XIV
ON THE MORNING of the twenty-second I wakened with a start. Before I
opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard
excited voices in the kitchen-- grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she
must be almost beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with
delight. What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death;
perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his
hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing
their woollen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both
looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with
a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed
reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her
lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: `Oh, dear
Saviour!' `Lord, Thou knowest!'
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: `Jimmy, we will not have
prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda
is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys
have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That
is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys.'
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to
talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances. I held my
tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
`No, sir,' Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, `nobody
heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox-team, trying to break a
road, and the women-folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch
come in, it was dark and he didn't see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of
queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him-- bolted clean out
of the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got
a lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him.'
`Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. `I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How
could he forget himself and bring this on us!'
`I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,' Fuchs
declared. `He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of
fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed
hisself all over after the girls had done the dishes. Antonia heated the
water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he
was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he
was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn
and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls,
where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent
except'--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated--'except what he couldn't
nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the
bed. He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck
and rolled up his sleeves.'
`I don't see how he could do it!' grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. `Why, ma'am, it was simple enough; he pulled the
trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the
barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!'
`Maybe he did,' said Jake grimly. `There's something mighty queer about
it.'
`Now what do you mean, Jake?' grandmother asked sharply.
`Well, ma'm, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I picks it up and
carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in
the front of the old man's face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin'
round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun
whimperin', "My God, man, don't do that!" "I reckon I'm a-goin' to look
into this," says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about
wringin' his hands. "They'll hang me!" says he. "My God, they'll hang me
sure!"'
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. `Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so have you.
The old man wouldn't have made all them preparations for Krajiek to murder
him, would he? It don't hang together. The gun was right beside him when
Ambrosch found him.'
`Krajiek could 'a' put it there, couldn't he?' Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: `See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go
trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble. Otto reads
you too many of them detective stories.'
`It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,' said grandfather quietly.
`If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the
inside outward.'
`Just so it is, Mr. Burden,' Otto affirmed. `I seen bunches of hair and
stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up
there by gunshot, no question.'
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas' with
him.
`There is nothing you can do,' he said doubtfully. `The body can't be
touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a
matter of several days, this weather.'
`Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to
them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a
right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He's left her alone in a
hard world.' She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his
breakfast at the kitchen table.
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to
make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On
the grey gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the
country with no roads to guide him.
`Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden,' he said cheerfully, as he put on a
second pair of socks. `I've got a good nose for directions, and I never
did need much sleep. It's the grey I'm worried about. I'll save him what
I can, but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!'
`This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you
can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner. She's a good
woman, and she'll do well by you.'
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had
not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not say a
word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his
hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy fell asleep
where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that
would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big
black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy
white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set
off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black
and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs.
Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted
cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the
house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to
acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar,
and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not
been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After
the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat
down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got `Robinson Crusoe' and tried to read,
but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed
upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about in this world at
all, it would be here, in our house, which had been more to his liking than
any other in the neighbourhood. I remembered his contented face when he
was with us on Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this
terrible thing would never have happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground,
always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench
behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I
could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I
had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there
with him. I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life
before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings
and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the
trombone-player, the great forest full of game--belonging, as Antonia said,
to the `nobles'-- from which she and her mother used to steal wood on
moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if
anyone killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came
to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out
from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If anyone did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, `just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze,' Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as anyone else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. `As I understand it,' Jake concluded, `it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment.'
`I don't believe it,' I said stoutly. `I almost know it isn't true.' I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.
