My Ántonia Read online

  IV

  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 thepost-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of timeby riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, orto send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, Iwas always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things afterworking 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 no fencesin those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed thesunflower-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 wilderness tofind a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members ofthe first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scatteredsunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains ofwagons came through with all the women and children, they had thesunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake'sstory, 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 for thedamp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soonturned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled likecocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south tovisit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to seethe big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had ahawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and theyhad to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious aboutthem, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been thescarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

  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 nestsunderground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and weused to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. Wehad 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 werequite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortablehouses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It wasalways mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear underthe earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like thatmust be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from anypond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in thedesert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted thatsome of the holes must go down to water--nearly two hundred feet,hereabouts. Antonia said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probablylapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.

  Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make themknown. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have herreading 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. Thewhite Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them withcuriosity. 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 werefamished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge ofthe 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 her everymovement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a goodhousewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

  I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave herfamily to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tinpeck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the pasteout to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of themeasure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let thisresidue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuffdown 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 could talkor from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and thetwo boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in theirhole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brownowls housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid ofhim.