My Antonia Read online

  IV

  ON THE AFTERNOON of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on mypony, under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week tothe post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good dealof time by riding on errands to our neighbours. When we had to borrowanything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at the sodschoolhouse, I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to suchthings after working hours.

  All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that firstglorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were nofences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grassuplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followedthe sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers wereintroduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of thepersecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wildernessto find a place where they could worship God in their own way, themembers of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah,scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the longtrains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they hadthe sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirmFuchs's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-borderedroads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

  I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking forthe damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweedsoon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curledlike cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I wentsouth 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 theearth and had a hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in thatcountry, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used tofeel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. Itmust have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that madedetail so precious.

  Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brownearth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nestsunderground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and weused to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit.We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurkingabout. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls,which were quite defenceless against them; took possession of theircomfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for theowls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset anddisappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things whowould live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town wasa long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populousdog-towns in the desert where there was no surface water for fiftymiles; he insisted that some of the holes must go down to water--nearlytwo hundred feet, hereabouts. Antonia said she didn't believe it; thatthe dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early morning, like therabbits.

  Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to makethem known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to haveher reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it wasimportant that one member of the family should learn English. When thelesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind thegarden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out thehearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers.The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them withcuriosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had setin, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdaswere famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along theedge of the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.

  Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn aboutcooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching herevery movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was agood housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under newconditions: the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

  I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she gaveher family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tinpeck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took thepaste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides ofthe measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let thisresidue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sourstuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

  During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiekencouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow bemysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but theyclung to him because he was the only human being with whom they couldtalk or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old manand the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept himin their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs andthe brown owls house the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how toget rid of him.