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Page 93
There was a picture of Frances Harling in a befrogged riding costume that I
remembered well. `Isn't she fine!' the girls murmured. They all assented.
One could see that Frances had come down as a heroine in the family
legend. Only Leo was unmoved.
`And there's Mr. Harling, in his grand fur coat. He was awfully rich,
wasn't he, mother?'
`He wasn't any Rockefeller,' put in Master Leo, in a very low tone, which
reminded me of the way in which Mrs. Shimerda had once said that my
grandfather `wasn't Jesus.' His habitual scepticism was like a direct
inheritance from that old woman.
`None of your smart speeches,' said Ambrosch severely.
Leo poked out a supple red tongue at him, but a moment later broke into a
giggle at a tintype of two men, uncomfortably seated, with an
awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them: Jake and Otto
and I! We had it taken, I remembered, when we went to Black Hawk on the
first Fourth of July I spent in Nebraska. I was glad to see Jake's grin
again, and Otto's ferocious moustaches. The young Cuzaks knew all about
them. `He made grandfather's coffin, didn't he?' Anton asked.
`Wasn't they good fellows, Jim?' Antonia's eyes filled. `To this day I'm
ashamed because I quarrelled with Jake that way. I was saucy and
impertinent to him, Leo, like you are with people sometimes, and I wish
somebody had made me behave.'
`We aren't through with you, yet,' they warned me. They produced a
photograph taken just before I went away to college: a tall youth in
striped trousers and a straw hat, trying to look easy and jaunty.
`Tell us, Mr. Burden,' said Charley, `about the rattler you killed at the
dog-town. How long was he? Sometimes mother says six feet and sometimes
she says five.'
These children seemed to be upon very much the same terms with Antonia as
the Harling children had been so many years before. They seemed to feel
the same pride in her, and to look to her for stories and entertainment as
we used to do.
It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and
started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with us,
and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the corral
and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of the
pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.
The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down
before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into the
stars. Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a hay-cave, back under the eaves,
and lay giggling and whispering. They tickled each other and tossed and
tumbled in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had been shot, they
were still. There was hardly a minute between giggles and bland slumber.
I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window
on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Antonia and her children;
about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous,
animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the
cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see.
Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not
fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of
such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer:
Antonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came
home in triumph with our snake; Antonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as
she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Antonia coming in with
her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial
human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I
had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl;
but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still
stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed
the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put
her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel
the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the
strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless
in serving generous emotions.
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich
mine of life, like the founders of early races.
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