My Antonia

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Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters,
and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was
a good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been talked about.
She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had--
and that at an age when she should still have been in pinafores.

Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement.
He was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit
with him. After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife,
`Crazy Mary,' tried to set a neighbour's barn on fire, and was sent
to the asylum at Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months,
then escaped and walked all the way home, nearly two hundred miles,
travelling by night and hiding in barns and haystacks by day.
When she got back to the Norwegian settlement, her poor feet
were as hard as hoofs. She promised to be good, and was allowed
to stay at home--though everyone realized she was as crazy as ever,
and she still ran about barefooted through the snow, telling her
domestic troubles to her neighbours.

Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane,
who was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard's
oldest girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no
more sense than his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn
that summer, he used to get discouraged in the field, tie up
his team, and wander off to wherever Lena Lingard was herding.
There he would sit down on the drawside and help her watch her cattle.
All the settlement was talking about it. The Norwegian preacher's
wife went to Lena and told her she ought not to allow this;
she begged Lena to come to church on Sundays. Lena said she hadn't
a dress in the world any less ragged than the one on her back.
Then the minister's wife went through her old trunks and found
some things she had worn before her marriage.

The next Sunday Lena appeared at church, a little late,
with her hair done up neatly on her head, like a young woman,
wearing shoes and stockings, and the new dress, which she had made
over for herself very becomingly. The congregation stared at her.
Until that morning no one--unless it were Ole--had realized how pretty
she was, or that she was growing up. The swelling lines of her figure
had been hidden under the shapeless rags she wore in the fields.
After the last hymn had been sung, and the congregation was dismissed,
Ole slipped out to the hitch-bar and lifted Lena on her horse.
That, in itself, was shocking; a married man was not expected
to do such things. But it was nothing to the scene that followed.
Crazy Mary darted out from the group of women at the church door,
and ran down the road after Lena, shouting horrible threats.

`Look out, you Lena Lingard, look out! I'll come over with
a corn-knife one day and trim some of that shape off you.
Then you won't sail round so fine, making eyes at the men!...'

The Norwegian women didn't know where to look. They were
formal housewives, most of them, with a severe sense of decorum.
But Lena Lingard only laughed her lazy, good-natured laugh and rode on,
gazing back over her shoulder at Ole's infuriated wife.

The time came, however, when Lena didn't laugh. More than once Crazy Mary
chased her across the prairie and round and round the Shimerdas' cornfield.
Lena never told her father; perhaps she was ashamed; perhaps she was
more afraid of his anger than of the corn-knife. I was at the Shimerdas'
one afternoon when Lena came bounding through the red grass as fast
as her white legs could carry her. She ran straight into the house
and hid in Antonia's feather-bed. Mary was not far behind:
she came right up to the door and made us feel how sharp her blade was,
showing us very graphically just what she meant to do to Lena.
Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly,
and was sorry when Antonia sent Mary away, mollified by an apronful
of bottle-tomatoes. Lena came out from Tony's room behind the kitchen,
very pink from the heat of the feathers, but otherwise calm.
She begged Antonia and me to go with her, and help get her cattle together;
they were scattered and might be gorging themselves in somebody's cornfield.

`Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes
at married men,' Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.

Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. `I never made anything to him with
my eyes. I can't help it if he hangs around, and I can't order him off.
It ain't my prairie.'

V

AFTER LENA CAME To Black Hawk, I often met her downtown, where she
would be matching sewing silk or buying `findings' for Mrs. Thomas.
If I happened to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses
she was helping to make, or about what she saw and heard when she
was with Tiny Soderball at the hotel on Saturday nights.

The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington,
and all the commercial travellers in that territory tried to get into
Black Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlour after
supper on Saturday nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick,
played the piano and sang all the latest sentimental songs.
After Tiny had helped the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on
the other side of the double doors between the parlour and the dining-room,
listening to the music and giggling at the jokes and stories.
Lena often said she hoped I would be a travelling man when I grew up.
They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on trains
all day and go to theatres when they were in big cities.
Behind the hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen
opened their big trunks and spread out their samples on the counters.
The Black Hawk merchants went to look at these things and order goods,
and Mrs. Thomas, though she was I retail trade,' was permitted to see
them and to `get ideas.' They were all generous, these travelling men;
they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons
and striped stockings, and so many bottles of perfume and cakes
of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on Lena.

One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drugstore,
gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's Arks arranged
in the frosty show window. The boy had come to town with a neighbour
to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own this year.
He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of sweeping out
the Norwegian church and making the fire in it every Sunday morning.
A cold job it must have been, too!

We went into Duckford's dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped
all his presents and showed them to me something for each of
the six younger than himself, even a rubber pig for the baby.
Lena had given him one of Tiny Soderball's bottles of perfume
for his mother, and he thought he would get some handkerchiefs
to go with it. They were cheap, and he hadn't much money left.
We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view
at Duckford's. Chris wanted those with initial letters
in the corner, because he had never seen any before.
He studied them seriously, while Lena looked over his shoulder,
telling him she thought the red letters would hold their colour best.
He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he hadn't
enough money, after all. Presently he said gravely:

`Sister, you know mother's name is Berthe. I don't know if I
ought to get B for Berthe, or M for Mother.'

