Cimarron · Chapter 7 (1/2)

VII

From Doc Nisbett, Yancey received laconic information to the effect that the house had been rented by a family whose aquatic demands were more modest than Sabra’s. Sabra was inconsolable, but Yancey did not once reproach her for her mistake. It was characteristic of him that he was most charming and considerate in crises which might have been expected to infuriate him. “Never mind, sugar. Don’t take on like that. We’ll find a house. And, anyway, we’re here. That’s the main thing. God, when I think of those years in Wichita!”

“Why, Yancey! I thought you were happy there.”

“ ‘A prison’d soul, lapped in Elysium.’ Almost five years in one place⁠—that’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey. Five years, back and forth like a trail horse; walking down to the Wigwam office in the morning, setting up personal and local items and writing editorials for a smug citizenry interested in nothing but the new waterworks. Walking back to dinner at noon, sitting on the veranda evenings, looking at the vegetables in the garden or the Venables in the house until I couldn’t tell vegetables from Venables and began to think, by God, that I was turning into one or the other myself.”

He groaned with relief, stretched his mighty arms, shook himself like a great shaggy lion. In all this welter of red clay and Indians and shirtsleeves and tobacco juice and drought he seemed to find a beauty and an exhilaration that eluded Sabra quite. But then Sabra, after those first two days, had ceased to search for a reason for anything. She met and accepted the most grotesque, the most fantastic happenings. When she looked back on the things she had done and the things she had said in the first few hours of her Oklahoma experience it was as though she were tolerantly regarding the naivetes of a child. Ten barrels of water a day! She knew now that water, in this burning land, was a precious thing to be measured out like wine. Life here was an anachronism, a great crude joke. It was hard to realize that while the rest of the United States, in this year of 1889, was living a conventionally civilized and primly Victorian existence, in which plumbing, gaslight, trees, gardens, books, laws, millinery, Sunday churchgoing, were taken for granted, here in this Oklahoma country life had been set back according to the frontier standards of half a century earlier. Literally she was pioneering in a wilderness surrounded but untouched by civilization.

Yancey had reverted. Always⁠—even in his staidest Wichita incarnation⁠—a somewhat incredibly romantic figure, he now was remarkable even in this town of fantastic humans gathered from every corner of the brilliantly picturesque Southwest. His towering form, his curling locks, his massive head, his vibrant voice, his dashing dress, his florid speech, his magnetic personality drew attention wherever he went. On the day following their arrival Yancey had taken from his trunk a pair of silver-mounted ivory-handled six-shooters and a belt and holster studded with silver. She had never before seen them. She had not known that he possessed these grim and gaudy trappings. His white sombrero he had banded with a rattlesnake skin of gold and silver, with glass eyes, a treasure also produced from the secret trunk, as well as a pair of gold-mounted spurs which further enhanced the Texas star boots. Thus bedecked for his legal and editorial pursuits he was by far the best dressed and most spectacular male in all the cycloramic Oklahoma country. He had always patronized a good tailor, and because the local talent was still so limited in this new community he later sent as far as San Antonio, Texas, when his wardrobe needed replenishing.

Sabra learned many astounding things in these first few days, and among the most terrifying were the things she learned about the husband to whom she had been happily married for more than five years. She learned, for example, that this Yancey Cravat was famed as the deadliest shot in all the deadly shooting Southwest. He had the gift of being able to point his six-shooters without sighting, as one would point with a finger. It was a direction-born gift in him and an enviable one in this community. He was one of the few who could draw and fire two six-shooters at once with equal speed and accuracy. His hands would go to his hips with a lightning gesture that yet was so smooth, so economical that the onlooker’s eye scarcely followed it. He could hit his mark as he walked, as he ran, as he rode his horse. He practised a great deal. From the back door of their cabin Sabra and Cim and rolling-eyed Isaiah used to stand watching him. He sometimes talked of wind and trajectory. You had to make allowance mathematically, he said, for this ever-blowing Oklahoma wind. Sabra was vaguely uneasy. Wichita had not been exactly effete, and Dodge City, Kansas, was notoriously a gunplay town. But here no man walked without his six-shooters strapped to his body. On the very day of her harrowing encounter with Doc Nisbett and the cowboy, Sabra, her composure regained, had gone with Yancey to see still another house owner about the possible renting of his treasure. The man was found in his crude one-room shack which he used as a combination dwelling and land office. He and Yancey seemed to know each other. Sabra was no longer astonished to find that Yancey, twenty-four hours after his arrival, appeared to be acquainted with everyone in the town. The man glanced up at them from the rough pine table at which he was writing.

