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Page 65
When I came upon the Marshalls' delivery horse, tied in the shade, the
girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which
wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each other.
The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between the
bluffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream, where their roots
were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms were
unusually luxuriant and beautiful that summer.
I followed a cattle path through the thick under-brush until I came to a
slope that fell away abruptly to the water's edge. A great chunk of the
shore had been bitten out by some spring freshet, and the scar was masked
by elder bushes, growing down to the water in flowery terraces. I did not
touch them. I was overcome by content and drowsiness and by the warm
silence about me. There was no sound but the high, singsong buzz of wild
bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath. I peeped over the edge
of the bank to see the little stream that made the noise; it flowed along
perfectly clear over the sand and gravel, cut off from the muddy main
current by a long sandbar. Down there, on the lower shelf of the bank, I
saw Antonia, seated alone under the pagoda-like elders. She looked up when
she heard me, and smiled, but I saw that she had been crying. I slid down
into the soft sand beside her and asked her what was the matter.
`It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,' she said softly.
`We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always grew
in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In
summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that
played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down there to hear
them talk-- beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country.'
`What did they talk about?' I asked her.
She sighed and shook her head. `Oh, I don't know! About music, and the
woods, and about God, and when they were young.' She turned to me suddenly
and looked into my eyes. `You think, Jimmy, that maybe my father's spirit
can go back to those old places?'
I told her about the feeling of her father's presence I had on that winter
day when my grandparents had gone over to see his dead body and I was left
alone in the house. I said I felt sure then that he was on his way back to
his own country, and that even now, when I passed his grave, I always
thought of him as being among the woods and fields that were so dear to
him.
Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and
credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.
`Why didn't you ever tell me that before? It makes me feel more sure for
him.' After a while she said: `You know, Jim, my father was different
from my mother. He did not have to marry my mother, and all his brothers
quarrelled with him because he did. I used to hear the old people at home
whisper about it. They said he could have paid my mother money, and not
married her. But he was older than she was, and he was too kind to treat
her like that. He lived in his mother's house, and she was a poor girl
come in to do the work. After my father married her, my grandmother never
let my mother come into her house again. When I went to my grandmother's
funeral was the only time I was ever in my grandmother's house. Don't that
seem strange?'
While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue sky
between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming and
singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did not come
down into the shadow of the leaves. Antonia seemed to me that day exactly
like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr. Shimerda.
`Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country, and I am going to the
little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it?'
`Jim,' she said earnestly, `if I was put down there in the middle of the
night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river
to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the
little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip
you. I ain't never forgot my own country.'
There was a crackling in the branches above us, and Lena Lingard peered
down over the edge of the bank.
`You lazy things!' she cried. `All this elder, and you two lying there!
Didn't you hear us calling you?' Almost as flushed as she had been in my
dream, she leaned over the edge of the bank and began to demolish our
flowery pagoda. I had never seen her so energetic; she was panting with
zeal, and the perspiration stood in drops on her short, yielding upper lip.
I sprang to my feet and ran up the bank.
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