 CHAPTER 2 When I awoke in the morning long bands of sunshine were coming in the window and reaching back under the eaves where the two boys lay. Leo was wide awake and was tickling his brother's leg with the dried cone-flower he had pulled out of the hay. Ambrose kicked at him and turned over. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Leo lay on his back, elevated one foot, and began exercising his toes. He picked up dried flowers with his toes and brandished them in the belt of sunlight. After he had amused himself thus for some time he rose on one elbow and began to look at me, cautiously, then critically, blinking his eyes in the light. His expression was droll, it dismissed me lightly. This old fellow is no different from other people. He doesn't know my secret. He seemed conscious of possessing a keener power of enjoyment than other people. His quick recognitions made him frantically impatient of deliberate judgements. He always knew what he wanted without thinking. After dressing in the hay I washed my face in cold water at the windmill. Breakfast was ready when I entered the kitchen and Yulka was baking griddle-cakes. The three older boys set off for the fields early. Leo and Yulka were to drive to town to meet their father, who would return from Wilbur on the noon train. "'We'll only have a lunch at noon,' Antonia said, and cook the geese for supper when our papa will be here. I wish my Martha could come down to see you. They have a thawed car now, and she doesn't seem so far away from me as she used to. But her husband's crazy about his farm and about having everything just right, and they almost never get away except on Sundays. He's a handsome boy, and he'll be rich some day. Everything he takes hold of turns out well. When they bring that baby in here and unwrap him, he looks like a little prince. Martha takes care of him so beautiful. I'm reconciled to her for being away from me now, but at first I cried like I was putting her into her coffin. We were alone in the kitchen, except for Anna, who was pouring cream into the churn. She looked up at me. Yes, she did. We were just ashamed of mother. She went round crying when Martha was so happy and the rest of us were all glad. Joe certainly was patient with you, mother." Antonia nodded and smiled at herself. I know it was silly, but I couldn't help it. I wanted her right here. She'd never been away from me a night since she was born. If Anton had made trouble about her when she was a baby, or wanted me to leave her with my mother, I wouldn't have married him. I couldn't, but he always loved her like she was his own. I didn't even know Martha wasn't my full sister until after she was engaged to Joe, Anna told me. Toward the middle of the afternoon, the wagon drove in, with the father and the eldest son. I was smoking in the orchard, and as I went out to meet them, Antonia came running down from the house and hugged the two men as if they had been away for months. Papa interested me from my first glimpse of him. He was shorter than his older sons, a crumpled little man, with run over boot heels, and he carried one shoulder higher than the other. But he moved very quickly, and there was an air of jaunty liveliness about him. He had a strong, ruddy colour, thick black hair, a little grizzled, a curly mustache, and red lips. His smile showed the strong teeth of which his wife was so proud, and as he saw me, his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he knew all about me. He looked like a humorous philosopher who had hitched up one shoulder under the burdens of life, and gone on his way having a good time when he could. He advanced to meet me, and gave me a hard hand, burned red on the back, and heavily coated with hair. He wore his Sunday clothes, very thick and hot for the weather, an unstarched white shirt, and a blue necktie with big white dots, like a little boy's, tied in a flowing bow. Cusick began at once to talk about his holiday. From politeness, he spoke in English. Mama, I wish you had seen the lady dance on the slack wire in the street at night. They throw a bright light on her, and she float through the air or something beautiful, like a bird. They have a dancing bear, like in the old country, and two-three merry-go-round, and people in balloons, and what do you call the big wheel, Rudolph? A ferris wheel. Rudolph entered the conversation in a deep baritone voice. He was six foot two, and had a chest, like a young blacksmith. We went to the big dance in the hall behind the saloon last night, mother, and I danced with all the girls, and so did father. I never saw so many pretty girls. It was a bow-hunk crowd, for sure. We didn't hear a word of English on the street, except from show-people, did we, papa? Cusick nodded, and very many send word to you, Antonia. You would excuse, turning to me, if I tell her. While we walked toward the house, he related incidents and delivered messages in the tongue he spoke fluently, and I dropped a little behind, curious to know what their relations had become, or remained. The two seemed to be on terms of easy friendliness, touched with humour. Clearly she was the impulse, and he the corrective. As they went up the hill, he kept glancing at her sidewise, to see whether she got his point, or how she received it. I noticed later that he always looked at people sidewise, as a workhorse does at its yoke-mate. Even when he sat opposite me in the kitchen, talking, he would turn his head a little toward the clock, or the stove, and look at me from the side, but with frankness and good nature. This trick did not suggest duplicity or secretiveness, but merely long habit, as with the horse. He had brought a tin-type of himself and Rudolph for Antonia's collection, and several paper bags of candy for the children. He looked a little disappointed when his wife showed him a big box of candy I had got in Denver. She hadn't let the children touch it the night before. He put his candy away in the cupboard, for when she rains, and glanced at the box, chuckling, I guess you must have heard about how my family ain't so small, he said. Cusick sat down behind the stove and watched his women folk and the little children with equal amusement. He had been off dancing with the girls and forgetting that he was an old fellow, and now his family rather surprised him. He seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking things out of his pockets, penny-dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan, whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently so as not to startle him. Looking over the boy's head, he said to me, This one is bashful. He gets left. Cusick had brought home with him a roll of illustrated Bohemian papers. He opened them and began to tell his wife the news, much of which seemed to relate to one person. I heard the name Vazakova. Vazakova repeated several times with a lively interest, and presently I asked him whether he were talking about the singer, Maria Vazak. You know? You have heard, maybe? He asked incredulously. When I assured him that I had heard her, he pointed out her picture and told me that Vazak had broken her leg, climbing in the Austrian Alps, and would not be able to fill her engagements. He seemed delighted to find that I had heard her sing in London and in Vienna, got out his pipe and lit it to enjoy our talk the better. She came from his part of Prague. His father used to mend her shoes for her when she was a student. Cusick questioned me about her looks, her popularity, her voice, but he particularly wanted to know whether I had noticed her tiny feet, and whether I thought she had saved much money. She was extravagant, of course, but he hoped she wouldn't squander everything and have nothing left when she was old. As a young man, working in Vienna, he had seen a good many artists who were old and poor, making one glass of beer last all evening, and it was not very nice that. When the boys came in from milking and feeding, the long table was laid, and two brown geese, stuffed with apples, were put down sizzling before Antonia. She began to carve, and Rudolf, who sat next to his mother, started the plates on their way. When everybody was served, he looked across the table at me. Have you been to Blackhawk lately, Mr. Burden? Then I wonder if you've heard about the cutters. Now I had heard nothing at all about them. Then you must tell him, son, though it's a terrible thing to talk about at supper. Now all you children be quiet. Rudolf is going to tell about the murder. Hurrah! The murder! The children murmured, looking pleased and interested. Rudolf told his story in great detail, with occasional promptings from his mother or father. Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on living in the house that Antonia and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be very old people. He shriveled up, Antonia said, until he looked like a little old yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe of hair never changed colour. Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had known her, but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking palsy which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure China, poor woman. As the couple grew older they quarreled more and more about the ultimate disposition of their property. A new law was passed in the state, securing the surviving wife a third of her husband's estate under all conditions. Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs. Cutter would live longer than he, and that eventually her people, whom he had always hated so violently, would inherit. Their quarrels on this subject passed the boundary of the close-growing cedars and were heard in the street by whoever wished to loiter and listen. One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that he thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it. Here the children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered giggles. Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practiced for an hour or so, and then went home. At six o'clock that evening, when several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to supper, they heard a pistol shot. They paused, and were looking doubtfully at one another, when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window. They ran into the house and found Vic Cutter lying on a sofa in his upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open, bleeding on a roll of sheets he had placed beside his head. Walk in, gentlemen, he said weakly. I am alive, you see, and competent. You are witnesses that I have survived my wife. You will find her in her own room. Please make your examination at once, so that there will be no mistake. One of the neighbors telephoned for a doctor, while the others went into Mrs. Cutter's room. She was lying on her bed, and her night-yun and wrapper shot through the heart. Her husband must have come in while she was taking her afternoon nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her breast. Her night-yun was burned from the powder. The horrified neighbors rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes and said distinctly, Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am conscious. My affairs are in order. Then Rudolph said, he let go and died. On his desk the coroner found a letter dated at five o'clock that afternoon. It stated that he had just shot his wife, that any will she might secretly have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant to shoot himself at six o'clock and would, if he had strength, fire a shot through the window in the hope that passers-by might come in and see him, before life was extinct, as he wrote. Now, would you have thought that that man had such a cruel heart? Antonia turned to me after the story was told, to go and do that poor woman out of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone. Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr. Burden? asked Rudolph. I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer learns over and over how strong a motive hate can be, but in my collection of legal anecdotes I had nothing to match this one. When I asked how much the estate amounted to, Rudolph said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars. Cusick gave me a twinkling, side-long glance. The lawyers, they got a good deal of it, sure, he said merrily. A hundred thousand dollars, so that was the fortune that had been scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself had died for in the end. After supper, Cusick and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat down by the windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it were my business to know it. His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he, being a younger son, was apprenticed to the latter's trade. You never got anywhere working for your relatives, he said, so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna and worked in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young fellow who liked a good time didn't save anything in Vienna. There were too many pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made in the day. After three years there he came to New York. He was badly advised and went to work on furs during a strike, when the factories were offering big wages. The strikers won, and