My Antonia

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No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken,
and that would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one
of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him.
She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat.
They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought.
Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black and
my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together
for Mrs. Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over
the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time,
I realized that I was alone in the house.

I felt a considerable extension of power and authority,
and was anxious to acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs
and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves.
I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody
had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water.
After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else
to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet was delightful,
and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions.
I got `Robinson Crusoe' and tried to read, but his life on
the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it
flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about
in this world at all, it would be here, in our house, which had
been more to his liking than any other in the neighbourhood.
I remembered his contented face when he was with us on Christmas Day.
If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would
never have happened.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at
once set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit,
so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow,
was resting now in this quiet house.

I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground,
always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench
behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could
hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let
the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him.
I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life before he came
to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances.
I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player,
the great forest full of game--belonging, as Antonia said, to the `nobles'--
from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights.
There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it,
he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they
might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air
in which they had haunted him.

It had begun to grow dark when my household returned,
and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed.
Jake and I got supper, and while we were washing the dishes
he told me in loud whispers about the state of things over at
the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came.
If anyone did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, `just as stiff as a dressed
turkey you hang out to freeze,' Jake said. The horses and oxen
would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there
was no longer any smell of blood. They were stabled there now,
with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them.
A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head.
Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going
down to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them,
because he did not feel the cold. I believed he felt cold as much
as anyone else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it.
He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!

Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him
capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about
his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would
remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
`As I understand it,' Jake concluded, `it will be a matter of years to pray
his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment.'

`I don't believe it,' I said stoutly. `I almost know it
isn't true.' I did not, of course, say that I believed
he had been in that very kitchen all afternoon, on his way
back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I went to bed,
this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly.
I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish:
he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.

XV

OTTO FUCHS GOT back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported
that the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon,
but the missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred
miles away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours'
sleep at the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the grey gelding
had strained himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward.
That long trip through the deep snow had taken all the endurance
out of him.

Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had
taken a homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse
to help his fellow countrymen in their trouble. That was the first
time I ever saw Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow
in the early twenties then, handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life,
and he came to us like a miracle in the midst of that grim business.
I remember exactly how he strode into our kitchen in his felt boots
and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks bright with the cold.
At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur cap, greeting her
in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.

`I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind
to poor strangers from my kawntree.'

He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous.
He said he would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired
out to husk corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going
to the school by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children.
He told me he had a nice `lady-teacher' and that he liked to go to school.

At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually
did to strangers.

`Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?' he asked.

Jelinek looked serious.

`Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father has
done a great sin'--he looked straight at grandfather.
`Our Lord has said that.'

Grandfather seemed to like his frankness.

`We believe that, too, Jelinek. But we believe that Mr. Shimerda's
soul will come to its Creator as well off without a priest.
We believe that Christ is our only intercessor.'

The young man shook his head. `I know how you think.
My teacher at the school has explain. But I have seen too much.
I believe in prayer for the dead. I have seen too much.'

We asked him what he meant.

He glanced around the table. `You want I shall tell you? When I was
a little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar.
I make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem
plain to me. By 'n' by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us.
We have very many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera
break out in that camp, and the men die like flies. All day long
our priest go about there to give the Sacrament to dying men,
and I go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy Sacrament.
Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness but me and the priest.
But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood
and that body of Christ, and it preserve us.' He paused, looking
at grandfather. `That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened to myself.
All the soldiers know, too. When we walk along the road, the old priest
and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on horse.
All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth, pull up
their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we pass.
So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family.'

We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire
his frank, manly faith.

`I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about
these things,' said grandfather, land I would never be the one to say
you were not in God's care when you were among the soldiers.'
After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek
should hook our two strong black farm-horses to the scraper and break a road
through to the Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary.
Fuchs, who was the only cabinetmaker in the neighbourhood was set to work
on a coffin.

Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it,
he told us that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man
who `batched' with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna,
made the coat. From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn
with the blacks, and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield.
Sometimes he was completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him;
then he and the horses would emerge black and shining.

Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor
for the oats-bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold draughts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his worktable and watched him.
He did not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on
a piece of paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them.
While he was thus engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled
at his half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him.
At last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.

`The hardest part of my job's done,' he announced.
`It's the head end of it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm
out of practice. The last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,'
he continued, as he sorted and tried his chisels, `was for a
fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up above Silverton, Colorado.
The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of the cliff,
and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a trolley
and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket travelled across a box
canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water.
Two Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water,
feet down. If you'll believe it, they went to work the next day.
You can't kill a Swede. But in my time a little Eyetalian
tried the high dive, and it turned out different with him.
We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him.
It's a handy thing to know, when you knock about like I've done.'

`We'd be hard put to it now, if you didn't know, Otto,' grandmother said.

`Yes, 'm,' Fuchs admitted with modest pride. `So few folks
does know how to make a good tight box that'll turn water.
I sometimes wonder if there'll be anybody about to do it for me.
However, I'm not at all particular that way.'

All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear
the panting wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane.
They were such cheerful noises, seeming to promise new
things for living people: it was a pity that those freshly
planed pine boards were to be put underground so soon.
The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost,
and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods,
as the heap of yellow shavings grew higher and higher.
I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to cabinet-work,
he settled down to it with such ease and content.
He handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them;
and when he planed, his hands went back and forth over the boards
in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them.
He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if this
occupation brought back old times to him.

At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbour
who lived east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on
their way to the Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over
there had somehow got abroad through the snow-blocked country.
Grandmother gave the visitors sugar-cakes and hot coffee.
Before these callers were gone, the brother of the Widow Steavens,
who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door, and after
him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbours
on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room.
They were all eager for any details about the suicide,
and they were greatly concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would
be buried. The nearest Catholic cemetery was at Black Hawk,
and it might be weeks before a wagon could get so far.
Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard.
There was a burying-ground over by the Norwegian church,
west of Squaw Creek; perhaps the Norwegians would take
Mr. Shimerda in.

