Cimarron · Chapter 6 (1/3)

VI

Long before the end of that first nightmarish day in Osage, Sabra had confronted her husband with blazing eyes. “I won’t bring up my boy in a town like this!”

It had been a night and a day fantastic with untoward happenings. Their wagons had rumbled wearily down the broad main street of the settlement⁠—a raw gash in the prairie. All about, on either side, were wooden shacks, and Indians and dried mud and hitching posts and dogs and crude wagons like their own. It looked like pictures Sabra had seen of California in ’49. They had supped on ham and eggs, fried potatoes, and muddy coffee in a place labeled Ice Cream and Oyster Parlor. They spent that first night in a rooming house above one of the score of saloons that enlivened the main street⁠—Pawhuska Avenue, it was called. It was a longish street, for the Osage town settlers seemed to have felt the need of huddling together for company in this wilderness. The street stopped abruptly at either end and became suddenly prairie.

“Pawhuska Avenue,” said a tipsy sign tacked on the front of a false-front pine shack. Yancey chose this unfortunate time to impart a little Indian lore to Cim, wide eyed on the wagon seat beside his mother.

“That’s Osage,” he shouted to the boy. “Pawhu⁠—that means hair. And scah, that means white. White Hair. Pawhuska⁠—White Hair⁠—was an old Osage Chief⁠—”

“Yancey Cravat!” Sabra called in a shout that almost equaled his own, and in a tone startlingly like one of Felice Venable’s best (she was, in fact, slightly hysterical, what with weariness and disappointment and fear), “Yancey Cravat, will you stop talking Indian history and find us a place to eat and sleep! Where’s your sense? Can’t you see he’s ready to drop, and so am I?”

The greasy food set before them in the eating house sickened her. She shrank from the slatternly boldfaced girl who slammed the dishes down in front of them on the oilcloth-covered table. At this same table with them⁠—there was only one, a long board accommodating perhaps twenty⁠—sat red-faced men talking in great rough voices, eating with a mechanical and absentminded thoroughness, shoveling potatoes, canned vegetables, pie into their mouths with knives. Cim was terribly wide awake and noisily unruly, excited by the sounds and strangeness about him.

“I’m an Indian!” he would yell, making a great clatter with his spoon on the table. “Ol’ White Hair! Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!” Being reprimanded, and having the spoon forcibly removed from his clutching fingers, he burst into tears and howls.

Sabra had taken him up to the bare and clean enough little room which was to be their shelter for the night. From wide-eyed wakefulness Cim had become suddenly limp with sleep. Yancey had gone out to see to the horses, to get what information he could about renting a house, and a shack for the newspaper. A score of plans were teeming in his mind.

“You’ll be all right,” he had said. “A good night’s sleep and everything’ll look rosy in the morning. Don’t look so down in the mouth, honey. You’re going to like it.”

“It’s horrible! It’s⁠—and those men! Those dreadful men.”

“ ‘For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows than the second man in Rome.’ ” Yancey struck an attitude.

Sabra looked at him dully. “Rome?”

“Plutarch, my sweet.” He kissed her; was gone with a great flirt of his coat tails. She heard his light step clattering down the flimsy wooden stairs. She could distinguish his beautiful vibrant voice among the raucous speech of the other men below.

The boy was asleep in a rude box bed drawn up beside theirs. Black Isaiah was bedded down somewhere in a little kennel outside. Sabra sank suspiciously down on the doubtful mattress. The walls of the room were wafer thin; mere pine slats with cracks between. From the street below came women’s shrill laughter, the sound of a piano hammered horribly. Horses clattered by. Voices came up in jocose greeting; there were conversations and arguments excruciatingly prolonged beneath her window.

“I was sellin’ a thousand beef steers one time⁠—holdin’ a herd of about three thousand⁠—and me and my foreman, we was countin’ the cattle as they come between us. Well, the steers was wild long-legged coasters⁠—and run! Say, they come through between us like scairt wolves, and I lost the count⁠ ⁠…”

“Heard where the Mullins gang rode in there this morning and cleaned up the town⁠—both banks⁠—eleven thousand in one and nineteen thousand in the other, and when they come out it looked like the whole county’d rallied against ’em.⁠ ⁠…”

“Say, he’s a bad hombre, that fella. Got a poisoned tongue, like a rattlesnake.⁠ ⁠… Spades trump?”

“No, hearts. Say, I would of known how to handle him. One time we was campin’ on Amarillo Creek⁠ ⁠…”

A loud knock at the door opposite Sabra’s room. The knock repeated. Then a woman’s voice, metallic, high. “Quien es? Quien es?” The impatient rattle of a door knob, and a man’s gruff voice.

A long-drawn wail in the street below, “Oh, Joe! He‑e‑e‑ere’s your mule!” followed by a burst of laughter.

