My Antonia

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`Walk in, gentlemen,' he said weakly. `I am alive, you see,
and competent. You are witnesses that I have survived my wife.
You will find her in her own room. Please make your examination
at once, so that there will be no mistake.'

One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others
went into Mrs. Cutter's room. She was lying on her bed,
in her night-gown and wrapper, shot through the heart.
Her husband must have come in while she was taking her afternoon
nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her breast.
Her night-gown was burned from the powder.

The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes and
said distinctly, `Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am conscious.
My affairs are in order.' Then, Rudolph said, `he let go and died.'

On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o'clock that afternoon.
It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she might secretly
have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant to shoot himself at
six o'clock and would, if he had strength, fire a shot through the window in
the hope that passersby might come in and see him `before life was extinct,'
as he wrote.

`Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?'
Antonia turned to me after the story was told. `To go and do
that poor woman out of any comfort she might have from his money
after he was gone!'

`Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite,
Mr. Burden?' asked Rudolph.

I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer learns over and over
how strong a motive hate can be, but in my collection
of legal anecdotes I had nothing to match this one.
When I asked how much the estate amounted to, Rudolph said it
was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance. `The lawyers,
they got a good deal of it, sure,' he said merrily.

A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been
scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself
had died for in the end!

After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat
down by the windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it
were my business to know it.

His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he,
being a younger son, was apprenticed to the latter's trade.
You never got anywhere working for your relatives, he said,
so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna and worked
in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young fellow
who liked a good time didn't save anything in Vienna; there were
too many pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made
in the day. After three years there, he came to New York.
He was badly advised and went to work on furs during a strike,
when the factories were offering big wages. The strikers won,
and Cuzak was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred
dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges.
He had always thought he would like to raise oranges!
The second year a hard frost killed his young grove,
and he fell ill with malaria. He came to Nebraska
to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about.
When he began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she was
exactly the kind of girl he had always been hunting for.
They were married at once, though he had to borrow money
from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.

`It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making
the first crops grow,' he said, pushing back his hat and scratching
his grizzled hair. `Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want
to quit, but my wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies
come along pretty fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow.
I guess she was right, all right. We got this place clear now.
We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and I been offered a hundred.
We bought another quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid for.
We got plenty boys; we can work a lot of land. Yes, she is a good
wife for a poor man. She ain't always so strict with me, neither.
Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town, and when I
come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no questions.
We always get along fine, her and me, like at first.
The children don't make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.'
He lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.

I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many
questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the Ringstrasse
and the theatres.

`Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm
the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country,
I pretty near run away,' he confessed with a little laugh.
`I never did think how I would be a settled man like this.'

He was still, as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theatres and lighted
streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over.
His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct.
He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement
of the crowd.--Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm,
in one of the loneliest countries in the world.

I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by
the windmill, nursing his pipe and listening to the silence;
the wheeze of the pump, the grunting of the pigs,
an occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed by a rat.
It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument
of Antonia's special mission. This was a fine life, certainly,
but it wasn't the kind of life he had wanted to live.
I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever
right for two!

I asked Cuzak if he didn't find it hard to do without the gay
company he had always been used to. He knocked out his pipe
against an upright, sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.

`At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,' he said frankly, `but my woman
is got such a warm heart. She always make it as good for me as she could.
Now it ain't so bad; I can begin to have some fun with my boys, already!'

As we walked toward the house, Cuzak cocked his hat jauntily over one
ear and looked up at the moon. `Gee!' he said in a hushed voice,
as if he had just wakened up, `it don't seem like I am away from
there twenty-six year!'

III

AFTER DINNER THE NEXT day I said good-bye and drove
back to Hastings to take the train for Black Hawk.
Antonia and her children gathered round my buggy before I started,
and even the little ones looked up at me with friendly faces.
Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate.
When I reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back.
The group was still there by the windmill. Antonia was
waving her apron.

At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm
on the wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off
into the pasture.

`That's like him,' his brother said with a shrug. `He's a crazy kid.
Maybe he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous.
He's jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.'

I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat,
the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.

`Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up
on the Niobrara next summer,' I said. `Your father's agreed to let
you off after harvest.'

He smiled. `I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys,'
he added, blushing.

`Oh, yes, you do!' I said, gathering up my reins.

He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed
pleasure and affection as I drove away.

My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends
were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing
to me, were playing in the Harlings' big yard when I passed;
the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump
was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate.
I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with Anton Jelinek,
under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon.
While I was having my midday dinner at the hotel, I met one
of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me
up to his office and talked over the Cutter case with me.
After that, I scarcely knew how to put in the time until
the night express was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures
where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up,
and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over
the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again.
Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn;
bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could
see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me,
and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour,
I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across
the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades.
Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already
fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.
I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over little towns,
and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to take
with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet.
Even after the boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself!
I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck
to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Black
Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather's farm,
then on to the Shimerdas' and to the Norwegian settlement.
Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways
were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence
was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a
wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places
and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.

On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared--were mere
shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them.
But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find.
The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deeply that the sod had never healed over them.
They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes
where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull
that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses.
I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night
when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in
the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither.
I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in
the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness.
The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and
touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself,
and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.
For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined
for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same
road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed,
we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

THE END

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