After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and

climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the

Shimerdas’, we heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Ántonia, her

head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her

weight on the pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon,

looked back over her shoulder, and, catching up her pail of water,

started at a run for the hole in the bank.

Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the

provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy

path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came

from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the

wind whisked them roughly away.

Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized

grandmother’s hand. She did not say ‘How do!’ as usual, but at once

began to cry, talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her

feet which were tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at

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. Ántonia 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 Ántonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony

left her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this

before.

‘You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad,’ she

whispered, as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things

grandmother handed her.

The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and

stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of

potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.

‘Haven’t you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Ántonia? This is

no place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?’

‘We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office what he throw out. We got no

potatoes, Mrs. Burden,’ Tony admitted mournfully.

When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the

door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from

behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth 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 Ántonia!’

Grandmother drew back. ‘You mean they sleep in there—your girls?’ He

bowed his head.

Tony slipped under his arm. ‘It is very cold on the floor, and this is

warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there,’ she insisted

eagerly. ‘My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in

Bohemie. See, Jim?’ She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had

built against the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.

Grandmother sighed. ‘Sure enough, where WOULD you sleep, dear! I don’t

doubt you’re warm there. You’ll have a better house after while,

Ántonia, and then you 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

Ántonia’s shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter

translated. He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old

country; he made good wages, and his family were respected there. He

left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their

passage money was paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New

York, and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected.

By the time they paid Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and

oxen and some old farm machinery, they had very little money left. He

wished grandmother to know, however, that he still had some money. If

they could get through until spring came, they would buy a cow and

chickens and plant a garden, and would then do very well. Ambrosch and

Ántonia were both old enough to work in the fields, and they were

willing to work. But the snow and the bitter weather had disheartened

them all.

Ántonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them

in the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but

the logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had

been felled.

While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the

floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously

toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to

make his queer noises for me—to bark like a dog or whinny like a

horse—but he did not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was

always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind

that he must make up for his deficiencies.

Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,

and, while Ántonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own

account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she

heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and

brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack

and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy

boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and

stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell,

very pungent, even among the other 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.’

Ántonia undertook to explain. ‘This very good, Mrs. Burden’—she clasped

her hands as if she could not express how good—‘it make very much when

you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken,

in the gravy—oh, so good!’

All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good

Christian people could forget they were their brothers’ keepers.

‘I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.

Where’s a body to begin, with these people? They’re wanting in

everything, and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give ‘em that, I

guess. Jimmy, here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they

are. Do you reckon that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?’

‘He’s a worker, all right, 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 Ántonia; even Yulka

was able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold

storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut

squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We

bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,

representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the

dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had

files of those good old family magazines which used to publish 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, Ántonia and her

mother rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit.

It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran

about examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while

commenting upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone.

In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the

stove and said: ‘You got many, Shimerdas no got.’ I thought it

weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot to her.

After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said,

tossing her head: ‘You got many things for cook. If I got all things

like you, I make much better.’

She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not

humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Ántonia and

listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.

‘My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music

any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for

dance. Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some

days he take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the

strings, like this, but never he make the music. He don’t like this

kawntree.’

‘People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home,’ I said

severely. ‘We don’t make them come here.’

‘He not want to come, never!’ she burst out. ‘My mamenka make him come.

All the time she say: “America big country; much money, much land for

my boys, much husband for my girls.” My papa, he cry for leave his old

friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play

the long horn like this’—she indicated a slide trombone. “They go to

school together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want

Ambrosch for be rich, with many cattle.”’

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

“Your grandfather is rich,” she retorted fiercely. ‘Why he not help my

papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very

smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here.’

Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs.

Shimerda and Ántonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly

with them and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother

had everything their own way. Though Ántonia loved her father more than

she did anyone else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.

After I watched Ántonia and her mother go over the hill on their

miserable horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to

grandmother, who had taken up her darning, and said I hoped that

snooping old woman wouldn’t come to see us any more.

Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in

Otto’s sock. ‘She’s not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you.

No, I wouldn’t mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body

never knows what traits poverty might bring out in ‘em. It makes a

woman grasping to see her children want for things. Now read me a

chapter in “The Prince of the House of David.” Let’s forget the

Bohemians.’

