by Willa Cather
Rosicky, the old Rosicky, could remember as if it were yesterday the day when the young Rosicky found out what was the matter with him. It was on a Fourth of July afternoon, and he was sitting in Park Place in the sun. The lower part of New York was empty. Wall Street, Liberty Street, Broadway, all empty. So much stone and asphalt with nothing going on, so many empty windows. The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops and the belts and bands cease running. It was too great a change, it took all the strength out of one. Those blank buildings, without the stream of life pouring through them, were like empty jails. It struck young Rosicky that this was the trouble with big cities; they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium, who were probably much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea.
On that very day he began to think seriously about the articles he had read in the Bohemian papers, describing prosperous Czech farming communities in the West. He believed he would like to go out there as a farm hand; it was hardly possible that he could ever have land of his own. His people had always been workmen; his father and grandfather had worked in shops. His mother’s parents had lived in the country, but they rented their farm and had a hard time to get along. Nobody in his family had ever owned any land,—that belonged to a different station of life altogether. Anton’s mother died when he was little, and he was sent into the country to her parents. He stayed with them until he was twelve, and formed those ties with the earth and the farm animals and growing things which are never made at all unless they are made early. After his grandfather died, he went back to live with his father and stepmother, but she was very hard on him, and his father helped him to get passage to London.
After that Fourth of July day in Park Place, the desire to return to the country never left him. To work on another man’s farm would be all he asked; to see the sun rise and set and to plant things and watch them grow. He was a very simple man. He was like a tree that has not many roots, but one tap-root that goes down deep. He subscribed for a Bohemian paper printed in Chicago, then for one printed in Omaha. His mind got farther and farther west. He began to save a little money to buy his liberty. When he was thirty-five, there was a great meeting in New York of Bohemian athletic societies, and Rosicky left the tailor shop and went home with the Omaha delegates to try his fortune in another part of the world.
IV
Perhaps the fact that his own youth was well over before he began to have a family was one reason why Rosicky was so fond of his boys. He had almost a grandfather’s indulgence for them. He had never had to worry about any of them—except, just now, a little about Rudolph.
On Saturday night the boys always piled into the Ford, took little Josephine, and went to town to the moving-picture show. One Saturday morning they were talking at the breakfast table about starting early that evening, so that they would have an hour or so to see the Christmas things in the stores before the show began. Rosicky looked down the table.
“I hope you boys ain’t disappointed, but I want you to let me have de car tonight. Maybe some of you can go in with de neighbours.”
Their faces fell. They worked hard all week, and they were still like children. A new jack-knife or a box of candy pleased the older ones as much as the little fellow.
“If you and Mother are going to town,” Frank said, “maybe you could take a couple of us along with you, anyway.”
“No, I want to take de car down to Rudolph’s, and let him an’ Polly go in to de show. She don’t git into town enough, an’ I’m afraid she’s gettin’ lonesome, an’ he can’t afford no car yet.”
That settled it. The boys were a good deal dashed. Their father took another piece of apple-cake and went on: “Maybe next Saturday night de two little fellers can go along wid dem.”
“Oh, is Rudolph going to have the car every Saturday night?”
Rosicky did not reply at once; then he began to speak seriously: “Listen, boys; Polly ain’t lookin’ so good. I don’t like to see nobody lookin’ sad. It comes hard fur a town girl to be a farmer’s wife. I don’t want no trouble to start in Rudolph’s family. When it starts, it ain’t so easy to stop. An American girl don’t git used to our ways all at once. I like to tell Polly she and Rudolph can have the car every Saturday night till after New Year’s, if it’s all right with you boys.”
“Sure it’s all right, Papa,” Mary cut in. “And it’s good you thought about that. Town girls is used to more than country girls. I lay awake nights, scared she’ll make Rudolph discontented with the farm.”
The boys put as good a face on it as they could. They surely looked forward to their Saturday nights in town. That evening Rosicky drove the car the half-mile down to Rudolph’s new, bare little house.
