My Ántonia
he related incidents and delivered messages in the tongue he spoke
fluently, and I dropped a little behind, curious to know what their
relations had become—or remained. The two seemed to be on terms of easy
friendliness, touched with humour. Clearly, she was the impulse, and he
the corrective. As they went up the hill he kept glancing at her
sidewise, to see whether she got his point, or how she received it. I
noticed later that he always looked at people sidewise, as a work-horse
does at its yokemate. Even when he sat opposite me in the kitchen,
talking, he would turn his head a little toward the clock or the stove
and look at me from the side, but with frankness and good nature. This
trick did not suggest duplicity or secretiveness, but merely long
habit, as with the horse.
He had brought a tintype of himself and Rudolph for Ántonia’s
collection, and several paper bags of candy for the children. He looked
a little disappointed when his wife showed him a big box of candy I had
got in Denver—she hadn’t let the children touch it the night before. He
put his candy away in the cupboard, ‘for when she rains,’ and glanced
at the box, chuckling. ‘I guess you must have hear about how my family
ain’t so small,’ he said.
Cuzak sat down behind the stove and watched his womenfolk and the
little children with equal amusement. He thought they were nice, and he
thought they were funny, evidently. He had been off dancing with the
girls and forgetting that he was an old fellow, and now his family
rather surprised him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these
children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in
his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a
wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned
to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him
with a paper snake, gently, so as not to startle him. Looking over the
boy’s head he said to me, ‘This one is bashful. He gets left.’
Cuzak had brought home with him a roll of illustrated Bohemian papers.
He opened them and began to tell his wife the news, much of which
seemed to relate to one person. I heard the name Vasakova, Vasakova,
repeated several times with lively interest, and presently I asked him
whether he were talking about the singer, Maria Vasak.
‘You know? You have heard, maybe?’ he asked incredulously. When I
assured him that I had heard her, he pointed out her picture and told
me that Vasak had broken her leg, climbing in the Austrian Alps, and
would not be able to fill her engagements. He seemed delighted to find
that I had heard her sing in London and in Vienna; got out his pipe and
lit it to enjoy our talk the better. She came from his part of Prague.
His father used to mend her shoes for her when she was a student. Cuzak
questioned me about her looks, her popularity, her voice; but he
particularly wanted to know whether I had noticed her tiny feet, and
whether I thought she had saved much money. She was extravagant, of
course, but he hoped she wouldn’t squander everything, and have nothing
left when she was old. As a young man, working in Wienn, he had seen a
good many artists who were old and poor, making one glass of beer last
all evening, and ‘it was not very nice, that.’
When the boys came in from milking and feeding, the long table was
laid, and two brown geese, stuffed with apples, were put down sizzling
before Ántonia. She began to carve, and Rudolph, who sat next his
mother, started the plates on their way. When everybody was served, he
looked across the table at me.
‘Have you been to Black Hawk lately, Mr. Burden? Then I wonder if
you’ve heard about the Cutters?’
No, I had heard nothing at all about them.
‘Then you must tell him, son, though it’s a terrible thing to talk
about at supper. Now, all you children be quiet, Rudolph is going to
tell about the murder.’
‘Hurrah! The murder!’ the children murmured, looking pleased and
interested.
Rudolph told his story in great detail, with occasional promptings from
his mother or father.
Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on living in the house that Ántonia
and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be
very old people. He shrivelled up, Ántonia said, until he looked like a
little old yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe of hair never
changed colour. Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had
known her, but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking
palsy which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her
hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure china, poor
woman! As the couple grew older, they quarrelled more and more often
about the ultimate disposition of their ‘property.’ A new law was
passed in the state, securing the surviving wife a third of her
husband’s estate under all conditions. Cutter was tormented by the fear
that Mrs. Cutter would live longer than he, and that eventually her
‘people,’ whom he had always hated so violently, would inherit. Their
quarrels on this subject passed the boundary of the close-growing
cedars, and were heard in the street by whoever wished to loiter and
listen.