We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral

ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we

hoped they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big

bulls, Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they

began to tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that

separated them. Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the

soft earth with their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their

heads. Each withdrew to a far corner of his own corral, and then they

made for each other at a gallop. Thud, thud, we could hear the impact

of their great heads, and their bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen

shelves. Had they not been dehorned, they would have torn each other to

pieces. Pretty soon the fat steers took it up and began butting and

horning each other. Clearly, the affair had to be stopped. We all stood

by and watched admiringly while Fuchs rode into the corral with a

pitchfork and prodded the bulls again and again, finally driving them

apart.

The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the

twentieth of January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake

and Otto came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping

their feet. They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:

‘You’ve got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was

a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.’

All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply

spilled out of heaven, like thousands of featherbeds being emptied.

That afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in

their tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles.

Neither grandmother nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the

chickens and brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.

Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn—and the

snow was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten

years my grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we

would not try to reach the cattle—they were fat enough to go without

their corn for a day or two; but tomorrow we must feed them and thaw

out their water-tap so that they could drink. We could not so much as

see the corrals, but we knew the steers were over there, huddled

together under the north bank. Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by

this time, were probably warming each other’s backs. ‘This’ll take the

bile out of ‘em!’ Fuchs remarked gleefully.

At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake

and Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff

arms and plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel through the

snow to the hen-house, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could

walk back and forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they

thought night had come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about,

pecking at the solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed

the lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great cackling and flew

about clumsily, scattering down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed

guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity, ran screeching out into the

tunnel and tried to poke their ugly, painted faces through the snow

walls. By five o’clock the chores were done just when it was time to

begin them all over again! That was a strange, unnatural sort of day.

XIV

On the morning of the twenty-second I wakened with a start. Before I

opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard

excited voices in the kitchen—grandmother’s was so shrill that I knew

she must be almost beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis

with delight. What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my

clothes. Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to

death; perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm.

Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his

hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were

rubbing their woollen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and

they both looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man,

covered up with a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room.

I obeyed reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying

dishes. Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to

herself: ‘Oh, dear Saviour!’ ‘Lord, Thou knowest!’

Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: ‘Jimmy, we will not have

prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr.

Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came

over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with

him. The boys have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with

questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast,

boys.’

After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began

to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother’s warning glances. I held

my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.

‘No, sir,’ Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, ‘nobody

heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox-team, trying to

break a road, and the women-folks was shut up tight in their cave. When

Ambrosch come in, it was dark and he didn’t see nothing, but the oxen

acted kind of queer. One of ‘em ripped around and got away from

him—bolted clean out of the stable. His hands is blistered where the

rope run through. He got a lantern and went back and found the old man,

just as we seen him.’

‘Poor soul, poor soul!’ grandmother groaned. ‘I’d like to think he

never done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give

trouble. How could he forget himself and bring this on us!’

‘I don’t think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,’ Fuchs

declared. ‘He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of

fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed

hisself all over after the girls had done the dishes. Ántonia heated

the water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and

after he was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun

and said he was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down

to the barn and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to

the ox stalls, where he always slept. When we found him, everything was

decent except’—Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated—‘except what he

couldn’t nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was

under the bed. He’d took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and

folded it smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt

at the neck and rolled up his sleeves.’

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

Otto misunderstood her. ‘Why, ma’am, it was simple enough; he pulled

the trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end

of the barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the

trigger. He found it all right!’

‘Maybe he did,’ said Jake grimly. ‘There’s something mighty queer about

it.’

‘Now what do you mean, Jake?’ grandmother asked sharply.

‘Well, ma’m, I found Krajiek’s axe under the manger, and I picks it up

and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the

gash in the front of the old man’s face. That there Krajiek had been

sneakin’ round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin’ the axe,

he begun whimperin’, “My God, man, don’t do that!” “I reckon I’m

a-goin’ to look into this,” says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat

and run about wringin’ his hands. “They’ll hang me!” says he. “My God,

they’ll hang me sure!”’

