by Willa Cather
IV
THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me thebaby 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. Shestood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as Icame. 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 lastnight. I've been looking for you all day."
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavenssaid, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravityof her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated healthand ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much hadhappened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked towardthat unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place totalk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shutMr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass hadnever been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in thespring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. Ifound myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and togo 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 differenceit had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way ofliving, and my dearest hopes.
"Of course it means you are going away from us for good," she said with asigh. "But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's beendead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybodyelse. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all thetime. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understandhim."
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. "I'd always bemiserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I knowevery stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to liveand die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world forsomething, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that my littlegirl has a better chance than ever I had. I'm going to take care of thatgirl, 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 mysister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part ofmy mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds oftimes 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 themslowly. "How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and whenI've disappointed you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people canmean to each other? I'm so glad we had each other when we were little. Ican't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her about all thethings we used to do. You'll always remember me when you think about oldtimes, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even thehappiest people."
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like agreat golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose inthe 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 twoluminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting onopposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree andshock 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 fieldsseemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemnmagic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be alittle boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her handsand held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm andgood they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind thingsthey had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. Aboutus it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see herface, 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 youdon'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 thata boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughingand whispering to each other in the grass.
BOOK V--CUZAK'S BOYS