Kabanata Kabanata 17 · Chapter 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; Ántonia 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 Ántonia 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, Ántonia 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, Ántonia 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.’

Ántonia 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.

Ántonia 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 Ántonia

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. Ántonia 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. Ántonia 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 Ántonia. 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 Ántonia. 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 Ántonia!’