After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill,
we returned to the kitchen. Grandmother began to make
the icing for a chocolate cake, and Otto again filled
the house with the exciting, expectant song of the plane.
One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked
more than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything
but `Only papers, to-day,' or, `I've got a sackful of mail for ye,'
until this afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman:
to herself or to the Lord, if there was no one else to listen;
but grandfather was naturally taciturn, and Jake and Otto
were often so tired after supper that I used to feel as if I
were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now everyone seemed eager
to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story:
about the Black Tiger Mine, and about violent deaths
and casual buryings, and the queer fancies of dying men.
You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die.
Most men were game, and went without a grudge.

The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather
would bring the coroner back with him to spend the night.
The officers of the Norwegian church, he told us, had held
a meeting and decided that the Norwegian graveyard could not
extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.

Grandmother was indignant. `If these foreigners are so clannish,
Mr. Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring.
If anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst 'em.'

Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek,
and that important person, the coroner. He was a mild,
flurried old man, a Civil War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty.
He seemed to find this case very perplexing, and said if it had not been
for grandfather he would have sworn out a warrant against Krajiek.
`The way he acted, and the way his axe fit the wound, was enough
to convict any man.'

Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had
killed himself, Jake and the coroner thought something ought
to be done to Krajiek because he behaved like a guilty man.
He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps he even felt
some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man's misery and loneliness.

At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake,
which I had hoped would linger on until tomorrow in a
mutilated condition, disappeared on the second round.
They talked excitedly about where they should bury Mr. Shimerda;
I gathered that the neighbours were all disturbed and shocked
about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their
own land; indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner.
Grandfather had explained to Ambrosch that some day,
when the country was put under fence and the roads were confined
to section lines, two roads would cross exactly on that corner.
But Ambrosch only said, `It makes no matter.'

Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was
some superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried
at the cross-roads.

Jelinek said he didn't know; he seemed to remember hearing there
had once been such a custom in Bohemia. `Mrs. Shimerda is made
up her mind,' he added. `I try to persuade her, and say it looks
bad for her to all the neighbours; but she say so it must be.
"There I will bury him, if I dig the grave myself," she say.
I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the grave tomorrow.'

Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial.
`I don't know whose wish should decide the matter, if not hers.
But if she thinks she will live to see the people of this
country ride over that old man's head, she is mistaken.'

XVI

MR. SHIMERDA LAY DEAD in the barn four days, and on the fifth
they buried him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch
digging the grave, chopping out the frozen earth with old axes.
On Saturday we breakfasted before daylight and got into the wagon
with the coffin. Jake and Jelinek went ahead on horseback to cut
the body loose from the pool of blood in which it was frozen fast
to the ground.

When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found
the womenfolk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn.
Mrs. Shimerda sat crouching by the stove, Antonia was washing dishes.
When she saw me, she ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms
around me. `Oh, Jimmy,' she sobbed, `what you tink for my lovely papa!'
It seemed to me that I could feel her heart breaking as she
clung to me.

Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over
her shoulder toward the door while the neighbours were arriving.
They came on horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought
his family in a wagon over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow
Steavens rode up from her farm eight miles down the Black Hawk road.
The cold drove the women into the cave-house, and it was soon crowded.
A fine, sleety snow was beginning to fall, and everyone was afraid
of another storm and anxious to have the burial over with.

Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it
was time to start. After bundling her mother up in clothes
the neighbours had brought, Antonia put on an old cape from our
house and the rabbit-skin hat her father had made for her.
Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill; Krajiek slunk
along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door,
so it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from
the cave and looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side,
with his knees drawn up. His body was draped in a black shawl,
and his head was bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy's;
one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the black cloth;
that was all one could see of him.

Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Antonia
and Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward,
and kept saying something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down,
shut her eyes, and put out her hand a little way, but she drew it
back and began to cry wildly. She was afraid to touch the bandage.
Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the shoulders and pushed her toward
the coffin, but grandmother interfered.

`No, Mrs. Shimerda,' she said firmly, `I won't stand
by and see that child frightened into spasms.
She is too little to understand what you want of her.
Let her alone.'

At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid
on the box, and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda.
I was afraid to look at Antonia. She put her arms round Yulka
and held the little girl close to her.

The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached
the grave, it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste.
The men took the coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes.
We stood about watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting
on the caps and shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women.
Jelinek spoke in a persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then
turned to grandfather.

`She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for him
here in English, for the neighbours to understand.'

Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat,
and the other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable.
I still remember it. He began, `Oh, great and just God,
no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it
for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.' He prayed
that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.
He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless,
and asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children,
and to `incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her.'
In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda at `Thy
judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.'

All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said `Amen,' I thought she looked satisfied
with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, `Can't you start a hymn, Fuchs?
It would seem less heathenish.'

Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval
of her suggestion, then began, `Jesus, Lover of my Soul,'
and all the men and women took it up after him. Whenever I
have heard the hymn since, it has made me remember that white
waste and the little group of people; and the bluish air,
full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:

`While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.'

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over,
and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it
had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were
under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things,
but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's
grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it,
and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted,
Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head.
The road from the north curved a little to the east just there,
and the road from the west swung out a little to the south;
so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed,
was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look
like soft grey rivers flowing past it. I never came upon
the place without emotion, and in all that country it was
the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition,
the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still
more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--
the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth
roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.
Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure,
without wishing well to the sleeper.

XVII

WHEN SPRING CAME, AFTER that hard winter, one could not get
enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh
consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs
of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods
or blooming gardens. There was only--spring itself; the throb of it,
the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere:
in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm,
high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful
like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.
If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should
have known that it was spring.

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