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| ON THE AFTERNOON of that same Sunday I took my first long ride
on my pony, under Otto's direction. After that Dude and 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 neighbours.
When we had to borrow anything, or to send about word that there would
be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I was always the messenger.
Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after working hours.
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| 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. Fuchs 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 seed 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 Fuchs's story, but insist that
the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend
has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem
to me the roads to freedom.
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| I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields,
looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges,
where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown
leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.
Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbours and to admire
their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out
of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest 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.
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| Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch
the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon
and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.
Antonia Shimerda 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 defenceless against them;
took possession of their comfortable houses and ate the 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 holes must go down to water--nearly two
hundred feet, hereabouts. Antonia said she didn't believe it;
that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early morning,
like the rabbits.
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| Antonia 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.
Mrs. Shimerda 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 the 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 Shimerdas were famished for fruit.
The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of the cornfields,
hunting for ground-cherries.
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| Antonia 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. Shimerda was a good housewife
in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!
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| I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread
she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered,
in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek 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
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.
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| During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town.
Krajiek encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they
would somehow be mysteriously separated from their money.
They hated Krajiek, 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 house the rattlesnakes--
because they did not know how to get rid of him.
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