THE WEEK FOLLOWING Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all
the world about us was a broth of grey slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about examining
our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting upon them
to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen she caught
up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said: `You got
many, Shimerdas no got.' I thought it weak-minded of grandmother to give
the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: `You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better.'
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
`My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawntree.'
`People who don't like this country ought to stay at home,' I said
severely. `We don't make them come here.'
`He not want to come, never!' she burst out. `My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: "America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls." My papa, he cry for leave his old friends
what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the long
horn like this'-- she indicated a slide trombone. "They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle.'
`Your mama,' I said angrily, `wants other people's things.'
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. `Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here.'
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them and
contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more than she did anyone
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman wouldn't
come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. `She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
wouldn't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in "The Prince of
the House of David." Let's forget the Bohemians.'
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again and
again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the twentieth of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:
`You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you.'
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of featherbeds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn-- and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle-- they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but tomorrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap so
that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other's backs. `This'll take the bile out of 'em!' Fuchs remarked
gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel through the snow to the
hen-house, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their ugly,
painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores were done
just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a strange,
unnatural sort of day.
Read next: BOOK I - The Shimerdas#Chapter 14
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