“… rubber boots to parties, often, because when it rains we wade up to our ankles in mud. We carry lanterns when we go to the church sociables. … Mrs. Buckner’s sister came to visit her from St. Joseph, Missouri, and she remarked that she had noticed that the one pattern of table silver seemed to be such a favorite. She had seen it at all the little tea parties that had been given for her during her visit. Of course it was my set that had been the rounds. Everybody borrowed it. We borrow each other’s lamps, too, and china, and even linen.”
At this the Venables and Marcys and Vians and Goforths looked not only shocked but stricken. Chests of lavender-scented linen, sideboards flashing with stately silver, had always been part of the Venable and Marcy tradition.
Then the children. The visiting Venables insisted on calling Cim by his full name—Cimarron. Sabra had heard it so rarely since the day of his birth that she now realized, for the first time, how foolish she had been to yield to Yancey’s whim in the naming of the boy. Cimarron. Spanish: wild, or unruly. The boy had made such an obstreperous entrance into the world, and Yancey had shouted, in delight, “Look at him! See him kick with his feet and strike out with his fists! He’s a wild one. Heh, Cimarron! Peceno Gitano.”
Cousin Jouett Goforth or Cousin Dabney Venable said, pompously, “And now, Cimarron, my little man, tell us about the big red Indians. Did you ever fight Indians, eh, Cimarron?” The boy surveyed them from beneath his long lashes, his head lowered, looking for all the world like his father.
Cimarron was almost eight now. If it is possible for a boy of eight to be romantic in aspect, Cimarron Cravat was that. His head was not large, like Yancey’s, but long and fine, like Sabra’s—a Venable head. His eyes were Sabra’s, too, dark and large, but they had the ardent look of Yancey’s gray ones, and he had Yancey’s absurdly long and curling lashes, like a beautiful girl’s. His mannerisms—the head held down, the rare upward glance that cut you like a sword thrust when he turned it full on you—the swing of his walk, the way he gestured with his delicate hands—all these were Yancey in startling miniature.
His speech was strangely adult. This, perhaps, because of his close association with his elders in those first formative years in Osage. Yancey had delighted in talking to the boy; in taking him on rides and drives about the broad burning countryside. His skin was bronzed the color of his father’s. He looked like a little patrician Spaniard or perhaps (the Venables thought privately) part Indian. Then, too, there had been few children of his age in the town’s beginning. Sabra had been, at first, too suspicious of such as there were. He would, probably, have seemed a rather unpleasant and priggish little boy if his voice and manner had not been endowed miraculously with all the charm and magnetism that his father possessed in such disarming degree.
He now surveyed his middle-aged cousins with the concentrated and disconcerting gaze of the precocious child.
“Indians,” he answered, with great distinctness, “don’t fight white men any more. They can’t. Their—uh—spirit is broken.” Cousin Dabney Venable, who still affected black stocks (modified), now looked slightly apoplectic. “They only fought in the first place because the white men took their buff’loes away from them that they lived on and ate and traded the skins and that was all they had; and their land away from them.”
“Well,” exclaimed Cousin Jouett Goforth, of the Louisiana Goforths, “this is quite a little Redskin you have here, Cousin Sabra.”
“And,” continued Cimarron, warming to his subject, “look at the Osage Indians where my father took me to visit the reservation near where we live. The white people made them move out of Missouri to Kansas because they wanted their land, and from there to another place—I forget—and then they wanted that, too, and they said, ‘Look, you go and live in the Indian Territory where we tell you,’ and it’s all bare there, and nothing grows in that place—it’s called the Bad Lands—unless you work and slave and the Osages they were used to hunting and fishing not farming, so they are just starving to death and my father says some day they will get their revenge on the white—”
Felice Venable turned her flashing dark gaze on her daughter.
“Aha!” said Cousin Jouett Goforth.
Cousin Dabney Venable, still the disgruntled suitor, brought malicious eyes to bear on Sabra. “Well, well, Cousin Sabra! Look out that you don’t have a Pocahontas for a daughter-in-law some fine day.”
Sabra
