My Ántonia
for me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a
windlass well beside the door. As we rode up the draw, we skirted a big
melon patch, and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about
on the sod. We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a
washtub. He was working so hard that he did not hear us coming. His
whole body moved up and down as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight
from the rear, with his shaggy head and bandy legs. When he
straightened himself up to greet us, drops of perspiration were rolling
from his thick nose down onto his curly beard. Peter dried his hands
and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us down to see his
chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He told Ántonia
that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any man could
have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for Pavel, who
was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream with a
wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks and
talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it
in a new place.
After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons
up the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off
somewhere helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable
for two men who were ‘batching.’ Besides the kitchen, there was a
living-room, with a wide double bed built against the wall, properly
made up with blue gingham sheets and pillows. There was a little
storeroom, too, with a window, where they kept guns and saddles and
tools, and old coats and boots. That day the floor was covered with
garden things, drying for winter; corn and beans and fat yellow
cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in the house, and all
the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies and sunshine
alike.
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood
over them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly
into them, they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He
gave us knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon
swimming with juice and seeds. I had never seen anyone eat so many
melons as Peter ate. He assured us that they were good for one—better
than medicine; in his country people lived on them at this time of
year. He was very hospitable and jolly. Once, while he was looking at
Ántonia, he sighed and told us that if he had stayed at home in Russia
perhaps by this time he would have had a pretty daughter of his own to
cook and keep house for him. He said he had left his country because of
a ‘great trouble.’
When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something
that would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a
gaudily painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat
legs apart began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very
lively or very doleful, and he sang words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda
and gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard
of cooking cucumbers, but Ántonia assured me they were very good. We
had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
VI
One afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy
bank where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there
was a shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horsepond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of
slimy green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the
full blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by
this time. That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our
friend the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a
special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she
said, went down into the hole after the badger and killed him there in
a terrific struggle underground; you could hear the barks and yelps
outside. Then the dog dragged himself back, covered with bites and
scratches, to be rewarded and petted by his master. She knew a dog who
had a star on his collar for every badger he had killed.
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up
all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a
game of some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the
grass were all dead—all but one. While we were lying there against the
warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped
painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of
bluestem. He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between
his long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for
something to come and finish him. Tony made a warm nest for him in her
hands; talked to him gaily and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he
began to sing for us—a thin, rusty little chirp. She held him close to
her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were tears in
her eyes. She told me that in her village at home there was an old
beggar woman who went about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in
the forest. If you took her in and gave her a warm place by the fire,
she sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this. Old
Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see her coming and
saved their cakes and sweets for her.
When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow
shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill
came on quickly when the sun got low, and Ántonia’s dress was thin.
What were we to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to
life by false pretences? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head
and carefully put the green insect in her hair, tying her big
handkerchief down loosely over her curls. I said I would go with her
until we could see Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home. We drifted
along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late
afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them.
As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in
sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the
day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and
threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned
with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of
victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died
young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of
day.
How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie
under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted
before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and
nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of
the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging
his feet along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake
him.
‘My papa sick all the time,’ Tony panted as we flew. ‘He not look good,
Jim.’
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and
peered about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it
against her cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse
the old man from the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag
from his belt and showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at
Ántonia with a wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her
something. She turned to me.
‘My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for winter!’
she exclaimed joyfully. ‘Meat for eat, skin for hat’—she told off these
benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and
lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of
old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his
fingers, and stood looking down at the green insect. When it began to
chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,
short and heavy, with a stag’s head on the cock. When he saw me
examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made
me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and
gravely, and Ántonia translated:
‘My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine,
from Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you
not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play
for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you.’
I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.
Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she
expected substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly
silence, while the feeble minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on
with its scratchy chirp. The old man’s smile, as he listened, was so
full of sadness, of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.
As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of
earth and drying grass. Ántonia and her father went off hand in hand,
and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.
VII
Much as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes
took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen
more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented
her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat
me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading
lessons. This change came about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Ántonia starting off
on foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had
been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and
heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled,
hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown,
rattling, burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and
get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas
melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the
spade, Ántonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog-town and dig
into one of the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight
down, or were horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground
connections; whether the owls had nests down there, lined with
feathers. We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snakeskins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but grey and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if
the town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that
an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I
picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for
a hole that would be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens
of them, sitting up on their hind legs over the doors of their houses.
As we approached, they barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried