| IV
| 0 | |
| THE NEXT AFTERNOON I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the baby
and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She stood
still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came.
We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.
| 1 | |
| `I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last night.
I've been looking for you all day.'
| 2 | |
| She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens said,
`worked down,' but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity of
her face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
| 3 | |
| Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest
place to talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire
fence that shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world.
The tall red grass had never been cut there. It had died down in winter
and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby
as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her everything:
why I had decided to study law and to go into the law office of one
of my mother's relatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's death
from pneumonia last winter, and the difference it had made in my life.
She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of living,
and my dearest hopes.
| 4 | |
| `Of course it means you are going away from us for good,'
she said with a sigh. `But that don't mean I'll lose you.
Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years,
and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else.
He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult
him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him
and the more I understand him.'
| 5 | |
| She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities.
`I'd always be miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness.
I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where
all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here.
Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for something,
and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that
my little girl has a better chance than ever I had.
I'm going to take care of that girl, Jim.'
| 6 | |
| I told her I knew she would. `Do you know, Antonia, since I've
been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part
of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife,
or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man.
The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes
and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it.
You really are a part of me.'
| 7 | |
| She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears
came up in them slowly, `How can it be like that, when you
know so many people, and when I've disappointed you so?
Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?
I'm so glad we had each other when we were little.
I can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her
about all the things we used to do. You'll always remember
me when you think about old times, won't you? And I guess
everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.'
| 8 | |
| As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped
and lay like a great golden globe in the low west.
While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big
as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour,
thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes,
the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land,
resting on opposite edges of the world.
| 9 | |
| In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower
stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed;
the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply.
I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out
of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again,
and that my way could end there.
| 10 | |
| We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted.
I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once
more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands,
and remembering how many kind things they had done for me.
I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it
was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see
her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest,
realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces,
at the very bottom of my memory.
| 11 | |
| `I'll come back,' I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
| 12 | |
| `Perhaps you will'--I felt rather than saw her smile.
`But even if you don't, you're here, like my father.
So I won't be lonesome.'
| 13 | |
| As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe
that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,
laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
| |