My Ántonia
ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He
looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A
long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a
sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown
as an Indian’s. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked
about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I
saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his
feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better
be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were
tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other
was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on
the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo
hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we
followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I
soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard
bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my
knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing
to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was
a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was
nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which
countries are made. No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating,
I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went
down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the
feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge
of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked
up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it.
But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did
not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up
there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the
creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had
left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I
knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived
anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt
erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt,
what would be would be.
II
I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.
When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely
larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was
flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin
and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my
grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my
eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my
bed.
‘Had a good sleep, Jimmy?’ she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, ‘My, how you do look like your
father!’ I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must
often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. ‘Here are your
clean clothes,’ she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand
as she talked. ‘But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and
have a nice warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s
nobody about.’
‘Down to the kitchen’ struck me as curious; it was always ‘out in the
kitchen’ at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement.
This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs
and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and
whitewashed—the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used
to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden
ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of
geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the
kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove
was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a
long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which
grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and
towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help. ‘Can
you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right
smart little boy.’
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
‘Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!’ Then she came
laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry
her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew
older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often
thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and
energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill,
and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly
desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her
laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a
lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong
woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It
was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.
Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they
came in from work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on the
wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat—he caught
not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow
sunlight on the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and
grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the
new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbours.
We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for
so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were
all seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old place
and about our friends and neighbours there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and
spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him.
The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard
of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He
had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a
young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances
at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had
led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow
outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain
pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a
while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north
of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to
me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but
he was a ‘perfect gentleman,’ and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me
everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He
promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his
‘chaps’ and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best
cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design—roses, and true-lover’s
knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were
angels.
Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room
for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read
several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so
interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters
in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word ‘Selah.’
‘He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved. Selah.’ I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had
not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of
words.
Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk—until you
came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our
neighbours lived in sod houses and dugouts—comfortable, but not very
roomy. Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the
basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with
the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground
sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This
slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by
the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw, was
a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The
road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the
farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to
climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along
the western sky-line it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any
field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the
barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye
could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it
as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to
look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant
against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over
them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the
water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the
colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed
up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed,
somehow, to be running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did
not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with
copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said,
was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy