Cimarron · Chapter 15 (1/3)

XV

Dixie Lee’s girls were riding by on their daily afternoon parade. Sabra recognized their laughter and the easy measured clatter of their horses’ hoofs before they came into view. She knew it was Dixie Lee’s girls. Somehow, the virtuous women of Osage did not laugh much, though Sabra did not put this thought into words, even in her mind. She glanced up now as they drove by. She was seated at her desk by the window in the front office of the Oklahoma Wigwam. Their plumes, their parasols, their brilliant-hued dresses made a gay garden of color in the monotony of Pawhuska Avenue. They rode in open phaetons, but without the usual top, so that they had only their parasols to shade their brightly painted faces from the ardent Southwest sun. The color of the parasols and plumes and dresses was changed from day to day, but they always were done in ensemble effect. One day the eyes of Osage’s male population were dazzled (and its female population’s eyes affronted) by a burst of rosy splendor shading from pale pink to scarlet. The next day they would shade from palest lavender to deepest purple. The next, from delicate lemon to orange; the day following they ran the gamut of green. They came four by four, and usually one in each carriage handled the reins, though occasionally a Negro driver occupied the front seat alone. They were not boisterous. Indeed, they conducted themselves in seemly enough fashion except perhaps for the little bursts of laughter and for the fact that they were generous with the ankles beneath the ruffled skirts. Often they carried dolls in their arms. Sometimes⁠—rarely⁠—they called to each other. Their voices were high and curiously unformed, like the voices of little children, and yet with a metallic note in them.

“Madge, looka! When we get to the end of Pawhuska we’ll race you to Coley’s Gulch and back.” These afternoon races became almost daily sporting events, and the young bloods of Osage got into the habit of stationing themselves along the road to bet on the pale pink plumes or the deep rose plumes.

“Heh, go it, Clemmie! Whip him up, Carmen. Give him the whip! Come on! Whoop‑ee! Yi!” Plumes whirling, parasols bobbing, skirts flying, shrill shouts and screams of laughter from the edge of town. But on the return drive their behavior was again seemly enough, their cheeks flushed with a natural color beneath the obvious red.

Sabra’s face darkened now as she saw them driving slowly by. Dixie Lee never drove with them. Sabra knew where she was this afternoon. She was down in the back room of the Osage First National Bank talking business to the President, Murch Rankin. The business men of the town were negotiating for the bringing of the packing house and a plough works and a watch factory to Osage. Any one of these industries required a substantial bonus. The spirit of the day was the boom spirit. Boom the town of Osage. Dixie Lee was essentially a commercial woman⁠—shrewd, clear headed. She had made a great success of her business. It was one of the crude town’s industries, and now she, as well as the banker, the hardware man, the proprietor of the furniture store, the meat market, the clothing store, contributed her share toward coaxing new industries to favor Osage. That way lay prosperity.

Dixie Lee was a personage in the town. Visitors came to her house now from the cities and counties round about. She had built for herself and her thriving business the first brick structure in the wooden town; a square, solid, and imposing two-story house, its bricks formed from the native Oklahoma red clay. Cal Bixby had followed close on it with the Bixby Block on Pawhuska Avenue, but Dixie Lee had led the way. She had commissioned Louie Hefner to buy her red velvet and gold furniture and her long gilt-framed mirrors, her scarlet deep-pile carpet⁠—that famous velvet-pile carpet in which Shanghai Wiley, that bearded, cultured, and magnetic barbarian, said he sank so deep that for a terrified moment he fell into a panic, being unable to tell which was red carpet and which his own flowing red beard. Dixie herself had gone East for her statues and pictures. The new house had been opened with a celebration the like of which had never been seen in the Southwest. Sabra Cravat, mentioning no names, had had an editorial about it in which the phrases “insult to the fair womanhood of America” and “orgy rivaling the Bacchanalian revels of history” (Yancey’s library stood her in good stead these days) figured prominently. Both the Philomathean Society and the Twentieth Century Culture Club had, for the duration of one meeting at least, deserted literature and culture for the discussion of the more vital topic of Dixie Lee’s new mansion.

