My Ántonia
Page 51
III
AFTER dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings totake the train for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children gathered round mybuggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me withfriendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When Ireached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still thereby the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron.
At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on thewheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.
"That's like him," his brother said with a shrug. "He's a crazy kid. Maybehe's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of anybodymother makes a fuss over, even the priest."
I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his finehead and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, thewind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
"Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on theNiobrara next summer," I said. "Your father's agreed to let you off afterharvest."
He smiled. "I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thingoffered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys," headded, blushing.
"Oh, yes you do!" I said, gathering up my reins.
He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasureand affection as I drove away.
My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were deador had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playingin the Harlings' big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cutdown, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar thatused to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent withAnton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind hissaloon. While I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel, I met one ofthe old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his officeand talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew howto put in the time until the night express was due.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the landwas so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass ofearly times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there Ifelt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue ofautumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could seethe dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all aboutstretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold color I remembered so well.Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against thewire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes ofgolden-rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with goldthreads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs overlittle towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant totake with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after theboys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp alonga few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.
As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumbleupon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the northcountry; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to theNorwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when thehighways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence wasall that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thingacross the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling anddoubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks hadalmost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger wouldnot have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it waseasy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washedthem so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked likegashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons usedto lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles onthe smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turnrosy in the slanting sunlight.
This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we gotoff the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wonderingchildren, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes tohear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome bythat obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so nearthat I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense ofcoming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man'sexperience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined forus all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was tobring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together theprecious, the incommunicable past.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
1 The Bohemian name _Antonia_ is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name _Anthony_, and the _i_ is, of course, given the sound of long _e_. The name is pronounced An{~MODIFIER LETTER PRIME~}-ton-ee-ah.