My Antonia E-book

                              1918
                           MY ANTONIA

                         by Willa Cather









Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                              Dedication
                                  To
                        Carrie and Irene Miner
                 In memory of affections old and true


                               Epigraph
                      Optima dies... prima fugit
                                Virgil


                             Introduction


  Last summer, in a season of intense heat, Jim Burden and I happened
to be crossing Iowa on the same train. He and I are old friends, we
grew up together in the same Nebraska town, and we had a great deal to
say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles
of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak
groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the
woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything.
The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We
were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little
towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes
of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy
beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in
the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery
winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and
grey as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a
little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of
freemasonry, we said.
  Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much
of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western
railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is
one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife.
She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems
unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her
husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth
while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of
advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives
her own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.
  As for Jim, disappointments have not changed him. The romantic
disposition which often made him seem very funny as a boy, has been
one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal
passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches.
His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part
in its development.
  During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept
returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known
long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our
childhood. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her
again after long years, and had renewed a friendship that meant a
great deal to him. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see
her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.
  "From time to time I've been writing down what I remember about
Antonia," he told me. "On my long trips across the country, I amuse
 myself like that, in my stateroom."
  When I told him that I would like to read his account of her, he
said I should certainly see it- if it were ever finished.
  Months afterward, Jim called at my apartment one stormy winter
afternoon, carrying a legal portfolio. He brought it into the sitting-
room with him, and said, as he stood warming his hands,
  "Here is the thing about Antonia. Do you still want to read it? I
finished it last night. I didn't take time to arrange it; I simply
wrote down pretty much all that her name recalls to me. I suppose it
hasn't any form. It hasn't any title, either." He went into the next
room, sat down at my desk and wrote across the face of the portfolio
"Antonia." He frowned at this moment, then prefixed another word,
making it "My Antonia." That seemed to satisfy him.



                                Book I
                            The Shimerdas


                                  I


  I FIRST heard of Antonia *001 on what seemed to me an interminable
journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten
years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year,
and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who
lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake
Marpole, one of the "hands" on my father's old farm under the Blue
Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake's
experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never
been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to
try our fortunes in a new world.
  We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy
with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys
offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and
for me a (r)Life of Jesse James, which I remember as one of the most
satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the
protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the
country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in
exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and
worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he
threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the
rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he
belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and
he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.
  Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car
ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was
the same as ours.
  "They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and
all she can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older
than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new
dollar. Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the
pretty brown eyes, too!"
  This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled
down to (r)Jesse James. Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you
were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
  I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the
long day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had
crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very
noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long,
Nebraska.
  I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while
when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We
stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were
running about with lanterns. I couldn't see any town, or even distant
lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting
heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group
of people stood huddled together on the platform, encumbered by
bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the
conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl tied over
her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it
as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two
half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth bundles, and a
little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man with a
lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I
pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever
 heard a foreign tongue.
  Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello,
are you Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for.
I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out.
Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?"
  I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light. He
might have stepped out of the pages of (r)Jesse James. He wore a
sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the
ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He
looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A
long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in
a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was
brown as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he
walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our
trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and
light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us,
and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two
 farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one
of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto
Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered
up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty
darkness, and we followed them.
  I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and
I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a
hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on
my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be
nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If
there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight.
There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out
of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land- slightly
undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake
as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.
I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over
the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never
before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain
ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there
was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were
watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the
sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the
mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was
homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between
that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my
prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.



