My Ántonia — Book 1

Book I

THE SHIMERDAS

I

I first heard of Ántonia^[1] on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

​We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a “Life of Jesse James,” which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from “across the water” whose destination was the same as ours.

“They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is ‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.’ She’s not ​much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!”

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to “Jesse James.” Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with lanterns. I couldn’t see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood ​huddied together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother’s skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

​Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: “Hello, are you Mr. Burden’s folks? If you are, it’s me you’re looking for. I’m Otto Fuchs. I’m Mr. Burden’s hired man, and I’m to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy, ain’t you scared to come so far west?”

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have stepped out of the pages of “Jesse James.” He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and ​as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian’s. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was ​a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

II

I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s farm sometime before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.

“Had a good sleep, Jimmy?” she asked briskly. Then in a very different tone she said, as if to herself, “My, how you do look like your father!” I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. “Here are your clean clothes,” she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. “But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath ​behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s nobody about.”

“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curious; it was always “out in the kitchen” at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed—the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help.

“Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.”

​It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, “Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!” Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed I explored the long cellar ​next the kitchen. It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work.

While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat—he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors there.

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one ​immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.

​The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a “perfect gentleman,” and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his “chaps” and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design—roses, and true-lover’s knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word “Selah.” “He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.” I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. ​But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk—until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived in sod houses and dugouts—comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the ​sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from ​the house, and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping . . .

Alone, I should never have found the garden—except, perhaps, for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines—and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk straight on ​through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sun-bonnet. “Aren’t you afraid of snakes?”

“A little,” I admitted, “but I’d like to stay anyhow.”

“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything to do with him. The big yellow and brown ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and help to keep the gophers down. Don’t be scared if you see anything look out of that ​hole in the bank over there. That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big ‘possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it ​singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

III

On Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday’s bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield.

I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew; some of them were as big as little trees, with ​great rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in time to his bites as he ate down toward them.

The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. He had brought his fiddle with him, which wouldn’t be of much ​use here, though he used to pick up money by it at home.

“If they’re nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in that cave of Krajiek’s,” said grandmother. “It’s no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he’s made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain’t worth ten.”

“Yes’m,” said Otto; “and he’s sold ’em his oxen and his two bony old horses for the price of good work-teams. I’d have interfered about the horses—the old man can understand some German—if I’d ‘a’ thought it would do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians.”

Grandmother looked interested. “Now, why is that, Otto?”

Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. “Well, ma’m, it’s politics. It would take me a long while to explain.”

The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas’ place and made the land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the ​stream, and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.

As we approached the Shimerdas’ dwelling, I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook grandmother’s hand energetically.

​“Very glad, very glad!” she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, “House no good, house no good!”

Grandmother nodded consolingly. “You’ll get fixed up comfortable after while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house.”

My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, “Much good, much thank!”—and again she wrung grandmother’s hand.

The oldest son, Ambrož,—they called it Ambrosch,—came out of the cave and stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother’s, but more sly and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.

The little girl was pretty, but Án-tonia— ​they accented the name thus, strongly, when they spoke to her—was still prettier. I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck’s foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, “Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!” like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly, “Marek!” then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

“She wants me to tell you he won’t hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make ​good farmer.” He struck Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.

At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother’s hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something from which all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up ​the steep drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.

When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed toward them, and Ántonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop until the ground itself stopped—fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls skirts were blown out before them. Ántonia seemed to like it; she held her little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.

“Name? What name?” she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, “What name?”

We sat down and made a nest in the ​long red grass. Yulka curled up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Ántonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like “ice.” She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “blue; blue sky.”

She clapped her hands and murmured, “Blue sky, blue eyes,” as if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Ántonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I didn’t ​want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was how they behaved.

While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling, “Án-tonia, Án-tonia!” She sprang up like a hare. “Tatinek, Tatinek!” she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Ántonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds. I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother’s hands, looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Án-tonia!”

IV

On the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony, under Otto’s direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod school-house, I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass up lands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship ​God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk’s nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of ​detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown, earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs. Ántonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that some of the holes must go down to water—nearly two hundred feet, hereabouts. Ántonia said she did n’t believe it; that the dogs probably ​
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like
the rabbits.

Antonia had opinions about everything, and
she was soon able to make them known. Almost every day she came running across the
prairie to have her reading lesson with me.
Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was
Important that one member of the family
should learn English. When the lesson was
over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch
behind the garden. I split the melons with an
old corn-knife, and we lifted out the hearts and
ate them with the juice trickling through our
fingers. The white Christmas melons we did
not touch, but we watched them with curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the
hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter
use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas
were famished for fruit. The two girls would
wander for miles along the edge of the corn
fields, hunting for ground-cherries.

Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about cooking and house keeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good house wife in her own country, but she managed ​
poorly under new conditions: the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

V

WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two
girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.

I remember Ántonia’s excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: “My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody
laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very
nice!”

I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in
that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a
little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country—farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all
the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were
the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,
so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to
people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could
understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they
avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he
had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations
and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this
supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great
frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn
tight over his high cheek-bones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always
had a cough.

Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,
bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met
people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well
as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair
and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the
sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was
usually called “Curly Peter,” or “Rooshian Peter.”

The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter
always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor
homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to
church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a
low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked
apologetically under the seat.

After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost
every evening, and sometimes took Ántonia with him. She said they came
from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from
Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for
me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.

