The realities of farm life—crop failures, debt, despair—are rarely offstage. At the center of the book Ántonia tells of something she has witnessed: a tramp who gives a friendly wave and flings himself headfirst into a threshing machine. As one of the hands reports, “by the time they got her stopped, he was all beat and cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out, and the machine ain’t never worked right since.”
No one who reads My Ántonia forgets the tale of Russian Peter and Pavel, driven from town to town and finally out of Russia after saving themselves, the last of a wedding party, by throwing the bride to a pack of wolves that have swarmed the wedding sledges: “[ T] he groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.”
Jim and Ántonia are haunted by the story, which they keep to themselves as a private treasure. Like all lasting tales it belongs to legend, to timelessness; and gives pleasure despite its savagery, as the most lasting stories do. “For Ántonia and me,” says Jim, “the story of the wedding party was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.”
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