My Ántonia
mother. Mrs. Thomas says she thinks I can move to some other town
pretty soon, and go into business for myself. If I don’t get into
business, I’ll maybe marry a rich gambler.’
‘That would be a poor way to get on,’ said Anna sarcastically. ‘I wish
I could teach school, like Selma Kronn. Just think! She’ll be the first
Scandinavian girl to get a position in the high school. We ought to be
proud of her.’
Selma was a studious girl, who had not much tolerance for giddy things
like Tiny and Lena; but they always spoke of her with admiration.
Tiny moved about restlessly, fanning herself with her straw hat. ‘If I
was smart like her, I’d be at my books day and night. But she was born
smart—and look how her father’s trained her! He was something high up
in the old country.’
‘So was my mother’s father,’ murmured Lena, ‘but that’s all the good it
does us! My father’s father was smart, too, but he was wild. He married
a Lapp. I guess that’s what’s the matter with me; they say Lapp blood
will out.’
‘A real Lapp, Lena?’ I exclaimed. ‘The kind that wear skins?’
‘I don’t know if she wore skins, but she was a Lapps all right, and his
folks felt dreadful about it. He was sent up North on some government
job he had, and fell in with her. He would marry her.’
‘But I thought Lapland women were fat and ugly, and had squint eyes,
like Chinese?’ I objected.
‘I don’t know, maybe. There must be something mighty taking about the
Lapp girls, though; mother says the Norwegians up North are always
afraid their boys will run after them.’
In the afternoon, when the heat was less oppressive, we had a lively
game of ‘Pussy Wants a Corner,’ on the flat bluff-top, with the little
trees for bases. Lena was Pussy so often that she finally said she
wouldn’t play any more. We threw ourselves down on the grass, out of
breath.
‘Jim,’ Ántonia said dreamily, ‘I want you to tell the girls about how
the Spanish first came here, like you and Charley Harling used to talk
about. I’ve tried to tell them, but I leave out so much.’
They sat under a little oak, Tony resting against the trunk and the
other girls leaning against her and each other, and listened to the
little I was able to tell them about Coronado and his search for the
Seven Golden Cities. At school we were taught that he had not got so
far north as Nebraska, but had given up his quest and turned back
somewhere in Kansas. But Charley Harling and I had a strong belief that
he had been along this very river. A farmer in the county north of
ours, when he was breaking sod, had turned up a metal stirrup of fine
workmanship, and a sword with a Spanish inscription on the blade. He
lent these relics to Mr. Harling, who brought them home with him.
Charley and I scoured them, and they were on exhibition in the Harling
office all summer. Father Kelly, the priest, had found the name of the
Spanish maker on the sword and an abbreviation that stood for the city
of Cordova.
‘And that I saw with my own eyes,’ Ántonia put in triumphantly. ‘So Jim
and Charley were right, and the teachers were wrong!’
The girls began to wonder among themselves. Why had the Spaniards come
so far? What must this country have been like, then? Why had Coronado
never gone back to Spain, to his riches and his castles and his king? I
couldn’t tell them. I only knew the schoolbooks said he ‘died in the
wilderness, of a broken heart.’
‘More than him has done that,’ said Ántonia sadly, and the girls
murmured assent.
We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The
curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red
as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the
stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the
willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze
sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and
somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless,
leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their
foreheads.
Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was
going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the
red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black
figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet,
straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On
some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun
was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the
horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained
within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black
against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing
on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball
dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The
fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten
plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.
XV
Late in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving
Ántonia in charge of the house. Since the scandal about the Swedish
girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife to stir out of Black Hawk
without him.
The day after the Cutters left, Ántonia came over to see us.
Grandmother noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. ‘You’ve
got something on your mind, Ántonia,’ she said anxiously.
‘Yes, Mrs. Burden. I couldn’t sleep much last night.’ She hesitated,
and then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went
away. He put all the silver in a basket and placed it under her bed,
and with it a box of papers which he told her were valuable. He made
her promise that she would not sleep away from the house, or be out
late in the evening, while he was gone. He strictly forbade her to ask
any of the girls she knew to stay with her at night. She would be
perfectly safe, he said, as he had just put a new Yale lock on the
front door.
Cutter had been so insistent in regard to these details that now she
felt uncomfortable about staying there alone. She hadn’t liked the way
he kept coming into the kitchen to instruct her, or the way he looked
at her. ‘I feel as if he is up to some of his tricks again, and is
going to try to scare me, somehow.’