Fuchs spoke up impatiently. ‘Krajiek’s gone silly, Jake, and so have

you. The old man wouldn’t have made all them preparations for Krajiek

to murder him, would he? It don’t hang together. The gun was right

beside him when Ambrosch found him.’

‘Krajiek could ’a’ put it there, couldn’t he?’ Jake demanded.

Grandmother broke in excitedly: ‘See here, Jake Marpole, don’t you go

trying to add murder to suicide. We’re deep enough in trouble. Otto

reads you too many of them detective stories.’

‘It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,’ said grandfather

quietly. ‘If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be

torn from the inside outward.’

‘Just so it is, Mr. Burden,’ Otto affirmed. ‘I seen bunches of hair and

stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up

there by gunshot, no question.’

Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas’

with him.

‘There is nothing you can do,’ he said doubtfully. ‘The body can’t be

touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be

a matter of several days, this weather.’

‘Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort

to them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like

a right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He’s left her alone

in a hard world.’ She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now

eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.

Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going

to make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the

coroner. On the grey gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his

way across the country with no roads to guide him.

‘Don’t you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,’ he said cheerfully, as he put

on a second pair of socks. ‘I’ve got a good nose for directions, and I

never did need much sleep. It’s the grey I’m worried about. I’ll save

him what I can, but it’ll strain him, as sure as I’m telling you!’

‘This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best

you can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens’s for dinner. She’s a

good woman, and she’ll do well by you.’

After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I

had not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not

say a word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying,

now silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor

lifted his hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy

fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray

again.

No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas’ until a road was broken, and

that would be a day’s job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our

big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore

her black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his

bushy white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as

they set off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the

other black and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got

together for Mrs. Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over

the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized

that I was alone in the house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious

to acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long

cellar, and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and

excitement of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the

eggs had not been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the

hens their corn, emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it

with water. After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing

else to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and

the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions. I got ‘Robinson

Crusoe’ and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull

compared with ours. Presently, as I looked with satisfaction about our

comfortable sitting-room, it flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda’s

soul were lingering about in this world at all, it would be here, in

our house, which had been more to his liking than any other in the

neighbourhood. I remembered his contented face when he was with us on

Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing

would never have happened.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered

whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to

his own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to

Virginia, to Baltimore—and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would

not at once set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted

spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the

ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb

him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly

underground, always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house.

There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr.

Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles

of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting

winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia

had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he

used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the

friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest

full of game—belonging, as Ántonia said, to the ‘nobles’—from which she

and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a

white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it, he would

be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might

have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not yet faded out from the air in

which they had haunted him.

It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother

was so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and

while we were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the

state of things over at the Shimerdas’. Nobody could touch the body

until the coroner came. If anyone did, something terrible would happen,

apparently. The dead man was frozen through, ‘just as stiff as a

dressed turkey you hang out to freeze,’ Jake said. The horses and oxen

would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there was

no longer any smell of blood. They were stabled there now, with the

dead man, because there was no other place to keep them. A lighted

lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda’s head. Ántonia and Ambrosch

and the mother took turns going down to pray beside him. The crazy boy

went with them, because he did not feel the cold. I believed he felt

cold as much as anyone else, but he liked to be thought insensible to

it. He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have

supposed him capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a

priest, and about his father’s soul, which he believed was in a place

of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had

prayed a great deal for him. ‘As I understand it,’ Jake concluded, ‘it

will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right

now he’s in torment.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said stoutly. ‘I almost know it isn’t true.’ I

did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very

kitchen all afternoon, on his way back to his own country.

Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and

Purgatory came back on me crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives

in torment, and shuddered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and

selfish: he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.

XV

Otto Fuchs got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported

that the coroner would reach the Shimerdas’ sometime that afternoon,

but the missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred

miles away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours’

sleep at the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the grey gelding

had strained himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward.

That long trip through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of

him.

Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken

a homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his

fellow countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw

Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties

then, handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like

a miracle in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he

strode into our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his

eyes and cheeks bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he

snatched off his fur cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which

seemed older than he.

‘I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind

to poor strangers from my kawntree.’

