My Antonia

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`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 woman!' 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 kawntree.'

`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, never!' she burst out. `My 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 sock. `She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old
to you. No, I wouldn't mourn if she never came again. But, you see,
a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in 'em.
It makes a woman grasping to see her children want for things.
Now read me a chapter in "The Prince of the House of David."
Let's forget the Bohemians.'

We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle
in the corral ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it
for them, and we hoped they would be ready for an early market.
One morning the two big bulls, Gladstone and Brigham Young,
thought spring had come, and they began to tease and butt
at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth
with their hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads.
Each withdrew to a far corner of his own corral, and then
they made for each other at a gallop. Thud, thud, we could
hear the impact of their great heads, and their bellowing
shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not
been dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces.
Pretty soon the fat steers took it up and began butting and
horning each other. Clearly, the affair had to be stopped.
We all stood by and watched admiringly while Fuchs rode into
the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again and again,
finally driving them apart.

The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the twentieth
of January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto
came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet.
They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:

`You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake.
They was a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.'

All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of featherbeds being emptied.
That afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought
in their tools and made two great wooden shovels with long handles.
Neither grandmother nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed
the chickens and brought in a pitiful contribution of eggs.

Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--
and the snow was still falling! There had not been such a
storm in the ten years my grandfather had lived in Nebraska.
He said at dinner that we would not try to reach the cattle--
they were fat enough to go without their corn for a day or two;
but tomorrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap so that they
could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we knew
the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably
warming each other's backs. `This'll take the bile out of 'em!'
Fuchs remarked gleefully.

At noon that day the hens had not been heard from.
After dinner Jake and Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them,
stretched their stiff arms and plunged again into the drifts.
They made a tunnel through the snow to the hen-house, with walls
so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and forth in it.
We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at
the solid lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed
the lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great cackling
and flew about clumsily, scattering down-feathers. The mottled,
pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity,
ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their ugly,
painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done just when it was time to begin them all over again!
That was a strange, unnatural sort of day.

XIV

ON THE MORNING of the twenty-second I wakened with a start.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something
had happened. I heard excited voices in the kitchen--
grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death;
perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm.

Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove
with his hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their
boots and were rubbing their woollen socks. Their clothes
and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted.
On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed reluctantly.
I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes.
Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself:
`Oh, dear Saviour!' `Lord, Thou knowest!'

Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: `Jimmy, we will not
have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do.
Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress.
Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto
went back with him. The boys have had a hard night, and you must not
bother them with questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench.
Come in to breakfast, boys.'

After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began
to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.

`No, sir,' Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather,
`nobody heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox-team, trying
to break a road, and the women-folks was shut up tight in their cave.
When Ambrosch come in, it was dark and he didn't see nothing, but the oxen
acted kind of queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--
bolted clean out of the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope
run through. He got a lantern and went back and found the old man,
just as we seen him.'

`Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. `I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble.
How could he forget himself and bring this on us!'

`I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,'
Fuchs declared. `He done everything natural. You know he was always
sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner,
and washed hisself all over after the girls had done the dishes.
Antonia heated the water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt
and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little
one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits.
He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then. He layed
down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where he always slept.
When we found him, everything was decent except'--Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated--'except what he couldn't nowise foresee.
His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt
at the neck and rolled up his sleeves.'

`I don't see how he could do it!' grandmother kept saying.

Otto misunderstood her. `Why, ma'am, it was simple enough;
he pulled the trigger with his big toe. He layed over
on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth,
then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger.
He found it all right!'

`Maybe he did,' said Jake grimly. `There's something mighty
queer about it.'

`Now what do you mean, Jake?' grandmother asked sharply.

`Well, ma'm, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I
picks it up and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my
oath it just fit the gash in the front of the old man's face.
That there Krajiek had been sneakin' round, pale and quiet,
and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun whimperin',
"My God, man, don't do that!" "I reckon I'm a-goin'
to look into this," says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat
and run about wringin' his hands. "They'll hang me!" says he.
"My God, they'll hang me sure!"'

Fuchs spoke up impatiently. `Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so
have you. The old man wouldn't have made all them preparations
for Krajiek to murder him, would he? It don't hang together.
The gun was right beside him when Ambrosch found him.'

`Krajiek could 'a' put it there, couldn't he?' Jake demanded.

Grandmother broke in excitedly: `See here, Jake Marpole, don't you
go trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble.
Otto reads you too many of them detective stories.'

`It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,' said grandfather quietly.
`If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from
the inside outward.'

`Just so it is, Mr. Burden,' Otto affirmed. `I seen bunches
of hair and stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof.
They was blown up there by gunshot, no question.'

Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas' with him.

`There is nothing you can do,' he said doubtfully. `The body
can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk,
and that will be a matter of several days, this weather.'

`Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of
comfort to them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling,
and was like a right hand to him. He might have thought of her.
He's left her alone in a hard world.' She glanced distrustfully
at Ambrosch, who was now eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.

Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going
to make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner.
On the grey gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across
the country with no roads to guide him.

`Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,' he said cheerfully,
as he put on a second pair of socks. `I've got a good
nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep.
It's the grey I'm worried about. I'll save him what I can,
but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!'

`This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best
you can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner.
She's a good woman, and she'll do well by you.'

After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
I saw a side of him I had not seen before. He was deeply,
even slavishly, devout. He did not say a word all morning,
but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now silently,
now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted
his hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor
boy fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began
to pray again.

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