My Ántonia
He seemed to be trying to pout, but his attempt only brought out
dimples in unusual places. After twisting and screwing the keys, he
played some Bohemian airs, without the organ to hold him back, and that
went better. The boy was so restless that I had not had a chance to
look at his face before. My first impression was right; he really was
faun-like. He hadn’t much head behind his ears, and his tawny fleece
grew down thick to the back of his neck. His eyes were not frank and
wide apart like those of the other boys, but were deep-set, gold-green
in colour, and seemed sensitive to the light. His mother said he got
hurt oftener than all the others put together. He was always trying to
ride the colts before they were broken, teasing the turkey gobbler,
seeing just how much red the bull would stand for, or how sharp the new
axe was.
After the concert was over, Ántonia brought out a big boxful of
photographs: she and Anton in their wedding clothes, holding hands; her
brother Ambrosch and his very fat wife, who had a farm of her own, and
who bossed her husband, I was delighted to hear; the three Bohemian
Marys and their large families.
‘You wouldn’t believe how steady those girls have turned out,’ Ántonia
remarked. ‘Mary Svoboda’s the best butter-maker in all this country,
and a fine manager. Her children will have a grand chance.’
As Ántonia turned over the pictures the young Cuzaks stood behind her
chair, looking over her shoulder with interested faces. Nina and Jan,
after trying to see round the taller ones, quietly brought a chair,
climbed up on it, and stood close together, looking. The little boy
forgot his shyness and grinned delightedly when familiar faces came
into view. In the group about Ántonia I was conscious of a kind of
physical harmony. They leaned this way and that, and were not afraid to
touch each other. They contemplated the photographs with pleased
recognition; looked at some admiringly, as if these characters in their
mother’s girlhood had been remarkable people. The little children, who
could not speak English, murmured comments to each other in their rich
old language.
Ántonia held out a photograph of Lena that had come from San Francisco
last Christmas. ‘Does she still look like that? She hasn’t been home
for six years now.’ Yes, it was exactly like Lena, I told her; a comely
woman, a trifle too plump, in a hat a trifle too large, but with the
old lazy eyes, and the old dimpled ingenuousness still lurking at the
corners of her mouth.
There was a picture of Frances Harling in a befrogged riding costume
that I remembered well. ‘Isn’t she fine!’ the girls murmured. They all
assented. One could see that Frances had come down as a heroine in the
family legend. Only Leo was unmoved.
‘And there’s Mr. Harling, in his grand fur coat. He was awfully rich,
wasn’t he, mother?’
‘He wasn’t any Rockefeller,’ put in Master Leo, in a very low tone,
which reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had once said that
my grandfather ‘wasn’t Jesus.’ His habitual scepticism was like a
direct inheritance from that old woman.
‘None of your smart speeches,’ said Ambrosch severely.
Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke into
a giggle at a tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated, with an
awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them: Jake and
Otto and I! We had it taken, I remembered, when we went to Black Hawk
on the first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska. I was glad to see
Jake’s grin again, and Otto’s ferocious moustaches. The young Cuzaks
knew all about them. ‘He made grandfather’s coffin, didn’t he?’ Anton
asked.
‘Wasn’t they good fellows, Jim?’ Ántonia’s eyes filled. ‘To this day
I’m ashamed because I quarrelled with Jake that way. I was saucy and
impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with people sometimes, and I wish
somebody had made me behave.’
‘We aren’t through with you, yet,’ they warned me. They produced a
photograph taken just before I went away to college: a tall youth in
striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look easy and jaunty.
‘Tell us, Mr. Burden,’ said Charley, ‘about the rattler you killed at
the dog-town. How long was he? Sometimes mother says six feet and
sometimes she says five.’
These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with Ántonia
as the Harling children had been so many years before. They seemed to
feel the same pride in her, and to look to her for stories and
entertainment as we used to do.
It was eleven o’clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and
started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with
us, and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the
corral and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of
the pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.
The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down
before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into
the stars. Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a hay-cave, back under the
eaves, and lay giggling and whispering. They tickled each other and
tossed and tumbled in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had
been shot, they were still. There was hardly a minute between giggles
and bland slumber.
I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my
window on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Ántonia and her
children; about Anna’s solicitude for her, Ambrosch’s grave affection,
Leo’s jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came
tumbling out of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have
come far to see. Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the
mind that did not fade—that grew stronger with time. In my memory there
was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of
one’s first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of
my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her
black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father’s grave in the
snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening
sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we
recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken.