The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass
well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch,
and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We
found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub. He was working
so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down
as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head
and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of
perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us
down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He
told Ántonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any
man could have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for
Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream
with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks
and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it
in a new place.

After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up
the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere
helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men
who were “batching.” Besides the kitchen, there was a living-room, with a
wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham
sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window,
where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That
day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and
beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in
the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies
and sunshine alike.

Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over
them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them,
they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us
knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with
juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one—better than medicine; in his
country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable
and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Ántonia, he sighed and told us
that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have
had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said
he had left his country because of a “great trouble.”

When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that
would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily
painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart
began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very
doleful, and he sang words to some of them.

Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Ántonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.

VI

ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all
about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of
some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead—all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a
little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the
buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennæ
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.
Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and
indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us—a thin, rusty
little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her
village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs
and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked
voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see
her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.

When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf
of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on
quickly when the sun got low, and Ántonia’s dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false
pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put
the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over
her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and
then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the
magical light of the late afternoon.

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As
far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in
sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day.
The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw
long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire
and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of
triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and
gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under
that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or
followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and
nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the
upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet
along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.

“My papa sick all the time,” Tony panted as we flew. “He not look good,
Jim.”

As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered
about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her
cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from
the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and
showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Ántonia with a wintry
flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.

“My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for win-ter!”
she exclaimed joyfully. “Meat for eat, skin for hat,”—she told off these
benefits on her fingers.

Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted
it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata.
He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood
looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he
listened as if it were a beautiful sound.

I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,
short and heavy, with a stag’s head on the cock. When he saw me examining
it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if
I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and
Ántonia translated:—

“My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine, from
Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got
here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his
wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you.”

[Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over his shoulder]

I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even
the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected
substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while
the feeble minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on with its scratchy
chirp. The old man’s smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of
pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it. As the sun sank there
came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.
Ántonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket
and raced my shadow home.

VII

MUCH as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of
the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more
like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Ántonia starting off on
foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been
another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as
wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled—hundreds of
miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling,
burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get
warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,
heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,
Ántonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of
the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were
horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get
some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the
town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an
orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude
down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would
be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on
their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they
barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the
mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the
town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.
If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into
the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors
united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which
much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I
heard Ántonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and
shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of
those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was
sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when
Ántonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter “W.” He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big
snake, I thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones could n’t crush the disgusting vitality
out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I did n’t run
because I did n’t think of it—if my back had been against a stone wall I
could n’t have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten—now he would
spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head
with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Ántonia,
barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly
head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back
on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. Ántonia came
after me, crying, “O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why you not run
when I say?”

“What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!” I said petulantly.

“I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared.” She took my handkerchief
from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away
from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.

“I never know you was so brave, Jim,” she went on comfortingly. “You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for
him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show
everybody. Nobody ain’t seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you
kill.”

She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for
this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly
in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.

“Look, Tony, that’s his poison,” I said.

I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to
taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained
to Ántonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must
have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over—would n’t let us come near
him.

We decided that Ántonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony’s sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her
exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big
and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that
no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.

The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward
the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the edge
of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Ántonia called him
to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but
scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.

“Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?”

“Up at the dog-town,” I answered laconically.

“Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?”

“We’d been up to Russian Peter’s, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.”

Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. “It was just luck you had a tool,” he said cautiously. “Gosh! I
would n’t want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother’s snake-cane would n’t more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?”

Ántonia broke in: “He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy’s boots.
I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was
crazy.”

Otto winked at me. After Ántonia rode on he said: “Got him in the head
first crack, did n’t you? That was just as well.”

We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I
found Ántonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with
a great deal of color.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it,
a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world does n’t owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for
many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the
snake was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and
admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake—I was now a big fellow.

VIII

WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles
to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a
mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was
Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could
give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew
that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty—that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew
faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with
mortgages.

Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow-workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill
indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the
log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The
Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to
put them out of mind.

One afternoon Ántonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just
as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,
and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch
them. When Ántonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated
grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I
would sleep in the Shimerdas’ barn and run home in the morning. My plan
must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about
humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,
and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches
and doughnuts for us.

Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Ántonia and I sat in the
straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a
cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in
the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of
the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept
sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would
never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew
magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the
world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his
land, too, some such belief.

The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that
we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided
us—the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.

We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I
sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in
front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the
thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept
moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then
swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore
down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me
think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying
desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in
one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up
with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together—to tell us
that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed,—a long
complaining cry,—as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some
old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor
by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap—then the
high whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.

“He is scared of the wolves,” Ántonia whispered to me. “In his country
there are very many, and they eat men and women.” We slid closer together
along the bench.

I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging
open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell
horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the
tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of
spirits went through the room.

Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and
slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted
some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous,
unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so
simple and docile.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper.
He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia took my hand under
the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to
hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his
bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.

“It’s wolves, Jimmy,” Ántonia whispered. “It’s awful, what he says!”

The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who
had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could
hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which
fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to
his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots—I thought I had
never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to
the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for
breath, like a child with croup. Ántonia’s father uncovered one of his
long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see
what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out
like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That
sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.

Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over.
Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got
up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home.
Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under
the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.

On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and
rattling Ántonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did
not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days
afterward.

When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were
asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another
village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom’s party went over to
the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom’s sledge, and
six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.

After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the
parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a
supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and
drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and
blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his
sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and
Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove.
The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom’s
sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for
merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.

