My Ántonia (Chap. 4.3) lyrics

ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces.

When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator’s. I told her at once why I had come.

“You’ll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I’ll talk to you after supper. I can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You’ve no prejudice against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days.”

While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o’clock, and I knew that I must eat him at six.

After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room, while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the heat. She sat down in her favorite rocking-chair and settled a little stool comfortably under her tired feet. “I’m troubled with callouses, Jim; getting old,” she sighed cheerfully. She crossed her hands in her lap and sat as if she were at a meeting of some kind.

“Now, it’s about that dear Ántonia you want to know? Well, you’ve come to the right person. I’ve watched her like she’d been my own daughter.

“When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be married, she was over here about every day. They’ve never had a sewing machine at the Shimerdas’, and she made all her things here. I taught her hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it—she was so strong—and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the happiest thing in the world.

“‘Ántonia,’ I used to say, ‘don’t run that machine so fast. You won’t hasten the day none that way.’

“Then she’d laugh and slow down for a little, but she’d soon forget and begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets. Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes. Tony told me just how she meant to have everything in her house. She’d even bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk. She was always coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man did write her real often, from the different towns along his run.

“The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. ‘I’m a country girl,’ she said, ‘and I doubt if I’ll be able to manage so well for him in a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.’ She soon cheered up, though.

“At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that she’d begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she’d never let me see it.

“Then there was a great time of packing. It was in March, if I remember rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad for hauling her things to town. And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing. He went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver in a purple velvet box, good enough for her station. He gave her three hundred dollars in money; I saw the check. He’d collected her wages all those first years she worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this room. ‘You’re behaving like a man, Ambrosch,’ I said, ‘and I’m glad to see it, son.’

“’T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk to take the night train for Denver—the boxes had been shipped before. He stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I’d done for her. She was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red cheeks was all wet with rain.