My Ántonia
long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Ántonia work so hard and pull herself down. He said, “If you put that
in her head, you better stay home.” And after that I did.
‘Ántonia worked on through harvest and threshing, though she was too
modest to go out threshing for the neighbours, like when she was young
and free. I didn’t see much of her until late that fall when she begun
to herd Ambrosch’s cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward
the big dog-town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill,
there, and I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She
had thirty cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was
short, or she wouldn’t have brought them so far.
‘It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she
hadn’t gone too far.
‘“It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,”
she said one day, “but if I start to work, I look around and forget to
go on. It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was
playing all over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places
where my father used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I’m not going to
live very long, so I’m just enjoying every day of this fall.”
‘After the winter begun she wore a man’s long overcoat and boots, and a
man’s felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going,
and I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in
December, the snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Ántonia
driving her cattle homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round
her and she bent to face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than
usual. “Deary me,” I says to myself, “the girl’s stayed out too late.
It’ll be dark before she gets them cattle put into the corral.” I
seemed to sense she’d been feeling too miserable to get up and drive
them.
‘That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them
into the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the
kitchen, and shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without
a groan, she lay down on the bed and bore her child.
‘I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the
basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:
‘“Baby come, baby come!” she says. “Ambrosch much like devil!”
‘Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down
to a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose
and went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there
as quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do
for Ántonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account
of me. The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I
overlooked what she was doing and I said out loud: “Mrs. Shimerda,
don’t you put that strong yellow soap near that baby. You’ll blister
its little skin.” I was indignant.
‘“Mrs. Steavens,” Ántonia said from the bed, “if you’ll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you’ll see some fine soap.” That was the first word
she spoke.
‘After I’d dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He
was muttering behind the stove and wouldn’t look at it.
‘“You’d better put it out in the rain-barrel,” he says.
‘“Now, see here, Ambrosch,” says I, “there’s a law in this land, don’t
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the
world sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls
it.” I pride myself I cowed him.
‘Well I expect you’re not much interested in babies, but Ántonia’s got
on fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she’d had a ring
on her finger, and was never ashamed of it. It’s a year and eight
months old now, and no baby was ever better cared-for. Ántonia is a
natural-born mother. I wish she could marry and raise a family, but I
don’t know as there’s much chance now.’
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of
the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the
barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark
shadow against the blue sky.
IV
The next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas’. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Ántonia was shocking wheat on the southwest
quarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way
off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching
me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if
not in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.
‘I thought you’d come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens’s last
night. I’ve been looking for you all day.’
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens
said, ‘worked down,’ but there was a new kind of strength in the
gravity of her face, and her colour still gave her that look of
deep-seated health and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that
though so much had happened in her life and in mine, she was barely
twenty-four years old.
Ántonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked
toward that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the
fittest place to talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging
wire fence that shut Mr. Shimerda’s plot off from the rest of the
world. The tall red grass had never been cut there. It had died down in
winter and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and
shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her
everything: why I had decided to study law and to go into the law
office of one of my mother’s relatives in New York City; about Gaston
Cleric’s death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference it had
made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.
‘Of course it means you are going away from us for good,’ she said with
a sigh. ‘But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s
been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost
anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult
him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more
I understand him.’
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be
miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know
every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to
live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world
for something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my
little girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care
of that girl, Jim.’
I told her I knew she would. ‘Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been
away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the
world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my
mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of
you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my
tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a
part of me.’
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in
them slowly, ‘How can it be like that, when you know so many people,
and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much
people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we
were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her
about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you
think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about
old times, even the happiest people.’
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a
great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose
in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose
colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten
minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level
land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every
sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high
and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand
up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that
comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little
boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her
hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and
warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many
kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my
heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look
hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the
closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the
very bottom of my memory.
‘I’ll come back,’ I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive
darkness.
‘Perhaps you will’—I felt rather than saw her smile. ‘But even if you
don’t, you’re here, like my father. So I won’t be lonesome.’
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe
that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,
laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
BOOK V. Cuzak’s Boys
I
I told Ántonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was
twenty years before I kept my promise. I heard of her from time to
time; that she married, very soon after I last saw her, a young
Bohemian, a cousin of Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a
large family. Once when I was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from
Prague I sent Ántonia some photographs of her native village. Months
afterward came a letter from her, telling me the names and ages of her
many children, but little else; signed, ‘Your old friend, Ántonia
Cuzak.’ When I met Tiny Soderball in Salt Lake, she told me that
Ántonia had not ‘done very well’; that her husband was not a man of
much force, and she had had a hard life. Perhaps it was cowardice that
kept me away so long. My business took me West several times every
year, and it was always in the back of my mind that I would stop in
Nebraska some day and go to see Ántonia. But I kept putting it off
until the next trip. I did not want to find her aged and broken; I
really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with
many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories
are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one
again.
I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to see Ántonia at last. I was in
San Francisco two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny Soderball were in
town. Tiny lives in a house of her own, and Lena’s shop is in an
apartment house just around the corner. It interested me, after so many
years, to see the two women together. Tiny audits Lena’s accounts
occasionally, and invests her money for her; and Lena, apparently,
takes care that Tiny doesn’t grow too miserly. ‘If there’s anything I
can’t stand,’ she said to me in Tiny’s presence, ‘it’s a shabby rich
woman.’ Tiny smiled grimly and assured me that Lena would never be
either shabby or rich. ‘And I don’t want to be,’ the other agreed
complacently.
Lena gave me a cheerful account of Ántonia and urged me to make her a
visit.
‘You really ought to go, Jim. It would be such a satisfaction to her.
Never mind what Tiny says. There’s nothing the matter with Cuzak. You’d
like him. He isn’t a hustler, but a rough man would never have suited
Tony. Tony has nice children—ten or eleven of them by this time, I