29 My Ántonia by Willa Cather
My Antonia
My Ántonia is a fictional memoir of a late-nineteenth century childhood on the great plains of Nebraska. It is narrated by Jim Burden, who came to the plains as a boy recently orphaned, to live with his grandparents. Jim’s grandparents are comfortably settled and provide well for him. But Jim arrives on the same train with the Shimerda family. The Shimerdas have come from Bohemia, nearly destitute, knowing little about America, and dangerously ignorant about what it takes to farm in the harsh environment of the great plains.
Mr. Shimerda is a musician by training, and ill-equipped for his new life. A son, Marek, has been born physically and mentally handicapped. Nonetheless, Mrs. Shimerda has insisted on coming to American, Placing her hopes in her eldest son, Ambrosch. The household also includes two daughters, Ántonia and Julka, and cousin, Krajiek. – Leon Kass
The first excerpt begins as the Burdens prepare to visit the Shimerdas at their dugout home in winter. Once there, they find the family in distress. – Leon Kass
Excerpt 1
For several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr. Shimerda out hunting.
“He’s made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain’t got but one overcoat among ’em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.”
“All but the crazy boy,” Jake put in. “He never wears the coat. Krajiek says he’s turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be getting scarce in this locality.
Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he’d shot. He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on, to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter’n me and put ’em back in his sack and walked off.”
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. “Josiah, you don’t suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do you?”
“You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline,” he replied gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them. I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
“Now, Jake,” grandmother was saying, “if you can find that old rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn’t have got hens from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she was confused and didn’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no matter what you don’t have.”
“Just as you say, mam,” said Jake, “but I hate to think of Krajiek getting a leg of that old rooster.” He tramped out through the long cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas’ we heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the hole in the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy path toward the door sunk in the draw-side.
Blue puffs of smoke came from the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind whisked them roughly away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother’s hand. She did not say “How do!” as usual, but at once began to cry, talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at every one.
The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at her mother, hid again. Ántonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour. Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an empty coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda’s reproaches. Then the poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed to her, but called Ántonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.
“You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad,” she whispered, as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things grandmother handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
“Haven’t you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Ántonia? This is no place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?”
“We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office, — what he throw out. We got no potatoes, Mrs. Burden,” Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the door-crack again.
Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took grandmother’s arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room. In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw. The old man held the lantern.
“Yulka,” he said in a low, despairing voice, “Yulka; my Ántonia!”
Grandmother drew back. “You mean they sleep in there, — your girls?” He bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. “It is very cold on the floor, and this is warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there,” she insisted eagerly. “My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?” She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built against the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. “Sure enough, where would you sleep, dear! I don’t doubt you’re warm there. You’ll have a better house after while, Ántonia, and then you’ll forget these hard times.”
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on Ántonia’s shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated. He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he made good wages, and his family were respected there. He left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected.
By the time they paid Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm machinery, they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know, however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden, and would then do very well. Ambrosch and Ántonia were both old enough to work in the fields, and they were willing to work. But the snow and the bitter weather had disheartened them all.
Ántonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me — to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse, — but he did not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies.
The second excerpt takes place at Christmas. The Burdens have delivered gifts to the Shimerdas, and Mr. Shimerda comes to their home for the first time, to thank them. The following week, Mrs. Shimerda visits with Jim’s friend Antonia, in a very different spirit. – Leon Kass
Excerpt 2
The Burden household has sent Christmas gifts to the Shimerdas. On Christmas Day, Mr. Shimerda comes to thank them. Soon after Christmas, his wife and daughter pay a visit on their own.
At about four o’clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He had come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother’s kindness to his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we sat about the stove, enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon and the atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather’s house. This feeling seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he had left so far behind. He sat still and passive, his head resting against the back of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass of Virginia applebrandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint flush came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter content.
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body formed a letter “S.” I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people’s feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with some one kneeling before it, — images, candles, . . . Grandfather merely put his fingertips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o’clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother’s hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, “Good wo-man!” He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. “The prayers of all good people are good,” he said quietly.
The week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year’s Day all the world about us was a broth of gray 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, Ántonia 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 Ántonia 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 kawn-tree.”
“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, nev-er!” 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 Ántonia 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 Ántonia loved her father more than she did any one else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Ántonia 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.”
The third excerpt begins the morning after Mr. Shimerda’s suicide is discovered, as the agitated Burden household struggles to understand how a man they liked and admired could have abandoned his beloved children “in a hard world.” – Leon Kass
Excerpt 3
On the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in the kitchen — grandmother’s was so shrill that I knew she must be almost beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the diningroom. I obeyed reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: “Oh, dear Saviour!”
