One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that he ‘thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.’ (Here the children interrupted Rudolph’s narrative by smothered giggles.)
Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practised for an hour or so, and then went home. At six o’clock that evening, when several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to supper, they heard a pistol shot. They paused and were looking doubtfully at one another, when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window. They ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on a sofa in his upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open, bleeding on a roll of sheets he had placed beside his head.
‘Walk in, gentlemen,’ he said weakly. ‘I am alive, you see, and competent. You are witnesses that I have survived my wife. You will find her in her own room. Please make your examination at once, so that there will be no mistake.’
One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others went into Mrs. Cutter’s room. She was lying on her bed, in her night-gown and wrapper, shot through the heart. Her husband must have come in while she was taking her afternoon nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her breast. Her night-gown was burned from the powder.
The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes and said distinctly, ‘Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am conscious. My affairs are in order.’ Then, Rudolph said, ‘he let go and died.’
On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o’clock that afternoon. It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she might secretly have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant to shoot himself at six o’clock and would, if he had strength, fire a shot through the window in the hope that passersby might come in and see him ‘before life was extinct,’ as he wrote.
‘Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?’ Ántonia turned to me after the story was told. ‘To go and do that poor woman out of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone!’
‘Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr. Burden?’ asked Rudolph.
I admitted that I hadn’t. Every lawyer learns over and over how strong a motive hate can be, but in my collection of legal anecdotes I had nothing to match this one. When I asked how much the estate amounted to, Rudolph said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.
Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance. ‘The lawyers, they got a good deal of it, sure,’ he said merrily.
A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself had died for in the end!
After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat down by the windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it were my business to know it.
His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he, being a younger son, was apprenticed to the latter’s trade. You never got anywhere working for your relatives, he said, so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna and worked in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young fellow who liked a good time didn’t save anything in Vienna; there were too many pleasant ways of spending every night what he’d made in the day. After three years there, he came to New York. He was badly advised and went to work on furs during a strike, when the factories were offering big wages. The strikers won, and Cuzak was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges. He had always thought he would like to raise oranges! The second year a hard frost killed his young grove, and he fell ill with malaria. He came to Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about. When he began to look about, he saw Ántonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl he had always been hunting for. They were married at once, though he had to borrow money from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.
‘It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first crops grow,’ he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled hair. ‘Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was right, all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an acre then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten years ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys; we can work a lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain’t always so strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town, and when I come home she don’t say nothing. She don’t ask me no questions. We always get along fine, her and me, like at first. The children don’t make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.’ He lit another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.
I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the Ringstrasse and the theatres.
‘Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I pretty near run away,’ he confessed with a little laugh. ‘I never did think how I would be a settled man like this.’
He was still, as Ántonia said, a city man. He liked theatres and lighted streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day’s work was over. His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the crowd.—Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world.
I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by the windmill, nursing his pipe and listening to the silence; the wheeze of the pump, the grunting of the pigs, an occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed by a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument of Ántonia’s special mission. This was a fine life, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
I asked Cuzak if he didn’t find it hard to do without the gay company he had always been used to. He knocked out his pipe against an upright, sighed, and dropped it into his pocket.
‘At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,’ he said frankly, ‘but my woman is got such a warm heart. She always make it as good for me as she could. Now it ain’t so bad; I can begin to have some fun with my boys, already!’
As we walked toward the house, Cuzak cocked his hat jauntily over one ear and looked up at the moon. ‘Gee!’ he said in a hushed voice, as if he had just wakened up, ‘it don’t seem like I am away from there twenty-six year!’
III
After dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to take the train for Black Hawk. Ántonia and her children gathered round my buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still there by the windmill. Ántonia was waving her apron.
At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.
‘That’s like him,’ his brother said with a shrug. ‘He’s a crazy kid. Maybe he’s sorry to have you go, and maybe he’s jealous. He’s jealous of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.’
I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
‘Don’t forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the Niobrara next summer,’ I said. ‘Your father’s agreed to let you off after harvest.’
He smiled. ‘I won’t likely forget. I’ve never had such a nice thing offered to me before. I don’t know what makes you so nice to us boys,’ he added, blushing.
br /> ‘Oh, yes, you do!’ I said, gathering up my reins.
He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure and affection as I drove away.
My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing in the Harlings’ big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his saloon. While I was having my midday dinner at the hotel, I met one of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office and talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how to put in the time until the night express was due.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well. Russian 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, grey 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.
THE END
Willa Cather, Willa Cather
(Series: # )
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