Cimarron · Chapter 18 (1/3)

XVIII

It was as though Osage and the whole Oklahoma country now stopped and took a deep breath. Well it might. Just ahead of it, all unknown, waited years of such clangor and strife as would make the past years seem uneventful in comparison. Ever since the day of the Run, more than fifteen years ago, it had been racing helter-skelter, devil take the hindmost; shooting into the air, prancing and yelping out of sheer vitality and cussedness. A rough roof over its head; coarse food on its table; a horse to ride; a burning drink to toss down its throat; border justice; gyp water; a girl to hug; mud roads to the edge of the sunbaked prairie, and thereafter no road; grab what you need; fight for what you want⁠—the men who had come to the wilderness of the Oklahoma country had expected no more than this; and this they had got. A man’s country it seemed to be, ruled by men for men. The women allowed them to think so. The word feminism was unknown to the Sabra Cravats, the Mrs. Wyatts, the Mrs. Hefners, the Mesdames Turket and Folsom and Sipes. Prim, good women and courageous, banded together by their goodness and by their common resolve to tame the wilderness. Their power was the more tremendous because they did not know they had it. They never once said, during those fifteen years, “We women will do this. We women will change that.” Quietly, indomitably, relentlessly, without even a furtive glance of understanding exchanged between them, but secure in their common knowledge of the sentimental American male, they went ahead with their plans.

The Philomathean Club. The Twentieth Century Culture Club. The Eastern Star. The Daughters of Rebekah. The Venus Lodge.

“Ha-ha!” and “Ho-ho!” roared their menfolk. “What do you girls do at these meetings of yours? Swap cooking receipts and dress patterns?”

“Oh, yes. And we talk.”

“I bet you do. Say, you don’t have to tell any man that. Talk! Time about ten of you women folks start gabblin’ together I bet you get the whole Territory settled⁠—politics, Injuns, land fights, and all.”

“Just about.”

Yancey had come home from the Spanish-American War a hero. Other men from Osage had been in the Philippines. One had even died there (dysentery and ptomaine from bad tinned beef). But Yancey was the town’s Rough Rider. He had charged up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt. Osage, knowing Yancey and never having seen Roosevelt, assumed that Yancey Cravat⁠—the Southwest Cimarron⁠—had led the way, an ivory- and silver-mounted six-shooter in either hand, the great buffalo head lowered with such menace that the little brown men had fled to their jungles in terror.

His return had been the occasion for such a celebration as the town had never known and never would know again, they assured each other, between drinks, until the day when statehood should come to the Territory. He returned a captain, unwounded, but thin and yellow, with the livery look that confirmed the stories one had heard of putrid food, typhoid, dysentery, and mosquitoes more deadly, in this semitropical country, than bullets or cannon.

Poisoned and enfeebled though he was, his return seemed to energize the crude little town. Wherever he might be he lived in a swirl of events that drew into its eddy all that came within its radius. Hi, Yancey! Hi, Clint! He shed the khaki and the cocked hat and actually appeared again in the familiar white sombrero, Prince Albert, and high-heeled boots. Osage breathed a sigh of satisfaction. His dereliction was forgiven, the rumors about him forgotten⁠—or allowed to subside, at least. Again the editorial columns of the Oklahoma Wigwam blazed with hyperbole.

It was hard for Sabra to take second place (or to appear to take second place) in the office of the Wigwam. She had so long ruled there alone. Her word had been law to the wavering Jesse Rickey and to the worshiping Cliff Means. And now to say, “You’d better ask Mr. Cravat.”

“He says leave it to you. He’s went out.”

Yancey did a good deal of going out. Sabra, after all, still did most of the work of the paper without having the satisfaction of dictating its policy. A linotype machine, that talented iron monster, now chattered and chittered and clanked in the composing room of the Wigwam. It was the first of its kind in the Oklahoma country. Very costly and uncannily human, Sabra never quite got over her fear of it. The long arm reached down with such leisurely assurance, snatched its handful of metal, carried it over, descended, dropped it. It opened its capacious maw to be fed bars of silvery lead which it spat forth again in the shape of neat cakes of type. Its keys were like grinning teeth. It grunted, shivered, clumped, spoke⁠—or nearly.

