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<h2><span style="font-size: 144%">XVII</span></h2>
<p id="p0320"><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-variant: small-caps">When</span></span> spring came,
after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air.
Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was
over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the
vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in
the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly,
sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed
you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down
blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was
spring.</p>
<p id="p0321">Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass.
Our neighbors burned off their pasture before the new grass made a
start, so that the fresh growth would not be mixed with the dead stand
of last year. Those light, swift fires, running about the country,
seemed a part of the same kindling that was in the air.</p>
<p id="p0322">The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then.
The neighbors had helped them to build it in March. It stood directly
in front of their old cave, which they used as a cellar. The family
were now fairly equipped to begin their struggle with the soil. They
had four comfortable rooms to live in, a new windmill,—bought
on credit,—a chicken-house and poultry. <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span>
Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.</p>
<p id="p0323">When I rode up to the Shimerdas’ one bright
windy afternoon in April, Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her,
now, that I gave reading lessons; Ántonia was busy with other
things. I tied my pony and went into the kitchen where
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as
she worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a
great many questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She
seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information, and that
from me she might get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me
very craftily when grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told
her,
adding that he thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn
would not be held back by too much rain, as it had been last year.</p>
<p id="p0324">She gave me a shrewd glance. “He not
Jesus,” she blustered; “he not know about the wet and the
dry.”</p>
<p id="p0325">I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat
waiting for the hour when Ambrosch and Ántonia would return
from the fields, I watched <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda at her work. She
took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm for
supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have seen
her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and
the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their
feather beds.</p>
<p id="p0326">When the sun was dropping low, Ántonia came up
the big south draw with her team. How much older she had grown in
eight months! She had come to us a child, and now she was a tall,
strong young girl, although her fifteenth birthday had just slipped
by. I ran out and met her as she brought her horses up to the windmill
to water them. She
wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot
himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about
her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all
day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor’s.
Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a
tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among the peasant
women in all old countries.</p>
<p id="p0327">She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me
how much ploughing she had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on
the north quarter, breaking sod with the oxen.</p>
<p id="p0328">“Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day.
I don’t want that Jake get more done in one day than me. I want
we have very much corn this fall.”</p>
<p id="p0329">While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each
other, and then drank again, Ántonia sat down on the windmill
step and rested her head on her hand. “You see the big prairie
fire from your place last night? I hope your grandpa ain’t lose
no stacks?”</p>
<p id="p0330">“No, we did n’t. I came to ask you
something, Tony. Grandmother wants to know if you can’t go to
the term of school that begins
next week over at the sod schoolhouse. She says there’s a good
teacher, and you’d learn a lot.”</p>
<p id="p0331">Ántonia stood up, lifting and dropping her
shoulders as if they were stiff. “I ain’t got time to
learn. I can work like mans now. My mother can’t say no more how
Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work as much as him.
School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good
farm.”</p>
<p id="p0332">She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I
walked beside her, feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful
like her mother, I wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt
something tense in her silence, and glancing up I saw that she was
crying. She turned her face from me and looked off at the red streak
of dying light, over the dark prairie.</p>
<p id="p0333">I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for
her, while she unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the
house. Ambrosch had come in from the north quarter, and was watering
his oxen at the tank.</p>
<p id="p0334">Ántonia took my hand. “Sometime you will
tell me all those nice things you learn at the
school, won’t you, Jimmy?” she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. “My father, he went much to school. He
know a great deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got
here. He play horn and violin, and he read so many books that the
priests in Bohemie come to talk to him. You won’t forget my
father, Jim?”</p>
<p id="p0335">“No,” I said, “I will never forget
him.”</p>
<p id="p0336"><span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda asked me to stay for
supper. After Ambrosch and Ántonia had washed the field dust
from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the kitchen door, we
sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the
mush we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake
that had been kept warm in the feathers. Ántonia and Ambrosch
were talking in Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more
ploughing that day. <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda egged them on,
chuckling while she gobbled her food.</p>
<SPAN name="fig41" id="fig41"></SPAN><ANTIMG src="images/image06.png" width-obs="640" height-obs="345" alt="Illustration: Ántonia ploughing in the field" />
<p id="p0337">Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English:
“You take them ox to-morrow and try the sod plough. Then you not
be so smart.”</p>
<p id="p0338">His sister laughed. “Don’t be mad. I know
it’s awful hard work for break sod. I milk the cow for you
to-morrow, if you want.”</p>
<p id="p0339"><span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Shimerda turned quickly to me.
“That cow not give so much milk like what your grandpa say. If
he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him back the cow.”</p>
<p id="p0340">“He does n’t talk about the fifteen
dollars,” I exclaimed indignantly. “He does n’t find
fault with people.”</p>
<p id="p0341">“He say I break his saw when we build, and I
never,” grumbled Ambrosch.</p>
<p id="p0342">I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and
lied about it. I began to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything
was disagreeable to me. Ántonia ate so noisily now, like a man,
and she yawned often at the table and kept stretching her arms over
her head, as if they ached. Grandmother had said, “Heavy field
work’ll spoil that girl. She’ll lose all her nice ways and
get rough ones.” She had lost them already.</p>
<p id="p0343">After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring
twilight. Since winter I had seen very little of Ántonia. She
was out in the fields from sun-up until sun-down. If I rode over to
see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to
chat for a
moment, then gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and
waded on down the furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and
had no time for me. On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or
sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased with Ántonia. When we
complained of her, he only smiled and said, “She will help some
fellow get ahead in the world.”</p>
<p id="p0344">Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of
things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of
her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a
girl ought not to do, and that the farmhands around the country joked
in a nasty way about it. Whenever I saw her come up the furrow,
shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck,
and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone
in which poor <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mr.</span> Shimerda, who could say so little, yet
managed to say so much when he exclaimed, “My
Án-tonia!”</p>
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