My Ántonia - Willa Cather (i read books txt) 📗

thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with gold threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water. There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather’s farm, then on to the Shimerdas’ and to the Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared⁠—were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly’s claws, on the slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Endnotes

The Bohemian name “Ántonia” is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name “Anthony,” and the i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah. ↩

Colophon

My Ántonia
was published in 1918 by
Willa Cather.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Mitchell Jacobs,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2008 by
Judith Boss, Martin Robb, and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Enclosed Field with Ploughman,
a painting completed in 1889 by
Vincent van Gogh.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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