 INTRODUCTION to MY ANTONIA Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a travelling companion James Quayle Burden, Jim Burden, as we still call him in the west. He and I are old friends, we grew up together in the same Nebraska town, and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by-country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat on the observation car where the woodwork was hot to the touch, and red dust laid deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate, burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath the brilliant sky when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests, blustery winters with little snow when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and our old friends, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time. It was said that she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the west out of Bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl even then who liked to astonish her friends. Later when I knew her she was always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her townhouses for a suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theatre, was arrested for picketing during a garment-maker strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name at her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worthwhile to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For some reason she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden. As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, although it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves, with a personal passion, the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development. He is always able to race capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boy had friends remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is western and American. During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventures of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart enough time to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her. I can't see, he said impetuously, why you have never written anything about Antonia. I told him I had always felt that other people, he himself, for one, knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him. I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her. He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. Maybe I will. Maybe I will," he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. Of course, he said, I should have to do it in a direct way and say a great deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other form of presentation. I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Antonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not. Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands. I finished it last night, the thing about Antonia. He said, now what about yours? I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes. Notes? I didn't make any. He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. I didn't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn't any form. It hasn't any title, either. He went into the next room, sat down at my desk, and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, Antonia. He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it, my Antonia. That seemed to satisfy him. Read it as soon as you can, he said, rising, but don't let it influence your own story. My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me. End of the introduction. Book I, Chapter I, of My Antonia. I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great Midland Plain of North America. I was ten years old then. I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the hands on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going west to work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world. We went all the way in daycoaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the news boys offered him—candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch charm, and for me a Life of Jesse James, which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going, and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere. In his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from across the water whose destination was the same as ours. They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is, we go Black Hawk, Nebraska. She's not much older than you, twelve or thirteen maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes, too. This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to Jesse James. Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners. I do not remember crossing the Missouri River or anything about the long day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska. I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled down from the train to a wooden siding where men were running about with lanterns. I couldn't see any town or even distant lights. We were surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its long run. In the red glow from the fire-box a group of people stood huddled together on the platform encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The woman wore a fringed shawl, tied over her head, and she carried a little tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oil-cloth bundles and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue. Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out. Hello! Are you Mr. Burton's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burton's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy! Ain't you scared to come so far west? I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might have stepped out of the pages of Jesse James. He wore a sombrero hat with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache were twisted up stiffly like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indians. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was rather a slight man, quick and wiry and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into the empty darkness, and we followed them. I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees, and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see, no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land, not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land, slightly undulating I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it, but this was the complete dome of heaven all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there. They would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not wither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night. Here I felt what would be, would be. CHAPTER I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm some time before daybreak after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When I awoke it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than the bed that held me, and the window shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me. I knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed. Had a good sleep, Jimmy? She asked briskly. Then in a very different tone she said, as if to herself. My, how you do look like your father. I remembered that my father had been her little boy. She must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. Here are your clean clothes, she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. But first you come down to the kitchen with me and have a nice warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things, there's nobody about. Down to the kitchen struck me as curious. It was always out in the kitchen at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed. The plaster lay directly upon the earth walls as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall and a tin-wash tub into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and towels I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help. Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well now I call you a right smart little boy. It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window and a big malty's cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously. Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning. Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens. She was a spare tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention as if she were looking at something or listening to something far away. As I grew older I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman of unusual endurance. After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work. While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat. He caught not only rats and mice but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family. She said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors there. My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian chic. His bald crown only made it more impressive. Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man. They were bright blue and had a fresh frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular, so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red, his eyebrows were still coppery. As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the far west among mining camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather. The minute supper was over Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale. He had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a perfect gentleman and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know, how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage driver and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his chaps and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me and his best cowboy boots with tops stitched in bold design, roses and true lovers' knots and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were angels. Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word, Sela. He shall choose our inheritance for us, the Excellency of Jacob whom he loved. Sela, I had no idea what the word meant, perhaps he had not, but as he uttered it it became oracular the most sacred of words. Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk until you came to the Norwegian settlement where there were several. Our neighbors lived in sod houses and dugouts, comfortable but not very roomy. Our white-framed house, with a story and half story above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farm-yard with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corn-cribs at the bottom of the shallow draw was a muddy little pond with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farm-yard, and curved round this little pond beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western skyline, it skirted a great cornfield much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield and the sorghum patch behind the barn were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere as far as the eye could reach there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as eye. North of the house, inside the plowed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them and over the plum patch behind the sod chicken-house. As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine stains or of certain sea-weeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother when she came out, her son bonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane tipped with copper which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife. She had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Blackhawk Road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer. I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me. For more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape, in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping. Alone I should never have found the garden, except perhaps for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines. And I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here, only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads, making slow shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork, we found standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes. While I picked them up out of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do. When grandmother was ready to go I said I would like to stay up there in the garden a while. She peered down at me from under her sun bonnet. Aren't you afraid of snakes? A little, I admitted, but I'd like to stay anyhow. Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow and brown ones won't hurt you. They're bull snakes and help to keep the gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I'm at work. Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw. When she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content. I sat down in the middle of the garden where snakes could scarcely approach unseen and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground cherry bushes growing along the furrows full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the plowed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Here little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air or goodness and change. At any rate, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. CHAPTER III On Sunday morning, Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat, and jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big cornfield. I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield, but there was only red grass like ours and nothing else, though from the high wagon seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild thing, avoiding the deep straws, crossing them where they were wide and shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew. Some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the prairie. Occasionally, one of the horses would tear off, with his teeth, a plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in time to his bites as he ate down toward them. The Bohemian family, Grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the homestead of a fellow countryman, Peter Kragik, and had paid him more than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs. Shimerda. The Shimerda's were the first Bohemian family to come to this part of the country. Kragik was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs said, was well grown and strong enough to work the land, but the father was old and frail, and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade, and had been a skillful workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. He had brought his fiddle with him, which wouldn't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money by it at home. If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in that cave of Kragiks, said Grandmother. It's no better than a badger-hole, no proper dug-out at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten. Yes, I'm, said Otto. And he sold him his oxen, and his two bony old horses, for the price of good work teams. I'd have interfered about the horses. The old man can understand some German. If I'd have thought it would do any good, Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians. Grandmother looked interested. Now, why is that, Otto? Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. Well, ma'am, it's politics. It would take me a long while to explain. The land was growing rougher. I was told that we were approaching Squaw Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shamirida's place, and made the land of little value for farming. Then we could see the broken grassy clay cliffs, which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down the ravine. Some of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining white bark made them look like gold and silver trees and fairytales. As we approached the Shamirida's dwelling, I could still see nothing but rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill frame that had no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a door and window sunk deep in the draw bank. The door stood open, and a woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us, hopefully. A little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Blackhawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrew little eyes. She shook Grandmother's hand energetically. Very glad, very glad! She ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the bank out of which she had emerged and said, How's no good? How's no good? Grandmother nodded consolingly. You'll get fixed up comfortable after a while, Mrs. Schmierder. Make good house! My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf. She made Mrs. Schmierder understand the friendly intention of our visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread, and even smelled them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, Much good, much thank! And again she run Grandmother's hand. The oldest son, Ambrose, they called it Ambrosh, came out of the cave and stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head and a wide, flat face. His hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and suspicious. They fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days. The little girl was pretty, but Antonia, they accented the name thus, strongly, when they spoke to her, was still prettier. I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called Yurka, was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood awkwardly confronting the two girls, Kragik came up from the barn to see what was going on. With him was another Shamir to son. Even from a distance one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he approached us, he began to make uncouth noises and held up his hands to show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly, Marik, then spoke rapidly to Kragik and Bohemian. She wants me to tell you that he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born like that. The others are smart. Ambrose, he made good farmer. He struck Ambrose on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly. At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears and made him look like the old portraits I remember in Virginia. He was tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. He looked calm somehow and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes, like something from which all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this man was in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral pen. While Kragik was translating for Mrs. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep drawside together, Jurka trotting after us. When we reached the level where we could see the golden treetops, I pointed toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek, and did not stop until the ground itself stopped. Fell away before us so abruptly that the next step would have been out into the treetops. We stood panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girl's skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like that. She held her little sister by the hand, and chattered away in that language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say. �Name? What name?� she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my name, and she repeated it after me, and made Jurka say it. She pointed into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood, and said again, �What name?� We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Jurka curled up like a baby rabbit, and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed into my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like ice. She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky, with movement so quick and impulsive that she distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then to mine into the sky, nodding violently. �Oh!� I exclaimed, �Blue!� �Blue sky!� she clapped her hands and murmured. �Blue sky!� �Blue eyes!� as if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind, she learned a score of words. She was quick and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us, and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Antonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring that she wore on her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I didn�t want her ring. And I felt there was something reckless and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never seen before. No wonder Krejczyk had got the better of these people if this was how they behaved. While we were disputing over the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling, �Antonia!� �Antonia!� she sprang up like a hare. �Tatanec!� Tatanec!� she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia reached him first, took his hand, and kissed it. When I came up he touched my shoulder, and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds. I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted by my elders. We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where Grandmother was waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his pocket, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands, looked at her intreatingly, and said with an earnestness, which I shall never forget, �Teach!� �Teach my Antonia!� End of Chapter 3 Book 1 Chapter 4 of My Antonia This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. My Antonia by Willa Cather Book 1 The Shimerdas Chapter 4 On the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony under Otto's direction. After that dude I went twice a week to the post office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod's schoolhouse, I was always the messenger. Formerly, folks attended to such things after working hours. All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me. There were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Folks told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons. That at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless the legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seemed to me the roads to freedom. I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweeds soon turned a rich copper color, and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors, and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of the deep crack in the earth, and had a hawksnest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious. Sometimes I rode north to the Prairie Dog Town, to watch the brown earth owls fly home in the late afternoon, or go down to their nests underground with the dogs. Antony and Shemirda liked to go with me, and we used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were quite defenseless against them. They took possession of their comfortable houses and ate their eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under the earth. But after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The Dog Town was a long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog towns in the desert, where there was no surface water for fifty miles. He insisted that some of the owls must go down to water, nearly two hundred feet hereabouts. Antony said she didn't believe it, that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits. Antony had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her reading lesson with me. This Shamirda grumbled, but realized it was important that one member of the family should learn English. When the lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the garden. I split the melons with an old corn knife, and we lifted out the hearts, and ate them with juice trickling through our fingers. The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shamirdas were famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields, hunting for ground cherries. Antony loved to help grandmother in the kitchen, and to learn about cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shamirda was a good house wife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions. The conditions were bad enough, certainly. I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin peck measure that Kragik had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure. Put the measure back on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast. During those first months the Shamirdas never went to town. Kragik encouraged them in the belief that in Blackhawk they would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Kragik, but they clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk, or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their hole, and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown owls housed rattlesnakes, because they did not know how to get rid of him. CHAPTER V We knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors. But the two girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie, scaring rabbits, or starting up flocks of quail. I remember Antony's excitement when she came into our kitchen one afternoon and announced, My papa find friends up north with Russian man's. Last night he take me for sea, and I can understand very much talk. Nice man's, Mrs. Burden. One is fat, and all the time laugh. Everybody laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this country. Oh, very nice! I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in that direction. But one of them was a wild-looking fellow, and I was a little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other country, farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all the strange, up-rooted people among the first settlers, those two men were the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable, so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to people, and until the Shamirdas came, they had no friends. Kragit could understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist, since he had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn tight over his high cheekbones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always had a cough. Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow, short, bow-legged, and his fat is butter. He always seemed pleased when he met people on the road, smiled, and took off his cap to everyone, men as well as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man. His hair and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its snug nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among leaves. He was usually called Curly Peter, or Ruschenpeter. The two Russians made good farmhands, and in the summer they worked out together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor homesteaders used canned milk to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to church at the Saad Schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him. Sitting on a low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked apologetically under the seat. After Mr. Shemirda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him. She said that they came from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place she could talk to them for me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there together on my pony. The Russians had a neat log house, built on a grassy slope, with a windlass well beside the door. As we rode up the draw, we skirted a big melon patch, and the garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the Saad. We found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a wash tub. He was working so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to Gritas, drops of perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard. Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He told Antonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any man could have one who could take care of her. The milk was good for Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it in a new place. After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men who were batching. Besides the kitchen, there was a living room with a wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window, where they kept guns and saddles and tools and old coats and boots. That day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter, corn and beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window blinds in the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies and sunshine alike. Peter put the melons in a row on the oil cloth covered table and stood over them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them, they split of their own ripeness with a delicious sound. He gave us knives but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with juice and seeds. I had never seen anyone eat so many melons as Peter ate. He assured us that they were very good for one, better than medicine. In his country, people lived on them at this time of the year. He was very hospitable and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Antonia, he sighed and told us that if he had stayed home in Russia, perhaps by this time he would have a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said he had left his country because of a great trouble. 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 godly 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. Shemirda and gave us a lard pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me that they were very good. We had to walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk. End of Chapter 5. My Antonia by Willa Cather. Book 1, Chapter 6. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit www.LibriVox.org. Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. 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 horse pond that morning, and as we went through the garden, we found the tallestparagus with its red berries lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green. Antonia 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 the alps 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 blue stem. 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 save 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 pretenses? 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 blonde cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and through 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 technique 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 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 faraway 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 technique say when you are big boy, he give you his gun, very fine, from Bohemian. It was belonged 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 Shemeridas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected substantial presence 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. End of Chapter 6. Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. Book 1, Chapter 7 of My Antonia by Willa Cather. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit www.librivox.org. Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. 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 Shemeridas, I found Antonia starting off on foot for Russian Peter's house to borrow a spade Ambrose knitted. 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, furry 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 Dogtown 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 snake skins. The dogtown 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 gray 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 picket a 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 and 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 Antonya 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 Antonya 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. Antonya, 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. Antonya came after me crying. Oh Jimmy, he not bite you, you sure? You not run when I say. What you jabber bow-hunk for, you might have told me there was a snake behind me, I said petulantly. I know I'm 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 was just like big man's, 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 country 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 a spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and measured him by my riding-court. 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 Antenna 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. Weren't let us come near him. We decided that Antenna should ride dude home, and I would walk. As she rode 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 a spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her exaltation 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 kettle pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antenna 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 into that beauty, Jim? Up at the dog town, I answered leconically. Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weapon? We'd been up to Russian Peters to borrow a spade for Ambrose. Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to 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 came wooden more than tickle him. You could stand right up and talk to you. He could. Did he fight hard? Antenna broke in. He fights something awful. He's all over Jimmy's boots. I screamed for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was crazy. Otto winked at me. After Antenna rode on, he said, got him in the head first, correct, didn't you? That was just as well. We hung him up on to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen, I found Antenna standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with a great deal of color. Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big Rettler 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 does not owe Rettler's a living. A snake of his size and 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 Antenna beside me to appreciate and admire. That snake hung on our coral fence for several days. Some of the neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest Rettler ever killed in those parts. This was enough for Antenna. 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. End of Chapter 7, Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. Book 1, Chapter 8 of My Antenna by Willa Cather. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit www.librivox.org. Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. While the autumn color 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 1st 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 Blackhawk moneylender, a man of evil name throughout the country, 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 $200, then another $100, then $50, 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. Miss Fortune 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 supper. I would sleep in the Shimerda's barn and run home in the morning. My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about humoring 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 donuts 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. Antonia 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 color of the night that we could not see it as we came up the draw. The rotty 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. People 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 pains, 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. The 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. Yep, yep, yep, then the high wine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow. He is scared of wolves, Antenna 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 tea kettle, 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 give his team—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 bell of another village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to the wedding and 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 goodbye to her and blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to a 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 marrymaking 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 up in a clump of trees and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow and the fleetist of the wolves strang upon them. The shrieks that followed made everybody sober. The driver stood up and lashed their horses. The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest. All the others carried from six to a dozen people. Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear. The people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost. The little bride hit her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully. At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked back. There are only three sledges left, he whispered. And the wolves, Pavel asked, enough, enough for all of us. Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a whirling black group on the snow. Presently, the groom screamed. He saw his father's sledge overturned with his mothers and sisters. He sprang up as if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even then too late. The black-ground shadows were already crowding over the heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom's movement had given Pavel an idea. They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel's middle horse was failing. Beside a frozen pond, something happened to the other sledge. Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in the harness, and overturned the sledge. When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar road. They still come, he asked Peter. Yes. How many? 20, 30, enough. Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He called to the groom that they must lighten and pointed to the bride. The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the struggle the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never completely remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clean air, louder than they had ever heard it before. The bell of the monastery of their own village ringing for early prayers. Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever since. They were run out of their village. Pavel's own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America. They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always unfortunate. When Pavel's health grew so bad, they decided to try farming. Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda and was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything and left the country, went to be cooked in a railway construction camp where gangs of Russians were employed. At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During the auction he went about with his head down and never lifted his eyes. He seemed not to care about anything. The Blackhawk moneylender who held mortgages on Peter's livestock was there, and he bought in the sale notes at about $0.50 on the dollar. Everyone said Peter kissed the cow before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but this I know. After all his furniture and his cookstove and pots and pans had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp knife and ate all the melons that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krijak drove up in their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping beard surrounded by heaps of melon rinds. The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda. When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously. As if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago and the wedding party had been sacrificed to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia. End of Chapter 8. Recording by Sharon Bautista in Evanston, Illinois. Book 1, Chapter 9 of My Antonia. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Katie Gibbany, Arkansas, December 2007. My Antonia by Willa Cather. Book 1, The Shamurtas, Chapter 9. The first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked from our sitting room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning. The low sky was like a sheet of metal. The blond cornfields had faded out into ghostliness at last. The little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing in the red grass. Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was, faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride. Jay Kanado were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners bound to a stake in the center. But grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there. Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle showed like a pattern in the grass. And this morning, when the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred in me as it had never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter. As soon as the snow had packed hard, I began to drive about the country in a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job if I hadn't hurried him. My first trip was to the post office and the next day I went over to take Yulka and Antonia for a sleigh ride. It was a bright cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the Shemurtas I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the bottom of the draw and called. Antonia and Yulka came running out, wearing little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard about my sledge from Ambrosh and knew why I had come. They tumbled in beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to be broken. The sky was brilliantly blue and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Antonia said, the whole world was changed by the snow. We kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks. The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft between snowdrifts, very blue when one looked down into it. The treetops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted as if they would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong dusky green. The wind had the burning taste of fresh snow. My throat and nostrils smarted as if someone had opened a heart-shorn bottle. The cold stung and at the same time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their color under the dazzling light and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces with tracings like ripple marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind. The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls. They kept shivering beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that they begged me to go on and on as far as Russian Peter's house. The great fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things. They laughed and shouted and said they never wanted to go home again. Couldn't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked, and couldn't I go to town and buy things for us to keep house with? All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when we turned back, it must have been about four o'clock. The east wind grew stronger and began to howl, the sun lost its heartening power and the sky became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins clumsily and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of Quincy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks. The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days, like a tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day, husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think they were like arctic explorers. In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning or making husking gloves, I read the Swiss family Robinson allowed to her, and I felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about keeping us warm and comfortable and well fed. She often reminded me, when she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, very little to do with. On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding, striped with currents and boiled in a bag. Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth and food, and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously. Feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs. When supper was over it took them a long while to get the cold out of their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes, and grandfather read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the stove, easing their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their cracked hands. Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to sing, for I am a cowboy and know I've done wrong, or bury me not on the lone prairie. He had a good baritone voice, and always led the singing when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse. I can still see those two men sitting on the bench. Otto's close clipped head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with. Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage driver, a bartender, a minor, had wandered all over that great western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it. Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him behave like a crazy man, tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill. But he was so soft-hearted that anyone could impose upon him. If he, as he said, forgot himself and swore before grandmother, he went about depressed and shame-faced all day. They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer and always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day. On those bitter starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling down by the corrals, and their hungry wintry cry used to remind the boys of wonderful animal stories. About gray wolves and bears in the Rockies, wild cats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes fuchs could be persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known. I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was working her bread on the breadboard, laugh until she wiped her eyes with her bare arm, her hands being flowery. It was like this. When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat to join her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he got on fine with the kids, and liked the mother, though she played a sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but three. This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety since he was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him. The doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first cabin passengers, who made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto and often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken ashore at New York, he had, as he said, to carry some of them. The trip to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was rather crushed by the size of it. He too seemed to consider Fuchs in some fashion to blame. I was sure glad, Otto concluded, that he didn't take his hard feelings out on that poor woman, but he had a sullen eye for me all right. Now, did you ever hear of a young fellow's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden? Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence. Book 1, Chapter 10 of My Antonia For several weeks after my sleigh ride we heard nothing from the Shimardas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and Grandmother had a cold which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to have a day at rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr. Shimarda out hunting. He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap-chim and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among them over there, and they take turns wearing it. It seemed awful scared of cold and sticking that hole in the bank like badgers. How about the crazy boy Jake put in? He never wears the coat. Criac says he's terrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality. Ambrose come along by the cornfield yesterday where I was at work. It showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot. He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter than me and put him back in his sack and walked off. Grandmother looked up and alarm and spoke to grandfather. Joe Sia, you don't suppose Criac will let the poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do you? You'd better go over and see our neighbors tomorrow, Amaline. He replied gravely. Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good for food. But their family connections were against them. I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat family. When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake packing a hamper basket in the kitchen. Now Jake, grandmother, was saying, if you can find that old rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist and we'll take him along. There was no good reason why Mrs. Shermard couldn't have gotten hands from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckoned she was confused and didn't know where to begin. I've come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hands are a good thing to have, no matter what you don't have. Just as you say, ma'am, said Jake, but I hate to think of Criac getting a leg of that old rooster. He tramped out through the long cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him. After breakfast, grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the cold front wagon seat. As we approached the Shermard as we heard the frosty wind of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the pump handle as it went up and down. She heard a wagon look back over her shoulder and catching up her pail of water started at a run for the hole in the bank. Jake held grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy path toward the door, sunk in the draw sign. Blue puffs of smoke came from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly away. Mrs. Shermarda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother's hand. She did not say, how do, as usual, but it once began to cry, talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were tied up in rags and looking about accusing me of everyone. The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but glancing up at her mother, hid again. Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window stretched out on a gunny sack, stuck with straw. As soon as we entered, he threw a grain sack over the crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling and it was very dark, too. I lighted lantern and hung over the stove throughout a feeble yellow glimmer. Mrs. Shimarda snatched up the covers of two barrels behind the door and made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour. Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the bohemian woman laughed scornfully, a kind of winny laugh, and catching up an empty coffee pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively vindictive. Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with a hampher, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimarda's reproaches. Then the poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hit her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed to her, but called Antonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before. You not mind my poor mama, Mrs. Burton? She is so sad, she whispered, as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things Grandmother handed her. The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft gurgling noises and stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity. Haven't you gone any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia? This is no place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen? We get for Mr. Bushy at the post office what he throw out. We got no potatoes, Mrs. Burton, Tony admitted mournfully. When Jake went out, Merrick crawled along the floor and stuffed up the door crack again. Then quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimarda came out from behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair as if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and neat as usual with his green neck cloth and his coral pin. He took grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove to the back of the room. And the rear wall was another little cave, a round hole, not much bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw. The old man held the lantern. Yulka, he said in a low, despairing voice. Yulka, my Antonia! Grandmother drew back. You mean they sleep in there, your girls? He bowed his head. Tony slipped under his arm. She was very cold on the floor and this is warm like the Badger Hole. I like for sleep there, she insisted eagerly. My momenka have nice bed with pillows from our own geese in Bohimi. See, Jim? She pointed to the narrow bunk which Crayak had built against the wall for himself before the Shimarda's cave. Grandmother sighed. Sure enough, where would you sleep, dear? I don't doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after a while, Antonia, and then you will forget these hard times. Mr. Shimarda made Grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on Antonia's shoulder, he talked in a low tone and his daughter translated. He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country. He made good wages and his family were respected there. He left Bohimi with more than $1,000 in savings after their passage money was paid. He had, in some way, lost on exchange in New York and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid Crayak for the land and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm machinery, they had very little money left. He wished Grandmother to know, however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden and they would then do very well. Amber and Antonia were both old enough to work in the fields and they were willing to work, but the snow and the bitter weather had disheartened them all. Antonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in the spring. He and Amber should already split the logs for it, but the logs were all buried in the snow along the creek where they had been felled. While Grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marik slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me, to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse, but he did not dare in the presence of his elders. Marik was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies. Mrs. Shemaita grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over, and while Antonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own account. The woman had a quick ear and caught up phrases whenever she heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flower sack and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shemaita opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a tea cup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking and presented it ceremoniously to Grandmother. For cook, she announced, little now be very much when cook, spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon. Very good, you know, have in this country. All things for eat better in my country. Maybe so, Mrs. Shemaita, Grandmother said dryly. I can't say, but I prefer our bread to yours myself. Antonia undertook to explain. This very good, Mrs. Burton. She clasped her hands as if she could not express how good. It makes very much when you cook. Like what my momma say, cook with rabbit, cook with chicken in the gravy. Oh, so good. All the way home, Grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good Christian people could forget they were their brother's keepers. I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep. Or is it body to begin with these people? They're wanting in everything, and most of all in horse sense. Nobody can give them that, I guess. Jimmy here is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon that boy, Ambrose, has any real push in him? He's a worker all right, ma'am, and he's got some catch on about him, but he's a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world, and then again they can be too mean. That night while Grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package Mrs. Shimarda 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 odor. We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable. They might be dried meat from some queer beast gym. They ain't dried fish, and they never grew on stock or vine. I'm afraid of them. 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 Shimardas had brought so far and treasured so jealously were dried mushrooms, they had been gathered, probably in some deep Bohemian forest. That was section two, chapter 10 of My Antonia by Willa Cather. This is a LibriVox recording. 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