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.

  ‘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 Antonia 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 Antonia 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.

  One of Ours

  This novel was published in 1922 by Alfred A Knoph and went on to win the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for a work of fiction by an American author, winning Cather the status of an acclaimed writer, ensuring her financial security for the rest of her life. She was 49 years old when she attained this success and so her prominence came relatively late in life. Apart from enabling Cather and her partner Edith to live comfortably and to travel when they wished, she also used her money to support farmers in her home state during the Great Depression, paying their mortgages and sending generous gifts home at Christmas. Sadly, this success was a watershed in another way, as she was to note in later years – from the early 1920s her health began to deteriorate, she felt, as a result of the emotional toll writing the book. The world she knew, loved and had written about was changing beyond all recognition. She was able to continue to write, however and was to publish seven more novels after One of Ours.

  Progress on the story was painfully slow, taking over three years, more than likely due to the distressing inspiration for the story; Cather started work on the novel during a visit to Canada in the summer of 1919 and finished it in Toronto in 1921. At the end of the process, the project had drained Cather more than any other work she had done. This must have come as a shock to her, as she was known to be a vigorous, confident woman, who normally exuded an aura of well-being and strength. The origins of the central character of Claude seem to be a composite of elements of Cather herself and significantly of her neighbour and cousin, Grosvenor Cather, who grew up on the farm adjoining her own family’s property. Grosvenor seems to have been something of a puzzle to Cather, a man that never seemed to be successful in what he attempted, but who had inner thoughts that he rarely revealed to anyone. Cather was also honest in that she accepted that in some ways, she and her cousin had traits in common, despite being very different on the surface – his personality was, she wrote in a letter to Dorothy Fisher, ‘all too painfully familiar.’ Grosvenor was killed in Cantigny, France, in 1918, during the Great War and his death affected Cather profoundly. She wrote that she was so preoccupied with the fate of her cousin that she was immobilised and could not concentrate on anything else: ‘Some of me was buried with him in France and some of him was left alive in me.’ She had learned of his death during a visit to a hair salon and as a writer, the contrast between the mundanity of her actions and the finality of his fate must have been deeply shocking to her. Grosvenor was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star citation for bravery under fire, another contrast that was not lost on Cather: ‘That anything so glorious should have happened to anyone so disinherited of hope.’ It was therefore in order to expunge the story of her cousin from her thoughts that she wrote this novel.

  The character of David Gerhardt, Claude’s friend in the story, was inspired by David Hochstein, a violinist from New York. Although Cather never regarded her work as a war story and was anxious that it was not received as such, she was at pains to be authentic in her account of a theatre of war, drawing on her cousin’s letters, interviewing veterans and wounded soldiers in hospitals and visiting the French battlefields, which at the time would have barely begun to recover from the damage caused by the conflict and would have been a vivid reminder of what had happened. Her particular interest was the experiences of men from Nebraska who had gone to the war, which she highlighted in a magazine article, ‘Roll Call on the Prairie’.

  Initially, reviews of the novel were mixed. Perhaps a sign of the times, numerous critics were misogynistic about Cather being so presumptuous to write about a theatre of war when she personally had no experience of the military life or active service and unkindly suggested she stick to her stories about farms. Ernest Hemingway declared it to be overly sentimental for the subject matter. Others found it pedestrian and yet some reviewers claimed it was Cather’s greatest work. A review in the New York Herald (September 1922) stated ‘she shows not only the brilliancy and power of her earlier stories, but also a broader, deeper maturity.’ Such polarised opinions may have helped to a degree to raise the profile of the novel and increase its chances of being considered for the Pulitzer prize.

  The novel is set in her adopted home state of Nebraska, on a farm apparently inspired by that of a family homestead adjacent to Cather’s own home. Claude Wheeler, on the surface, has a decent life. He lives on a farm with his two brothers and his parents. His father is a well off farmer, so affluent that he does not have to work at all now, as he lives off the proceeds of his leased out farms. On the family property, Claude’s father can employ farm hands to do some of the heavy work, whilst he goes out and about, visiting acquaintances and donating to local churches. His mother is a decent and religious woman, a former teacher, whose focus now is her home and family. Claude has a straight-laced brother, Bayliss, who has an agricultural machinery business in the local town and another brother, Ralph, who also lives at home. Unfortunately, Claude just does not fit in and is the butt of jokes from the farm hands and even his father – ‘He was afraid of his father’s humour when it got too near him.’

