Books: My Antonia

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When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that
would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily
painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart
began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very
doleful, and he sang words to some of them.

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.

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