“Lord, Thou knowest!”
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: “Jimmy, we will not have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys.”
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother’s warning glances. I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
“No, sir,” Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, “nobody heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a road, and the womenfolks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch come in it was dark and he didn’t see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of queer. One of ’em ripped around and got away from him — bolted clean out of the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him.”
“Poor soul, poor soul!” grandmother groaned. “I’d like to think he never done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How could he forget himself and bring this on us!”
“I don’t think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden,” Fuchs declared. “He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Ántonia heated the water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls, where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent except,” — Fuchs wrinkled
his brow and hesitated, — “except what he couldn’t nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed. He’d took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck and rolled up his sleeves.”
“I don’t see how he could do it!” grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. “Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He found it all right!”
“Maybe he did,” said Jake grimly.
“There’s something mighty queer about it.”
“Now what do you mean, Jake?” grandmother asked sharply.
“Well, mam, I found Krajiek’s axe under the manger, and I picks it up and carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in the front of the old man’s face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin’ round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin’ the axe, he begun whimperin’, ‘My God, man, don’t do that!’ ‘I reckon I’m a-goin’ to look into this,’ says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about wringin’ his hands.
‘They’ll hang me!’ says he. ‘My God, they’ll hang me sure!’”
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. “Krajiek’s gone silly, Jake, and so have you. The old man would n’t have made all them preparations for Krajiek to murder him, would he?
It don’t hang together. The gun was right beside him when Ambrosch found him.”
“Krajiek could ’a’ put it there, couldn’t he?” Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: “See here, Jake Marpole, don’t you go trying to add murder to suicide. We’re deep enough in trouble. Otto reads you too many of them detective stories.”
“It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline,” said grandfather quietly. “If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the inside outward.”
“Just so it is, Mr. Burden,” Otto affirmed. “I seen bunches of hair and stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up there by gunshot, no question.”
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas’ with him.
“There is nothing you can do,” he said doubtfully. “The body can’t be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a matter of several days, this weather.”
“Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to them poor Shimerdas little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He’s left her alone in a hard world.”
The fourth excerpt includes a discussion about where Mr. Shimerda is to be buried; as a suicide, he is unwelcome in at least one of the local graveyards. The Burdens are displeased by this, and shocked, too, at his own family’s plan for his body. – Leon Kass
Excerpt 4
The Burden household discusses where Mr. Shimerda will be buried.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had hoped would linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated condition, disappeared on the second round.
They talked excitedly about where they should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbors were all disturbed and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs.
Shimerda and Ambrosch wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their own land; indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner. Grandfather had explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country was put under fence and the roads were confined to section lines, two roads would cross exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch
only said, “It makes no matter.”
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the cross-roads.
Jelinek said he did n’t know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once been such a custom in Bohemia. “Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind,” he added. “I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the neighbors; but she say so it must be.
‘There I will bury him, if I dig the grave myself,’ she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the grave to-morrow.”
Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. “I don’t know whose wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will live to see the people of this country ride over that old man’s head, she is mistaken.”
The fifth and final excerpt describes the burial and the grave. – Leon Kass
Excerpt 5
The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine, icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave, it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek spoke in a persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to grandfather.
“She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for him here in English, for the neighbors to understand.”
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember it. He began, “Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.” He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the way before this widow and her children, and to “incline the hearts of men to deal justly with her.” In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at “Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.”
All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black fingers of her glove, and when he said “Amen,” I thought she looked satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, “Can’t you start a hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish.”
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her suggestion, then began, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” and all the men and women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:—
“While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.”
. . .
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross.
As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
This text is in the public domain https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Cather/Antonia/Antonia.pdf
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Consider this:
- The Shimerdas are eating prairie dogs and their children are sleeping in a hole in the earth. Both practices sustain life effectively. Why is Jim’s grandmother so disturbed by them?
- Why is Mr. Shimerda dressed as he is, in the darkness of his hovel? Why does he seem at first to try to “hide,” though he has taken pains to be clean and neat?
- Mr. Shimerda remains entirely dignified, even when utterly relaxed and passive, and even when he assumes a position — bowing before the tree– which looks strange to his hosts. In what does his dignity reside?
The Burdens, even young Jim, can tell that Mr. Shimerda is failing in important ways, yet he commands respect. What do they respect about him? - Jim is annoyed because “even misfortune could not humble” Mrs. Shimerda. Is humility becoming, to one who is unfortunate?
- Why is there a local to-do over where Mr. Shimerda is to be buried? Why does Grandfather correctly predict that “the people of the country” will not make a crossroads over a grave? What about Mr. Shimerda does Grandfather seem to acknowledge in his words at the graveside?