  Claude has friends in the local town, however and the money and leisure time to enjoy himself with them. When a circus sets up locally, Claude is determined to go, as a treat before he has to return to the uninspiring faith-based Temple college he has been attending for two years. But he has a greater favour to ask of his parents – he wants to move from the college to the far better state university. Claude’s mother is disapproving: ‘how can there be any serious study where they give so much time to athletics and frivolity?’ Claude begins to wonder if everything in his life has to be second rate, or not quite suited to his personality: ‘He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by.’ Surely there had to be more to life than making money and tending a home?

  However, Claude finally seems to take matters into his own hands. Although he is still enrolled at Temple, he successfully sits an entrance examination for the state university, to attend lectures on European History. He finds the lectures stimulating and his new friends entertaining and interesting, in particular, Julius Erlich and his lively, free thinking family. Here were people who talked of art, music and books and their company made Claude truly happy. His studies flourish, as does his social life.

  Claude’s happiness is not to last. The following year, Claude’s father announces news that is the ruination of Claude’s new hopes for his future – Mr Wheeler has bought a new farm, which brother Ralph will manage under the supervision of their father and that means that Claude must give up his studies altogether and return home, to run the family farm in his turn. With the greatest of reluctance, Claude complies, trying when he can to visit the Erlichs to retain a remnant of the life he loves. Otherwise, Claude has to accept his new responsibility, circumstances which cause him sadness, boredom and a general malaise. He begins to spend more time with a young woman he has known since childhood, Enid Royce, who is undemanding and pleasant company, but a far cry from the intellectual stimulation of the Erlichs. Perhaps, however, in Enid’s quiet manner and her devotion to her faith, Claude saw something of his beloved mother in her and that appeals to him; he begins to think she would make a good wife for him. A huge disruption to his placid farming community is about to happen, though – the outbreak of war…

  For admirers of Cather, this book offers her usual delicate descriptions of farming and a way of life long gone and a departure – the theatre of war. The rural scenes are written with her eye for detail and rounded characters and once again, common themes of feelings of sadness and regret in, for example, Claude, are palpable – this is a theme Cather returns to repeatedly in her work. One wonders if this novel won so many accolades as it took a gentler view of war than more brutal depictions such as the contemporary Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos; but above all, Cather’s story is heartfelt and because of the heavy emphasis on Claude, who is based on Grosvenor Cather, it serves almost as a family chronicle of sorts.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  Book One: On Lovely Creek

  I.

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  IX

  Book Two: Enid

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  Book Three; Sunrise on the Prairie

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XII

  XIII

  Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Book Five: “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On”

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  Grosvenor Cather, the author’s cousin

  Book One: On Lovely Creek

  I.

  CLAUDE WHEELER OPENED his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.

  “Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car.”

  “What for?”

  “Why, aren’t we going to the circus today?”

  “Car’s all right. Let me alone.” The boy turned over and pulled the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was beginning to come through the curtainless windows.

  Claude rose and dressed, — a simple operation which took very little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock’s comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom, which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to the kitchen, took Mahailey’s tin basin, doused his face and head in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.

  Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were alone.

  “What air you gittin’ up for a-ready, boy? You goin’ to the circus before breakfast? Don’t you make no noise, else you’ll have ’em all down here before I git my fire a-goin’.”

  “All right, Mahailey.” Claude caught up his cap and ran out of doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort of day that must, somehow, turn out well.

  Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men, Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock. Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one of the horses.

  Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg swollen until it looked like an elephant’s. She would have to stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a credit to him.

  Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell. After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being petted. She let him touch her foot and examine her leg.

  When Claude reached the kitchen, his mother was sitting at one end of the breakfast table, pouring weak coffee, his brother and Dan and Jerry were in their chairs, and Mahailey was baking griddle cakes at the stove. A moment later Mr. Wheeler came down the enclosed stairway and walked the length of the table to his own place. He was a very large man, taller and broader than any of his neighbours. He seldom wore a coat in summer, and his rumpled shirt bulged out carelessly over the belt of his trousers. His florid face was clean shaven, likely to be a trifle tobacco-stained about the mouth, and it was conspicuous both for good-nature and coarse humour, and for an imperturbable physical composure. Nobody in the county had ever seen Nat Wheeler flustered about anything, and nobody had ever heard him speak with complete seriousness. He kept up his easy-going, jocular affability even with his own family.