Cimarron · Chapter 15 (2/3)

Sabra, serene in the knowledge that the attacked could do little to wreak vengeance on a woman, printed stories and statements which for boldness and downright effrontery would have earned a male editor a horsewhipping. She publicly scolded the street loafers who, in useless sombreros and six-shooters and boots and spurs, relics of a bygone day, lolled limply on Pawhuska Avenue corners, spitting tobacco juice into the gutter. Sometimes she borrowed Yancey’s vigorous and picturesque phraseology. She denounced a local politician as being too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse, and the phrase stuck, and in the end defeated him. Law, order, the sanctity of the home, prunes, prisms. Though the Gyp Hills and the Osage Hills still were as venomous with outlaws as the Plains were with rattlesnakes; though the six-shooter still was as ordinary a part of the Oklahoma male costume as boots or trousers; though outlawry still meant stealing a horse rather than killing a man; though the Territory itself had been settled and peopled, in thousands of cases, by men who had come to it, not in a spirit of adventure, but from cowardice, rapacity, or worse, Sabra Cravat and the other basically conventional women of the community were working unconsciously, yet with a quiet ferocity, toward that day when one of them would be able to say, standing in a doorway with a stiff little smile:

“Awfully nice of you to come.”

“Awfully nice of you to ask me,” the other would reply.

When that day came, Osage would no longer need to feel itself looked down upon by Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

Slowly, slowly, certain figures began to take on the proportions of personalities. No one had arisen in the Territory to fill Yancey Cravat’s romantic boots. Pat Leary was coming on as a Territory lawyer, with an office in the Bixby Block and the railroads on which he had worked as section hand now consulting him on points of Territorial law. In his early railroad days he had married an Osage girl named Crook Nose. People shook their heads over this and said that he regretted it now, and that a lawyer could never hope to get on with this marital millstone round his neck.

There still was very little actual money in the Territory. People traded this for that. Sabra often translated subscriptions to the Oklahoma Wigwam⁠—and even advertising space⁠—into terms of fresh vegetables, berries, wild turkey, quail, prairie chickens, dress lengths, and shoes and stockings for the children.

Sol Levy’s store, grown to respectable proportions now, provided Sabra with countless necessities in return for the advertisement which, sent through the country via the Oklahoma Wigwam, urged its readers to Trade at Sol Levy’s. Visit the Only Zoo in the Territory. This invitation, a trifle bewildering to the uninitiated, was meant to be taken literally. In the back of his store Sol Levy kept a sizable menagerie. It had started through one of those chance encounters. A gaunt and bearded plainsman had come into the store one day with the suggestion that the proprietor trade a pair of pants for a bear cub. The idea had amused Sol Levy; then he had glanced out into the glare of Pawhuska Avenue and had seen the man’s ocherous wife, his litter of spindling children, huddled together in a crazy wagon attached by what appeared to be ropes, strings, and bits of nail and wire, to horses so cadaverous that his amusement was changed to pity. He gave the man the pants, stockings for the children, and⁠—the sentimentalist in him⁠—a piece of bright-colored cotton stuff for the woman.

The bear cub, little larger than a puppy, had been led gingerly into the welter of packing cases, straw, excelsior, and broken china which was the Levy Mercantile Company’s back yard, and there tied with a piece of rope which he immediately bit in two. Five minutes later a local housewife, deep in the purchase of a dress length of gingham, and feeling something rubbing against her stout calves, looked down to see the bear cub sociably gnawing his way through her basket of provisions, carelessly placed on the floor by her side.

One week later the grateful ranger brought in a pair of catamounts. A crude wire cage was built. There were added coyotes, prairie dogs, an eagle. The zoo became famous, and all the town came to see it. It brought trade to the Mercantile Company, and free advertising. It was the nucleus for the zoo which, fifteen years later, Sol Levy shyly presented to the Osage City Park, and which contained every wild thing that the Southwest had known, from the buffalo to the rattlesnake.

In a quiet, dreamy way Sol Levy had managed to buy a surprising amount of Osage real estate by now. He owned the lot on which his store stood, the one just south of it, and, among other pieces, the building and lot which comprised the site of the Wigwam and the Cravat house. In the year following Yancey’s departure Sabra’s economic survival was made possible only through the almost shamefaced generosity of this quiet, sad-eyed man.

“I’ve got it all down in my books,” Sabra would say, proudly. “You know that it will all be paid back some day.”

He began in the Oklahoma Wigwam a campaign of advertising out of all proportions to his needs, and Sabra’s debt to him began to shrink to the vanishing point. She got into the habit of talking to him about her business problems, and he advised her shrewdly. When she was utterly discouraged, he would say, not triumphantly, but as one who states an irrefutable and not particularly happy fact:

“Some day, Mrs. Cravat, you and I will look back on this and we will laugh⁠—but not very loud.”