One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and
bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that he
‘thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.’
(Here the children interrupted Rudolph’s narrative by smothered
giggles.)
Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practised
for an hour or so, and then went home. At six o’clock that evening,
when several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to
supper, they heard a pistol shot. They paused and were looking
doubtfully at one another, when another shot came crashing through an
upstairs window. They ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on
a sofa in his upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open, bleeding on
a roll of sheets he had placed beside his head.
‘Walk in, gentlemen,’ he said weakly. ‘I am alive, you see, and
competent. You are witnesses that I have survived my wife. You will
find her in her own room. Please make your examination at once, so that
there will be no mistake.’
One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others went
into Mrs. Cutter’s room. She was lying on her bed, in her night-gown
and wrapper, shot through the heart. Her husband must have come in
while she was taking her afternoon nap and shot her, holding the
revolver near her breast. Her night-gown was burned from the powder.
The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes and
said distinctly, ‘Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am
conscious. My affairs are in order.’ Then, Rudolph said, ‘he let go and
died.’
On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o’clock that
afternoon. It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she
might secretly have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant
to shoot himself at six o’clock and would, if he had strength, fire a
shot through the window in the hope that passersby might come in and
see him ‘before life was extinct,’ as he wrote.
‘Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?’ Ántonia
turned to me after the story was told. ‘To go and do that poor woman
out of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone!’
‘Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr.
Burden?’ asked Rudolph.
I admitted that I hadn’t. Every lawyer learns over and over how strong
a motive hate can be, but in my collection of legal anecdotes I had
nothing to match this one. When I asked how much the estate amounted
to, Rudolph said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.
Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance. ‘The lawyers, they got a
good deal of it, sure,’ he said merrily.
A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been
scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself had died
for in the end!
After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat down by
the windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it were my business
to know it.
His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he, being a
younger son, was apprenticed to the latter’s trade. You never got
anywhere working for your relatives, he said, so when he was a
journeyman he went to Vienna and worked in a big fur shop, earning good
money. But a young fellow who liked a good time didn’t save anything in
Vienna; there were too many pleasant ways of spending every night what
he’d made in the day. After three years there, he came to New York. He
was badly advised and went to work on furs during a strike, when the
factories were offering big wages. The strikers won, and Cuzak was
blacklisted. As he had a few hundred dollars ahead, he decided to go to
Florida and raise oranges. He had always thought he would like to raise
oranges! The second year a hard frost killed his young grove, and he
fell ill with malaria. He came to Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton
Jelinek, and to look about. When he began to look about, he saw
Ántonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl he had always been
hunting for. They were married at once, though he had to borrow money
from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.
‘It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first
crops grow,’ he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled
hair. ‘Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but
my wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along
pretty fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she
was right, all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty
dollars an acre then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another
quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys;
we can work a lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She
ain’t always so strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a
little too much beer in town, and when I come home she don’t say
nothing. She don’t ask me no questions. We always get along fine, her
and me, like at first. The children don’t make trouble between us, like
sometimes happens.’ He lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.
I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many
questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the
Ringstrasse and the theatres.
‘Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm
the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I
pretty near run away,’ he confessed with a little laugh. ‘I never did
think how I would be a settled man like this.’
He was still, as Ántonia said, a city man. He liked theatres and
lighted streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day’s work
was over. His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct.
He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the
excitement of the crowd.—Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a
farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world.
I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by the
windmill, nursing his pipe and listening to the silence; the wheeze of
the pump, the grunting of the pigs, an occasional squawking when the
hens were disturbed by a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had
been made the instrument of Ántonia’s special mission. This was a fine
life, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of life he had wanted to live.
I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for
two!
I asked Cuzak if he didn’t find it hard to do without the gay company
he had always been used to. He knocked out his pipe against an upright,
sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.