                                  II


  I DO NOT remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime
before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-
horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room,
scarcely larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my
head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled
brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she
must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I
opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the
foot of my bed.
  "Had a good sleep, Jimmy?" she asked briskly. Then in a very
different tone she said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like
your father!" I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she
must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. "Here
are your clean clothes," she went on, stroking my coverlid with her
brown hand as she talked. "But first you come down to the kitchen with
me, and have a nice warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things;
 there's nobody about."
  "Down to the kitchen" struck me as curious; it was always "out in
the kitchen" at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed
her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a
basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of
the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and
whitewashed- the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it
used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the
wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and
pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered
the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The
stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it
there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub,
into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the
soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without
help.
  "Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a
right smart little boy."
  It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-
water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and
rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I
scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I
called anxiously, "Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!"
Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were
shooing chickens.
  She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to
carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she
were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I
grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so
often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and
energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill,
and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was
exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and
decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but
there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years
old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
  After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It
was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented,
with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went.
Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they
 came in from work.
  While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on the
wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat- he
caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of
yellow sunlight on the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and
grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of
the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest
neighbours. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been
her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields,
and we were all seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about
the old place and about our friends and neighbours there.
  My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and
spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him.
The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful,
crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like
the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more
impressive.
  Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were
white and regular- so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his
life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When
he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were
still coppery.
  As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert
glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting
supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy
and had led an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and
cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain
pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a
while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north
of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
  The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper
to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a
sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad
tricks, but he was a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude. Fuchs
told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a
Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso.
He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out
his "chaps" and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best
cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design- roses, and true-
lover's knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly
explained, were angels.
  Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-
room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read
several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so
interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters
in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word
"Selah." "He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of
Jacob whom He loved. Selah." I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the
most sacred of words.
  Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had
been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk-
until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several.
Our neighbours lived in sod houses and dugouts- comfortable, but not
very roomy. Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above
the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard,
with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the
ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards.
This slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding
gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the
shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes
growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by our
door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond
which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the
west. There, along the western sky-line it skirted a great cornfield,
much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the
sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight.
Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but
 rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.
  North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-
set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already
turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I
had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were
insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about
to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-
house.
  As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the
water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the
colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first
washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country
seemed, somehow, to be running.
  I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out,
her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I
did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
  The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the
house, and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with
copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said,
was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a
heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on
her way back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road
was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.
  I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked
beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early
September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still
with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape;
in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as
if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds
of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping....
  Alone, I should never have found the garden- except, perhaps, for
the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering
vines- and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I
wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of
the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me
told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky
were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun
and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which
sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. While
grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing in one of the rows
and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of the soft brown earth
and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the hawks that were
doing what I might so easily do.
  When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up
there in the garden awhile.
  She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Aren't you afraid
of snakes?"
  "A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay, anyhow."