“How do you mean⁠—laugh?”

The little curious cast came into his eyes. “Oh⁠—I will be very rich, and you will be very famous. And Yancey⁠—”

“Yancey!” The word was wrenched from her like a cry.

“They will tell stories about Yancey until he will grow into a legend. He will be part of the history of the Southwest. They will remember him and write about him when all these mealy-faced governors are dead and gone and forgotten. They will tell the little children about him, and they will dispute about him⁠—he did this, he did that; he was like this, he was like that. You will see.”

Sabra thought of her own children, who knew so little of their father. Donna, a thin secretive child of almost seven now, with dark, straight black hair and a sallow skin like Yancey’s; Cim, almost thirteen, moody, charming, imaginative. Donna was more like her grandmother Felice Venable than her own mother; Cim resembled Yancey so strongly in mood, manner, and emotions as to have almost no trace of Sabra. She wondered, with a pang, if she had failed to impress herself on them because of her absorption in the town, in the newspaper, in the resolve to succeed. She got out a photograph of Yancey that she had hidden away because to see it was to feel a stab of pain, and had it framed, and hung it on the wall where the children could see it daily. He was shown in the familiar costume⁠—the Prince Albert, the white sombrero, the six-shooters, the boots, the spurs, the long black locks curling beneath the hat brim, the hypnotic eyes startling you with their arresting gaze, so that it was as if he were examining you rather than that you were seeing his likeness in a photograph. One slim foot, in its high-heeled boot, was slightly advanced, the coat tails flared, the whole picture was somehow endowed with a sense of life and motion.

“Your father⁠—” Sabra would begin, courageously, resolved to make him live again in the minds of the children. Donna was not especially interested. Cim said, “I know it,” and capped her story with a tale of his own in which Yancey’s feat of derring-do outrivaled any swashbuckling escapade of D’Artagnan.

“Oh, but Cim, that’s not true! You mustn’t believe stories like that about your father.”

“It is true. Isaiah told me. I guess he ought to know.” And then the question she dreaded. “When are Isaiah and Father coming back?”

She could answer, somehow, evasively, about Yancey, for her instinct concerning him was sure and strong. But at the fate that had overtaken the Negro boy she cowered, afraid even to face the thought of it. For the thing that had happened to the black boy was so dreadful, so remorseless that when the truth of it came to Sabra she felt all this little world of propriety, of middle-class Middle West convention that she had built up about her turning to ashes under the sudden flaring fire of hidden savagery. She tried never to think of it, but sometimes, at night, the hideous thing took possession of her, and she was swept by such horror that she crouched there under the bedclothes, clammy and shivering with the sweat of utter fear. Her hatred of the Indians now amounted to an obsession.

It was in the fourth year of Yancey’s absence that, coming suddenly and silently into the kitchen from the newspaper office, where she had been busy as usual, she saw Arita Red Feather twisted in a contortion in front of the table where she had been at work. Her face was grotesque, was wet, with agony. It was the agony which only one kind of pain can bring to a woman’s face. The Indian girl was in the pangs of childbirth. Even as she saw her Sabra realized that something about her had vaguely disturbed her in the past few weeks. Yet she had not known, had not dreamed of this. The loose garment which the girl always wore⁠—her strong natural slenderness⁠—the erect dignity of her Indian carriage⁠—the stoicism of her race⁠—had served to keep secret her condition. She had had, too, Sabra now realized in a flash, a way of being out of the room when her mistress was in it; busy in the pantry when Sabra was in the kitchen; busy in the kitchen when Sabra was in the dining room; in and out like a dark, swift shadow.

“Arita! Here. Come. Lie down. I’ll send for your father⁠—your mother.” Her father was Big Knee, well known and something of a power in the Osage tribe. Of the tribal officers he was one of the eight members of the Council and as such was part of the tribe’s governing body.

Dreadful as the look on Arita Red Feather’s face had been, it was now contorted almost beyond recognition. “No! No!” She broke into a storm of pleading in her own tongue. Her eyes were black pools of agony. Sabra had never thought that one of pure Indian blood would thus give way to any emotion before a white person.

She put the girl to bed. She sent Isaiah for Dr. Valliant, who luckily was in town and sober. He went to work quietly, efficiently, aided by Sabra, making the best of such crude and hasty necessities as came to hand. The girl made no outcry. Her eyes were a dull, dead black; her face was rigid. Sabra, passing from the kitchen to the girl’s bedroom with hot water, cloths, blankets, saw Isaiah crouched in a corner by the wood box. He looked up at her mutely. His face was a curious ash gray. As Sabra looked at him she knew.

