Cimarron

seen the oxen haul the native yellow limestone of which the building was made; she had known the fear of the scalping knife; with her own big, capable, curiously masculine hands she had planted the first young fruit trees, the vegetable and flower garden that now flourished in the encircling osage hedge; she had superintended the building of the great hedge itself, made of the tough yet supple wood that the exploring pioneer French had called bois d’arc, because in the early days the Indians had fashioned their bows of it. Then Kansans had corrupted the word until now the wood was known as “bodark.” The Mission had been an Indian school then, with a constantly fluctuating attendance. One day there would be forty pairs of curiously dead black Indian eyes intent on a primer of reading, writing, or arithmetic; the next there would none. The tribe had gone on a visit to a neighboring friendly tribe. Bucks and squaws, ponies and dogs and children, they were off on society bent, the Osages visiting the Kaws, or the Kaws the Quapaws. At other times their absence might mean something more sinister⁠—an uprising in the brewing, or an attack on an enemy tribe. Mother Bridget had terrible tales to tell. She could even make grim jokes about those early days. “Hair-raising times they were,” she would tell you (it was her pet pun), “in more ways than one, as many a poor white settler could prove to you who’d had the scalp lifted off him by the knife.” She had taught the Indian girls to sew, to exchange wigwams for cabins, and to wear sunbonnets and to speak about their souls and their earthly troubles as well to a Great Father named God who was much more powerful than the Sun and the Rain and the Wind to whom they attributed such potency. These things they did with gratifying docility for weeks at a time, or even months, after which it was discovered that they buried their dead under the cabins, removing enough of the puncheon floor to enable them to dig a grave, laying the timbers back neatly, and then deserting the cabins to live outdoors again, going back to the blanket at the same time and holding elaborate placating ceremonies to various gods of the elements. Mother Bridget (Sister Bridget then, red cheeked in her wimple, her beads clicking a stubborn race against the treachery of the savages) and the other Sisters of Loretto had it all to do over again from the start.

All this was past now. The Indians were herded on reservations in the Indian Territory. Mother Bridget and her helpers taught embroidery and music and kindred ladylike accomplishments to the bonneted and gloved young ladies of Wichita’s gentry. The osage hedge now shielded prim and docile misses where once it had tried to confine the wild things of the prairie. The wild things seemed tame enough now, herded together on their reservations, spirit broken, pride destroyed.

Sabra had her calico pony hitched to the phaeton (a matron now, it was no longer seemly to ride him as she used to, up and down the rutted prairie roads, her black hair in a long thick braid switching to the speed of the hard-bitten hoofs). Mother Bridget was in the Mission vegetable garden, superintending the cutting of great rosy stalks of late pie plant. The skirt of her habit was hitched up informally above her list shoes, muddied by the soft loam of the garden.

“Indian Territory! What does your ma say?”

“She’s wild.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Oh, yes, yes!” Then added hastily: “Of course, I hate to leave Mamma and Papa. But the Bible says, ‘Whither thou⁠—’ ”

“I know what the Bible says,” interrupted the old nun shrewdly. “Why does he want to go⁠—Cravat?”

Sabra glowed with pride. “Yancey says it’s a chance to build an empire out of the last frontier in America. He says its lawmakers can profit by the mistakes of the other states, so that when the Indian Territory becomes a state some day it will know wherein the other states have failed, and knowing⁠—us⁠—avoid the pitfalls⁠—”

“Stuff!” interrupted Mother Bridget. “He’s going for the adventure of it. They always have, no matter what excuse they’ve given, from the Holy Grail to the California gold fields. The difference in America is that the women have always gone along. When you read the history of France you’re peeking through a bedroom keyhole. The history of England is a joust. The womenfolks were always Elaineish and anemic, seems. When Ladye Guinevere had pinned a bow of ribbon to her knight’s sleeve, why, her job was done for the day. He could ride off to be killed while she stayed home and stitched at a tapestry. But here in this land, Sabra, my girl, the women, they’ve been the real hewers of wood and drawers of water. You’ll want to remember that.”

“But that’s what Yancey said. Exactly.”

“Did he now!” She stood up and released the full folds of her skirt from the waist cord that had served to loop it away from the moist earth. She lifted her voice in an order to the figure that stooped over the pieplant bed. “Enough, Sister Norah, enough. Tell Sister Agnes plenty of sugar and not like the last pie, fit to pucker your mouth.” She turned back to Sabra. “When do you start? How do you go?”

“Next Monday. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit, the other with the household goods and bedding. Yancey will have it that we’ve got to take along bedsprings for me, right out of our bed here and laid flat in the wagon.”

Mother Bridget seemed not to hear. She looked out across the garden to where prairie met sky. Her eyes, behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, saw a pageant that Sabra had never known. “So. It’s come to that. They’ve opened it to the whites after all⁠—the land that was to belong to the Indians forever. ‘As long