Grandmother was apprehensive at once. ‘I don’t think it’s right for you
to stay there, feeling that way. I suppose it wouldn’t be right for you
to leave the place alone, either, after giving your word. Maybe Jim
would be willing to go over there and sleep, and you could come here
nights. I’d feel safer, knowing you were under my own roof. I guess Jim
could take care of their silver and old usury notes as well as you
could.’
Ántonia turned to me eagerly. ‘Oh, would you, Jim? I’d make up my bed
nice and fresh for you. It’s a real cool room, and the bed’s right next
the window. I was afraid to leave the window open last night.’
I liked my own room, and I didn’t like the Cutters’ house under any
circumstances; but Tony looked so troubled that I consented to try this
arrangement. I found that I slept there as well as anywhere, and when I
got home in the morning, Tony had a good breakfast waiting for me.
After prayers she sat down at the table with us, and it was like old
times in the country.
The third night I spent at the Cutters’, I awoke suddenly with the
impression that I had heard a door open and shut. Everything was still,
however, and I must have gone to sleep again immediately.
The next thing I knew, I felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed.
I was only half awake, but I decided that he might take the Cutters’
silver, whoever he was. Perhaps if I did not move, he would find it and
get out without troubling me. I held my breath and lay absolutely
still. A hand closed softly on my shoulder, and at the same moment I
felt something hairy and cologne-scented brushing my face. If the room
had suddenly been flooded with electric light, I couldn’t have seen
more clearly the detestable bearded countenance that I knew was bending
over me. I caught a handful of whiskers and pulled, shouting something.
The hand that held my shoulder was instantly at my throat. The man
became insane; he stood over me, choking me with one fist and beating
me in the face with the other, hissing and chuckling and letting out a
flood of abuse.
‘So this is what she’s up to when I’m away, is it? Where is she, you
nasty whelp, where is she? Under the bed, are you, hussy? I know your
tricks! Wait till I get at you! I’ll fix this rat you’ve got in here.
He’s caught, all right!’
So long as Cutter had me by the throat, there was no chance for me at
all. I got hold of his thumb and bent it back, until he let go with a
yell. In a bound, I was on my feet, and easily sent him sprawling to
the floor. Then I made a dive for the open window, struck the wire
screen, knocked it out, and tumbled after it into the yard.
Suddenly I found myself running across the north end of Black Hawk in
my night-shirt, just as one sometimes finds one’s self behaving in bad
dreams. When I got home, I climbed in at the kitchen window. I was
covered with blood from my nose and lip, but I was too sick to do
anything about it. I found a shawl and an overcoat on the hat-rack, lay
down on the parlour sofa, and in spite of my hurts, went to sleep.
Grandmother found me there in the morning. Her cry of fright awakened
me. Truly, I was a battered object. As she helped me to my room, I
caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My lip was cut and stood out
like a snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was
swollen shut and hideously discoloured. Grandmother said we must have
the doctor at once, but I implored her, as I had never begged for
anything before, not to send for him. I could stand anything, I told
her, so long as nobody saw me or knew what had happened to me. I
entreated her not to let grandfather, even, come into my room. She
seemed to understand, though I was too faint and miserable to go into
explanations. When she took off my night-shirt, she found such bruises
on my chest and shoulders that she began to cry. She spent the whole
morning bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me with arnica. I heard
Ántonia sobbing outside my door, but I asked grandmother to send her
away. I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost
as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this
disgustingness. Grandmother kept saying how thankful we ought to be
that I had been there instead of Ántonia. But I lay with my disfigured
face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was
that grandmother should keep everyone away from me. If the story once
got abroad, I would never hear the last of it. I could well imagine
what the old men down at the drugstore would do with such a theme.
While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable, grandfather went
to the depot and learned that Wick Cutter had come home on the night
express from the east, and had left again on the six o’clock train for
Denver that morning. The agent said his face was striped with
court-plaster, and he carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so
used up, that the agent asked him what had happened to him since ten
o’clock the night before; whereat Cutter began to swear at him and said
he would have him discharged for incivility.
That afternoon, while I was asleep, Ántonia took grandmother with her,
and went over to the Cutters’ to pack her trunk. They found the place
locked up, and they had to break the window to get into Ántonia’s
bedroom. There everything was in shocking disorder. Her clothes had
been taken out of her closet, thrown into the middle of the room, and