My Antonia
by
Willa Cather

Part 1 out of 4



software or any other related product without express permission.]





This etext was originally produced by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
Edition 11 was produced by Martin Robb (MartinRobb@ieee.org).





CONTENTS
Introduction
BOOK I. The Shimerdas
BOOK II. The Hired Girls
BOOK III. Lena Lingard
BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman's Story
BOOK V. Cuzak's Boys


TO CARRIE AND IRENE MINER In memory of affections old and true


Optima dies ... prima fugit VIRGIL





INTRODUCTION

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of
intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion
James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and
I are old friends--we grew up together in the same Nebraska town--and we
had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through
never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered
pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car,
where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over
everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many
things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in
little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating
extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy
beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the
color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with
little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as
sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie
town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.


Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do
not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great
Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks
together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I
do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in
New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.
Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her
marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time.
It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,
and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado. She
was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her
friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something
unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters,
produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for
picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe
that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and
her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me
she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.
Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth
while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of
advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her
own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.

As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his
naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it
often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the
strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the
great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it
and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.
He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or
Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in
mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim
Burden's attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the
wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which
means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in
those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people
and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends
remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and
sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his
sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is Western
and American.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning
to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom
both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl
seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of
our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and
places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost sight of her
altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a
friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set
apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that
day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old
affection for her.

"I can't see," he said impetuously, "why you have never written anything
about Antonia."

I told him I had always felt that other people--he himself, for one knew
her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with
him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would
do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often
announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold
of him. "Maybe I will, maybe I will!" he declared. He stared out of the
window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the
sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. "Of
course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great
deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've
had no practice in any other form of presentation."

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted
to know about Antonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl
who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter
afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat.
He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride
as he stood warming his hands.

"I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said. "Now, what
about yours?"

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

"Notes? I didn't make any." He drank his tea all at once and put down the
cup. "I didn't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself
and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it
hasn't any form. It hasn't any title, either." He went into the next
room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio
the word, "Antonia." He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another
word, making it "My Antonia." That seemed to satisfy him.

"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it influence
your own story."

My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's
manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.




NOTES: [1] The Bohemian name Antonia is strongly accented on the first
syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the `i' is, of course, given
the sound of long `e'. The name is pronounced An'-ton-ee-ah.





BOOK I

The Shimerdas



I

I FIRST HEARD OF Antonia 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
travelled 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
huddled 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 oilcloth
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 moustache
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 travelled 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 neighbours. 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
neighbours 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 favourite 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 neighbours
lived in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our
white frame house, with a storey and half-storey 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 colour of
winestains, 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 sunbonnet. `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 neighbours. 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 workteams. I'd have interfered about the horses--the
old man can understand some German--if I'd I 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-coloured 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 drawbank. 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, Ambroz--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 Antonia--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 colour. 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-grey 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 grey 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, Antonia 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 Antonia 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. Antonia 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. Antonia 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 alive, 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 Antonia 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,
`Antonia, Antonia!' She sprang up like a hare. 'Tatinek! Tatinek!' she
shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia
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 Antonia!'



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 neighbours. When we had to borrow anything, or
to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, 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 uplands,
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 Fuchs'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 colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbours 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. Antonia 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 defenceless 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. Antonia said she didn'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 cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.

Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about cooking
and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every movement.
We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good housewife 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-grey 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.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk
or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the
two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and the brown
owls house the rattlesnakes-- because they did not know how to get rid of
him.



V

WE KNEW THAT THINGS were hard for our Bohemian neighbours, but the two
girls were lighthearted 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 Antonia'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 kawntree. 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
cheekbones. 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 everyone, 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 colour 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 farm-hands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbours 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 Antonia 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 onto 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 Antonia 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 anyone 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 Antonia, 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 Antonia 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 horsepond
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 antennae
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 gaily 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 Antonia's dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false
pretences? 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 Antonia 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 Antonia 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 winter!' 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
Antonia 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.'

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 Antonia'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.
Antonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket
and raced my shadow home.



VII

MUCH AS I LIKED Antonia, 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 Antonia 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,
Antonia 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 snakeskins.

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 grey 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 Antonia 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
Antonia 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 couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out
of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I didn't run
because I didn't think of it--if my back had been against a stone wall I
couldn'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. Antonia,
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.

Antonia 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 kawntree 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
Antonia 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-- wouldn't let us come near
him.

We decided that Antonia 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. Antonia 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
wouldn't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?'

Antonia 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 Antonia rode on he said: `Got him in the head
first crack, didn't you? That was just as well.'

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

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 doesn'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 Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. 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 COLOUR 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 Antonia 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 Antonia 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
humouring 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; Antonia 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 colour 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,' Antonia 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
teakettle 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
someone. 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, Antonia 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,' Antonia 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. Antonia'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 Antonia 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 everyone 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 livestock was there, and he bought in the sale notes
at about fifty cents on the dollar. Everyone 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 cookstove 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 Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, 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 centre; 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 cabinetmaker in the old country
and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job if I hadn't
hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the next day I went
over to take Yulka and Antonia 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 m sleigh at the bottom
of the draw and called. Antonia 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 Antonia 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 snowdrifts--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
someone 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
colour 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. Couldn't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka
asked, and couldn'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 grey and sombre. I took off my long woollen comforter and wound it
around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head
under the buffalo robe. Antonia 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 favourite 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 centred 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 bartender, 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 anyone 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 grey 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 travelling 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 enquired 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 didn'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 didn'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 neighbours tomorrow, 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 couldn't have got hens from her
neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by now. I reckon she was
confused and didn'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, ma'm,' 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 Antonia, 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 everyone.

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. Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark
corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunny-sack
stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered, he threw a grain-sack 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 Antonia 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.

`Haven't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia? 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 grey 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 Antonia!'

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, Antonia,
and then you will 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
Antonia'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 Antonia 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.

Antonia 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 Antonia 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 odours 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 dryly. `I can't say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself.'

Antonia 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, ma'm, 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 odour. 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
shouldn'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 twenty-first 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 grey, 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 twenty-second, 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 Antonia; 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 coloured 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 grey 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 splendours, 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
coloured 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 apparelled, 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 moustache.
As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no practised 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 labourers 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 Saint 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 grey 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 grey 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.

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 coloured 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 woman!' 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 grey 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, Antonia 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 Antonia 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 kawntree.'

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


 


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