Chapter: THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Antonia 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 color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. 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.

Antonia 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, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of any one 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 cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color,
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.

 The next afternoon he goes over to the Shimerdas'. He sees the baby, but Antonia is out. He goes out to the fields to find her. She's working with a pitchfork. Antonia looks thin but still strong. Jim notes that she's only 24 but that a lot has happened to her already. The two of them sit down by a fence to talk to each other. Jim looks at the grass. He tells Antonia what he's been up to the last few years. He reveals that Gaston died of pneumonia. Antonia talks about her father. She says that the older she gets, she better she understands him. Then she asks if Jim has gotten to like living in cities, because she is definitely a country girl. Jim tells Antonia that he thinks of her more than anyone else in the world. He says he wishes he could have had her for a wife or mother or sister or anything that a woman could be to a man. She is in his mind and influences him all the time, he says. Antonia wonders at how this could be. She agrees that Jim means a lot to her and thinks that it is wonderful. She tells him that as soon as her daughter grows up she'll tell her all about him. They walk home and watch the sun set. Jim looks at the landscape. He wishes he were a kid again. Before he leaves Jim promises that he will come back. Antonia says he will be there in spirit even when he is away. As Jim leaves he imagines himself and Antonia playing in the grass when they were kids.

