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 neighbours. 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 Fuchs'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 colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbours 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 defenceless 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 didn'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-grey 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 house the rattlesnakes-- because they did not know how to get rid of
him.
Read next: BOOK I - The Shimerdas#Chapter 5
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