II
I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When
I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger
than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping
softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black
hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother.
She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled,
peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
`Had a good sleep, Jimmy?' she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, `My, how you do look like your father!' I
remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come
to wake him like this when he overslept. `Here are your clean clothes,'
she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. `But
first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath
behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about.'
`Down to the kitchen' struck me as curious; it was always `out in the
kitchen' at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a
kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the
plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.
The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were
little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and
wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen, I sniffed a
pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with
bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench
against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and
cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was
used to taking my bath without help. `Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are
you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.'
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
`Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!' Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her
head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at
something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to
believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that
were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.
Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious
inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with
due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little
strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then
fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was
dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a
stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of
the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on the wooden
bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat-- he caught not only
rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on
the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked
about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she
said they were to be our nearest neighbours. We did not talk about the
farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the
men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper table,
then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and
neighbours there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke
kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of
an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had
a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he
was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an
adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His
iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had
drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in
Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had
been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had
been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a
`perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design-- roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.' I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbours
lived in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our
white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the basement, stood
at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close
by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to
the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and
bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs,
at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty
willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came
directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little
pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie
to the west. There, along the western sky-line it skirted a great
cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and
the sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight.
Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough,
shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the
plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is
the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of
winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and
the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother
called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung
by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake
cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little
girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been
sick all summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping ...
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of
the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the
hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. `Aren't you afraid of
snakes?'
`A little,' I admitted, `but I'd like to stay, anyhow.'
`Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow
and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in
the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big
'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once
in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new country a body
feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me
when I'm at work.'
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the
path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the
draw; when she came to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared. I
was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There
were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I
turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and
ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever
seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers
scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as
I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was
something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did
not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like
that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun
and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it
comes as naturally as sleep.
