My Ántonia
downtown on Saturday afternoon, and learned that she and Tiny and Lena
were going to the river next day with Anna Hansen—the elder was all in
bloom now, and Anna wanted to make elderblow wine.
‘Anna’s to drive us down in the Marshalls’ delivery wagon, and we’ll
take a nice lunch and have a picnic. Just us; nobody else. Couldn’t you
happen along, Jim? It would be like old times.’
I considered a moment. ‘Maybe I can, if I won’t be in the way.’
On Sunday morning I rose early and got out of Black Hawk while the dew
was still heavy on the long meadow grasses. It was the high season for
summer flowers. The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides,
and the cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere. Across the wire
fence, in the long grass, I saw a clump of flaming orange-coloured
milkweed, rare in that part of the state. I left the road and went
around through a stretch of pasture that was always cropped short in
summer, where the gaillardia came up year after year and matted over
the ground with the deep, velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets. The
country was empty and solitary except for the larks that Sunday
morning, and it seemed to lift itself up to me and to come very close.
The river was running strong for midsummer; heavy rains to the west of
us had kept it full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream along the
wooded shore to a pleasant dressing-room I knew among the dogwood
bushes, all overgrown with wild grapevines. I began to undress for a
swim. The girls would not be along yet. For the first time it occurred
to me that I should be homesick for that river after I left it. The
sandbars, with their clean white beaches and their little groves of
willows and cottonwood seedlings, were a sort of No Man’s Land, little
newly created worlds that belonged to the Black Hawk boys. Charley
Harling and I had hunted through these woods, fished from the fallen
logs, until I knew every inch of the river shores and had a friendly
feeling for every bar and shallow.
After my swim, while I was playing about indolently in the water, I
heard the sound of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck downstream
and shouted, as the open spring wagon came into view on the middle
span. They stopped the horse, and the two girls in the bottom of the
cart stood up, steadying themselves by the shoulders of the two in
front, so that they could see me better. They were charming up there,
huddled together in the cart and peering down at me like curious deer
when they come out of the thicket to drink. I found bottom near the
bridge and stood up, waving to them.
‘How pretty you look!’ I called.
‘So do you!’ they shouted altogether, and broke into peals of laughter.
Anna Hansen shook the reins and they drove on, while I zigzagged back
to my inlet and clambered up behind an overhanging elm. I dried myself
in the sun, and dressed slowly, reluctant to leave that green enclosure
where the sunlight flickered so bright through the grapevine leaves and
the woodpecker hammered away in the crooked elm that trailed out over
the water. As I went along the road back to the bridge, I kept picking
off little pieces of scaly chalk from the dried water gullies, and
breaking them up in my hands.
When I came upon the Marshalls’ delivery horse, tied in the shade, the
girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which
wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each
other. The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between
the bluffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream, where their
roots were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms
were unusually luxuriant and beautiful that summer.
I followed a cattle path through the thick under-brush until I came to
a slope that fell away abruptly to the water’s edge. A great chunk of
the shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet, and the scar was
masked by elder bushes, growing down to the water in flowery terraces.
I did not touch them. I was overcome by content and drowsiness and by
the warm silence about me. There was no sound but the high, singsong
buzz of wild bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I
peeped over the edge of the bank to see the little stream that made the
noise; it flowed along perfectly clear over the sand and gravel, cut
off from the muddy main current by a long sandbar. Down there, on the
lower shelf of the bank, I saw Ántonia, seated alone under the
pagoda-like elders. She looked up when she heard me, and smiled, but I
saw that she had been crying. I slid down into the soft sand beside her
and asked her what was the matter.
‘It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,’ she said
softly. ‘We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It
always grew in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under
the bushes. In summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there
with his friend that played the trombone. When I was little I used to
go down there to hear them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear
in this country.’
‘What did they talk about?’ I asked her.
She sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t know! About music, and the
woods, and about God, and when they were young.’ She turned to me
suddenly and looked into my eyes. ‘You think, Jimmy, that maybe my
father’s spirit can go back to those old places?’
I told her about the feeling of her father’s presence I had on that
winter day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and
I was left alone in the house. I said I felt sure then that he was on
his way back to his own country, and that even now, when I passed his
grave, I always thought of him as being among the woods and fields that
were so dear to him.
Ántonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and
credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure
for him.’ After a while she said: ‘You know, Jim, my father was
different from my mother. He did not have to marry my mother, and all
his brothers quarrelled with him because he did. I used to hear the old
people at home whisper about it. They said he could have paid my mother
money, and not married her. But he was older than she was, and he was
too kind to treat her like that. He lived in his mother’s house, and
she was a poor girl come in to do the work. After my father married
her, my grandmother never let my mother come into her house again. When
I went to my grandmother’s funeral was the only time I was ever in my
grandmother’s house. Don’t that seem strange?’