It was⁠—this red brick brothel⁠—less sinister than these good and innocent women suspected. Dixie Lee, now a woman of thirty or more, ruled it with an iron hand. Within it obtained certain laws and rules of conduct so rigid as to be almost prim. In a crude, wild, and nearly lawless country the brick mansion occupied a strange place, filled a want foreign to its original purpose. It was, in a way, a club, a rendezvous, a salon. For hundreds of men who came there it was all they had ever known of richness, of color, of luxury. The red and gold, the plush and silk, the perfume, the draperies, the white arms, the gleaming shoulders sank deep into their hard-bitten senses, long starved from years on windswept ranches, plains dust bedeviled, prairies baked barren by the fierce Southwest sun. Here they lolled, sunk deep in rosy comfort, while they talked Territory politics, swapped yarns of the old cattle days, played cards, drank wines which tasted like sweet prickling water to their whisky-scarred palates. They kissed these women, embraced them fiercely, thought tenderly of many of them, and frequently married them; and these women, once married, settled down contentedly to an almost slavish domesticity.

A hard woman, Dixie Lee; a bad woman. Sabra was morally right in her attitude toward her. Yet this woman, as well as Sabra, filled her place in the early life of the Territory.

Now, as the laughter sounded nearer and the equipages came within her view, Sabra, seated at her desk in the newspaper office, put down the soft pencil with which she had been filling sheet after sheet of copy paper. She wrote easily now, with no pretense to style, but concisely and with an excellent sense of news values. The Oklahoma Wigwam had flourished in these last five years of her proprietorship. She was thinking seriously of making it a daily instead of a weekly; of using the entire building on Pawhuska Avenue for the newspaper plant and building a proper house for herself and the two children on one of the residence streets newly sprung up⁠—streets that boasted neatly painted houses and elm and cottonwood trees in the front yards.

Someone came up the steps of the little porch and into the office. It was Mrs. Wyatt. She often brought club notices and social items to the Wigwam: rather fancied herself as a writer; a born woman’s club corresponding secretary.

“Well!” she exclaimed now, simply, but managing to put enormous bite and significance into the monosyllable. Her glance followed Sabra’s. Together the two women, tight lipped, condemnatory, watched the gay parade of Dixie Lee’s girls go by.

The flashing company disappeared. A whiff of patchouli floated back to the two women standing by the open window. Their nostrils lifted in disdain. The sound of the horses’ hoofs grew fainter.

“It’s a disgrace to the community”⁠—Mrs. Wyatt’s voice took on its platform note⁠—“and an insult to every wife and mother in the Territory. There ought to be a law.”

Sabra turned away from the window. Her eyes sought the orderly rows of books, bound neatly in tan and red⁠—Yancey’s law books, so long unused now, except, perhaps, for occasional newspaper reference. Her face set itself in lines of resolve. “Perhaps there is.”

It had taken almost three of those five years to bring those lines into Sabra Cravat’s face. They were not, after all, lines. Her face was smooth, her skin still fresh in spite of dust and alkali water and sun and wind. It was, rather, that a certain hardening process had taken place⁠—a crystallization. Yancey had told her, tenderly, that she was a charming little fool, and she had believed it⁠—though perhaps with subconscious reservations. It was not until he left her, and the years rolled round without him, that she developed her powers. The sombrero had ridden gayly away. The head under the sunbonnet had held itself high in spite of hints, innuendoes, gossip.

A man like Yancey Cravat⁠—spectacular, dramatic, impulsive⁠—has a thousand critics, scores of bitter enemies. As the weeks had gone by and Yancey failed to return⁠—had failed to write⁠—rumor, clouded by scandal, leaped like prairie fire from house to house in Osage, from town to town in the Oklahoma Country, over the Southwest, indeed. All the old stories were revived, and their ugly red tongues licked a sordid path through the newly opened land.

They say he is living with the Cherokee squaw who is really his wife.

They say he was seen making the Run in the Kickapoo Land Opening in 1895.

They say he killed a man in the Cherokee Strip Run and was caught by a posse and hung.

They say he got a section of land, sold it at a high figure, and was seen lording it around the bar of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, in his white sombrero and his Prince Albert coat.

They say Dixie Lee is his real wife, and he left her when she was seventeen, came to Wichita, and married Sabra Venable; and he is the one who has set Dixie up in the brick house.

They say he drank five quarts of whisky one night and died and is buried in an unmarked grave in Horseshoe Ranch, where the Doolin gang held forth.

They say he is really the leader of the Doolin gang.

They say. They say. They say.