Cusick was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges. He had always thought he would like to raise oranges. The second year a hard frost killed his young grove and he fell ill with malaria. He came to Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelenek, and to look about. When he began to look about he saw Antonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl he had always been hunting for. They were married at once, though he had to borrow money from his cousin to buy the wedding ring. It was a pretty hard job breaking up this place and making the first crops grow, he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled hair. Sometimes I get awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty fast, so it looked like it'd be hard to move anyhow. I guess she was right, all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and I've been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten years ago and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys, we can work a lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain't always so strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town, and when I come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no questions. We always get along fine her and me like at first. The children don't make trouble between us like sometimes happens. He lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly. I found Cusack a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna, and the Ringstrasse, and the theatres. Gee, I like to go back there once when the boys is big enough to farm the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country I pretty near run away. He confessed with a little laugh. I never did think how I would be a settled man like this. He was still, as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theatres and lighted streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over. His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the crowd. Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world. I could see the little chap sitting here every evening by the windmill, nursing his pipe and listening to the silence, the wheeze of the pump, the grunting of the pigs, and occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed by a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cusick had been made the instrument of Antonia's special mission. This was a fine life, certainly, but it wasn't the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two. I asked Cusick if he didn't find it hard to do without the gay company he had always been used to. He knocked his pipe against an upright, side, and dropped it in his pocket. At first I'd near go crazy with lonesomeness, he said frankly, but my woman has got such a warm heart. She always make it as good for me as she could. Now it ain't so bad. I can begin to have some fun with my boys already. As we walked toward the house, Cusick cocked his hat jauntily over one ear and looked up at the moon. Gee! he said in a hushed voice, as if he had just wakened up. It don't seem like I am away from there twenty-six year. End of Chapter 2 of Book 5, recorded by Rachel Ellen in Yosemite, California, January 26th, 2008. Book 5, Chapter 3 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 5, Cusick's Boys. Chapter 3 After dinner the next day I said goodbye and drove back to Hastings to take the train for Blackhawk. Antonia and her children gathered round my buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with friendly faces. Leo and Ambrose ran ahead to open the lane-gate. When I reached the bottom of the hill I glanced back. The group was still there by the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron. At the gate Ambrose lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture. That's like him, his brother said with a shrug. He's a crazy kid. Maybe he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest. I found I hated to leave this boy with his pleasant voice and his fine head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders. Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me upon the Niobrara next summer, I said. Your fathers agreed to let you off after harvest. He smiled. I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys, he added, blushing. Oh, yes you do, I said, gathering up my reins. He made no answer to this except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure and affection as I drove away. My day in Blackhawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing in the Harling's big yard when I passed. The mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardi poplar that used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with Anton Yelenick under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon, while I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel I met one of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office and talked over the cutter case with me. After that I scarce they knew how to put in the time until the night express was due. I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been plowed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn, bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see the dun shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields of the pale gold colour I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of golden rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things—trips I meant to take with the Cusick boys, in the badlands and up on the stinking water. There were enough Cusicks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the boys grew up there would always be Cusick himself. I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cusick. As I wandered over those rough pastures I had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Blackhawk out to the North Country, to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Chiméras and to the Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been plowed under when the highways were surveyed. This half-mile or so within the pasture fence was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared, where mere shadings in the grass and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw it was easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight. This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Blackhawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not wither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and me, this had been the road of destiny, had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again, whatever we had missed we possessed together the precious, the incomunicable past.