My Antonia

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

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 horsepond that morning,
and as we went through the garden we found the tall asparagus,
with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton
dress and was comfortable only when we were tucked
down on the baked earth, in the full blaze of the sun.
She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend
the badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept
a special kind of dog, with very short legs, to hunt him.
Those dogs, she said, went down into the hole after the badger
and killed him there in a terrific struggle underground;
you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches,
to be rewarded and petted by his master. She knew a dog
who had a star on his collar for every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept
starting up all about us, and dashing off down the draw as if
they were playing a game of some kind. But the little buzzing
things that lived in the grass were all dead--all but one.
While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little
insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of
the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem.
He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his
long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for
something to come and finish him. Tony made a warm nest for him
in her hands; talked to him gaily and indulgently in Bohemian.
Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty little chirp.
She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that
in her village at home there was an old beggar woman who went
about selling herbs and roots she had dug up in the forest.
If you took her in and gave her a warm place by the fire,
she sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this.
Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see her
coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.

When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow
shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill
came on quickly when the sun got low, and 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 tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for winter!'
she exclaimed joyfully. `Meat for eat, skin for hat'--she told off
these benefits on her fingers.

Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist
and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly.
I heard the name of old Hata. He untied the handkerchief,
separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking
down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly,
he listened as if it were a beautiful sound.

I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the
old country, short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock.
When he saw me examining it, he turned to me with his far-away look
that always made me feel as if I were down at the bottom of a well.
He spoke kindly and gravely, and Antonia translated:

`My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun.
Very fine, from Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich,
like what you not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house.
My papa play for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun,
and my papa give you.'

I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never
were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away
everything they had. Even the mother was always offering me things,
though I knew she expected substantial presents in return.
We stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble minstrel
sheltered in 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 kawntree 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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18