My Ántonia
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