My Ántonia
how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did
not stop until the ground itself stopped—fell away before us so
abruptly that the next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We
stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and
bushes that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my
hat on, and the girls’ skirts were blown out before them. Ántonia
seemed to like it; she held her little sister by the hand and chattered
away in that language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly
than mine. She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she
could not say.
‘Name? What name?’ she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her
my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She
pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and
said again, ‘What name?’
We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like
a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Ántonia pointed up to the
sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was
not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the
word, making it sound like ‘ice.’ She pointed up to the sky, then to my
eyes, then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that
she distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her
knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her
head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.
‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, ‘blue; blue sky.’
She clapped her hands and murmured, ‘Blue sky, blue eyes,’ as if it
amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind, she learned a
score of words. She was alive, and very eager. We were so deep in the
grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold
tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Ántonia had
said the new words over and over, she wanted to give me a little chased
silver ring she wore on her middle finger. When she coaxed and
insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I didn’t want her ring, and I
felt there was something reckless and extravagant about her wishing to
give it away to a boy she had never seen before. No wonder Krajiek got
the better of these people, if this was how they behaved.
While we were disputing ‘about the ring, I heard a mournful voice
calling, ‘Ántonia, Ántonia!’ She sprang up like a hare. ‘Tatinek!
Tatinek!’ she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming
toward us. Ántonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When
I came up, he touched my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my
face for several seconds. I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used
to being taken for granted by my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother’s hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, ‘Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Ántonia!’
IV
On the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my
pony, under Otto’s direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week
to the post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good
deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbours. When we had to
borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at
the sod schoolhouse, I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs
attended to such things after working hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no
fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass
uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed
the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness
to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the
members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah,
scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long
trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had
the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm
Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those
plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and
sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for
the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed
soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung
curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I
went south to visit our German neighbours and to admire their catalpa
grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in
the earth and had a hawk’s nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in
that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we
used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were
persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny
landscape that made detail so precious.
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown
earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Ántonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We
had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking
about. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls,
which were quite defenceless against them; took possession of their
comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the
owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and
disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who
would live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town
was a long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen
populous dog-towns in the desert where there was no surface water for
fifty miles; he insisted that some of the holes must go down to
water—nearly two hundred feet, hereabouts. Ántonia said she didn’t
believe it; that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early
morning, like the rabbits.
Ántonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make
them known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to
have her reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized
it was important that one member of the family should learn English.
When the lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch
behind the garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we
lifted out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our
fingers. The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched
them with curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts
had set in, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the
Shimerdas were famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles
along the edge of the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.
Ántonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about
cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her
every movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a
good housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new
conditions: the conditions were bad enough, certainly!
I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she gave
her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin
peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the
paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of
the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let
this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this
sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could
talk or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man
and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him
in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and
the brown owls house the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to
get rid of him.
V
We knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbours, but the two
girls were lighthearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the
prairie, scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.
I remember Ántonia’s excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: ‘My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much
talk. Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh.
Everybody laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawntree.
Oh, very nice!’
I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding
in that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was
a little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country—farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of
all the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two
men were the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were
unpronounceable, so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about
making signs to people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no
friends. Krajiek could understand them a little, but he had cheated
them in a trade, so they avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to
be an anarchist; since he had no means of imparting his opinions,
probably his wild gesticulations and his generally excited and
rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition. He must once have been
a very strong man, but now his great frame, with big, knotty joints,
had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn tight over his high
cheekbones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always had a cough.
Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,
bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met
people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to everyone, men as
well as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man;
his hair and beard were of such a pale flaxen colour that they seemed
white in the sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy
face, with its snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among
its leaves. He was usually called ‘Curly Peter,’ or ‘Rooshian Peter.’
The two Russians made good farm-hands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbours laughing when they told how Peter
always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor
homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to
church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on
a low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet
tucked apologetically under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost
every evening, and sometimes took Ántonia with him. She said they came
from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from
Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them