Polly was in a short-sleeved gingham dress, clearing away the supper dishes. She was a trim, slim little thing, with blue eyes and shingled yellow hair, and her eyebrows were reduced to a mere brushstroke, like Miss Pearl’s.
“Good evening, Mr. Rosicky. Rudolph’s at the barn, I guess.” She never called him father, or Mary mother. She was sensitive about having married a foreigner. She never in the world would have done it if Rudolph hadn’t been such a handsome, persuasive fellow and such a gallant lover. He had graduated in her class in high school in town, and their friendship began in the ninth grade.
Rosicky went in, though he wasn’t exactly asked. “My boys ain’t goin’ to town tonight, an’ I brought de car over fur you two to go in to de picture show.”
Polly, carrying dishes to the sink, looked over her shoulder at him. “Thank you. But I’m late with my work tonight, and pretty tired. Maybe Rudolph would like to go in with you.”
“Oh, I don’t go to de shows! I’m too old-fashioned. You won’t feel so tired after you ride in de air a ways. It’s a nice clear night, an’ it ain’t cold. You go an’ fix yourself up, Polly, an’ I’ll wash de dishes an’ leave everything nice fur you.”
Polly blushed and tossed her bob. “I couldn’t let you do that, Mr. Rosicky. I wouldn’t think of it.”
Rosicky said nothing. He found a bib apron on a nail behind the kitchen door. He slipped it over his head and then took Polly by her two elbows and pushed her gently toward the door of her own room. “I washed up de kitchen many times for my wife, when de babies was sick or somethin’. You go an’ make yourself look nice. I like you to look prettier’n any of dem town girls when you go in. De young folks must have some fun, an’ I’m goin’ to look out fur you, Polly.”
That kind, reassuring grip on her elbows, the old man’s funny bright eyes, made Polly want to drop her head on his shoulder for a second. She restrained herself, but she lingered in his grasp at the door of her room, murmuring tearfully: “You always lived in the city when you were young, didn’t you? Don’t you ever get lonesome out here?”
As she turned round to him, her hand fell naturally into his, and he stood holding it and smiling into her face with his peculiar, knowing, indulgent smile without a shadow of reproach in it. “Dem big cities is all right fur de rich, but dey is terrible hard fur de poor.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d like to take a chance. You lived in New York, didn’t you?”
“An’ London. Da’s bigger still. I learned my trade dere. Here’s Rudolph comin’, you better hurry.”
“Will you tell me about London some time?”
“Maybe. Only I ain’t no talker, Polly. Run an’ dress yourself up.”
The bedroom door closed behind her, and Rudolph came in from the outside, looking anxious. He had seen the car and was sorry any of his family should come just then. Supper hadn’t been a very pleasant occasion. Halting in the doorway, he saw his father in a kitchen apron, carrying dishes to the sink. He flushed crimson and something flashed in his eye. Rosicky held up a warning finger.
“I brought de car over fur you an’ Polly to go to de picture show, an’ I made h
er let me finish here so you won’t be late. You go put on a clean shirt, quick!”
“But don’t the boys want the car, Father?”
“Not tonight dey don’t.” Rosicky fumbled under his apron and found his pants pocket. He took out a silver dollar and said in a hurried whisper: “You go an’ buy dat girl some ice cream an’ candy tonight, like you was courtin’. She’s awful good friends wid me.”
Rudolph was very short of cash, but he took the money as if it hurt him. There had been a crop failure all over the county. He had more than once been sorry he’d married this year.
In a few minutes the young people came out, looking clean and a little stiff. Rosicky hurried them off, and then he took his own time with the dishes. He scoured the pots and pans and put away the milk and swept the kitchen. He put some coal in the stove and shut off the draughts, so the place would be warm for them when they got home late at night. Then he sat down and had a pipe and listened to the clock tick.
