She wore no ornaments. That was the prerogative of the male. Old Big Elk was a structure of splendor. His enormous bulk filled the chair. His great knees were wide apart. His blue trousers were slashed and beaded elaborately at the sides and on his feet were moccasins heavy with intricate beadwork. His huge upper body was covered with a shirt of brilliant green brocade worn outside the trousers, and his striped blanket hung regally from his shoulders. About his neck and on his broad breast hung chains, beads, necklaces. In the bright silk neckerchief knotted about his throat you saw the silver emblem of his former glory as chief of the tribe. There were other insignia of distinction made of beaten silver—the star, the crescent, the sun. On his head was a round high cap of brown beaver like a Cossack’s. Up the back of this was stuck an eagle feather. His long locks, hanging about his shoulders, straight and stiff, were dyed a brilliant orange, like an old burlesque queen’s, a startling, a fantastic background for the parchment face, lined and creased and crisscrossed with a thousand wrinkles. One hand rested on his knee. The other wielded languidly, back and forth, back and forth, an enormous semicircular fan made of eagle feathers. Side by side the two massive figures sat like things of bronze. Only their eyes moved, and that nightmarish eagle feather fan, back and forth, back and forth, regally.

  Those dull black unsmiling eyes, that weaving fan, moved Sabra to nameless terror. “Yancey!” she cried again, through stiff lips. “Yancey!”

  At the note of terror in her voice he was down the stairs and in the room with his quick light step. But at sight of old Big Elk and his wife his look of concern changed to one of relief. He smiled his utterly charming smile.

  “How!”

  “How!” croaked Big Elk.

  Mrs. Big Elk nodded her greeting. She was a woman younger, perhaps, by thirty years than her aged husband; his third wife. She spoke English; had even attended an Indian Mission school in her girlhood. But through carelessness or indifference she used the broken, slovenly English of the unlettered Indian.

  Now the two relapsed into impassive silence.

  “What do they want? Ask them what they want.”

  Yancey spoke a few words in Osage. Big Elk replied with a monosyllable.

  “What did he say? What is it?”

  “I asked them to eat dinner with us. He says he cannot.”

  “I should hope not. Tell her to speak English. She speaks English.”

  Big Elk turned his great head, slowly, as though it moved on a mechanical pivot. He stared at his fat, round-faced wife. He uttered a brief command in his own tongue. The squaw smiled a little strange, embarrassed smile, like a schoolgirl—it was less a smile than a contortion of the face, so rare in her race as to be more frightening than a scowl.

  “Big Elk and me come take you back to Wazhazhe.”

  “What for?” cried Sabra, sharply.

  “Four o’clock big dinner, big dance. Your son want um come tell you. Want um know he marry Ruby this morning.”

  She was silent again, smiling her foolish fixed smile. Big Elk’s fan went back and forth, back and forth.

  “God A’mighty!” said Yancey Cravat. He looked at Sabra, came over to her quickly, but she waved him away.

  “Don’t. I’m not going to—it’s all right.” It was as though she shrank from his touch. She stood there, staring at the two barbaric figures staring so stonily back at her with their dead black Indian eyes. It was at times like this that the Marcy in her stood her in good stead. She came of iron stock, fit to stand the fire. Only beneath her fine dark eyes you now suddenly saw a smudge of purplish brown, as though a dirty thumb had rubbed there; and a sagging of all the muscles of her face, so that she looked wattled, lined, old.

  “Don’t look like that, honey. Come. Sit down.”

  Again the groping wave of her hand. “I’m all right, I tell you. Come. We must go there.”

  Yancey came forward. He shook hands formally with Big Elk, with the Indian woman. Sabra, seeing him, suddenly realized that he was not displeased. She knew that no formal politeness would have prevented him from voicing his anger if this monstrous announcement had shattered him as it had her, so that her very vitals seemed to be withering within her.

  “Sugar, shake hands with them, won’t you?”

  “No. No.” She wet her dry lips a little with her tongue, like one in a fever. She turned, woodenly, and walked to the door, ignoring the Indians. Across the hall, slowly, like an old woman, down the porch steps, toward the shabby little car next to the big rich one. As she went she heard Yancey’s voice (was there an exultant note in it?) at the telephone.

  “Jesse! Take this. Get it in. Ready! … Ex-Chief Big Elk, of the Osage Nation, and Mrs. Big Elk, living at Wazhazhe, announce the marriage of their daughter Ruby Big Elk to Cimarron Cravat, son of—don’t interrupt me—I’m in a hurry—son of Mr. and Mrs. Yancey Cravat, of this city. The wedding was solemnized at the home of the bride’s parents and was followed by an elaborate dinner made up of many Indian and American dishes, partaken of by the parents of the bride and the groom, many relatives and numerous friends of the young …”

  Sabra climbed heavily into the car and sat staring at the broad back of the car ahead of her. Chief Big Elk and his wife came out presently, unreal, bizarre in the brilliant noonday Oklahoma sunshine, ushered by Yancey. He was being charming. They heaved their ponderous bulk into the big car. Yancey got in beside Sabra. She spoke to him once only.

  “I think you are glad.”

