Cimarron · Chapter 18 (2/3)

Sometimes he thought vaguely of going to Wichita or Kansas City or even Chicago to meet some nice Jewish girl there, but he never did. It never entered his head to marry a Gentile. The social life of the town was almost unknown to him. Sometimes if a big local organization⁠—the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Sons of the Southwest⁠—gave a benefit dance, you would glimpse him briefly, in the early part of the evening, standing shyly against the wall or leaning half hidden in the doorway, a darkling, remote, curiously Oriental figure in the midst of these robust red-faced plainsmen and ex-cowmen.

“Come on, Sol, mix in! Grab off one of the girls and get to dancin’, why don’t you? What you scairt of?” But Sol remained aloof. He regarded the hot, sweaty, shouting dancers with a kind of interested bewilderment and wonder, much as the dancers themselves sometimes watched the Indians during one of the Festival Dances on the outlying reservations. On occasion he made himself politely agreeable to a stout matron well past middle age. They looked up at his tragic dark eyes; they noticed his slim ivory hand as it passed them a plate of cake or a cup of coffee. “He’s real nice when you get to know him,” they said. “For a Jew, that is.”

Between him and Yancey there existed a deep sympathy and understanding. Yancey campaigned for Sol Levy in the mayoralty race⁠—if a thing so one-sided could be called a race. The Wigwam extolled him.

“Sol Levy, the genial proprietor of the Levy Mercantile Company, is the Wigwam’s candidate for mayor. It behooves the people of Osage to do honor to one of its pioneer citizens whose career, since its early days, has been marked by industry, prosperity, generosity. He comes of a race of dreamers and doers.⁠ ⁠…”

“Why, the very idea!” snorted the redoubtable virago, Mrs. Tracy Wyatt, whose husband was the opposing candidate. “A Jew for mayor of Osage! They’ll be having an Indian mayor next. Mr. Wyatt’s folks are real Americans. They helped settle Arkansas. And as for me, why, I can trace my ancestry right back to William Whipple, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

Sol Levy never had a chance for public honor. He, in fact, did practically nothing to further his own possible election. He seemed to regard the whole matter with a remoteness slightly tinged with ironic humor. Yancey dropped into Sol’s store to bring him this latest pronouncement of the bristling Mrs. Wyatt. Sol was busy in the back of the store, where he was helping the boy unpack a new invoice of china and lamps just received, for the Levy Mercantile Company had blossomed into a general store of parts. His head was in a barrel, and when he straightened and looked up at the towering Yancey there were bits of straw and excelsior clinging to his shirtsleeves and necktie and his black hair.

“Declaration of Independence!” he exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Tell her one of my ancestors wrote the Ten Commandments. Fella name of Moses.”

Yancey, roaring with laughter, used this in the Wigwam, and it naturally helped as much as anything to defeat the already defeated candidate.

Sometimes the slim, white-faced proprietor, with his friend Yancey Cravat, stood in the doorway of the store, watching the town go by. They said little. It was as though they were outsiders, looking on at a strange pageant.

“What the hell are you doing here in this town, anyway, Sol?” Yancey would say, as though musing aloud.

“And you?” Sol would retort. “A civilized barbarian.”

The town went by⁠—Indians, cowboys up from Texas, plainsmen, ranchers. They still squatted at the curb, as in the early days. They chewed tobacco and spat. The big sombrero persisted, and even the boots and spurs.

“Howdy, Yancey! Howdy, Sol! H’are you, Cim!”

There was talk of paving Pawhuska Avenue, but this did not come for years. The town actually boasted a waterworks. The Wigwam office still stood on Pawhuska, but it now occupied the entire house. Two years after Yancey’s return they had decided to build a home on Kihekah Street, where there actually were trees now almost ten years old.

Sabra had built the house as she wanted it, though at first there had been a spirited argument about this. Yancey’s idea had been, of course, ridiculous, fantastic. He said he wanted the house built in native style.

“Native! What in the world! A wickiup?”

“Well, a house in the old Southwest Indian style⁠—almost pueblo, I mean. Or Spanish, sort of, made of Oklahoma red clay⁠—plaster, maybe. Not brick. And low, with a patio where you can be out of doors and yet away from the sun. And where you can have privacy.”

Sabra made short work of that idea. Or perhaps Yancey did not persist. He withdrew his plan as suddenly as he had presented it; shrugged his great shoulders as though the house no longer interested him.

Osage built its new houses with an attached front porch gaping socially out into the street. It sat on the front porch in its shirtsleeves and kitchen apron. It called from porch to porch, “How’s your tomato plants doing? I see the Packses got out-of-town company visiting.” It didn’t in the least want privacy.

