The neighborhood wives showered the Cravat household with the customary cakes, pies, meat loaves, and bowls of broth. Black Isaiah was touching, was wonderful. He washed dishes, he mopped floors, he actually cooked as though he had inherited the art from Angie, his vast black mother, left behind in Wichita. One of Sabra’s gingham kitchen aprons, checked blue and white, was always hitched up under his arms, and beneath this utilitarian yet coquettish garment his great bare feet slapped in and out as he did the work of the household. He was utterly fascinated by the new baby. “Looka dat! She know me! Hi, who yo’ rollin’ yo’ eyes at, makin’ faces!” He danced for her, he sang Negro songs to her, he rocked her to sleep. He was, as Donna grew older, her nursemaid, pushing her baby buggy up and down the dusty street, and later still her playmate as well as Cim’s.
When Sabra Cravat arose from that bed something in her had crystallized. Perhaps it was that, for the first time in a year, she had had hours in which to rest her tired limbs; perhaps the ordeal itself worked a psychic as well as a physical change in her; it might have been that she realized she must cut a new pattern in this Oklahoma life of theirs. The boy Cim might surmount it; the girl Donna never. During the hours through which she had lain in her bed in the stifling wooden shack, mists seemed to have rolled away from before her eyes. She saw clearly. She felt light and terribly capable—so much so that she made the mistake of getting up, dizzily donning slippers and wrapper, and tottering into the newspaper office where Yancey was writing an editorial and shouting choice passages of it into the inattentive ear of Jesse Rickey, who was setting type in the printing shop.
“… the most stupendous farce ever conceived by the mind of man in a civilized country. …”
He looked up to see in the doorway a wraith, all eyes and long black braids. “Why, sugar! What’s this? You can’t get up!”
She smiled rather feebly. “I’m up. I felt so light, so—”
“I should think you would. All that physic.”
“I feel so strong. I’m going to do so many things. You’ll see. I’m going to paper the whole house. Rosebuds in the bedroom. I’m going to plant two trees in the front. I’m going to start another club—not like the Philomathean—I think that’s silly now—but one to make this town … no saloons … women like that Dixie Lee … going to have a real hired girl as soon as the newspaper begins to … feel so queer … Yancey …”
As she began to topple, Yancey caught the Osage Joan of Arc in his arms.
Incredibly enough, she actually did paper the entire house, aided by Isaiah and Jesse Rickey. Isaiah’s ebony countenance splashed with the white paste mixture made a bizarre effect, a trifle startling to anyone coming upon the scene unawares. Also Jesse Rickey’s inebriate eye, which so often resulted in many grotesque pied print lines appearing in unexpected and inconvenient places in the Oklahoma Wigwam columns, was none too dependable in the matching of rosebud patterns. The result, in spots, was Burbankian, with roses grafted on leaves and tendrils emerging from petals. Still, the effect was gay, even luxurious. The Philomathean Club, as one woman, fell upon wallpaper and paste pot, as they had upon the covered jars in Sabra’s earlier effort at decoration. Within a month Louie Hefner was compelled to install a full line of wallpaper to satisfy the local demand.
Slowly, slowly, the life of the community, in the beginning so wild, so unrelated in its parts, began to weave in and out, warp and woof, to make a pattern. It was at first faint, almost undiscernible. But presently the eye could trace here a motif, there a figure, here a motif, there a figure. The shuttle swept back, forward, back, forward.
“It’s almost time for the Jew,” Sabra would say, looking up from her sewing. “I need some number forty sewing-machine needles.”
And then perhaps next day, or the day after, Cim, playing in the yard, would see a familiar figure, bent almost double, gnomelike and grotesque, against the western sky. It was Sol Levy, the peddler, the Alsatian Jew. Cim would come running into the house, Donna, perhaps, trotting at his heels. “Mom, here comes the Jew!”
Sabra would fold up her work, brush the threads from her apron; or if her hands were in the dough she would hastily mold and crimp her pie crust so as to be ready for his visit.
Sol Levy had come over an immigrant in the noisome bowels of some dreadful ship. His hair was blue-black and very thick, and his face was white in spite of the burning Southwest sun. A black stubble of beard intensified this pallor. He had delicate blue-veined hands and narrow arched feet. His face was delicate, too, and narrow, and his eyes slanted ever so little at the outer corners, so that he had the faintly Oriental look sometimes seen in the student type of his race. He belonged in crowded places, in populous places, in the color and glow and swift drama of the bazaars. God knows how he had found his way to this vast wilderness. Perhaps in Chicago, or in Kansas City, or Omaha he had heard of this new country and the rush of thousands for its land. And he had bummed his way on foot. He had started to peddle with an oilcloth-covered pack on his back. Through the little hot Western towns in summer. Through the bitter cold Western towns in winter. They turned the dogs on him. The children cried, “Jew! Jew!” He was only a boy,