She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that
something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath
for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in
common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on
a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the
goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong
things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in
serving generous emotions.
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich
mine of life, like the founders of early races.
II
When I awoke in the morning, long bands of sunshine were coming in at
the window and reaching back under the eaves where the two boys lay.
Leo was wide awake and was tickling his brother’s leg with a dried
cone-flower he had pulled out of the hay. Ambrosch kicked at him and
turned over. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Leo lay on
his back, elevated one foot, and began exercising his toes. He picked
up dried flowers with his toes and brandished them in the belt of
sunlight. After he had amused himself thus for some time, he rose on
one elbow and began to look at me, cautiously, then critically,
blinking his eyes in the light. His expression was droll; it dismissed
me lightly. ‘This old fellow is no different from other people. He
doesn’t know my secret.’ He seemed conscious of possessing a keener
power of enjoyment than other people; his quick recognitions made him
frantically impatient of deliberate judgments. He always knew what he
wanted without thinking.
After dressing in the hay, I washed my face in cold water at the
windmill. Breakfast was ready when I entered the kitchen, and Yulka was
baking griddle-cakes. The three older boys set off for the fields
early. Leo and Yulka were to drive to town to meet their father, who
would return from Wilber on the noon train.
‘We’ll only have a lunch at noon,’ Ántonia said, and cook the geese for
supper, when our papa will be here. I wish my Martha could come down to
see you. They have a Ford car now, and she don’t seem so far away from
me as she used to. But her husband’s crazy about his farm and about
having everything just right, and they almost never get away except on
Sundays. He’s a handsome boy, and he’ll be rich some day. Everything he
takes hold of turns out well. When they bring that baby in here, and
unwrap him, he looks like a little prince; Martha takes care of him so
beautiful. I’m reconciled to her being away from me now, but at first I
cried like I was putting her into her coffin.’
We were alone in the kitchen, except for Anna, who was pouring cream
into the churn. She looked up at me. ‘Yes, she did. We were just
ashamed of mother. She went round crying, when Martha was so happy, and
the rest of us were all glad. Joe certainly was patient with you,
mother.’
Ántonia nodded and smiled at herself. ‘I know it was silly, but I
couldn’t help it. I wanted her right here. She’d never been away from
me a night since she was born. If Anton had made trouble about her when
she was a baby, or wanted me to leave her with my mother, I wouldn’t
have married him. I couldn’t. But he always loved her like she was his
own.’
‘I didn’t even know Martha wasn’t my full sister until after she was
engaged to Joe,’ Anna told me.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, the wagon drove in, with the father
and the eldest son. I was smoking in the orchard, and as I went out to
meet them, Ántonia came running down from the house and hugged the two
men as if they had been away for months.
‘Papa,’ interested me, from my first glimpse of him. He was shorter
than his older sons; a crumpled little man, with run-over boot-heels,
and he carried one shoulder higher than the other. But he moved very
quickly, and there was an air of jaunty liveliness about him. He had a
strong, ruddy colour, thick black hair, a little grizzled, a curly
moustache, and red lips. His smile showed the strong teeth of which his
wife was so proud, and as he saw me his lively, quizzical eyes told me
that he knew all about me. He looked like a humorous philosopher who
had hitched up one shoulder under the burdens of life, and gone on his
way having a good time when he could. He advanced to meet me and gave
me a hard hand, burned red on the back and heavily coated with hair. He
wore his Sunday clothes, very thick and hot for the weather, an
unstarched white shirt, and a blue necktie with big white dots, like a
little boy’s, tied in a flowing bow. Cuzak began at once to talk about
his holiday—from politeness he spoke in English.
‘Mama, I wish you had see the lady dance on the slack-wire in the
street at night. They throw a bright light on her and she float through
the air something beautiful, like a bird! They have a dancing bear,
like in the old country, and two-three merry-go-around, and people in
balloons, and what you call the big wheel, Rudolph?’
‘A Ferris wheel,’ Rudolph entered the conversation in a deep baritone
voice. He was six foot two, and had a chest like a young blacksmith.
‘We went to the big dance in the hall behind the saloon last night,
mother, and I danced with all the girls, and so did father. I never saw
so many pretty girls. It was a Bohunk crowd, for sure. We didn’t hear a
word of English on the street, except from the show people, did we,
papa?’
Cuzak nodded. ‘And very many send word to you, Ántonia. You will
excuse’—turning to me—‘if I tell her.’ While we walked toward the house