They said he could have paid my mother money, and not married her. But he
was older than she was, and he was too kind to treat her like that. He
lived in his mother's house, and she was a poor girl come in to do the
work. After my father married her, my grandmother never let my mother come
into her house again. When I went to my grandmother's funeral was the only
time I was ever in my grandmother's house. Don't that seem strange?"
While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue sky
between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming and
singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did not come
down into the shadow of the leaves. Antonia seemed to me that day exactly
like the little girl who used to come to our house with Mr. Shimerda.
"Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country, and I am going to the
little town where you lived. Do you remember all about it?"
"Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the
night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river
to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the
little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip
you. I ain't never forgot my own country."
There was a crackling in the branches above us, and Lena Lingard peered
down over the edge of the bank.
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