Chapter: 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 traveled 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 neighbors. 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 neighbors
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 favorite 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 neighbors lived
in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame
house, with a story and half-story 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 color of
wine-stains, 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 {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

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. "Are n'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.

 Jims party reaches his grandparents farm at dawn, but he is fast asleep and later wakes in a small bedroom. Hs grandmother is with him. She has been crying, but she smiles when she sees him wake up and helps him with his new clothes. She takes him to the kitchen, located in the basement, and readies his bath for him. He feels content in the bathtub. He notices his grandmothers features. She is tall and thin, forward leaning as if always rushing into the future. She speaks anxiously because she is always "desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum." She is fifty-five years old. After his bath, he explores the cellar and then the men come in from work. His grandfather only acknowledges him and speaks kindly to him. He feels deep awe for his grandfather, who seems to have a great "deliberateness and personal dignity." At the table, Jim is especially fascinated with Otto Fuchs. He learns that Ottos is Austrian and lived in the "Far West" leading an adventurous life. When he contracted pneumonia, he lost his good health and returned eastward where life is easier. He has family in Bismark, a German settlement to the north. He has worked for Jims grandparents for a year. After dinner he goes outside with Otto who tells him a pony has been bought for him. He shows Jim his chaps and his boots, which are stitched with fancy designs. Before bed, they are all called to the living room for prayers. Jim is quite taken with his grandfathers sonorous voice as he reads several of the Psalms. He reads, "He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah." Early the next morning, Jim runs outside to look around. He notices especially the ocean of red tall grass: "It seemed as if the grass were about to run over , and over the plum- patch behind the sod chicken-house." He thinks of the grass as to the country like water is to the sea. He feels a great deal of motion in the grass, as if the country is running. His grandmother comes out with a gunnysack and asks him to walk with her to the garden. She tells him to notice a stick she has hanging from her belt used for killing rattlesnakes. Jim, the present writer, remembers vividly what the land looked like that day when he was ten years old. It seemed as if it the landscape were in motion, as if underneath the grass, there were herds of wild buffalo running. After helping his grandmother pick potatoes out of the ground, he asks her if he can stay on in the garden alone. He says hes afraid of snakes, but still wants to stay. She advises him about the good snakes, the bull snakes who help keep the gopher population down and tells him not to worry when he sees the badger peep at him out of its hole. She says one becomes protective of the creatures of the earth when living out on the prairie like she has. Jim sits in the middle of the garden, leaning against a pumpkin and feels perfectly happy. He begins to feel as if he were "something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want anything more." He decides this must be the feeling one has after death, being part of something entire.