Yet somehow she had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion, only to be awakened by pistol shots, a series of bloodcurdling yells, the crash and tinkle of broken glass. Then came screams of women, the sound of horses galloping. She lay there, cowering. Cim stirred in his bed, sighed deeply, slept again. She was too terrified to go to the window. Her shivering seemed to shake the bed. She wanted to waken the child for comfort, for company. She summoned courage to go to the window; peered fearfully out into the dim street below. Nothing. No one in the street. Yancey’s bleeding body was not lying in the road; no masked men. Nothing again but the clink of glasses and plates; the tinny piano, the slap of cards.

She longed with unutterable longing, not for the sweet security of her bed back in Wichita⁠—that seemed unreal now⁠—but for those nights in the wagon on the prairie with no sound but the rustle of the scrub oaks, the occasional stamp of horses’ hoofs on dry clay, the rippling of a nearby stream. She looked at her little gold watch, all engraved with a bird and a branch and a waterfall and a church spire. It was only nine.

It was midnight when Yancey came in. She sat up in bed in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown. Her eyes, in her white face, were two black holes burned in a piece of paper.

“What was it? What was it?”

“What was what? Why aren’t you asleep, sugar?”

“Those shots. And the screaming. And the men hollering.”

“Shots?” He was unstrapping his broad leather belt with its twin six-shooters whose menacing heads peered just above their holsters. He wore it always now. It came, in time, to represent for her a sinister symbol of all the terrors, all the perils that lay waiting for them in this new existence. “Why, sugar, I don’t recollect hearing any⁠—Oh⁠—that!” He threw back his great head and laughed. “That was just a cowboy, feeling high, shooting out the lights over in Strap Turket’s saloon. On his way home and having a little fun with the boys. Scare you, did it?”

He came over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged away from him, furious. She pressed her hand frantically to her forehead. It was cold and wet. She was panting a little. “I won’t bring my boy up in a town like this. I won’t. I’m going back. I’m going back home, I tell you.”

“Wait till morning, anyhow, won’t you, honey?” he said, and took her in his arms.

Next morning was, somehow, magically, next morning, with the terrors of the night vanished quite. The sun was shining. For a moment Sabra had the illusion that she was again at home in her own bed at Wichita. Then she realized that this was because she had been awakened by a familiar sound. It was the sound of Isaiah’s voice somewhere below in the dusty yard. He was polishing Yancey’s boots, spitting on them industriously and singing as he rubbed. His husky sweet voice came up to her as she lay there.

“Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

Lis’en to de lambs, all a-cryin’

Ah wanta go to heab’n when ah die.

Come on, sister, wid yo’ ups an’ downs,

Wanta go to heab’n when ah die,

De angels waitin’ fo’ to gib yo’ a crown,

Wanta go to heab’n when ah die.”

Lugubrious though the words were, Sabra knew he was utterly happy.

There was much to be done⁠—a dwelling to be got somehow⁠—a place in which to house the newspaper plant. If necessary, Yancey said, they could live in the rear and set up the printing and law office in the front. Almost everyone who conducted a business in the town did this. “Houses are mighty scarce,” Yancey said, making a great masculine snorting and snuffling at the wash bowl as they dressed. “It’s take what you can get or live in a tent. I heard last night that Doc Nisbett’s got a good house. Five rooms, and he’ll furnish us with water. There’s a dozen families after it, and Doc’s as independent as a hog on ice.”

Sabra rather welcomed this idea of combining office and home. She would be near him all day. As soon as breakfast was over she and Yancey fared forth, leaving Cim in Isaiah’s care (under many and detailed instructions from Sabra). She had put on her black grosgrain silk with the three box pleats on each side, trimmed with the passementerie and jet buttons⁠—somewhat wrinkled from its long stay in the trunk⁠—and her modish hat with the five ostrich plumes and the pink roses that had cost twelve dollars and fifty cents in Wichita, and her best black buttoned kid shoes and her black kid gloves. In the tightly basqued black silk she was nineteen inches round the waist and very proud of it. Her dark eyes, slightly shadowed now, what with weariness, excitement, and loss of sleep, were enormous beneath the brim of the romantic black plumed hat.

Yancey, seeing her thus attired in splendor after almost a fortnight of the gray cheviot, struck an attitude of dazzlement. Blank verse leaped to his ready lips. “ ‘But who is this, what thing of sea or land⁠—female of sex it seems⁠—that so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, comes this way sailing, like a stately ship of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles of Javan or Gadire, with all her bravery on.⁠ ⁠…’ ”

“Oh, now, Yancey, don’t talk nonsense. It’s only my second-best black grosgrain.”

“You’re right, my darling. Even Milton has no words for such beauty.”

“Do hurry, dear. We’ve so much to do.”