“I never come near it,” Sabra once admitted, “that I don’t expect the thing to reach down with its iron arm and clap me on the shoulder and clatter, ‘Hello, Sabra!’ ”

She was proud of the linotype machine, for it had been her five years at the head of the Wigwam that had made it possible. It was she who had gone out after job printing contracts; who had educated the local merchants to the value of advertising. Certainly Yancey, prancing and prating, had never given a thought to these substantial foundations on which the entire business success of the paper rested. They now got out with ease the daily Wigwam for the Osage townspeople and the weekly for county subscribers. Passing the windows of the Wigwam office on Pawhuska Avenue you could hear the thump and rattle of the iron monster. Between them Jesse Rickey and Cliff Means ran the linotype. Often they labored far into the night on job work, and the late passerby would see the little light burning in the printing shop and hear the rattle and thump of the machine. In a pinch Sabra herself could run it. Yancey never went near it, and, strangely enough, young Cim had a horror of it, as he had of most things mechanical. After one attempt at the keyboard, during which he had hopelessly jammed the machine’s delicate insides, he was forbidden ever to go near it again. For that matter, Cim had little enough taste for the newspaper business. He pied type at the case rack. He had no news sense. He had neither his father’s gift for mingling with people and winning their confidence nor his mother’s more orderly materialistic mind. He had much of Yancey Cravat’s charm, and something of the vagueness of his grandfather, old Lewis Venable (dead these two years), but combining the worst features of both.

“Stop dreaming!” Sabra said to him, often and often. “What are you dreaming about?”

She had grown to love the atmosphere of the newspaper office and resented the boy’s indifference to it. She loved the very smell of it⁠—the mixed odor of hot metal, printer’s ink, dust, white paper, acid, corncob pipe, and cats.

“Stop dreaming!” Yancey hearing her thus admonishing Cim, whirled on her in one of his rare moments of utter rage. “God a’mighty, Sabra! That’s what Ann Hathaway said to Shakespeare. Don’t you women know that ‘Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming’? Leave the boy alone! Let him dream! Let him dream!”

“One starry dreamer in a family is enough,” Sabra retorted, tartly.

Five years had gone by⁠—six years since Yancey’s return. Yet, strangely enough, Sabra never had a feeling of security. She never forgot what he had said about Wichita. “Almost five years in one place. That’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey.” Five years. And this was well into the sixth. He had plunged head first into the statehood fight, into the Indian Territory situation. The anti-Indian faction was bitterly opposed to the plan for combining the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory under the single state of Oklahoma. Their slogan was “The White Man’s State for the White Man.”

“Who brought the Indian here to the Oklahoma country in the first place?” shouted Yancey in the editorial columns of the Wigwam. “White men. They hounded them from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which they now live in squalor and misery. It isn’t fit for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now. Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the country that has taken their country away from them. Give them at least the right to become citizens of the state of Oklahoma.”

He was obsessed by it. He traveled to Washington in the hope of lobbying for it, and made quite a stir in that formal capital with his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his Texas star boots, his great buffalo head, his charm, his grace, his manner. Roosevelt was characteristically cordial to his old campaign comrade. Washington ladies were captivated by the flowery speeches of this romantic, this storybook swaggerer out of the Southwest.

It was rumored on good authority that he was to be appointed the next Governor of the Oklahoma Territory.

“Oh, Yancey,” Sabra said, “do be careful. Governor of the Territory! It would mean so much. It would help Cim in the future. Donna, too. Their father a governor.” She thought, “Perhaps everything will be all right now. Perhaps all that I’ve gone through in the last ten years will be worth it, now. Perhaps it was for this. He’ll settle down.⁠ ⁠… Mamma can’t say now⁠ ⁠… and all the Venables and the Vians and the Goforths and the Greenwoods.⁠ ⁠…” She had had to endure their pity, even from a distance, all these years.

The rumor took on substance. My husband, Yancey Cravat, Governor of the Territory of Oklahoma. And then, when statehood came, as it must in the next few years, perhaps Governor of the state of Oklahoma. Why not!

At which point Yancey blasted any possibility of his appointment to the governorship by hurling a red-hot editorial into the columns of the Wigwam. The gist of it was that the hundreds of thousands of Indians now living on reservations throughout the United States should be allowed to live where they pleased, at liberty. The whites of the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory, with an Indian population of about one hundred and twenty thousand of various tribes⁠—Poncas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Osages, Kiowas, Comanches, Kaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and a score of others⁠—read, emitted a roar of rage, and brandishing the paper ran screaming into the streets, cursing the name of Yancey Cravat.

Sabra had caught the editorial in the wet proof sheet. Her eye leaped down its lines.