  “This is Oklahoma. In a way it’s what I wanted it to be when I came here twenty years ago. Cim’s like your father, Lewis Venable. Weak stuff, but good stock. Ruby’s pure Indian blood and a magnificent animal. It’s hard on you now, my darling. But their children and their grandchildren are going to be such stuff as Americans are made of. You’ll see.”

  “I hope I shall die before that day.”

  The shabby little middle-class car followed the one whirling ahead of them over the red clay Okl
ahoma roads. Eating the dust of the big car just ahead.

  She went through it and stood it, miraculously, until one grotesquerie proved too much for her strained nerves and broke them. But she went into the Indian house, and saw Cim sitting beside the Indian woman, and as she looked at his beautiful weak face she thought, I wish that I had never found him that day when he was lost on the prairie long ago. He came toward her, his head lowered with that familiar look, his fine eyes hidden by the lids.

  “Look at me!” Sabra commanded, in the voice of Felice Venable. The boy raised his eyes. She looked at him, her face stony. Ruby Big Elk came toward her with that leisurely, insolent, scuffling step. The two women gazed at each other; rather, their looks clashed, like swords held high. They did not shake hands.

  There were races, there were prizes, there was dancing. In the old Indian days the bucks had raced on foot for a prize that was a pony tethered at a distance and won by the fleetest to reach him, mount, and ride him back to the starting point. To-day the prize was a magnificent motor car that stood glittering in the open field half a mile distant. Sabra thought, I am dying, I am dying. And Donna. This squaw is her sister-in-law. Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson.

  Ruby’s handsome head right had bought the young couple the house just across the road from Big Elk’s—a one-story red brick bungalow, substantial, ugly. They showed Sabra and Yancey through it. It was furnished complete. Mongrel Spanish furniture in the living room—red plush, fringe, brass nail heads as big as twenty-dollar gold pieces. An upright piano. An oak dining-room set. A fine bathroom with heavy rich bath towels neatly hung on the racks. A shining stained oak bedroom set with a rose-colored taffeta spread. Sabra felt a wave of nausea. Cim’s face was smiling, radiant. Yancey was joking and laughing with the Indians. In the kitchen sat a white girl in a gingham dress and a kitchen apron. The girl’s hair was so light a yellow as to appear almost white. Her unintelligent eyes were palest blue. Her skin was so fair as to be quite colorless. In the midst of the roomful of dark Indian faces the white face of the new Cravat hired girl seemed to swim in a hazy blob before Sabra’s eyes. But she held on. She felt Ruby’s scornful dark eyes on her. Sabra had a feeling as though she had been disemboweled and now was a hollow thing, an empty shell that moved and walked and talked.

  Dinner. White servants and negro servants to wait on them. A long table seating a score or more, and many such tables. Bowls and plates piled with food all down the length of it. Piles of crisp pork, roasted in the Indian fashion over hot embers sunk in a pit in the yard, and skewered with a sharp pointed stick. Bowls of dried corn. Great fat, black ripe olives. Tinned lobster. Chicken. Piles of dead ripe strawberries. Vast plateaus of angel-food cake covered with snow fields of icing.

  Sabra went through the motions of eating. Sometimes she put a morsel into her mouth and actually swallowed it. There was a great clatter of knives and forks and dishes. Everything was eaten out of one plate. Platters and bowls were replenished. Sabra found herself seated beside Mrs. Big Elk. On her other side was Yancey. He was eating and laughing and talking. Mrs. Big Elk was being almost comically polite, solicitous. She pressed this tidbit, that dainty, on her stony guest.

  Down the center of the table, at intervals, were huge bowls piled with a sort of pastry stuffed with forcemeat. It was like a great ravioli, and piles of it vanished beneath the onslaught of appreciative guests.

  “For God’s sake, pretend to eat something, Sabra,” Yancey murmured, under his breath. “It’s done now. They consider it an insult. Try to eat something.”

  She stirred the pastry and chopped meat that had been put on her plate.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Big Elk, beside her, and pointed at the mass with one dusky maculate finger.

  Sabra lifted her fork to her lips and swallowed a bit of it. It was delicious—spicy, rich, appetizing. “Yes,” she said, and thought, I am being wonderful. This is killing me. “Yes, it is very good. This meat—this stuffing—is it chopped or ground through a grinder?”

  The huge Indian woman beside her turned her expressionless gaze on Sabra. Ponderously she shook her head from side to side in negation.

  “Naw,” she answered, politely. “Chawed.”

  The clatter of a fork dropped to the plate, a clash among the cups and saucers. Sabra Cravat had fainted.

  23

  Osage was so sophisticated that it had again become simple. The society editor of the Oklahoma Wigwam used almost no adjectives. In the old days, you had read that “the house was beautifully decorated with an artistic arrangement of smilax, sent from Kansas City, pink and purple asters in profusion making a bower before which the young couple stood, while in the dining room the brilliance of golden glow, scarlet salvia, and autumn leaves gave a seasonal touch.” But now the society column said, austerely, “The decorations were orchids and Pernet roses.”

  Osage, Oklahoma, was a city.