Sabra built a white frame house in the style of the day, with turrets, towers, minarets, cupolas, and scrollwork. There was a stained glass window in the hall, in purple and red and green and yellow, which, confronting the entering caller, gave him the look of being suddenly stricken with bubonic plague. There were parlor, sitting room, dining room, kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms on the second floor, and a bathroom, actually, with a full-size bathtub, a toilet, and a marble washstand with varicose veins. In the cellar there was a hot air furnace. In the parlor were brown brocade-and-velvet settee and stuffed chairs. In the sitting room was a lamp with a leaded glass shade in the shape of a strange and bloated flower⁠—a Burbankian monstrosity, half water lily, half petunia.

“As long as we’re building and furnishing,” Sabra said, “it might as well be the best.” She had gone about planning the house, and furnishing it, with her customary energy and capability. With it all she found time to do her work on the Wigwam⁠—for without her the paper would have been run to the ground in six months. Osage had long since ceased to consider it queer that she, a woman, and the wife of one of its most prominent citizens, should go to work every morning like a man.

By ten every morning she had attended to her household, seen it started for the day, had planned the meals, ordered them on her way downtown, and was at her desk in the Wigwam office, sorting mail, reading exchanges, taking ads, covering news, writing heads, pasting up. Yancey’s contributions were brilliant but spasmodic. The necessary departmental items⁠—real estate transfers, routine court news, out-of-town district and county gleanings⁠—bored him, though he knew well that they were necessary to the success of the paper. He left these to Sabra, among many other things.

Sabra, in common with the other well-to-do housewives of the community, employed an Indian girl as a house servant. There was no other kind of help available. After her hideous experience with Arita Red Feather she had been careful to get Indian girls older, more settled, though this was difficult. She preferred Osage girls. These married young, often before they had finished their studies at the Indian school.

Ruby Big Elk had been with Sabra now for three years. A curious, big, silent girl of about twenty-two⁠—almost handsome⁠—one of six children⁠—a large family for an Osage. Sabra was somewhat taken aback, after the girl had been with her for some months, to learn that she already had been twice married.

“What became of your husbands, Ruby?”

“Died.”

She had a manner that bordered on the insolent. Sabra put it down to Indian dignity. When she walked she scuffed her feet ever so little, and this, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to add insolence to her bearing. “Oh, do lift your feet, Ruby! Don’t scuffle when you walk.” The girl made no reply. Went on scuffling. Sabra discovered that she was lame; the left leg was slightly shorter than the right. She did not limp⁠—or, rather, hid the tendency to limp by the irritating sliding sound. Her walk was straight, leisurely, measured. Sabra was terribly embarrassed; apologized to the Indian girl. The girl only looked at her and said nothing. Sabra repressed a little shiver. She had never got accustomed to the Indians.

Sabra was a bustler and a driver. As she went about the house in the morning, performing a dozen household duties before leaving for the Wigwam office, her quick tapping step drummed like hail on a tin roof. It annoyed her intensely, always, to see Ruby Big Elk making up the beds with that regal manner, or moving about the kitchen with the pace and air of a Lady Macbeth. The girl’s broad, immobile face, her unspeaking eyes, her secret manner all worked a slow constant poison in Sabra. She spoke seldom; never smiled. When Sabra spoke to her about some household task she would regard her mistress with an unblinking gaze that was highly disconcerting.

“Did you understand about the grape jell, Ruby? To let it get thoroughly cool before you pour on the wax?”

Ruby would majestically incline her fine head, large, like a man’s head. The word “sinister” came into Sabra’s mind. Still, Sabra argued, she was good to the children, fed them well, never complained about the work. Sometimes⁠—on rare occasions⁠—she would dig a little pit in the back yard and build a slow hot smothered fire by some secret Indian process, and there, to the intense delight of young Cim, she would roast meats deliciously in the Indian fashion, crisp and sweet, skewered with little shafts of wood that she herself whittled down. Donna refused to touch the meat, as did Sabra. Donna shared her mother’s dislike of the Indians⁠—or perhaps she had early been impressed with her mother’s feeling about them. Sometimes Donna, the spoiled, the pampered, the imperious (every inch her grandmother Felice Venable), would feel Ruby Big Elk’s eye on her⁠—that expressionless, dead black Indian eye. Yet back of its deadness, its utter lack of expression, there still seemed to lurk a cold contempt.

“What are you staring at, Ruby?” Donna would cry, pettishly. Ruby would walk out of the room with her slow scuffling step, her body erect, her head regal, her eyes looking straight ahead. She said nothing. “Miserable squaw!” Donna would hiss under her breath. “Gives herself the airs of a princess because her greasy old father runs the tribe or something.”

