| XIV
| 0 | |
| ON THE MORNING of the twenty-second I wakened with a start.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something
had happened. I heard excited voices in the kitchen--
grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death;
perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm.
| 1 | |
| Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove
with his hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their
boots and were rubbing their woollen socks. Their clothes
and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted.
On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed reluctantly.
I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes.
Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself:
`Oh, dear Saviour!' `Lord, Thou knowest!'
| 2 | |
| Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: `Jimmy, we will not
have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do.
Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress.
Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto
went back with him. The boys have had a hard night, and you must not
bother them with questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench.
Come in to breakfast, boys.'
| 3 | |
| After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began
to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
| 4 | |
| `No, sir,' Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather,
`nobody heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox-team, trying
to break a road, and the women-folks was shut up tight in their cave.
When Ambrosch come in, it was dark and he didn't see nothing, but the oxen
acted kind of queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--
bolted clean out of the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope
run through. He got a lantern and went back and found the old man,
just as we seen him.'
| 5 | |
| `Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. `I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble.
How could he forget himself and bring this on us!'
| 6 | |
| `I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,'
Fuchs declared. `He done everything natural. You know he was always
sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner,
and washed hisself all over after the girls had done the dishes.
Antonia heated the water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt
and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little
one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits.
He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then. He layed
down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where he always slept.
When we found him, everything was decent except'--Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated--'except what he couldn't nowise foresee.
His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt
at the neck and rolled up his sleeves.'
| 7 | |
| `I don't see how he could do it!' grandmother kept saying.
| 8 | |
| Otto misunderstood her. `Why, ma'am, it was simple enough;
he pulled the trigger with his big toe. He layed over
on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth,
then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger.
He found it all right!'
| 9 | |
| `Maybe he did,' said Jake grimly. `There's something mighty
queer about it.'
| 10 | |
| `Now what do you mean, Jake?' grandmother asked sharply.
| 11 | |
| `Well, ma'm, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I
picks it up and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my
oath it just fit the gash in the front of the old man's face.
That there Krajiek had been sneakin' round, pale and quiet,
and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun whimperin',
"My God, man, don't do that!" "I reckon I'm a-goin'
to look into this," says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat
and run about wringin' his hands. "They'll hang me!" says he.
"My God, they'll hang me sure!"'
| 12 | |
| Fuchs spoke up impatiently. `Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so
have you. The old man wouldn't have made all them preparations
for Krajiek to murder him, would he? It don't hang together.
The gun was right beside him when Ambrosch found him.'
| 13 | |
| `Krajiek could 'a' put it there, couldn't he?' Jake demanded.
| 14 | |
| Grandmother broke in excitedly: `See here, Jake Marpole, don't you
go trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble.
Otto reads you too many of them detective stories.'
| 15 | |
| `It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,' said grandfather quietly.
`If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from
the inside outward.'
| 16 | |
| `Just so it is, Mr. Burden,' Otto affirmed. `I seen bunches
of hair and stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof.
They was blown up there by gunshot, no question.'
| 17 | |
| Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas' with him.
| 18 | |
| `There is nothing you can do,' he said doubtfully. `The body
can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk,
and that will be a matter of several days, this weather.'
| 19 | |
| `Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of
comfort to them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling,
and was like a right hand to him. He might have thought of her.
He's left her alone in a hard world.' She glanced distrustfully
at Ambrosch, who was now eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.
| 20 | |
| Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going
to make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner.
On the grey gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across
the country with no roads to guide him.
| 21 | |
| `Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,' he said cheerfully,
as he put on a second pair of socks. `I've got a good
nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep.
It's the grey I'm worried about. I'll save him what I can,
but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!'
| 22 | |
| `This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best
you can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner.
She's a good woman, and she'll do well by you.'
| 23 | |
| After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
I saw a side of him I had not seen before. He was deeply,
even slavishly, devout. He did not say a word all morning,
but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now silently,
now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted
his hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor
boy fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began
to pray again.
| 24 | |
| No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken,
and that would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one
of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him.
She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat.
They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought.
Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black and
my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together
for Mrs. Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over
the hill by the drifted cornfield. Then, for the first time,
I realized that I was alone in the house.
| 25 | |
| I felt a considerable extension of power and authority,
and was anxious to acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs
and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves.
I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody
had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water.
After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else
to do, and I sat down to get warm. The quiet was delightful,
and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions.
I got `Robinson Crusoe' and tried to read, but his life on
the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it
flashed upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about
in this world at all, it would be here, in our house, which had
been more to his liking than any other in the neighbourhood.
I remembered his contented face when he was with us on Christmas Day.
If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would
never have happened.
| 26 | |
| I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at
once set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit,
so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow,
was resting now in this quiet house.
| 27 | |
| I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground,
always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench
behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could
hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let
the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him.
I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life before he came
to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances.
I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player,
the great forest full of game--belonging, as Antonia said, to the `nobles'--
from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights.
There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it,
he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they
might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air
in which they had haunted him.
| 28 | |
| It had begun to grow dark when my household returned,
and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed.
Jake and I got supper, and while we were washing the dishes
he told me in loud whispers about the state of things over at
the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came.
If anyone did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, `just as stiff as a dressed
turkey you hang out to freeze,' Jake said. The horses and oxen
would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there
was no longer any smell of blood. They were stabled there now,
with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them.
A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head.
Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going
down to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them,
because he did not feel the cold. I believed he felt cold as much
as anyone else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it.
He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!
| 29 | |
| Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him
capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about
his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would
remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
`As I understand it,' Jake concluded, `it will be a matter of years to pray
his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment.'
| 30 | |
| `I don't believe it,' I said stoutly. `I almost know it
isn't true.' I did not, of course, say that I believed
he had been in that very kitchen all afternoon, on his way
back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I went to bed,
this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly.
I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish:
he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.
| 31 | |
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