  "Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big
yellow and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to
keep the gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of
that hole in the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as
big as a big 'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He
takes a chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In
a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him
come out and watch me when I'm at work."
  Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went
down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the
windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend, she waved at me
and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness
and content.
  I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full
of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected
the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as
big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried
vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in
the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could
hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the
tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled
it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in
slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with
black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not
expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and
felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I
was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a
part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and
knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into
something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as
naturally as sleep.



                                 III


  ON SUNDAY morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the
acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbours. We were taking them some
provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there was
no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought
up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and
grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter,
and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered
up to the front seat and jolted off past the little pond and along the
road that climbed to the big cornfield.
  I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there
was only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high
wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a
wild thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were
wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the
sunflowers grew; some of them were as big as little trees, with great
rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They
made a gold ribbon across the prairie. Occasionally one of the horses
would tear off with his teeth a plant full of blossoms, and walk along
munching it, the flowers nodding in time to his bites as he ate down
toward them.
  The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had
bought the homestead of a fellow countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had
paid him more than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made
before they left the old country, through a cousin of his, who was
also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first
Bohemian family to come to this part of the county. Krajiek was their
only interpreter, and could tell them anything he chose. They could
not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most
pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs said, was well-grown, and strong
enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew
nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled
workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. He had brought his
fiddle with him, which wouldn't be of much use here, though he used to
pick up money by it at home.
  "If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter
in that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a
badger hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay
twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."
  "Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old
horses for the price of good workteams. I'd have interfered about the
horses- the old man can understand some German- if I'd 'a' thought it
would do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."
  Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"
  Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It
would take me a long while to explain."
  The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching
Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and
made the land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the
broken, grassy clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream,
and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew
down in the ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and
the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like the gold
and silver trees in fairy tales.
  As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing
but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots
hanging out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one
of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-
coloured grass that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered
windmill frame, that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie
our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the draw-
bank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out
and looked up at us hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind
them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk
fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black
Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was
alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little eyes. She shook
 grandmother's hand energetically.
  "Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to
the bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house
no good!"
  Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable
after while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."
  My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if
they were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly
intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of
bread and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively
curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good, much thank!"- and again she wrung
grandmother's hand.
  The oldest son, Ambroz- they called it Ambrosch- came out of the
cave and stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and
broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face.
His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly
and suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been
living on corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.
  The little girl was pretty, but An-tonia- they accented the name
thus, strongly, when they spoke to her- was still prettier. I
remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes. They were big
and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the
wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of
rich, dark colour. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The
little sister, whom they called Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed
mild and obedient. While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls,
Krajiek came up from the barn to see what was going on. With him was
another Shimerda son. Even from a distance one could see that there
was something strange about this boy. As he approached us, he began to
make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to show us his fingers,
which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's foot. When he
saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-
hoo!" like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly, "Marek!"
then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.
  "She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was
born like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer."
He struck Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.
  At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore
no hat, and his thick, iron-grey hair was brushed straight back from
his forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and
made him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was
tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us
understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I
noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked
calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set
back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked
like ashes- like something from which all the warmth and light had
died out. Everything about this old man was in keeping with his
dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a
knitted grey vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark
bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pin.
While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me
and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the
steep drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.
  When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I
pointed toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to
tell me 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.
Antonia 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. Antonia 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 quick, 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 Antonia
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, "An-tonia, An-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare. (r)"Tatinek!
Tatinek!" she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming
toward us. Antonia 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
An-tonia!"



