Examination For Admission Sample Test Template With Answer Key - Hunter College High School Page 15
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29water for them—and Grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do in the kitchen that they could
not have told whether one day was hotter than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on
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the grass, Ántonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner.
Grandmother made her wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached the garden she threw it on
the grass and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over the pea-vines, beads
of perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like a little moustache.
“Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!” she used to sing joyfully and
unselfconsciously in her broken English. “I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like
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a man. I like to be like a man.” She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in
her brown arm.
We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive that one did not
mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with pans. Grandmother was in high spirits
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during the weeks that Ántonia worked for us.
All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The harvesters slept in the
hayloft because it was cooler there than in the house. I used to lie in my bed by the open
window, watching the heat lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt
frame of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a beautiful electric storm,
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though not enough rain fell to damage the cut grain. The men went down to the barn
immediately after supper, and when the dishes were washed, Ántonia and I climbed up on the
slanting roof of the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic, like
the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens, making
everything stand out and come close to us for a moment. Half the sky was checkered with black
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thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning flashes it looked like deep
blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and the mottled part of the sky was like marble
pavement, like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction. Great warm
splashes of rain fell on our upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted
out into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward. All about us we could hear the
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felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard. Grandmother came to the door and
said it was late, and we would get wet out there.
“In a minute we come,” Ántonia called back to her. “I like your grandmother, and all
things here,” she sighed. “I wish my papa live to see this summer. I wish no winter ever come
again.”
“It will be summer a long while yet,” I reassured her. “Why aren’t you always nice like
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this, Toni?”
“How nice?”
“Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be like your brother
Ambrosch?”
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. “If I live here, like
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you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us immigrants.”
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