The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too
much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and
echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together.
There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove
came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like
streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were
hundreds of them.

Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,—he was
probably very drunk,—the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a
clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow,
and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed
made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The
groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest—all the others carried
from six to a dozen people.

Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible
to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the
wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who
were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.
The little bride hid her face on the groom’s shoulder and sobbed. Pavel
sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the
groom’s three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm
and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked
back. “There are only three sledges left,” he whispered.

“And the wolves?” Pavel asked.

“Enough! Enough for all of us.”

Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down
the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a
whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father’s sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as
if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even
then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the
heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness
hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom’s movement had given
Pavel an idea.

They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left
out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel’s middle horse was
failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;
Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the
horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in
the harness, and overturned the sledge.

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone
upon the familiar road. “They still come?” he asked Peter.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Twenty, thirty—enough.”

Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave
Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He
called to the groom that they must lighten—and pointed to the bride. The
young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away.
In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the
sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly
how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front
seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound
that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it
before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early
prayers.

Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever
since. They were run out of their village. Pavel’s own mother would not
look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned
where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who
had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed
them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.
They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always
unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.

Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and
was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left
the country—went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of
Russians were employed.

At his sale we bought Peter’s wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During
the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes.
He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held
mortgages on Peter’s live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes
at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow
before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but
this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans
had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and
bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons
that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping
beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.

The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.
When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit
there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows
penned him in his cave. For Ántonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but
guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that
night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a
painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often
found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country
that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.

IX

THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff
willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.

Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the
Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like
strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.

As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in
a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the
old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job
if I had n’t hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the
next day I went over to take Yulka and Ántonia for a sleigh-ride.

It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box,
and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the
Shimerdas’ I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the
bottom of the draw and called. Ántonia and Yulka came running out, wearing
little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard
about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in
beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to
be broken.

The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white
stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the whole world
was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.
The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft
between snow-drifts—very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops
that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they
would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were
so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind
had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if
some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same
time delighted one. My horse’s breath rose like steam, and whenever we
stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their
color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the
sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual
impression of the stinging lash in the wind.

The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering
beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were
so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother’s scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter’s house. The great
fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like
wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go
home again. Could n’t we settle down and live in Russian Peter’s house,
Yulka asked, and could n’t I go to town and buy things for us to keep
house with?

All the way to Russian Peter’s we were extravagantly happy, but when we
turned back,—it must have been about four o’clock,—the east wind grew
stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky
became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it
around Yulka’s throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head
under the buffalo robe. Ántonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins
clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It
was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with
them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a
fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home
directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of
quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks.

The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days—like a
tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day,
husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down
over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think
they were like Arctic explorers.

In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making
husking-gloves, I read “The Swiss Family Robinson” aloud to her, and I
felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an
adventurous life. I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the
cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about
keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when
she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was
not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, “very little to
do with.” On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on
other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or
cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,
striped with currants and boiled in a bag.

Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most
interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth
and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands
cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously:
feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs.
When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of
their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather
read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the
stove, “easing” their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their
cracked hands.

Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to
sing, “For I Am a Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong,” or, “Bury Me Not on
the Lone Prairee.” He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing
when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.

I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto’s close-clipped
head and Jake’s shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see
the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good
fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept
faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name
with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him
behave like a crazy man—tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. If he, as
he said, “forgot himself” and swore before grandmother, he went about
depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the
cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and
to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare
themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do
anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.

On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed
us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling
down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys
of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies,
wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be
persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.
I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was
working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with
her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:—

When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his
relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join
her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it
was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he
“got on fine with the kids,” and liked the mother, though she played a
sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but
three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he
was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him,
the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who
made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and
often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken
ashore at New York, he had, as he said, “to carry some of them.” The trip
to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very
difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The
mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could
feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture
factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was
rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in
some fashion to blame. “I was sure glad,” Otto concluded, “that he did n’t
take his hard feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for
me, all right! Now, did you ever hear of a young feller’s having such hard
luck, Mrs. Burden?”

Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to
his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he did n’t
realize that he was being protected by Providence.

X

FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the
Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold
which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to
have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr.
Shimerda out hunting.

“He’s made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that
he buttons on outside his coat. They ain’t got but one overcoat among ’em
over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of
cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.”

“All but the crazy boy,” Jake put in. “He never wears the coat. Krajiek
says he’s turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be
getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield
yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he’d shot.
He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on,
to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter’n me and put ’em back
in his sack and walked off.”

Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. “Josiah, you
don’t suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do
you?”

“You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline,” he
replied gravely.

Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and
ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.
I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat
family.

When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake
packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.

“Now, Jake,” grandmother was saying, “if you can find that old rooster
that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him
along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n’t have got hens
from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she
was confused and did n’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new
country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no
matter what you don’t have.”

“Just as you say, mam,” said Jake, “but I hate to think of Krajiek getting
a leg of that old rooster.” He tramped out through the long cellar and
dropped the heavy door behind him.

After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and
climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas’ we
heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Ántonia, her head tied up and
her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the
pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over
her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the
hole in the bank.

Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the
provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy
path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came from
the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind
whisked them roughly away.

Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother’s
hand. She did not say “How do!” as usual, but at once began to cry,
talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were
tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at every one.

The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if
he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her
kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at
her mother, hid again. Ántonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark
corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack
stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the
crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it
was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a
feeble yellow glimmer.

Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and
made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been
frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively
vindictive.

Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the
hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda’s reproaches. Then the
poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid
her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed
to her, but called Ántonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left
her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.

“You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad,” she whispered,
as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things grandmother
handed her.

The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of
potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.

“Have n’t you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Ántonia? This is no
place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?”

“We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,—what he throw out. We got no
potatoes, Mrs. Burden,” Tony admitted mournfully.

When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the
door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from
behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as
if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and
neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother’s arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room.
In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger
than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one
of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw.
The old man held the lantern. “Yulka,” he said in a low, despairing voice,
“Yulka; my Ántonia!”

Grandmother drew back. “You mean they sleep in there,—your girls?” He
bowed his head.

Tony slipped under his arm. “It is very cold on the floor, and this is
warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there,” she insisted eagerly.
“My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?” She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built against
the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.

Grandmother sighed. “Sure enough, where would you sleep, dear! I don’t
doubt you’re warm there. You’ll have a better house after while, Ántonia,
and then you’ll forget these hard times.”

Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his
wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on
Ántonia’s shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated.
He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he
made good wages, and his family were respected there. He left Bohemia with
more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was
paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway
fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid
Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm
machinery, they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know,
however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until
spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden, and
would then do very well. Ambrosch and Ántonia were both old enough to work
in the fields, and they were willing to work. But the snow and the bitter
weather had disheartened them all.

Ántonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in
the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the
logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been
felled.

While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor
with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us
and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his
queer noises for me—to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,—but he did
not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be
agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up
for his deficiencies.

Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,
and, while Ántonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own
account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and
brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and
half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy
began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the
contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent,
even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied
it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.

“For cook,” she announced. “Little now; be very much when cook,” spreading
out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon.
“Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my
country.”

“Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda,” grandmother said drily. “I can’t say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself.”

[Illustration: Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms in a Bohemian forest]

Ántonia undertook to explain. “This very good, Mrs. Burden,”—she clasped
her hands as if she could not express how good,—”it make very much when
you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in
the gravy,—oh, so good!”

All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good
Christian people could forget they were their brothers’ keepers.

“I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where’s a body to begin, with these people? They’re wanting in everything,
and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give ’em that, I guess. Jimmy,
here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon
that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?”

“He’s a worker, all right, mam, and he’s got some ketch-on about him; but
he’s a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and
then, ag’in, they can be too mean.”

That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package
Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked
like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the
most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor. We
could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.

“They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain’t dried
fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I’m afraid of ’em. Anyhow, I
should n’t want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old
clothes and goose pillows.”

She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the
chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the
strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little
brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so
jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some
deep Bohemian forest. . . .

XI

DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of
our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas shopping.
But on the 21st of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the
windmill—its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial like a shadow. The
snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The
cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men could
not go farther than the barns and corral. They sat about the house most of
the day as if it were Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their
suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.

On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced at breakfast that it
would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases. Jake was
sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things in
saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated, and
a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over. Anyway, he would
never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.

We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had
wanted to get some picture-books for Yulka and Ántonia; even Yulka was
able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut
squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound
it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room
table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those
good old family magazines which used to publish colored lithographs of
popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
“Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine” for my frontispiece. On the
white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and advertising cards which I
had brought from my “old country.” Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and
made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and
baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar
and red cinnamon drops.

On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the
Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather’s gray gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung
to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was
planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from
the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west
hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a
coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he
was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my
father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten
how much I liked them.

By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner
of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all
gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table,
looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five
feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals,
strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into
pasteboard sockets. Its real splendors, however, came from the most
unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never seen
anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker’s
wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly
colored paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand
alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in
Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously appareled, and the ox and the ass and the
shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels,
singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the
three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends
and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it
reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under
it for a snow-field, and Jake’s pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.

I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the
lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face
seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar
that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As
I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner
behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had
only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of
those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!

XII

ON Christmas morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just
coming in from their morning chores—the horses and pigs always had their
breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted “Merry Christmas”! to me,
and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat. Morning
prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from St. Matthew
about the birth of Christ, and as we listened it all seemed like something
that had happened lately, and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the
Lord for the first Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the world
ever since. He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the
poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder
than it was here with us. Grandfather’s prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he
talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull
from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the
time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and
his views about things.

After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how pleased the
Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was friendly and
went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft gray
day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky, and occasional
squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on
holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played
dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother. He always
wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he was, and no
matter how long it had been since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in
the dining-room. He would write for a while, then sit idle, his clenched
fist lying on the table, his eyes following the pattern of the oilcloth.
He spoke and wrote his own language so seldom that it came to him
awkwardly. His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.

At about four o’clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He had
come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother’s kindness to
his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we sat about the
stove, enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon and the
atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather’s house. This feeling
seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the
crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace
and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he
had left so far behind. He sat still and passive, his head resting against
the back of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His
face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when
they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass
of Virginia apple-brandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint
flush came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a
shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled
rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter content.

[Illustration: Jake bringing home a Christmas tree]

As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before
the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow
flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of
meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and
quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body
formed a letter “S.” I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.
He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and
hurt people’s feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree
before, but now, with some one kneeling before it,—images, candles, . . .
Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable
head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.

We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little
urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to
look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his
deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into
the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.

At nine o’clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his
overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern
and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took
grandmother’s hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly,
“Good wo-man!” He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and
went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather
looked at me searchingly. “The prayers of all good people are good,” he
said quietly.

