Chapter Chapter 11 · Chapter XI

During the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of

our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas

shopping. But on the twenty-first of December, the snow began to fall.

The flakes came down so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I

could not see beyond the windmill—its frame looked dim and grey,

unsubstantial like a shadow. The snow did not stop falling all day, or

during the night that followed. The cold was not severe, but the storm

was quiet and resistless. The men could not go farther than the barns

and corral. They sat about the house most of the day as if it were

Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their suspenders, plaiting

whiplashes.

On the morning of the twenty-second, grandfather announced at breakfast

that it would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas

purchases. Jake was sure he could get through on horseback, and bring

home our things in saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads

would be obliterated, and a newcomer in the country would be lost ten

times over. Anyway, he would never allow one of his horses to be put to

such a strain.

We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I

had wanted to get some picture books for Yulka and Ántonia; even Yulka

was able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold

storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut

squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We

bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,

representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the

dining-room table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had

files of those good old family magazines which used to publish coloured

lithographs of popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of

these. I took ‘Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine’ for my

frontispiece. On the white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and

advertising cards which I had brought from my ‘old country.’ Fuchs got

out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted

up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and roosters, which

we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.

On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to

the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather’s grey

gelding. When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a

hatchet slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which

told me he was planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched

long and eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark

spot moving on the west hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where

the sky was taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite

break through. I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to

the pond, I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree

across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me

in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.

By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a

corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper

we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the

table, looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was

about five feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread

animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted

into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the

most unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never

seen anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a

fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and

shoemaker’s wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of

brilliantly coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff

enough to stand alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by

his old mother in Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of

paper lace; there were the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the

ox and the ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and

a group of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the

black slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of

the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put

sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake’s

pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.

I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in

the lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his

face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage

scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted

moustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their

very roughness and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no

practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a

distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.

Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened labourers who

never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so fond of

children!