MY ANTONIA
I first heard Ántonia Shimerda's name when I was ten years old, fresh from Virginia and set down in the middle of Nebraska, where the land stretched flat as a table and the wind never stopped telling secrets. The Shimerdas were Bohemian immigrants—foreign, hungry, and proud in a way that frightened the other farm wives. My grandmother sent me over with a sack of provisions. Ántonia met me at the door of their sod dugout, her black eyes already older than her years. "You ain't got to be ashamed," she said. "We ain't got nothing but we ain't mean."
That was how it began. We ran across the prairie together—through sunflower blooms taller than our heads, past the old road that followed the creek where the badgers dug their dens. She taught me the Bohemian words for bread and sky and winter. I taught her how to read the clouds for rain. In those years, the land was everything: the color of the plow's fresh turn, the smell of the haymow, the weight of the first frost on the pumpkin vines.
Then came the hard winter. Mr. Shimerda, her father, took his own life with his gun, his sorrow too deep for English or Bohemian or any language. The neighbors built his coffin and dug his grave on the corner of the pasture, facing east toward the old country. Ántonia stopped being a girl that day. She went to work in the fields like a man, her shoulders broadening, her laugh still loud but something broken behind it.
I left Nebraska for the city, for law school, for a life of carpeted floors. Years later, I came back. I found Ántonia on her own farm, her sons around her, her hair gray and her hands cracked. She put a plate of kolaches before me. "The land belongs to the people who love it," she said. And I knew then that I had never loved anything the way she loved that hard, beautiful, unforgiving earth.