While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue
sky between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming
and singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did
not come down into the shadow of the leaves. Ántonia seemed to me that
day exactly like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr.
Shimerda.
‘Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country, and I am going to the
little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it?’
‘Jim,’ she said earnestly, ‘if I was put down there in the middle of
the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the
river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember
all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick
out to trip you. I ain’t never forgot my own country.’
There was a crackling in the branches above us, and Lena Lingard peered
down over the edge of the bank.
‘You lazy things!’ she cried. ‘All this elder, and you two lying there!
Didn’t you hear us calling you?’ Almost as flushed as she had been in
my dream, she leaned over the edge of the bank and began to demolish
our flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic; she was panting
with zeal, and the perspiration stood in drops on her short, yielding
upper lip. I sprang to my feet and ran up the bank.
It was noon now, and so hot that the dogwoods and scrub-oaks began to
turn up the silvery underside of their leaves, and all the foliage
looked soft and wilted. I carried the lunch-basket to the top of one of
the chalk bluffs, where even on the calmest days there was always a
breeze. The flat-topped, twisted little oaks threw light shadows on the
grass. Below us we could see the windings of the river, and Black Hawk,
grouped among its trees, and, beyond, the rolling country, swelling
gently until it met the sky. We could recognize familiar farm-houses
and windmills. Each of the girls pointed out to me the direction in
which her father’s farm lay, and told me how many acres were in wheat
that year and how many in corn.
‘My old folks,’ said Tiny Soderball, ‘have put in twenty acres of rye.
They get it ground at the mill, and it makes nice bread. It seems like
my mother ain’t been so homesick, ever since father’s raised rye flour
for her.’
‘It must have been a trial for our mothers,’ said Lena, ‘coming out
here and having to do everything different. My mother had always lived
in town. She says she started behind in farm-work, and never has caught
up.’
‘Yes, a new country’s hard on the old ones, sometimes,’ said Anna
thoughtfully. ‘My grandmother’s getting feeble now, and her mind
wanders. She’s forgot about this country, and thinks she’s at home in
Norway. She keeps asking mother to take her down to the waterside and
the fish market. She craves fish all the time. Whenever I go home I
take her canned salmon and mackerel.’
‘Mercy, it’s hot!’ Lena yawned. She was supine under a little oak,
resting after the fury of her elder-hunting, and had taken off the
high-heeled slippers she had been silly enough to wear. ‘Come here,
Jim. You never got the sand out of your hair.’ She began to draw her
fingers slowly through my hair.
Ántonia pushed her away. ‘You’ll never get it out like that,’ she said
sharply. She gave my head a rough touzling and finished me off with
something like a box on the ear. ‘Lena, you oughtn’t to try to wear
those slippers any more. They’re too small for your feet. You’d better
give them to me for Yulka.’
‘All right,’ said Lena good-naturedly, tucking her white stockings
under her skirt. ‘You get all Yulka’s things, don’t you? I wish father
didn’t have such bad luck with his farm machinery; then I could buy
more things for my sisters. I’m going to get Mary a new coat this fall,
if the sulky plough’s never paid for!’
Tiny asked her why she didn’t wait until after Christmas, when coats
would be cheaper. ‘What do you think of poor me?’ she added; ‘with six
at home, younger than I am? And they all think I’m rich, because when I
go back to the country I’m dressed so fine!’ She shrugged her
shoulders. ‘But, you know, my weakness is playthings. I like to buy
them playthings better than what they need.’
‘I know how that is,’ said Anna. ‘When we first came here, and I was
little, we were too poor to buy toys. I never got over the loss of a
doll somebody gave me before we left Norway. A boy on the boat broke
her and I still hate him for it.’
‘I guess after you got here you had plenty of live dolls to nurse, like
me!’ Lena remarked cynically.
‘Yes, the babies came along pretty fast, to be sure. But I never
minded. I was fond of them all. The youngest one, that we didn’t any of
us want, is the one we love best now.’
Lena sighed. ‘Oh, the babies are all right; if only they don’t come in
winter. Ours nearly always did. I don’t see how mother stood it. I tell
you what, girls’—she sat up with sudden energy—‘I’m going to get my
mother out of that old sod house where she’s lived so many years. The
men will never do it. Johnnie, that’s my oldest brother, he’s wanting
to get married now, and build a house for his girl instead of his