He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the

eye when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He

said he would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired

out to husk corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going

to the school by the mill, to learn English, along with the little

children. He told me he had a nice ‘lady-teacher’ and that he liked to

go to school.

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

strangers.

‘Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?’ he

asked.

Jelinek looked serious.

‘Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father has done a great

sin’—he looked straight at grandfather. ‘Our Lord has said that.’

Grandfather seemed to like his frankness.

‘We believe that, too, Jelinek. But we believe that Mr. Shimerda’s soul

will come to its Creator as well off without a priest. We believe that

Christ is our only intercessor.’

The young man shook his head. ‘I know how you think. My teacher at the

school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for

the dead. I have seen too much.’

We asked him what he meant.

He glanced around the table. ‘You want I shall tell you? When I was a

little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I

make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to

me. By ‘n’ by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us. We have very

many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in

that camp, and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about

there to give the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry

the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp

catch the sickness but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we

have no fear, because we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and

it preserve us.’ He paused, looking at grandfather. ‘That I know, Mr.

Burden, for it happened to myself. All the soldiers know, too. When we

walk along the road, the old priest and me, we meet all the time

soldiers marching and officers on horse. All those officers, when they

see what I carry under the cloth, pull up their horses and kneel down

on the ground in the road until we pass. So I feel very bad for my

kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament, and to die in a bad way for

his soul, and I feel sad for his family.’

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

manly faith.

‘I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these

things,’ said grandfather, ‘and I would never be the one to say you

were not in God’s care when you were among the soldiers.’ After dinner

it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong black

farm-horses to the scraper and break a road through to the Shimerdas’,

so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was the only

cabinetmaker in the neighbourhood was set to work on a coffin.

Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told

us that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who

‘batched’ with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna,

made the coat. From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn

with the blacks, and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield.

Sometimes he was completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose

about him; then he and the horses would emerge black and shining.

Our heavy carpenter’s bench had to be brought from the barn and carried

down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks

grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor

for the oats-bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and

the doors were closed again and the cold draughts shut out, grandfather

rode away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas’, and Fuchs took off his

coat and settled down to work. I sat on his worktable and watched him.

He did not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a

piece of paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While

he was thus engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled

at his half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb

him. At last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.

‘The hardest part of my job’s done,’ he announced. ‘It’s the head end

of it that comes hard with me, especially when I’m out of practice. The

last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,’ he continued, as he sorted

and tried his chisels, ‘was for a fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up

above Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the

face of the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over

on a trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket travelled across a

box canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two

Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down.

If you’ll believe it, they went to work the next day. You can’t kill a

Swede. But in my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it

turned out different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now,

and I happened to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for

him. It’s a handy thing to know, when you knock about like I’ve done.’

‘We’d be hard put to it now, if you didn’t know, Otto,’ grandmother

said.

‘Yes, ‘m,’ Fuchs admitted with modest pride. ‘So few folks does know

how to make a good tight box that’ll turn water. I sometimes wonder if

there’ll be anybody about to do it for me. However, I’m not at all

particular that way.’

All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the

panting wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They

were such cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living

people: it was a pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be

put underground so soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was

full of frost, and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as

the heap of yellow shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why

Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such

ease and content. He handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them;

and when he planed, his hands went back and forth over the boards in an

eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them. He broke out now and

then into German hymns, as if this occupation brought back old times to

him.

At four o’clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbour who

lived east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their way to the

Shimerdas’. The news of what had happened over there had somehow got

abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother gave the visitors

sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were gone, the brother

of the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our

door, and after him came the father of the German family, our nearest

neighbours on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the

dining-room. They were all eager for any details about the suicide, and

they were greatly concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried.

The nearest Catholic cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks

before a wagon could get so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother

were sure that a man who had killed himself could not be buried in a

Catholic graveyard. There was a burying-ground over by the Norwegian

church, west of Squaw Creek; perhaps the Norwegians would take Mr.

Shimerda in.

After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned

to the kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate

cake, and Otto again filled the house with the exciting, expectant song

of the plane. One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody

talked more than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything

but ‘Only papers, to-day,’ or, ‘I’ve got a sackful of mail for ye,’

until this afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman: to herself

or to the Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was

naturally taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper

that I used to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now

everyone seemed eager to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after

story: about the Black Tiger Mine, and about violent deaths and casual

buryings, and the queer fancies of dying men. You never really knew a

man, he said, until you saw him die. Most men were game, and went

without a grudge.