                                  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. Antonia 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. Antonia said she didn't
believe it; that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early
morning, like the rabbits.
  Antonia 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.
  Antonia 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 Antonia'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 kawn-tree.
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 Antonia 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 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
Antonia 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 Antonia, 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 Antonia 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
horse-pond 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 Antonia'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 Antonia 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
Antonia with a wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her
something. She turned to me.
  "My (r)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 faraway look that always
made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke
kindly and gravely, and Antonia translated:
  "My (r)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 Antonia'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. Antonia and her father went off hand in hand,
and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.



                                 VII


  MUCH as I liked Antonia, 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 Antonia 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, Antonia 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 underground. Before the mouths of the holes were little
patches of sand and gravel, scratched up, we supposed, from a long way
below the surface. Here and there, in the town, we came on larger
gravel patches, several yards away from any hole. If the dogs had
scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried it so far?
It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.
  We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped
into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two
corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little
highway over which much travel went. I was walking backward, in a
crouching position, when I heard Antonia scream. She was standing
opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I
whirled round, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the
biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold
night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I
turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter "W." He
twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I
thought- he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his
loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting
vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I
didn't run because I didn't think of it- if my back had been against a
stone wall I couldn't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils
tighten- now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran
up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the
neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck
now from hate. Antonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even
after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and
winding, doubling and falling back on itself. I walked away and turned
my back. I felt seasick.
  Antonia came after me, crying, "O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure?
Why you not run when I say?"
  "What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a
snake behind me!" I said petulantly.
  "I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared." She took my
handkerchief from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I
snatched it away from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.
  "I never know you was so brave, Jim," she went on comfortingly. "You
is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go
for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and
show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like
you kill."
  She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed
for this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went
back to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his
ugly belly in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a
thread of green liquid oozed from his crushed head.
  "Look, Tony, that's his poison," I said.
  I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his
head with the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out
straight and measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a
half feet long. He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before
they began to taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-
four. I explained to Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four
years old, that he must have been there when white men first came,
left on from buffalo and Indian times. As I turned him over, I began
to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his age and size.
He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly his kind have left
horrible unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life. When we
dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off to the end of his
tether and shivered all over- wouldn't let us come near him.
  We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As
she rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's
sides, she kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody
would be. I followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my
snake. Her exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked
to me so big and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was
equal to them all. Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now
and then to see that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my
quarry, was racing up from the rear.
  The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw
toward the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting
on the edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper.
Antonia called him to come quick and look. He did not say anything for
a minute, but scratched his head and turned the snake over with his
boot.
  "Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?"
  "Up at the dog-town," I answered laconically.
  "Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?"
  "We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch."
  Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. "It was just luck you had a tool," he said cautiously. "Gosh!
I wouldn't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I
had a fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more
than tickle him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could.
Did he fight hard?"
  Antonia broke in: "He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's
boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake
like he was crazy."
  Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: "Got him in the
head first crack, didn't you? That was just as well."
  We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen,
I found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story
with a great deal of colour.
  Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first
encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and
had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had
probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast
whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed,
perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn't owe rattlers a
living. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any
boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was
fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I
had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and
lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.
  That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler
ever killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me
better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with
me again. I had killed a big snake- I was now a big fellow.