  Where, scarcely two decades ago, prairie and sky had met the eye with here a buffalo wallow, there an Indian encampment, you now saw a twenty-story hotel: the Savoy-Bixby. The Italian head waiter bent from the waist and murmured in your ear his secret about the veal sauté with mushrooms or the spaghetti Caruso du jour. Sabra Cravat, Congresswoman from Oklahoma, lunching in the Louis XIV room with the members of the Women’s State Republican Committee, would say, looking up at him with those intelligent dark eyes, “I’ll leave it to you, Nick. Only quickly. We haven’t much time.” Niccolo Mazzarini would say yes, he understood. No one had much time in Osage, Oklahoma. A black jackanapes in a tight scarlet jacket with brass buttons and even tighter bright blue pants, an impudent round red cap cocked over one ear, strolled through the dining room bawling, “Mistah Thisandthat! Mistah Whoandwhat!” He carried messages on a silver salver. There were separate ice-water taps in every bedroom. Servidors. Ring once for the waiter. Twice for the chambermaid. A valet is at your service.

  Twenty-five years earlier anybody who was anybody in Oklahoma had dilated on his or her Eastern connections. Iowa, if necessary, was East.

  They had been a little ashamed of the Run. Bragged about the splendors of the homes from which they had come.

  Now it was considered the height of chic to be able to say that your parents had come through in a covered wagon. Grandparents were still rather rare in Oklahoma. As for the Run of ’89—it was Osage’s Mayflower. At the huge dinner given in Sabra Cravat’s honor when she was elected Congresswoman, and from which they tried to exclude Sol Levy over Sabra’s vigorous (and triumphant) protest, the chairman of the Committee on Arrangements explained it all to Sol, patronizingly.

  “You see, we’re inviting only people who came to Oklahoma in the Run.”

  “Well, sure,” said the former peddler, genially. “That’s all right. I walked.”

  The Levy Mercantile Company’s building now occupied an entire square block and was fifteen stories high. In the huge plate-glass windows on Pawhuska postured ladies waxen and coquettish, as on Fifth Avenue. You went to the Salon Moderne to buy Little French Dresses, and the saleswomen of this department wore black satin and a very nice little strand of imitation pearls, and their eyes were hard and shrewd and their phrases the latest. The Osage Indian women had learned about these Little French Dresses, and they often came in with their stately measured stride: soft and flaccid from easy living, rolls of fat about their hips and thighs. They tried on sequined dresses, satin dresses, chiffon. Sometimes even the younger Osage Indian girls still wore the brilliant striped blanket, in a kind of contemptuous defiance of the whites. And to these, as well as to the other women customers, the saleswomen said, “That’s awfully good this year.… That’s dreadfully smart on you, Mrs. Buffalo Hide.… I think that line isn’t the thing for your figure, Mrs. Plenty Vest.… My dear, I want you to have that. It’s perfect with your coloring.”

  The daughter of Mrs. Pat Leary (née Crook Nose) always caused quite a flutter when she came in, for accustomed though Osage was to money and the spending of it, the Learys’ lavis
hness was something spectacular. Hand-made silk underwear, the sheerest of cobweb French stockings, model hats, dresses—well, in the matter of gowns it was no good trying to influence Maude Leary or her mother. They frankly wanted beads, spangles, and paillettes on a foundation of crude color. The saleswomen were polite and acquiescent, but they cocked an eyebrow at one another. Squaw stuff. Now that little Cravat girl—Felice Cravat, Cimarron Cravat’s daughter—was different. She insisted on plain, smart tailored things. Young though she was, she was Oklahoma State Woman Tennis Champion. She always said she looked a freak in fluffy things—like a boy dressed up in girl’s clothes. She had long, lean, muscular arms and a surprising breadth of shoulder, was slim flanked and practically stomachless. She had a curious trick of holding her head down and looking up at you under her lashes and when she did that you forgot her boyishness, for her lashes were like fern fronds, and her eyes, in her dark face, an astounding ocean gray. She was a good sport, too. She didn’t seem to mind the fact that her mother, when she accompanied her, wore the blanket and was hatless, just like any poor Kaw, instead of being one of the richest of the Osages. She was rather handsome for a squaw, in a big, insolent, slow-moving way. Felice Cravat, everyone agreed, was a chip of the old block, and by that they did not mean her father. They were thinking of Yancey Cravat—old Cimarron, her grandfather, who was now something of a legend in Osage and throughout Oklahoma. Young Cim and his Osage wife had had a second child—a boy—and they had called him Yancey, after the old boy. Young Yancey was a bewilderingly handsome mixture of a dozen types and forbears—Indian, Spanish, French, Southern, Southwest. With that long narrow face, the dolichocephalic head, people said he looked like the King of Spain—without that dreadful Hapsburg jaw. Others said he was the image of his grandmother, Sabra Cravat. Still others contended that he was his Indian mother over again—insolence and all. A third would come along and say, “You’re crazy. He’s old Yancey, born again. I guess you don’t remember him. There, look, that’s what I mean! The way he closes his eyes as if he were sleepy, and then when he does look at you straight you feel as if you’d been struck by lightning. They say he’s so smart that the Osages believe he’s one of their old gods come back to earth.”