Kabanata Kabanata 19 · Chapter XIX

July came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the

plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It

seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the

stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured

cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green. If all

the great plain from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains had been under

glass, and the heat regulated by a thermometer, it could not have been

better for the yellow tassels that were ripening and fertilizing the

silk day by day. The cornfields were far apart in those times, with

miles of wild grazing land between. It took a clear, meditative eye

like my grandfather’s to foresee that they would enlarge and multiply

until they would be, not the Shimerdas’ cornfields, or Mr. Bushy’s, but

the world’s cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great

economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie all the

activities of men, in peace or war.

The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,

secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little

to fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the

wheatfields that they did not notice the heat—though I was kept busy

carrying water for them—and grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do

in the kitchen that they could not have told whether one day was hotter

than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass,

Ántonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for

dinner. Grandmother made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we

reached the garden she threw it on the grass and let her hair fly in

the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads of

perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like a little moustache.

‘Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!’ she used to

sing joyfully. ‘I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a

man. I like to be like a man.’ She would toss her head and ask me to

feel the muscles swell in her brown arm.

We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive

that one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with

pans. Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Ántonia

worked for us.

All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The

harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the

house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat

lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt

frame of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a

beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut

grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when

the dishes were washed, Ántonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof

of the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and

metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in

great zigzags across the heavens, making everything stand out and come

close to us for a moment. Half the sky was chequered with black

thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning

flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on

it; and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the

quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction. Great warm

splashes of rain fell on our upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger

than a little boat, drifted out into the clear space unattended, and

kept moving westward. All about us we could hear the felty beat of the

raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard. Grandmother came to the

door and said it was late, and we would get wet out there.

‘In a minute we come,’ Ántonia called back to her. ‘I like your

grandmother, and all things here,’ she sighed. ‘I wish my papa live to

see this summer. I wish no winter ever come again.’

‘It will be summer a long while yet,’ I reassured her. ‘Why aren’t you

always nice like this, Tony?’

‘How nice?’

‘Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be

like Ambrosch?’

She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky.

‘If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for

you. But they will be hard for us.’

BOOK II. The Hired Girls