My Ántonia
of spirits went through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle
and slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had
outwitted someone. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a
contemptuous, unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised
him for being so simple and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a
whisper. He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia took
my hand under the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and
strained her ears to hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept
pointing all around his bed, as if there were things there and he
wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.
‘It’s wolves, Jimmy,’ Ántonia whispered. ‘It’s awful, what he says!’
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people
who had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but
could hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit
which fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and
held it to his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots—I
thought I had never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and
turned his face to the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay
patiently fighting for breath, like a child with croup. Ántonia’s
father uncovered one of his long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically.
From our bench we could see what a hollow case his body was. His spine
and shoulder-blades stood out like the bones under the hide of a dead
steer left in the fields. That sharp backbone must have hurt him when
he lay on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was
over. Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word
Peter got up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to
drive us home. Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long
bowed back under the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.
On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and
rattling Ántonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she
did not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for
days afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they
were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of
another village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom’s party
went over to the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the
groom’s sledge, and six sledges followed with all his relatives and
friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by
the parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it
became a supper and continued far into the night. There was much
dancing and drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said
good-bye to her and blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and
carried her out to his sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He
sprang in beside her, and Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took
the front seat. Pavel drove. The party set out with singing and the
jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom’s sledge going first. All the drivers
were more or less the worse for merry-making, and the groom was
absorbed in his bride.
The wolves were bad that winter, and everyone knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had
too much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up
and echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming
together. There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A
black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves
ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there
were hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control—he
was probably very drunk—the horses left the road, the sledge was caught
in a clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the
snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that
followed made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their
horses. The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest—all the
others carried from six to a dozen people.
Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more
terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to
check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear;
the people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who
were already lost. The little bride hid her face on the groom’s
shoulder and sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses. The road
was clear and white, and the groom’s three blacks went like the wind.
It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.
At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and
looked back. ‘There are only three sledges left,’ he whispered.
‘And the wolves?’ Pavel asked.
‘Enough! Enough for all of us.’
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him
down the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind
them a whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed.
He saw his father’s sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He
sprang up as if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him
back. It was even then too late. The black ground-shadows were already
crowding over the heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the
fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the
groom’s movement had given Pavel an idea.
They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left
out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel’s middle horse was
failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;
Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and
the horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled
up in the harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was
alone upon the familiar road. ‘They still come?’ he asked Peter.
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Twenty, thirty—enough.’
Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel
gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge.
He called to the groom that they must lighten—and pointed to the bride.
The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her
away. In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side
of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered
exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in
the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was
a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever
heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing
for early prayers.
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone
ever since. They were run out of their village. Pavel’s own mother
would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people
learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the
two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the
story followed them. It took them five years to save money enough to
come to America. They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but
they were always unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so bad, they
decided to try farming.
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and
was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and
left the country—went to be cook in a railway construction camp where
gangs of Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter’s wheelbarrow and some of his harness.
During the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted
his eyes. He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk
money-lender who held mortgages on Peter’s livestock was there, and he
bought in the sale notes at about fifty cents on the dollar. Everyone
said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner. I
did not see him do it, but this I know: after all his furniture and his
cookstove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers, when
his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his
clasp-knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter.
When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in their wagon to take Peter to
the train, they found him with a dripping beard, surrounded by heaps of
melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr.
Shimerda. When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log
house and sit there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the
winter snows penned him in his cave. For Ántonia and me, the story of
the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret
to anyone, but guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had
gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to
give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to
sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing
through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something
like Virginia.
IX
The first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world
looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that
morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields
had faded out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen
under its stiff willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over
everything and disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring
the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first
light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful
distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure
stirred me as it had never done before and seemed a good omen for the
winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard, I began to drive about the country
in a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in the
old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better
job if I hadn’t hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and
the next day I went over to take Yulka and Ántonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the
box, and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the
Shimerdas’, I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the
bottom of the draw and called. Ántonia and Yulka came running out,
wearing little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They
had heard about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They
tumbled in beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that
happened to be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white
stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the whole
world was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar
landmarks. The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only
a cleft between snowdrifts—very blue when one looked down into it. The
tree-tops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted,