II
WHEN I AWOKE IN THE morning, long bands of sunshine were coming in at the
window and reaching back under the eaves where the two boys lay. Leo was
wide awake and was tickling his brother's leg with a dried cone-flower he
had pulled out of the hay. Ambrosch kicked at him and turned over. I
closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Leo lay on his back, elevated
one foot, and began exercising his toes. He picked up dried flowers with
his toes and brandished them in the belt of sunlight. After he had amused
himself thus for some time, he rose on one elbow and began to look at me,
cautiously, then critically, blinking his eyes in the light. His
expression was droll; it dismissed me lightly. `This old fellow is no
different from other people. He doesn't know my secret.' He seemed
conscious of possessing a keener power of enjoyment than other people; his
quick recognitions made him frantically impatient of deliberate judgments.
He always knew what he wanted without thinking.
After dressing in the hay, I washed my face in cold water at the windmill.
Breakfast was ready when I entered the kitchen, and Yulka was baking
griddle-cakes. The three older boys set off for the fields early. Leo and
Yulka were to drive to town to meet their father, who would return from
Wilber on the noon train.
`We'll only have a lunch at noon,' Antonia said, and cook the geese for
supper, when our papa will be here. I wish my Martha could come down to
see you. They have a Ford car now, and she don't seem so far away from me
as she used to. But her husband's crazy about his farm and about having
everything just right, and they almost never get away except on Sundays.
He's a handsome boy, and he'll be rich some day. Everything he takes hold
of turns out well. When they bring that baby in here, and unwrap him, he
looks like a little prince; Martha takes care of him so beautiful. I'm
reconciled to her being away from me now, but at first I cried like I was
putting her into her coffin.'
We were alone in the kitchen, except for Anna, who was pouring cream into
the churn. She looked up at me. `Yes, she did. We were just ashamed of
mother. She went round crying, when Martha was so happy, and the rest of
us were all glad. Joe certainly was patient with you, mother.'
Antonia nodded and smiled at herself. `I know it was silly, but I couldn't
help it. I wanted her right here. She'd never been away from me a night
since she was born. If Anton had made trouble about her when she was a
baby, or wanted me to leave her with my mother, I wouldn't have married
him. I couldn't. But he always loved her like she was his own.'
`I didn't even know Martha wasn't my full sister until after she was
engaged to Joe,' Anna told me.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, the wagon drove in, with the father and
the eldest son. I was smoking in the orchard, and as I went out to meet
them, Antonia came running down from the house and hugged the two men as if
they had been away for months.
`Papa,' interested me, from my first glimpse of him. He was shorter than
his older sons; a crumpled little man, with run-over boot-heels, and he
carried one shoulder higher than the other. But he moved very quickly, and
there was an air of jaunty liveliness about him. He had a strong, ruddy
colour, thick black hair, a little grizzled, a curly moustache, and red
lips. His smile showed the strong teeth of which his wife was so proud,
and as he saw me his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he knew all about
me. He looked like a humorous philosopher who had hitched up one shoulder
under the burdens of life, and gone on his way having a good time when he
could. He advanced to meet me and gave me a hard hand, burned red on the
back and heavily coated with hair. He wore his Sunday clothes, very thick
and hot for the weather, an unstarched white shirt, and a blue necktie with
big white dots, like a little boy's, tied in a flowing bow. Cuzak began at
once to talk about his holiday--from politeness he spoke in English.
`Mama, I wish you had see the lady dance on the slack-wire in the street at
night. They throw a bright light on her and she float through the air
something beautiful, like a bird! They have a dancing bear, like in the
old country, and two-three merry-go-around, and people in balloons, and
what you call the big wheel, Rudolph?'
`A Ferris wheel,' Rudolph entered the conversation in a deep baritone
voice. He was six foot two, and had a chest like a young blacksmith. `We
went to the big dance in the hall behind the saloon last night, mother, and
I danced with all the girls, and so did father. I never saw so many pretty
girls. It was a Bohunk crowd, for sure. We didn't hear a word of English
on the street, except from the show people, did we, papa?'
Cuzak nodded. `And very many send word to you, Antonia. You will
excuse'--turning to me--`if I tell her.' While we walked toward the house
he related incidents and delivered messages in the tongue he spoke
fluently, and I dropped a little behind, curious to know what their
relations had become--or remained. The two seemed to be on terms of easy
friendliness, touched with humour. Clearly, she was the impulse, and he
the corrective. As they went up the hill he kept glancing at her sidewise,
to see whether she got his point, or how she received it. I noticed later
that he always looked at people sidewise, as a work-horse does at its
yokemate. Even when he sat opposite me in the kitchen, talking, he would
turn his head a little toward the clock or the stove and look at me from
the side, but with frankness and good nature. This trick did not suggest
duplicity or secretiveness, but merely long habit, as with the horse.
He had brought a tintype of himself and Rudolph for Antonia's collection,
and several paper bags of candy for the children. He looked a little
disappointed when his wife showed him a big box of candy I had got in
Denver--she hadn't let the children touch it the night before. He put his
candy away in the cupboard, `for when she rains,' and glanced at the box,
chuckling. `I guess you must have hear about how my family ain't so
small,' he said.
Cuzak sat down behind the stove and watched his womenfolk and the little
children with equal amusement. He thought they were nice, and he thought
they were funny, evidently. He had been off dancing with the girls and
forgetting that he was an old fellow, and now his family rather surprised
him; he seemed to think it a joke that all these children should belong to
him. As the younger ones slipped up to him in his retreat, he kept taking
things out of his pockets; penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that
was inflated by a whistle. He beckoned to the little boy they called Jan,
whispered to him, and presented him with a paper snake, gently, so as not
to startle him. Looking over the boy's head he said to me, `This one is
bashful. He gets left.'
Cuzak had brought home with him a roll of illustrated Bohemian papers. He
opened them and began to tell his wife the news, much of which seemed to
relate to one person. I heard the name Vasakova, Vasakova, repeated
several times with lively interest, and presently I asked him whether he
were talking about the singer, Maria Vasak.
`You know? You have heard, maybe?' he asked incredulously. When I assured
him that I had heard her, he pointed out her picture and told me that Vasak
had broken her leg, climbing in the Austrian Alps, and would not be able to
fill her engagements. He seemed delighted to find that I had heard her
sing in London and in Vienna; got out his pipe and lit it to enjoy our talk
the better. She came from his part of Prague. His father used to mend her
shoes for her when she was a student. Cuzak questioned me about her looks,
her popularity, her voice; but he particularly wanted to know whether I had
noticed her tiny feet, and whether I thought she had saved much money. She
was extravagant, of course, but he hoped she wouldn't squander everything,
and have nothing left when she was old. As a young man, working in Wienn,
he had seen a good many artists who were old and poor, making one glass of
beer last all evening, and `it was not very nice, that.'
When the boys came in from milking and feeding, the long table was laid,
and two brown geese, stuffed with apples, were put down sizzling before
Antonia. She began to carve, and Rudolph, who sat next his mother, started
the plates on their way. When everybody was served, he looked across the
table at me.
`Have you been to Black Hawk lately, Mr. Burden? Then I wonder if you've
heard about the Cutters?'
No, I had heard nothing at all about them.
`Then you must tell him, son, though it's a terrible thing to talk about at
supper. Now, all you children be quiet, Rudolph is going to tell about the
murder.'
`Hurrah! The murder!' the children murmured, looking pleased and
interested.
Rudolph told his story in great detail, with occasional promptings from his
mother or father.
Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on living in the house that Antonia and I
knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be very old
people. He shrivelled up, Antonia said, until he looked like a little old
yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe of hair never changed colour.
Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had known her, but as the
years passed she became afflicted with a shaking palsy which made her
nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her hands were so uncertain
that she could no longer disfigure china, poor woman! As the couple grew
older, they quarrelled more and more often about the ultimate disposition
of their `property.' A new law was passed in the state, securing the
surviving wife a third of her husband's estate under all conditions.
Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs. Cutter would live longer than
he, and that eventually her `people,' whom he had always hated so
violently, would inherit. Their quarrels on this subject passed the
boundary of the close-growing cedars, and were heard in the street by
whoever wished to loiter and listen.
One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and bought
a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that he `thought
he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.' (Here the
children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered giggles.)
Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practised for
an hour or so, and then went home. At six o'clock that evening, when
several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to supper, they
heard a pistol shot. They paused and were looking doubtfully at one
another, when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window. They
ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on a sofa in his upstairs
bedroom, with his throat torn open, bleeding on a roll of sheets he had
placed beside his head.
`Walk in, gentlemen,' he said weakly. `I am alive, you see, and competent.
You are witnesses that I have survived my wife. You will find her in her
own room. Please make your examination at once, so that there will be no
mistake.'
One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others went into
Mrs. Cutter's room. She was lying on her bed, in her night-gown and
wrapper, shot through the heart. Her husband must have come in while she
was taking her afternoon nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her
breast. Her night-gown was burned from the powder.
The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes and
said distinctly, `Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am conscious.
My affairs are in order.' Then, Rudolph said, `he let go and died.'
On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o'clock that
afternoon. It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she
might secretly have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant to
shoot himself at six o'clock and would, if he had strength, fire a shot
through the window in the hope that passersby might come in and see him
`before life was extinct,' as he wrote.
`Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?' Antonia
turned to me after the story was told. `To go and do that poor woman out
of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone!'
`Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr.
Burden?' asked Rudolph.
I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer learns over and over how strong a
motive hate can be, but in my collection of legal anecdotes I had nothing
to match this one. When I asked how much the estate amounted to, Rudolph
said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.
Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance. `The lawyers, they got a good
deal of it, sure,' he said merrily.
A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been scraped
together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself had died for in the
end!
After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat down by the
windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it were my business to know
it.
His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he, being a younger
son, was apprenticed to the latter's trade. You never got anywhere working
for your relatives, he said, so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna
and worked in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young fellow who
liked a good time didn't save anything in Vienna; there were too many
pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made in the day. After
three years there, he came to New York. He was badly advised and went to
work on furs during a strike, when the factories were offering big wages.
The strikers won, and Cuzak was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred
dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges. He had
always thought he would like to raise oranges! The second year a hard
frost killed his young grove, and he fell ill with malaria. He came to
Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about. When he
began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl
he had always been hunting for. They were married at once, though he had
to borrow money from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.
`It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first
crops grow,' he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled
hair. `Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my
wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty
fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was right,
all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an
acre then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten
years ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys; we can work a
lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain't always so
strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in
town, and when I come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no
questions. We always get along fine, her and me, like at first. The
children don't make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.' He lit
another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.
I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many
questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the Ringstrasse
and the theatres.
`Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm the
place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I pretty
near run away,' he confessed with a little laugh. `I never did think how I
would be a settled man like this.'
He was still, as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theatres and lighted
streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over.
His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to
live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the
crowd.--Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the
loneliest countries in the world.
I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by the windmill,
nursing his pipe and listening to the silence; the wheeze of the pump, the
grunting of the pigs, an occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed
by a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument
of Antonia's special mission. This was a fine life, certainly, but it
wasn't the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life
that was right for one was ever right for two!
I asked Cuzak if he didn't find it hard to do without the gay company he
had always been used to. He knocked out his pipe against an upright,
sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.
`At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,' he said frankly, `but my
woman is got such a warm heart. She always make it as good for me as she
could. Now it ain't so bad; I can begin to have some fun with my boys,
already!'
As we walked toward the house, Cuzak cocked his hat jauntily over one ear
and looked up at the moon. `Gee!' he said in a hushed voice, as if he had
just wakened up, `it don't seem like I am away from there twenty-six
year!'
