“Ruby was just teaching me one of the Mescal Ceremony songs. Darned interesting. It’s the last song. They sing it at sunrise when they’re just about all in. Goes like this.”
To Sabra’s horror he began an eerie song as he stood there leaning against the kitchen wall, his eyes half closed.
“Stop it!” screamed Sabra. With the gesture of a tragedy queen she motioned him out of the kitchen. He obeyed with very bad grace, his going more annoying, in its manner, than his staying. Sabra followed him, silently. Suddenly she realized she hated his walk, and knew why. He walked with a queer little springing gait, on the very soles of his feet. It came over her that it always had annoyed her. She remembered that someone had laughingly told her what Pete Pitchlyn, the old Indian scout, lounging on his street corner, had said about young Cim:
“Every time I see that young Cimarron Cravat a-comin’ down the street I expect to hear a twig snap. Walks like a storybook Injun.”
In the privacy of the sitting room Sabra confronted her son, the bit of peyote still crushed in her hand.
“So you’ve come to this! I’m ashamed of you!”
“Come to what?”
She opened her hand to show the button of pulpy green crushed in her palm. “Peyote. A son of mine. I’d rather see you dead—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom, don’t get Biblical, like Dad. To hear you a person would think you’d found me drugged in a Chinese opium den.”
“I think I’d almost rather.”
“It’s nothing but a miserable little piece of cactus. And what was I doing but sitting in the kitchen listening to Ruby tell how her father—”
“I should think a man of almost eighteen could find something better to do than sit in a kitchen in the middle of the day talking to an Indian hired girl. Where’s your pride!”
Cim’s eyes were still cast down. He still lounged insolently, his hands in his pockets. “How about these stories you’ve told me all your life about the love you Southerners had for your servants and how old Angie was like a second mother to you?”
“Niggers are different. They know their place.”
He raised the heavy eyelids then and lifted his fine head with the menacing look that she knew so well in his father. “You’re right. They are different. In the first place, Ruby isn’t an Indian hired girl. She is the daughter of an Osage chief.”
“Osage fiddlesticks! What of it!”
“Ruby Big Elk is just as important a person in the Osage Nation as Alice Roosevelt is in Washington.”
“Now, listen here, Cimarron Cravat! I’ve heard about enough. A lot of dirty Indians! Just you march yourself down to the Wigwam office, young man, and don’t you ever again let me catch you talking in that disrespectful manner about the daughter of the President of the United States. And if I ever hear that you’ve eaten a bite of this miserable stuff”—she held out her hand, shaking a little, the mescal button crushed in her palm—“I’ll have your father thrash you within an inch of your life, big as you are. As it is, he shall hear of this.”
But Yancey, on being told, only looked thoughtful and a little sad. “It’s your own fault, Sabra. You’re bound that the boy shall live the life you’ve planned for him instead of the one he wants. So he’s trying to escape into a dream life. Like the Indians. It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you know, either.”
“The Indians started to eat peyote after the whites had taken their religious and spiritual and decent physical life away from them. They had owned the plains and the prairies for centuries. The whites took those. The whites killed off the buffalo, whose flesh had been the Indians’ food, and whose skins had been their shelter, and gave them bacon and tumbledown wooden houses in their place. The whites told them that the gods they had worshiped were commonplace things. The Sun was a dying planet—the Stars lumps of hot metal—the Rain a thing that could be regulated by tree planting—the Wind just a current of air that a man in Washington knew all about and whose travels he could prophesy by looking at a piece of machinery.”
“And they ought to be grateful for it. The government’s given them food and clothes and homes and land. They’re a shiftless good-for-nothing lot and won’t work. They won’t plant crops.”
“ ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ He has got to have dreams, or life is unendurable. So the Indian turned to the peyote. He finds peace and comfort and beauty in his dreams.”
A horrible suspicion darted through Sabra. “Yancey Cravat, have you ever—”
He nodded his magnificent head slowly, sadly. “Many times. Many times.”
XIX
Cim was nineteen, Donna fifteen. And now Sabra lived quite alone in the new house on Kihekah Street, except for a colored woman servant sent from Kansas. She ran the paper alone, as she wished it run. She ordered the house as she wished it. She very nearly ran the town of Osage. She was a power in the Territory. And Yancey was gone, Cim was gone, Donna was gone. Sabra had refused to compromise with life, and life had take matters out of her hands.
Donna was away at an Eastern finishing school—Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson. Yancey had opposed that, of course. It had been Sabra’s idea to send Donna east to school.
“East?” Yancey had said. “Kansas City?”
“Certainly not.”
“Oh—Chicago.”
“I mean New York.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I didn’t expect you to approve. I suppose you’d like her to go to an Indian school. Donna’s an unusual girl. She’s not a beauty and never will be, but she’s brilliant, that’s what she is. Brilliant. I