The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring

the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the

Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the

Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.

Grandmother was indignant. ‘If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr.

Bushy, we’ll have to have an American graveyard that will be more

liberal-minded. I’ll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring.

If anything was to happen to me, I don’t want the Norwegians holding

inquisitions over me to see whether I’m good enough to be laid amongst

‘em.’

Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that

important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil

War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case

very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would

have sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. ‘The way he acted, and the

way his axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man.’

Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself,

Jake and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek

because he behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened,

certainly, and perhaps he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his

indifference to the old man’s misery and loneliness.

At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had

hoped would linger on until tomorrow in a mutilated condition,

disappeared on the second round. They talked excitedly about where they

should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbours were all

disturbed and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda

and Ambrosch wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their

own land; indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner.

Grandfather had explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country

was put under fence and the roads were confined to section lines, two

roads would cross exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, ‘It

makes no matter.’

Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some

superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the

cross-roads.

Jelinek said he didn’t know; he seemed to remember hearing there had

once been such a custom in Bohemia. ‘Mrs. Shimerda is made up her

mind,’ he added. ‘I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her

to all the neighbours; but she say so it must be. “There I will bury

him, if I dig the grave myself,” she say. I have to promise her I help

Ambrosch make the grave tomorrow.’

Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. ‘I don’t know whose

wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will

live to see the people of this country ride over that old man’s head,

she is mistaken.’

XVI

Mr. Shimerda lay dead in the barn four days, and on the fifth they

buried him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging the

grave, chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On Saturday we

breakfasted before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin.

Jake and Jelinek went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the

pool of blood in which it was frozen fast to the ground.

When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas’ house, we found the

womenfolk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat

crouching by the stove, Ántonia was washing dishes. When she saw me,

she ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. ‘Oh,

Jimmy,’ she sobbed, ‘what you tink for my lovely papa!’ It seemed to me

that I could feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.

Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her

shoulder toward the door while the neighbours were arriving. They came

on horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a

wagon over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from

her farm eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women

into the cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was

beginning to fall, and everyone was afraid of another storm and anxious

to have the burial over with.

Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to

start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbours had

brought, Ántonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin

hat her father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda’s box up

the hill; Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for

the door, so it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from

the cave and looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his

knees drawn up. His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was

bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy’s; one of his long, shapely

hands lay out on the black cloth; that was all one could see of him.

Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,

making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.

Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Ántonia

and Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward, and kept

saying something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down, shut her eyes,

and put out her hand a little way, but she drew it back and began to

cry wildly. She was afraid to touch the bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught

her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin, but grandmother

interfered.

‘No, Mrs. Shimerda,’ she said firmly, ‘I won’t stand by and see that

child frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you

want of her. Let her alone.’

At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the

box, and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look

at Ántonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close

to her.

The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the

fine, icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached

the grave, it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The

men took the coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes.

We stood about watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting

on the caps and shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women.

Jelinek spoke in a persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to

grandfather.

‘She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for

him here in English, for the neighbours to understand.’

Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and

the other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still

remember it. He began, ‘Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows

what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him

and Thee.’ He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the

stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his

heart. He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and

asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children, and to

‘incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her.’ In closing, he

said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda at ‘Thy judgment seat, which is also

Thy mercy seat.’

All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black

fingers of her glove, and when he said ‘Amen,’ I thought she looked

satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, ‘Can’t you start

a hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish.’

Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her

suggestion, then began, ‘Jesus, Lover of my Soul,’ and all the men and

women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it

has made me remember that white waste and the little group of people;

and the bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:

‘While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high.’

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red

grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared

from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads

no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed

section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging

wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had

predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The

road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the

road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave,

with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island;

and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty

roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. I never came

upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot

most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent,

that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that

could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the

clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons

rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I

am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

XVII

When spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of

the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that

winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I

used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There

was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the

vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the

pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking

suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and

then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that

red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbours

burned off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the

fresh growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those

light, swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the

same kindling that was in the air.

