XVII
WHEN SPRING CAME, AFTER that hard winter, one could not get enough of the
nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter
was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in
the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and
playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbours burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.
The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbours had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill--bought on credit--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April, Yulka
ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Antonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might get
valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.
She gave me a shrewd glance. `He not Jesus,' she blustered; `he not know
about the wet and the dry.
I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbours were there building the new house, they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their featherbeds.
When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draught-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.
She greeted me gaily, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.
`Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall.'
While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand.
`You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope your
grandpa ain't lose no stacks?'
`No, we didn't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a
lot.'
Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were stiff.
`I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother can't
say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work as much
as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one
good farm.'
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch
had come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Antonia took my hand. `Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?' she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. `My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?' `No,' I said, `I will never
forget him.'
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers. Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in
Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day.
Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: `You take them ox tomorrow
and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart.'
His sister laughed. `Don't be mad. I know it's awful hard work for break
sod. I milk the cow for you tomorrow, if you want.'
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. `That cow not give so much milk like
what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him
back the cow.'
`He doesn't talk about the fifteen dollars,' I exclaimed indignantly. `He
doesn't find fault with people.'
`He say I break his saw when we build, and I never,' grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me.
Antonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table
and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother
had said, `Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose all her nice
ways and get rough ones.' She had lost them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Antonia. She was out in the fields from
sunup until sundown. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making
me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she
helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased
with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, `She
will help some fellow get ahead in the world.'
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much
she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew,
too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and
that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it.
Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned,
sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest
dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who
could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, `My
Antonia!'
