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Page 85
`I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the basement
stairs, out of breath and screeching:
`"Baby come, baby come!" she says. "Ambrosch much like devil!"
`Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to
a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and
went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as
quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for
Antonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud: "Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that
strong yellow soap near that baby. You'll blister its little skin." I was
indignant.
`"Mrs. Steavens," Antonia said from the bed, "if you'll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap." That was the first word she
spoke.
`After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was
muttering behind the stove and wouldn't look at it.
`"You'd better put it out in the rain-barrel," he says.
`"Now, see here, Ambrosch," says I, "there's a law in this land, don't
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world
sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it." I pride
myself I cowed him.
`Well I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Antonia's got on
fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months old now,
and no baby was ever better cared-for. Antonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know as there's much
chance now.'
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with
the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe
fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and
the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow
against the blue sky.
IV
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She
stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came.
We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. Her
warm hand clasped mine.
`I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day.'
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens said,
`worked down,' but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her
face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seated health and
ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had happened
in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know 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 with a
sigh. `But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's been
dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody
else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the
time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand
him.'
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