The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbours had

helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their

old cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly

equipped to begin their struggle with the soil. They had four

comfortable rooms to live in, a new windmill—bought on credit—a

chicken-house and poultry. Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten

dollars for a milk cow, and was to give him fifteen more as soon as

they harvested their first crop.

When I rode up to the Shimerdas’ one bright windy afternoon in April,

Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading

lessons; Ántonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went

into the kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy

seeds as she worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask

me a great many questions about what our men were doing in the fields.

She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information, and

that from me she might get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked

me very craftily when grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I

told her, adding that he thought we should have a dry spring and that

the corn would not be held back by too much rain, as it had been last

year.

She gave me a shrewd glance. ‘He not Jesus,’ she blustered; ‘he not

know about the wet and the dry.

I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour

when Ambrosch and Ántonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs.

Shimerda at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she

wanted to keep warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with

feathers. I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep

it hot. When the neighbours were there building the new house, they saw

her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their

food in their featherbeds.

When the sun was dropping low, Ántonia came up the big south draw with

her team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to

us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her

fifteenth birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she

brought her horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots

her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and

his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves,

over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her

arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor’s. Her neck came up

strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf.

One sees that draught-horse neck among the peasant women in all old

countries.

She greeted me gaily, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing

she had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter,

breaking sod with the oxen.

‘Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don’t want that Jake

get more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this

fall.’

While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then

drank again, Ántonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head

on her hand.

‘You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope your

grandpa ain’t lose no stacks?’

‘No, we didn’t. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to

know if you can’t go to the term of school that begins next week over

at the sod schoolhouse. She says there’s a good teacher, and you’d

learn a lot.’

Ántonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were

stiff. ‘I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother

can’t say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can

work as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make

this land one good farm.’

She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,

feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I

wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her

silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face

from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark

prairie.

I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she

unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch

had come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the

tank.

Ántonia took my hand. ‘Sometime you will tell me all those nice things

you learn at the school, won’t you, Jimmy?’ she asked with a sudden

rush of feeling in her voice. ‘My father, he went much to school. He

know a great deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got

here. He play horn and violin, and he read so many books that the

priests in Bohemie come to talk to him. You won’t forget my father,

Jim?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will never forget him.’

Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Ántonia

had washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin

by the kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs.

Shimerda ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it.

After the mush we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with

the cake that had been kept warm in the feathers. Ántonia and Ambrosch

were talking in Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more

ploughing that day. Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she

gobbled her food.

Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: ‘You take them ox tomorrow

and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.’

His sister laughed. ‘Don’t be mad. I know it’s awful hard work for

break sod. I milk the cow for you tomorrow, if you want.’

Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. ‘That cow not give so much milk

like what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I

send him back the cow.’

‘He doesn’t talk about the fifteen dollars,’ I exclaimed indignantly.

‘He doesn’t find fault with people.’

‘He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,’ grumbled Ambrosch.

I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I

began to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable

to me. Ántonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at

the table and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached.

Grandmother had said, ‘Heavy field work’ll spoil that girl. She’ll lose

all her nice ways and get rough ones.’ She had lost them already.

After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since

winter I had seen very little of Ántonia. She was out in the fields

from sunup until sundown. If I rode over to see her where she was

ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then

gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the

furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for

me. On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day.

Grandfather was pleased with Ántonia. When we complained of her, he

only smiled and said, ‘She will help some fellow get ahead in the

world.’

Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how

much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I

knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to

do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way

about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her

beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat

and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr.

Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he

exclaimed, ‘My Ántonia!’

XVIII

After I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians.

We were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on

horseback and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very

interesting, but I somehow felt that, by making comrades of them, I was

getting even with Ántonia for her indifference. Since the father’s

death, Ambrosch was more than ever the head of the house, and he seemed

to direct the feelings as well as the fortunes of his womenfolk.

Ántonia often quoted his opinions to me, and she let me see that she

admired him, while she thought of me only as a little boy. Before the

spring was over, there was a distinct coldness between us and the

Shimerdas. It came about in this way.