Ruby’s father, Big Elk, had in fact been Chief of the Osage tribe by election for ten years, and though he no longer held this highest office, was a man much looked up to in the Osage Nation. He had sent his six children and actually his fat wife to the Indian school, but he himself steadfastly refused to speak a word of English, though he knew enough of the language. He conversed in Osage, and when necessary used an interpreter. It was a kind of stubborn Indian pride in him. It was his enduring challenge to the white man. “You have not defeated me.”

His pride did not, however, extend to more material things, and Sabra was frequently annoyed by the sight of the entire Big Elk family, the old ex-Chief, his squaw, and the five brothers and sisters, squatting in her kitchen doorway enjoying such juicy bits as Ruby saw fit to bestow upon them from the Cravat larder. When Sabra would have put a stop to this, Yancey intervened.

“He’s a wise old man. If he had a little white blood in him he’d be as great as Quanah Parker was, or Sequoyah. Everything he says is wisdom. I like to talk with him. Leave him alone.”

This did not serve to lessen Sabra’s irritation. Often she returned home to find Yancey squatting on the ground with old Big Elk, smoking and conversing in a mixture of Osage and English, for Big Elk did not refuse to understand the English language, even though he would not speak it. Yancey had some knowledge of Osage. Sabra, coming upon the two grunting and muttering and smoking and staring ahead into nothingness or (worse still) cracking some Indian joke and shaking with silent laughter, Indian fashion, was filled with fury. Nothing so maddened her.

It slowly dawned on Sabra that young Cim was always to be found lolling in the kitchen, talking to Ruby. Ruby, she discovered to her horror, was teaching Cim to speak Osage. A difficult language to the white, he seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She came upon them, their heads close together over the kitchen table, laughing and talking and singing. Rather, Ruby Big Elk was singing a song with a curious rhythm, and (to Sabra’s ear, at least) no melody. There was a pulsation of the girl’s voice on sustained notes such as is sometimes produced on a violin when the same note is sounded several times during a single bow stroke. Cim was trying to follow the strange gutturals, slurs, and accents, his eyes fixed on Ruby’s face, his own expression utterly absorbed, rapt.

“What are you doing? What is this?”

The Indian girl’s face took on its customary expression of proud disdain. She rose. “Teach um song,” she said; which was queer, for she spoke English perfectly.

“Well, I must say, Cimarron Cravat! When you know your father is expecting you down at the office⁠—” She stopped. Her quick eye had leaped to the table where lay the little round peyote disk or mescal button which is the hashish of the Indian.

She had heard about it; knew how prevalent among the Indian tribes from Nebraska down to Mexico had become the habit of eating this little buttonlike top of a Mexican cactus plant. In shape a disk about an inch and a half in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick, the mescal or peyote gave the eater a strange feeling of lightness, dispelled pain and fatigue, caused visions of marvelous beauty and grandeur. The use of it had become an Indian religious rite.

Like a fury Sabra advanced to the table, snatched up the little round button of soft green.

“Peyote!” She whirled on Cim. “What are you doing with this thing?”

Cim’s eyes were cast down sullenly. His hands in his pockets, he leaned against the wall, very limp, very bored, very infuriating and insolent.

“Ruby was just teaching me one of the Mescal Ceremony songs. Darned interesting. It’s the last song. They sing it at sunrise when they’re just about all in. Goes like this.”

To Sabra’s horror he began an eerie song as he stood there leaning against the kitchen wall, his eyes half closed.

“Stop it!” screamed Sabra. With the gesture of a tragedy queen she motioned him out of the kitchen. He obeyed with very bad grace, his going more annoying, in its manner, than his staying. Sabra followed him, silently. Suddenly she realized she hated his walk, and knew why. He walked with a queer little springing gait, on the very soles of his feet. It came over her that it always had annoyed her. She remembered that someone had laughingly told her what Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian scout, lounging on his street corner, had said about young Cim:

“Every time I see that young Cimarron Cravat a-comin’ down the street I expect to hear a twig snap. Walks like a storybook Injun.”

In the privacy of the sitting room Sabra confronted her son, the bit of peyote still crushed in her hand.

“So you’ve come to this! I’m ashamed of you!”

“Come to what?”

She opened her hand to show the button of pulpy green crushed in her palm. “Peyote. A son of mine. I’d rather see you dead⁠—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom, don’t get Biblical, like Dad. To hear you a person would think you’d found me drugged in a Chinese opium den.”

“I think I’d almost rather.”

“It’s nothing but a miserable little piece of cactus. And what was I doing but sitting in the kitchen listening to Ruby tell how her father⁠—”