Generally speaking, marrying an American girl was certainly a risk. A Czech should marry a Czech. It was lucky that Polly was the daughter of a poor widow woman; Rudolph was proud, and if she had a prosperous family to throw up at him, they could never make it go. Polly was one of four sisters, and they all worked; one was book-keeper in the bank, one taught music, and Polly and her younger sister had been clerks, like Miss Pearl. All four of them were musical, had pretty voices, and sang in the Methodist choir, which the eldest sister directed.
Polly missed the sociability of a store position. She missed the choir, and the company of her sisters. She didn’t dislike housework, but she disliked so much of it. Rosicky was a little anxious about this pair. He was afraid Polly would grow so discontented that Rudy would quit the farm and take a factory job in Omaha. He had worked for a winter up there, two years ago, to get money to marry on. He had done very well, and they would always take him back at the stockyards. But to Rosicky that meant the end of everything for his son. To be a landless man was to be a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be nothing.
Rosicky thought he would come over and do a little carpentering for Polly after the New Year. He guessed she needed jollying. Rudolph was a serious sort of chap, serious in love and serious about his work.
Rosicky shook out his pipe and walked home across the fields. Ahead of him the lamplight shone from his kitchen windows. Suppose he were still in a tailor shop in Vesey Street, with a bunch of pale, narrow-chested sons working on machines, all coming home tired and sullen to eat supper in a kitchen that was a parlour also; with another crowded, angry family quarrelling just across the dumb-waiter shaft, and squeaking pulleys at the windows where dirty washings hung on dirty lines above a court full of old brooms and mops and ash-cans.…
He stopped by the windmill to look up at the frosty winter stars and draw a long breath before he went inside. That kitchen with the shining windows was dear to him; but the sleeping fields and bright stars and the noble darkness were dearer still.
V
On the day before Christmas the weather set in very cold; no snow, but a bitter, biting wind that whistled and sang over the flat land and lashed one’s face like fine wires. There was baking going on in the Rosicky kitchen all day, and Rosicky sat inside, making over a coat that Albert had outgrown into an overcoat for John. Mary had a big red geranium in bloom for Christmas, and a row of Jerusalem cherry trees, full of berries. It was the first year she had ever grown these; Doctor Ed brought her the seeds from Omaha when he went to some medical convention. They reminded Rosicky of plants he had seen in England; and all afternoon, as he stitched, he sat thinking about those two years in London, which his mind usually shrank from even after all this while.
He was a lad of eighteen when he dropped down into London, with no money and no connexions except the address of a cousin who was supposed to be working at a confectioner’s. When he went to the pastry shop, however, he found that the cousin had gone to America. Anton tramped the streets for several days, sleeping in doorways and on the Embankment, until he was in utter despair. He knew no English, and the sound of the strange language all about him confused him. By chance he met a poor German tailor who had learned his trade in Vienna, and could speak a little Czech. This tailor, Lifschnitz, kept a repair shop in a Cheapside basement, underneath a cobbler. He didn’t much need an apprentice, but he was sorry for the boy and took him in for no wages but his keep and what he could pick up. The pickings were supposed to be coppers given you when you took work home to a customer. But most of the customers called for their clothes themselves, and the coppers that came Anton’s way were very few. He had, however, a place to sleep. The tailor’s family lived upstairs in three rooms; a kitchen, a bedroom, where Lifschnitz and his wife and five children slept, and a living-room. Two corners of this living-room were curtained off for lodgers; in one Rosicky slept on an old horsehair sofa, with a feather quilt to wrap himself in. The other corner was rented to a wretched, dirty boy, who was studying the violin. He actually practised there. Rosicky was dirty, too. There was no way to be anything else. Mrs. Lifschnitz got the water she cooked and washed with from a pump in a brick court, four flights down. There were bugs in the place, and multitudes of fleas, though the poor woman did the best she could. Rosicky knew she often went empty to give another potato or a spoonful of dripping to the two hungry, sad-eyed boys who lodged with her. He used to think he would never get out of there, never get a clean shirt to his back again. What would he do, he wondered, when his clothes actually dropped to pieces and the worn cloth wouldn’t hold patches any longer?
