| XVII
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| WHEN SPRING CAME, AFTER that hard winter, one could not get
enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh
consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs
of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods
or blooming gardens. There was only--spring itself; the throb of it,
the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere:
in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm,
high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful
like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.
If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should
have known that it was spring.
| 1 | |
| Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass.
Our neighbours burned off their pasture before the new grass
made a start, so that the fresh growth would not be mixed
with the dead stand of last year. Those light, swift fires,
running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.
| 2 | |
| The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then.
The neighbours had helped them to build it in March. It stood
directly in front of their old cave, which they used as a cellar.
The family were now fairly equipped to begin their struggle
with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to live in,
a new windmill--bought on credit--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow,
and was to give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested
their first crop.
| 3 | |
| When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon
in April, Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I
gave reading lessons; Antonia was busy with other things.
I tied my pony and went into the kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda
was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she worked.
By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great
many questions about what our men were doing in the fields.
She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information,
and that from me she might get valuable secrets. On this
occasion she asked me very craftily when grandfather expected
to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he thought we
should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.
| 4 | |
| She gave me a shrewd glance. `He not Jesus,' she blustered;
`he not know about the wet and the dry.
| 5 | |
| I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting
for the hour when Ambrosch and Antonia would return
from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work.
She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm
for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers.
I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot.
When the neighbours were there building the new house, they saw
her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept
their food in their featherbeds.
| 6 | |
| When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw
with her team. How much older she had grown in eight months!
She had come to us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl,
although her fifteenth birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met
her as she brought her horses up to the windmill to water them.
She wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before
he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress
switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves
rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown
as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders,
like the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draught-horse
neck among the peasant women in all old countries.
| 7 | |
| She greeted me gaily, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing
she had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter,
breaking sod with the oxen.
| 8 | |
| `Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't
want that Jake get more done in one day than me.
I want we have very much corn this fall.'
| 9 | |
| While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other,
and then drank again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step
and rested her head on her hand.
| 10 | |
| `You see the big prairie fire from your place last night?
I hope your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?'
| 11 | |
| `No, we didn't. I came to ask you something, Tony.
Grandmother wants to know if you can't go to the term of
school that begins next week over at the sod schoolhouse.
She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a lot.'
| 12 | |
| Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they
were stiff. `I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
My mother can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him.
I can work as much as him. School is all right for little boys.
I help make this land one good farm.'
| 13 | |
| She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother,
I wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense
in her silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying.
She turned her face from me and looked off at the red streak
of dying light, over the dark prairie.
| 14 | |
| I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house.
Ambrosch had come in from the north quarter, and was watering his
oxen at the tank.
| 15 | |
| Antonia took my hand. `Sometime you will tell me all those nice things
you learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?' she asked with a sudden
rush of feeling in her voice. `My father, he went much to school.
He know a great deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here.
He play horn and violin, and he read so many books that the priests
in Bohemie come to talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?'
`No,' I said, `I will never forget him.'
| 16 | |
| Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia
had washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin
by the kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table.
Mrs. Shimerda ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk
on it. After the mush we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses,
and coffee with the cake that had been kept warm in the feathers.
Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in Bohemian; disputing about which of
them had done more ploughing that day. Mrs. Shimerda egged them on,
chuckling while she gobbled her food.
| 17 | |
| Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: `You take them ox
tomorrow and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.'
| 18 | |
| His sister laughed. `Don't be mad. I know it's awful
hard work for break sod. I milk the cow for you tomorrow,
if you want.'
| 19 | |
| Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. `That cow not give so much milk
like what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars,
I send him back the cow.'
| 20 | |
| `He doesn't talk about the fifteen dollars,' I exclaimed indignantly.
`He doesn't find fault with people.'
| 21 | |
| `He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,' grumbled Ambrosch.
| 22 | |
| I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied
about it. I began to wish I had not stayed for supper.
Everything was disagreeable to me. Antonia ate so noisily now,
like a man, and she yawned often at the table and kept
stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached.
Grandmother had said, `Heavy field work'll spoil that girl.
She'll lose all her nice ways and get rough ones.'
She had lost them already.
| 23 | |
| After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight.
Since winter I had seen very little of Antonia.
She was out in the fields from sunup until sundown.
If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped
at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow,
making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me.
On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day.
Grandfather was pleased with Antonia. When we complained of her,
he only smiled and said, `She will help some fellow get ahead
in the world.'
| 24 | |
| Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how
much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength.
I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought
not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked
in a nasty way about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow,
shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck,
and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone
in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed
to say so much when he exclaimed, `My Antonia!'
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