My Ántonia | Page 8

sunlight on the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and
grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the
new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbours.
We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home
for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we
were all seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old
place and about our friends and neighbours there.

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and
spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard
of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had
a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a
young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still
coppery.
As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that
he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow
outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain
pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a
while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north
of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper
to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a
sale; he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
but he was a `perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told
me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming
blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He
promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out
his `chaps' and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best
cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design-- roses, and true-lover's
knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained,
were angels.
Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room
for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read
several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so

interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters
in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.'
`He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved. Selah.' I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had
not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until
you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our
neighbours lived in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very
roomy. Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the
basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with
the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground
sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This
slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies
by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it.
The road from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the
farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to
climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the
western sky-line it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I
had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn,
were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could
reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall
as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew