My Ántonia
‘Yes, I know. But mother won’t hold it against her if she behaves well
here. You needn’t say anything about that to the children. I guess Jim
has heard all that gossip?’
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow.
We were good friends, Frances and I.
I ran home to tell grandmother that Lena Lingard had come to town. We
were glad of it, for she had a hard life on the farm.
Lena lived in the Norwegian settlement west of Squaw Creek, and she
used to herd her father’s cattle in the open country between his place
and the Shimerdas’. Whenever we rode over in that direction we saw her
out among her cattle, bareheaded and barefooted, scantily dressed in
tattered clothing, always knitting as she watched her herd. Before I
knew Lena, I thought of her as something wild, that always lived on the
prairie, because I had never seen her under a roof. Her yellow hair was
burned to a ruddy thatch on her head; but her legs and arms, curiously
enough, in spite of constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous
whiteness which somehow made her seem more undressed than other girls
who went scantily clad. The first time I stopped to talk to her, I was
astonished at her soft voice and easy, gentle ways. The girls out there
usually got rough and mannish after they went to herding. But Lena
asked Jake and me to get off our horses and stay awhile, and behaved
exactly as if she were in a house and were accustomed to having
visitors. She was not embarrassed by her ragged clothes, and treated us
as if we were old acquaintances. Even then I noticed the unusual colour
of her eyes—a shade of deep violet—and their soft, confiding
expression.
Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large
family. Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and
sisters, and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted
that she was a good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been
talked about. She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little
sense he had—and that at an age when she should still have been in
pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement. He
was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit with
him. After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife, ‘Crazy
Mary,’ tried to set a neighbour’s barn on fire, and was sent to the
asylum at Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months, then escaped
and walked all the way home, nearly two hundred miles, travelling by
night and hiding in barns and haystacks by day. When she got back to
the Norwegian settlement, her poor feet were as hard as hoofs. She
promised to be good, and was allowed to stay at home—though everyone
realized she was as crazy as ever, and she still ran about barefooted
through the snow, telling her domestic troubles to her neighbours.
Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane,
who was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard’s
oldest girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no more
sense than his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn that
summer, he used to get discouraged in the field, tie up his team, and
wander off to wherever Lena Lingard was herding. There he would sit
down on the drawside and help her watch her cattle. All the settlement
was talking about it. The Norwegian preacher’s wife went to Lena and
told her she ought not to allow this; she begged Lena to come to church
on Sundays. Lena said she hadn’t a dress in the world any less ragged
than the one on her back. Then the minister’s wife went through her old
trunks and found some things she had worn before her marriage.
The next Sunday Lena appeared at church, a little late, with her hair
done up neatly on her head, like a young woman, wearing shoes and
stockings, and the new dress, which she had made over for herself very
becomingly. The congregation stared at her. Until that morning no
one—unless it were Ole—had realized how pretty she was, or that she was
growing up. The swelling lines of her figure had been hidden under the
shapeless rags she wore in the fields. After the last hymn had been
sung, and the congregation was dismissed, Ole slipped out to the
hitch-bar and lifted Lena on her horse. That, in itself, was shocking;
a married man was not expected to do such things. But it was nothing to
the scene that followed. Crazy Mary darted out from the group of women
at the church door, and ran down the road after Lena, shouting horrible
threats.
‘Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out! I’ll come over with a corn-knife
one day and trim some of that shape off you. Then you won’t sail round
so fine, making eyes at the men!...’
The Norwegian women didn’t know where to look. They were formal
housewives, most of them, with a severe sense of decorum. But Lena
Lingard only laughed her lazy, good-natured laugh and rode on, gazing
back over her shoulder at Ole’s infuriated wife.
The time came, however, when Lena didn’t laugh. More than once Crazy
Mary chased her across the prairie and round and round the Shimerdas’
cornfield. Lena never told her father; perhaps she was ashamed; perhaps
she was more afraid of his anger than of the corn-knife. I was at the
Shimerdas’ one afternoon when Lena came bounding through the red grass
as fast as her white legs could carry her. She ran straight into the
house and hid in Ántonia’s feather-bed. Mary was not far behind: she
came right up to the door and made us feel how sharp her blade was,
showing us very graphically just what she meant to do to Lena. Mrs.
Shimerda, leaning out of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and
was sorry when Ántonia sent Mary away, mollified by an apronful of
bottle-tomatoes. Lena came out from Tony’s room behind the kitchen,
very pink from the heat of the feathers, but otherwise calm. She begged
Ántonia and me to go with her, and help get her cattle together; they
were scattered and might be gorging themselves in somebody’s cornfield.
‘Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes
at married men,’ Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.
Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. ‘I never made anything to him with
my eyes. I can’t help it if he hangs around, and I can’t order him off.
It ain’t my prairie.’
V
After Lena came To Black Hawk, I often met her downtown, where she
would be matching sewing silk or buying ‘findings’ for Mrs. Thomas. If
I happened to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she
was helping to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with
Tiny Soderball at the hotel on Saturday nights.
The Boys’ Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and
all the commercial travellers in that territory tried to get into Black
Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlour after supper on
Saturday nights. Marshall Field’s man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the
piano and sang all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped
the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the
double doors between the parlour and the dining-room, listening to the
music and giggling at the jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped
I would be a travelling man when I grew up. They had a gay life of it;
nothing to do but ride about on trains all day and go to theatres when
they were in big cities. Behind the hotel there was an old store
building, where the salesmen opened their big trunks and spread out
their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk merchants went to look at
these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas, though she was ‘retail
trade,’ was permitted to see them and to ‘get ideas.’ They were all
generous, these travelling men; they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs
and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and so many bottles of
perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on
Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and her
funny, square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the
drugstore, gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah’s Arks
arranged in the frosty show window. The boy had come to town with a
neighbour to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own
this year. He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of
sweeping out the Norwegian church and making the fire in it every
Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been, too!
We went into Duckford’s dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his
presents and showed them to me -- something for each of the six younger
than himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of
Tiny Soderball’s bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he
would get some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he
hadn’t much money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out
for view at Duckford’s. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the
corner, because he had never seen any before. He studied them
seriously, while Lena looked over his shoulder, telling him she thought
the red letters would hold their colour best. He seemed so perplexed
that I thought perhaps he hadn’t enough money, after all. Presently he
said gravely:
‘Sister, you know mother’s name is Berthe. I don’t know if I ought to
get B for Berthe, or M for Mother.’
Lena patted his bristly head. ‘I’d get the B, Chrissy. It will please
her for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now.’
That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds
and three blues. When the neighbour came in to say that it was time to
start, Lena wound Chris’s comforter about his neck and turned up his
jacket collar—he had no overcoat—and we watched him climb into the
wagon and start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the
windy street, Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woollen glove.
‘I get awful homesick for them, all the same,’ she murmured, as if she
were answering some remembered reproach.
VI
Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens
that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw
closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green
tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than
when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind,
I couldn’t see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate
to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it
was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in
the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on
the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh,
with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: ‘This is reality, whether
you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and
shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they
were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’ It was
as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.
If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the
post-office for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the
cigar-stand, it would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun
was gone; the frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the
lights were shining pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the
suppers cooking as I passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of
them was hurrying toward a fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were
like magnets. When one passed an old man, one could see nothing of his