Chapter: I FIRST heard of Antonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey
across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I
traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands"
on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to
work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider
than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with
each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered
him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a
"Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory
books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a
friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we
were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our
confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of
distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of
different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons
were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an
Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the
immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose
destination was the same as ours.

"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you
want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes,
too!"

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to
"Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to
get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long
day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so
many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about
Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when
we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled
down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with
lanterns. I could n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were
surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its
long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood
huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew
this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little
tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old
man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting
and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time
I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,
ain't you scared to come so far west?"

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's
jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of
heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to
the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and
that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:
here, I felt, what would be would be.





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.





ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance
of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as
they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or
chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of
potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed
some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies
in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and
jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big
cornfield.

I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was
only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high
wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild
thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and
shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many
branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the
prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a
plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in
time to his bites as he ate down toward them.

The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the
homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more
than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the
old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs.
Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this
part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell
them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for
advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs
said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father
was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by
trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.
He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here,
though he used to pick up money by it at home.

"If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in
that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger
hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty
dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."

"Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old
horses for the price of good work-teams. I'd have interfered about the
horses--the old man can understand some German--if I'd 'a' thought it would
do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."

Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"

Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It would
take me a long while to explain."

The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw
Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and made the
land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering
tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some
of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining
white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.

As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but
rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging
out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those
banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass
that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had
no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a
door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a
woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A
little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same
embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted
from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not
young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little
eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically.

"Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the
bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no
good!"

Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after
while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."

My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they
were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our
visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled
them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good,
much thank!"--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.

The oldest son, Ambroz,--they called it Ambrosch,--came out of the cave and
stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and
broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His
hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and
suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on
corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.

The little girl was pretty, but An-tonia-- they accented the name thus,
strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier. I remembered what the
conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of
light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was
brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her
brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood
awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see
what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance
one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he
approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to
show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's
foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!" like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly,
"Marek!" then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

"She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born
like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer." He struck
Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.

At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no
hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his
forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him
look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and
slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,
then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and
well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.
His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face
was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes--like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his
coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf
of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral
pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me
and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep
drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.

When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed
toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how
glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop
until the ground itself stopped--fell away before us so abruptly that the
next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the
edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below
us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like it; she held her
little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed
to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes
fairly blazing with things she could not say.

"Name? What name?" she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my
name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into
the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What
name?"

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a
baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the sky
and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not
satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word,
making it sound like "ice." She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes,
then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she
distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees
and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then
to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."

She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused
her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of
words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we
could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of
us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Antonia had said the new words over
and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on
her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite
sternly. I did n't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never
seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was
how they behaved.

While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,
"An-tonia, An-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare. "Tatinek, Tatinek!" she
shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia
reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched
my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.
I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted
by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia!"





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 neighbors. 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 Jake'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 color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors 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. Antonia 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 defenseless 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. Antonia said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probably
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.

Antonia 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.

Antonia 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-gray 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 housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid of
him.

 Introduction My Antonia opens with a short frame story: the author  relates a chance meeting with an old acquaintance, Jim Burden, on a train ride through Iowa. The time appears to be roughly contemporary with the publication of the novel . The two adults reminisce about their shared Nebraska childhood, where they first met, and they mention a woman named Antonia. They challenge each other to write an account of their relationship with Antonia, and only Jim appears to follow through, composing a lengthy manuscript and bringing it to her a few months later. The author says that this manuscript became the text of My Antonia.

