I
TWO years after I left Lincoln I completed my academic course at Harvard.
Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On
the night of my arrival Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her
husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in
grandmother’s parlor, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at
her gate, she said simply, “You know, of course, about poor Ántonia.”
Poor Ántonia! Every one would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Ántonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted
her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
“He never married her,” Frances said. “I have n’t seen her since she came
back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She
brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I’m afraid she’s settled down
to be Ambrosch’s drudge for good.”
I tried to shut Ántonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart
away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had
got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to
think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used
to stop at Mrs. Gardener’s hotel owned idle property along the water-front
in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his
empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors’ lodging-house. This,
every one said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running
a decent place, she could n’t keep it up; all sailors’ boarding-houses
were alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well
as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the
dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce traveling men, and contemptuously at
the scrubby ones—who were so afraid of her that they did n’t dare to ask
for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we would have been, as we sat
talking about her on Frances Harling’s front porch, if we could have known
what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous
life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for
Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went
in dog sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came
into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike
farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and
her friends, and nearly every one else in Circle City, started for the
Klondike fields on the last steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze
for the winter. That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter’s wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed
a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their
placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for
it in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one
night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The
poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be
amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a
working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from
the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on
Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson
building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off
into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged
miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable
fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake City in 1908.
She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in
manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener, for whom she
had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about some of the
desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but the thrill of
them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing interested her much now
but making money. The only two human beings of whom she spoke with any
feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given her his claim, and Lena
Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco and go into
business there.
“Lincoln was never any place for her,” Tiny remarked. “In a town of that
size Lena would always be gossiped about. Frisco’s the right field for
her. She has a fine class of trade. Oh, she’s just the same as she always
was! She’s careless, but she’s level-headed. She’s the only person I know
who never gets any older. It’s fine for me to have her there; somebody who
enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me and won’t let me be
shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress, she makes it and sends it
home—with a bill that’s long enough, I can tell you!”
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took toll
from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of weather,
like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those pretty little
feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed slippers and striped
stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casually—did n’t seem
sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her success, but not elated.
She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn
out.
II
SOON after I got home that summer I persuaded my grandparents to have
their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer’s
shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of
his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on
his walls: girls in Commencement dresses, country brides and grooms
holding hands, family groups of three generations. I noticed, in a heavy
frame, one of those depressing “crayon enlargements” often seen in
farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses.
The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.
“That’s Tony Shimerda’s baby. You remember her; she used to be the
Harling’s Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; would n’t
hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for
it Saturday.”
I went away feeling that I must see Ántonia again. Another girl would have
kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its picture on
exhibition at the town photographer’s, in a great gilt frame. How like
her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she had n’t thrown herself
away on such a cheap sort of fellow.
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that some one may ask them to put up a
car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of
official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to
compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently
from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and
his conductor’s cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the
station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of the utmost importance
to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was
usually cold and distant with men, but with all women he had a silent,
grave familiarity, a special handshake, accompanied by a significant,
deliberate look. He took women, married or single, into his confidence;
walked them up and down in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he
had made by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much
better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver
than the roughshod man who then bore that title. His unappreciated worth
was the tender secret Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always
able to make some foolish heart ache over it.
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard,
digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now
no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere
on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate—it was with a feeling of
pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I liked the feel
of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while I
loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down on the steps and talked
about the oriole family that had a nest in its branches.
“Mrs. Harling,” I said presently, “I wish I could find out exactly how
Ántonia’s marriage fell through.”
“Why don’t you go out and see your grandfather’s tenant, the Widow
Steavens? She knows more about it than anybody else. She helped Ántonia
get ready to be married, and she was there when Ántonia came back. She
took care of her when the baby was born. She could tell you everything.
Besides, the Widow Steavens is a good talker, and she has a remarkable
memory.”
III
ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out
for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was
over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of
smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now
being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was
disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were
wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards,
and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men
who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the
blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat
tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in
long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a
great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found
that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the
modeling of human faces.
When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet
me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was
little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator’s. I
told her at once why I had come.
“You’ll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I’ll talk to you after supper. I
can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You’ve no prejudice
against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days.”
While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at
my watch and sighed; it was three o’clock, and I knew that I must eat him
at six.