“Herded like sheep in a corral⁠—no, like wild animals in a cage⁠—they are left to rot on their reservations by a government that has taken first their land, then their self-respect, then their liberty from them. The land of the free! When the very people who first dwelt on it are prisoners! Slaves, but slaves deprived of the solace of work. What hope have they, what ambition, what object in living! Their spirit is broken. Their pride is gone. Slothful, yes. Why not? Each month he receives his dole, his pittance. Look at the Osage Nation, now dwindled to a wretched two thousand souls. The men are still handsome, strong, vital; the women beautiful, dignified, often intelligent. Yet there they huddle in their miserable shanties like beaten animals eating the food that is thrown them by a great⁠—a munificent⁠—government. The government of these United States! Let them be free. Let the Red Man live a free man as the White Man lives.⁠ ⁠…”

Much that he wrote was true, perhaps. Yet the plight of the Indian was not as pitiable as Yancey painted it. He cast over them the glamour of his own romantic nature. The truth was that they themselves cared little⁠—except a few of their tribal leaders, more intelligent than the rest. They hunted a little, fished, slept, visited from tribe to tribe, the Poncas visiting the Osages, the Osages the Poncas, gossiping, eating, holding powwows. The men were great poker players, having learned the game from the white man, and spent hours at it.

They passed through the town of Osage in their brilliant striped blankets, sometimes walking, sometimes on sorry nags, sometimes in rickety wagons laden with pots, poles, rags, papooses, hounds. The townspeople hastily removed such articles as might please the pilfering fancy.

Sabra picked up the proof sheet, still damp from the press, and walked into Yancey’s office. Her face was white, set.

“You’re going to run this, Yancey?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll never be Governor of the Territory.”

“Never.”

She stood a moment, her face working. She crushed the galley proof in her hand so that her knuckles stood out, white.

“I’ve forgiven you many, many things, God knows, in the last ten years. I’ll never forgive you for this. Never.”

“Yes, you will, honey. Never is a long time. Not while I’m alive, maybe. But some day, a long time from now⁠—though not so very long, maybe⁠—you’ll be able to turn back to the old files of the Oklahoma Wigwam and lift this editorial of mine right out of it, word for word, and run it as your own.”

“Never.⁠ ⁠… Donna⁠ ⁠… Cim⁠ ⁠…”

“I can’t live my children’s lives for them, Sabra, honey. They’ve got to live their own. I believe what I believe. This town is rotten⁠—the Territory⁠—the whole country. Rotten.”

“You’re a fine one to say what is or isn’t rotten. You with your whisky and your Indians and your women. I despise you. So does everyone in the town⁠—in the Territory.”

“ ‘A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own home.’ ” A trifle sonorously.

She never really knew whether he had done this thing with the very purpose of making his governorship impossible. It was like him.

Curiously enough, the editorial, while it maddened the white population of the Territory, gained the paper many readers. The Wigwam prospered. Osage blossomed. The town was still rough, crude, wide open, even dangerous. But it began to take on an aspect of permanence. It was no longer a camp; it was a town. It began to build schools, churches, halls. Arkansas Grat’s gambling tent had long ago been replaced by a solid wooden structure, just as gambling terms of the West and the Southwest had slowly been incorporated into the language of daily use. I’m keeping cases on him⁠ ⁠… standing pat⁠ ⁠… bluffing⁠ ⁠… bucking the tiger. Terms filched from the gaming table; poker and faro and keno.

Sol Levy’s store⁠—the Levy Mercantile Company⁠—had two waxen ladies in the window, their features only slightly affected by the burning Southwest sun. Yancey boomed Sol Levy for mayor of Osage, but he never had a chance. It was remarkable how the Oklahoma Wigwam persisted, though its position in most public questions was violently unpopular. Perhaps it, like Yancey, had a vitality and a charm that no one could withstand.

Although Sol Levy was still the town Jew, respected, prosperous, the town had never quite absorbed this Oriental. A citizen of years’ standing, he still was a stranger. He mingled little with his fellow townsmen outside business hours. He lived lonesomely at the Bixby House and ate the notoriously bad meals served by Mrs. Bixby. He was shy of the town women though the Women of the Town found him kindly, passionate, and generous. The business men liked him. They put him on committees. Occasionally Sabra or some other woman who knew him well enough would say, half playfully, half seriously, “Why don’t you get married, Sol? A nice fellow like you. You’d make some girl happy.”