It was still early when the old farmer put aside his sewing and his recollections. The sky had been a dark grey all day, with not a gleam of sun, and the light failed at four o’clock. He went to shave and change his shirt while the turkey was roasting. Rudolph and Polly were coming over for supper.
After supper they sat round in the kitchen, and the younger boys were saying how sorry they were it hadn’t snowed. Everybody was sorry. They wanted a deep snow that would lie long and keep the wheat warm, and leave the ground soaked when it melted.
“Yes, sir!” Rudolph broke out fiercely; “if we have another dry year like last year, there’s going to be hard times in this country.”
Rosicky filled his pipe. “You boys don’t know what hard times is. You don’t owe nobody, you got plenty to eat an’ keep warm, an’ plenty water to keep clean. When you got them, you can’t have it very hard.”
Rudolph frowned, opened and shut his big right hand, and dropped it clenched upon his knee. “I’ve got to have a good deal more than that, Father, or I’ll quit this farming gamble. I can always make good wages railroading, or at the packing house, and be sure of my money.”
“Maybe so,” his father answered dryly.
Mary, who had just come in from the pantry and was wiping her hands on the roller towel, thought Rudy and his father were getting too serious. She brought her darning-basket and sat down in the middle of the group.
“I ain’t much afraid of hard times, Rudy,” she said heartily. “We’ve had a plenty, but we’ve always come through. Your father wouldn’t never take nothing very hard, not even hard times. I got a mind to tell you a story on him. Maybe you boys can’t hardly remember the year we had that terrible hot wind, that burned everything up on the Fourth of July? All the corn an’ the gardens. An’ that was in the days when we didn’t have alfalfa yet,—I guess it wasn’t invented.
“Well, that very day your father was out cultivatin’ corn, and I was here in the kitchen makin’ plum preserves. We had bushels of plums that year. I noticed it was terrible hot, but it’s always hot in the kitchen when you’re preservin’, an’ I was too busy with my plums to mind. Anton come in from the field about three o’clock, an’ I asked him what was the matter.
“ ‘Nothin’,’ he says, ‘but it’s pretty hot, an’ I think I won’t work no more today.’ He stood round for a few minutes, an’ then he says: ‘Ain’t you near through
? I want you should git up a nice supper for us tonight. It’s Fourth of July.’
“I told him to git along, that I was right in the middle of preservin’, but the plums would taste good on hot biscuit. ‘I’m goin’ to have fried chicken, too,’ he says, and he went off an’ killed a couple. You three oldest boys was little fellers, playin’ round outside, real hot an’ sweaty, an’ your father took you to the horse tank down by the windmill an’ took off your clothes an’ put you in. Them two box-elder trees was little then, but they made shade over the tank. Then he took off all his own clothes, an’ got in with you. While he was playin’ in the water with you, the Methodist preacher drove into our place to say how all the neighbours was goin’ to meet at the school-house that night, to pray for rain. He drove right to the windmill, of course, and there was your father and you three with no clothes on. I was in the kitchen door, an’ I had to laugh, for the preacher acted like he ain’t never seen a naked man before. He surely was embarrassed, an’ your father couldn’t git to his clothes; they was all hangin’ up on the windmill to let the sweat dry out of ’em. So he laid in the tank where he was, an’ put one of you boys on top of him to cover him up a little, an’ talked to the preacher.
“When you got through playin’ in the water, he put clean clothes on you and a clean shirt on himself, an’ by that time I’d begun to get supper. He says: ‘It’s too hot in here to eat comfortable. Let’s have a picnic in the orchard. We’ll eat our supper behind the mulberry hedge, under them linden trees.’
“So he carried our supper down, an’ a bottle of my wild-grape wine, an’ everything tasted good, I can tell you. The wind got cooler as the sun was goin’ down, and it turned out pleasant, only I noticed how the leaves was curled up on the linden trees. That made me think, an’ I asked your father if that hot wind all day hadn’t been terrible hard on the gardens an’ the corn.