“Howdy, Yancey!”

“Howdy, Cass!”

Yancey, all grace, performed an introduction. The lean, leather-skinned house owner wiped his palm on his pants’ seat in courtly fashion and, thus purified, extended a hospitable hand to Sabra. Yancey revealed to him their plight.

“Well, now, say, that’s plumb terr’ble, that is. Might be I can help you out⁠—you and your good lady here. But say, Yancey, just let me step out, will you, to the corner, and mail this here letter. The bag’s goin’ any minute now.”

He licked and stamped the envelope, rose, and took from the table beside him his broad leather belt with its pair of holstered six-shooters, evidently temporarily laid aside for comfort while writing. This he now strapped quickly about his waist with the same unconcern that another man would use in slipping into his coat. He merely was donning conventional street attire for the well-dressed man of the locality. He picked up his sheaf of envelopes and stepped out. In three minutes he was back, and affably ready to talk terms with them.

It was, perhaps, this simple and sinister act, more than anything she had hitherto witnessed, that impressed Sabra with the utter lawlessness of this new land to which her husband had brought her.

This house, so dearly held by the man called Cass, turned out to be a four-room dwelling inadequate to their needs, and they were in despair at the thought of being obliged to wait until a house could be built. Then Yancey had a brilliant idea. He found a two-room cabin made of rough boards. This was hauled to the site of the main house, plastered, and⁠—added to it⁠—provided them with a six-room combination dwelling, newspaper plant, and law office. There was all the splendor of sitting room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen to live in. One room of the small attached cabin was a combination law and newspaper office. The other served as composing room and print shop. The Hefner Furniture and Undertaking Parlors provided them with furniture⁠—a large wooden bedstead to fit Sabra’s mattress and spring; a small bed for Cim; tables, chairs⁠—the plainest of everything. The few bits of furnishing and ornament that Sabra had brought with her from Wichita were fortunately⁠—or unfortunately⁠—possessed of the enduring beauty of objects which have been carefully made by hands exquisitely aware of line, texture, color, and further enhanced by the rich mellow patina that comes with the years. Her pieces of silver, of china, of fine linen were as out of place in this roughly furnished cabin of unpainted lumber as a court lady in a peasant’s hovel. In two days Sabra was a housewife established in her routine as though she had been at it for years. A pan of biscuits in the oven of the wood-burning kitchen stove; a dress pattern of calico, cut out and ready for basting, on the table in the sitting room.

Setting up the newspaper plant and law office was not so simple. Yancey, for example, was inclined to write his first editorial entitled “Whither Oklahoma?” before the hand press had been put together. He was more absorbed in the effect of the sign tacked up over the front of the shop than he was in the proper mechanical arrangement of the necessary appliances inside. The Oklahoma Wigwam, read the sign in block letters two feet high, so that the little cabin itself was almost obscured. Then, beneath, in letters scarcely less impressive: Yancey Cravat, Prop. and Editor. Attorney at Law. Notary.

The placing of this sign took the better part of a day, during which time all other work was suspended. While the operation was in progress Yancey crossed the road fifty times, ostensibly to direct matters from a proper vantage point of criticism, but really to bask in the dazzling effect of the bold fat black letters. As always in the course of such proceedings on the part of the laboring male there was much hoarse shouting, gesticulation, and general rumpus. To Sabra, coming to the door from time to time, dish towel or ladle in hand, the clamor seemed out of all proportion to the results achieved. She thought (privately) that two women could have finished the job in half the time with one tenth the fuss. She still was far too feminine, tactful, and in love with her husband to say so. Cim enjoyed the whole thing enormously, as did his black satellite, bodyguard, and playmate, Isaiah. They capered, shouted, whooped, and added much to the din.

Yancey from across the road⁠—“Lift her up a little higher that end!”

“What say?” from the perspiring Jesse Rickey, his assistant.

“That end⁠—up! No! Up! I said, Up!”

“Well, which end, f’r Chris’ sakes, right or left?”

“Right! Right! God Almighty, man, don’t you know your right from your left?”

“Easy now. E‑e‑e‑esy! Over now. Over! There! That’s⁠—no⁠—yeh⁠—now head her a little this way.⁠ ⁠…”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, my land’s sakes alive!” thought Sabra, going back to her orderly kitchen. “Men make such a lot of work of nothing.”

