"
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Antonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?" she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. "My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?"
"No," I said, "I will never forget him."
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers.
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