My Ántonia, Willa Cather [i want to read a book TXT] 📗

his wife had gone on living in the house that Ántonia and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be very old people. He shriveled up, Ántonia said, until he looked like a little old yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe of hair never changed color. Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had known her, but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking palsy which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure china, poor woman! As the couple grew older, they quarreled more and more often about the ultimate disposition of their “property.” A new law was passed in the state, securing the surviving wife a third of her husband’s estate under all conditions. Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs. Cutter would live longer than he, and that eventually her “people,” whom he had always hated so violently, would inherit. Their quarrels on this subject passed the boundary of the close-growing cedars, and were heard in the street by whoever wished to loiter and listen.

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, practiced 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 neighbors telephoned for a doctor, while the others went into Mrs. Cutter’s room. She was lying on her bed, in her nightgown 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 nightgown was burned from the powder.

The horrified neighbors 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