Cimarron · Chapter 2 (1/3)

II

Coat tails swishing, eyes flashing, arms waving, voice soaring.

“Folks, there’s never been anything like it since Creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was History made in an hour⁠—and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast commonwealth of ours” (he talked like that) “traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. ‘Lands of lost gods, and godlike men!’ They came like a procession⁠—a crazy procession⁠—all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand⁠—scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. God knows why⁠—for they all knew that once arrived there they’d have to wait like penned cattle for the firing of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the prairie. They came from Texas, and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback. In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages. I saw a surrey, honey colored, with a fringe around the top, and two elegant bays drawing it, still stepping high along those rutted clay roads as if out for a drive in the Presidio. There was a black boy driving it, brass buttons and all, and in the back seat was a dude in a light tan coat and a cigar in his mouth and a diamond in his shirtfront; and a woman beside him in a big hat and a pink dress laughing and urging the horses along the red dust that was halfway up to the wheel spokes and fit to choke you. They had driven like that from Denver, damned if they hadn’t. I met up with one old homesteader by the roadside⁠—a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg⁠—who told me he had started weeks and weeks before, and had made the long trip as best he could, on foot or by rail and boat and wagon, just as kindhearted people along the way would pick him up. I wonder if he ever got his piece of land in that savage rush⁠—poor old devil.”

He paused a moment, perhaps in retrospect, perhaps cunningly to whet the appetites of his listeners. He wrung a breathless, “Oh, Yancey, go on! Go on!” from Sabra.

“Well, the Border at last, and it was like a Fourth of July celebration on Judgment Day. The militia was lined up at the boundary. No one was allowed to set foot on the new land until noon next day, at the firing of the guns. Two million acres of land were to be given away for the grabbing. Noon was the time. They all knew it by heart. April twenty-second, at noon. It takes generations of people hundreds of years to settle a new land. This was going to be made livable territory overnight⁠—was made⁠—like a miracle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves and the Fishes and the parting of the Red Sea were nothing⁠—mere tricks.”

“Don’t be blasphemous, Yancey!” spoke up Aunt Cassandra Venable.

Cousin Dabney Venable tittered into his stock.

“A wilderness one day⁠—except for an occasional wandering band of Indians⁠—an empire the next. If that isn’t a modern miracle⁠—”

“Indians, h’m?” sneered Cousin Dabney, meaningly.

“Oh, Dabney!” exclaimed Sabra, sharply. “Why do you interrupt? Why don’t you just listen!”

Yancey Cravat raised a pacifying hand, but the great buffalo head was lowered toward Cousin Dabney, as though charging. The sweetest of smiles wreathed his lips. “It’s all right, Sabra. Let Cousin Dabney speak. And why not? Un cabello hace sombra.”

Cousin Dabney’s ivory face flushed a delicate pink. “What’s that, Cravat? Cherokee talk?”

“Spanish, my lad. Spanish.”

A little moment of silent expectation. Yancey did not explain. A plump and pretty daughter-in-law (not a Venable born) put the question.

“Spanish, Cousin Yancey! I declare! Whatever in the world does it mean? Something romantic, I do hope.”

“Not exactly. A Spanish proverb. It means, literally ‘Even a hair casts a shadow.’ ”

Another second’s silence. The pretty daughter-in-law’s face became quite vacuous. “Oh. A hair⁠—but I don’t see what that’s got to do with⁠ ⁠…”

The time had come for Felice Venable to take charge. Her drawling, querulous voice dripped its slow sweetness upon the bitter feud that lay, a poisonous pool, between the two men.

“Well, I must say I call it downright bad manners, I do indeed. Here we all are with our ears just a-flapping to hear the first sound of the militia guns at high noon on the Border, and here’s Cousin Jouett Goforth all the way up from Louisiana the first time in fifteen years, and just a-quivering with curiosity, and what do we hear but chitchat about Spanish proverbs and shadows.” She broke off abruptly, cast a lightning glance aloft, and in a tone that would have been called a shout had it issued from the throat of any but a Venable, said, “Ah‑saiah!”

The black boy’s shoofly, hanging limp from his inert hand, took up its frantic swishing. The air was cleared. The figures around the table relaxed. Their faces again turned toward Yancey Cravat. Yancey glanced at Sabra. Sabra’s lips puckered into a phantom kiss. They formed two words, unseen, unheard by the rest of the company. “Please, darling.”

“Cede Deo,” said Yancey, with a little bow to her. Then, with a still slighter bow, he turned to Cousin Dabney. “ ‘Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me.’ You may not recognize that either, Dabney. It’s from the Old Testament.”

Cousin Dabney Venable ran a finger along the top of his black silk stock, as though to ease his throat.

With a switch of his coat tails Yancey was off again, pausing only a moment at the sideboard to toss off three fingers of Spanish brandy, like burning liquid amber. He patted his lips with his fine linen handkerchief. “I’ve tasted nothing like that in a month, I can tell you. Raw corn whisky fit to tear your throat out. And as for the water! Red mud. There wasn’t a drink of water to be had in the town after the first twenty-four hours. There we were, thousands and thousands of us, milling around the Border like cattle, with the burning sun baking us all day, nowhere to go for shade, and the thick red dust clogging eyes and nose and mouth. No place to wash, no place to sleep, nothing to eat. Queer enough, they didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t seem to notice. They were feeding on a kind of crazy excitement, and there was a wild light in their eyes. They laughed and joked and just milled around, all day and all night and until near noon next day. If you had a bit of food you divided it with someone. I finally got a cup of water for a dollar, after standing in line for three hours, and then a woman just behind me⁠—”

“A woman!” Cousin Arminta Greenwood (of the Georgia Greenwoods). And Sabra Cravat echoed the words in a shocked whisper.

“You wouldn’t believe, would you, that women would go it alone in a fracas like that. But they did. They were there with their husbands, some of them, but there were women who made the Run alone.”

“What kind of women?” Felice Venable’s tone was not one of inquiry but of condemnation.

“Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home. Pioneer women.”

From Aunt Cassandra Venable’s end of the table there came a word that sounded like, “Hussies!”

Yancey Cravat caught the word beneath his teeth and spat it back. “Hussies, heh! The one behind me in the line was a woman of forty⁠—or looked it⁠—in a calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had driven across the prairies all the way from the north of Arkansas in a springless wagon. She was like the women who crossed the continent to California in ’49. A gaunt woman, with a weather-beaten face; the terribly neglected skin”⁠—he glanced at Sabra with her creamy coloring⁠—“that means alkali water and sun and dust and wind. Rough hair, and unlovely hands, and boots with the mud caked on them. It’s women like her who’ve made this country what it is. You can’t read the history of the United States, my friends” (all this he later used in an Oklahoma Fourth of July speech when they tried to make him Governor) “without learning the great story of those thousands of unnamed women⁠—women like this one I’ve described⁠—women in mud-caked boots and calico dresses and sunbonnets, crossing the prairie and the desert and the mountains enduring hardship and privation. Good women, with a terrible and rigid goodness that comes of work and self-denial. Nothing picturesque or romantic about them, I suppose⁠—though occasionally one of them flashes⁠—Belle Starr the outlaw⁠—Rose of the Cimarron⁠—Jeannette Daisy who jumped from a moving Santa Fe train to stake her claim⁠—but the others⁠—no, their story’s never really been told. But it’s there, just the same. And if it’s ever told straight you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.”

“Talking nonsense,” drawled Felice Venable.

Yancey whirled on his high heels to face her, his fine eyes blazing. “You’re one of them. You came up from the South with your husband to make a new home in this Kansas⁠—”

“I am not!” retorted Felice Venable, with enormous dignity. “And I’ll thank you not to say any such thing. Sunbonnet indeed! I’ve never worn a sunbonnet in my life. And as for my skin and hair and hands, they were the toast of the South, as I can prove by anyone here, all the way from Louisiana to Tennessee. And feet so small my slippers had to be made to order. Calico and muddy boots indeed!”

“Oh, Mamma, Yancey didn’t mean⁠—he meant courage to leave your home in the South and come up⁠—he wasn’t thinking of⁠—Yancey, do get on with your story of the Run. You got a drink of water for a dollar⁠—dear me!⁠—and shared it with the woman in the calico and the sunbonnet⁠ ⁠…”

