第 四 章 · Chapter IV

On the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my

pony, under Otto’s direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week

to the post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good

deal of time by riding on errands to our neighbours. When we had to

borrow anything, or to send about word that there would be preaching at

the sod schoolhouse, I was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs

attended to such things after working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first

glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no

fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass

uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed

the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were

introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the

persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness

to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the

members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah,

scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long

trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had

the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm

Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those

plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and

sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for

the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed

soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung

curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I

went south to visit our German neighbours and to admire their catalpa

grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in

the earth and had a hawk’s nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in

that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we

used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were

persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny

landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown

earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests

underground with the dogs. Ántonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we

used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We

had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking

about. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls,

which were quite defenceless against them; took possession of their

comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the

owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and

disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who

would live like that must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town

was a long way from any pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen

populous dog-towns in the desert where there was no surface water for

fifty miles; he insisted that some of the holes must go down to

water—nearly two hundred feet, hereabouts. Ántonia said she didn’t

believe it; that the dogs probably lapped up the dew in the early

morning, like the rabbits.

Ántonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make

them known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to

have her reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized

it was important that one member of the family should learn English.

When the lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch

behind the garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we

lifted out the hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our

fingers. The white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched

them with curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts

had set in, and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the

Shimerdas were famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles

along the edge of the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.

Ántonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about

cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her

every movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a

good housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new

conditions: the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she gave

her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin

peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the

paste out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of

the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let

this residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this

sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek

encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be

mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they

clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could

talk or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man

and the two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him

in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and

the brown owls house the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to

get rid of him.