With his curling locks, his broad-brimmed white sombrero, his high-heeled boots, his fine white shirt, the ample skirts of his Prince Albert spreading and swooping with the vigor of his movements, Yancey was an equally striking figure, though perhaps not so unusual as she, in this day and place.

The little haphazard town lay broiling in the summer sun. The sky that Sabra was to know so well hung flat and glaring, a gray-blue metal disk, over the prairie.

“Well, Sabra honey, this isn’t so bad!” exclaimed Yancey, and looked about him largely. “ ‘Now Morning saffron-robed arose from the streams of Ocean to bring light to gods and men.’ ”

“Ocean!” echoed Sabra, the literal. “Mighty little water I’ve seen around here⁠—unless you call that desert prairie the ocean.”

“And so it is, my pet. That’s very poetic of you. The prairie’s an ocean of land.” He seemed enormously elated⁠—jubilant, almost. His coat tails switched; he stepped high in his fine Texas star boots. She tucked her hand in her handsome husband’s arm. The air was sweet, and they were young, and it was morning. Perhaps it was not going to be so dreadful, after all.

Somehow, she had yet no feeling that she, Sabra Cravat, was part of this thing. She was an onlooker. The first thing she noticed, as she stepped into the dust of the street in her modish dress and hat, caused her heart to sink. The few women to be seen scuttling about wore sunbonnets and calico⁠—the kind of garments in which Sabra had seen the women back home in Wichita hanging up the Monday wash to dry on the line in the back yard. Here they came out of butcher’s shop or grocery store with the day’s provisions in their arms; a packet of meat, tins of tomatoes or peaches, unwrapped. After sharp furtive glances at Sabra, they vanished into this little pine shack or that. Immediately afterward there was great agitation among the prim coarse window curtains in those dwellings boasting such elegance.

“But the others⁠—the other kind of women⁠—” Sabra faltered.

Yancey misunderstood. “Plenty of the other kind in a town like this, but they aren’t stirring this time of day.”

“Don’t be coarse, Yancey. I mean ladies like myself⁠—that I can talk to⁠—who’ll come calling⁠—that is⁠—”

He waved a hand this way and that. “Why, you just saw some women folks, didn’t you?”

“Those!”

“Well, now, honey, you can’t expect those ladies to be wearing their best bib and tucker mornings to do the housework in. Besides, most of the men came without their women folks. They’ll send for them, and then you’ll have plenty of company. It isn’t every woman who’d have the courage you showed, roughing it out here. You’re the stuff that Rachel was made of, and the mother of the Gracchi.”

Rachel was, she knew, out of the Bible; she was a little hazy about the Gracchi, but basked serene in the knowledge that a compliment was intended.

There was the absurdly wide street⁠—surely fifty feet wide⁠—in this little one-street town. Here and there a straggling house or so branched off it. But the life of Osage seemed to be concentrated just here. There were tents still to be seen serving as dwellings. Houses and stores were built of unpainted wood. They looked as if they had been run up overnight, as indeed they had. They stared starkly out into the wide-rutted red clay road, and the muddy road glared back at them, and the brazen sky burned with fierce intensity down on both, with never a tree or bit of green to cheer the spirit or rest the eye. Tied to the crude hitching posts driven well into the ground were all sorts of vehicles: buckboards, crazy carts, dilapidated wagons, mule drawn; here and there a top buggy covered with the dust of the prairie; and everywhere, lording it, those four-footed kings without which life in this remote place could not have been sustained⁠—horses of every size and type and color and degree. Indian ponies, pintos, pack horses, lean long-legged range horses, and occasionally a flashing-eyed creature who spurned the red clay with the disdainful hoof of one whose ancestors have known the mesas of Spain. Direct descendants, these, of the equine patricians who, almost four hundred years before, had been brought across the ocean by Coronado or Moscosco to the land of the Seven Cities of Gold.

There were the sounds of the hammer and the saw, the rattle of chains, the thud of hoofs, all very sharp and distinct, as though this mushroom town were pulling itself out of the red clay of the prairie by its own bootstraps before one’s very eyes. Crude and ugly though the scene was that now spread itself before Sabra and Yancey, it still was not squalid. It had vitality. You sensed that behind those bare boards people were planning and stirring mightily. There was life in the feel of it. The very names tacked up over the store fronts had bite and sting. Sam Pack. Mott Bixler. Strap Buckner. Ike Hawes. Clint Hopper. Jim Click.

Though they had come to town but the night before, it seemed to her that a surprising number of people knew Yancey and greeted him as they passed down the street. “H’are you, Yancey! Howdy, ma’am.” Loungers in doorways stared at them curiously. Cowboys loping by gave her a long hard look that still had in it something of shyness⁠—a boyish look, much like that with which the outlaws had greeted her down in the draw on the prairie when they learned that she was Cim’s mother.