My Ántonia
over the stove, threw out a feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door,
and made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had
been frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and, catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively
vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the
hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda’s reproaches. Then the
poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son,
hid her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no
heed to her, but called Ántonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony
left her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this
before.
‘You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad,’ she
whispered, as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things
grandmother handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of
potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
‘Haven’t you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Ántonia? This is
no place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?’
‘We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office what he throw out. We got no
potatoes, Mrs. Burden,’ Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the
door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from
behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth grey hair,
as if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean
and neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother’s arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the
room. In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much
bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got
up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a
pile of straw. The old man held the lantern. ‘Yulka,’ he said in a low,
despairing voice, ‘Yulka; my Ántonia!’
Grandmother drew back. ‘You mean they sleep in there—your girls?’ He
bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. ‘It is very cold on the floor, and this is
warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there,’ she insisted
eagerly. ‘My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in
Bohemie. See, Jim?’ She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had
built against the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. ‘Sure enough, where WOULD you sleep, dear! I don’t
doubt you’re warm there. You’ll have a better house after while,
Ántonia, and then you will forget these hard times.’
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed
his wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on
Ántonia’s shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter
translated. He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old
country; he made good wages, and his family were respected there. He
left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their
passage money was paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New
York, and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected.
By the time they paid Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and
oxen and some old farm machinery, they had very little money left. He
wished grandmother to know, however, that he still had some money. If
they could get through until spring came, they would buy a cow and
chickens and plant a garden, and would then do very well. Ambrosch and
Ántonia were both old enough to work in the fields, and they were
willing to work. But the snow and the bitter weather had disheartened
them all.
Ántonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them
in the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but
the logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had
been felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the
floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously
toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to
make his queer noises for me—to bark like a dog or whinny like a
horse—but he did not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was
always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind
that he must make up for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,
and, while Ántonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own
account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and
brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack
and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy
boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and
stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell,
very pungent, even among the other odours of that cave. She measured a
teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it
ceremoniously to grandmother.
‘For cook,’ she announced. ‘Little now; be very much when cook,’
spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to
a gallon. ‘Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat
better in my country.’
‘Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda,’ grandmother said dryly. ‘I can’t say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself.’
Ántonia undertook to explain. ‘This very good, Mrs. Burden’—she clasped
her hands as if she could not express how good—‘it make very much when
you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken,
in the gravy—oh, so good!’
All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good
Christian people could forget they were their brothers’ keepers.
‘I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where’s a body to begin, with these people? They’re wanting in
everything, and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give ‘em that, I
guess. Jimmy, here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they
are. Do you reckon that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?’
‘He’s a worker, all right, ma’m, and he’s got some ketch-on about him;
but he’s a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world;
and then, ag’in, they can be too mean.’
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package
Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that
looked like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers,
and the most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy
odour. We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
‘They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain’t dried
fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I’m afraid of ‘em. Anyhow,
I shouldn’t want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with
old clothes and goose pillows.’
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of
the chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot
the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those
little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and
treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered,
probably, in some deep Bohemian forest....
XI
During the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of
our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas
shopping. But on the twenty-first of December, the snow began to fall.
The flakes came down so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I
could not see beyond the windmill—its frame looked dim and grey,
unsubstantial like a shadow. The snow did not stop falling all day, or
during the night that followed. The cold was not severe, but the storm
was quiet and resistless. The men could not go farther than the barns
and corral. They sat about the house most of the day as if it were
Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their suspenders, plaiting
whiplashes.
On the morning of the twenty-second, grandfather announced at breakfast
that it would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas
purchases. Jake was sure he could get through on horseback, and bring
home our things in saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads
would be obliterated, and a newcomer in the country would be lost ten
times over. Anyway, he would never allow one of his horses to be put to
such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I
had wanted to get some picture books for Yulka and Ántonia; even Yulka
was able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut
squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We
bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the
dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had
files of those good old family magazines which used to publish coloured
lithographs of popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of
these. I took ‘Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine’ for my
frontispiece. On the white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and
advertising cards which I had brought from my ‘old country.’ Fuchs got
out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted
up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and roosters, which
we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to
the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather’s grey
gelding. When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a
hatchet slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which
told me he was planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched
long and eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark
spot moving on the west hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where
the sky was taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite
break through. I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to
the pond, I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree
across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me
in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a
corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper
we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the
table, looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was
about five feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread
animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted
into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the
most unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never
seen anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and
shoemaker’s wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of
brilliantly coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff
enough to stand alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by
his old mother in Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of
paper lace; there were the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the
ox and the ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and