My Antonia, Page 43

  IV

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed methe baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwestquarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long wayoff. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watchingme as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if notin tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.

  'I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's lastnight. I've been looking for you all day.'

  She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavenssaid, 'worked down,' but there was a new kind of strength in the gravityof her face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seatedhealth and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so muchhad happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four yearsold.

  Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked towardthat unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest placeto talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence thatshut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall redgrass had never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come upagain in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropicalgarden-grass. I found myself telling her everything: why I had decidedto study law and to go into the law office of one of my mother'srelatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonialast winter, and the difference it had made in my life. She wanted toknow about my friends, and my way of living, and my dearest hopes.

  'Of course it means you are going away from us for good,' she said witha sigh. 'But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he'sbeen dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almostanybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consulthim all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more Iunderstand him.'

  She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. 'I'd always bemiserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I knowevery stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want tolive and die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this worldfor something, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that mylittle girl has a better chance than ever I had. I'm going to take careof that girl, Jim.'

  I told her I knew she would. 'Do you know, Antonia, since I've beenaway, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of theworld. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or mymother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea ofyou is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all mytastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a partof me.'

  She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up inthem slowly, 'How can it be like that, when you know so many people, andwhen I've disappointed you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much peoplecan mean to each other? I'm so glad we had each other when we werelittle. I can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her aboutall the things we used to do. You'll always remember me when you thinkabout old times, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about oldtimes, even the happiest people.'

  As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like agreat golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rosein the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rosecolour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes,the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, restingon opposite edges of the world.

  In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, everysunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up highand pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand upsharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comesout of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boyagain, and that my way could end there.

  We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took herhands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong andwarm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how manykind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over myheart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hardto see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest,realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottomof my memory.

  'I'll come back,' I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusivedarkness.

  'Perhaps you will'--I felt rather than saw her smile. 'But even if youdon't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome.'

  As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believethat a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

  BOOK V. Cuzak's Boys