XIII

THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year’s Day all
the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.

One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Ántonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about
examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting
upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen
she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said:
“You got many, Shimerdas no got.” I thought it weak-minded of grandmother
to give the pot to her.

After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: “You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better.”

She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Ántonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.

“My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don’t like this kawn-tree.”

“People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home,” I said
severely. “We don’t make them come here.”

“He not want to come, nev-er!” she burst out. “My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: ‘America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls.’ My papa, he cry for leave his old
friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the
long horn like this”—she indicated a slide trombone. “They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle.”

“Your mama,” I said angrily, “wants other people’s things.”

“Your grandfather is rich,” she retorted fiercely. “Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here.”

Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Ántonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them
and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Ántonia loved her father more than she did any one
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.

After I watched Ántonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n’t
come to see us any more.

Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto’s
sock. “She’s not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
would n’t mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in ’em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in ‘The Prince of
the House of David.’ Let’s forget the Bohemians.”

We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.

The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:—

“You’ve got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you.”

All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.

Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn—and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle—they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but to-morrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap
so that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other’s backs. “This’ll take the bile out of ’em!” Fuchs remarked
gleefully.

At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the
henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their
ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o’clock the chores
were done—just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a
strange, unnatural sort of day.

XIV

ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes,
I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in
the kitchen—grandmother’s was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What
could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn
had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was
lost in the storm.

Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his
hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing
their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both
looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with
a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed
reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips
were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: “Oh, dear
Saviour!” “Lord, Thou knowest!”

Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: “Jimmy, we will not have
prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda
is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys
have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That
is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys.”

After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to
talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother’s warning glances. I held my
tongue, but I listened with all my ears.

“No, sir,” Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, “nobody
heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a
road, and the women folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch
come in it was dark and he did n’t see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of
queer. One of ’em ripped around and got away from him—bolted clean out of
the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a
lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him.”

“Poor soul, poor soul!” grandmother groaned. “I’d like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How
could he forget himself and bring this on us!”

“I don’t think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,” Fuchs
declared. “He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of
fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed
hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Ántonia heated the
water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he
was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he
was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn
and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls,
where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent
except,”—Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,—”except what he could n’t
nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the
bed. He’d took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck
and rolled up his sleeves.”

“I don’t see how he could do it!” grandmother kept saying.

Otto misunderstood her. “Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the
trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the
barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!”

“Maybe he did,” said Jake grimly. “There’s something mighty queer about
it.”

“Now what do you mean, Jake?” grandmother asked sharply.

“Well, mam, I found Krajiek’s axe under the manger, and I picks it up and
carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in
the front of the old man’s face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin’
round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin’ the axe, he begun
whimperin’, ‘My God, man, don’t do that!’ ‘I reckon I’m a-goin’ to look
into this,’ says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about
wringin’ his hands. ‘They’ll hang me!’ says he. ‘My God, they’ll hang me
sure!'”

Fuchs spoke up impatiently. “Krajiek’s gone silly, Jake, and so have you.
The old man would n’t have made all them preparations for Krajiek to
murder him, would he? It don’t hang together. The gun was right beside him
when Ambrosch found him.”

“Krajiek could ‘a’ put it there, could n’t he?” Jake demanded.

Grandmother broke in excitedly: “See here, Jake Marpole, don’t you go
trying to add murder to suicide. We’re deep enough in trouble. Otto reads
you too many of them detective stories.”

“It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,” said grandfather quietly.
“If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the
inside outward.”

“Just so it is, Mr. Burden,” Otto affirmed. “I seen bunches of hair and
stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up
there by gunshot, no question.”

Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas with
him.

“There is nothing you can do,” he said doubtfully. “The body can’t be
touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a
matter of several days, this weather.”

“Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to
them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a
right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He’s left her alone in a
hard world.” She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his
breakfast at the kitchen table.

Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to
make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On
the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the
country with no roads to guide him.

“Don’t you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,” he said cheerfully, as he put on
a second pair of socks. “I’ve got a good nose for directions, and I never
did need much sleep. It’s the gray I’m worried about. I’ll save him what I
can, but it’ll strain him, as sure as I’m telling you!”

“This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you
can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens’s for dinner. She’s a good
woman, and she’ll do well by you.”

After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had
not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not say a
word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his
hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy fell asleep
where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.

No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas’ until a road was broken, and that
would be a day’s job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big
black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy
white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set
off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black
and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs.
Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted
cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the
house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to
acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar,
and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not
been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After
the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat
down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got “Robinson Crusoe” and tried to read,
but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed
upon me that if Mr. Shimerda’s soul were lingering about in this world at
all, it would be here, in our house, which had been more to his liking
than any other in the neighborhood. I remembered his contented face when
he was with us on Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this
terrible thing would never have happened.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore,—and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly
underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house. There,
on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda.
Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It
was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were
sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever told me
about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the
fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned
to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,—belonging,
as Ántonia said, to the “nobles,”—from which she and her mother used to
steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that
forest, and if any one killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid
pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not
yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.

It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas’. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, “just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze,” Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda’s head. Ántonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father’s soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. “As I understand it,” Jake concluded, “it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he’s in torment.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said stoutly. “I almost know it is n’t true.” I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.

XV

OTTO FUCHS got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported that
the coroner would reach the Shimerdas’ sometime that afternoon, but the
missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles
away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours’ sleep at
the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the gray gelding had strained
himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That long trip
through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.

Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a
homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow-countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties then,
handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a miracle
in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks
bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur
cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.

“I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to
poor strangers from my kawn-tree.”

He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He said he
would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to husk
corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going to the school
by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children. He told me
he had a nice “lady-teacher” and that he liked to go to school.

At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to
strangers.

“Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?” he asked.

Jelinek looked serious. “Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father
has done a great sin,” he looked straight at grandfather. “Our Lord has
said that.”

Grandfather seemed to like his frankness. “We believe that, too, Jelinek.
But we believe that Mr. Shimerda’s soul will come to its Creator as well
off without a priest. We believe that Christ is our only intercessor.”

The young man shook his head. “I know how you think. My teacher at the
school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the
dead. I have seen too much.”

We asked him what he meant.

He glanced around the table. “You want I shall tell you? When I was a
little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make
my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By
‘n’ by war-times come, when the Austrians fight us. We have very many
soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp,
and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give
the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with
the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness
but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because
we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us.” He
paused, looking at grandfather. “That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened
to myself. All the soldiers know, too. When we walk along the road, the
old priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on
horse. All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth,
pull up their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we
pass. So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family.”

We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank,
manly faith.

“I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these
things,” said grandfather, “and I would never be the one to say you were
not in God’s care when you were among the soldiers.”

After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong
black farmhorses to the scraper and break a road through to the
Shimerdas’, so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was
the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, was set to work on a coffin.

Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us
that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who “batched”
with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made the coat.
From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn with the blacks,
and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield. Sometimes he was
completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him; then he and
the horses would emerge black and shining.

Our heavy carpenter’s bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for
the oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas’, and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his work-table and watched him. He did
not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of
paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus
engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his
half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At
last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.

“The hardest part of my job’s done,” he announced. “It’s the head end of
it that comes hard with me, especially when I’m out of practice. The last
time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,” he continued, as he sorted and
tried his chisels, “was for a fellow in the Black Tiger mine, up above
Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of
the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a
trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled across a box
cañon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two Swedes
had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down. If you’ll
believe it, they went to work the next day. You can’t kill a Swede. But in
my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned out
different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It’s a handy
thing to know, when you knock about like I’ve done.”

“We’d be hard put to it now, if you did n’t know, Otto,” grandmother said.

“Yes, ‘m,” Fuchs admitted with modest pride. “So few folks does know how
to make a good tight box that’ll turn water. I sometimes wonder if
there’ll be anybody about to do it for me. However, I’m not at all
particular that way.”

All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting
wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such
cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a
pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so
soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the
boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow
shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to
cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled
the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands
went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he
were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if
this occupation brought back old times to him.

At four o’clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbor who lived
east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their way to the
Shimerdas’. The news of what had happened over there had somehow got
abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother gave the visitors
sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were gone, the brother of
the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door,
and after him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbors
on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room. They were
all eager for any details about the suicide, and they were greatly
concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried. The nearest Catholic
cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks before a wagon could get
so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. There was a
burying-ground over by the Norwegian church, west of Squaw Creek; perhaps
the Norwegians would take Mr. Shimerda in.

After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to
the kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate cake, and
Otto again filled the house with the exciting, expectant song of the
plane. One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked more
than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything but “Only
papers, to-day,” or, “I’ve got a sackful of mail for ye,” until this
afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman; to herself or to the
Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was naturally
taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper that I used
to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now every one seemed
eager to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story; about the
Black Tiger mine, and about violent deaths and casual buryings, and the
queer fancies of dying men. You never really knew a man, he said, until
you saw him die. Most men were game, and went without a grudge.

The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring
the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the
Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the
Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.

Grandmother was indignant. “If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr.
Bushy, we’ll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I’ll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring. If
anything was to happen to me, I don’t want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I’m good enough to be laid amongst
’em.”

Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that
important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil
War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case
very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would have
sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. “The way he acted, and the way his
axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man.”

Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake
and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he
behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps
he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man’s misery and loneliness.

At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had
hoped would linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated condition,
disappeared on the second round. They talked excitedly about where they
should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbors were all disturbed
and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their own land;
indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner. Grandfather had
explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country was put under fence
and the roads were confined to section lines, two roads would cross
exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, “It makes no matter.”

Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some
superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the
cross-roads.

Jelinek said he did n’t know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once
been such a custom in Bohemia. “Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind,” he
added. “I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the
neighbors; but she say so it must be. ‘There I will bury him, if I dig the
grave myself,’ she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the
grave to-morrow.”

Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. “I don’t know whose
wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will
live to see the people of this country ride over that old man’s head, she
is mistaken.”

XVI

MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the barn four days, and on the fifth they buried
him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging the grave,
chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On Saturday we breakfasted
before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin. Jake and Jelinek
went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in
which it was frozen fast to the ground.

When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas’ house, we found the
women-folk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat
crouching by the stove, Ántonia was washing dishes. When she saw me she
ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. “Oh, Jimmy,” she
sobbed, “what you tink for my lovely papa!” It seemed to me that I could
feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.

Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her
shoulder toward the door while the neighbors were arriving. They came on
horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a wagon
over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from her farm
eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women into the
cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning to
fall, and every one was afraid of another storm and anxious to have the
burial over with.

Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to
start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors had brought,
Ántonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her
father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda’s box up the hill;
Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door, so
it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from the cave and
looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up.
His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was bandaged in white
muslin, like a mummy’s; one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the
black cloth; that was all one could see of him.

Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Ántonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward, and kept saying
something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down, shut her eyes, and put
out her hand a little way, but she drew it back and began to cry wildly.
She was afraid to touch the bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the
shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin, but grandmother interfered.

“No, Mrs. Shimerda,” she said firmly, “I won’t stand by and see that child
frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of
her. Let her alone.”

At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the box,
and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look at
Ántonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close to
her.

The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave,
it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the
coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about
watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and
shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek spoke in a
persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to grandfather.

“She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for
him here in English, for the neighbors to understand.”

Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the
other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember
it. He began, “Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the
sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.”
He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled
the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the
way before this widow and her children, and to “incline the hearts of men
to deal justly with her.” In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at “Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.”

All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said “Amen,” I thought she looked
satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, “Can’t you start a
hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish.”

Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her
suggestion, then began, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” and all the men and
women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has
made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the
bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:—

“While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.”

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass
had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the
prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran
about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr.
Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and
an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda
never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a
little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a
little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was
never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray
rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and
in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim
superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and
still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the
error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along
which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver
passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

XVII

WHEN spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the
nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter
was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in
the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and
playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.

Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.

The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill,—bought on credit,—a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.

When I rode up to the Shimerdas’ one bright windy afternoon in April,
Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Ántonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.

She gave me a shrewd glance. “He not Jesus,” she blustered; “he not know
about the wet and the dry.”

I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Ántonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.

When the sun was dropping low, Ántonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor’s. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.

She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.

“Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don’t want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall.”

While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Ántonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand. “You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope
your grandpa ain’t lose no stacks?”

“No, we did n’t. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can’t go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there’s a good teacher, and you’d learn a
lot.”

Ántonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were
stiff. “I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother
can’t say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work
as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land
one good farm.”

She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.

I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.

Ántonia took my hand. “Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won’t you, Jimmy?” she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. “My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won’t forget my father, Jim?”

“No,” I said, “I will never forget him.”

Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Ántonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers. Ántonia and Ambrosch were talking in
Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day.
Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.

[Illustration: Ántonia ploughing in the field]

Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: “You take them ox to-morrow
and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.”

His sister laughed. “Don’t be mad. I know it’s awful hard work for break
sod. I milk the cow for you to-morrow, if you want.”

Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. “That cow not give so much milk like
what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him
back the cow.”

“He does n’t talk about the fifteen dollars,” I exclaimed indignantly. “He
does n’t find fault with people.”

“He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,” grumbled Ambrosch.

I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me.
Ántonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table
and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother
had said, “Heavy field work’ll spoil that girl. She’ll lose all her nice
ways and get rough ones.” She had lost them already.

After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Ántonia. She was out in the fields from
sun-up until sun-down. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making
me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she
helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased
with Ántonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, “She
will help some fellow get ahead in the world.”

Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much
she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too,
that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that
the farmhands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I
saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her
dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to
think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet
managed to say so much when he exclaimed, “My Án-tonia!”

XVIII

AFTER I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians. We
were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback
and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making comrades of them I was getting even with
Ántonia for her indifference. Since the father’s death, Ambrosch was more
than ever the head of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings as
well as the fortunes of his women-folk. Ántonia often quoted his opinions
to me, and she let me see that she admired him, while she thought of me
only as a little boy. Before the spring was over, there was a distinct
coldness between us and the Shimerdas. It came about in this way.

One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar which
Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful
blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses
along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year’s dried sunflower
stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and
their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet
gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.

We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was
cleaning out the stable, and Ántonia and her mother were making garden,
off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill
tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake asked
for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar belonged to
grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.

“Now, don’t you say you have n’t got it, Ambrosch, because I know you
have, and if you ain’t a-going to look for it, I will.”

Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the
stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he
returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used—trampled in the dirt
and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.

“This what you want?” he asked surlily.

Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough
stubble on his face. “That ain’t the piece of harness I loaned you,
Ambrosch; or if it is, you’ve used it shameful. I ain’t a-going to carry
such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden.”

Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. “All right,” he said coolly,
took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by the
belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch’s feet had scarcely
touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at Jake’s
stomach. Fortunately Jake was in such a position that he could dodge it.
This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they played at
fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head—it
sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over,
stunned.

We heard squeals, and looking up saw Ántonia and her mother coming on the
run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged through the
muddy water, without even lifting their skirts. They came on, screaming
and clawing the air. By this time Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
sputtering with nose-bleed. Jake sprang into his saddle. “Let’s get out of
this, Jim,” he called.

Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were
going to pull down lightning. “Law, law!” she shrieked after us. “Law for
knock my Ambrosch down!”

“I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden,” Ántonia panted. “No
friends any more!”

Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. “Well, you’re a damned
ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you,” he shouted back. “I guess the
Burdens can get along without you. You’ve been a sight of trouble to them,
anyhow!”

We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for
us. I had n’t a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and
trembling all over. It made him sick to get so angry. “They ain’t the
same, Jimmy,” he kept saying in a hurt tone. “These foreigners ain’t the
same. You can’t trust ’em to be fair. It’s dirty to kick a feller. You
heard how the women turned on you—and after all we went through on account
of ’em last winter! They ain’t to be trusted. I don’t want to see you get
too thick with any of ’em.”

“I’ll never be friends with them again, Jake,” I declared hotly. “I
believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath.”

Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake to
ride to town to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had
knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was
inclined to make trouble—her son was still under age—she would be
forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market
the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after Jake had
started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving by, looking
neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight down the Black
Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would
follow the matter up.

Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for
that purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in town
that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had to sell
his pig to pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas great
satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met
Ántonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road with her
work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing
voice:—

“Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!”

Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia’s behavior. He only lifted
his brows and said, “You can’t tell me anything new about a Czech; I’m an
Austrian.”

Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the
Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Ántonia always greeted him respectfully, and he
asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought
the future looked hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he
soon realized that his oxen were too heavy for any work except breaking
sod, and he succeeded in selling them to a newly arrived German. With the
money he bought another team of horses, which grandfather selected for
him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but he could never
teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The one idea that had ever got
through poor Marek’s thick head was that all exertion was meritorious. He
always bore down on the handles of the cultivator and drove the blades so
deep into the earth that the horses were soon exhausted.

In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy’s for a week, and took Marek
with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator;
she and Ántonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses
got colic and gave them a terrible fright.

Ántonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well
before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was swollen
about the middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted another
horse, without waiting to saddle him, and hammered on our door just as we
were going to bed. Grandfather answered her knock. He did not send one of
his men, but rode back with her himself, taking a syringe and an old piece
of carpet he kept for hot applications when our horses were sick. He found
Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern, groaning and wringing
her hands. It took but a few moments to release the gases pent up in the
poor beast, and the two women heard the rush of wind and saw the roan
visibly diminish in girth.

“If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden,” Ántonia exclaimed, “I never stay here
till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before morning.”

When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy’s, we learned that he had given
Marek’s wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses for their father’s
soul. Grandmother thought Ántonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda
needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, “If he can spare six
dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes.”

It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas.
One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well, he
thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July. He would
need more men, and if it were agreeable to every one he would engage
Ambrosch for the reaping and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small
grain of their own.

“I think, Emmaline,” he concluded, “I will ask Ántonia to come over and
help you in the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something, and it will
be a good time to end misunderstandings. I may as well ride over this
morning and make arrangements. Do you want to go with me, Jim?” His tone
told me that he had already decided for me.

After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she
ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she did not
want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse,
and we followed her.

Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been
grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal, pulled
up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to hide the
cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow
held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at her hind
quarters, trying to spank her into the draw-side.

Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch?
Which field?”

“He with the sod corn.” She pointed toward the north, still standing in
front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.

“His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter,” said grandfather
encouragingly. “And where is Ántonia?”

“She go with.” Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously
in the dust.

“Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me cut
my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good-morning. By the
way, Mrs. Shimerda,” he said as he turned up the path, “I think we may as
well call it square about the cow.”

She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not
understand, grandfather turned back. “You need not pay me anything more;
no more money. The cow is yours.”

“Pay no more, keep cow?” she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes
snapping at us in the sunlight.

“Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow.” He nodded.

Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and crouching down beside
grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had ever been
so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too. Somehow, that
seemed to bring the Old World very close.

We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: “I expect she thought we had
come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she would n’t have
scratched a little if we’d laid hold of that lariat rope!”

Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.
Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She
presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, “Now you not come
any more for knock my Ambrosch down?”

Jake laughed sheepishly. “I don’t want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he’ll let me alone, I’ll let him alone.”

“If he slap you, we ain’t got no pig for pay the fine,” she said
insinuatingly.

Jake was not at all disconcerted. “Have the last word, mam,” he said
cheerfully. “It’s a lady’s privilege.”

XIX

JULY came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains
of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if
we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a
faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered
stalks stood so juicy and green. If all the great plain from the Missouri
to the Rocky Mountains had been under glass, and the heat regulated by a
thermometer, it could not have been better for the yellow tassels that
were ripening and fertilizing each other day by day. The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between. It took
a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather’s to foresee that they would
enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas’ cornfields,
or Mr. Bushy’s, but the world’s cornfields; that their yield would be one
of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie
all the activities of men, in peace or war.

The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,
secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little to
fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the wheatfields
that they did not notice the heat,—though I was kept busy carrying water
for them,—and grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do in the kitchen
that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another.
Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Ántonia went with me
up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner. Grandmother made her
wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached the garden she threw it on the
grass and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over
the pea-vines, beads of perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like
a little mustache.

“Oh, better I like to work out of doors than in a house!” she used to sing
joyfully. “I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I
like to be like a man.” She would toss her head and ask me to feel the
muscles swell in her brown arm.

We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive that
one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with pans.
Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Ántonia worked for
us.

[Illustration: Jim and Ántonia in the garden]

All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The
harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the
house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat
lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt frame
of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a
beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut
grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when
the dishes were washed Ántonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof of
the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic,
like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags
across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a
moment. Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the
west was luminous and clear: in the lightning-flashes it looked like deep
blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and the mottled part of the
sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid sea-coast
city, doomed to destruction. Great warm splashes of rain fell on our
upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted out
into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward. All about us we
could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the
farmyard. Grandmother came to the door and said it was late, and we would
get wet out there.

“In a minute we come,” Ántonia called back to her. “I like your
grandmother, and all things here,” she sighed. “I wish my papa live to see
this summer. I wish no winter ever come again.”

“It will be summer a long while yet,” I reassured her. “Why are n’t you
always nice like this, Tony?”

“How nice?”

“Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be
like Ambrosch?”

She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. “If I
live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But
they will be hard for us.”

Nguồn: Wikisource English — My Ántonia/Book 1. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.