                                 VIII


  WHILE the autumn colour was growing pale on the grass and
cornfields, things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter
told his troubles to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which
fell due on the first of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on
renewing it, and to give a mortgage on his pigs and horses and even
his milk cow. His creditor was Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk
money-lender, a man of evil name throughout the county, of whom I
shall have more to say later. Peter could give no very clear account
of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew that he had first
borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then fifty- that
each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew faster
than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with mortgages.
  Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting
timbers for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a
gush of blood from the lungs that his fellow workmen thought he would
die on the spot. They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and
there he lay, very ill indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an
evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there,
warning human beings away. The Russians had such bad luck that people
were afraid of them and liked to put them out of mind.
  One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low.
Just as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad,
he said, and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had
come to fetch them. When Antonia and her father got into the wagon, I
entreated grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go
without my supper, I would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home
in the morning. My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she
was often large-minded about humouring the desires of other people.
She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when she came back from the
kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches and doughnuts for us.
  Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I sat in
the straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun
sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn
in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We
burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the
angry red die out of the west and the stars begin to shine in the
clear, windy sky. Peter kept sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to
me that he was afraid Pavel would never get well. We lay still and did
not talk. Up there the stars grew magnificently bright. Though we had
come from such different parts of the world, in both of us there was
some dusky superstition that those shining groups have their influence
upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps Russian Peter, come from
farther away than any of us, had brought from his land, too, some such
belief.
  The little house on the hillside was so much the colour of the night
that we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows
guided us- the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp
burning.
  We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony
and I sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the
table in front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that
supported the thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he
breathed, and he kept moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and
windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big
spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off
like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or
of ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then
went moaning on. Presently, in one of those sobbing intervals between
the blasts, the coyotes tuned up with their whining howl; one, two,
three, then all together- to tell us that winter was coming. This
sound brought an answer from the bed- a long complaining cry- as if
Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some old misery. Peter
listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor by the kitchen
stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap- then the high
whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.
  "He is scared of the wolves," Antonia whispered to me. "In his
country there are very many, and they eat men and women." We slid
closer together along the bench.
  I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was
hanging open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle,
rose and fell horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet,
caught up the teakettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The
sharp smell 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, Antonia 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," Antonia 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.
Antonia'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 Antonia 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 cook-stove 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 Antonia 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 cabinet-
maker 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 Antonia
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. Antonia 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 Antonia 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, as if they would never have any life in them
again. The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before, now
stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind had the burning taste of
fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if someone had opened a
hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same time delighted one.
My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we stopped he smoked
all over. The cornfields got back a little of their colour under the
dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and
snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the
actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind.
  The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept
shivering beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth.
But they were so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their
mother's scolding that they begged me to go on and on, as far as
Russian Peter's house. The great fresh open, after the stupefying
warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things. They laughed and
shouted, and said they never wanted to go home again. Couldn't we
settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked, and
couldn't I go to town and buy things for us to keep house with?
  All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when
we turned back- it must have been about four o'clock- the east wind
grew stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and
the sky became grey and sombre. I took off my long woollen comforter
and wound it around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her
hide her head under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I
held the reins clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good
deal of the time. It was growing dark when we got to their house, but
I refused to go in with them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache
terribly if I went near a fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my
comforter, and I had to drive home directly against the wind. The next
day I came down with an attack of quinsy, which kept me in the house
for nearly two weeks.
  The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days-
like a tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the
fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long
caps pulled down over their ears and their feet in red-lined
overshoes, I used to think they were like Arctic explorers. In the
afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making husking-
gloves, I read (r)The Swiss Family Robinson aloud to her, and I felt
that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an
adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is
the cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went
about keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded
me, when she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this
country was not like Virginia; and that here a cook had, as she said,
"very little to do with." On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we
could eat, and on other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She
baked either pies or cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she
made my favourite pudding, striped with currants and boiled in a bag.
  Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the
most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centred
around warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used
to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb
and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so
conscientiously: feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and
look after the pigs. When supper was over, it took them a long while
to get the cold out of their bones. While grandmother and I washed the
dishes and grandfather read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on
the long bench behind the stove, "easing" their inside boots, or
rubbing mutton tallow into their cracked hands.
  Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs
used to sing, "For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong," or, "Bury
Me Not on the Lone Prairee." He had a good baritone voice and always
led the singing when we went to church services at the sod school-
house.
  I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-
clipped head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet
comb. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the
whitewashed wall. What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and
how many things they had kept faith with!
  Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for
it. Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his
name with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made
him behave like a crazy man- tore him all to pieces and actually made
him ill. But he was so soft-hearted that anyone could impose upon him.
If he, as he said, "forgot himself" and swore before grandmother, he
went about depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them
jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready
to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride
with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who
never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or
two a day.
  On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that
fed us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes
howling down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to
remind the boys of wonderful animal stories; about grey wolves and
bears in the Rockies, wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains.
Sometimes Fuchs could be persuaded to talk about the outlaws and
desperate characters he had known. I remember one funny story about
himself that made grandmother, who was working her bread on the bread-
board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with her bare arm, her hands
being floury. It was like this:
  When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of
his relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat,
to join her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two
children, but it was clear that her family might grow larger on the
journey. Fuchs said he "got on fine with the kids," and liked the
mother, though she played a sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she
proceeded to have not one baby, but three! This event made Fuchs the
object of undeserved notoriety, since he was travelling with her. The
steerage stewardess was indignant with him, the doctor regarded him
with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who made up a purse for
the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and often enquired
of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken ashore at New
York, he had, as he said, "to carry some of them." The trip to Chicago
was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very
difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean.
The mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources,
could feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a
furniture factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the
station he was rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to
consider Fuchs in some fashion to blame. "I was sure glad," Otto
concluded, "that he didn't take his hard feeling out on that poor
woman; but he had a sullen eye for me, all right! Now, did you ever
hear of a young feller's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?"
  Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these
things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he
didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence.