One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar which

Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful

blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses

along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year’s dried

sunflower stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown

back and their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm,

sweet gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.

We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was

cleaning out the stable, and Ántonia and her mother were making garden,

off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill

tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake

asked for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar

belonged to grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for

it, flared up. ‘Now, don’t you say you haven’t got it, Ambrosch,

because I know you have, and if you ain’t a-going to look for it, I

will.’

Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the

stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he

returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used—trampled in the

dirt and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.

‘This what you want?’ he asked surlily.

Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough

stubble on his face. ‘That ain’t the piece of harness I loaned you,

Ambrosch; or, if it is, you’ve used it shameful. I ain’t a-going to

carry such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden.’

Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. ‘All right,’ he said coolly,

took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by

the belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch’s feet had

scarcely touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at

Jake’s stomach. Fortunately, Jake was in such a position that he could

dodge it. This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they

played at fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow

on the head—it sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin.

Ambrosch dropped over, stunned.

We heard squeals, and looking up saw Ántonia and her mother coming on

the run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged

through the muddy water, without even lifting their skirts. They came

on, screaming and clawing the air. By this time Ambrosch had come to

his senses and was sputtering with nosebleed.

Jake sprang into his saddle. ‘Let’s get out of this, Jim,’ he called.

Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were

going to pull down lightning. ‘Law, law!’ she shrieked after us. ‘Law

for knock my Ambrosch down!’

‘I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden,’ Ántonia panted. ‘No

friends any more!’

Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. ‘Well, you’re a damned

ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you,’ he shouted back. ‘I guess the

Burdens can get along without you. You’ve been a sight of trouble to

them, anyhow!’

We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for

us. I hadn’t a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and

trembling all over. It made him sick to get so angry.

‘They ain’t the same, Jimmy,’ he kept saying in a hurt tone. ‘These

foreigners ain’t the same. You can’t trust ‘em to be fair. It’s dirty

to kick a feller. You heard how the women turned on you—and after all

we went through on account of ‘em last winter! They ain’t to be

trusted. I don’t want to see you get too thick with any of ‘em.’

‘I’ll never be friends with them again, Jake,’ I declared hotly. ‘I

believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath.’

Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake

to ride to town tomorrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had

knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda

was inclined to make trouble—her son was still under age—she would be

forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to

market the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after

Jake had started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving

by, looking neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight

down the Black Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather

expected she would follow the matter up.

Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for

that purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in

town that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had

to sell his pig to pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas

great satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and

I met Ántonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road

with her work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a

spiteful, crowing voice:

‘Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!’

Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia’s behaviour. He only

lifted his brows and said, ‘You can’t tell me anything new about a

Czech; I’m an Austrian.’

Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the

Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Ántonia always greeted him respectfully, and he

asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He

thought the future looked hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing

fellow; he soon realized that his oxen were too heavy for any work

except breaking sod, and he succeeded in selling them to a newly

arrived German. With the money he bought another team of horses, which

grandfather selected for him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him

hard; but he could never teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The

one idea that had ever got through poor Marek’s thick head was that all

exertion was meritorious. He always bore down on the handles of the

cultivator and drove the blades so deep into the earth that the horses

were soon exhausted.

In June, Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy’s for a week, and took

Marek with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second

cultivator; she and Ántonia worked in the fields all day and did the

chores at night. While the two women were running the place alone, one

of the new horses got colic and gave them a terrible fright.

Ántonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well

before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was

swollen about the middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted

another horse, without waiting to saddle him, and hammered on our door

just as we were going to bed. Grandfather answered her knock. He did

not send one of his men, but rode back with her himself, taking a

syringe and an old piece of carpet he kept for hot applications when

our horses were sick. He found Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with

her lantern, groaning and wringing her hands. It took but a few moments

to release the gases pent up in the poor beast, and the two women heard

the rush of wind and saw the roan visibly diminish in girth.

‘If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden,’ Ántonia exclaimed, ‘I never stay

here till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before

morning.’

When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy’s, we learned that he had given

Marek’s wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for Masses for their

father’s soul. Grandmother thought Ántonia needed shoes more than Mr.

