Giving Thanks with Neighbour Rosicky

Reading Willa Cather for the Holiday

Willa Cather in 1921. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

On my recent visit to Escondido, California, I made a brief stop at Helen’s Book Mark and came away with a copy of Willa Cather’s 1932 Obscure Destinies. This appropriately named collection includes three stories—a short(ish) one, a long one, and another short one—that highlight ordinary characters impressive for their quiet dignity. In each, a central character dies, but the stories are not depressing. The third is tinged by melancholy, the “feeling of something broken that could so easily have been mended.” But the first two are quiet celebrations of everyday decency and kindness—truly masterful revelations of the human spirit.

The third story, “Two Friends,” is the weakest of the three, though it is still good, and remarkably timely. It describes the friendship between two leading citizens of a western town, the banker Ellis and cattleman Trueman. They appear larger than life to the story’s young narrator, who loves to sit nearby on a summer evening, playing jacks and listening in on the men’s conversation. Though temperamentally very different, they are bound together by deep mutual understanding and respect.

Until politics comes between them. Ellis visits the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago and returns a devoted follower of William Jennings Bryan, for whom Trueman has only contempt. Their friendship quickly splinters, leaving each of them lacking his vital counterpart. “After that rupture,” says the narrator, “nothing went well with either of my two great men. Things were out of true, the equilibrium was gone.” When Ellis unexpectedly dies of pneumonia, Trueman abruptly departs for San Francisco, where he lives out his remaining nine years. At the story’s conclusion, the narrator reflects that he (or perhaps she?) cannot think of that lost friendship without regret. In a warning to our own age, when too many friendships and families are being divided by politics, he remembers their bond as “something delightful that was senselessly wasted… a truth that was accidentally distorted—one of the truths we want to keep.”

William Jennings Bryan, who came between our “two friends.” Harris & Ewing, photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Old Mrs. Harris,” the volume’s second and longest story, is also its most complex, with the broadest cast of characters. The Rosens are a cultured, childless couple, German Jewish immigrants who have moved west to Colorado. Their neighbors are the Templetons, who have migrated from Tennessee so that the husband could pursue business opportunities that have not quite materialized. His wife, Victoria, raised to be a southern belle, is out of place in her new western home—beautiful, socially graceful, the mother of kind and courteous children, but otherwise idle in a way the local women cannot afford to be. Her daughter Vickie wants desperately to win a university scholarship to go study in Ann Arbor (and finally succeeds), an ambition Victoria does not fully understand.

Meanwhile, Grandmother—Old Mrs. Harris of the title—is the glue holding the family together, retreating into the background but supplying necessary household labor. She sees that her son-in-law is not successful as he had hoped, feels the strain of her daughter’s inability quite to fit in, strives to keep up appearances, and misses her old home in Tennessee, where she would have been surrounded by other women filling precisely her domestic and social role: quietly governing the home while ceding center stage to the next generation, pitching in to help neighbors in need, exercising a kind of matriarchal role and enjoying the respect that goes with it. Cather exquisitely sketches the tensions among generations, among different immigrant perspectives, and between the local families and the newcomers. “Mrs. Harris was no longer living in a feudal society,” she writes, “but in a snappy little Western democracy, where every man was as good as his neighbour and out to prove it.” Tocqueville himself could not have supplied a finer portrait of the interpenetration of aristocratic and democratic manners than Cather delivers in this story.

But here I want to dwell on the book’s opening tale, “Neighbour Rosicky,” a deeply moving story that is perfect for Thanksgiving. Anton Rosicky is a Czech immigrant to the United States. He had lost his mother while young, lived for several years in the country with his grandparents, then traveled to London, where he spent two difficult years in deep poverty as a tailor’s apprentice in the vast, alien city. A stroke of good fortune sends him to New York. He is very happy there but eventually senses that something is missing, feels the tug of the country that he remembers from his grandparents’ farm—the call of “the earth and the farm animals and growing things”—and he decides to move west to Nebraska. There he acquires his own farm and marries a Czech woman fifteen years his junior, and the two of them raise five boys and a daughter.

As the story begins, Rosicky is visiting Doctor Ed about some shortness of breath he’s been experiencing. The doctor tells him that his problem is not asthma, as he’d thought, but rather a weak heart. He should be grateful that he’s got five strong boys to do the farm work and should stick to indoor tasks: some carpentry, mending the family’s clothes, helping out his wife. After Rosicky departs, the doctor reminisces about a generous breakfast he’d once enjoyed at the Rosicky home: warm hospitality, courteous children, a loving family. The doctor knows that neighbors gossip about why Rosicky, though a hard worker, doesn’t “get on faster.” But maybe, he reflects, “people as generous and warm-hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldn’t enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too.”

As Rosicky heads home, he passes by the graveyard that sits just at the edge of his own property and pauses to contemplate it.

It was a nice graveyard, Rosicky reflected, sort of snug and homelike, not cramped or mournful,— a big sweep all round it. A man could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of the sky over him, hear the wagons go by; in summer the mowing-machine rattled right up to the wire fence. And it was so near home. Over there across the cornstalks his own roof and windmill looked so good to him that he promised himself to mind the Doctor and take care of himself. He was awful fond of his place, he admitted. He wasn’t anxious to leave it. And it was a comfort to think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his own hayfield. The snow, falling over his barnyard and the graveyard, seemed to draw things together like. And they were all old neighbours in the graveyard, most of them friends; there was nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about.