Lena patted his bristly head. `I'd get the B, Chrissy.
It will please her for you to think about her name.
Nobody ever calls her by it now.'

That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took
three reds and three blues. When the neighbour came in to say
that it was time to start, Lena wound Chris's comforter about
his neck and turned up his jacket collar--he had no overcoat--
and we watched him climb into the wagon and start on his long,
cold drive. As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woollen glove.
`I get awful homesick for them, all the same,' she murmured,
as if she were answering some remembered reproach.

VI

WINTER COMES DOWN SAVAGELY over a little town on the prairie.
The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all
the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer,
and the houses seem to draw closer together. The roofs,
that looked so far away across the green tree-tops, now stare
you in the face, and they are so much uglier than when their
angles were softened by vines and shrubs.

In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against
the wind, I couldn't see anything but the road in front of me;
but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked
bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter
sunset did not beautify--it was like the light of truth itself.
When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun
went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy
roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh,
with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: `This is reality,
whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer,
the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled
over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath.
This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished
for loving the loveliness of summer.

If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office
for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand,
it would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone;
the frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were
shining pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the suppers cooking
as I passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying
toward a fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets.
When one passed an old man, one could see nothing of his face but a red
nose sticking out between a frosted beard and a long plush cap.
The young men capered along with their hands in their pockets,
and sometimes tried a slide on the icy sidewalk. The children, in their
bright hoods and comforters, never walked, but always ran from the moment
they left their door, beating their mittens against their sides.
When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I was about halfway home.
I can remember how glad I was when there happened to be a light
in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us as we came
along the frozen street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour
came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar.
Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church
when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice.
The crude reds and greens and blues of that coloured glass held us there.

On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like
the painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was colour, too.
After supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets,
and dive through the willow hedge as if witches were after me.
Of course, if Mr. Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out on
the blind of the west room, I did not go in, but turned and walked
home by the long way, through the street, wondering what book I
should read as I sat down with the two old people.

Such disappointments only gave greater zest to the nights when we
acted charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlour,
with Sally always dressed like a boy. Frances taught us
to dance that winter, and she said, from the first lesson,
that Antonia would make the best dancer among us.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas
for us--'Martha,' `Norma,' `Rigoletto'--telling us the story
while she played. Every Saturday night was like a party.
The parlour, the back parlour, and the dining-room were warm
and brightly lighted, with comfortable chairs and sofas,
and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there.
Antonia brought her sewing and sat with us--she was
already beginning to make pretty clothes for herself.
After the long winter evenings on the prairie, with Ambrosch's
sullen silences and her mother's complaints, the Harlings'
house seemed, as she said, `like Heaven' to her.
She was never too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us.
If Sally whispered in her ear, or Charley gave her three winks,
Tony would rush into the kitchen and build a fire in the range
on which she had already cooked three meals that day.

While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy
to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories--about the calf
that broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning
in the freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia.
Nina interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite
of our derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia
a short time before the Shimerdas left that country. We all liked
Tony's stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep,
a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it.
Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.

One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy,
Tony told us a new story.

`Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the
Norwegian settlement last summer, when I was threshing there?
We were at Iversons', and I was driving one of the grain-wagons.'

Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. `Could you throw the wheat
into the bin yourself, Tony?' She knew what heavy work it was.

`Yes, ma'm, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern
boy that drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot.
When we got back to the field from dinner, we took things kind
of easy. The men put in the horses and got the machine going,
and Ole Iverson was up on the deck, cutting bands. I was sitting
against a straw-stack, trying to get some shade. My wagon wasn't
going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful that day.
The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up.
After a while I see a man coming across the stubble,
and when he got close I see it was a tramp. His toes stuck
out of his shoes, and he hadn't shaved for a long while,
and his eyes was awful red and wild, like he had some sickness.
He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: `The ponds in this country is done got so low a man
couldn't drownd himself in one of 'em.'

`I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we didn't
have rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle.

`"Oh, cattle," he says, "you'll all take care of your cattle!
Ain't you got no beer here?" I told him he'd have to go to the Bohemians
for beer; the Norwegians didn't have none when they threshed.
"My God!" he says, "so it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought
this was Americy."

`Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson,
"Hello, partner, let me up there. I can cut bands, and I'm
tired of trampin'. I won't go no farther."

`I tried to make signs to Ole, 'cause I thought that
man was crazy and might get the machine stopped up.
But Ole, he was glad to get down out of the sun and chaff--
it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it's hot like that. So Ole jumped down and crawled under
one of the wagons for shade, and the tramp got on the machine.
He cut bands all right for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling,
he waved his hand to me and jumped head-first right into
the threshing machine after the wheat.

`I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses,
but the belt had sucked him down, and by the time they
got her stopped, he was all beat and cut to pieces.
He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain't never worked right since.'

`Was he clear dead, Tony?' we cried.

`Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There, now, Nina's all upset.
We won't talk about it. Don't you cry, Nina. No old tramp won't
get you while Tony's here.'

Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. `Stop crying, Nina, or I'll always
send you upstairs when Antonia tells us about the country.
Did they never find out where he came from, Antonia?'

`Never, ma'm. He hadn't been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there wasn't any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman hadn't seen him.
They couldn't find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old
penknife in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece
of paper, and some poetry.'

`Some poetry?' we exclaimed.

`I remember,' said Frances. `It was "The Old Oaken Bucket,"
cut out of a newspaper and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson
brought it into the office and showed it to me.'

`Now, wasn't that strange, Miss Frances?' Tony asked thoughtfully.
`What would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for?
In threshing time, too! It's nice everywhere then.'

`So it is, Antonia,' said Mrs. Harling heartily. `Maybe I'll go home
and help you thresh next summer. Isn't that taffy nearly ready to eat?
I've been smelling it a long while.'

There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress.
They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what
they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved
children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth.
They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it;
to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them.
They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones.
Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality,
a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating.
I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.
I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any other house
in Black Hawk than the Harlings'.

VII

WINTER LIES TOO LONG in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby,
old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's
affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched,
frozen down to the bare stalk.

Through January and February I went to the river with
the Harlings on clear nights, and we skated up to the big
island and made bonfires on the frozen sand. But by March
the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on the river
bluffs was grey and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts
and the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long.
There was only one break in the dreary monotony of that month:
when Blind d'Arnault, the Negro pianist, came to town.
He gave a concert at the Opera House on Monday night, and he and
his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our comfortable hotel.
Mrs. Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She told Antonia
she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys' Home.

Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and
slipped quietly into the parlour. The chairs and sofas were
already occupied, and the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke.
The parlour had once been two rooms, and the floor
was swaybacked where the partition had been cut away.
The wind from without made waves in the long carpet.
A coal stove glowed at either end of the room, and the grand
piano in the middle stood open.

There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night,
for Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been
having drinks with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It
was Mrs. Gardener who ran the business and looked after everything.
Her husband stood at the desk and welcomed incoming travellers.
He was a popular fellow, but no manager.

Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk,
drove the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little
white-and-gold sleigh. She seemed indifferent to her possessions,
was not half so solicitous about them as her friends were.
She was tall, dark, severe, with something Indian-like
in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold,
and she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving,
not conferring, a favour when they stayed at her house.
Even the smartest travelling men were flattered when
Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment.
The patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes:
those who had seen Mrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.

When I stole into the parlour, Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man,
was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey,
with friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor.
I did not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized
a furniture salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly,
who travelled for a jewellery house and sold musical instruments.
The talk was all about good and bad hotels, actors and actresses
and musical prodigies. I learned that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha
to hear Booth and Barrett, who were to play there next week, and that Mary
Anderson was having a great success in `A Winter's Tale,' in London.

The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in,
directing Blind d'Arnault--he would never consent to be led.
He was a heavy, bulky mulatto, on short legs, and he came
tapping the floor in front of him with his gold-headed cane.
His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show of white teeth,
all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay motionless
over his blind eyes.

`Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good evening, gentlemen.
We going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going
to play for me this evening?' It was the soft, amiable Negro voice,
like those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile
subservience in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all;
nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool.
He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy.
It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.

He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down,
I noticed the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me.
When he was sitting, or standing still, he swayed back
and forth incessantly, like a rocking toy. At the piano,
he swayed in time to the music, and when he was not playing,
his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands
up and down the keys a few times, tinkling off scales,
then turned to the company.

`She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up
before I come. Now gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices.
Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight.'

The men gathered round him, as he began to play `My Old Kentucky Home.'
They sang one Negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat
rocking himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted,
his shrivelled eyelids never fluttering.

He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation,
where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was
three weeks old, he had an illness which left him totally blind.
As soon as he was old enough to sit up alone and toddle about,
another affliction, the nervous motion of his body, became apparent.
His mother, a buxom young Negro wench who was laundress for
the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was `not right'
in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him devotedly,
but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his `fidgets,' that she
hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from
the Big House were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed
her other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying
to get his chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early,
remembered everything he heard, and his mammy said he `wasn't all wrong.'
She named him Samson, because he was blind, but on the plantation he was
known as `yellow Martha's simple child.' He was docile and obedient,
but when he was six years old he began to run away from home,
always taking the same direction. He felt his way through the lilacs,
along the boxwood hedge, up to the south wing of the Big House,
where Miss Nellie d'Arnault practised the piano every morning.
This angered his mother more than anything else he could have done;
she was so ashamed of his ugliness that she couldn't bear to have white
folks see him. Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin,
she whipped him unmercifully, and told him what dreadful things old
Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found him near the Big House.
But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran away again.
If Miss d'Arnault stopped practising for a moment and went toward
the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in
an old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between
the hollyhock rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face
lifted to the sun and wearing an expression of idiotic rapture.
Often she was tempted to tell Martha that the child must be kept at home,
but somehow the memory of his foolish, happy face deterred her.
She remembered that his sense of hearing was nearly all he had--
though it did not occur to her that he might have more of it
than other children.

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