It is impossible to know how Sabra survived those first terrible weeks that lengthened into months that lengthened into years. There was in her the wiry endurance of the French Marcys; the pride of the Southern Venables. Curiously enough, in spite of all that had happened to her she still had that virginal look⁠—that chastity of lip, that clearness of the eye, that purity of brow. Men come back to the women who look as Sabra Cravat looked, but the tempests of men’s love pass them by.

She told herself that he was dead. She told the world that he was dead. She knew, by some deep and unerring instinct, that he was alive. Donna had been so young when he left that he now was all but wiped from her memory. But Cim, strangely enough, spoke of Yancey Cravat as though he were in the next room. “My father says⁠ ⁠…” Sometimes, when Sabra saw the boy coming toward her with that familiar swinging stride, his head held down and a little thrust forward, she was wrenched by a physical pang of agony that was almost nausea.

She ran the paper competently; wrung from it a decent livelihood for herself and the two children. When it had no longer been possible to keep secret from her parents the fact of Yancey’s prolonged absence, Felice Venable had descended upon her prepared to gather to the family bosom her deserted child and to bring her, together with her offspring, back to the parental home. Lewis Venable had been too frail and ill to accompany his wife, so Felice had brought with her the more imposing among the Venables, Goforths, and Vians who chanced to be visiting the Wichita house at the time of her departure. Osage had looked upon these stately figures with much awe, but Sabra’s reception of them had been as coolly cordial as her rejection of their plans for her future was firm.

“I intend to stay right here in Osage,” she announced, quietly, but in a tone that even Felice Venable recognized as inflexible, “and run the paper, and bring up my children as their father would have expected them to be brought up.”

“Their father!” Felice Venable repeated, in withering accents.

The boy Cimarron, curiously sensitive to sounds and moods, stood before his grandmother, his head thrust forward, his handsome eyes glowing. “My father is the most famous man in Oklahoma. The Indians call him Buffalo Head.”

Felice Venable pounced on this. “If that’s what you mean by bringing them up as their father⁠ ⁠…”

The meeting degenerated into one of those family bickerings. “I do wish, Mamma, that you wouldn’t repeat everything I say and twist it by your tone into something poisonous.”

“I say! I can’t help it if the things you say sound ridiculous when they are repeated. I simply mean⁠—”

“I don’t care what you mean. I mean to stay here in Osage until Yancey⁠—until⁠—” She never finished that sentence.

The Osage society notes became less simple. From bare accounts of quiltings, sewing bees, and church sociables they blossomed into flowery imitations of the metropolitan dailies’ descriptions of social events. Refreshments were termed elegant. Osage matrons turned from the sturdy baked beans, cole slaw, and veal loaf of an earlier day to express themselves in food terms culled from the pictures in the household magazines. They heard about fruit salads. They built angel-food cakes whose basis was the whites of thirteen eggs, and their husbands, at breakfast, said, “What makes these scrambled eggs so yellow?” Countrified costumes were described in terms of fashion. The wilted prairie flowers that graced weddings and parties were transformed into rare hothouse blooms by the magic touch of the Oklahoma Wigwam hand press. Sabra cannily published all the brilliant social news items that somewhat belatedly came her way via the ready-print and the paper’s scant outside news service.

“Newport. Oct. 4⁠—One of the most brilliant weddings which Newport has seen for many years was solemnized in old Trinity Church today. The principals were Miss Georgina Harwood and Mr. Harold Blake, both members of families within the charmed circle of the 400. The bride wore a gown of ivory satin with draperies and rufflings of rarest point lace, the lace veil being caught with a tiara of pearls and diamonds. After the ceremony a magnificent collation⁠ ⁠…”

The feminine population of Osage⁠—of the county⁠—felt that it had seen the ivory satin, the point lace, the tiara of pearls and diamonds, as these splendors moved down the aisle of old Trinity on the person of Miss Georgina Harwood of Newport. They derived from it the vicarious satisfaction that a dieting dyspeptic gets from reading the cook book.

Sabra was, without being fully aware of it, a power that shaped the social aspect of this crude Southwestern town. The Ladies of the new Happy Hour Club, on her declining to become a member, pleading lack of time and press of work (as well she might), made her an honorary member, resolved to have her influential name on their club roster, somehow. They were paying unconscious tribute to Oklahoma’s first feminist. She still ran the paper single handed, with the aid of Jesse Rickey, the most expert printer in the Southwest (when sober), and as good as the average when drunk.