That graveyard will return later, but Rosicky’s reflections here offer a small window onto his soul. His life has not always been easy. The years in London, we learn later, were very hard ones, when he often went hungry and his clothes fell to rags. There have been difficult times on the farm in Nebraska. He is worried about his oldest son Rudolph, who has just married an American girl, Polly; she is having trouble adjusting to the hard labor of a farmer’s wife, with little company or entertainment. But all in all it’s been a good life. As his wife Mary tells the children, “We’ve had a plenty [of hard times], but we’ve always come through. Your father wouldn’t never take nothing very hard, not even hard times.” And when he thinks back over his life, he does so with satisfaction. He’s escaped the sharp elbows and bitter competition of the city and made it to his own land, where “in all these years, he had never had to take a cent from anyone in bitter need,— never had to look at the face of a woman become like a wolf’s from struggle and famine. When he thought of these things, Rosicky would put on his cap and jacket and slip down to the barn and give his work-horses a little extra oats, letting them eat it out of his hand in their slobbery fashion. It was his way of expressing what he felt, and made him chuckle with pleasure.”

My copy of Obscure Destinies, including “Neighbour Rosicky.”

Rosicky’s gratitude for his life shines through on almost every page of the story, so that the reader feels humbled in the face of this simple immigrant farmer—as, indeed, do those around him, like the doctor, who admires the older man’s warmth and decency, the good humor in the “gleam of amusement” that always seems to flicker from his “queer triangular-shaped eyes.” Rosicky’s wife, worried about the doctor’s report, thinks of their many years together: “They had been shipmates on a rough voyage and had stood by each other in trying times.” If the times have never gotten rougher than they could handle, that owes a lot to her husband’s gentle nature: “A good deal had to be sacrificed and thrown overboard in a life like theirs, and they had never disagreed as to the things that could go.”

Perhaps the most moving testimony to Rosicky comes from his new daughter-in-law Polly. One day Rosicky ignores the doctor’s advice. Visiting his son’s farm while the boys are all out working in the fields, he takes the horses to go rake out some thistle seeds that have settled themselves among the alfalfa crop and, he fears, may choke it out. As he returns and puts the team back in the stall, he has an attack of sharp chest pains. Polly discovers him staggering toward the house, helps him inside, lays him down, and attends to him while he slowly recovers. Watching him doze on the bed, she puzzles over the secret of the old man’s attraction. She knows that he is fond of her, and that she is fond of him, but she has trouble expressing why. “Polly sat still, thinking hard,” and then she had a kind of revelation (this is truly beautiful writing by Cather):

She had a sudden feeling that nobody in the world, not her mother, not Rudolph, or anyone, really loved her as much as old Rosicky did. It perplexed her. She sat frowning and trying to puzzle it out. It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for colour. It was quiet, unobtrusive; it was merely there. You saw it in his eyes,— perhaps that was why they were merry. You felt it in his hands, too. After he dropped off to sleep, she sat holding his warm, broad, flexible brown hand. She had never seen another in the least like it…. It wasn’t nervous, it wasn’t a stupid lump; it was a warm brown human hand, with some cleverness in it, a great deal of generosity, and something else which Polly could only call “gypsy-like,”— something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are. Polly remembered that hour long afterwards; it had been like an awakening to her. It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life from anything as from old Rosicky’s hand.

Rosicky’s gratitude for his life and his “special gift for loving people” are surely intimately connected. It is hard to love people in the way Cather describes here without a kind of underlying gratitude for the sheer gift of their existence. I myself am not really very good at feeling gratitude, I don’t think. I tend to focus on what I haven’t accomplished, what still needs to be done, what I don’t have rather than what I do have. Even when I am grateful, I rather doubt that those around me particularly notice it, certainly not the way that Rosicky’s friends and family sense it about him. The old man has some good Thanksgiving lessons for me.

The day after raking out the thistles, now back at home again, Rosicky has a second, and final, heart attack. Mary finds him crumpled on the floor, “and the moment she touched him she knew that he was gone.” Doctor Ed is out of town, but after his return he looks for an opportunity to visit the family. As he finally finds time one evening to head toward their farm, he passes the same cemetery that Rosicky had contemplated earlier in the story—the cemetery where Rosicky himself is now lying down in the long grass with the complete arch of the sky above him. The doctor pauses; a “sudden hush had fallen on his soul,” writes Cather.

For the first time it struck Doctor Ed that this was really a beautiful graveyard…. [T]his was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running on until they met that sky…. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. Rosicky’s life seemed to him complete and beautiful.

And with that near-eulogy, the story ends.

“Neighbour Rosicky” is just about a perfect story, I think. A whole life, “complete and beautiful,” encapsulated in about 70 pages. An ordinary man, together with his history, his family, his friends, his joys and sorrows, and the special traits that make him extraordinary to those around him. One cannot read the story and not aspire to be just a bit more like Anton Rosicky—and, what’s more, to think that doing so might not be entirely out of reach. He is a kind of everyday saint, somewhat like Sarah Smith in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, “someone ye’ll never have heard of” but nevertheless “a person of great importance.” Of Sarah Smith, Lewis writes that every “boy that met her became her son” and “every girl that met her was her daughter.” As in Anton Rosicky’s twinkling eyes, “there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”

Perhaps on this Thanksgiving I can resolve to imitate Neighbour Rosicky. And may he accompany all of you today as well. I wish you all his profound sense of gratitude for life, and his “special gift for loving people.”

Thanks to Willa Cather for sharing him with me, and thanks to you for reading about him here. I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.