Shimerda needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, ‘If he can

spare six dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he

professes.’

It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the

Shimerdas. One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so

well, he thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July.

He would need more men, and if it were agreeable to everyone he would

engage Ambrosch for the reaping and threshing, as the Shimerdas had no

small grain of their own.

‘I think, Emmaline,’ he concluded, ‘I will ask Ántonia to come over and

help you in the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something, and it

will be a good time to end misunderstandings. I may as well ride over

this morning and make arrangements. Do you want to go with me, Jim?’

His tone told me that he had already decided for me.

After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming,

she ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she

did not want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied

his horse, and we followed her.

Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been

grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal,

pulled up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to

hide the cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and

dark, the cow held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at

her hind quarters, trying to spank her into the drawside.

Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.

‘Good morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find

Ambrosch? Which field?’

‘He with the sod corn.’ She pointed toward the north, still standing in

front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.

‘His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter,’ said grandfather

encouragingly. ‘And where is Ántonia?’

‘She go with.’ Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about

nervously in the dust.

‘Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me

cut my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good morning.

By the way, Mrs. Shimerda,’ he said as he turned up the path, ‘I think

we may as well call it square about the cow.’

She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not

understand, grandfather turned back. ‘You need not pay me anything

more; no more money. The cow is yours.’

‘Pay no more, keep cow?’ she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow

eyes snapping at us in the sunlight.

‘Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow.’ He nodded.

Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and, crouching down

beside grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had

ever been so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too.

Somehow, that seemed to bring the Old World very close.

We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: ‘I expect she thought we

had come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she

wouldn’t have scratched a little if we’d laid hold of that lariat

rope!’

Our neighbours seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.

Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted.

She presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, ‘Now you

not come any more for knock my Ambrosch down?’

Jake laughed sheepishly. ‘I don’t want to have no trouble with

Ambrosch. If he’ll let me alone, I’ll let him alone.’

‘If he slap you, we ain’t got no pig for pay the fine,’ she said

insinuatingly.

Jake was not at all disconcerted. ‘Have the last word ma’m,’ he said

cheerfully. ‘It’s a lady’s privilege.’

XIX

July came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the

plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It

seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the

stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured

cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green. If all

the great plain from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains had been under

glass, and the heat regulated by a thermometer, it could not have been

better for the yellow tassels that were ripening and fertilizing the

silk day by day. The cornfields were far apart in those times, with

miles of wild grazing land between. It took a clear, meditative eye

like my grandfather’s to foresee that they would enlarge and multiply

until they would be, not the Shimerdas’ cornfields, or Mr. Bushy’s, but

the world’s cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great

economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the

activities of men, in peace or war.

The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,

secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little

to fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the

wheatfields that they did not notice the heat—though I was kept busy

carrying water for them—and grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do

in the kitchen that they could not have told whether one day was hotter

than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass,

Ántonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for

dinner. Grandmother made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we

reached the garden she threw it on the grass and let her hair fly in

the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads of

perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like a little moustache.

‘Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!’ she used to

sing joyfully. ‘I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a

man. I like to be like a man.’ She would toss her head and ask me to

feel the muscles swell in her brown arm.

We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive

that one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with

pans. Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Ántonia

worked for us.

All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The

harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the

house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat

lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt

frame of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a

beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut

grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when

the dishes were washed, Ántonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof

of the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and

metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in

great zigzags across the heavens, making everything stand out and come

close to us for a moment. Half the sky was chequered with black

thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning

flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on

it; and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the

quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction. Great warm

splashes of rain fell on our upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger

than a little boat, drifted out into the clear space unattended, and

kept moving westward. All about us we could hear the felty beat of the

raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard. Grandmother came to the

door and said it was late, and we would get wet out there.

‘In a minute we come,’ Ántonia called back to her. ‘I like your

grandmother, and all things here,’ she sighed. ‘I wish my papa live to

see this summer. I wish no winter ever come again.’

‘It will be summer a long while yet,’ I reassured her. ‘Why aren’t you

always nice like this, Tony?’

‘How nice?’

‘Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be

like Ambrosch?’

She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky.

‘If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for

you. But they will be hard for us.’