He looked a little sheepish. “Well, matter of fact, it turned out she didn’t have a dollar to spare, or anywhere near it, but even if she had it wouldn’t have done her any good. The fellow selling it was a rat-faced hombre with one eye and Mexican pants. The trigger finger of his right hand had been shot away in some fracas or other, so he ladled out water with that hand and toted his gun in his left. Bunged up he was, plenty. A scar on his nose, healed up, but showing the marks of where human teeth had bit him in a fight, as neat and clear as a dentist’s signboard. By the time I got to him there was one cup of water left in the bucket. He tipped it while I held the dipper, and it trickled out, just an even dipperful. The last cup of water on the Border. The crowd waiting in line behind me gave a kind of sound between a groan and a moan. The sound you hear a herd of cow animals give, out on the prairie, when their tongues are hanging out for water in the dry spell. I tipped up the dipper and had down a big mouthful⁠—filthy tasting stuff it was, too. Gyp water. You could feel the alkali cake on your tongue. Well, my head went back as I drank, and I got one look at that woman’s face. Her eyes were on me⁠—on my throat, where the Adam’s apple had just given that one big gulp after the first swallow. All bloodshot the whites of her eyes, and a look in them like a dying man looks at a light. Her mouth was open, and her lips were all split with the heat and the dust and the sun, and dry and flaky as ashes. And then she shut her lips a little and tried to swallow nothing, and couldn’t. There wasn’t any spit in her mouth. I couldn’t down another mouthful, parching as I was. I’d have seen her terrible face to the last day of my life. So I righted it, and held it out to her and said, ‘Here, sister, take the rest of it. I’m through.’ ”

Cousin Jouett Goforth essayed his little joke. “Are you right sure she was forty, Yancey, and weather-beaten? And that about her hair and boots and hands?”

Cravat, standing behind his wife’s chair, looked down at her; at the fine white line that marked the parting of her thick black hair. With one forefinger he touched her cheek, gently. He allowed the finger to slip down the creamy surface of her skin, from cheek bone to chin. “Dead sure, Jouett. I left out one thing, though.” Cousin Jouett made a sound signifying, ah, I thought so. “Her teeth,” Yancey Cravat went on thoughtfully. “Broken and discolored like those of a woman of seventy. And most of them gone at the side.”

Here Yancey could not resist charging up and down, flirting his coat tails and generally ruining the fine flavor of his victory over the Venable mind. The Venable mind (or the prospect of escaping it) had been one of the reasons for his dash into the wild melee of the Run in the first place. Now he stood surveying these handsome futile faces, and a great impatience shook him, and a flame of rage shot through him, and a tongue of malice flicked him. With these to goad him, and the knowledge of how he had failed, he plunged again into his story to the end.

“I had planned to try and get a place on the Santa Fe train that was standing, steam up, ready to run into the Nation. But you couldn’t get on. There wasn’t room for a flea. They were hanging on the cowcatcher and swarming all over the engine, and sitting on top of the cars. It was keyed down to make no more speed than a horse. It turned out they didn’t even do that. They went twenty miles in ninety minutes. I decided I’d use my Indian pony. I knew I’d get endurance, anyway, if not speed. And that’s what counted in the end.

“There we stood, by the thousands, all night. Morning, and we began to line up at the Border, as near as they’d let us go. Militia all along to keep us back. They had burned the prairie ahead for miles into the Nation, so as to keep the grass down and make the way clearer. To smoke out the Sooners, too, who had sneaked in and were hiding in the scrub oaks, in the draws, wherever they could. Most of the killing was due to them. They had crawled in and staked the land and stood ready to shoot those of us who came in, fair and square, in the Run. I knew the piece I wanted. An old freighters’ trail, out of use, but still marked with deep ruts, led almost straight to it, once you found the trail, all overgrown as it was. A little creek ran through the land, and the prairie rolled a little there, too. Nothing but blackjacks for miles around it, but on that section, because of the water, I suppose, there were elms and persimmons and cottonwoods and even a grove of pecans. I had noticed it many a time, riding the range.”

(H’m! Riding the range! All the Venables made a quick mental note of that. It was thus, by stray bits and snatches, that they managed to piece together something of Yancey Cravat’s past.)

“Ten o’clock, and the crowd was nervous and restless. Hundreds of us had been followers of Payne and had gone as Boomers in the old Payne colonies, and had been driven out, and had come back again. Thousands from all parts of the country had waited ten years for this day when the land-hungry would be fed. They were like people starving. I’ve seen the same look exactly on the faces of men who were ravenous for food.

“Well, eleven o’clock, and they were crowding and cursing and fighting for places near the Line. They shouted and sang and yelled and argued, and the sound they made wasn’t human at all, but like thousands of wild animals penned up. The sun blazed down. It was cruel. The dust hung over everything in a thick cloud, blinding you and choking you. The black dust of the burned prairie was over everything. We were like a horde of fiends with our red eyes and our cracked lips and our blackened faces. Eleven-thirty. It was a picture straight out of hell. The roar grew louder. People fought for an inch of gain on the Border. Just next to me was a girl who looked about eighteen⁠—she turned out to be twenty-five⁠—and a beauty she was, too⁠—on a coal-black thoroughbred.”