Chương Chương 42 · Chapter IV

The next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas’. Yulka showed me the

baby and told me that Ántonia was shocking wheat on the southwest

quarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way

off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching

me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if

not in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.

‘I thought you’d come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens’s last

night. I’ve been looking for you all day.’

She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens

said, ‘worked down,’ but there was a new kind of strength in the

gravity of her face, and her colour still gave her that look of

deep-seated health and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that

though so much had happened in her life and in mine, she was barely

twenty-four years old.

Ántonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked

toward that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the

fittest place to talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging

wire fence that shut Mr. Shimerda’s plot off from the rest of the

world. The tall red grass had never been cut there. It had died down in

winter and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and

shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her

everything: why I had decided to study law and to go into the law

office of one of my mother’s relatives in New York City; about Gaston

Cleric’s death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference it had

made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of

living, and my dearest hopes.

‘Of course it means you are going away from us for good,’ she said with

a sigh. ‘But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s

been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost

anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult

him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more

I understand him.’

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be

miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know

every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to

live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world

for something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my

little girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care

of that girl, Jim.’

I told her I knew she would. ‘Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been

away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the

world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my

mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of

you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my

tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a

part of me.’

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in

them slowly, ‘How can it be like that, when you know so many people,

and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much

people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we

were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her

about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you

think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about

old times, even the happiest people.’

As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a

great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose

in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose

colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten

minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level

land, resting on opposite edges of the world.

In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every

sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high

and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand

up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that

comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little

boy again, and that my way could end there.

We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her

hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and

warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many

kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my

heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look

hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the

closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the

very bottom of my memory.

‘I’ll come back,’ I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive

darkness.

‘Perhaps you will’—I felt rather than saw her smile. ‘But even if you

don’t, you’re here, like my father. So I won’t be lonesome.’

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe

that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,

laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

BOOK V. Cuzak’s Boys