My Ántonia
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