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Page 31
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground,
always seemed to me the heart and centre of the house. There, on the bench
behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I
could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I
had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there
with him. I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life
before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings
and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the
trombone-player, the great forest full of game--belonging, as Antonia said,
to the `nobles'-- from which she and her mother used to steal wood on
moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if
anyone killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came
to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out
from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If anyone did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, `just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze,' Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as anyone else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of, but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. `As I understand it,' Jake concluded, `it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment.'
`I don't believe it,' I said stoutly. `I almost know it isn't true.' I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.
XV
OTTO FUCHS GOT back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported that
the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon, but the
missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles away,
and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours' sleep at the
livery barn in town, but he was afraid the grey gelding had strained
himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That long trip
through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a
homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties then,
handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a miracle
in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks
bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur
cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.
`I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to
poor strangers from my kawntree.'
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