After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room,
while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm
papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining
outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess
put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the
heat. She sat down in her favorite rocking-chair and settled a little
stool comfortably under her tired feet. “I’m troubled with callouses, Jim;
getting old,” she sighed cheerfully. She crossed her hands in her lap and
sat as if she were at a meeting of some kind.
“Now, it’s about that dear Ántonia you want to know? Well, you’ve come to
the right person. I’ve watched her like she’d been my own daughter.
“When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be
married, she was over here about every day. They’ve never had a sewing
machine at the Shimerdas’, and she made all her things here. I taught her
hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at
that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it—she was so
strong—and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the
happiest thing in the world.
“‘Ántonia,’ I used to say, ‘don’t run that machine so fast. You won’t
hasten the day none that way.’
“Then she’d laugh and slow down for a little, but she’d soon forget and
begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to
housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had
given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We
hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes. Tony
told me just how she meant to have everything in her house. She’d even
bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk. She was always
coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man did write her real
often, from the different towns along his run.
“The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been
changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. ‘I’m a country
girl,’ she said, ‘and I doubt if I’ll be able to manage so well for him in
a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.’ She soon
cheered up, though.
“At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by
it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that
she’d begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she’d never let me see
it.
“Then there was a great time of packing. It was in March, if I remember
rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad for hauling
her things to town. And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing. He
went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver in a purple
velvet box, good enough for her station. He gave her three hundred dollars
in money; I saw the check. He’d collected her wages all those first years
she worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this
room. ‘You’re behaving like a man, Ambrosch,’ I said, ‘and I’m glad to see
it, son.’
“’T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk
to take the night train for Denver—the boxes had been shipped before. He
stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her
arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I’d done for her. She
was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red
cheeks was all wet with rain.
“‘You’re surely handsome enough for any man,’ I said, looking her over.
“She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, ‘Good-bye, dear house!’
and then ran out to the wagon. I expect she meant that for you and your
grandmother, as much as for me, so I’m particular to tell you. This house
had always been a refuge to her.
“Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe, and he
was there to meet her. They were to be married in a few days. He was
trying to get his promotion before he married, she said. I did n’t like
that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka got a postal card, saying
she was ‘well and happy.’ After that we heard nothing. A month went by,
and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky with me
as if I’d picked out the man and arranged the match.
“One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the
fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west
road. There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another
behind. In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her
veils, he thought ’t was Ántonia Shimerda, or Ántonia Donovan, as her name
ought now to be.
“The next morning I got brother to drive me over. I can walk still, but my
feet ain’t what they used to be, and I try to save myself. The lines
outside the Shimerdas’ house was full of washing, though it was the middle
of the week. As we got nearer I saw a sight that made my heart sink—all
those underclothes we’d put so much work on, out there swinging in the
wind. Yulka came bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but she darted
back into the house like she was loath to see us. When I went in, Ántonia
was standing over the tubs, just finishing up a big washing. Mrs. Shimerda
was going about her work, talking and scolding to herself. She did n’t so
much as raise her eyes. Tony wiped her hand on her apron and held it out
to me, looking at me steady but mournful. When I took her in my arms she
drew away. ‘Don’t, Mrs. Steavens,’ she says, ‘you’ll make me cry, and I
don’t want to.’
“I whispered and asked her to come out of doors with me. I knew she could
n’t talk free before her mother. She went out with me, bareheaded, and we
walked up toward the garden.
“‘I’m not married, Mrs. Steavens,’ she says to me very quiet and
natural-like, ‘and I ought to be.’
“‘Oh, my child,’ says I, ‘what’s happened to you? Don’t be afraid to tell
me!’
“She sat down on the draw-side, out of sight of the house. ‘He’s run away
from me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if he ever meant to marry me.’
“‘You mean he’s thrown up his job and quit the country?’ says I.
“‘He did n’t have any job. He’d been fired; blacklisted for knocking down
fares. I did n’t know. I thought he had n’t been treated right. He was
sick when I got there. He’d just come out of the hospital. He lived with
me till my money gave out, and afterwards I found he had n’t really been
hunting work at all. Then he just did n’t come back. One nice fellow at
the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up. He
said he was afraid Larry’d gone bad and would n’t come back any more. I
guess he’s gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there,
collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was
always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way.’
