“Oh, Indians …” said Sabra. Her tone was that of one who speaks of prairie dogs, seven-year locusts, or any like Western nuisance.
“I know,” said Mother Bridget. “You can’t change them. Nobody knows better than I. I’ve had Indian girls here in the school for two years at a stretch. We’d teach them to wash themselves every day; they’d learn to sew, and embroider, and cook and read and write. They were taught worsted and coral work and drawing and even painting and vocal music. They learned the Gospel of the Son of God. They’d leave here as neat and pretty and well behaved as any girl you’d care to see. In two weeks I’d hear they’d gone back to the blanket. Say what you like, the full-blood Indian today is just about where he was before Joshua. Well—”
Sabra was a little bored by all this. She had not come out to the old Mission to hear about Indians. She had come to say farewell to Mother Bridget, and have a fuss made over her, and to be exclaimed over. Wasn’t she going to be a pioneer woman such as you read about in the books?
“I must be going, dear Mother Bridget. I just came out—there’s so much to do.” She was vaguely disappointed in the dramatics of this visit.
“I’ve something for you. Come along.” She led the way through the garden, across the sandstone flagging of the porch, into the dim cool mustiness of the Mission hall. She left Sabra there and went swiftly down the corridor. Sabra waited, grateful for this shady haven after the heat of the Kansas sun. She had known this hall, and the bare bright rooms that opened off it, all through her girlhood. The fragrance of pie crust, baking crisply, came to her nostrils: the shell, of course, that was to hold the succulent rhubarb. There was the sound of a heavy door opening, shutting, click, thud, somewhere down a turn in the corridor. She had never seen Mother Bridget’s room. No one had. Sabra wondered about it. The Sisters of Loretto owned nothing. It was a rule of the Order. The possessive pronoun, first person, was never used by them. Sabra recalled how Sister Innocenta had come running in one morning in great distress. “Our rosary!” she had cried. “I have lost our rosary!” The string of devotional beads she always wore at her waist had somehow slipped or broken and was missing. They kept nothing for themselves. Strange and sometimes beautiful things came into their hands and were immediately disposed of. Sabra had seen Mother Bridget part with queer objects. Once it had been a scalping knife with brown stains on it that looked like rust and were not; another time an Osage papoose board with its gay and intricately beaded pocket in which some Indian woman had carried her babies strapped to her tireless back. There had been a crewelwork motto done in bright-colored wool threads by the fingers of some hopeful New England émigrée of years ago. Its curlicue letters announced: “Music Hath Charms to Soothe the Savage Breast.” It had been found hanging on the wall just above the prim little parlor organ in the cabin of a settler whose young wife and children had been killed during a sudden uprising of Indians in his absence.
Suddenly, as she waited there in the peace of the old building, there swept over Sabra a great wave of nostalgia for the very scenes she was leaving. It was as though she already had put behind her these familiar things of her girlhood: the calico pony and the little yellow phaeton; the oblong of Kansas sunshine and sky and garden seen through the Mission doorway; the scents and sounds and security of the solid stone building itself. She was shaken by terror. Indian Territory! Indian—why, she couldn’t go there to live. To live forever, the rest of her life. Yancey Cravat, her husband, became suddenly remote, a stranger, terrible. She was Sabra Venable, Sabra Venable, here, safe from harm, in the Mission school. She wouldn’t go. Her mother was right.
A door at the end of the corridor opened. The huge figure of Mother Bridget appeared, filling the oblong, blotting out the sunlight. In her arms was a thick roll of cloth. “Here,” she said, and turned to let the light fall on it. It was a blanket or coverlet woven in a block pattern of white and a deep, brilliant blue. “It’s to keep you and little Cim warm, in the wagon, on the way to the Indian Territory. I wove it myself, on a hand loom. There’s no wear-out to it. The blue is Indian dye, and nothing can fade it. It’s a wild country you’ll be going to. But there’s something in the blue of this makes any room fit to live in, no matter how bare and ugly. If they ask you out there what it is, tell ’em a Kansas tapestry.”
She walked with Sabra to the phaeton and produced from a capacious pocket hidden in the folds of her habit a little scarlet June apple for the pony. Sabra kissed her on both plump cheeks quickly and stepped into the buggy, placing the blue and white blanket on the seat beside her. Her face was screwed up comically—the face of a little girl who is pretending not to be crying. “Goodbye,” she said, and was surprised to find that her voice was no more than a whisper. And at that, feeling very sorry for herself, she began to cry, openly, even as she matter-of-factly gathered up the reins in her strong young fingers.
Mother Bridget stepped close to the wheel. “It’ll be all right. There’s no such thing as a new country for the people who come to it. They bring along their own ways and their own bits of things and make it like