It was her first admission that the male of the species might be fallible. A product of Southern training, even though a daily witness, during her girlhood, to the dominance of her matriarchal mother over her weak and war-shattered father, she had been bred to the tradition that the male was always right, always to be deferred to. Yancey, still her passionate lover, had always treated her tenderly, as a charming little fool, and this role she had meekly⁠—even gratefully⁠—accepted. But now suspicion began to rear its ugly head. These last three weeks had shown her that the male was often mistaken, as a sex, and that Yancey was almost always wrong as an individual. But these frightening discoveries she would not yet admit even to herself. Also that he was enthralled by the dramatics of any plan he might conceive, but that he often was too impatient of its mechanics to carry it through to completion.

“Yancey, this case of type’s badly pied.” Jesse Rickey, journeyman printer and periodic drunkard, was responsible for this misfortune, having dropped a case, face down, in the dust of the road while assisting Yancey in the moving. “It’ll have to be sorted before you can get out a paper.”

“Oh, Rickey’ll tend to that. I’ve got a lot of important work to do. Editorials to write, news to get, lot of real estate transfers⁠—and I’m going to find out who killed Pegler and print it in the first issue if it takes the last drop of blood in me.”

“Oh, please don’t. What does it matter! He’s dead. Maybe he did shoot himself. And besides, you’ve got Cim and me to think of. You can’t let anything happen to you.”

“Let that Yountis gang get away with a thing like that and anything is likely to happen to me; the same thing that happened to him. No, sir! I’ll show them, first crack, that the Oklahoma Wigwam prints all the news, all the time, knowing no law but the Law of God and the government of these United States! Say, that’s a pretty good slogan. Top of the page, just above the editorial column.”

In the end it was she who sorted the case of pied type. The five years of Yancey’s newspaper ownership in Wichita had familiarized her, almost unconsciously, with many of the mechanical aspects of a newspaper printing shop. She even liked the smell of printer’s ink, of the metal type, of the paper wet from the hand press. She found that the brass and copper thin spaces, used for setting up ads, had no proper container, and at a loss to find one she hit upon the idea of using a muffin tin until a proper receptacle could be found. It never was found, and the muffin tin still served after a quarter of a century had gone by. She was, by that time, sentimental about it, and superstitious.

The hand press was finally set up, and the little job press, and the case rack containing the type. The rollers were in place, and their little stock of paper. Curiously enough, though neither Yancey nor Sabra was conscious of it, it was she who had directed most of this manual work and who had indeed actually performed much of it, with Isaiah and Jesse Rickey to help her. Yancey was off and up the street every ten minutes. Returning, he would lose himself in the placing of his law library, his books of reference, and his favorite volumes, for which he contended there was not enough shelf room in the house proper. He had brought along boxes of books stowed away in the covered wagons. If the combined book wealth contained in all the houses, offices, and shops of the entire Oklahoma country so newly settled could have been gathered in one spot it probably would have been found to number less than this preposterous library of the paradoxical Yancey Cravat. Glib and showy though he was with his book knowledge Yancey still had in these volumes of his the absorption of the true book lover. He gave more attention to the carpenter who put up these crude bookshelves than he had bestowed upon the actual coupling of the two cabins when first they had moved in. The books he insisted on placing himself, picking them up, one by one, and losing himself now in this page, now in that, so that at the end of the long hot afternoon he had accomplished nothing. Blackstone and Kent (ineffectual enough in this lawless land) were shocked to find themselves hobnobbing side by side with Childe Harold and the Decameron. Culpepper’s Torts nestled cosily between the shameless tale of the sprightly Wife of Bath and Yancey’s new and joyously discovered copy of FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám.

Lost to all else he would call happily in to Sabra as she bent over the case rack, her cheek streaked with ink, her fingers stained, her head close to Jesse Rickey’s bleary-eyed one as she sorted type or filled the muffin tin with the metal thin spaces: “Sabe! Oh, Sabe⁠—listen to this.” He would clear his throat. “ ‘Son of Nestor, delight of my heart, mark the flashing of bronze through the echoing halls, and the flashing of gold and of amber and of silver and of ivory. Suchlike, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, for the world of things that are here; wonder comes over me as I look thereon.’⁠ ⁠… God, Sabra, it’s as fine as the Old Testament. Finer!”

“ ‘The world of things that are here,’ ” echoed Sabra, not bitterly, but with grave common sense. “Perhaps if you’d pay more attention to those, and less to your nonsense in books about gold and silver and ivory, we might get settled.”