The child was a boy. His hair was coarse and kinky. His nose was wide. His lips were thick. He was a Negro child. Doc Valliant looked at him as Sabra held the writhing red-purple bundle in her arms.

“This is a bad business.”

“I’ll send for her parents. I’ll speak to Isaiah. They can marry.”

“Marry! Don’t you know?”

Something in his voice startled her. “What?”

“The Osages don’t marry Negroes. It’s forbidden.”

“Why, lots of them have. You see Negroes who are Indians every day. On the street.”

“Not Osages. Seminoles, yes. And Creeks, and Choctaws, and even Chickasaws. But the Osages, except for intermarriage with whites, have kept the tribe pure.”

This information seemed to Sabra to be unimportant and slightly silly. Purity of the tribe, indeed! Osages! She resolved to be matter of fact and sensible now that the shocking event was at hand, waiting to be dealt with. She herself felt guilty, for this thing had happened in her own house. She should have foreseen danger and avoided it. Isaiah had been a faithful black child in her mind, whereas he was, in reality, a man grown.

Dr. Valliant had finished his work. The girl lay on the bed, her dull black eyes fixed on them; silent, watchful, hopeless. Isaiah crouched in the kitchen. The child lay now in Sabra’s arms. Donna and Cim were, fortunately, asleep, for it was now long past midnight. The tense excitement past, the whole affair seemed to Sabra sordid, dreadful. What would the town say? What would the members of the Philomathean Club and the Twentieth Century Culture Club think?

Doc Valliant came over to her and looked down at the queer shriveled morsel in her arms. “We must let his father see him.”

Sabra shrank. “Oh, no!”

He took the baby from her and turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll do it. Let me have a drink of whisky, will you, Sabra? I’m dead tired.”

She went past him into the dining room, without a glance at the Negro boy cowering in the kitchen. Doc Valliant followed her. As she poured a drink of Yancey’s store of whisky, almost untouched since he had left, she heard Valliant’s voice, very gentle, and then the sound of Isaiah’s blubbering. All the primness in her was outraged. Her firm mouth took on a still straighter line. Valliant took the child back to the Indian girl’s bed and placed it by her side. He stumbled with weariness as he entered the dining room where Sabra stood at the table. As he reached for the drink Sabra saw that his hand shook a little as Yancey’s used to do in that same gesture. She must not think of that. She must not think of that.

“There’s no use talking now, Doctor, about what the Osages do or don’t do that you say is so pure. The baby’s born. I shall send for the old man⁠—what’s his name?⁠—Big Knee. As soon as Arita can be moved he must take her home. As for Isaiah, I’ve a notion to send him back to Kansas, as I wanted to do years ago, only he begged so to stay, and Yancey let him. And now this.”

Doc Valliant had swallowed the whisky at a gulp⁠—had thrown it down his throat as one takes medicine to relieve pain. He poured another glass. His face was tired and drawn. It was late. His nerves were not what they had been, what with drink, overwork, and countless nights without sleep as he rode the country on his black horse, his handsome figure grown a little soft and sagging now. But he still was a dashing sight when he sat the saddle in his black corduroys and his soft-brimmed black hat.

He swallowed his second drink. His face seemed less drawn, his hand steadier, his whole bearing more alert. “Now listen, Sabra. You don’t understand. You don’t understand the Osages. This is serious.”

Sabra interrupted quickly. “Don’t think I’m hard. I’m not condemning her altogether, or Isaiah, either. I’m partly to blame. I should have seen. But I am so busy. Anyway, I can’t have her here now, can I? With Isaiah. Even you⁠ ⁠…”

He filled his glass. She wished he would stop drinking; go home. She would sit up the night with the Indian girl. And in the morning⁠—well, she must get someone in to help. They would know, sooner or later.

He was repeating rather listlessly what he had said. “The Osages have kept the tribe absolutely free of Negro blood. This is a bad business.”

Her patience was at an end. “What of it? And how do you know? How do you know?”

“Because they remove any member of the tribe that has had to do with a Negro.”

“Remove!”

“Kill. By torture.”

She stared at him. He was drunk, of course. “You’re talking nonsense,” she said crisply. She was very angry.

“Don’t let this get around. They might blame you. The Osages. They might⁠—I’ll just go and take another look at her.”

The girl was sleeping. Sabra felt a pang of pity as she gazed down at her. “Go to bed⁠—off with you,” said Doc Valliant to Isaiah. The boy’s face was wet, pulpy with tears and sweat and fright. He walked slackly, as though exhausted.