Chapter Chapter 2 · Chapter 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.