“I asked her, of course, why she did n’t insist on a civil marriage at
once—that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, ‘I just don’t know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he’d want to stay with me.’
“Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried
like a young thing. I could n’t help it. I was just about heart-broke. It
was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the
colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Ántonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that
Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out
so well, and was coming home here every summer in her silks and her
satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give credit where credit is
due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great difference in
the principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that had
come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marveled at her calm. As we
went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they
was drying well, and seemed to take pride in their whiteness—she said
she’d been living in a brick block, where she did n’t have proper
conveniences to wash them.
“The next time I saw Ántonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it
seemed to be an understood thing. Ambrosch did n’t get any other hand to
help him. Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution
a good while back. We never even saw any of Tony’s pretty dresses. She did
n’t take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and steady. Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she’d put on airs. She was
so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her. She never
went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At first I
was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in
from the fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about
the grain and the weather as if she’d never had another interest, and if I
went over at night she always looked dead weary. She was afflicted with
toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated, and she went about with her
face swollen half the time. She would n’t go to Black Hawk to a dentist
for fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell
long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Ántonia work so hard and pull herself down. He said, ‘If you put that in
her head, you better stay home.’ And after that I did.
“Ántonia worked on through harvest and thrashing, though she was too
modest to go out thrashing for the neighbors, like when she was young and
free. I did n’t see much of her until late that fall when she begun to
herd Ambrosch’s cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and
I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty
cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she
would n’t have brought them so far.
“It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she had
n’t gone too far.
“‘It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,’ she
said one day, ‘but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on.
It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all
over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father
used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I’m not going to live very long, so
I’m just enjoying every day of this fall.’
“After the winter begun she wore a man’s long overcoat and boots, and a
man’s felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and
I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the
snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Ántonia driving her cattle
homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to
face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual. ‘Deary me,’ I says
to myself, ‘the girl’s stayed out too late. It’ll be dark before she gets
them cattle put into the corral.’ I seemed to sense she’d been feeling too
miserable to get up and drive them.
“That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and
shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay
down on the bed and bore her child.
“I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the
basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:—
“‘Baby come, baby come!’ she says. ‘Ambrosch much like devil!’
“Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to
a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and
went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as
quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for
Ántonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud:—
“‘Mrs. Shimerda, don’t you put that strong yellow soap near that baby.
You’ll blister its little skin.’ I was indignant.
[Illustration: Ántonia driving her cattle home]
“‘Mrs. Steavens,’ Ántonia said from the bed, ‘if you’ll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you’ll see some fine soap.’ That was the first word she
spoke.
“After I’d dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was
muttering behind the stove and would n’t look at it.
“‘You’d better put it out in the rain barrel,’ he says.
“‘Now, see here, Ambrosch,’ says I, ‘there’s a law in this land, don’t
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world
sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.’ I pride
myself I cowed him.
“Well, I expect you’re not much interested in babies, but Ántonia’s got on
fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she’d had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it. It’s a year and eight months old now,
and no baby was ever better cared-for. Ántonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don’t know as there’s much
chance now.”
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the
ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn
and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow
against the blue sky.
IV
THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas’. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Ántonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She
stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I
came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.
“I thought you’d come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens’s last
night. I’ve been looking for you all day.”
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens
said, “worked down,” but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Ántonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda’s plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother’s relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric’s death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.
“Of course it means you are going away from us for good,” she said with a
sigh. “But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s been
dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody
else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the
time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand
him.”
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. “I’d always be
miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know
every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live
and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world for
something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my little
girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care of that
girl, Jim.”
I told her I knew she would. “Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been away,
I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world.
I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of
my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of
times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.”
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them
slowly. “How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when
I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can
mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I
can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all the
things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you think about old
times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the
happiest people.”
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a
great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in
the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color,
thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two
luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on
opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and
shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain,
drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields
seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn
magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a
little boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands
and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and
good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things
they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About
us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her
face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face,
under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory.
“I’ll come back,” I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
“Perhaps you will”—I felt rather than saw her smile. “But even if you
don’t, you’re here, like my father. So I won’t be lonesome.”
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that
a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing
and whispering to each other in the grass.