V
By noon next day they were wondering how they had got on at all without him. He gathered wood. He started fires. He tended Cim like a nurse, played with him, sang to him, helped put him to bed, slept anywhere, like a little dog. He even helped Sabra to drive her team, change and change about, for after all there was little to it but the holding of the reins slackly in one’s fingers while the horses plodded across the prairie, mile on mile, mile on mile.
Yancey pointed out the definiteness with which the land changed when they left Kansas and came into the Oklahoma country. “Oklahoma,” he explained to Cim. “That’s Choctaw. Okla—people. Humma—red. Red People. That’s what they called it when the Indians came here to live.”
Suddenly the land, too, had become red: red clay as far as the eye could see. The rivers and little creeks were sanguine with it, and at sunset the sky seemed to reflect it, so that sometimes Sabra’s eyes burned with all this scarlet. When the trail led through a cleft in a hill the blood red of the clay on either side was like a gaping wound. Sabra shrank from it. She longed for the green of Kansas. The Oklahoma sky was not blue but steel color, and all through the day it was a brazen sheet of glittering tin over their heads. Its glare seared the eyeballs.
It was a hard trip for the child. He was by turns unruly and listless. He could not run about, except when they stopped to make camp. Sabra, curiously enough, had not the gift of amusing him as Yancey had, or even Isaiah. Isaiah told him tales that were Negro folklore, handed down by word of mouth through the years. Like the songs he sang, these were primitive accounts of the sorrows and the tribulations of a wronged people and their inevitable reward in after life.
“An’ de angel say to him, he say, ‘Mose, come on up on dis’ya throne an’ eat ’case yo’ hongry, an’ drink ’case yo’ parch, and res’ yo’ weary an’ achin’ feet …’ ”
But when he rode with his father he heard thrilling tales. If it was just before his bedtime, after their early supper had been eaten, Yancey invariably began his story with the magic words, “It was on just such a night as this …”
There would follow a legend of buried treasure. Spanish conquistadores wandered weary miles over plains and prairie and desert, led, perhaps, by the false golden promises of some captured Indian eager to get back to the home of his own tribe far away. As in all newly settled countries, there were here hundreds of such tales. The sparsely settled land was full of them. The poorer the class the more glittering the treasure. These people, wresting a meager living from the barren plains, consoled themselves with tales of buried Spanish gold; of jewels. No hairy squatter or nester in his log cabin with his pony parchment-skinned wife and litter of bare-legged brats but had some tale of long-sought treasure. Cim heard dozens of these tales as they dragged their way across the red clay of Oklahoma, as they forded rivers, passed little patches of blackjack or cottonwood. He was full of them. They became as real to him as the rivers and trees themselves.
During the day Yancey told him stories of the Indians. He taught him the names of the Five Civilized Tribes, and Cim remembered the difficult Indian words and repeated them—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw. He heard the Indian story, not in terms of raids, scalpings, tomahawk, and tom-tom, but as the saga of a tricked and wronged people. Yancey Cravat needed only a listener. That that listener was four, and quite incapable of comprehending the significance of what he heard, made no difference to Cravat. He told the boy the terrific story of the Trail of Tears—of the Cherokee Nation, a simple and unnomadic people, driven from their homes in Georgia, like cattle across hundreds of miles of plain and prairie to die by the thousands before they reached the Oklahoma land that had been allotted to them, with two thousand troops under General Winfield Scott to urge on their flagging footsteps.
“Why did they make the Indians go away?”
“They wanted the land for themselves.”
“Why?”
“It had marble, and gold and silver and iron and lead, and great forests. So they took all this away from them and drove them out. They promised them things and then broke their promise.”
Sabra was horrified at Cim’s secondhand recital of this saga. He told her all about it as he later sat on the seat beside her. “Uncle Sam is a mean bad man. He took all the farms and the gold and the silver and the buff’loes away from the Indians and made them go away and they didn’t want to go and so they went and they died.”
He knew more about David Payne than about Columbus. He was more familiar with Quanah Parker, the Comanche, with Elias Boudinot and General Stand Waitie, his brother, both full-blooded Cherokees, than he was with the names of Lincoln and Washington.
Sabra, in her turn, undertook to wipe this impression from the boy’s mind. “Indians are bad people. They take little boys from their mammas and never bring them back. They burn down people’s houses, and hurt them. They’re dirty and lazy, and they steal.”
She was unprepared for the hysterical burst of protest that greeted this. The boy grew white with rage. “They’re not. You’re a liar. I hate you. I won’t ride with you.”
He actually prepared to climb down over the wagon wheel. She clutched at him with one hand, shook him smartly, cuffed him. He kicked her. She stopped the team, wound the reins, took him over her knee and spanked him soundly. He announced, through his tears, that he was going to run away and join