                                  X


  FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the
Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold
which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad
to have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen
Mr. Shimerda out hunting.
  "He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar
that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat
among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful
scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
  "All but the crazy boy," Jake put in. "He never wears the coat.
Krajiek says he's turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess
rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along
by the cornfield yesterday where I was at work and showed me three
prairie dogs he'd shot. He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit
and made a face and took on, to scare him, but he just looked like he
was smarter'n me and put 'em back in his sack and walked off."
  Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. "Josiah,
you don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie
dogs, do you?"
  "You had better go over and see our neighbours tomorrow, Emmaline,"
he replied gravely.
  Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts
and ought to be good for food, but their family connections were
against them. I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they
belonged to the rat family.
  When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake
packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
  "Now, Jake," grandmother was saying, "if you can find that old
rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll
take him along. There's no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn't have
got hens from her neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by
now. I reckon she was confused and didn't know where to begin. I've
come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens are a
good thing to have, no matter what you don't have."
  "Just as you say, ma'm," said Jake, "but I hate to think of Krajiek
getting a leg of that old rooster." He tramped out through the long
cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him.

  After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and
climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the
Shimerdas', we heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her
head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her
weight on the pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon,
looked back over her shoulder, and, catching up her pail of water,
started at a run for the hole in the bank.
  Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the
provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the
icy path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke
came from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but
the wind whisked them roughly away.
  Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized
grandmother's hand. She did not say "How do!" as usual, but at once
began to cry, talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her
feet which were tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at
everyone.
  The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over
as if he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his
feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but,
glancing up at her mother, hid again. Antonia was washing pans and
dishes in a dark corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window,
stretched on a gunny-sack stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered,
he threw a grain-sack over the crack at the bottom of the door. The
air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too. A lighted
lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a feeble yellow glimmer.
  Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the 
overs 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 Antonia 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 (r)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, Antonia? 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 Antonia!"
  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 (r)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 (r)would you sleep, dear! I
don't doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after while,
Antonia, 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
Antonia'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 Antonia 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.
  Antonia 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 Antonia 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."
  Antonia 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 Antonia; 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 a group of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held
by the black slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking
tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its
branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge.
We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake's
pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
  I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table
in the lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that
his face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the
savage scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his
twisted moustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they
were; their very roughness and violence made them defenceless. These
boys had no practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold
people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the
world with. Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened
labourers who never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so
fond of children!



                                 XII


  ON CHRISTMAS morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were
just coming in from their morning chores- the horses and pigs always
had their breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted "Merry
Christmas!" to me, and winked at each other when they saw the waffle
irons on the stove. Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and
his Sunday coat. Morning prayers were longer than usual. He read the
chapters from Saint Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as we
listened, it all seemed like something that had happened lately, and
near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the Lord for the first
Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the world ever since. He
gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the poor and
destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than
it was here with us. Grandfather's prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because
he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not
worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was
thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we
got to know his feelings and his views about things.
  After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how
pleased the Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was
friendly and went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It
was a soft grey day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky,
and occasional squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done
about the barn on holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon.
Then Jake and I played dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home
to his mother. He always wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no
matter where he was, and no matter how long it had been since his last
letter. All afternoon he sat in the dining-room. He would write for a
while, then sit idle, his clenched fist lying on the table, his eyes
following the pattern of the oilcloth. He spoke and wrote his own
language so seldom that it came to him awkwardly. His effort to
remember entirely absorbed him.
  At about four o'clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He
had come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother's
kindness to his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and
we sat about the stove, enjoying the deepening grey of the winter
afternoon and the atmosphere of comfort and security in my
grandfather's house. This feeling seemed completely to take possession
of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the crowded clutter of their cave, the
old man had come to believe that peace and order had vanished from the
earth, or existed only in the old world he had left so far behind. He
sat still and passive, his head resting against the back of the wooden
rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His face had a look of
weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when they feel relief
from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass of Virginia
apple-brandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint flush
came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a
shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled
rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter
content.
  As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree
before the lamp was brought. When the candle-ends sent up their
conical yellow flames, all the coloured figures from Austria stood out
clear and full of meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose,
crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk
forward. His long body formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look
apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious
matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people's feelings. There had
been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with some one
kneeling before it- images, candles... Grandfather merely put his
finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus
Protestantizing the atmosphere.
  We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little
urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked
to look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his
deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead
into the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
  At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on
his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the
lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he
took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said
slowly, "Good wo-man!" He made the sign of the cross over me, put on
his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-
room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. "The prayers of all good
people are good," he said quietly.



                                 XIII


  THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's
Day all the world about us was a broth of grey slush, and the guttered
slope between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The
soft black earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed
all my chores, carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the
afternoons at the barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
  One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her
mother rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit.
It was the first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran
about examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while
commenting upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone.
In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the
stove and said: "You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-
minded of grandmother to give the pot to her.
  After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said,
tossing her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things
like you, I make much better."
  She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could
not humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward
Antonia and listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was
not well.
  "My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make
music any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and
for dance. Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no.
Some days he take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers
on the strings, like this, but never he make the music. He don't like
this kawn-tree."
  "People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said
severely. "We don't make them come here."
  "He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My (r)mamenka make
him come. All the time she say: 'America big country; much money, much
land for my boys, much husband for my girls.' My papa, he cry for
leave his old friends what make music with him. He love very much the
man what play the long horn like this"- she indicated a slide
trombone. "They go to school together and are friends from boys. But
my mama, she want Ambrosch for be rich, with many cattle."
  "Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
  "Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help
my papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is
very smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
  Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs.
Shimerda and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly
with them and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother
had everything their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more
than she did anyone else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
  After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their
miserable horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to
grandmother, who had taken up her darning, and said I hoped that
snooping old woman wouldn't come to see us any more.
  Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in
Otto's